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Title: Happy Ending: The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney

Author: Louise Imogen Guiney

Release date: May 14, 2017 [eBook #54719]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Emmy, Linda Cantoni, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAPPY ENDING: THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY ***

HAPPY ENDING

CONTENTS

G.F. Watts, pinx.                                                                                                                 Hollyer, Photo.

Rower maul'd in the Sea, ah, Rower

Limp as Grasses behind the Mower.

Pity'd most that thy Woes deny thee

Sight of the Spirit Steersman by thee!

Tho' more near than a hinted Haven

Lie the Port that is coral-paven,

All is well: the Unseen Befriending

Makes of either the Happy Ending.

HAPPY ENDING

The Collected Lyrics of

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

TOUT BIEN OU RIEN

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON AND NEW YORK: 1909

COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published December 1909

TO

ANNE WHITNEY

PREFACE

THIS volume has been garnered from the author's earlier books. Two poems have been chosen from "The White Sail" (1887); nine Oxford Sonnets from a privately printed booklet (1895), since added to, and much altered; and many lyrics, under a revised form, from "A Roadside Harp" (1893), and "The Martyrs' Idyl" (1899), plus some twenty newer titles transferred, with grateful acknowledgments, from McClure's Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century. The principle of exclusion goes far enough to cover all poems in narrative form, or of any appreciable length, or translated; also, any which seemed out of keeping with the character of the present collection. Such as that is, it comprises the less faulty half of all the author's published verse.

L.I.G.

BOSTON, October 21, 1909.

CONTENTS

The Kings

3

The Squall

5

Open, Time

9

The Knight Errant (Donatello's Saint George)

11

To a Dog's Memory

13

Memorial Day

15

Romans in Dorset: A.D. MDCCCXCV

16

Horologion

19

His Angel to his Mother

21

Autumn Magic

23

Five Carols for Christmastide:

I. The Ox he Openeth wide the Doore

25

II. Vines Branching Stilly

26

III. Three without Slumber Ride from Afar

27

IV. Was a Soule from Farre Away

28

V. The Ox and the Ass

29

On Leaving Winchester

32

Cobwebs

34

Astræa

35

The Yew-Tree

36

Ten Colloquies:

I. The Search

38

II. Fact and the Mystic

39

III. The Poet's Chart

40

IV. Of the Golden Age

41

V. On Time's Threshold

42

VI. Wood-Pigeons

42

VII. Predicaments

43

VIII. The Co-Eternal

44

IX. Stern Aphrodite

44

X. The Jubilee

45

Winter Boughs

46

W.H.: A.D. MDCCLXXVIII-MDCCCXXX

47

The Vigil-at-Arms

48

A Friend's Song for Simoisius

49

To an Ideal

51

In a Ruin, after a Thunder-Storm

53

Beati Mortui

54

Two Irish Peasant Songs:

I. In Leinster

57

II. In Ulster

58

The Japanese Anemone

61

Orisons

63

The Inner Fate: A Chorus

64

The Acknowledgment

66

By the Trundle-Bed

67

Arboricide

68

The Cherry Bough

70

The Wild Ride

73

Bedesfolk

75

In a City Street

77

Florentin: A.D. MDCCCXC

79

A Song of the Lilac

80

Monochrome

81

Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon

82

An Estray

83

Friendship Broken

85

A Talisman

87

Heathenesse

88

For Izaak Walton

89

Fifteen Epitaphs

91

Deo Optimo Maximo

98

Charista Musing

99

The Still of the Year

100

A Footnote to a Famous Lyric

102

T.W.P.: A.D. MDCCCXIX-MDCCCXCII

104

Summum Bonum

105

When on the Marge of Evening

106

Hylas

107

Nocturne

109

To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

110

Planting the Poplar

111

To One Who would not Spare Himself

113

Winter Peace

114

Sleep

116

Writ in my Lord Clarendon's History of the Rebellion

117

In a February Garden (Somerset, England)

118

A Valediction. (R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV)

120

A Footpath Morality

121

The Light of the House

123

An Outdoor Litany

125

Of Joan's Youth

127

In a Brecon Valley

128

A Song of Far Travel

130

Spring

131

The Colour-Bearer

132

Sanctuary

134

Emily Brontë

135

Pascal

136

Borderlands

137

Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore

138

Oxford and London: XXVI Sonnets

Oxford:

I. The Tow-Path

145

II. Ad Antiquarium

146

III. Martyrs' Memorial

147

IV. Parks Road

148

V. Tom

149

VI, VIa. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford

150

VII. A December Walk

152

VIII. The Old Dial of Corpus

153

IX. Rooks: New College Gardens

154

X. Above Port Meadow

155

XI. Undertones at Magdalen

156

XII, XIIa. A Last View

157

London:

I. On First Entering Westminster Abbey

159

II. Fog

160

III. St. Peter-ad-Vincula

161

IV. Strikers in Hyde Park

162

V. Changes in the Temple

163

VI. The Lights of London

164

VII. Doves

165

VIII. In the Reading-Room of the British Museum

166

IX. Sunday Chimes in the City

167

X. A Porch in Belgravia

168

XI. York Stairs

169

XII. In the Docks

170

Notes

171

HAPPY ENDING

The Kings

A MAN said unto his Angel:

"My spirits are fallen low,

And I cannot carry this battle:

O brother! where might I go?

"The terrible Kings are on me

With spears that are deadly bright;

Against me so from the cradle

Do fate and my fathers fight."

Then said to the man his Angel:

"Thou wavering witless soul,

Back to the ranks! What matter

To win or to lose the whole,

"As judged by the little judges

Who hearken not well, nor see?

Not thus, by the outer issue,

The Wise shall interpret thee.

"Thy will is the sovereign measure

And only event of things:

The puniest heart, defying,

Were stronger than all these Kings.

"Though out of the past they gather,

Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain,

And pallid Thirst of the Spirit

That is kin to the other twain,

"And Grief, in a cloud of banners,

And ringletted Vain Desires,

And Vice, with the spoils upon him

Of thee and thy beaten sires,—

"While Kings of eternal evil

Yet darken the hills about,

Thy part is with broken sabre

To rise on the last redoubt;

"To fear not sensible failure,

Nor covet the game at all,

But fighting, fighting, fighting,

Die, driven against the wall."

The Squall

WHILE all was glad,

It seemed our birch-tree had,

That August hour, intelligence of death;

For warningly against the eaves she beat

Her body old, lamenting, prophesying,

And the hot breath

Of ferny hollows nestled at her feet

Spread out in startled sighing.

Across an argent sea,

Distinct unto the farthest reef and isle,

The clouds began to be.

Huge forms 'neath sombre draperies, awhile

Made slow uncertain rally;

But as their ranks conjoined, and from the north

The leader shook his lance, Oh, then how fair

Unvested, they stood forth,

In diverse armour, plumed majestically,

Each with his own esquires, a King in air!

Up moved the dark vanguard,

With insolent colours that o'erdusked the skies,

And trailed from beach to beach:

Massed orange and mould-green; vermilion barred

On bronze or mottled silver; saffron dyes

And purples migratory

Fanned each in each,

As the long column broke, athirst for glory.

Sudden, the thunder!

Upon the roofed verandas how it rolled,

Twice, thrice: a thud and flame of doom that told

New-fallen, nor far away,

Some black destruction on the innocent day.

And little Everard

Deep in the hammock under, eyes alight

With healthful fear and wonder

The brave do ne'er unlearn,

Clenched his soft hand, and breathing hard,

Smiled there against his father, like a knight

Baptized on Cressy field or Bannockburn.

A moment gone,

Into our paradise from Acheron,

With imperceptive sorcery crawled ashore

Odours unnamable: an exhalation

Of men and ships in oozy graves. (Ah, cease,

Derisive nereids! cease:

Be it enough, that even ye can pour,

From crystal flagons of your ancient peace,

So strange obscene libation.)

But with the thunder-peal

Sprang the pure winds, their thurible swung wide,

To chase that tainted tide;

Fresh from the pastures and the cedar-grove,

They rode the copper ridges of the main,

And bared a league of distance to reveal

A sail, aslant, astrain,

Impetuous for the cove;

And tossing after, panic-stricken,

Another, and a third: white spirits, fain to sicken,

Nor out of natural harm salvation gain.

The selfsame hunter winds that drave

The horror down, as faithful-hearted drew

The sad clouds from their carnage, and up-piled

Their rebel gonfalons, or jocund threw

Their cannon in the wave;

And subtly, with a parting whisper, gave

An eve most mild:

A sunset like a prayer, a world all rose and blue:

A good world, as it was,

And as it shall be: clear circumferent space,

Where punctual yet, for worship of their Cause,

The stars came thick in choir.

Sleep had our Everard in her cool embrace,

Else from his cot he hardly need have stooped

To see (and laugh to see!) the headland pine

Embossed on changing fire:

For close behind it, cooped

Within a smallest span,

In fury, to and fro and round and round,

The routed leopards of the lightning ran:

Bright, bright, inside their dungeon-bars, malign

They ran; and ran till dawn, without a sound.

Open, Time

OPEN, Time, and let him pass

Shortly where his feet would be!

Like a leaf at Michaelmas

Swooning from the tree,

Ere its hour the manly mind

Trembles in a sure decrease,

Nor the body now can find

Any hold on peace.

Take him, weak and overworn;

Fold about his dying dream

Boyhood, and the April morn,

And the rolling stream:

Weather on a sunny ridge,

Showery weather, far from here;

Under some deep-ivied bridge,

Water rushing clear:

Water quick to cross and part

(Golden light on silver sound),

Weather that was next his heart

All the world around!

Soon upon his vision break

These, in their remembered blue;

He shall toil no more, but wake

Young, in air he knew.

He hath done with roofs and men.

Open, Time, and let him pass,

Vague and innocent again,

Into country grass.

The Knight Errant

(Donatello’s Saint George)

SPIRITS of old that bore me,

And set me, meek of mind,

Between great dreams before me,

And deeds as great behind,

Knowing humanity my star

As first abroad I ride,

Shall help me wear with every scar

Honour at eventide.

Let claws of lightning clutch me

From summer's groaning cloud,

Or ever malice touch me,

And glory make me proud.

Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword,

Choice of the heart's desire:

A short life in the saddle, Lord!

Not long life by the fire.

Forethought and recollection

Rivet mine armour gay!

The passion for perfection

Redeem my failing way!

The arrows of the upper slope

From sudden ambush cast,

Rain quick and true, with one to ope

My Paradise at last!

I fear no breathing bowman,

But only, east and west,

The awful other foeman

Impowered in my breast.

The outer fray in the sun shall be,

The inner beneath the moon;

And may Our Lady lend to me

Sight of the Dragon soon!

To a Dog’s Memory

THE gusty morns are here,

When all the reeds ride low with level spear;

And on such nights as lured us far of yore,

Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine,

The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine:

But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine,

Together roam no more.

Soft showers go laden now

With odours of the sappy orchard-bough,

And brooks begin to brawl along the march;

Steams the late frost from hollow sedges high;

The finch is come, the flame-blue dragonfly,

The marsh-born marigold that children spy,

The plume upon the larch.

There is a music fills

The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills

Southward to Dewing's little bubbly stream,—

The heavenly weather's call! Oh, who alive

Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive,

Having free feet that never felt a gyve

Weigh, even in a dream?

But thou, instead, hast found

The sunless April uplands underground,

And still, wherever thou art, I must be.

My beautiful! arise in might and mirth,

(For we were tameless travellers from our birth);

Arise against thy narrow door of earth,

And keep the watch for me.

Memorial Day

O DAY of roses and regret,

Kissing the old graves of our own!

Not to the slain love's lovely debt

Alone.

But jealous hearts that live and ache,

Remember; and while drums are mute,

Beneath your banners' bright outbreak,

Salute:

And say for us to lessening ranks

That keep the memory and the pride,

On whose thinned hair our tears and thanks

Abide,

Who from their saved Republic pass,

Glad with the Prince of Peace to dwell:

Hail, dearest few! and soon, alas,

Farewell.

Romans in Dorset

A.D. MDCCCXCV

A STUPOR on the heath,

And wrath along the sky;

Space everywhere; beneath

A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.

Sullen quiet below,

But storm in upper air!

A wind from long ago,

In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there,

And singed the triple gloom,

And let through, in a flame,

Crowned faces of old Rome:

Regnant o'er Rome's abandoned ground, processional they came.

Uprisen as any sun

Through vistas hollow grey,

Aloft, and one by one,

In brazen casques the Emperors loomed large, and sank away.

In ovals of wan light

Each warrior eye and mouth:

A pageant brutal bright

As if once over loudly passed Jove's laughter in the south;

And dimmer, these among,

Some cameo'd head aloof,

With ringlets heavy-hung,

Like yellow stonecrop comely grown around a castle roof.

An instant: gusts again,

Then heaven's impacted wall,

The hot insistent rain,

The thunder-shock; and of the Past mirage no more at all,

No more the alien dream

Pursuing, as we went,

With glory's cursèd gleam:

Nor sin of Cæsar's ruined line engulfed us, innocent.

The vision great and dread

Corroded; sole in view

Was empty Egdon spread,

Her crimson summer weeds ashake in tempest: but we knew

What Tacitus had borne

In that wrecked world we saw;

And what, thine heart uptorn,

My Juvenal! distraught with love of violated Law.

Horologion

THE frost may form apace,

The roses pine away:

Nomæa! if I see thy face,

Then is the summer day.

A word of thine, a breath,

And lo! my joy shall seem

To peer far down where life and death

Stir like a forded stream;

Or else shall misery sound

And travel in that hour

All utmost things in their shut round,

As a bee feels his flower.

Thought lags and cries Alas,

Love ranges quick and free.

Oh, figured clock and sanded glass,

They mark no term for me.

And since I can but rue

The calendar gone wrong,

And dials never telling true

If dreams be short or long,

Dear, from these arts that fail

To thee I will repair.

Till the last eve dance down the gale

With no star in her hair,

Be thou my solar chime,

Be thou my wheel of night,

Be thy bright heart, not ashen Time,

My measure, law, and light.

His Angel to his Mother

WHAT would you do for your fairest one,

Wild as the wind and free as the sun,

Born a fugitive, sure to slip

Soon from secular ownership?

Men in search of the heart's desire,

Wearily trampling flood and fire,

Rove betimes into some abyss

Darker far than eternity's.

(Ah, the hazard! it awes one so!)

And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?

Sweet, if you love him, let him go.

Happy the Frontier to have gained

Undetaining and undetained,

Quick and clean, like a solar ray

Shot through spindrift across the bay!

Men would follow a long vain quest,

Feed on ashes and forfeit rest,

Bleed with battle and flag with toil,

Only to stifle in desert soil.

(Ah, the failure! it stings one so!)

And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?

Sweet, if you love him, let him go.

Vats fill up, and the sheaves are in:

Never a blessing is left to win

Save for the myrtle coronal

Round the urn at the end of all.

Men will clutch, as they clutched of old,

Souring honey or dimming gold,

Not the treasure-trove of the land

Here shut fast in a roseleaf hand.

(Ah, the folly! it irks one so!)

And shall it be thus with the boy, or no?

Sweet, if you love him, let him go.

Autumn Magic

SOON as divine September, flushing from sea to sea,

Peers from the whole wide upland into eternity,

Soft as an exhalation, ghosts of the thistle start:

Never a poet saw them but ached in his baffled heart.

Gossamer armies rising thicker than snowflakes fall,

Waken in blood and marrow, aware of the unheard call.

Oh, what a nameless urging through avenues laid in air,

Hints of escape, unbodied, intricate, everywhere,

Sense of a feared denial, or access hard to be won;

Gleams of a dubious gesture for guesses to feed upon!

Flame goes flying in heaven, the down on the cool hillside:

Earth is a bride-veil glory to show and conceal the Bride.

Five Carols for Christmastide

I

THE OX he openeth wide the Doore,

And from the Snowe he calls her inne,

And he hath seen her Smile therefor,

Our Ladye without Sinne.

Now soone from Sleep

A Starre shall leap,

And soone arrive both King and Hinde:

Amen, Amen:

But O, the Place co'd I but finde!

The Ox hath hush'd his voyce and bent

Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,

And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,

The Blessed layes her Browe.

Around her feet

Full Warme and Sweete

His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell:

Amen, Amen:

But sore am I with Vaine Travèl!

The Ox is host in Judah stall

And Host of more than onelie one,

For close she gathereth withal

Our Lorde her littel Sonne.

Glad Hinde and King

Their Gyfte may bring,

But wo'd to-night my Teares were there,

Amen, Amen:

Between her Bosom and His hayre!

II

VINES branching stilly

Shade the open door,

In the house of Zion's Lily,

Cleanly and poor.

Oh, brighter than wild laurel

The Babe bounds in her hand,

The King, who for apparel

Hath but a swaddling-band,

And sees her heavenlier smiling than stars in His command!

Soon, mystic changes

Part Him from her breast,

Yet there awhile He ranges

Gardens of rest:

Yea, she the first to ponder

Our ransom and recall,

Awhile may rock Him under

Her young curls' fall,

Against that only sinless love-loyal heart of all.

What shall inure Him

Unto the deadly dream,

When the Tetrarch shall abjure Him,

The thief blaspheme,

And scribe and soldier jostle

About the shameful tree,

And even an Apostle

Demand to touch and see?—

But she hath kissed her Flower where the Wounds are to be.

III

THREE without slumber ride from afar,

Fain of the roads where palaces are;

All by a shed as they ride in a row,

"Here!" is the cry of their vanishing Star.

First doth a greybeard, glittering fine,

Look on Messiah in slant moonshine:

"This have I bought for Thee!" Vainly: for lo,

Shut like a fern is the young hand divine.

Next doth a magian, mantled and tall,

Bow to the Ruler that reigns from a stall:

"This have I sought for Thee!" Though it be rare,

Loath little fingers are letting it fall.

Last doth a stripling, bare in his pride,

Kneel by the Lover as if to abide:

"This have I wrought for Thee!" Answer him there

Laugh of a Child, and His arms opened wide.

IV

WAS a Soule from farre away

Stood wistful in the Hay,

And of the Babe a-sleeping hadde a sight:

Neither reck'd hee any more

Men behind him and before,

Nor a thousand busie Winges, flitting light:

But in middle of the night

This few-worded wight

(Yule! Yule!)

Bespake Our Ladye bright:

"Fill mee, ere my corage faints,

With the lore of all the Saints:

Harte to harte against my Brother let mee be.

By the Fountaines that are His

I wo'd slumber where Hee is:

Prithee, Mother, give the other Brest to mee!"

The Soule that none co'd see

She hath taken on her knee:

(Yule! Yule!)

Sing prayse to Our Ladye.

V

The Ox and the Ass,

Tell aloud of them:

Sing their pleasure as it was

In Bethlehem.

STILL as blowing rose, sudden as a sword,

Maidenly the Maiden bare Jesu Christ the Lord;

Yet for very lowlihood, such a Guest to greet,

Goeth in a little swoon while kissing of His feet.

Mary, drifted snow on the earthen floor,

Joseph, fallen wondrous weak now he would adore,—

(Oh, the surging might of love! Oh, the drowning bliss!)

Both are rapt to Heaven and lose their human Heaven that is.

From the Newly Born trails a lonely cry.

With a mind to heed, the Ox turns a glowing eye;

In the empty byre the Ass thinks her heart to blame:

Up for comforting of God the beasts of burden came,

Softly to inquire, thrusting as for cheer

There between the tender hands, furry faces dear.

Blessing on the honest coats! tawny coat and grey

Friended Our Delight so well when warmth had strayed away.

Crooks are on the sill; sceptres sail the wave;

All the hopes of all the years are thronging to the Cave.

Mother slept not long, nor long Father's sense was dim,

But another twain the while stood parent-wise to Him.

The Ox and the Ass,

Be you glad for them

Such a moment came to pass

In Bethlehem!

On Leaving Winchester

WINTON, my window with a mossy marge,

My lofty oriel, whence the soul hath sight

Of passionate yesterdays, all gold and large,

Arisen to enrich our narrow night:

Though others bless thee, who so blest before

Hath pastured from the violent time apart,

And laved in supersensual light the heart

Alone with thy magnificent No More?

Sweet court of roses now, sweet camp of bees!

The hills that lean to thy white bed at dawn

Hear, for the clash of raging dynasties,

Laughter of boys about a branchy lawn.

Hast thou a stain, let ivy cover all;

Nor seem of greatness disinhabited

While spirits in their wonted splendour tread

From close to close, by Wolvesey's idle wall.

Bright fins against thy lucid waters leap,

And nigh thy towers the nesting ring-doves dwell;

Be lenient winter, and long moons, and sleep

Upon thee; but on me the sharp Farewell.

Happy art thou, O clad and crowned with rest!

Happy the shepherd (would that I were he!)

Whose early way is step for step with thee,

Whose old brow fades on thine immortal breast.

Cobwebs

WHO would not praise thee, miracle of Frost?

Some gesture overnight, some breath benign,

And lo! the tree's a fountain all a-shine,

The hedge a throne of unimagined cost;

In wheel and fan along a wall embossed,

The spider's humble handiwork shows fine

With jewels girdling every airy line:

Though the small mason in the cold be lost.

Web after web, a morning snare of bliss

Starring with beauty the whole neighbourhood,

May well beget an envy clean and good.

When man goes too into the earth-abyss,

And God in His altered garden walks, I would

My secret woof might gleam so fair as this.

Astræa

SINCE I avail no more, O men! with you,

I will go back unto the gods content;

For they recall me, long with earth inblent,

Lest lack of faith divinity undo.

I served you truly while I dreamed you true,

And golden pains with sovereign pleasure spent:

But now, farewell! I take my sad ascent,

With failure over all I nursed and knew.

Are ye unwise, who would not let me love you?

Or must too bold desires be quieted?

Only to ease you, never to reprove you,

I will go back to heaven with heart unfed:

Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you,

To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.

The Yew-Tree

AS I came homeward

At merry Christmas,

By the old Church tower

Through the Churchyard grass,

And saw there circled

With graves all about,

The Yew-tree paternal,

The Yew-tree devout,

Then this hot life-blood

Was hard to endure,

O Death! so I loved thee,

The sole love sure.

For stars slip in heaven,

They wander, they break;

But under the Yew-tree

Not one heartache.

And ours, what failure

Renewed and avowed!

But ah, the long-buried

Is leal, and is proud.

* * * * * *

At eve, o'erlooking

The smooth chilly tide,

With age-hidden meaning

The Yew-tree sighed,

By the square grey tower,

In the short grey grass,

As I came homeward

At merry Christmas.

Ten Colloquies

I. THE SEARCH

"WHY dost thou hide from these

Out along the hills halloaing?

Why hast forbade

Thy face, O goddess! to thy votaries?"

"Unasking and unknowing

Is he whom I make glad,

Like Dian grandly going

To the sleeping shepherd-lad.

Men that pursue learn not

To follow is my lot."

"Happiness, secret one,

Heartbeat of the April weather,

Where art thou found?

Tell; lest I err too, yonder in the sun."

"Call in thine eye from ether,

Thy feet from far ground;

Seek Honour in this heather,

With austere purples wound.

Serve her: she will reveal

Me, hound-like at thy heel."

II. FACT AND THE MYSTIC

"GOOD-MORROW, Symbol."—"Call me not

The name I neither love nor merit."

—"That grave eternal name inherit,

Thine ever, though all men forgot."

"Mistake me not; secure and free

From rock to rock my falchion passes:

But Symbols trail through grey morasses

The tattered shows of faëry."

"My Symbol thou, of phantom blood,

With starlight from thy temples raying;

Along thy floated body playing

Are withering wings, and wings in bud."

"Alas, thine eye with clay is sealed."

—"Symbol, before the clay's denial,

While yet I had a god's espial,

I saw thee in a solar field!"

"Nay: I am Fact."—"Then lose thy praise;

And lest to-day no song behoove thee,

Lest mine impeach thee, or reprove thee,

Ah, Symbol, Symbol! go thy ways."

III. THE POET’S CHART

"WHERE shall I find my light?"

"Turn from another's track:

Whether for gain or lack,

Love but thy natal right.

Cease to follow withal,

Though on thine up-led feet

Flakes of the phosphor fall.

Oracles overheard

Are never again for thee,

Nor at a magian's knee

Under the hemlock tree,

Burns the illumining word."

"Whence shall I take my law?"

"Neither from sires nor sons,

Nor the delivered ones,

Holy, invoked with awe.

Rather, dredge the divine

Out of thine own poor dust,

Feebly to speak and shine.

Schools shall be as they are:

Be thou truer, and stray

Alone, intent, and away,

In a savage wild to obey

Some dim primordial star."

IV. OF THE GOLDEN AGE

"RECALL for me, recall

The time more true and ample;

The world whereon I trample,

How tortuous and small!

Behold, I tire of all.

"Once, gods in jewelled mail

Through greenwood ways invited;

There how the moon is blighted,

And mosses long and pale

On lifeless cedars trail."

"Child, keep this good unrest:

But give to thine own story

Simplicity with glory;

To greatness dispossessed,

Dominion of thy breast.

"In abstinence, in pride,

Thou, who from Folly's boldest

Thy sacred eye withholdest,

Another morn shalt ride

At Agamemnon's side."

V. ON TIME’S THRESHOLD

"See: brood: remember: this thy function only;

Neither to have nor do is meet for thee."

"Ah, earth's a palace where I must go lonely!"

"Nay: earth's a dungeon which thou passest, free."

VI. WOOD-PIGEONS

"I CANNOT soar beside, but must for ever suffer

Blue air athrill with thee to lap against my breast,

And dream it is thy wing."

—"Dear, sighs about thee hover:

Among the dewy leaves my longing is thy guest.

Yet, lone and far apart, shall we no joy discover

To travel the same sky, and by one sea to rest?

Say, mate in all this world?"

—"Ah, mute forbidden lover,

Ah, song I shall not hear!"

—"Ah, sweet unbuilded nest!"

VII. PREDICAMENTS

"IF the gods ruin send?"—

"Make that thy bride and friend."

"If the gods cheat?"—"They say

The one true word alway."

"If for some loss I pine?"

"—The past is theirs, yet thine."

"If I sue not?"—"Vain cares!

The morrow's thine, not theirs."

VIII. THE CO-ETERNAL

"Is it thou, silly heart,

Not prone on thy pallet, but grieving apart?"

—"Natal Star, even so."

"I miss thee to-night, while thou smoulderest low."

—"Live in beauty! but I

For bloodshed of spirit, here dwindle and die."

"Are we two not the same,

By law everlasting one mystical flame?

Aloft if I burn,

Every ray of my light be thy stair of return:

Up, up! to our lot

Where warfare and time and the body are not."

IX. STERN APHRODITE

"IOLE is coy with me,

Goddess! for a month I suffer

Knowing not how far I be:

Teach me softer arts, or rougher,

Well to sail that sea."

"Fie: how long could Love divine

Venturing, abstain from answer,

Nor look landward for a sign!

Niggard, take of thine entrancer

Shipwreck in the brine."

X. THE JUBILEE

"Master of your wounded heart, regent of your pleasure!

We that long defied your art, tamèd Moods at leisure,

All with you, nor now apart, would tread out our measure."

"Welcome, equal powers benign, quit of ancient madness!

Dance with me beneath the vine, not ungentle Sadness;

Link your little hand in mine soberly, my Gladness."

Winter Boughs

HOW tender and how slow, in sunset cheer,

Far on the hill, our quiet treetops fade!

A broidery of ebon seaweed, laid

Long in a book, were scarce more fine and clear.

Frost and sad light and windless atmosphere

Have breathed on them, and of their frailties made

Beauty more sweet than summer's builded shade,

Whose green domes fallen, leave this wonder here.

O ye forgetting and outliving boughs,

With not a plume, gay in the joust before,

Left for the Archer! so, in evening's eye,

So stilled, so lifted, let your lover die,

Set in the upper calm no voices rouse,

Stript, meek, withdrawn, against the heavenly door.

W.H.

A.D. MDCCLXXVIII-MDCCCXXX

BETWEEN the wet trees and the sorry steeple,

Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,

Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;

Beauty's a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;

But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,

Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.

Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,

Safe also on our earth, begetting ever

Some one love worth the ages and the nations!

Falleth no thing that was to thee eternal.

Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,

Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches.

The Vigil-at-Arms

KEEP holy watch with silence, prayer, and fasting

Till morning break, and every bugle play;

Unto the One aware from everlasting

Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.

Forth from this peace on manhood's way thou goest,

Flushed with resolve, and radiant in mail;

Blessing supreme for men unborn thou sowest,

O knight elect! O soul ordained to fail!

A Friend’s Song for Simoisius

THE breath of dew and twilight's grace

Be on the lonely battle-place,

And to so young, so kind a face,

The long protecting grasses cling!

(Alas, alas,

That one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,

The honey-bees unrifled sleep;

The early moon from Ida steep

Comes to the empty wrestling-ring;

Upon the widowed wind recede

No echoes of the shepherd's reed;

And children without laughter lead

The war-horse to the watering;

With footstep separate and slow

The father and the mother go,

Not now upon an urn they know

To mingle tears for comforting.

Thou stranger Ajax Telamon!

What to the lovely hast thou done,

That nevermore a maid may run

With him across the flowery Spring?

The world to me has nothing dear

Beyond the namesake river here:

Oh, Simois is wild and clear!

And to his brink my heart I bring;

My heart, if only this might be,

Would stay his waters from the sea,

To cover Troy, to cover me,

To haste the hour of perishing.

(Alas, alas,

That one inexorable thing!)

To an Ideal

THAT I have tracked you from afar, my crown I call it and my height:

All hail, O dear and difficult star! All hail, O heart of light!

No pleasure born of time for me,

Who in you touch eternity.

If I have found you where you are, I win my mortal fight.

You flee the plain: I therefore choose summit and solitude for mine,

The high air where I cannot lose our comradeship divine.

More lovely here, to wakened blood,

Sparse leaf and hesitating bud,

Than rosaries in the dewy vales for which the dryads pine.

Spirit austere! lend aid: I walk along inclement ridges too,

Disowning toys of sense, to baulk my soul of ends untrue.

Because man's cry, by night and day,

Cried not for God, I broke away.

On, at your ruthless pace! I'll stalk, a hilltop ghost, with you.

In a Ruin, after a Thunder Storm

KEEP of the Norman, old to flood and cloud!

Thou dost reproach me with thy sunset look,

That in our common menace I forsook

Hope, the last fear, and stood impartial proud:

Almost, almost, while ether spake aloud,

Death from the smoking stones my spirit shook

Into thy hollow as leaves into a brook,

No more than they by heaven's assassins cowed.

But now thy thousand-scarrèd steep is flecked

With the calm kisses of the light delayed,

Breathe on me better valour: to subject

My soul to greed of life, and grow afraid

Lest ere her fight's full term, the Architect

See downfall of the stronghold that He made.

Beati Mortui

BLESSED the Dead in Spirit, our brave dead

Not passed, but perfected:

Who tower up to mystical full bloom

From self, as from a known alchemic tomb;

Who out of wrong

Run forth with laughter and a broken thong;

Who win from pain their strange and flawless grant

Of peace anticipant;

Who cerements lately wore of sin, but now,

Unbound from foot to brow,

Gleam in and out of cities, beautiful

As sun-born colours of a forest pool

Where Autumn sees

The splash of walnuts from her thinning trees.

Though wondered-at of some, yea, feared almost

As any chantry ghost,

How sight of these, in hermitage or mart,

Makes glad a wistful heart!

For life's apologetics read most true

In spirits risen anew,

Like larks in air

To whom flat earth is all a heavenward stair,

And who from yonder parapet

Scorn every mortal fret,

And rain their sweet bewildering staves

Upon our furrow of fresh-delvèd graves.

If thus to have trod and left the wormy way

Makes men so wondrous gay,

So stripped and free and potently alive,

Who would not his infirmity survive,

And bathe in victory, and come to be

As blithe as ye,

Saints of the ended wars? Ah, greeting give;

Turn not away, too fugitive:

But hastening towards us, hallow the foul street,

And sit with us at meat,

And of your courtesy, on us unwise

Fix oft those purer eyes,

Till in ourselves who love them dwell

The same sure light ineffable:

Till they who walk with us in after years

Forgetting time and tears

(As we with you), shall sing all day instead:

"How blessed are the Dead!"

Two Irish Peasant Songs

I. IN LEINSTER

I TRY to knead and spin, but my life is low the while.

Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile;

Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,

Why from me that's young should the wild tears fall?

The shower-sodden earth, the earth-coloured streams,

They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,

And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,

It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill,

And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;

But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call,

The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

II. IN ULSTER

'TIS the time o' the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,

The green like a breaker rolls steady up the branch,

And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves

In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;

And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,

And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

'Tis the time o' the year the marsh is full of sound,

And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground.

The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars,

The daisy takes the middle field and spangles it with stars,

And down the hedgerow to the lane the primroses do crowd,

All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!

'Tis the time o' the year, in early light and glad,

The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;

The rocks are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,

Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling's golden eyes,

And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep

Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

'Tis the time o' the year I turn upon the height

To watch from my harrow the dance of going light;

And if before the sun be hid, come slowly up the vale

Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,

Hey, but there's many a March for me, and many and many a lass!—

I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.

The Japanese Anemone

ALL summer the breath of the roses around

Exhales with a delicate passionate sound;

And when from a trellis, in holiday places,

They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,

A lad in the lane must slacken his paces.

Fragrance of these is a voice from a bower:

But low by the wall is my odourless flower,

So pure, so controlled, not a fume is above her,

That poet or bee should delay there and hover;

For she is a silence, and therefore I love her.

And never a mortal by morn or midnight

Is called to her hid little house of delight;

And she keeps from the wind, on his pillages olden,

Upon a true stalk in rough weather upholden,

Her winter-white gourd with the hollow moon-golden.

While ardours of roses contend and increase,

Methinks she has found how noble is peace,

Like a spirit besought from the world to dissever,

Not absent to men, though resumed by the Giver,

And dead long ago, being lovely for ever.

Orisons

ORANGE and olive and glossed bay-tree,

And air of the evening out at sea,

And out at sea on the steep warm stone,

A little bare diver poising alone.

Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves,

Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves,

"I am!" he cries to his glorying heart,

And unto he knows not what: "THOU art!"

He leaps, he shines, he sinks and is gone:

He will climb to the golden ledge anon.

Perfecter rite can none employ,

When the god of the isle is good to a boy.

The Inner Fate: a Chorus

NOT weak with eld

The stars beheld

Proud Persia coming to her doom;

Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed,

The long luxurious galleys lost

Their souls at Actium.

Not outer arts

Of hostile hearts

Seduced the arm of France to be

The wreckage of his wars at last,

The orphan of the kingdoms, cast

Upon the mothering sea.

Man evermore doth work his will,

And evermore the gods are still,

Applauding him alone who stands

Too just for Heaven-accusing groans,

But in his house of havoc owns

The doing of his hands:

Transgressor, yet divinely taught

To suffer all, blaspheming naught,

When fair-begun must foul conclude:

Himself progenitor of death

Who breeds, within, the only breath

Can kill beatitude.

The Acknowledgment

SINCE first I knew it our divine employ

To beat beyond the reach of soiling care,

As at Philippi, well of doom aware,

The Prætor called and heard the singing-boy;

Since first my soul so jealous was of joy,

That any facile linden-bloom in air,

Or fall of water on a wildwood stair,

Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy;

Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled

Long, long, at such august amends up-piled,

Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop

Death's aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup,

On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child,

Immortals! unto You will drink it up.

By the Trundle-bed

LOST love, be never beyond Love's calling!

For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet

As fontal water in Arden falling,

As first-mown hay in the April heat:

To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden,

And bring to bloom in the outer cold,

Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden,

Our son that is like you, and six years old;

And lest his worth be the worth unreal,

To ward him not from the mortal blast,

But suffer your own, through a long ordeal,

Verily like you to be at the last,

And hear men murmur, if so he merit

In your old place with your look to arise:

"The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?—

You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes."

Arboricide

A WORD of grief to me erewhile:

We have cut the oak down, in our isle.

And I said: "Ye have bereaven

The song-thrush and the bee,

And the fisher-boy at sea

Of his sea-mark in the even;

And gourds of cooling shade, to lie

Within the sickle's sound;

And the old sheep-dog's loyal eye

Of sleep on duty's ground;

And poets of their tent

And quiet tenement.

Ah, impious! who so paid

Such fatherhood, and made

Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade."

For the hewn oak a century fair,

A wound in earth, an ache in air.

And I said: "No pillared height

With a summer daïs over,

Where a dryad fled her lover

Through the long arcade of light;

Nor 'neath Arcturus rolleth more,

Since the loud leaves are gone,

Between the shorn cliff and the shore,

Pan's organ antiphon.

Some nameless envy fed

This blow at grandeur's head:

Some breathed reproach, o'erdue,

Degenerate men, ye drew!

Hence, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew."

The Cherry Bough

IN a new poet's and a new friend's honour,

Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting,

Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome

Here in my garden,

Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses,

And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting,

One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries.

Oh, naught is absent,

Oh, naught but you, kind head that far in prison

Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god's pity

Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels

Were once so plenty;

Nor dreams, from revel and strange faces turning,

How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you

I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden

With your rich verses!

Since, long ago, in other gentler weather,

Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it

(Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother

Glad with your gladness),

What has befallen in the world of wonder,

That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet colour,

And you, and you that fed our eyes with beauty,

Are sapped and rotten?

Alas! When my young guests have done with singing,

I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden's glory,

And hold it high among them, and say after:

"O my poor Ovid,

"Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember

For the clear time when we were boys together,

These tears at home are shed; and with you also

Your bough is dying."

The Wild Ride

I HEAR in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses

All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,

All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle

Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,

With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;

There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:

What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.

Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,

And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:

Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.

A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,

A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:

We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses

All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,

All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)

We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;

We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil.

Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers that follow.

Bedesfolk

WHO is good enough to be

Near the never-stainèd sea?

Ah, not I,

Who thereby

Only sigh:

Pray for me.

Standing underneath some free

Innocent magnanimous tree,

To be true,

There anew

Must I sue:

Pray for me.

Ere I pass on hilly lea

Fellow-lives of glad degree,

Without shame,

Name by name

These I claim:

Pray for me.

Fail not, then, thou kingly sea!

Aid the needy, sister tree!

March herds,

Ye have words!

April birds,

Pray for me!

In a City Street

THOUGH sea and mount have beauty and this but what it can,

Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,

The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,

The dread endearing stain of time,

The sullied heart of man.

Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,

That where it dare not enter steals in shrouded passion by;

And mine the saffron river-sails,

And every plane-tree that avails

To rest an urban eye;

The bells, the dripping gable, the tavern's corner glare;

The cab in firefly darting; the barrel-organ air,

While one by one, or two by two

The hatless babes are waltzing through

The gutters of the Square.

Not on Thessalian headlands of song and old desire

My spirit chose her pleasure-house, but in the London mire:

Long, long alone she loves to pace,

And find a music in this place

As in a minster choir.

O names of awe and rapture! O deeds of legendry!

Still is it most of joy within your altered pale to be,

Whose very ills I fain would slake

Mine angels are, and help to make

In Hell a Heaven for me.

Florentin

A.D. MDCCCXC

HEART all full of heavenward haste, too like the bubble bright

On wild little waters floating half of an April night,

Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light,

Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be

Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea:

Whither, through troubled valleys, we also follow thee.

A Song of the Lilac

ABOVE the wall that's broken,

And from the coppice thinned,

So sacred and so sweet

The lilac in the wind!

For when by night the May wind blows

The lilac-blooms apart,

The memory of his first love

Is shaken on his heart.

In tears it long was buried,

And trances wrapt it round;

Oh, how they wake it now,

The fragrance and the sound!

For when by night the May wind blows

The lilac-blooms apart,

The memory of his first love

Is shaken on his heart.

Monochrome

SHUT fast again in Beauty's sheath

Where ancient forms renew,

The round world seems above, beneath,

One wash of faintest blue,

And air and tide so stilly sweet

In nameless union lie,

The little far-off fishing fleet

Goes drifting up the sky.

Secure of neither misted coast

Nor ocean undefined,

Our flagging sail is like the ghost

Of one that served mankind,

Who in the void, as we upon

This melancholy sea,

Finds labour and allegiance done,

And Self begin to be.

Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon

"AND now, my clerks who go in fur or feather

Or brighter scales, I bless you all. Be true

To your true Lover and Avenger, whether

By land or sea ye die the death undue.

Then proffer man your pardon; and together

Track him to Heaven, and see his heart made new.

"From long ago one hope hath in me thriven,

Your hope, mysterious as the scented May:

Not to Himself your titles God hath given

In vain, nor only for our mortal day.

O doves! how from The Dove shall ye be driven?

O darling lambs! ye with The Lamb shall play."

An Estray

WELL we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream:

Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,

For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd's stave,

For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.

While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering,

And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,

Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast

Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,

As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay,

Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?

Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain

Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,

As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light,

How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!

Lest captivity be o'er, lest thou glide away, and so

From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.

Friendship Broken

I

WE chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,

Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,

Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke

Strange things and deep as any poet penned,

Such truth as never truth again can mend,

Whatever art we use, what gods invoke;

It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke:

Be what it may, it had a solemn end.

Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne

Are foeman vassals; pale astrologers,

Each a wise skeptic of the other's star.

Silently, as we went our ways alone,

The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters,

Drew high between us his majestic bar.

II

MINE was the mood that shows the dearest face

Through a long avenue, and voices kind

Idle, and indeterminate, and blind

As rumours from a very distant place;

Yet, even so, it gathered the first chase

Of the first swallows where the lane's inclined,

An ebb of wavy wings to serve my mind

For round Spring's vision. Ah, some equal grace

(The calm sense of seen beauty without sight)

Befell thee, honourable heart! no less

In patient stupor walking from the dawn;

Albeit thou too wert loser of life's light,

Like fallen Adam in the wilderness,

Aware of naught but of the thing withdrawn.

A Talisman

TAKE Temperance to thy breast,

While yet is the hour of choosing,

As arbitress exquisite

Of all that shall thee betide;

For better than fortune's best

Is mastery in the using,

And sweeter than any thing sweet

The art to lay it aside!

Heathenesse

NO round boy-satyr, racing from the mere,

Shakes on the mountain lawn his dripping head

This many a May, your sister being dead,

Ye Christian folk! your sister great and dear.

To breathe her name, to think how sad-sincere

Was all her searching, straying, dreaming, dread,

How of her natural night was Plato bred

(A star to keep the ways of honour clear),

Who will not sigh for her? who can forget

Not only unto campèd Israel,

Nor martyr-maids that as a bridegroom met

The Roman lion's roar, salvation fell?

To Him be most of praise that He is yet

Your God through gods not inaccessible.

For Izaak Walton

CAN trout allure the rod of yore

In Itchen stream to dip?

Or lover of her banks restore

That sweet Socratic lip?

Old fishing and wishing

Are over many a year.

Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Again the foamy shallows fill,

The quiet clouds amass,

And soft as bees by Catherine Hill

At dawn the anglers pass,

And follow the hollow,

In boughs to disappear.

Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Nay, rise not now, nor with them take

One amber-freckled fool!

Thy sons to-day bring each an ache

For ancient arts to cool.

But, father, lie rather

Unhurt and idle near;

Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

While thought of thee to men is yet

A sylvan playfellow,

Ne'er by thy marble they forget

In pious cheer to go.

As air falls, the prayer falls

O'er kingly Winchester:

Oh, hush thee, Oh, hush thee! heart innocent and dear.

Fifteen Epitaphs

I

I LAID the strewings, darling, on thine urn;

I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.

Now hushaby, my little child, and learn

Long sleep how good it is.

In vain thy mother prays, wayfaring hence,

Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell;

But thou more blest, O mild intelligence!

Forget her, and Farewell.

II

GENTLE Grecian passing by,

Father of thy peace am I:

Wouldst thou now, in memory,

Give a soldier's flower to me,

Choose the standard named of yore

Beautiful Worth-dying-for,

That shall wither not, but wave

All the year above my grave.

III

LIGHT thou hast of the moon,

Shade of the dammar-pine,

Here on thy hillside bed;

Fair befall thee, O fair

Lily of womanhood,

Patient long, and at last

Here on thy hillside bed,

Happier: ah, Blæsilla!

IV

ME, deep-tressèd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,

Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,

Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!

V

UPON thy level tomb, till windy winter morn,

The fallen leaves delay;

But plain and pure their trace is, when themselves are torn

From delicate frost away.

As here to transient frost the absent leaf is, such

Thou wert and art to me:

So on my passing life is thy long-passèd touch,

O dear Alcithoë!

VI

HAIL, and be of comfort, thou pious Xeno,

Late the urn of many a kinsman wreathing;

On thine own shall even the stranger offer

Plentiful myrtle.

VII

HERE lies one in the earth who scarce of the earth was moulded,

Wise Æthalides' son, himself no lover of study,

Cnopus, asleep, indoors: the young invincible runner.

They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave we made him,

Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare and beautiful iris,

Stop short, full of delight, and cry out: "See, it is Cnopus

Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to Chalcis!"

VIII

ERE the Ferryman from the coast of spirits

Turn the diligent oar that brought thee thither,

Soul, remember: and leave a kiss upon it

For thy desolate father, for thy sister,

Whichsoever be first to cross hereafter.

IX

JAFFA ended, Cos begun

Thee, Aristeus. Thou wert one

Fit to trample out the sun:

Who shall think thine ardours are

But a cinder in a jar?

X

TWO white heads the grasses cover:

Dorcas, and her lifelong lover.

While they graced their country closes

Simply as the brooks and roses,

Where was lot so poor, so trodden,

But they cheered it of a sudden?

Fifty years at home together,

Hand in hand, they went elsewhither,

Then first leaving hearts behind

Comfortless. Be thou as kind.

XI

AS wind that wasteth the unmarried rose,

And mars the golden breakers in the bay,

Hurtful and sweet from heaven for ever blows

Sad thought that roughens all our quiet day;

And elder poets envy, while they weep,

Ion, whom first the gods to covert brought,

Here under inland olives laid asleep,

Most wise, most happy, having done with thought.

XII

COWS in the narrowing August marshes,

Cows in a stretch of water

Motionless,

Neck on neck overlapped and drooping;

These in their troubled and dumb communion,

Thou on the steep bank yonder,

Pastora!

No more ever to lead and love them,

No more ever. Thine innocent mourners

Pass thy tree in the evening

Heavily,

Hearing another herd-girl calling.

XIII

GO you by with gentle tread.

This was Paula, who is dead:

Dear grey eyes that had a look

Like some rock-o'ershadowed brook,

Voice upon the ear to cling

Sweeter than the cithern string.

With that spirit shy and fair

Quietly and unaware

Climbing past the starry van

Went, for triple talisman,

They to whom the heavens must ope:

Candour, Chastity, and Hope.

XIV

TAKE from an urn my vow and salutation

Unto the land I never now shall see:

Laid here exiled, my heart in desolation

Frets like a child against her breast to be.

Far from the sky, a rose that opes at even

(One liquid star for dewdrop on the rose),

Far from the shower that nesting low in heaven

Thrice in an hour light-wingèd comes and goes,

Far from my lost and blessèd and belovèd

Nightfall of June beside the Rhodian wave,

Mine is the pain another isle to covet,

Though all in vain, for gardener of my grave.

XV

PRAISE thou the Mighty Mother for what is wrought, not me,

A nameless nothing-caring head asleep against her knee.

Deo Optimo Maximo

ALL else for use, One only for desire;

Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:

Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,

Impel Thou me.

Delight is menace if Thou brood not by,

Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.

Oft as the morn (though none of earth deny

These three are dear),

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,

And wander free amid my freeborn joys:

Oh, close my hand upon Beatitude!

Not on her toys.

Charista Musing

MOVELESS, on the marge of a sunny cornfield,

Rapt in sudden revery while thou standest,

Like the sheaves, in beautiful Doric yellow

Clad to the ankle,

Oft to thee with delicate hasty footstep

So I steal, and suffer because I find thee

Inly flown, and only a fallen feather

Left of my darling.

Give me back thy wakening breath, thy ringlets

Fragrant as the vine of the bean in blossom,

And those eyes of violet dusk and daylight

Under sea-water,

Eyes too far away, and too full of longing!

Yes: and go not heavenward where I lose thee,

Go not, go not whither I cannot follow,

Being but earthly.

Willing swallow poisèd upon my finger,

Little wild-wing ever from me escaping,

For the care thou art to me, I thy lover

Love thee, and fear thee.

The Still of the Year

UP from the willow-root

Subduing agonies leap;

The field-mouse and the purple moth

Turn over amid their sleep;

The icicled rocks aloft

Burn amber and blue alway,

And trickling and tinkling

The snows of the drift decay.

Oh, mine is the head must hang

And share the immortal pang!

Winter or spring is fair;

Thaw's hard to bear.

Heigho! my heart's sick.

Sweet is cherry-time, sweet

A shower, a bobolink,

And trillium, fain far under

Her cloistering leaf to shrink;

But here in the vast, unborn,

Is the bitterest place to be,

Till striving and longing

Shall quicken the earth and me.

What change inscrutable

Is nigh us, we know not well;

Gone is the strength to sigh

Either to live or die.

Heigho! my heart's sick.

A Footnote to a Famous Lyric

TRUE love's own talisman, which here

Shakespeare and Sidney failed to teach,

A steel-and-velvet Cavalier

Gave to our Saxon speech:

Chief miracle of theme and touch

That all must envy and adore:

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

No critic born since Charles was King

But sighed in smiling, as he read:

"Here's theft supreme of everything

A poet might have said!"

Young knight and wit and beau, who won

Mid war's upheaval, ladies' praise,

Was't well of you, ere you had done,

To blight our modern bays?

Oh, yet to you, whose random hand

Struck from the dark whole gems like these

(Archaic beauty, never planned

Nor reared by wan degrees,

Which leaves an artist poor, and Art

An earldom richer all her years);

To you, dead on your shield apart,

Be "Ave!" passed in tears.

'Twas virtue's breath inflamed your lyre:

Heroic from the heart it ran;

Nor for the shedding of such fire

Lived, since, a manlier man.

And till your strophe sweet and bold

So lovely aye, so lonely long,

Love's self outdo, dear Lovelace! hold

The parapets of Song.

T.W.P.

A.D. MDCCCXIX-MDCCCXCII

FRIEND who hast gone, and dost enrich to-day

New England brightly building far away,

And crown her liberal walk

With company more choice, and sweeter talk,

Look not on Fame, but Peace; and in a bower

Receive at last her fulness and her power:

Nor wholly, pure of heart!

Forget thy few, who would be where thou art.

Summum Bonum

WAITING on Him who knows us and our need,

Most need have we to dare not, nor desire,

But as He giveth, softly to suspire

Against His gift with no inglorious greed,

For this is joy, though still our joys recede;

And, as in octaves of a noble lyre,

To move our minds with His, and clearer, higher,

Sound forth our fate: for this is strength indeed.

Thanks to His love let earth and man dispense

In smoke of worship when the heart is stillest,

A praying more than prayer: "Great good have I,

Till it be greater good to lay it by;

Nor can I lose peace, power, permanence,

For these smile on me from the thing Thou willest!"

When on the Marge of Evening

WHEN on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,

And winds of dreamy odour are loosened from afar,

Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken,

On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying star,

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!),

Whose greater noonday splendours the many share and see,

While sacred and for ever, some perfect law is keeping

The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.

Hylas

(THERE'S a thrush on the under bough

Fluting evermore and now:

"Keep—young!" but who knows how?)

Jar in arm, they bade him rove

Through the alder's long alcove,

Where the hid spring musically

Gushes to the ample valley.

Down the woodland corridor,

Odours deepened more and more;

Blossomed dogwood in the briars

Struck her faint delicious fires;

Miles of April passed between

Crevices of closing green,

And the moth, the violet-lover,

By the wellside saw him hover.

Ah, the slippery sylvan dark!

Never after shall he mark

(On his drownèd cheek down-sinking),

Noisy ploughman drinking, drinking.

Quit of serving is that wild

Absent and bewitchèd child,

Unto action, age, and danger

Thrice a thousand years a stranger.

Fathoms low, the naiads sing,

In a birthday welcoming;

Water-white their breasts, and o'er him,

Water-grey, their eyes adore him.

(There's a thrush on the under bough

Fluting evermore and now:

"Keep—young!" but who knows how?)

Nocturne

THE sun that hurt his lovers from on high

Is fallen; she more merciful is nigh,

The blessèd one whose beauty's even glow

Gave never wound to any shepherd's eye.

Above our lonely boat in shallows drifting,

Alone her plaintive form ascends the sky.

Oh, sing! the water-golds are deepening now,

Almost a hush is on the aspen bough;

Her light caresseth thine, as saint to saint

Sweet interchanged adorings may allow:

Sing, Eunoë, that lily throat uplifting:

They are so like, the holy Moon and thou!

To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

YOUNG father-poet! much in you I praise

Adventure high, romantic, vehement,

All with inviolate honour sealed and blent

To the axe-edge that cleft your soldier bays;

Your friendships too, your follies, whims, and frays;

And most, that verse of strict imperious bent

Heard sweetly as from some old harper's tent,

And clanging in the listener's brain for days.

At Framlingham to-night if there should be

No guest beyond a sea-born wind that sighs,

No guard save moonlight's crossed and trailing spears,

And I, your pilgrim, call you, Oh, let me

In at the gate! and smile into the eyes

That sought you, Surrey, down three hundred years.

Planting the Poplar

BECAUSE thou'rt not an oak

To breast the thunder-stroke,

Or flamy-fruited yew

Darker than Time, how few

Of birds or men or kine

Will love this throne of thine,

Scant Poplar, without shade

Inhospitably made!

Yet, branches never parted

From their straight secret bole,

Yet, sap too single-hearted!

Prosper as my soul.

In loneliness, in quaint

Perpetual constraint,

In gallant poverty,

A girt and hooded tree,

See if against the gale

Our leafage can avail:

Lithe, equal, naked, true,

Rise up as spirits do,

And be a spirit crying

Before the folk that dream!

My slender early-dying

Poplar, by the stream.

To One who would not Spare Himself

A CENSER playing from a heart all fire,

A flushing, racing, singing mountain stream

Thou art; and dear to us of dull desire

In thy far-going dream.

Full to the grave be thy too fleeting way,

And full thereafter: few that know thee best

Will grudge it so, for neither thou nor they

Can mate thy soul with rest.

God put thee from the laws of Time adrift.

Lo, He who moves without delay or haste,

Far less may love the sheaves of ghostly thrift,

Than some diviner waste.

Be mine to ride in joy, ere thou art gone,

The flame, the torrent, which is one with thee!

Saint, from this pool of dying sweep us on

Where Life must long to be.

Winter Peace

APRIL seemed a restless pain,

June a phantom in the rain;

Weary Autumn without grain

Turned her home, full of tears.

O my year, the most in vain

Of the years!

While the furrowed field was red,

While the roses rioted,

While a leaf was left to shed,

There was storm in the air.

Now that troubled heart is dead,

All is fair.

'Neath a glow of copper-grey

Spreads the stubble far away,

And the hilltop cedars play

Interludes in accord,

And the sun adorns the day

Like a sword.

Even, usual, and slow,

Blue enchanted breakers go

Over carmine reefs in snow,

With a sail in the lee:

There's the godhead that we know

On the sea.

Ah, let be a promise vast

So mysteriously downcast!

I will love this year that passed

To her grave in the wild,

And is clear of stain at last

As a child.

Sleep

O GLORIOUS tide, O hospitable tide

On whose mysterious breast my head hath lain,

Lest I, all eased of wounds and washed of stain

Through holy hours, be yet unsatisfied,

Loose me betimes: for in my soul abide

Urgings of memory, and exile's pain

Weighs on me, as the spirit of one slain

May throb for the old strife wherein he died.

Often and evermore, across the sea

Of dark and dreams, to fatherlands of Day,

Oh, speed me: as that outworn King erewhile

By kind Phæacians borne ashore, so me,

Thy loving healèd ward, fail not to lay

Beneath the olive boughs of mine own isle.

Writ in my Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion

HOW life hath cheapen'd, and how blank

The Worlde is! like a fen

Where long ago unstainèd sank

The starrie gentlemen:

Since Marston Moor and Newbury drank

King Charles his gentlemen.

If Fate in any air accords

What Fate deny'd, Oh, then

I ask to be among your Swordes,

My joyous gentlemen;

Towards Honour's heaven to goe, and towards

King Charles his gentlemen!

In a February Garden

ONE rose till after snowtime

O'erlooked the sodden grass;

Now crocuses are twenty

With spear and torch a plenty,

To keep our Candlemas.

So thin that winter greyness,

So light that sleep forlorn,

No seventh week uncloses

Between the martyr roses

And crocus newly born.

All doubt is hushed for ever,

Confuted without sound,

All ruin featly ended,

When bulbs begin their splendid

Gay muster overground;

And mid the golden heralds

That ride the icy breeze,

Man, too, divinely vernal,

Storms into life eternal

Victoriously with these.

O Beauty, O Persistence

Ineffable and strong!

Would we had borne with Sorrow

In her unlasting morrow:

And Death was not for long.

A Valediction

R.L.S.: A.D. MDCCCXCIV

WHEN from the vista of the Book I shrink,

From lauded pens that earn ignoble wage

Begetting nothing joyous, nothing sage,

Nor keep with Shakespeare's use one golden link;

When heavily my sanguine spirits sink

To read too plain on each impostor page

Only of kings the broken lineage,—

Well for my peace if then on thee I think,

Louis, our priest of letters, and our knight

With whose familiar baldric Hope is girt,

From whose young hands she bears the Grail away.

All glad, all great! Truer because thou wert,

I am and must be; and in thy known light

Go down to dust, content with this my day.

A Footpath Morality

ALONG the Hills, height unto height

Tosses the dappled light,

Rills in a torrent flow,

And cuckoo calls beyond the third hedgerow.

Young winds nothing can quell

Scale the wild-chestnut citadel,

Again to make

Its thousand faëry white pagodas shake.

Up many a lane

The blue vervain

A coverlid hath featly spread

For the bees' bed,

That those tired sylvan thieves

May lie most soft on the sweet and scalloped leaves.

And by to-morrow morn

Bright agrimony, in the thickets born,

Will high uphold

Each cinquefoil of plain gold;

Dogwood in white will hood herself apace,

And betony flaunt a varied gypsy mace,

And copper pimpernel, true as a clock,

On some waste common, by a rock

Her small dark-centred wheel draw in

Long, long ere dusk begin.

This day

Of infinite May

Is far more fitly yours than ours,

O spirit-bodied flowers!

What heart disordered sore

Comes through the greenwood door,

Shall for your sake

Find sap and soil and dew, and shall not break;

And hearts beneath no ban

Will in your sight some penance do for man,

Poor lagging man, content to be

Sick with the impact of eternity,

Who might keep step with you in the low grass,

Best part of one strange pageant made in joy to pass!

Not ye, not ye, the privilege disown

To flourish fair and fall fair, and be strewn

Deep in that Will of God, where blend

The origin of beauty and the end.

The Light of the House

BEYOND the cheat of Time, here where you died, you live;

You pace the garden walk, secure and sensitive;

You linger on the stair: Love's lonely pulses leap!

The harpsichord is shaken, the dogs look up from sleep.

Here, after all the years, you keep the heirdom still;

The youth and joy in you achieve their olden will,

Unbidden, undeterred, with waking sense adored;

And still the house is happy that hath so dear a lord.

To every inmate heart, confirmed in cheer you brought,

Your name is as a spell midway of speech and thought,

And to a wonted guest (not awestruck heretofore),

The sunshine that was you floods all the open door.

An Outdoor Litany

Donec misereatur nostri.

THE spur is red upon the briar,

The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;

The wind shakes out the coloured fire

From lamps a-row on the sycamore;

The bluebird with his flitting note

Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;

The mink is busy; herds again

Go hillward in the honeyed rain;

The midges meet. I cry to Thee

Whose heart

Remembers each of these: Thou art

My God who hast forgotten me!

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,

The lined gulls in the offing ride;

Along an edge of marshy ground

The shad-bush enters like a bride.

Yon little clouds are washed of care

That climb the blue New England air,

And almost merrily withal

The hyla tunes at evenfall

His oboe in a mossy tree.

So too,

Am I not Thine? Arise, undo

This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

Happy the vernal rout that come

To their due offices to-day,

And strange, if in Thy mercy's sum,

Excluded man alone decay.

I ask no triumph, ask no joy,

Save leave to live, in law's employ.

As to a weed, to me but give

Thy sap! lest aye inoperative

Here in the Pit my strength shall be:

And still

Help me endure the Pit, until

Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

Of Joan’s Youth

I WOULD unto my fair restore

A simple thing:

The flushing cheek she had before!

Out-velveting

No more, no more,

On our sad shore,

The carmine grape, the moth's auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass

Unmoor the rose;

Or guileful ways the salmon pass

To sea, disclose:

For so, alas,

With Love, alas,

With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

In a Brecon Valley

Patulis ubi vallibus errans

Subjacet aëriis montibus Isca pater.

H.V. Ad Posteros.

I

I FOLLOWED thee, wild stream of Paradise,

White Usk, for ever showering the sunned bee

In the pink chestnut and the hawthorn tree;

And all along had magical surmise

Of mountains fluctuant in those vesper skies,

As unto mermen, caverned in mid-sea,

Far up the vast green reaches, soundlessly

The giant breakers form, and fall, and rise.

Above thy poet's dust, by yonder yew,

Ere distance perished, ere a star began,

His clear monastic measure, heard of few,

Through lonelier glens of mine own being ran;

And thou to me wert dear, because I knew

The God who made thee gracious, and the man.

II

IF, by that second lover's power controlled,

In sweet symbolic rite thy breath o'erfills

Fields of no war with vagrant daffodils,

From distance unto distance trailing gold;

If dazzling sands or thickets thee enfold,

Transfigured Usk, where from their mossy sills

Grey hamlets kiss thee, and by herded hills

Diviner run thy shallows than of old;—

If intellectual these, Oh! name my Vaughan

Creator too: and close his memory keep

Who from thy fountain, kind to him, hath drawn

Birth, energy, and joy; devotion deep;

A play of thought more mystic than the dawn,

And death at home; and centuried sylvan sleep.

A Song of Far Travel

MANY a time some drowsy oar from the nearer bank invited,

Crossed a narrow stream, and bore in among the reeds moon-lighted,

There to leave me on a shore no ferryman hath sighted.

Many a time a mountain stile, dark and bright with sudden wetting,

Lured my vagrant foot the while 'twixt uplifting and down-setting,—

Whither? Thousand mile on mile, beyond the last forgetting.

Long by hidden ways I wend (past occasion grown a ranger);

Yet enchantment, like a friend, takes from death the tang of danger:

Hardly river or road can end where I need step a stranger.

Spring

With a difference.—HAMLET.

AGAIN the bloom, the northward flight,

The fount freed at its silver height,

And down the deep woods to the lowest

The fragrant shadows scarred with light.

O inescapeable joy of Spring!

For thee the world shall leap and sing;

But by her darkened door thou goest

Henceforward as a spectral thing.

The Colour-Bearer

THY charge was: "Hold My banner

Against our hidden foe;

To war where sounds no manner

Of glorious music, go!"

And like Thy word my answer all joyless: "Be it so."

Ah, not to brave Thy censure

But win Thy smile of light,

My heart of misadventure

Will end in the losing fight,

And lie out yonder, wattled with wounds from left to right.

The day will pass of torment,

The evenfall be sweet

When I shall wear for garment

The nakedness of defeat.

But when afield Thou comest, and look'st in vain to meet

That eagle of the wartime,

That oriflamme, outrolled

With strength of staff aforetime,

With cleanly and costly fold,—

Ride on, ride on! and seek me with lanthorns through the cold,

And take from me (turned donor

That night on blood-soaked sand),

The stick and rag of Honour

There safe in a stiffened hand,

Not left, not lost, nor ever a spoil in the victor's land.

Sanctuary

HIGH above hate I dwell:

O storms! farewell.

Though at my sill your daggered thunders play

Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,

To me they sound more small

Than a young fay's footfall:

Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low

In Long Ago,

And winnowed into silence on that wind

Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

Hither Felicity

Doth climb to me,

And bank me in with turf and marjoram

Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;

With golden barberry-wreath,

And bluets thick beneath;

One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest

With bud-red breast,

Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage

Float less than April fog below our hermitage.

Emily Brontë

WHAT sacramental hurt that brings

The terror of the truth of things

Had changed thee? Secret be it yet.

'Twas thine, upon a headland set,

To view no isles of man's delight,

With lyric foam in rainbow flight,

But all a-swing, a-gleam, mid slow uproar,

Black sea, and curved uncouth sea-bitten shore.

Pascal

THOU lovedst life, but not to brand it thine

(O rich in all forborne felicities!),

Nor use it with marauding power, to seize

And stain the sweet earth's blue horizon-line.

Virgin the grape might in the trellis twine

Where thou hadst long ago an hour of ease,

And foot of thine across the unpressed leas

Went light as some Idæan foot divine.

Spirit so abstinent, in thy deeps lay

What passion of possession? Day by day

Was there no thirst upon thee, sharp and pure,

In forward sea-like surges unforgot?

Yes: and in life and death those joys endure

More blessedly, that men can name them not.

Borderlands

THROUGH all the evening,

All the virginal long evening,

Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;

For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;

And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,

Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

Yet in the valley,

At a turn of the orchard alley,

When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,

Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,

Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,

O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!

Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore

THERE in his room, whene'er the moon looks in,

To silver now a shell, and now a fin,

And o'er his chart glide like an argosy,

Quiet and old sits he.

Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.

Where hidest thou the while, heart's boast,

Strange face of beauty sought and lost,

Star-face that lured him out from boyhood's isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold

Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,

The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss

Their veering weight across.

On, on he wears, the seaman long exiled,

To lands where stunted cedars throw

A lace-like shadow over snow,

Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Again play up and down the briny spar

Odours of Surinam or Zanzibar,

Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,

The Labradorian blue;

All homeless hurricanes about him break;

The purples of spent day he sees

From Samos to the Hebrides,

And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,

Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,

Away, and far away, his barque is borne

Riding the noisy morn,

Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know

The helm and tightening halyards still

Follow the urging of his will,

And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Alas! Fate bars him from his heirdom high,

And shackles him with many an inland tie,

And of his only wisdom makes a jibe

Amid an alien tribe:

No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.

The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!

Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?

Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,

Familiar Danger, Oh, forget not him!

Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole

Unto his subject soul,

Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,

Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,

But she may know that voice again,

And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

And give him back, before his passion fail,

The singing cordage and the hollow sail,

And level with those ageing eyes let be

The bright unsteady sea;

And like a film remove from sense and brain

This pasture wall, these boughs that run

Their evening arches to the sun,

Yon hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the shallow hour,

Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,

With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,

Him whom thou lovedst, bring:

That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,

Not having, at the last, less grace

Of thee than had his roving race,

Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.

OXFORD AND LONDON

XXVI SONNETS

OXFORD

I. The Tow-Path

FURROW to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,

Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;

The sister shells that hither, thither, flit

Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds.

A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,

Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:

An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits,

Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.

West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black

Where waters by their warm escarpments run,

Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington,

Print in the early dew a married track,

And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun,

Ere in laborious health the crews come back.

II. Ad Antiquarium

MY gentle Aubrey, who in everything

Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust,

Yet never lineal to her towers august

Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,

Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,

Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust

Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,

Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.

Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,

Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now,

The endless terraces of ended Time

Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release

Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,

Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.

III. Martyrs’ Memorial

SUCH natural debts of love our Oxford knows,

So many ancient dues undesecrate,

I marvel how the landmark of a hate

For witness unto future time she chose;

How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose

The Three, in great denial only great,

For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight,

My soul to seek a holier captain goes:

That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell

Whenas the synagogues were watching not;

Whose crystal name on royal Oriel

Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot

Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well

To live of all his dear domain forgot.

IV. Parks Road

VIEWED yesterday, in sad elusive light,

These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree,

Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly,

Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite.

All the wild winter day and flooded night

They feigned to march far as the eye could see,

Through transient oceans plunging to the knee

Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.

To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare

Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow

Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air,

Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow.

What secret craftsmen painted them so fair?

Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.

V. Tom

HARK! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir.

As in between each golden roar doth come

That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum

Chiding the truant with archaic ire,

On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre

The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from

May's chestnut like a lampadarium

By Brasenose, with every point afire.

Yet over all roofs to the uttermost,

Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground:

For some there be, on whatsoever coast,

In midst of any morrow's ordered round,

Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!)

And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.

VI. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford

I

IMPERIAL Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,

And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call,

And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall

That dost upon adoring ivies lean;

Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene

Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall;

Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual,

Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:

If one of all in your sad courts that come

Belovèd and disparted! be your own,

Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures

Some memory of a great communion known

At home in quarries of old Christendom,—

Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.

II

IS this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day

For dread, for dereliction, and for tears?

Rather, from grass and air and many spheres

In prophecy his heart is called away;

And under English eaves, more still than they,

Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears

The long-arrested, the believing years

Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:

"Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best

Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain

To watch beside her darkened doors, go by

With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh!

Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest:

Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."

VII. A December Walk

WHITHERSOEVER cold and fair ye flow,

Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind,

Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined,

And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow,

And groves in bridal gossamer below

Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned

In altered eminence for dawn to find

Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.

White sacraments of weather, shine on me!

Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift,

Lest either blemish an ensainted ground

Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound,

On recollected wing mine angel drift

Across new spheres of immortality.

VIII. The Old Dial of Corpus

WARDEN of hours and ages, here I dwell,

Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook

For good unborn; and towards a willow nook,

Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;

And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,

Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,

Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:

Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.

Naught steadfast may I image nor attain

Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope

After my god, like him, inconstant bright:

But sun and shade will unto you remain

Alternately a symbol and a hope,

Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.

IX. Rooks: New College Gardens

THROUGH rosy cloud and over thorny towers,

Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,

From Isis' valley border, many-hilled,

The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:

Not for men only, and their musing hours

By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build

These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,

These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

Blest birds! A book held open on the knee

Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight:

With surer art the while, and simpler rite,

They gather power in some monastic tree

Where breathe against their docile breasts by night

The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.

X. Above Port Meadow

THE plain gives freedom. Hither from the town

How oft a dreamer and a book of yore

Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more

Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown,

But bade the vernal sky with spices drown

His head by Plato's in the grass, before

Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar,

At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!

So seeming far the confines and the crowd,

The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire,

From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven,

Go happier than the inly-moving cloud

Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire,

Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.

XI. Undertones at Magdalen

FAIR are the finer creature-sounds; of these

Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop

Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop;

And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries

Of wrens in council from an hundred leas;

And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop

The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop

Delicious herbage under choral trees.

The cry for silver and gold in Christendom

Without, threads not her silence and her dark.

Only against the isolate Tower there break

Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come:

Invasive seas of hushed approach that make

Memorial music, would the ear but hark.

XII. A Last View

I

WHERE down the hill, across the hidden ford

Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene,

By halted horses silently we lean,

Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward.

How yon low loving skies of April hoard

A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen

Of spike and ball her languid clouds between

Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!

Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls

Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls;

Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar.

Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well,

And powers that aye aglow in you, impel

Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.

II

STARS in the bosom of thy braided tide,

Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone,

O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown,

Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide!

And still, for greatness flickering from thy side,

Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone

True heirs in true succession, later blown

From that same seed of fire which never died.

Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold

Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge,

Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces;

And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old,

In radiant broad tumultuary surge

For ever, the young voices, the young faces.

LONDON

I. On First Entering Westminster Abbey

HOLY of England! since my light is short

And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew

Of timeless passion set my dial true,

That with thy saints and thee I may consort;

And wafted in the cool enshadowed port

Of poets, seem a little sail long due,

And be as one the call of memory drew

Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.

Not now for secular love's unquiet lease

Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile

Hath broken tryst with transitory things;

But seal with her a marriage and a peace

Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle,

Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.

II. Fog

LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh,

Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,

And in their sharp disastrous undertow

Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.

The towery vista sinks upon the eye,

As if it heard the horns of Jericho,

Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know

How what was built so bright should daily die.

Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in,

City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown

The natural light in which thy life began;

Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,

Greater and elder yet the love of man

Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.

III. St. Peter-ad-Vincula

TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe,

Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;

More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye,

The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw;

Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw

Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie

White martyrdoms: rank in a company

Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.

Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row

Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,

Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,

Infects me: suddenly must I depart,

Ere thought of man's injustice then and now

Add to these aisles one other broken heart.

IV. Strikers in Hyde Park

A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave,

How slow! but never once they slip the thread.

Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread,

Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,

Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,

Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,

Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,

Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange

Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so

The clear Republic waits the general throe,

Along her noonday mountains' open range.

God be with both! for one is young to know

The other's rote of evil and of change.

V. Changes in the Temple

THE cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground,

Again: for oft ere now thy children went

Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent

Some old red alley with a dial crowned;

Some house of honour, in a glory bound

With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;

Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent

Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.

Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that

Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!

Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,

Her walled oasis, and where once it was

All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat

Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.

VI. The Lights of London

THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot

Far down into the valley's cold extreme,

Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream

Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.

The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot

Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,

From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam,

London, one moment fallen and forgot.

Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright

Prick door and window; every street obscure

Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure,

Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:

Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure

Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

VII. Doves

AH, if man's boast and man's advance be vain,

And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,

And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,

That monstrous island of the middle main;

If each inheritor must sink again

Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb

Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?—

I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!

Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,

Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's

Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,

And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.

"God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."

VIII. In the Reading-Room of the British Museum

PRAISED be the moon of books! that doth above

A world of men, the sunken Past behold,

And colour spaces else too void and cold

To make a very heaven again thereof;

As when the sun is set behind a grove,

And faintly unto nether ether rolled,

All night his whiter image and his mould

Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,

Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!

Feebly along a venerable way

They climb the infinite, or perish quite:

Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,

While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

IX. Sunday Chimes in the City

ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow

The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain

Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain,

And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;

Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,

Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:

From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,

Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower

A subtle beauty on the empty hour,

From all their dark throats aching and outblown;

Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,

Like the last gull that up some naked coast

Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

X. A Porch in Belgravia

WHEN, after dawn, the lordly houses hide

Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest

(Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,

Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,

Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied

Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest,

Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,

And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),

Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,

Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,

Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft

Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore

Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,

Which cannot but have been, for evermore.

XI. York Stairs

MANY a musing eye returns to thee,

Against the formal street disconsolate,

Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,

With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;

And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity,

Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight

Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate;

Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.

Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus

Till the next fury; teach the time and us

Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:

Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,

Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud

Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.

XII. In the Docks

WHERE the bales thunder till the day is done,

And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;

Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,

Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;

Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,

A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;

Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,

I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!

O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,

To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,

Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,

Sodden with human trespass and despair,

Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,

A sick mind follows into Eden air.

NOTES

The Kings: P. 3.

II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.

His Angel to his Mother: P. 21.

One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song, "Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular Music of the Olden Time.

Beside Hazlitt’s Grave: P. 47.

St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now for some years stood in place of the interesting original one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer west wall of the church.

The Vigil-at-Arms: P. 48.

Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4, the last two lines coming in for repetitions.

A Friend’s Song for Simoisius: P. 49.

Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.

The Inner Fate: P. 64.

It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.

The Acknowledgment: P. 66.

"The Prætor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical Brutus.

The Cherry Bough: P. 70.

"Si quis adhuc isthic meminit Nasonis adempti,

Et superest sine me nomen in urbe meum."

Tristia, Lib. III, El. X.

"Atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto,

Deponat lacrymis pocula mista suis."

Idem, Lib. V, El. IV.

A Talisman: P. 87.

Many years after these lines were in print, it was pointed out to the author by a friend, a student of St. Bernard, how they have managed to echo in part a saying of that great Doctor, in his De Consideratione, Lib. I, Cap. VIII, Sec. 9:

"Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines ... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt Temperantiam."

Fifteen Epitaphs: P. 91.

It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for translations), that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.

A Footpath Morality: P. 121.

A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton in Berkshire, May, 1908.

OXFORD

Ad Antiquarium: P. 146.

This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S., 1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that most ingeniose Place!"

Martyrs’ Memorial: P. 147.

The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude (then dead), Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was written barely a month before his rather sudden death on August 11, 1890.

Tom: P. 149.

The College is a century and a half older than the upper part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell is much older than either. "The Tom Tower [was] finished in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal that all students should be within their College walls. It need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"

J. WELLS, M.A., 1901. Oxford and its Colleges: Christ Church, pp. 205-206.

The Old Dial of Corpus: P. 153.

The great Dial in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi College was not put up until 1605,—too late to have been contemporary with either Erasmus or Pole. The author discovered the error several years ago, but has never known how to correct it except by this caution. "Osney Bell" is Great Tom (see just above): Christ Church being next neighbour to Corpus; but Tom may or may not have been in place and condition to ring for curfew in the second year of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The closing line is meant to refer to the motto of the University, Dominus illuminatio mea, taken from the opening of Psalm XXVII.

Undertones at Magdalen: P. 156.

"The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when this sonnet was written (1895), though it is so no longer. From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on St. John Baptist's Day.

LONDON

St. Peter-ad-Vincula: P. 161.

St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.

York Stairs: P. 169.

Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS

U . S . A

Transcriber's Note

In the Table of Contents, the entry for "Wood-Pigeons" is erroneously listed as "Wood-Doves." This has been corrected.

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Table of Contents

HAPPY ENDING

HAPPY ENDING

PREFACE

CONTENTS

HAPPY ENDING

The Kings

The Squall

Open, Time

The Knight Errant

To a Dog’s Memory

Memorial Day

Romans in Dorset

Horologion

His Angel to his Mother

Autumn Magic

Five Carols for Christmastide

I

II

III

IV

V

On Leaving Winchester

Cobwebs

Astræa

The Yew-Tree

Ten Colloquies

I. THE SEARCH

II. FACT AND THE MYSTIC

III. THE POET’S CHART

IV. OF THE GOLDEN AGE

V. ON TIME’S THRESHOLD

VI. WOOD-PIGEONS

VII. PREDICAMENTS

VIII. THE CO-ETERNAL

IX. STERN APHRODITE

X. THE JUBILEE

Winter Boughs

W.H.

The Vigil-at-Arms

A Friend’s Song for Simoisius

To an Ideal

In a Ruin, after a Thunder Storm

Beati Mortui

Two Irish Peasant Songs

I. IN LEINSTER

II. IN ULSTER

The Japanese Anemone

Orisons

The Inner Fate: a Chorus

The Acknowledgment

Arboricide

The Cherry Bough

The Wild Ride

Bedesfolk

In a City Street

Florentin

A Song of the Lilac

Monochrome

Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon

An Estray

Friendship Broken

I

II

A Talisman

Heathenesse

For Izaak Walton

Fifteen Epitaphs

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Deo Optimo Maximo

Charista Musing

The Still of the Year

A Footnote to a Famous Lyric

T.W.P.

Summum Bonum

When on the Marge of Evening

Hylas

Nocturne

To Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Planting the Poplar

To One who would not Spare Himself

Winter Peace

Sleep

Writ in my Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion

In a February Garden

A Valediction

A Footpath Morality

The Light of the House

An Outdoor Litany

Of Joan’s Youth

In a Brecon Valley

I

II

A Song of Far Travel

Spring

The Colour-Bearer

Sanctuary

Emily Brontë

Pascal

Borderlands

Ode for a Master Mariner Ashore

OXFORD AND LONDON

OXFORD

I. The Tow-Path

II. Ad Antiquarium

III. Martyrs’ Memorial

IV. Parks Road

V. Tom

VI. On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford

I

II

VII. A December Walk

VIII. The Old Dial of Corpus

IX. Rooks: New College Gardens

X. Above Port Meadow

XI. Undertones at Magdalen

XII. A Last View

I

II

LONDON

I. On First Entering Westminster Abbey

II. Fog

III. St. Peter-ad-Vincula

IV. Strikers in Hyde Park

V. Changes in the Temple

VI. The Lights of London

VII. Doves

VIII. In the Reading-Room of the British Museum

IX. Sunday Chimes in the City

X. A Porch in Belgravia

XI. York Stairs

XII. In the Docks

NOTES

Oxford

London

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