Poems. Volume 2

CHANGE IN RECURRENCE

I

 
I stood at the gate of the cot
Where my darling, with side-glance demure,
Would spy, on her trim garden-plot,
The busy wild things chase and lure.
For these with their ways were her feast;
They had surety no enemy lurked.
Their deftest of tricks to their least
She gathered in watch as she worked.
 

II

 
When berries were red on her ash,
The blackbird would rifle them rough,
Till the ground underneath looked a gash,
And her rogue grew the round of a chough.
The squirrel cocked ear o’er his hoop,
Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush.
She knew any tit of the troop
All as well as the snail-tapping thrush.
 

III

 
I gazed: ’twas the scene of the frame,
With the face, the dear life for me, fled.
No window a lute to my name,
No watcher there plying the thread.
But the blackbird hung peeking at will;
The squirrel from cone hopped to cone;
The thrush had a snail in his bill,
And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.
 

HYMN TO COLOUR

I

 
With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,
And made them on each side a shadow seem.
Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,
Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream
To fall on daylight; and night puts away
         Her darker veil for grey.
 

II

 
In that grey veil green grassblades brushed we by;
We came where woods breathed sharp, and overhead
Rocks raised clear horns on a transforming sky:
Around, save for those shapes, with him who led
And linked them, desert varied by no sign
         Of other life than mine.
 

III

 
By this the dark-winged planet, raying wide,
From the mild pearl-glow to the rose upborne,
Drew in his fires, less faint than far descried,
Pure-fronted on a stronger wave of morn:
And those two shapes the splendour interweaved,
         Hung web-like, sank and heaved.
 

IV

 
Love took my hand when hidden stood the sun
To fling his robe on shoulder-heights of snow.
Then said: There lie they, Life and Death in one.
Whichever is, the other is: but know,
It is thy craving self that thou dost see,
         Not in them seeing me.
 

V

 
Shall man into the mystery of breath,
From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy?
Or learn the secret of the shrouded death,
By lifting up the lid of a white eye?
Cleave thou thy way with fathering desire
         Of fire to reach to fire.
 

VI

 
Look now where Colour, the soul’s bridegroom, makes
The house of heaven splendid for the bride.
To him as leaps a fountain she awakes,
In knotting arms, yet boundless: him beside,
She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power
         Brings heaven to the flower.
 

VII

 
He gives her homeliness in desert air,
And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leads
Through widening chambers of surprise to where
Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes,
Because his touch is infinite and lends
         A yonder to all ends.
 

VIII

 
Death begs of Life his blush; Life Death persuades
To keep long day with his caresses graced.
He is the heart of light, the wing of shades,
The crown of beauty: never soul embraced
Of him can harbour unfaith; soul of him
         Possessed walks never dim.
 

IX

 
Love eyed his rosy memories: he sang:
O bloom of dawn, breathed up from the gold sheaf
Held springing beneath Orient! that dost hang
The space of dewdrops running over leaf;
Thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost
         Than Time with all his host!
 

X

 
Of thee to say behold, has said adieu:
But love remembers how the sky was green,
And how the grasses glimmered lightest blue;
How saint-like grey took fervour: how the screen
Of cloud grew violet; how thy moment came
         Between a blush and flame.
 

XI

 
Love saw the emissary eglantine
Break wave round thy white feet above the gloom;
Lay finger on thy star; thy raiment line
With cherub wing and limb; wed thy soft bloom,
Gold-quivering like sunrays in thistle-down,
         Earth under rolling brown.
 

XII

 
They do not look through love to look on thee,
Grave heavenliness! nor know they joy of sight,
Who deem the wave of rapt desire must be
Its wrecking and last issue of delight.
Dead seasons quicken in one petal-spot
         Of colour unforgot.
 

XIII

 
This way have men come out of brutishness
To spell the letters of the sky and read
A reflex upon earth else meaningless.
With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
         Shall on through brave wars waged.
 

XIV

 
More gardens will they win than any lost;
The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain.
Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed,
To stature of the Gods will they attain.
They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord,
         Themselves the attuning chord!
 

XV

 
The song had ceased; my vision with the song.
Then of those Shadows, which one made descent
Beside me I knew not: but Life ere long
Came on me in the public ways and bent
Eyes deeper than of old: Death met I too,
         And saw the dawn glow through.
 

MEDITATION UNDER STARS

 
What links are ours with orbs that are
   So resolutely far:
The solitary asks, and they
Give radiance as from a shield:
   Still at the death of day,
   The seen, the unrevealed.
   Implacable they shine
To us who would of Life obtain
An answer for the life we strain
   To nourish with one sign.
Nor can imagination throw
The penetrative shaft: we pass
The breath of thought, who would divine
   If haply they may grow
As Earth; have our desire to know;
If life comes there to grain from grass,
And flowers like ours of toil and pain;
   Has passion to beat bar,
   Win space from cleaving brain;
   The mystic link attain,
   Whereby star holds on star.
 
 
Those visible immortals beam
   Allurement to the dream:
Ireful at human hungers brook
   No question in the look.
For ever virgin to our sense,
Remote they wane to gaze intense:
Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite
The beating heart behind the ball of sight:
   Till we conceive their heavens hoar,
   Those lights they raise but sparkles frore,
And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey
To that frigidity of brainless ray.
 
 
   Yet space is given for breath of thought
   Beyond our bounds when musing: more
   When to that musing love is brought,
   And love is asked of love’s wherefore.
   ’Tis Earth’s, her gift; else have we nought:
   Her gift, her secret, here our tie.
   And not with her and yonder sky?
   Bethink you: were it Earth alone
   Breeds love, would not her region be
      The sole delight and throne
      Of generous Deity?
 
 
   To deeper than this ball of sight
Appeal the lustrous people of the night.
Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails,
   It is our ravenous that quails,
Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.
         The spirit leaps alight,
         Doubts not in them is he,
The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right:
Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought,
To feel it large of the great life they hold:
In them to come, or vaster intervolved,
The issues known in us, our unsolved solved:
That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree,
Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.
So may we read and little find them cold:
Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide
Our eyes; no branch of Reason’s growing lopped;
Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified
By day to penetrate black midnight; see,
Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we,
The specks of dust upon a mound of mould,
We who reflect those rays, though low our place,
   To them are lastingly allied.
 
 
So may we read, and little find them cold:
Not frosty lamps illumining dead space,
Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.
The fire is in them whereof we are born;
The music of their motion may be ours.
Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced
Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.
Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold
   The love that lends her grace
   Among the starry fold.
Then at new flood of customary morn,
   Look at her through her showers,
   Her mists, her streaming gold,
A wonder edges the familiar face:
She wears no more that robe of printed hours;
Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.
 

WOODMAN AND ECHO

 
Close Echo hears the woodman’s axe,
To double on it, as in glee,
With clap of hands, and little lacks
Of meaning in her repartee.
   For all shall fall,
   As one has done,
   The tree of me,
   Of thee the tree;
   And unto all
   The fate we wait
   Reveals the wheels
   Whereon we run:
   We tower to flower,
   We spread the shade,
   We drop for crop,
   At length are laid;
   Are rolled in mould,
   From chop and lop:
And are we thick in woodland tracks,
Or tempting of our stature we,
The end is one, we do but wax
For service over land and sea.
   So, strike! the like
   Shall thus of us,
My brawny woodman, claim the tax.
   Nor foe thy blow,
   Though wood be good,
And shriekingly the timber cracks:
   The ground we crowned
   Shall speed the seed
Of younger into swelling sacks.
 
 
   For use he hews,
   To make awake
The spirit of what stuff we be:
   Our earth of mirth
   And tears he clears
For braver, let our minds agree;
   And then will men
   Within them win
An Echo clapping harmony.
 

THE WISDOM OF ELD

 
We spend our lives in learning pilotage,
And grow good steersmen when the vessel’s crank!
Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank
Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.
It is the sentence which completes that stage;
A testament of wisdom reading blank.
The seniors of the race, on their last plank,
Pass mumbling it as nature’s final page.
These, bent by such experience, are the band
Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain
What things we view, and Earth’s decree withstand,
Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay,
Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,
And ancients musical at close of day.
 

EARTH’S PREFERENCE

 
Earth loves her young: a preference manifest:
She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds;
Their beauty with her choicest interthreads,
And makes her revel of their merry zest;
As in our East much were it in our West,
If men had risen to do the work of heads.
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.
How wrought they in their zenith?  ’Tis not writ;
Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read:
Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
 

SOCIETY

 
Historic be the survey of our kind,
And how their brave Society took shape.
Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape,
The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find,
Who, with some jars in harmony, combined,
Their primal instincts taming, to escape
The brawl indecent, and hot passions drape.
Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind.
Thus entered they the field of milder beasts,
Which in some sort of civil order graze,
And do half-homage to the God of Laws.
But are they still for their old ravenous feasts,
Earth gives the edifice they build no base:
They spring another flood of fangs and claws.
 

WINTER HEAVENS

 
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.
 

NOTES

PHAETHON

The Galliambic Measure

Hermann (Elementa Doctrinae Metricae), after citing lines from the Tragic poet Phrynichus and from the Comic, observes:

Dixi supra, Phrynichorum versus videri puros Ionicos esse.  Id si verum est, Galliambi non alia re ab his differunt, quam quod anaclasin, contractionesque et solutiones recipiunt.  Itaque versus Galliambicus ex duobus versibus Anacreonteis constat, quorum secundus catalecticus est, hac forma:

The wonderful Attis of Catullus is the one classic example.  A few lines have been gathered elsewhere.  Lord Tennyson’s Boadicea rides over many difficulties and is a noble poem.  Catullus makes general use of the variant second of the above metrical forms:

 
Mihi januae frequentes, mihi limina tepida:
 

With stress on the emotion;

 
Jam, jam dolet quod egi, jam jamque poenitet.
 

A perfect conquest of the measure is not possible in our tongue.  For the sake of an occasional success in the velocity, sweep, volume of the line, it seems worth an effort; and, if to some degree serviceable for narrative verse, it is one of the exercises of a writer which readers may be invited to share.

THEODOLINDA

The legend of the Iron Crown of Lombardy, formed of a nail of the true Cross by order of the devout Queen Theodolinda, is well known.  In this dramatic song she is seen passing through one of the higher temptations of the believing Christian.