THE 
 MUSE 
 
 EXILE 
 
 WILLIAM 
 WATSON 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 B 3 315 3D7 
 
THE 
 
 MUSE 
 
 IN 
 
 EXILE 
 
THE 
 MUSE IN EXILE 
 
 POEMS BY 
 WILLIAM 
 WATSON 
 
 TO WHICH IS ADDED AN ADDRESS ON 
 
 THE POET'S PLACE IN 
 THE SCHEME OF LIFE 
 
 HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED 
 ARUNDEL PLACE HAYMARKET 
 LONDON S.W. fig £3 MCMXIII 
 

 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH 
 
TO 
 
 ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON 
 
 OF NEW YORK 
 
 In your swift city, where all things 
 
 Hasten on such impetuous wings, 
 
 Nought have I known to fly more fast 
 
 Than hours that 'neath your roof were passed. 
 
 To you these pages ! and may they 
 
 Hurry not utterly away. 
 
 W. W. 
 
 £ d Q 1 O n 
 
 i ^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE greater number of the poems and 
 verses in this volume now make their 
 first appearance ; others are recovered 
 from the pages of the Times, the Daily 
 News, the Daily Chronicle, the Nation, the Spectator, 
 the New York Times, the Irish Times, the Comhill 
 Magazine, and the Quest ; and I am indebted to 
 the editors of these journals and periodicals for 
 liberty to reprint my contributions. The " Hymn 
 for a Progressive People " has appeared, without 
 that title, in the new hymnals of the Unitarian and 
 Congregational churches in America, but has not 
 hitherto been published in England. 
 
 Concerning one short poem — the lines entitled 
 " Science and Nature "— I wish here to say a few 
 words. On its appearance in a newspaper this 
 little piece evoked rejoinders, couched in vivacious 
 verse, from two writers perhaps more truly dis- 
 tinguished by their prose — Mr. Eden Phillpotts 
 and Mr. Chiozza Money. Neither of these gentle- 
 
8 PREFACE 
 
 nicd resorted to any unfairer weapon than the 
 retort courteous, but both of them seemed to 
 suppose that the object of their very urbane attack 
 was a person either uninterested in science, or 
 hostile to it ; and I had fondly imagined that there 
 was quite enough in the fourteen or fifteen volumes, 
 with which I have helped to encumber the shelves 
 of the British Museum and the Bodleian, to make 
 such a supposition impossible. It so happens that 
 I was almost cradled in ideas of Evolution, and 
 grew up in an atmosphere where " natural selec- 
 tion " and " the survival of the fittest " were 
 household words. My earliest companion in country 
 walks — my father — was a man whose very en- 
 franchised mind had a natural impulse towards 
 scientific speculation on its largest lines, and he 
 did not long leave me unimbued with his own 
 tendencies. One of the last letters written by 
 Darwin — a letter making beautifully courteous 
 acknowledgment of the utility of a trifling sugges- 
 tion sent to him — was written to me, then a very 
 young man, the author of a single unnoticed book. 
 It was written on April 18, 1882, the day before 
 he died, and was published by me soon afterwards 
 in the Academy, where it can be found by the 
 curious. I have been told on good authority that 
 
PREFACE 9 
 
 the friendly interest which Herbert Spencer is 
 known to have taken in my writings was partly 
 due to his perceiving with pleasure that their 
 author was in touch with the modern spirit, which 
 to him meant the scientific spirit. Passing from 
 these personal reminiscences I return to what 
 occasioned them — the lines entitled " Science and 
 Nature." These verses of mine had especial refer- 
 ence to " aviation," and I still think, as I thought 
 when I wrote them, that to do imperfectly and 
 with difficulty what any seabird can do with 
 divinely beautiful ease, and then to call this awk- 
 ward imitation the " conquest of the air," is to 
 court criticism and to use vainglorious language. 
 As a matter of fact, whilst I watch all the really 
 great achievements of the scientific intelligence 
 with as fascinated a gaze as in early youth, I 
 cannot but think that there is as good reason now 
 as there was then for some protest against what 
 used to be called, not entirely without justification, 
 the arrogance of science. When one considers, for 
 instance, that the operations of electrical energy 
 have been, as one may say, flashed and brandished 
 before Man's eyes ever since he was Man, the fact 
 that he has very recently come to know anything 
 about them should rather be an occasion for 
 
io PREFACE 
 
 humility than for pride. When one remembers at 
 how late a period in the history of knowledge was 
 discovered either the circulation of our own dwelling- 
 place around the sun, or the circulation of the blood 
 in our own bodies ; when, looking at the progress 
 of applied science, we consider how long Nature 
 had been vainly thrusting upon our attention the 
 unused capabilities of steam as a motive power ; 
 one may, perhaps, be pardoned for asking of the 
 scientific intellect some moderation in the homage 
 it pays to its own subtlety. A hundred other 
 instances might be cited to the same effect, but 
 perhaps the point hardly needs to be laboured. 
 
 Together with the verse-contents of this volume 
 I have included a lecture given last winter before 
 various audiences in America. Prepared with 
 enforced haste, on shipboard, it has defects of 
 which I am extremely sensible, and no doubt it 
 has many others besides ; but when I sat down to 
 revise and generally castigate it into some sort of 
 fitness for its present form of publication I found 
 that it would speedily become, under that process, 
 a palimpsest in which the old matter would tend 
 to disappear altogether under the new ; so I 
 decided to let it go forth untouched, with all its 
 blemishes, more especially as it does say with 
 
PREFACE ii 
 
 sincerity, if also with the disjointedness which is 
 perhaps permissible in an oral address, some 
 things of which I wished to deliver my mind. 
 Certain very good-natured critics in America inter- 
 preted part of it as a lament for the insufficient 
 praise bestowed upon living poets, and took me 
 gently to task on that score ; but what I had rather 
 meant to convey was a feeling of dissatisfaction at 
 the paucity of real discussion, whether it involve 
 praise or blame : direct discussion of concrete 
 qualities in a poet's work. Twenty or thirty years 
 ago we were threatened with a surfeit of a kind of 
 criticism which made rather exaggerated claims to 
 be synthetic, and which took the form of ponderous 
 essays with some such titles as " Keats and the 
 French Revolution,' ' or " Shelley and the Pre- 
 cession of the Equinoxes." This kind of criticism 
 has latterly abated, and though I do not much 
 bewail the fact I could wish that the so-called 
 " synthesis " had been replaced by rather more of 
 definite analysis than I can see in the criticism of 
 the present day. For a quarter of a century before 
 the death of Swinburne it became the custom to 
 place that poet on an elevation where critical tests 
 and standards were simply suspended altogether. 
 It is these tests and standards that I wish to see 
 
12 PREFACE 
 
 more rigorously enforced, and applied to the living 
 and the dead alike. I ask for more discussion of 
 the actual ways and means by which a poet com- 
 passes, or fails to compass, his specifically poetic 
 ends ; more examination of his art and science as a 
 poet. 
 
 To illustrate what appears to me the regrettable 
 dearth of such discussion and examination, I will 
 risk being thought a prattling egotist, and will tell a 
 little story drawn from my own experience. A 
 few years ago I resolved to deepen somewhat my 
 too superficial knowledge of old English history by 
 going to the original sources from which our modern 
 historians derive their material. Accordingly, I 
 spent no inconsiderable time in reading very 
 thoroughly the old chroniclers of this island's 
 fortunes, from Gildas and Bede and Nennius down 
 to Florence of Worcester and other twelfth-century 
 annalists, and I was greatly struck by the un- 
 expected frequency with which superbly picturesque 
 phrases leap from their rust-eaten pens. Where, 
 I asked myself, in Freeman or Green, could one 
 meet with diction so vivid as in the passage where 
 one of these ancients, describing the mustering of 
 an army, speaks of the rustle of their breastplates ? 
 Where could one find a modern counterpart to the 
 
PREFACE 13 
 
 phraseology of another old chronicler who pictures 
 a military conqueror as filling his wheel-tracks with 
 blood ? I, therefore, tried an experiment. Writing 
 a poem, which I afterwards published — first with 
 the title of The King Without Peer, subsequently as 
 King Alfred — I introduced into its opening lines a 
 striking expression directly borrowed from a 
 sentence of Asser's in which he speaks of Alfred's 
 physical infirmities : Erat itaque rex Me multis 
 tribulationum clavis confossus. And reproducing 
 the latter part of this sentence almost literally 
 as " pierced with many nails of pain " — a haunting 
 phrase which perhaps the author of the Book of 
 Job would not have disdained — I then, throughout 
 the rest of my poem, imported bodily many other 
 powerful phrases from the archaic poems quoted 
 in the Saxon Chronicle ; from that Chronicle itself ; 
 from William of Malmesbury and Henry of Hunting- 
 don ; from that glorious romanticist, Geoffrey of 
 Monmouth, and from kindred sources ; weaving 
 these phrases into my verse with such poor skill as 
 I could command. One of them was possibly the 
 original of a more famous but not finer phrase of 
 Milton's. And as these jewels were not of my own 
 fashioning, I feel free to say that they were mag- 
 nificent ; but I suppose they were taken to be my 
 
i 4 PREFACE 
 
 own, and, at any rate, they passed without a word 
 of comment, so far as I know, save in one provincial 
 newspaper. I narrate my little experiment and its 
 result, because I think the matter gives some point 
 to my complaint that criticism is falling into a 
 habit of passing neglectfully over what I will call 
 the literary aspects of literature — surely not its 
 least interesting aspects. I have, however, touched 
 here the outskirts of a large subject to which I hope 
 to return before this young year grows old. 
 
 W. W. 
 
THE POET'S PLACE IN 
 THE SCHEME OF LIFE 
 
 AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN VARIOUS PARTS 
 OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 IN the latter part of the reign of Queen Victoria, 
 at Ambleside, in the County of Westmorland, 
 and the country of Wordsworth, a coach- 
 driver was taking a party of excursionists 
 through one of the most charming pieces of scenery 
 in that heavenly neighbourhood. He was taking 
 them along Loughrigg Drive, and on passing the 
 house associated with that eminent historian, Dr. 
 Arnold of Rugby, he pointed it out to his passengers 
 with this illuminating remark : " That was the 
 residence of the late Dr. Arnold — Dr. Matthew 
 Arnold, the Queen's head physician." Now that 
 coachman was, as I happen to know, a most ex- 
 cellent man, a man whom the contemporaries of 
 Shakespeare would, I suppose, have called " ex- 
 cellent in the quality he professes." His manner of 
 driving combined an appearance of recklessness 
 
•i6 TtiE POET'S PLACE 
 
 with an actually- high degree of circumspection in 
 a way which gave his passengers at once an ex- 
 hilarating sense of adventure and a comforting 
 assurance of security. But I must qualify this 
 tribute to his genius for " the manage of horses " 
 in general, by the admission that he had little 
 familiarity with the special points of that rather 
 restive steed, Pegasus. In other words, he was, I am 
 afraid, typical of those innumerable persons, in whose 
 scheme of life the poet cannot properly be said to 
 have a place at all. I say those innumerable persons, 
 and, as a matter of fact, in my own country they 
 form a majority so overwhelming that the minority 
 sinks into an almost negligible, almost invisible 
 fraction of the people as a whole. In America, I 
 have reason to think that the case is different. The 
 number of persons in this country who take an 
 interest in poets, — it may not always be an effusively 
 benevolent interest, — is manifestly far larger in pro- 
 portion to the entire population than in the country 
 of Chaucer and Milton. But even here I suspect 
 that an increasingly substantial body of persons 
 are acquiescing in a scheme of life which excludes 
 poetry altogether — a scheme of life in which the 
 poet has no place at all. This is a state of things 
 obviously unfortunate for the poet, and I for one 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 17 
 
 hold the opinion that it is not altogether good for 
 his fellow-men. You are, of course, at liberty to 
 form your own judgment as to the disinterested- 
 ness of this opinion, but you will hardly deny that 
 the state of things I have spoken of is really a 
 phenomenon of our times, and, as such, deserves 
 attention and study. What is the true explanation 
 of it? 
 
 We live, one man will tell us, in a busy age, and 
 the world has simply no time for poetry, no leisure 
 for the muse. Another will assure us that poetry 
 is bound to recede and dwindle before her great 
 competitor and supplanter, science. The external 
 and physical world is declared to be more mar- 
 vellous than any inner world of the mind, and 
 imagination must be relegated to a comparatively 
 humble place as a vassal kingdom under the 
 suzerainty of knowledge. To both of these con- 
 tentions I vehemently demur. 
 
 In the first place I have a strong suspicion that 
 what is called the speed and rush of modern life as 
 compared with the supposed tranquillity and de- 
 liberateness of the past is largely an illusion, and 
 at any rate the slowness and tedium of our age is 
 clearly what most often oppresses the ordinary man. 
 The motor-car and the aeroplane are typical of a 
 
 B 
 
18 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 hundred ways by which he desperately seeks to 
 escape from the monotony, the slowness, of a life 
 empty of action and incident ; a life in which nothing 
 occurs ; a life made so smooth and orderly by the 
 operation of law and custom — a life so regulated 
 and policed — that none of the primal passions have 
 free play in it, that the elements of sudden danger 
 and thrilling hazard are almost banished from it, 
 and the exercise of some of the more heroic virtues 
 almost precluded. One might have thought that 
 a life so shorn of its more glowing colours, its more 
 violent situations, would provide precisely the 
 antecedent conditions necessary for the appreciation 
 of an art whose function is to see the world through 
 a kind of ecstasy ; to heighten and emphasize its 
 lineaments, though without distorting them ; to 
 see vividly, to paint nobly, and to feel romantically, 
 whatever in this universe is to be seen and felt and 
 painted. Yet the truth must be confessed that the 
 art whose functions I venture thus to describe — 
 the art of poetry — is, more than all others, the art 
 which of late has appealed with constantly diminish- 
 ing force to the audience which it addresses. 
 
 In the second place, — coming to the statement, 
 so often made, that poetry is being ousted by 
 science, let me say at once that between poetry 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 19 
 
 and science I can perceive no antagonism what- 
 ever. I do not believe it possible for any true 
 poetic greatness to coexist with an attitude of 
 hostility towards the advancement of knowledge. 
 If I heard of a poet who, whether under theological 
 or other influences, cut himself off from the great 
 avenues of enlightenment, — who, for instance, 
 allowed himself to live in ignorance of the results 
 of modern biological research as they affect the 
 supremely interesting question of man's origin 
 on this planet, — I should say — " this is a poet 
 insufficiently interested in man and in life " ; and 
 I do not believe that such a poet could have any- 
 thing really pertinent to say to his generation. 
 The poet who is really a poet, however deeply he 
 may strike root in the past, emphatically lives and 
 moves and has his being in the present. There is 
 nothing of the mustiness of antiquity about him. 
 And the necessity for him is never so great as in an 
 age exceptionally fruitful of scientific discovery. 
 For the more we know of the plan and workings 
 of this cosmos, especially in its astronomical re- 
 lations, the more does it wear the appearance 
 of a scrupulously and soullessly accurate machine ; 
 the more does it seem a merely ingenious con- 
 trivance, a magnification, on an infinite scale, of a 
 
20 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 design not inconceivably beyond the powers of 
 some prodigious human engineer ; the more does it 
 seem a piece of illimitable, fantastic clockwork, 
 rather terrifying in its adamantine regularity ; and 
 the greater becomes our need of that particular order 
 of mind which never quite loses its consciousness 
 of the soul behind the apparently mechanical 
 springs ; which cares about the springs, mainly in 
 so far as they seem to give evidence of a soul ; 
 and which translates into rhythm and melody the 
 iron routine of the universe. 
 
 Yet I am bound to admit that this need for the 
 poet is felt by but few persons in our day. With 
 one exception there is not a living English poet, 
 the sales of whose poems would not have been 
 thought contemptible by Scott and Byron. The 
 exception is, of course, that apostle of British im- 
 perialism — that vehement and voluble glorifier of 
 Britannic ideals, whom I dare say you will readily 
 identify from my brief, and, I hope, not disparaging 
 description of him. With that one brilliant and 
 salient exception, England's living singers succeed 
 in reaching only a pitifully small audience. The 
 fault, many persons hold, is in the poets themselves. 
 For my part, I will not say that I share that view. 
 Neither will I say that I totally dissent from it. 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 21 
 
 But I will say this — the indifference of the reading 
 public to contemporary poetry is, in my belief, 
 largely due to the vagaries and perversities of a kind 
 of critic who is not so much an expositor and in- 
 terpreter of literature as a rather officious inter- 
 loper between writers and readers. Lest, however, 
 I should be misunderstood, and should be wrongly 
 supposed to depreciate, not only the noble science 
 of criticism itself, but that company of select minds 
 by whom its best traditions are honourably upheld 
 in our own day, let me hasten to explain my meaning 
 with some approach to fullness. 
 
 We have amongst us the critic with a bee in his 
 bonnet ; the critic who finds that it pays him to 
 have a bee in his bonnet, since brilliantly unsound 
 criticism is often more readable than criticism which 
 is unbrilliantly sound ; the critic who makes little 
 attempt to arrive at fundamental laws of taste and 
 of art, but who has infinite confidence in his own 
 crotchets, who gives a loose rein to his idiosyncrasy, 
 or, shall I say, erects his idiosyncrasy into a standard 
 or criterion ; the critic who happens to have a 
 temperamental preference for a certain kind or 
 order of excellence, perhaps not the highest kind 
 or order, and who judges everything that comes 
 before him with sole reference to the degree in 
 
22 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 which it satisfies that particular idiosyncratic test 
 of his. Then there is the critic who sets an inordinate 
 value on a certain kind of simplicity, — a simplicity 
 often as self-conscious and deliberate as the most 
 highly elaborated ornateness ; in fact, a simplicity 
 which is one of the most artificial products of 
 extreme literary sophistication. This kind of 
 critic is offended by any richness or splendour of 
 attire in which the poet has— perhaps appro- 
 priately — clothed his thought. We have, too, the 
 critic who at every opportunity, in or out of 
 season, pits one great writer against another, 
 instead of appreciating the individuality of both ; 
 who plays off Wordsworth against Shelley, or 
 Shelley against Wordsworth, instead of recog- 
 nizing that the poetry of Wordsworth is a food, 
 while the poetry of Shelley is a stimulant — that 
 food is a more essential and indispensable thing 
 than stimulants, while nevertheless stimulants, 
 though not things one can live upon, have at times 
 their value, and, in short, that the poet who feeds 
 and nourishes us, and the poet who fires and 
 quickens us, are alike performing, each in his own 
 way, a noble service. There is likewise the critic 
 — and he has been very much to the fore of 
 late— who frankly dislikes and resents sound and 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 23 
 
 solid workmanship ; who thinks it one of the 
 signs of genius to be careless of finish and scornful 
 of technique ; who fails to comprehend that real 
 inspiration can work hand in hand with careful 
 craftsmanship, not extinguished or hampered by 
 it, but informing and ennobling what would other- 
 wise be scarcely better than dull mechanic toil. And 
 finally there is the critic who is eternally demanding 
 that poetry should be progressive, and to whom 
 progress means a kicking against tradition and 
 a violent breach with the past. He does not 
 recognize that there are limits beyond which the 
 only possible progress is a descent into mere 
 eccentricity and formlessness. Some critics when 
 they speak of progress really mean decomposition. 
 In art, as in nature, there is such a thing as ripe- 
 ness, and we all know what is the stage that 
 succeeds to it. 
 
 Now I maintain that the total effect produced 
 upon the " reading public " by this orgy of critical 
 individualism is a distracting and bewildering one, 
 and that it makes seriously against the appreciation 
 of what is good in contemporary poetry. People 
 read, let us say, in their favourite newspaper, a 
 highly laudatory review of some work really pro- 
 duced in response to a purely factitious demand 
 
24 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 created by a literary " group," by a critical 
 cabal, whose habit it is to set an exaggerated 
 value on certain literary qualities. The " public " 
 buy some copies of this work, find in it no refresh- 
 ment for their soul, nothing but what is odd or 
 quaint or deliberately singular and freakish, and 
 they come to the conclusion that the latter-day 
 poet is a being who dwells apart from life as to 
 all its larger manifestations, a person uninterested 
 in politics, in science, in sociology, in the progress 
 of the human species ; a dreamy, ineffectual, 
 and generally neurotic creature, concerned chiefly 
 with the manufacture of strange epitaphs and the 
 analysis of his own equally strange and not very 
 important emotions. Is it surprising if they imagine 
 that contemporary poetry has nothing to give them 
 which can in an}^ way illustrate or clarify life — 
 nothing which in any way says to them an intimate 
 and helpful word ? 
 
 For amid many doubtful and arguable matters, 
 one thing is certain : the majority of cultivated 
 men and women do not set any exaggerated value 
 upon these subtle and singular odours and flavours 
 in literary art which your professional critic is so 
 sedulously in search of. Your professional critic 
 is often like a medical specialist, who is more 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 25 
 
 keenly interested in a remarkable and abnormal 
 case than in the wider aspects of pathology or 
 therapeutics. The typical intelligent reader does 
 not share this purely professional curiosity ; he is 
 not so tired of the great writers of the past as to 
 resent any natural and inherited resemblance to 
 them in their successors. Rather is he pleased 
 to see the ancient ancestral lineaments reappear, 
 and to think that the noble tradition in which he 
 was nurtured is being nobly perpetuated. 
 
 Indeed I am more and more convinced that 
 there exists a large though scattered body of 
 cultivated, intelligent, serious, but silent lovers of 
 fine literature, who are quite unswayed by ephemeral 
 literary fashions, and quite indifferent to the 
 critical catchwords which are so often made to 
 do duty in place of the unchanging laws of taste 
 and form. These unknown and silent lovers of 
 fine literature are probably the real readers, and 
 the real judges, by whose judgment in the long 
 run the poet stands or falls. They are superior 
 to the mere virtuosity of the professional con- 
 noisseur, for they are not blase as he is, but have 
 kept alive their original faculty of enjoying those 
 writers who tread the great main road of the mind ; 
 who belong to the centre party of literature ; who 
 
26 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 do not loiter long in the by-paths or fix their abode 
 in some blind alley of thought or style. This informal 
 judiciary is our nearest living approach to that 
 ultimate court of literary appeal which we call 
 posterity ; and I venture to prophesy that before 
 our century is twenty years older these serious 
 lovers of serious literature, for whom the poet has 
 still his very real place in the scheme of life, will 
 have largely augmented their numbers. 
 
 Nor would it surprise me if such an increase of 
 their forces should coincide with some falling off 
 in the relative numerical strength of the readers 
 of prose fiction. The position of prose fiction is 
 at present apparently so impregnable, its conquest 
 of the public seems so complete, that most of us 
 can hardly bring ourselves to conceive the possi- 
 bility of the fall of the novel from its high estate. 
 And yet the novel, as we nowadays understand it, 
 is a form of literature so modern — I suppose it 
 dates virtually from the author of Clarissa Har- 
 low e — that it must surely have been called into 
 existence by some phase of taste which is itself also 
 modern, and which, born of an age, may pass with 
 an age. For it is only in the hands of its very greatest 
 masters that the novel can truly be called a form of 
 art. In lesser hands it is not so much an art as a 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 27 
 
 game — the game of keeping up the ball of the 
 narrative, of holding the reader's attention by 
 alternately gratifying and piquing his curiosity, of 
 resorting to innumerable shifts and transparent 
 devices which are scarcely the methods of an 
 art, in the great sense of that word. The endless 
 conversations, usually unmemorable in themselves ; 
 the so-called realism ; the often indiscriminate 
 transcription of life, as if everything in life had an 
 equal value ; all this has about it something which 
 scarcely seems to smack of permanency. Art is 
 above all eclectic. It selects, it does not merely 
 throw " life " at you in handfuls. It fixes its eye 
 upon large essential features of things, it refuses to 
 have its attention frittered away upon a thousand 
 accidental details. Think of the great human 
 stories in the Bible ; masterpieces of narration ; 
 stories told with the consummate perfection of 
 narrative art, with epic breadth and with what I 
 will venture to call epic brevity ; no long-spun 
 dialogue between the titanic actors in the drama ; 
 no chronicle of the expression of their faces or the 
 tone of their voices, nothing but the huge elemental 
 facts and events put before you with a huge ele- 
 mental simplicity. Take the story of Judith and 
 Holofernes in the Apocrypha. There you have a 
 
28 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 story on the grandest lines, superb in the sweep 
 of its action, and told in about as many words 
 as would suffice to fill a dozen pages of a modern 
 novel. That is the kind of narrative art which 
 reaches and stirs us after thousands of years ; not 
 the kind of narrative art which preserves a faithful 
 record of how the hero of the story coughed slightly 
 at a moment of supreme crisis in his fate, or how 
 the heroine at a similar juncture wore a sprig of 
 primroses in a dress of some fluffy white material. 
 In short it is my opinion — an opinion, I am 
 aware, which is shared by few persons at present, 
 and probably by no novelist — that the novel, 
 as nowadays understood, will pass away, or 
 at all events will cease to dominate the situa- 
 tion — to upset the balance of power, as it now 
 does, among the republics and principalities of 
 literature. Fiction is really the arch-enemy of 
 literature at the present time. The very word 
 " literature " seems in most people's mouths to 
 mean scarcely anything but novels and tales. 
 Now we have had amongst us in England during 
 the past quarter of a century some gifted novelists, 
 but we have also had some very real poets — poets 
 whose names and achievement would, in my opinion, 
 add lustre to any age or nation. They occupy almost 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 29 
 
 no place in the public eye ; they receive almost no 
 substantial rewards ; and they are everlastingly 
 being told what feeble and degenerate successors 
 they are to the poets who, being dead, are 
 commonly called the Victorian Giants. Your 
 novelist, as a rule, gets his due rewards in this 
 life. Your poet, as a rule, does not. Now it is no 
 part of my purpose to attempt any estimate of 
 the work of my poetical contemporaries in England. 
 All that I shall do is to offer them my most sincere 
 condolences on the hard fate which condemned 
 them to be born there at all in the latter part of 
 the nineteenth century. If you wish your poets to 
 blossom and fructify as Nature may have intended, 
 you must give them some warmth and sunshine. 
 If they grow up in an Arctic environment of per- 
 petual frost, a killing frost, do not expect from them 
 the abounding harvest which only a summer sun 
 can fully ripen. Their appropriate place in the 
 scheme of life is not in life's cold outer courts and 
 shivering ante-chambers. Surely it is to the great 
 banqueting-hall itself that the minstrel should be 
 bidden. 
 
 The true function of the poet to-day is to keep 
 fresh within us our often nagging sense of life's 
 greatness and grandeur. Like that Helen to whom 
 
3 o THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 Edgar Poe addressed in early youth some of his 
 most exquisite verses,— her whose classic beauty 
 " brought him home " "to the glory that was 
 Greece and the grandeur that was Rome "—like 
 her, the poet recalls us, " brings us home " to a 
 glory we are but too prone to lose sight of, to a 
 grandeur we continually forget. But woe be unto 
 him if he himself forgets that the ancient and only 
 way in which he can truly perform this function 
 is by marrying his wisdom to a worthy music. 
 We have had poets among us who forgot this 
 lesson, and their inevitable nemesis is to be them- 
 selves forgotten. Neither his intellectual brilliancy 
 and subtlety nor his prodigal wealth of fancy has 
 saved Donne from the fate which overtakes all poets 
 who lack the crowning grace of harmonious utter- 
 ance. There are singers to-day who seem to cultivate 
 a gratuitous ruggedness, forgetting that what may 
 be effective as an exception becomes merely tedious 
 when it constitutes the rule. I myself should imagine 
 that if one of these gentlemen happened in a 
 moment of absent-mindedness to write a perfectly 
 regular and smooth-running line, he would spend, 
 if necessary, days and nights in tormenting and 
 lacerating it out of all shape and comeliness. When 
 I find myself suffering from the effects of what some 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 31 
 
 persons consider ruggedly powerful diction, my 
 remedy is to call to mind and inwardly repeat some 
 passage from one of the great poets, where language 
 and metre are employed with imperial mastery, 
 and yet with a perfect obedience to law — nay, in 
 a spirit that rejoices in law and embraces discipline 
 with ardour. Fortunately English poetry is rich 
 in such passages, for in our blank verse we possess 
 a measure which without any violent distortion 
 of the normal line can be almost infinitely varied 
 in structure and cadence and modulation by the 
 architectonic power of real metrical genius. Our 
 greatest poets exemplify this abundantly — but 
 then theirs is a kind of poetry which disdains all 
 oddity, all quaintness, all violence ; a kind of poetry 
 in which power is wedded to grace, in perfect 
 nuptial bliss. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, the foregoing observations 
 were jotted down during my rather uneven progress 
 towards you across the Atlantic in the teeth of 
 adverse winds which seemed to typify somewhat 
 the fate of the modern bard. Since my arrival 
 on these shores I have been told that here also the 
 public interest in poetry is visibly on the wane. 
 I have even been warned that I could scarcely choose 
 
32 THE POET'S PLACE 
 
 a more unpopular subject on which to discourse 
 than that calling of which I myself am a humble 
 practitioner. If that be so, then the adverse winds 
 to which I allude indicate a meteorological con- 
 dition affecting a wider geographical area than 
 I had supposed. Now here in America, you are 
 at any rate to be congratulated upon your com- 
 parative freedom from the particular kind of social 
 influences which in the mother country are apt to 
 affect unduly — to affect illegitimately — the mental 
 tone of large masses of human beings. In England 
 it is possible for a frivolous aristocracy, an idea- 
 less plutocracy, or a somewhat unintellectual 
 court, in a considerable measure, to set the 
 tone of the entire community. King Edward VII 
 was a man with fine human qualities which we 
 must all admire, but he was not furiously addicted 
 to literature, and to extol him as a patron of litera- 
 ture would be the insincerest flattery. Perhaps 
 you will say that patronage, with its tendency to 
 impair the independence of the patronized, is the 
 last thing to be desired in the real interests of 
 Letters ; and in theory this is true, but in practice 
 it is perhaps disputable. Similarly one may admit 
 that titles and honorific distinctions are poor things 
 in themselves, while recognizing that in a country 
 
IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 33 
 
 like England they still retain some of the symbolic 
 value of insignia, and may occasionally serve the 
 useful purpose of investing certain achievements 
 which are more real than spectacular with a dignity 
 visible to the general eye. In England, not state 
 action only, but the personality of the heads of the 
 state and of the occupants of august positions can 
 affect profoundly the whole mental atmosphere. 
 King George and Queen Mary are setting an admir- 
 able example to their people in all things ethical ; if 
 they can set an equally admirable example in the 
 direction of things intellectual, their record will be 
 a truly illustrious one. But, as I was saying, you in 
 America are to be felicitated on the fact that you are 
 not at the mercy of those chance currents, those for- 
 tuitous influences, which are capable of playing so 
 large a part in the life of my countrymen. If ever 
 there was a nation that seemed to hold its destinies 
 in its own hands and to be master of its own soul, 
 that nation is the United States of America. If you 
 let the intellectual life of your country decline, you 
 cannot lay the blame on a king or an aristocracy. 
 As you look back on the history of your country, 
 does it not seem to you that America would have 
 been distinctly a poorer place in the human sense 
 if it had not been for her poets ? It seems to me 
 
34 THE POET'S PLACE IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 
 
 that the air of America is the sweeter because 
 Longfellow breathed it. It is a vivid and a vitalizing 
 air ; a tonic air ; an air that vibrates with powerful 
 impulses. It feels to me like an air which a poet 
 might be glad to have been born in ; an air which 
 a poet might be glad to sing in. But do not ask him 
 to sing in a solitude. Do not ask him to sing before 
 an audience which visibly melts away while he 
 sings. Give him something of your hearts, and he 
 will give you all his own heart in return. Give him 
 a place — an honourable and honoured place — in 
 your scheme of life. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Dedication — To Robert Underwood Johnson . 5 
 
 Preface ........ 7 
 
 The Poet's Place in the Scheme of Life . 15 
 
 The Muse in Exile 39 
 
 Dawn on the Headland ..... 42 
 
 To a Privileged Thief ..... 44 
 
 The Centenary of Dickens .... 46 
 
 The Three Givers ...... 50 
 
 Imperial Mother . . . . . • 5 1 
 
 Home Truths 5 2 
 
 Liberalism . . . . . . 53 
 
 On Pyrrho, a Great Editor . . . -54 
 
 A Guess in Anthropology ..... 55 
 
 A Literary Dialogue . . . . 58 
 
 Summer's Overthrow 62 
 
 Dublin Bay ....... 64 
 
 Hymn for a Progressive People ... 66 
 
 Ireland Once More ...... 68 
 
 On Killiney Strand ...... 7° 
 
 Part of my Story 7 1 
 
 The Sappers and Miners 73 
 
 A Full Confession ...... 76 
 
 A Little Ditty ...... 79 
 
 35 
 
36 CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Indestructibles . . . . . .81 
 
 Peace .... 
 
 
 
 
 
 82 
 
 A Retort . 
 
 
 
 
 
 83 
 
 Clontarf . 
 
 
 
 
 
 84 
 
 " Ireland's Eye" 
 
 
 
 
 
 85 
 
 MOONSET AND SUNRISE 
 
 
 
 
 
 87 
 
 Science and Nature . 
 
 
 
 
 
 94 
 
 A Chance Meeting 
 
 
 
 
 
 95 
 
 To a Certain Ministry 
 
 
 
 
 
 96 
 
 The Rash Poet . 
 
 
 
 
 
 97 
 
 Arthur at Tintagil: A Romaunt 
 
 
 
 98 
 
 Ulster's Reward 
 
 
 
 100 
 
 SONNETS 
 
 To Theodore Roosevelt . . . . .105 
 
 Till that Hour 
 
 
 
 
 
 107 
 
 To an American Poet 
 
 
 
 
 
 109 
 
 To an English Liberal 
 
 
 
 
 
 in 
 
 To Miss Clara B. Spence 
 
 
 
 
 
 113 
 
 The Real Reformer . 
 
 
 
 
 
 115 
 
THE MUSE IN EXILE 
 
THE MUSE IN EXILE 
 
 Verse— a light handful— verse again I bring ; 
 
 Verse that perhaps had glowed with lustier hues 
 
 Amid more fostering air : for it was born 
 
 In the penurious sunshine of an Age 
 
 That does not stone her prophets, but, alas, 
 
 Turns, to their next of kin, the singers, oft 
 
 An ear of stone : in bare, bleak truth an Age 
 
 That banishes the poets, as he of old, 
 
 The great child of the soul of Socrates, 
 
 Out of his visionary commonwealth 
 
 Banished them ; for she drives them coldly forth 
 
 From where alone they yearn to live — her heart ; 
 
 Scourges them with the scourge of apathy, 
 
 39 
 
4 o THE MUSE IN EXILE 
 
 From out her bosom's rich metropolis, 
 
 To a distant, desert province of her thoughts, 
 
 A region grey and pale : or, crueller still, 
 
 Gives them, at times, gusts of applause, and then 
 
 Remands them to new frosts of unconcern ; 
 
 Nay, to atone for some brief generous hour, 
 
 Holds back their dues, husbands the heartening 
 
 word. 
 Until they dwell where praise cheers not the praised, 
 And scorn and honour are received in like 
 Silence, and laurel and poppy are as one. 
 
 Let me not slight her. Let me not do wrong 
 To her whose child I am : this giant Age, 
 Cumbered with her own hugeness as is the wont 
 Of giants. Yet too openly she herself 
 Hath slighted one of Time's great offspring : she 
 Hath slighted Song ; and Song will be revenged : 
 
THE MUSE IN EXILE 41 
 
 Song will survive her ; Song will follow her hearse, 
 And either weep or dance upon her grave. 
 For in Life's midmost chamber there still burns 
 Upon the ancient hearth the ancient fire, 
 Whence are all flamelike things, the unquenchable 
 
 Muse 
 Among them, who, though meanly lodged to-day, 
 In dreariest outlands of the world's regard, 
 Foresees the hour when Man shall once more feel 
 His need of her, and call the exile home. 
 
DAWN ON THE HEADLAND 
 
 Dawn — and a magical stillness : on earth, quiescence 
 profound ; 
 On the waters a vast Content, as of hunger ap- 
 peased and stayed ; 
 In the heavens a silence that seems not mere priva- 
 tion of sound, 
 But a thing with form and body, a thing to be 
 touched and weighed ! 
 
 Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of the 
 
 cosmic wheel, 
 
 In the hot collision of Forces, and clangour of 
 
 boundless Strife, 
 
 42 
 
DAWN ON THE HEADLAND 43 
 
 Mid the sound of the speed of the worlds, the rushing 
 worlds, and the peal 
 Of the thunder of Life. 
 
TO A PRIVILEGED THIEF 
 
 Blackbird, that in our garden, here and there 
 
 Nibbling an apple or pear, 
 
 Hast marred so many, and slaked thyself on none- 
 
 If thou wouldst come and eat thy fill of one 
 
 Instead of ruining twenty, 
 
 Were it not kindlier done ? 
 
 Thou still wouldst have thy share 
 
 Of this our plenty, 
 
 This ruddy issue of the earth and sun. 
 
 But ah, thou dost for thine exemplar take 
 
 The loveless rake, 
 
 The shallow libertine, 
 
 44 
 
TO A PRIVILEGED THIEF 45 
 
 Who wanders among maidens, leaving each 
 Like a peck'd apple or a bitten peach, 
 For other palates spoiled ; nor dares to win 
 One heart in rich completeness, 
 And banquet all his days on its upyielded sweetness. 
 
THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 
 
 Lines read by the author at the Dickens Centenary celebration at the 
 Carnegie Hall, New York. 
 
 When Nature first designed, 
 
 In her all-procreant mind, 
 
 The man whom here to-night we are met to honour — 
 
 When first the idea of Dickens flashed upon her — 
 
 " Where, where," she said, " in all my populous 
 
 Earth, 
 
 Shall this prodigious child be brought to birth ? 
 
 Where shall he have his earliest wondering look 
 
 Into my magic book ? 
 
 Shall he be born where life runs like a brook, 
 
 Far from the sound and shock of mighty deeds, 
 
 Among soft English meads ? 
 
 46 
 
THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 47 
 
 Or shall he first my pictured volume scan 
 Where London lifts its hot and fevered brow, 
 For cooling Night to fan ? 
 Nay, nay," she said ; " I have a happier plan ! 
 For where, at Portsmouth, on the embattled tides, 
 The ships of war step out with thundering prow, 
 And shake their stormy sides — 
 In yonder place of arms, whose gaunt sea wall 
 Flings to the clouds the far-heard bugle-call, 
 He shall be born amid the drums and guns, 
 He shall be born among my fighting sons, 
 Perhaps the greatest warrior of them all." 
 
 So there, where frown the forts and battle-gear, 
 And all the proud sea babbles Nelson's name, 
 Into the world this later hero came, 
 He, too, a man that knew all moods but fear, 
 
4 8 THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 
 
 He, too, a fighter ! Yet not his the strife 
 
 That leaves dark scars on the fair face of life. 
 
 He did not fight to rend the world apart, 
 
 He fought to make it one in mind and heart, 
 
 Building a broad and noble bridge to span 
 
 The icy chasm that sunders man from man. 
 
 Wherever Wrong had fixed its bastions deep, 
 
 There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise 
 
 Some fortress girt with lucre or with lies ; 
 
 There his light battery stormed some ponderous 
 
 keep ; 
 There charged he up the steep ; 
 A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell, 
 Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell. 
 And still undimmed his conquering weapons shine ; 
 On his bright sword no spot of rust appears ; 
 And still, across the years, 
 
THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 49 
 
 His soul goes forth to battle, and in the face 
 Of whatsoe'er is false, or cruel, or base, 
 He hurls his gage, and leaps among the spears, 
 Being armed with pity and love, and scorn divine, 
 Immortal laughter, and immortal tears. 
 
THE THREE GIVERS 
 
 England gave me sun and storm, 
 The food on which my spirit throve ; 
 
 America gave me hand-grasps warm, 
 And Ireland gave me her I love. 
 
 Heirs of unequal wealth they are, 
 These noble lands, these givers three 
 
 And it was the poorest one by far, 
 That gave the richest gift to me. 
 
 50 
 
IMPERIAL MOTHER 
 
 Imperial Mother, from whose breasts 
 We drank as babes the pride whereby 
 
 We question ev'n thine own behests, 
 And judge thee with no timorous eye ;- 
 
 Oft slow to hear when thou dost call, 
 Oft vext with an unstable will, 
 
 When once a rival seeks thy fall 
 
 We are thy sons and daughters still ! 
 
 The love that halts, the faith that veers, 
 
 Are then deep sunk as in the Sea : 
 
 The Sea where thou must brook no peers, 
 
 And halve with none thy sovereignty. 
 51 
 
HOME TRUTHS 
 
 It is not the flight from the country, 
 It is not the rush to the town, 
 
 It is ignorance, ignorance, ignorance, 
 Will bring old England down. 
 
 Though vast our overlordship, 
 
 And ancient our renown, 
 If the unfed mind is everywhere 
 
 Twill pull old England down. 
 
 Do German legions menace ? 
 
 Do German Dreadnoughts frown ? 
 
 It is rather the German schoolmaster 
 
 May smite old England down. 
 52 
 
LIBERALISM 
 
 To Liberalism I owe, and pay, 
 Allegiance whole and hearty, — 
 
 The Liberalism which has to-day 
 No foe like the Liberal Party. 
 
 53 
 
ON PYRRHO, A GREAT EDITOR 
 
 Yes, Pyrrho was my hospitable friend, 
 Till, at the nineteenth century's stormy end, 
 Upon one thunderous theme, we failed to agree. 
 Thenceforward, " Oh, the difference to me ! " 
 Thenceforward, if I pined, I pined in vain 
 For Pyrrho's conversation or champagne. 
 
 And whose opinion, Pyrrho's or my own, 
 Was wisest ? Time may tell, and Time alone. 
 I do but know that mine has cost me dear, 
 While his brought in ten thousand pounds a year. 
 
 54 
 
A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 When Man was yet so young upon the Earth 
 
 As to be just as lofty or as lowly 
 
 As other creatures, whether hoofed or taloned, 
 
 Feathered or scaled, that shared with him this 
 
 orb ; 
 
 It chanced upon a day that he peered down 
 
 From his hid perch, high in some forest tree, 
 
 And saw beneath him on the ground a beast 
 
 Of alien kind, his foe. Then did he spring, 
 
 With something 'twixt a chatter and a screech — 
 
 Knowing not other language — toward his victim ; 
 
 And as from branch to branch he swung himself, 
 
 With long, thick, hirsute arms, down to the ground, 
 
 55 
 
56 A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 It so befell that the last branch of all 
 
 Broke off in his right hand. Twas his first weapon ! 
 
 The father of all weapons wielded since ! 
 
 Nay, more — from this, all instruments and tools, 
 
 Whether they be of war or peace, descend. 
 
 Thus, in that pregnant hour, that held within it 
 
 All after ages — thus, and then, and there, 
 
 Took he the first tremendous step of fate 
 
 In the long task of making earth, stone, iron, 
 
 His servants. Thus his great career began. 
 
 Such is my guess — which whoso will may scorn, 
 
 And whoso will may ponder — as to how 
 
 Dawned through the darkness this our human 
 
 empire 
 Over the beast and bird, this human sway 
 Of the earth and air, this governance and power 
 
A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 57 
 
 Whereby we bind to our hot chariot wheels 
 The captive world, and shall not pause content 
 Until all nature bear the yoke of man, 
 As man himself beareth the yoke of God. 
 
 June 4, 1912. 
 
A LITERARY DIALOGUE 
 
 [The speakers, X. X. and W. W.] 
 
 X. X. 
 
 A poet always in a fuss ; 
 
 A bustling poet, who thought to utter 
 
 All Life's meaning in a stutter, 
 
 And whose poetry is thus 
 
 One interminable splutter ; — 
 
 An intellectual acrobat, 
 
 Skilled in a sort of strenuous clowning — 
 
 W. W. 
 
 God bless us, why, you don't mean Browning ? 
 58 
 
A LITERARY DIALOGUE 59 
 
 X. X. 
 
 He made us stand agape, but we 
 Were wearied in the end by that 
 Intolerable agility, 
 As of some vast, performing flea — 
 
 W. W. 
 
 Come, come, this is too much for me. 
 
 X. X. 
 
 As to his " optimism," it's just 
 The doctrine of the well-dined man 
 Who, o'er his port, takes God on trust, 
 Lauds, with sound lungs, the Cosmic Plan, 
 And finds all perfect beyond question, 
 
60 A LITERARY DIALOGUE 
 
 Evil itself being good when seen 
 Through a supremely good digestion. 
 
 W. W. 
 
 But if it's Browning that you mean — 
 
 XX. 
 
 Great poets bring their fruits full-grown 
 Only the fine results are shown 
 Of their great thinking : he displays 
 Each crude process to your gaze, 
 Or gives you processes alone ; 
 As if a builder's hand should raise 
 No tower, no stately, gracious thing, 
 Looking out on time and tide, 
 
A LITERARY DIALOGUE 61 
 
 But a wilderness of scaffolding, 
 And 
 
 W. W. 
 Well, go on. 
 
 X. X. 
 
 And nought beside ! 
 
SUMMER'S OVERTHROW 
 
 Summer is fallen, is conquered, her greatness 
 ravished away. 
 
 We saw her broken with tempest on cliffs of the 
 
 Irish shore ; 
 We saw her flee like the wraith of a monstrous rose 
 
 before 
 The airy invisible hunters that hunted her night 
 
 and day. 
 And once we believed them frustrate, believed them 
 
 reft of their prey, 
 For she suddenly flashed anew into violent splendour, 
 
 defied 
 The yelling pack of the storm, and turned, and held 
 
 them at bay. 
 
 62 
 
SUMMER'S OVERTHROW 63 
 
 In superb despair she faced them, she towered like 
 
 June once more, — 
 Then, sinking, shook on the world her golden ruins, 
 
 and died. 
 
DUBLIN BAY 
 
 On Dublin Bay, on Dublin Bay, 
 
 The ships come in, the ships go out, 
 The great gulls hover and wheel about, 
 
 The white sails gleam, and shimmer away ; 
 
 And over the heathery heights we stray, 
 
 To watch, through a haze of sultry drought, 
 The ships come in, the ships go out, 
 
 Yonder below us on Dublin Bay. 
 
 We have heard the clang of Life's mean fray, 
 
 Where joyless sounded the victor's shout, 
 
 And brief as the flash of a leaping trout 
 
 Was Pride that pranced in the summer ray ; 
 
 64 
 
DUBLIN BAY 65 
 
 And little we think of the world to-day, 
 Whether it smile or whether it pout, 
 For the ships come in, and the ships go out, 
 And yonder below is Dublin Bay. 
 
 Grief may visit us, — who shall say ? 
 
 Time may spite us, and Fortune flout ; 
 
 Care, with her brood, a doleful rout, 
 Care may follow us all the way ; 
 But Love is ours, and Love will stay, 
 
 Love that knows not shadow of doubt, 
 
 While the ships come in, while the ships go out, 
 Yonder below us on Dublin Bay. 
 
HYMN FOR A PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE 
 
 Great and fair is she, our Land, 
 High of heart and strong of hand ; 
 Dawn is on her forehead still, 
 In her veins youth's arrowy thrill. 
 
 Hers are riches, might and fame ; 
 All the earth resounds her name ; 
 In her roadsteads navies ride : 
 Hath she need of aught beside ? 
 
 Power Unseen, before whose eyes 
 
 Nations fall and nations rise, 
 
 Grant she climb not to her goal 
 
 All-forgetful of the Soul ! 
 66 
 
HYMN FOR A PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE 67 
 Firm in honour be she found, 
 Justice-armed and mercy-crowned, 
 Blest in labour, blest in ease, 
 Blest in noiseless charities. 
 
 Unenslaved by things that must 
 Yield full soon to moth and rust, 
 Let her hold a light on high 
 Men unborn may travel by. 
 
 Mightier still she then shall stand, 
 Moulded by Thy secret hand, 
 Power Eternal, at whose call 
 Nations rise and nations fall ! 
 
IRELAND ONCE MORE 
 
 Wild Erin of the still unconquered heart ; 
 
 Thou whom the woeful interloping seas 
 
 Have blindly riven apart 
 
 From her that nursed me on great craggy knees, 
 
 Her of whose dales and mountains I am sprung : 
 
 Once more I stray among 
 
 Fields that remember thy calamities, 
 
 And hills that muse on ancient weeping years ; 
 
 And I behold how beautiful thou art 
 
 In thine immortal tears. 
 
 Yes, thou art fair, and Sorrow on thy brow 
 
 Hath deeper charm than all the brood of Joy ; 
 
 68 
 
IRELAND ONCE MORE 69 
 
 But sad have been thy harpstrings long enow, 
 And ev'n the loveliness of grief can cloy. 
 Oh, come thou forth and put the Past away, 
 Oh, bid it get behind thee and begone, 
 And with thy conquered conqueror speed thou on 
 Unto the mightier day. 
 This is no time for sundering and divorce, 
 This is the hour for closer bonds of soul, 
 In one great march, by one far-mounting course, 
 To one majestic goal. 
 
 Old Hate is dying : let Ignorance, mother of Hate, 
 Follow her leperous daughter through Hell's gate ; 
 And when from both at last the breath is fled, 
 Then for their carrion corses let there be 
 A sea-deep grave, to hide them till the sea 
 Gives up its dead. 
 
ON KILLINEY STRAND 
 
 The sea before me 
 
 Is harassed and stormy : 
 
 The low sky o'er me 
 
 Is haggard and wan. 
 With grey tides foaming, 
 And drear winds roaming, 
 And tired gulls homing, 
 
 Great Night comes on. 
 
 70 
 
PART OF MY STORY 
 
 We met when you were in the May of life, 
 And I had left its June behind me far. 
 
 Some barren victories, — much defeat and strife, — 
 Had marked my soul with many a hidden scar. 
 
 I was a man hurt deep with blows that men 
 Ne'er guessed at ; strangely weak — more strangely 
 strong ; 
 
 Daring at times ; and uttering now and then, 
 Out of a turbid heart, a limpid song. 
 
 Fitful in effort, — fixed and clear in aim ; 
 
 Poor, but not envious of the wealth I lack ; 
 
 Ever half-scaling the hard hill of fame, 
 
 And ever by some evil fate flung back, — 
 7i 
 
72 PART OF MY STORY 
 
 Such did you find me, in that city grey 
 
 Where we were plighted, O my comrade true : 
 My wife, now dearer far than on the day 
 
 When this our love was new. 
 
THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 
 
 In lands that still the heirs of Othman sway, 
 
 There lives a legend, wild as wildest note 
 
 Of birds that haunt the Arabian waste, where rolls 
 
 Tigris through Baghdad to the Persian Sea. 
 
 Tis fabled that the mighty sorcerer, 
 
 King Solomon, when he died, was sitting aloft, 
 
 Like one that mused, on his great lion-throne ; 
 
 Sitting with head bent forward o'er his staff, 
 
 Whereon with both his hands he leaned. And 
 
 tribes 
 
 And peoples moved before him, in their awe 
 
 Not venturing nigh ; and tawny fiercenesses, 
 
 Panther and pard, at timorous distance couched ; 
 
 73 
 
74 THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 
 
 While Figures vast, Forms indeterminate, 
 Demons and Genii, the Enchanter's thralls, 
 Cloudily rose, and darkly went and came. 
 But so majestic sat he lifeless there, 
 And counterfeited life so perfectly, 
 That change of hue or feature was by none 
 Seen, and none guessed him dead, and every knee 
 Rendered him wonted homage, until worms 
 Gnawing his staff, made fall that last support, 
 And with it fell the unpropped Death, divulged 
 In gorgeous raiment to the wondering world. 
 
 So may an Empire, from whose body and limbs 
 The spirit hath wholly fled, still seem to breathe 
 And feel, still keep its living posture, still 
 Cheat with similitude of glory and power 
 The gazing Earth, until the evil things 
 
THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 75 
 
 That burrow in secret, and by night destroy, 
 Unseat the grandiose Semblance, and man's heart 
 Hastes to forget the obeisances he made 
 To a jewelled corse, long ripe for sepulture. 
 
A FULL CONFESSION 
 
 What lands, where you and I have dwelt or strayed, 
 
 What lands, you ask me, Dearest, love I best, 
 
 After this Isle, with which my roots are woven 
 
 Beyond unravelling ? First, your motherland, 
 
 Your Erin, dear to me for her sweet self, 
 
 Dearer for one sweet daughter whom she bore : 
 
 A land of glowing, kindling countenances, 
 
 A land where, when the lips are oped in speech, 
 
 All the lit face speaks too : and, next to her, 
 
 America, the Supreme Misunderstood, 
 
 The oft aspersed, oft railed at and reviled 
 
 And slandered ; in whose cities, in whose streets 
 
 And avenues, we almost thought to find, 
 
 76 
 
A FULL CONFESSION 77 
 
 Adored and supplicated day and night, 
 A graven image throned against the heavens, 
 A sculptor's marble dream of Mammon, there 
 Hymned with Te Deum by ten million throats, 
 But found instead the nourished brain, athirst 
 For nobler things than lucre ; found the love 
 Of these fair things sown wide in fecund soil : 
 And found the way not steep, but easy and smooth, 
 To that best hostel for all travellers, 
 The Human Heart Divine. How can we think 
 Coldly of such a land, itself so warm 
 In its accost and greeting ? There we won 
 Friends whom to lose were to find life itself 
 Less winsome. There, too, did we taste awhile 
 Sorrow, not pleasure alone. And there we roamed 
 Wide as from Spain-remembering shores, that watch 
 The hues and moods of a chameleon sea 
 
78 A FULL CONFESSION 
 
 Beyond Miami's palms and orange-groves, 
 
 To where Niagara takes the infernal plunge, 
 
 And out of the grey rage of the abysm, 
 
 Out of the torment, everlastingly 
 
 Upbreathes what seems, when sunlight touches it, 
 
 The smoke of Hell, lost in the smile of God. 
 
A LITTLE DITTY 
 
 Oh, England is a darling, 
 And Scotland is a dear, 
 
 And well I love their faces 
 At any time of year ; 
 
 But on a summer day 
 
 My heart went astray, 
 
 And I gave it all away 
 
 To bonny Ireland. 
 
 Oh, hardy is the thistle, 
 
 And comely is the rose, 
 
 But witching are the maids where 
 
 The shy shamrock grows ; 
 79 
 
8o A LITTLE DITTY 
 
 And I knew, upon the day 
 When I gave my heart away, 
 It would ever after stay 
 In bonny Ireland. 
 
THE INDESTRUCTIBLES 
 
 The dullards of past generations, the undiscerning crew 
 That turned deaf ears unto Shelley, that turned 
 blind eyes upon Keats, 
 Unchangeably reincarnate, invincibly born anew, 
 Still buzz in the press and the salon, still lord it 
 in learning's seats. 
 
 Do you think they are ever conquered ? Do you 
 
 think they are ever slain ? 
 They are secular, sempiternal ; the Powers that 
 
 cannot die. 
 When all things else have perished, Stupidity shall 
 
 remain, 
 
 And sit secure on the ruins of every star of the sky. 
 f 81 
 
PEACE 
 
 Lines in anticipation of the centenary of the conclusion of peace 
 between England and the United States. 
 
 Behold a marvel great ! 
 
 Two mighty peoples, in two hemispheres, 
 
 Throughout a hundred years, 
 
 Slaying not one another in murderous hate ! 
 
 This is the miracle we shall celebrate 
 
 With pomps, and feasts, and state. 
 
 O Nations, count not peace itself an end, 
 
 But something which, achieved, we must transcend. 
 
 Be glad of war's surcease, 
 
 But give no rest unto the soul of Man 
 
 Till he has fared some stages further than 
 
 Mere Peace. 
 
 82 
 
A RETORT 
 
 Year after year it grows more hard 
 
 For the Muse to capture the world's regard, 
 
 And the world asks lightly, What ails the bard ? 
 
 But it never asks if some deep ill 
 
 Be making its Soul more hard to thrill — 
 
 Some malady there, past leech's skill. 
 
 «3 
 
CLONTARF 
 
 Here, nigh a thousand years ago, 
 
 King Brian fought the Dane, 
 On a day of ruin and overthrow, 
 
 And at eve in his tent was slain. 
 
 And here, where thrones came crashing down 
 On the wild, ensanguined shore, 
 
 In a drooping suburb of Dublin town 
 To-day the tramcars roar. 
 
 And they jolt me back with a ruthless whirl, 
 
 From ages of myth and mist, 
 
 To an Ireland ruled by a harmless earl 
 
 And an innocent essayist. 
 84 
 
"IRELAND'S EYE" 
 
 A drear, waste, island rock, by tempests worn, 
 
 Gnawed by the seas and naked to the sky, 
 It bears the name it hath for ages borne 
 Of " Ireland's Eye." 
 
 It looks far eastward o'er the desert foam ; 
 
 Round it the whimpering, wild sea- voices cry. 
 The gulls and cormorants have their stormy home 
 On Ireland's Eye. 
 
 A strange and spectral head the gaunt crag rears, 
 
 And ghostly seem the wings that hover nigh. 
 
 Are these dim rains the phantoms of old tears 
 
 In Ireland's Eye ? 
 85 
 
86 "IRELAND'S EYE" 
 
 The tide ebbs fast ; the wind droops low to-day, 
 
 Feeble as dying hate that hates to die. 
 Blow, living airs, and blow the mists away 
 From Ireland's Eye. 
 
MOONSET AND SUNRISE 
 
 The forts of midnight fall at last ; 
 
 The ancient, baleful powers 
 Yield up, with countenances aghast, 
 
 Their dragon-guarded towers. 
 Henceforth, their might as dust being trod, 
 Tis easier to believe in God. 
 
 Where were the great ones of the earth, 
 
 Kaiser and Czar and King ? 
 Small thanks to them, for this glad birth 
 
 Whereat the daystars sing ! 
 
 The little lands, with hearts of flame, 
 
 Have put the mighty thrones to shame. 
 87 
 
MOONSET AND SUNRISE 
 To-morrow, who shall dare deny 
 
 The heroes their reward, 
 And snatch from under Victory's eye 
 
 The harvest of the sword ? 
 Not we ourselves, a second time, 
 Could dye our hands with such a crime. 
 
 Idle the dream, that e'er the Turk 
 
 Can change into a Man ! 
 Have we not seen his handiwork 
 
 Since first his reign began, — 
 Since first he fed his lust and rage 
 On ravished youth and slaughtered age 
 
 If, of his power, no lingering trace 
 Remained to insult the sky, 
 
MOONSET AND SUNRISE 89 
 
 Were not this earth a better place 
 
 Wherein to live and die ? 
 If he could vanish from the Day, 
 What but a stain were cleansed away ? 
 
 Three lustrums have in turmoil sped 
 
 Since Greece, unfriended, hurled 
 Her javelin at the python's head, 
 
 Before a languid world, 
 While the great Kings, in far-off tones, 
 Mumbled upon their frozen thrones. 
 
 She dared too much, or dared too soon, 
 
 And broke in disarray, 
 Where, underneath his crescent moon, 
 
 The coiled Corruption lay. 
 
9o MOONSET AND SUNRISE 
 
 Heartened anew, the scaly thing 
 Returned unto his ravening. 
 
 But now his empire, more and more 
 In narrowing confines penned, 
 
 An old and putrefying sore, 
 Hath festered to its end ; 
 
 Nor far the hour, when he at last 
 
 Shall, like a foul disease, have passed. 
 
 Pity for others had he none ; 
 
 In storms of blood and fire 
 He slew the daughter with the son, 
 
 The mother with the sire ; 
 And oft, where Earth had felt his tread, 
 The quick were envious of the dead. 
 
MOONSET AND SUNRISE 91 
 
 But since his fierceness and his strength, 
 
 His faded pomps august, 
 His courage and his guile, at length 
 
 Sink into night and dust, 
 For him, too, let Compassion plead, 
 Ev'n as for all of Adam's seed. 
 
 O lands by his dominion curst 
 Throughout five hundred years, — 
 
 You that could ne'er appease his thirst 
 With all your blood and tears, — 
 
 In this new day that breaks divine 
 
 He shall drink deep another wine. 
 
 The cup of lowliness shall slake 
 Lips that nought else might cool, 
 
92 
 
 MOONSET AND SUNRISE 
 When hurricanes of terror shake 
 
 The towers of Istamboul, 
 And blasts blown on that Golden Horn 
 Arouse the City of Dreadful Morn. 
 
 For now the hour of dreams is past ; 
 
 The gibbering ghosts depart ; 
 And Man is unashamed at last 
 
 To have a human heart. 
 And lo, the doors of dawn ajar, 
 And in the East again a Star ! 
 
 Loveless and cold was Europe's sin, 
 Loveless the path she chose, 
 
 And self-upbraidings deep within 
 She strangled as they rose ; 
 
MOONSET AND SUNRISE 93 
 
 But that dark trespass of our own 
 Forbids that we should cast a stone. 
 
 Enough, if hands that heretofore 
 
 Laboured to bar His road, 
 Delay henceforward nevermore 
 
 The charioteers of God, 
 Who halt and slumber, but anon, 
 With burning wheels, drive thundering on. 
 
 November 9, 191 2. 
 
SCIENCE AND NATURE 
 
 You babble of your " conquest of the air " ; 
 Of Nature's secrets one by one laid bare. 
 Her secrets ! They are evermore withheld : 
 'Tis only in her porches you have dwelled. 
 Could you once lift her veil as you desire, 
 You were burnt up as chaff before her fire. 
 
 When will you learn your place and rank in Mind ? 
 
 Art can create ; Science can only find. 
 
 You do but nibble at Truth : your vaunted lore 
 
 Is the half-scornful alms flung from her door. 
 
 Your lips her weak and watered wine have known ; 
 
 The un thinned vintage is for gods alone. 
 
 94 
 
A CHANCE MEETING 
 
 I met a poet, — peerless among those 
 Who make their lives and songs one perfect pose. 
 A wise man too ! For, take the pose away, 
 What else were left 'twould pose the gods to say. 
 
 95 
 
TO A CERTAIN MINISTRY 
 
 Statesmen, arrayed in all the splendour 
 Of your long record of surrender, — 
 If one false god there yet may be 
 To whom you have not bowed the knee, 
 Oh, haste to yield him genuflexion ! 
 Fill up the cup of your abjection. 
 In that brief hour ere hence ye fleet, 
 Make your ingloriousness complete, 
 Let it not just elude perfection. 
 
 96 
 
THE RASH POET 
 
 A poet wrote a little book, and rashly called it a play, 
 And some were wroth with the little book, for they 
 
 said, " It is not a play ; 
 A poem, a passable poem perhaps, but oh dear, not 
 
 a play ; 
 Not anything like a play ! " 
 
 A lover gave his lady a pearl, and somehow called 
 
 it a pebble, 
 But she never quarrelled with the pearl because it 
 
 was not a pebble ; 
 She never cried, " A passable pearl, but oh dear, 
 
 not a pebble ; 
 
 Not anything like a pebble ! " 
 g 97 
 
ARTHUR AT TINTAGIL : A ROMAUNT 
 
 Sir Launcelot he was lithe and agile, 
 His armour fitted him wondrous well ; 
 
 And he spake with Arthur at Tintagil, — 
 The place beside the new hotel. 
 
 " Thy knights," he said, " are stout and able ; 
 
 I trow their swords are trusty steel ; 
 But what they like at thy Round Table 
 
 Is a square meal." 
 
 And Queen Guinevere was fair and fragile, 
 
 And loved Sir Launcelot all too well ; 
 
 And she tired of Arthur and Tintagil, 
 
 Long ere they built the new hotel. 
 98 
 
ARTHUR AT TINTAGIL: A ROMAUNT 99 
 Fled are the Shapes of rose-hued fiction : 
 
 Vanished are Vivien, Elaine, Etarre ! 
 Gone to a world of archaic diction, 
 
 Where only impossible beings are. 
 
 Fled is the Queen, the fair and fragile, 
 
 Flown with the Knight she loved too well ; 
 
 But the sea still roars beneath Tintagil 
 And that hotel. 
 
ULSTER'S REWARD 
 
 What is the wage the faithful earn ? 
 What is a recompense fair and meet ? 
 Trample their fealty under your feet ; 
 That is a fitting and just return. 
 Flout them, buffet them, over them ride. 
 Fling them aside. 
 
 Ulster is ours to mock and spurn, 
 Ours to spit upon, ours to deride ; 
 And let it be known and blazoned wide 
 That this is the wage the faithful earn. 
 Did she uphold us when others defied ? 
 Then fling her aside. 
 
 IOO 
 
ULSTER'S REWARD iot 
 
 Oh, when has constancy firm and oeep' 
 Been proven so oft yet held 30 cheap : 
 She had only asked that none should sever, 
 None should divorce us, nothing divide ; 
 She had only asked to be ours for ever, 
 And this was denied. 
 
 This was the prayer of the heart of Ulster, 
 To them that repulsed her 
 And flung her aside. 
 
 When in the world was such payment tendered 
 
 For service rendered ? 
 
 Her faith had been tested, her love had been 
 
 tried, 
 And all that she begged was with us to abide. 
 She proffered devotion in boundless store, 
 But that is a thing men prize no more, 
 
102 ULSTER'S REWARD 
 
 And tossing jt tyick in her face they cried — 
 " Let us.op< n the door, 
 And fling her outside." 
 
 Where on the earth was the like of it done 
 
 In the gaze of the sun ? 
 
 She had pleaded and prayed to be counted still 
 
 As one of our household through good and ill, 
 
 And with scorn they replied ; 
 
 Jeered at her loyalty, trode on her pride ; 
 
 Spurned her, repulsed her, — 
 
 Great-hearted Ulster ; 
 
 Flung her aside. 
 
SONNETS 
 
TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 I hear a mighty people asking now 
 
 Who next shall be their captain and their 
 
 chief. 
 Amidst them towers a Man, as Teneriffe 
 Towers from the ocean, and that Man art thou — 
 Thou of the shaggy and the craggy brow. 
 The day of fate comes on ; the time is brief ; 
 Round the great ship is many a lurking reef ; 
 And wouldst thou drive once more that giant 
 
 prow ? 
 Perhaps thou shalt and must ! But if the 
 
 choice 
 
 Fall on another voyager, thou shalt still 
 g 2 105 
 
io6 TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 Be what thou art, thy nation's living voice, 
 Wherewith she speaks in thunder. Nay, thou art 
 
 more ; 
 Thou art her fiery pulse, her conquering will ; 
 Thou art America, dauntless Theodore. 
 
 June iS, 1 91 2. 
 
TILL THAT HOUR 
 
 When captive Bonaparte behind him threw 
 
 The chains of Elba, and flashed on earth once 
 
 more 
 In arms, against him marched a host that bore 
 The lily of France ; and baring to their view 
 His bosom he cried, " Shoot ! " — but no man 
 
 drew 
 Trigger, and by a lone lake's wondering shore 
 They knelt in awe and homage, to adore 
 Him they were sent to smite and bind anew. 
 
 Would that the hour, O England, were at hand, 
 
 When thou, before the nations, without fear, 
 
 107 
 
ioS TILL THAT HOUR 
 
 Mightst in thy majesty unguarded stand, 
 While none for very shame should dare assail 
 Thy shieldless breast ! But till that hour draw near, 
 Thou mayst not once ungird thy cumbering mail. 
 
TO AN AMERICAN POET 
 
 After reading his " Dirge on the Violation of the Panama Treaty." * 
 
 Friend, who in these sad numbers dost deplore 
 A faithless deed : because I love thy land, 
 That gave to me of late so hearty a hand, 
 In thronged Manhattan, or amid the roar 
 Of that loud city on Michigan's still shore, 
 Therefore do I rejoice that one pure band 
 
 * It has been pointed out to me that the American nation, as 
 distinct from its Government, is overwhelmingly against the policy 
 here commented upon, and that the friend to whom this sonnet is 
 addressed had himself emphasized the fact. I accept the correction 
 gladly ; but the Government of a democratic country is very apt to 
 stand for the country in the eyes of the outside world, and if I have 
 improperly confused the two I submit that the confusion is one into 
 which the foreigner, in the particular circumstances of the case, may 
 pardonably fall. To him, at the present time (January, 1913), the 
 policy referred to is a much more visible fact than the national 
 repudiation of it. — W. W. 
 
 109 
 
no TO AN AMERICAN POET 
 
 Keep not ignoble silence, but withstand 
 
 Ev'n Her, their mother, when she shuts the door 
 
 In Honour's face. So Chatham, whose free speech 
 
 Yet rings through Time — so Wordsworth, whose 
 
 free song 
 Comes blowing from his mountains — dared to 
 
 impeach 
 Their England, speaking out for Man. And long 
 May Earth breed men like these, who scorned to 
 
 teach 
 That Power can shift the bounds of Right and 
 
 Wrong. 
 
TO AN ENGLISH LIBERAL 
 
 Who accused me of political apostasy. 
 
 When reek of massacre rilled the eastern skies, 
 
 Who among singers sang for Man but me ? 
 
 These lute-strings were a scourge to tyranny 
 
 When you turned listless from those anguished 
 
 cries. 
 
 A hundred times, when all the worldly-wise 
 
 Kept comfortable silence, I spoke free. 
 
 And would you now begrudge me liberty 
 
 To use my own brain, see with my own eyes ? 
 
 When yon hung rearward, I was in the van, 
 
 Among the whizzing arrows ; and to-day, 
 
 in 
 
112 TO AN ENGLISH LIBERAL 
 
 Because in one thing I reshape my creed, 
 You cry " Apostate ! " — Liberalism indeed ! 
 Give me the Liberalism that guards for Man 
 His right to think his thought and say his say. 
 
TO MISS CLARA B. SPENCE 
 OF NEW YORK 
 
 [A greeting from William Watson and Maureen, his wife.] 
 
 Lady, whose task or joy it is to guide 
 
 By fragrant pathways, toward noble goals 
 
 Of womanhood, so many vernal souls, 
 
 Clad in the glory of their morningtide ; — 
 
 Across that Sea, the Great Unsatisfied, 
 
 That took the cruellest of its cruel tolls 
 
 But yesterday, and now exulting rolls 
 
 Above the fallen turrets of Man's pride, 
 
 Receive our salutation, you that choose 
 
 The life laborious, crowned with fruitful deed ; 
 
 113 
 
ii4 TO MISS CLARA B. SPENCE 
 
 And us forgive, who oft so lightly heed 
 What hours inestimable we richly lose, 
 In this old garden and orchard, or some mead 
 Lulled by the drone of the meandering Ouse. 
 
THE REAL REFORMER 
 
 Not he, the statesman, whatsoe'er his name, 
 Who would strip Life of all adventurousness, 
 Of all but arrow-proof and storm-proof dress, 
 Making it more and more ignobly tame, 
 Poorer in perils which they that overcame 
 Were braced and manned by, — making it less and 
 
 less 
 The school of heroes armed for struggle and 
 
 stress, — 
 
 Not he shall win hereafter radiant fame. 
 
 But when some dauntless teller of truth unsweet 
 
 Shall shake the slumberous People, with rude 
 
 power, 
 
 »5 
 
n6 THE REAL REFORMER 
 
 To a vast New Birth of all the soul and mind, 
 
 Him, and none other, at the destined hour, 
 
 Him, quick or dead, the thunderous thanks shall 
 
 greet, 
 Not of his country alone, but of his kind. 
 
THE POEMS OF 
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