The Unknown Eros

VII.  THE AZALEA

   There, where the sun shines first

Against our room,

She train’d the gold Azalea, whose perfume

She, Spring-like, from her breathing grace dispersed.

Last night the delicate crests of saffron bloom,

For this their dainty likeness watch’d and nurst,

Were just at point to burst.

At dawn I dream’d, O God, that she was dead,

And groan’d aloud upon my wretched bed,

And waked, ah, God, and did not waken her,

But lay, with eyes still closed,

Perfectly bless’d in the delicious sphere

By which I knew so well that she was near,

My heart to speechless thankfulness composed.

Till ’gan to stir

A dizzy somewhat in my troubled head—

It

was

 the azalea’s breath, and she

was

 dead!

The warm night had the lingering buds disclosed,

And I had fall’n asleep with to my breast

A chance-found letter press’d

In which she said,

‘So, till to-morrow eve, my Own, adieu!

Parting’s well-paid with soon again to meet,

Soon in your arms to feel so small and sweet,

Sweet to myself that am so sweet to you!’

VIII.  DEPARTURE

   It was not like your great and gracious ways!

Do you, that have nought other to lament,

Never, my Love, repent

Of how, that July afternoon,

You went,

With sudden, unintelligible phrase,

And frighten’d eye,

Upon your journey of so many days,

Without a single kiss, or a good-bye?

I knew, indeed, that you were parting soon;

And so we sate, within the low sun’s rays,

You whispering to me, for your voice was weak,

Your harrowing praise.

Well, it was well,

To hear you such things speak,

And I could tell

What made your eyes a growing gloom of love,

As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove.

And it was like your great and gracious ways

To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear,

Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash

To let the laughter flash,

Whilst I drew near,

Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear.

But all at once to leave me at the last,

More at the wonder than the loss aghast,

With huddled, unintelligible phrase,

And frighten’d eye,

And go your journey of all days

With not one kiss, or a good-bye,

And the only loveless look the look with which you pass’d:

’Twas all unlike your great and gracious ways.

IX.  EURYDICE

   Is this the portent of the day nigh past,

And of a restless grave

O’er which the eternal sadness gathers fast;

Or but the heaped wave

Of some chance, wandering tide,

Such as that world of awe

Whose circuit, listening to a foreign law,

Conjunctures ours at unguess’d dates and wide,

Does in the Spirit’s tremulous ocean draw,

To pass unfateful on, and so subside?

Thee, whom ev’n more than Heaven loved I have,

And yet have not been true

Even to thee,

I, dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,

And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue

Thro’ sordid streets and lanes

And houses brown and bare

And many a haggard stair

Ochrous with ancient stains,

And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,

In whose unhaunted glooms

Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,

Their course have run;

And ofttimes my pursuit

Is check’d of its dear fruit

By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,

Furious that I should keep

Their forfeit power to weep,

And mock, with living fear, their mournful malice thin.

But ever, at the last, my way I win

To where, with perfectly sad patience, nurst

By sorry comfort of assured worst,

Ingrain’d in fretted cheek and lips that pine,

On pallet poor

Thou lyest, stricken sick,

Beyond love’s cure,

By all the world’s neglect, but chiefly mine.

Then sweetness, sweeter than my tongue can tell,

Does in my bosom well,

And tears come free and quick

And more and more abound

For piteous passion keen at having found,

After exceeding ill, a little good;

A little good

Which, for the while,

Fleets with the current sorrow of the blood,

Though no good here has heart enough to smile.

X.  THE TOYS

   My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes

And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,

Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,

I struck him, and dismiss’d

With hard words and unkiss’d,

His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,

I visited his bed,

But found him slumbering deep,

With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet

From his late sobbing wet.

And I, with moan,

Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;

For, on a table drawn beside his head,

He had put, within his reach,

A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,

A piece of glass abraded by the beach

And six or seven shells,

A bottle with bluebells

And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,

To comfort his sad heart.

So when that night I pray’d

To God, I wept, and said:

Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,

Not vexing Thee in death,

And Thou rememberest of what toys

We made our joys,

How weakly understood,

Thy great commanded good,

Then, fatherly not less

Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,

Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,

‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’

XI.  TIRED MEMORY

   The stony rock of death’s insensibility

Well’d yet awhile with honey of thy love

And then was dry;

Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove,

Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the band

Which really spann’d

Thy body chaste and warm,

Thenceforward move

Upon the stony rock their wearied charm.

At last, then, thou wast dead.

Yet would I not despair,

But wrought my daily task, and daily said

Many and many a fond, unfeeling prayer,

To keep my vows of faith to thee from harm.

In vain.

‘For ’tis,’ I said, ‘all one,

The wilful faith, which has no joy or pain,

As if ’twere none.’

Then look’d I miserably round

If aught of duteous love were left undone,

And nothing found.

But, kneeling in a Church, one Easter-Day,

It came to me to say:

‘Though there is no intelligible rest,

In Earth or Heaven,

For me, but on her breast,

I yield her up, again to have her given,

Or not, as, Lord, Thou wilt, and that for aye.’

And the same night, in slumber lying,

I, who had dream’d of thee as sad and sick and dying,

And only so, nightly for all one year,

Did thee, my own most Dear,

Possess,

In gay, celestial beauty nothing coy,

And felt thy soft caress

With heretofore unknown reality of joy.

But, in our mortal air,

None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,

And fresh despair

Bade me seek round afresh for some extreme

Of unconceiv’d, interior sacrifice

Whereof the smoke might rise

To God, and ’mind him that one pray’d below.

And so,

In agony, I cried:

‘My Lord, if thy strange will be this,

That I should crucify my heart,

Because my love has also been my pride,

I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss

Wherein She has no part.’

And I was heard,

And taken at my own remorseless word.

O, my most Dear,

Was’t treason, as I fear?

’Twere that, and worse, to plead thy veiled mind,

Kissing thy babes, and murmuring in mine ear,

‘Thou canst not be

Faithful to God, and faithless unto me!’

Ah, prophet kind!

I heard, all dumb and blind

With tears of protest; and I cannot see

But faith was broken.  Yet, as I have said,

My heart was dead,

Dead of devotion and tired memory,

When a strange grace of thee

In a fair stranger, as I take it, bred

To her some tender heed,

Most innocent

Of purpose therewith blent,

And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such

That the pale reflex of an alien love,

So vaguely, sadly shown,

Did her heart touch

Above

All that, till then, had woo’d her for its own.

And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn,

Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine,

And made me weak,

By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,

And Nature’s long suspended breath of flame

Persuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name,

Awhile to smile and speak

With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine;

Thy Sister sweet,

Who bade the wheels to stir

Of sensitive delight in the poor brain,

Dead of devotion and tired memory,

So that I lived again,

And, strange to aver,

With no relapse into the void inane,

For thee;

But (treason was’t?) for thee and also her.

XII.  MAGNA EST VERITAS

   Here, in this little Bay,

Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

Where, twice a day,

The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

I sit me down.

For want of me the world’s course will not fail:

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

The truth is great, and shall prevail,

When none cares whether it prevail or not.

XIII.  1867.

1

1

  In this year the middle and upper classes were disfranchised by Mr. Disraeli’s Government, and the final destruction of the liberties of England by the Act of 1884 rendered inevitable.

   In the year of the great crime,

When the false English Nobles and their Jew,

By God demented, slew

The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,

One said, Take up thy Song,

That breathes the mild and almost mythic time

Of England’s prime!

But I, Ah, me,

The freedom of the few

That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,

Can song renew?

Ill singing ’tis with blotting prison-bars,

How high soe’er, betwixt us and the stars;

Ill singing ’tis when there are none to hear;

And days are near

When England shall forget

The fading glow which, for a little while,

Illumes her yet,

The lovely smile

That grows so faint and wan,

Her people shouting in her dying ear,

Are not two daws worth two of any swan!

   Ye outlaw’d Best, who yet are bright

With the sunken light,

Whose common style

Is Virtue at her gracious ease,

The flower of olden sanctities,

Ye haply trust, by love’s benignant guile,

To lure the dark and selfish brood

To their own hated good;

Ye haply dream

Your lives shall still their charmful sway sustain,

Unstifled by the fever’d steam

That rises from the plain.

Know, ’twas the force of function high,

In corporate exercise, and public awe

Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law

That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,

Which kept you in your sky!

But, when the sordid Trader caught

The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,

And soon, to the Mechanic vain,

Sold the proud toy for nought,

Your charm was broke, your task was sped,

Your beauty, with your honour, dead,

And though you still are dreaming sweet

Of being even now not less

Than Gods and Goddesses, ye shall not long so cheat

Your hearts of their due heaviness.

Go, get you for your evil watching shriven!

Leave to your lawful Master’s itching hands

Your unking’d lands,

But keep, at least, the dignity

Of deigning not, for his smooth use, to be,

Voteless, the voted delegates

Of his strange interests, loves and hates.

In sackcloth, or in private strife

With private ill, ye may please Heaven,

And soothe the coming pangs of sinking life;

And prayer perchance may win

A term to God’s indignant mood

And the orgies of the multitude,

Which now begin;

But do not hope to wave the silken rag

Of your unsanction’d flag,

And so to guide

The great ship, helmless on the swelling tide

Of that presumptuous Sea,

Unlit by sun or moon, yet inly bright

With lights innumerable that give no light,

Flames of corrupted will and scorn of right,

Rejoicing to be free.

   And, now, because the dark comes on apace

When none can work for fear,

And Liberty in every Land lies slain,

And the two Tyrannies unchallenged reign,

And heavy prophecies, suspended long

At supplication of the righteous few,

And so discredited, to fulfilment throng,

Restrain’d no more by faithful prayer or tear,

And the dread baptism of blood seems near

That brings to the humbled Earth the Time of Grace,

Breathless be song,

And let Christ’s own look through

The darkness, suddenly increased,

To the gray secret lingering in the East.

XIV.  ‘IF I WERE DEAD.’

   ‘If I were dead, you’d sometimes say, Poor Child!’

The dear lips quiver’d as they spake,

And the tears brake

From eyes which, not to grieve me, brightly smiled.

Poor Child, poor Child!

I seem to hear your laugh, your talk, your song.

It is not true that Love will do no wrong.

Poor Child!

And did you think, when you so cried and smiled,

How I, in lonely nights, should lie awake,

And of those words your full avengers make?

Poor Child, poor Child!

And now, unless it be

That sweet amends thrice told are come to thee,

O God, have Thou

no

 mercy upon me!

Poor Child!

XV.  PEACE

   O England, how hast thou forgot,

In dullard care for undisturb’d increase

Of gold, which profits not,

The gain which once thou knew’st was for thy peace!

Honour is peace, the peace which does accord

Alone with God’s glad word:

‘My peace I send you, and I send a sword.’

O England, how hast thou forgot,

How fear’st the things which make for joy, not fear,

Confronted near.

Hard days?  ’Tis what the pamper’d seek to buy

With their most willing gold in weary lands.

Loss and pain risk’d?  What sport but understands

These for incitements!  Suddenly to die,

With conscience a blurr’d scroll?

The sunshine dreaming upon Salmon’s height

Is not so sweet and white

As the most heretofore sin-spotted soul

That darts to its delight

Straight from the absolution of a faithful fight.

Myriads of homes unloosen’d of home’s bond,

And fill’d with helpless babes and harmless women fond?

Let those whose pleasant chance

Took them, like me, among the German towns,

After the war that pluck’d the fangs from France,

With me pronounce

Whether