THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES POEMS POEMS By HUBERT CHURCH MELBOURNE THOMAS C. LOTHIAN 1912 PRINTED IN ENGLAND / haoe to thank the proprietors of " The Bulletin " (Sydney) for permission to reprint oerses which appeared in thiir paper. Printed by BUTLER & TANNER, Frame ani Lo:idun A/7 CONTENTS PAGE MOUNT EGMONT . . ..... 9 BOWEN FALLS, MILFORD SOOND . . . .11 THE OLD SANDHILLS, HOB ART . . . .12 CAPE RAOUL, TASMAN'S PENINSULA ... 16 AKAROA HEADS ....... 16 SPRING IN NEW ZEALAND . . . . .17 A SWALLOW IN NEW ZEALAND .... 18 NELSON ........ 19 HANS ANDERSEN ....... 20 HARRY ALBERT ATKINSON ..... 22 ROSALIND ........ 24 MARGARET ........ 26 A TOAST 28 AT HER GATE ....... 29 FIDELIS 31 FYNEDUN CASTLE. ...... 32 THE YOUNG HEART ...... 34 BY THE SEA ....... 35 UNATTAINABLE ....... 36 ADRIFT ........ 37 CONVALESCENT ....... 38 SHADOWS ........ 41 ODE ON METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT .... 44 7 1421464 8 CONTENTS PAGE WHO MAY CONDEMN ? . . . . . .52 To MY DOG . .54 ON THE CLIFF ^ . . 57 RETROSPECTION ....... 59 FAVONITJS . . . . . . . .60 HTJSH! . ... 61 DEAD CHARLES . . . . . . .62 THE OLD TREE . . . . . ... . 63 THE TOP o' THE HILL ...... 64 THE STAR 65 AGED SEVEN YEARS . -. . . . . 66 ALONE . . . . . . . . .68 FAREWELL ........ 69 VERA FIGNEU . . . . . . .70 SCHLtJSSELBTJRG . . . . . . .73 DEAD . . .--'.. . . . . .74 A DIRGE ........ 75 ODE 76 AT EVENTIDE IT SHALL BE LIGHT. ... 77 PARACLETE ........ 78 EPITAPH ........ 79 EPITAPH . ... . . . . .80 HYMN . 81 TUA MARINA 82 NEW ZEALAND . . . . . . .86 To THE LIGHT ....... 109 A FUGUE 137 MOUNT EGMONT WHAT temple shall I enter at thy feet, What sacrament avalleth here below, That I do penance till all thought is sweet, And pure as thy investiture of snow ? Let me but hear thy cloudy music fall, Not the far thunder, but the tacit shower Of secrecies revealing thee, till all My heart encloseth rest like a shut flower How silent, where the unperturbing sea Frets not the border of thy seraph air, As one who to the Earth's enchantment free Loves her too much for thy eternal prayer. Sad symbol of our hearts that so forget The quiet haven for the troubled foam, Breaking upon the reefs that overset The sail that beateth evermore for home. Thou hast a morn remembered when all streams Poured from thy bosom through a forest hid By Silence from the eddy of day's beams That would disturb her bough-enchanted lid. No song of men, no gladness, no refrain Of the blithe axe re-echoing can reclude The time thou hadst the sunshine and the rain Interpreters for thee and Solitude. 10 We stand beneath thy unitary power, We watch thee when no cloud a shadow throws Upon thy stole of glory in the hour The sunset is a pilgrim to thy snows ; And there is never heart that doth not climb With the meek evening to thine altar peak, And, failing, doth not sorrow for the time Prayer touched us so, and nightly God would speak. Thy footstool is the land, but far away The intangible, dim girdle of the sea Folds thee for ever like the Milky Way Andromeda 'tis fitting thou shouldst be Lovelier and more monumental shown To the eternal wave than to the shore ; It knoweth what e'en thou hast never known And murmureth it to thee evermore. The sound that is the ivy of the beach Hath harmony beyond all earthly song ; Oh, thou that hast for ever heard it, teach My heart some fragment, so it may belong To all my being and as thou dost shine A greater temple to the changeless sea, Be it my glory that I am divine Less to the world than to Eternity. BOWEN FALLS, MILFORD SOUND 11 BOWEN FALLS, MILFORD SOUND O WATERFALL that fallest to the sea, Falling for ever to white virginals Of olden melody ! thy voice I hear In molten moments of the summer stars When the great sun is dead in majesty. From the white fields of home like thee I came Impetuous to the cliffs, and I have poured Treasure of love on altars cold, as thou Hast showered thy rainbow on the icy rocks, That have not felt thy kiss, -and I would die. Athwart the hollows of the moon-fed air Come eider tremors of thy dying plunge, Surceasing as child-tired eyelids droop Upon a wavy bosom, rocked with love Poured from the heaven for ever like thy song. The moon is kissing thy keen diadem, Sick for her barrenness, and all her face Creeps to thy white arc down the precipice, As I have nestled, yearning with wild eyes, Into the umber chancels of a soul. 12 THE OLD SANDHILLS, HOBART THE OLD SANDHILLS, HOBART OLD Sandhills, do you know my name, Do you remember where my feet Danced like will o' the wisp flame As light as elfin heart could beat ? Behind me was the slumbering town, About me was the father's hand, Does ever wind of thistle down Fall quite so soft upon your sand ? Old Sandhills, when we played together, Chariot clouds, and the jocund weather, Whalers oozed beside the jetty Odour of the spermaceti ; Mists were round them ragged snows From the dark South sneaking floes Of hunger evermore By a desolate shore. Old Sandhills, you will stay, Whatsoe'er the wind shall say To the city. Parapets, Towers and palaces, and nets Of jangling streets, all, all, shall go ! The old wind knows it, they can hear A prophecy ; the turret sheer Shall scatter like a moorland snow, And perish like a star that swam Above a city of Abraham. THE OLD SANDHILLS, HOBART 13 Old Sandhills, when a bark went down Heavily in Dolomieu, The gleam-gull marked the sailor drown, But the undertow for you Warped him with invisible kedge To your rampart, and you knew Many a bone within your ledge. For you are old, and Tasman gazed Athwart your smoothness, and his curse Was over all when sunset blazed This ragged end of the universe. Old Sandhills, voices move about The wind-whipped funnel of your slope Would God my heart renewed the shout Of forty years ago, when Hope Peeped over every curling wave To find a mermaid in its fall, And thought its glowing arch her cave, And all its music but her call. I dare not turn a haunted glance Pale ghosts will glimmer thro' the waste, Each Memory's golden circumstance, With love and childhood interlaced, Falls on me thro' a veil of tears The dead's imagination hears. 14 THE OLD SANDHILLS, HOBART Come thou, dear presence of the past, Forget with me the looping years That link the joy that could not last To the insufferable tears Of days remembering thee again Pace with me that enchanted shore Where we have watched the prisoned rain Delight the sunbow evermore ; And where thy staff has written large My name upon the woven sand The jealous wave shuts in its marge, Come with me till the breeze has fanned Thy tired eyes that do but move Thro' daily toil to daily love. Oh dreary beat of waves that follow Compelling winds, repeat no more Your melancholy dirges hollow, Full-fitted to this vacant shore. My heart with thee, beloved, is sleeping-- If thou art here, my soul abides In the eternal furrow sweeping Above the spent breath of the tides. Or, if the wind thy spirit carries Athwart the Derwent's drifting foam To love's own roof, my being tarries With thee in its created home ! CAPE RAOUL, TASMAN'S PENINSULA 15 CAPE RAOUL, TASMAN'S PENINSULA SCAR, ever frowning to the Southern pole Over a sullen ocean, thou hast seen Splendour of God and devilry of men, Earthquake and tempest, and the stubborn soul Of the oppressor ; now thou art a scroll Where Time has writ the fury that has been, And thou for solace on the clouds dost lean, From their full utterance gathering a soft toll. The surges at thy base for ever thunder, The piping winds like haggard spirits wail, And from afar the melancholy main, Tinged as if Sorrow's palace was thereunder, Yearns to thee for its solitary pain Unsoothed by the magic of a sail. 16 AKAROA HEADS AKAROA HEADS OH ! what a solitude is all around The hermit sea, the splintered cliff that falls In altars on eternal pedestals That make the wilderness a holy ground ! Yet surely do I hear an ancient sound, Barbaric worship in these massy walls, Souls bared to heaven where now the seamew calls, Wild rapture where is now a death profound. Oh ! may my spirit never fail to soar Far from the foamy fabric of the brine And all the shallow coil that cumbers Life, Lest I be like this desolated shore, For ever fretted, and for ever strife, A soul whose altars are no more divine. SPRING IN NEW ZEALAND 17 SPRING IN NEW ZEALAND THOU wilt come with suddenness, Like a gull between the waves, Or a snowdrop that doth press Through the white shroud on the graves ; Like a love too long withheld, That at last has over-welled. What if we have waited long, Brooding by the Southern Pole, Where the towering icebergs throng, And the inky surges roll : What can all their terror be When thy fond winds compass thee ? They shall blow through all the land Fragrance of thy cloudy throne, Underneath the rainbow spanned Thou wilt enter in thine own, And the glittering earth shall shine Where thy footstep is divine. P. 18 A SWALLOW IN NEW ZEALAND A SWALLOW IN NEW ZEALAND DEAR Swallow from a fonder sky ! Wliy do you leave your happy mate Within the golden lands that lie Beyond the evening's shadowy gate ? Ah, tender wings ! you bear a load That only Memory may see The fragrance of my Youth's abode, The ecstasy of life to me ! It may be that their beat has weaved A path by Childhood's starry creek, Where jealous ferns droop interleaved To hear the whispering waters speak ; And thou, perchance, hast flown aloof Athwart the garden sweet and wild, And rested on the sheltering roof Where tender Love and I have smiled ! Already thou on ceaseless wings Art bidden to thy loved return ; To all thy flight my vision clings, For far-off home like thee I yearn ; And through the warm, unfolding tears I see the sacred fount again That poured the Joy of Childhood's years The still, supremest heart of Pain 1 NELSON 19 NELSON THY sun that set at Trafalgar and shed Glory on England, like a star that dies Leaving the earth a light though it be dead, Flames evermore to our believing eyes. We cannot doubt thee, Nelson ; thou hast placed Thy spell upon the battle-haunted sea That we have loved, and there thy name is traced ; We cannot love it without loving thee. Oh, splendour of renown where every tide Floated thy menace to the foeman's shore. What if the eagle in the dome abide, Outwatching tempests far below no more Than thy great realm his empery ; the wind Bore thy unconquerable thunder far, Till death that loveth sacrifice was kind To thee, for ever England's avatar. Like Wycliffe's ashes thy dear shade has passed Over the waters of the earth that we Should find our freedom ; we shall hold it fast Till England is no longer true to thee. And we her children far upon the main, Where never any but her cannon call, Share for thy triumph her immortal pain, For thee the humblest keep a festival. 20 HANS ANDERSEN HANS ANDERSEN DEAR master of the faint flute of the herbs, The crystal revel of the stream that flows By magic furrows where the wind disturbs t Rich drony moths upon the plaited rose ; Alone thou nearest where the wild swan dips His crest beneath the torrent of the morn, Alone thou seest from his tender lips The sun's last smile to fairy Matterhorn. The nightingale that in a forest spent Her lovely soul in music for a lord Of empery, distilling bland content Threw all herself to thee as thou adored. She is not of the earth, and thou art free From low communion, like her quivering wings, That ache for all despair that song can be, Th' impenetrable heart of sacred things ! Through thee the lowliest do achieve renown, The unsought grace of solitude is theirs, But thou dost give such eremites a crown, From thee they take our happiness and tears, What though the violet leans athwart a stone And hears but rivulet or nightingale, Her secrecies surprised by thee alone Shall charm young hearts in immemorial tale HANS ANDERSEN 21 What largesse of all magic ! Does the bird Lament thee in her thicket ? Shall her note Fall where alone a stealthy leaf is stirred By sleeping castle in a sleepy moat, And never heart be there her song to tell Nor any cunning weaver of her brain ? Shall we for ever watch the citadel, And never see the sanctuary again ? 22 HARRY ALBERT ATKINSON HARRY ALBERT ATKINSON (Karori Cemetery] EARTH that holds him, he withheld From the vulgar herd the tide That within his spirit welled ; Here he sleepeth sanctified, Like a kauri monarch felled. From the triumph of the North, Where the battle shook the boughs, By the shade of Egmont's wrath, Thunder-menace of his brows, He with Constancy came forth ! Brow with all the ruggedness Roman lapidary carved Never let the shrine confess That its marble urn was halved With remotest tenderness. He was steadfast, he was true, Like the breeze that finds the cliff Whatsoe'er the darkness do; Like the ripple to the skiff Was his heart to them that knew ! HARRY ALBERT ATKINSON 23 Labour that had never gleaned Tithe of its delicious rest Broke the heart that duty weaned From the quiet of the blest Till, worn out, on death he leaned. Hear ! O Land, to whom he gave All the absolute design Of his strenuous thought; the grave Keeps him, he can make no sign, Not a memory can crave ! But you will not let him fall From the grateful heart that keeps With the dead a festival, Where remembrance never weeps, Though love shadoweth it all ! We shall gather from his shade High endeavour, word austere Of the truth that he has made Pole for tribune chart, and here We shall tremble, unafraid ! 24 ROSALIND ROSALIND ROSALIND has come to town ! All the street's a meadow, Balconies are beeches brown With a drowsy shadow, And the long-drawn window panes Are the foliage of her lanes. Rosalind about me brings Sunny brooks that quiver Unto palpitating wings Ere they kiss the river, And her eyes are trusting birds That do nestle without words. Rosalind ! to me you bear Memories of a meeting When the love-star smote the air With a pulse's beating : Does your Spirit love to pace In the temple of that place ? ROSALIND 25 Rosalind ! be thou the fane For my soul's uprising, Where my heart may reach again Thoughts of heaven's devising : Be the solace self-bestowed In the shrine of Love's abode ! 26 MARGARET MARGARET WHAT were it, dear, to gather you Like a harvest glebe the dew ; And to find at breath of morn Heaven with my waking born ? With your footfall in my house, Love should flutter on the stair Lighter than a flitting mouse At the sound of chantress fair Singing an old cithern air. Here the bat's wing weaves a sound Like the foam on velvet sand Of fairy gulfs ; the rain has bound Cobweb to the stalks that stand Sentinels of sleep ; and, tired, In branches breathes the dying wind, Flown from the bleak Antipodes ; Inheriting the sleep desired Through the illimitable seas. The garden wall is faint with light Lo ! the evening looking through The sunset, calleth to the Night To follow. Margaret, are you MARGARET 27 The evening of my Soul, to call Love to follow ? Within the shade, Where the spider ladders fall ; Where the breeze a porch hath made Through the willow boughs within Love's uncharted wilderness, Where the track is happiness, And the star to lead, a kiss Margaret, shall we be this ? 28 A TOAST A TOAST IT were a fault to drink Save in a subtle wine, (The cup full to the brink, That glancing gold should shine Where velvet shadows sink,) To one who is divine ! No name shall we disclose, But dream of her whose eyes Have magic with the rose, Within whose depths arise Thoughts that are born of those Cradled in Paradise ! AT HER GATE 29 AT HER GATE How blest the wandered bird that sings With such a woodland ecstasy, Till song is Sorrow's self, and he Folds on thy roof his fretted wings, All pain forgotten when with thee ! Thus would my wandered heart achieve (So far outborne on wayward tide) A still roof in thy heart, to hide Shielded from lonely Night, and weave Youth's dream again, and there abide II One bird upon the roof, A chorister forlorn, Sings to the cloistered Morn, Hid in her cloudy woof, A song that doth unfold Itself in plaited gold. 30 AT HER GATE Sing what I ne'er can say The wave may love the shore, The flowers the dews that pour, The tired winds love to stay On cliffs where moss has lain, Spent with the toiling main. Dearer to me one heart Where I would love to dwell, Woven with magic spell Into its inner part; Sunk in its secrecy Like a star in the sea. FIDELIS 31 FIDELIS FIDELIS was the word, A rosebud smile the wand To touch my soul that stirred All ecstasy beyond, Like a soaring bird. The bird is in the skies, My heart was even there, Where Summer's cradle lies Rocked by a secret air Slipped from Paradise. The Summer light it goes, The bird away it flies, And Love is one with those : The rose that never dies Never was a rose. 32 FYNEDUN CASTLE FYNEDUN CASTLE AT Fynedun Castle the girls Walk like a schooner's glide ; The wind that shakes their curls Loosening loves that hide In filleted hair Finds none elsewhere Like them o'er the wold and tide. At Fynedun Castle a bird Broke at the breath of dawn ; Philida's voice I heard, Or thrush at a lonely lawn. However it be, Throstle or she, The thread of my fate was drawn. At Fynedun Castle I found Philida's smile that makes All eve like elfin sound Of horn that leaps the lakes, When you see the night With her purfled light Footing the moors and brakes. FYNEDUN CASTLE 33 Fynedun Castle, adieu ! Philida goes with me ; What shall remain to you, Philida over the sea ? You will keep for grace The light of her face ; Remember what that can be ! 84 THE YOUNG HEART THE YOUNG HEART AH, if she go away Before the moonlight fall Like manna on the bay, What shall I do but call Her lovely name, to be The dark's delight to me ? What rover on the hill Shall find within the horn Her melody to fill The night, the noon, the morn, With everything that sleeps In Music's wayward deeps ? What flower, or bird, or sea, Shall charm her woodland eyes Beyond their grace to me, Beyond their sweet surprise ; The most that Love can find In her, like him too blind ? BY THE SEA 35 BY THE SEA DAY is at noon, and one cloud, A glory of snowy rings, Over the city is bowed, Poised on ethereal wings, Like a stainless spirit and proud Scorning earthly things. The sea is about my feet, Folding in shallow waves Music as sad and sweet As a bruised spirit craves ; Like voices when angels meet Over children's graves. But the flower of my soul's content Not the cloud, nor the sea, With all their loveliness blent, Can restore unto me ; For the flower of my soul with its scent Is with thee with thee ! 36 UNATTAINABLE UNATTAINABLE STAINLESS icicle so cold, Was there ever heart so bold, Made a mastery so felt, That your spirit could but melt ? From love's fiery-laden eyes Looking on you to surmise All your magic you do turn, Like a vestal to her urn. In to-morrow there may be Such a sun to conquer thee As shall win the sleeping soul Hidden from us at its pole ; He shall gather all the light Shielded from all other sight, Bathe in the mysterious stream That to others is a dream 1 ADRIFT 37 ADRIFT THE weary, slow, unfolding wave Lips the dim softness of the cave, Whispering the chancel of the sea How sweet it is in peace to be. Ah, witchery of dying hours ! Oh, pain of adamantine powers ! That draw the full, reluctant tide From where its slumber would abide. Thus have I dreamt to dwell with thee, But thou hast said it may not be, And now I drift for evermore Far from thy soul's secluded shore. For thine could never make return : Love's lonely vigil did but learn To show thee, dearest one, in vain Its incommunicable pain 38 CONVALESCENT CONVALESCENT LAY roses here, and lift The curtain, let me be One that may share the gift Of sunset with the sea ; But lord alone with thee ! How good it is to dream That thou art near my side ! As fountains make the stream Thy heart to me shall glide, Pouring pellucid tide. To waken thou art there ! Heart to heart leaps, afraid To lose one smile ; thy hair Tent for a kiss has made, Dusking it with the braid. Hast thou within thee stored Arabian night that breaks Magical wave adored On slumber's strand that takes The rainbow curve Love makes ! CONVALESCENT 39 Or whither came that glance ? Greek maid of Tempe's vale Scattered it ; in Provence Proud Beauty let it fail At sunset on a sail ; Where troubadour let fall Music that words have twined, For ever wedded, all The soul, to earth confined, Ever of heaven divined ! Dearest, when you come in, Crusaders shadow walls, The camp of Saladin Is round me, Richard calls Derision to his thralls. Then shallops thinly fade White wings by minaret With twisted columns, jade And agate, dimly set Far from the city's fret. Or Ganges bears thee slow By tamarind and tower, Jungle, where to and fro The tiger in his bower Licks the appointed hour. 40 CONVALESCENT Dost thou remember, dear, The soul of Ronsard dead ? Art thou a rondel clear Once chambered by him, shed To soothe a stricken bed ? Deny it not ! around Thy shadow are the wings Of nestling birds, the sound Of Summer where she sings Of immemorial things. So let it be thy touch Is like the evening wind That bloweth softly, such As men would pray to bind About a tangled mind. Then let the great world slide ; I follow by a shore Unfooted, and abide With thee, to gather store Of Love for evermore 1 SHADOWS 41 SHADOWS How many tread the patient street With heart so sanctified as mine : Who have a shadow at my feet Whereof no other hath a sign ? No other sees the tender face Fledging the drab and stony place. I see through gloomy archway walls The scattered sandhills of the past : An air from meadow pipit calls Where I her shadow followed fast. Beneath the pavement of the street Lieth the motion of her feet. Lo, there she sped by lichened fence The glance where sudden love appears : Pale with retreating confidence, Too shy for words, too sweet for tears Too full of her own happiness To pledge what love would fain confess. 42 SHADOWS There she abides amid the roar Of city struggles. Men are made Joyful or sad, but I am more Than they who pass me unafraid To lift a sleeping face to shine Making me for the hour divine. A river rolls between. . . . We stand, Love in all tenderness our star. No voice we hear : nor understand The morning and the evening are To some delighting dedicate, Wherefore for ever we must wait. Again I see the cottage door. The fire is chattering to the panes : Flowers make the courtesy of the poor : The kettle with a singing feigns A merry note but all is bare For lack of one who is not there. I dream I hear a footfall blend With airs about the stooping eaves. The surges of my spirit send Faint shadows lighter than the leaves Athwart the attic Silence keeps In her unfathomable deeps. SHADOWS 43 No, never more will she descend. I wake to know life is beyond Her intimacy. I shall spend A many tears of memory fond For eyes that know not kith or kin Death's majesty alone therein. 44 ODE ON ODE ON METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT LET the breeze blow about me all the prime Of the unthreaded years, untold Upon the rosary of Time ; Let the gull beat his happy wings that fold All the magic of the dateless Morn When she looked forth with rosy fingers pressed On silent lips, and with her smile caressed Island and sea and gulf yet unforlorn With the unknelled, the castaway, and sails For ever ruffled by the wind. O bird, that to the dark song of the mind Bearest a music with thy wheeling, tell If ever in the sun the morning fails To whisper to thee, like enchanted shell, Message that we have never gathered home, No more than we can treasure up the foam. Thine hour is happiness, There never comes duress To thee, illusion ; never is the cloud All darkness where at night thy head is bowed. METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT 45 II Something of thy dominion do I gain, Dreaming within the faint-communing land The soul finds in her slumber ; Somewhere I feel I touch again Hours hidden by the ages without number, And for a blessed moment do I stand Before the past we know had taken shape, Before the glow of the young world was dim ; When the uncontaminated mirrored Him, Floe, sea, and islet, continent and cape. Yes, I would trench upon thy heritage To leave at will the tributary earth, Rolling to greater orbs and would assuage Thought that will ask too much of human dearth. To soothe our elementary pain, To vex no more the doubting heart ; That were above all sunshine and all rain ; We cannot do it, but I feel apart, Above, a mighty wand is given, That we have never found, though we have ever striven. Ill Would God my heart could be Uplifted from the banal load 46 ODE ON Inherited with our abode ! Would that my spirit leaped to light as thee, Not with a stagnant mortmain of old thought, So little satisfying, on the bowed, Tired children of humanity. Thou hast the early path for ever sought By man and never found; Oh take me on thy wings from the unholy ground. Then let me feel (or dream I feel) the cloud That floats above the droning earth is strewn An immaterial curtain, from me bowed Far to the sunken haven of the moon ; Below me the grey roof Of the world, and a woof By the vapour spun For the laughing sun ; Here we shall fly, O my soul, till the day be done. IV Below the world shall spin ; Here let my thought begin Like the soft birth of Eden reveries, Before the tribulation, Or the prophecy ; When the heart knew its own elation METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT 47 To be the music of the earth and sky ; When all things were the children of delight, Nor man abstaining; Thought was the shining disc of sight, And moved with her to the heaven's cloudy veining. Oh, Time, irrevocable for all prayer, All adoration, all supreme desire, What if my heart would gather anywhere One cloud-beat of thy fragrance when the fire Of the first sun illumined the young sea ; What if I willed to wander back with thee Before man brooded on his eternal pain ; Thou couldst not be again The unrecordable and free From all conception men have woven round Life, death and immortality ; For ever under thee there is a sound, It is the moan of men who never Truth have found. And they have looked for her with eyes That tired not for their vigil; they outwatch Soft-footed centuries ; They breathe with agony to catch Her beam like palms of Paradise ; 48 ODE ON But she her pennon frees To loftier worlds, and we descry afar Some shadow of her splendour like a falling star. VI Oh, wealth of imagery men have weaved, And held it Truth ! Oh, heart that leaps again, For evermore aspiring, and deceived For ever with interminable pain ! The rack lies through the tributary past, Shadow and ruin of philosophy, Broken as summer cloud The heady splendours of young souls to be Never by sorrow bowed ; The sombre gloom of weary sages led Through old despair to pale futility, Losing themselves in maze Of windlestraw of phrase, Until the human heart supremely dowered be dead. VII Yet building ever like the coral reef For ever to the light, too hard it lies METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT 49 Upon the heart that its relief Never doth come until the weaver dies. Art is all broidery for our despair, The lance light of the throne we cannot see, We know not if the anodyne of prayer Hath aught of sacrament for what shall be ; We do but build, and scatter everywhere Flower of our soul in fond hope it is He. VIII Behold the ocean of old Time Traced with dead beliefs ; Naught visible sublime, Only grey forgotten reefs, Where drowned nations who believed The star led thither, moulder deep, Their alchemy of Hope achieved In a sea-change of quiet sleep. Dreams are about us evermore Each hath a dream, a slender web Spun from the lintel of his door To the grave where life doth ebb ; Be it a famed phylactery, The holy of a temple built By thorn-grieved worshippers who see In us a precious balsam spilt ; p 50 ODE ON Be it forgotten in a day, A chanceless seedling overblown By ragged, uncurbed winds away To the charity of a stone. IX All shall perish from the glow Of dreaming prophets who have seen The azure of Heaven's inner bow, To the dusk of thoughts that lean On spectral mysteries outworn ; The flameless lamp of sodden mind Where a Tashi Lama blinks Before a multitude that thinks In him Heaven smiles or is unkind. Oh, Father, let us be forlorn No longer in the desert, break Thy clouds of darkness, oh forsake Infinity of shade, conceal No more Thy splendour, oh, reveal-! Some diviner Argonaut Of the drifting sail of thought METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT 51 Shall discover all the main We have trembled for in vain. Under Truth's pavilion cloud Men shall wander pure and proud, Ear shall hearken to a word That no sophistry hath blurred ; Time shall fold his wing behind, Death be youth and beauty blind ; Every heart shall burdened be With more joy than it can see. 52 WHO MAY CONDEMN? WHO MAY CONDEMN ? WHAT shall a man condemn, Whose secret hour has flamed With turpitude, in them Found out, dishonoured, shamed ? You twine your hidden thought, Lapped in a drowsy prayer The priest presents you brought Another gospel there. You see beyond the walls A harlot of young time ; Her squandered splendour calls To you through anthem rhyme. Her eyes you see when lids Drop down, the organ jars ; A dolt the priest who bids Aspire beyond the stars. The murmur of the breeze Evokes the day you held Her face, near wandering seas In some white land of eld. WHO MAY CONDEMN ? 53 Ah, riot of red days Unknown to all, for she Is dead with tears you praise The blessed Trinity. The sullen stone that falls May crush a virgin bride, Or, muffled in sea walls, Roll stainless through the tide. The harlot of the street, If Fate had looked away, Had followed where the feet Of Jesus make the day. 54 TO MY DOG TO MY DOG LOOK ! my Tasso, where the smoke Rolls beyond the clouds austere, Far above the kea's stroke, And the lightning of the drear Cliff-embattled atmosphere. Somewhat we have dwelt apart, Yet the smoke above the strife Pictures with a vivid art Sepias of the dizzy life On the keen edge of the knife. When the fire was in the brain, Facile love upon the lips, Splendid Passion threw the rein On the fiery coursers' hips, Scourged by Youth's unsparing whips. Hard Ambition vainly glozed : Ours the moment, ours the bliss ; Love in loving scarce reposed For a moment, for a kiss, O'er satiety's abyss. TO MY DOG 55 Oft the mazy-spinning blood Lifted to the merry horn; Many a leap athwart the flood Let us see that Joy is born Best above the earth forlorn. Sabres flashed when we were young, And the sparkle of the blade Round our heads an aureole flung : Death himself might be afraid Of that Paladin brigade ! All are vanished : they are dust, As a lute whose fingers lie Curled about a poniard's thrust, Alien love whose anthem high Waked one chamber, but to die Here upon the giant hills, Far from fretting of the sword, And the grinding of the mills For the harvest of the Lord, Thou and I make one accord. Underneath a stunted branch Evermore our sleep shall be, Waked not by the avalanche Or the huddled revelry Of the cataract to the sea. 56 TO MY DOG Torrents from eternal snow We alone have ever seen. Shall leap over us below, Sanctifying the ravine In our sepulchre serene. ON THE CLIFF 57 ON THE CLIFF COME, let us sit and watch the flowing ships, Here where your foot has touched a shivering stone To leave the merry sunshine for eclipse, Down, down, for ever, darkened and alone, Beneath the cozening ripples smooth and cool . . . What's Life but a poor stone flung in a pool ? The lying waves have lapped it oh, poor stone ! Earth has no dearer sight than a warm sea, Braided with isles, forgetting the far moan Concealed in the dim Ocean's agony : But, dear, there lie beneath these shallow waves Christ knows how many unattended graves. The waves are all about us we are one With the unstable waters and the tides, Symbols of ever-varying threads bespun By Fate that never in a mood abides ; We leave our fretful image here, or go Without a fateful scion : better so 1 58 ON THE CLIFF We know the motion of a molten star, We weigh the rapture of the rushing wind, Unweave the light, but know not what we are, Nor whose the fetters that intently bind : Why we do sorrow, joy, or smile, or weep, Scatter a little fragrance then a sleep. If I were as a shell upon the beach, The virgin calyx of voluted flowers, The utter magic of a song to teach Sorrow a solace in belated hours, I should be more than I can ever be : Beggared of doubt, nor wistful all to see. So be it, dearest ! watch the great Sun die In marvellous thunder, to our ears unknown, Music of equal planets that do lie In the full plane of knowledge : we are thrown By a capricious hand, the wise, the fool, Like a poor stone that's flung into a pool ! RETROSPECTION 59 RETROSPECTION IF there were any of the sons of men Could win from Fate to hold their youth again, Would any travel more The paths they trod before Y Would any vex those hyacinthine days For love of woman, or the many's praise ; The vain delights that trend To the abhorred end Age, that discovers there is nothing worth ? . God, when He flung this unessential earth, Spun it with bias given To sunder it from Heaven 1 60 FAVONIUS FAVONIUS FAVONIUS from the setting sun, Sigh, sigh not so upon her tresses ! What though thou diest in the dun, She trembled at thy mute caresses. The rose shall lose her diadem, The nightingale shall weep his singing, And Love shall hear his requiem From bells that Sorrow sets a-ringing. Delight is alway in the earth, From soul to soul a meteor flying. And as some spirit gives it birth Some other spirit feels it dying. HUSH ! 61 HUSH! SILENCE, for slumber of the children's eyes : Let not a footfall or a voice be heard, Nor any sound break on the muffled word That babbles of their dreaming mysteries ! Far, far beyond us, in a land that lies Round infancy, their tender souls are stirred, Flushed with the rapture of a soaring bird Escaping heavenward with a wild surprise. Thus would I sleep at last beneath the turf, A temple by the ever-sounding sea, All else a stillness, while my soul should be, Showered with the flame of a celestial light Beyond the farthest constellation's curve, Encompassed only by the infinite. 62 DEAD CHARLES DEAD CHARLES I SHUT the Comus in my hands, And let the blind slip gently down ; Dead Charles went by who understands All mysteries. I called him clown, The passive burden children weep, Who sees beyond my search, asleep. Dear Charles, you could not hear me groan, Though you were passing near my door ; I felt my soul was all alone, So beggared of all worth, so poor, Since I had squandered every hour When thy delight was in my power. How pitiful my knowledge grows At thought of thy dear loyal heart ; Would God, like any clustered rose, I had bestowed my better part On you, to find that laboured books Are naught to one beloved's looks. There's not in all thy dear one's pain The anguish that awakes my night. Thou didst forget, again, again, My wronging, thy complaintless right ; Thou didst forgive, and Death has made My unrelenting heart afraid. THE OLD TREE 63 THE OLD TREE THIS is the garden, thinly set ; The winds that struggle with pear and pine Know the borders that men forget And Love remembers at day's decline. Bough that gnarls where a foot has sped, The birds have envied, with slide of foam, Night will cover you till the red Of dawn is knitted beneath the dome. Morn will deem it is bright as day That broke enchanted when Love was new ; We shall know the deceit, and say The old was magical light and true. Night shall come to us both for pain ; Time will never renew the morn She and I shall enclasp again The flower unknown that of you was born. 64 THE TOP O' THE HILL THE TOP O' THE HILL THE top o' the hill, the hill ! To hold the sail that is dreamed away As the eyes with all the summer fill, And the wind lies down in the bay. The top o' the hill, the hill ! You knew the moss that a foot had turned To grey a moment your heart is still, As it was when its silence yearned. The top o' the hill, the hill ! You felt the wind of the calling days, When never a wrong or care could kill, And you warmed the world with a blaze The top o' the hill, the hill ! Your eyes shall never beseech again For beauty, or love, or fire ; the will To conquer the peak is slain. THE STAR 65 THE STAR I DRAW the curtain, and one Star Gleams through an opening in the cloud Above the college faint and far Your shining, but your world is proud. To be a Sun, unchallenged, free, Unwarped by creeping moon or tide ; The centre of a planet sea Where all about thee must abide ; That were a triumph. Far below Thy Sovereignty Earth's scant domain ; Lord but of tropic and of snow, And the insurgence of the main. Time is sullen. We bear a bond Immutable ; and nothing stirs The oracle to brood beyond Her answer to dead emperors. 66 AGED SEVEN YEARS AGED SEVEN YEARS SHUT in thy little guarded heap, Thou dost not hear me, such a sleep Is round thee, that the dusk denied To thy soft prayer at eventide. So still, so quiet ! It may be The fondest sound to agony, That breaks its heart upon the turf Like uncompanionable surf, That has no solace for its moan, For ever restless and alone ; The only thing in all the earth For which no hope has any birth. Thy toys, who treasures them and holds Their shape within the heart's deep folds ; Thy tears, who doth remember all Their shining when the night doth fall ? One heart has made a sacrament Each morning when her eyes are bent To thy still chamber, at whose door Are shadowy feet about the floor. AGED SEVEN YEARS 67 Though fields encompass thee, and flowers Make girdle for thee through the hours, Thy living home, at evening prayer, Recalleth thee, and thou art there. And in the trinity of love, My heart, and thee, and prayer above, I know not if the night can be Unblest when I remember thee. 68 ALONE ALONE I HEAR the summer breathing at my door, So early that the thrush's thankful air The night is done still sleeps but nevermore Will your delight be there. The shadow on my roof is very small, The rose will shake it from her petal soon ; The sun will enter, and my heart will fall Faint as the little moon That creeps behind the mountains, there to hide. Oh, would that to her silence I could go ; Shut from the pain of all that doth abide The tears for long ago. But thou wilt come, beloved, in a dream, Like a cloud summoned from a misty sea ; And though it be but sleep my heart will seem Lifted again by thee. FAREWELL 69 FAREWELL FAREWELL ! For thee the earth Holds never more a hand That shall retain ; thy birth Breaks on diviner land The dead but understand. Thou couldst not find the path Of happiness again ; The burden each one hath O'erweighted thee amain, Till all thy strength was slain. Take in thy hallowed rest More than our thought can say, What we with grief opprest About thy precinct lay ; Still thou with us shalt stay. 70 VERA FIGNER VERA FIGNER NOTK. V'era Figner, Russian Revolutionary; a woman of great charm and radiant beauty. She was condemned to im- prisonment for life, and for twenty years was immured in the living grave of the Schliisselburg Fortress. When these lines were composed the writer thought that Vera Figner was still in prison. By a strange chance, on the day after the lines were written, he read that Vera Figner had been released.) VERA FIGNER, when the breezes blow, Do you awaken to the hostile morn ? Or do you live so numbed you do not know, Like a toad in a granite tempest-worn ? Vera Figner, are the eyes bedewed That men had died for in the far-away ? Is your face like a wounded soul subdued To grief that never heals for any day ? II Does the clock in the turret tell you now The morn is vanishing, the day declines ? Or is all thought beneath the drooping brow Vacant and gloomy as the winter pines ? Have men betrampled through the many years Your soul submitting till its very deep VERA FIGNER 71 Has oozed away to dust : till you lack tears, Denied the unhappy ones who cannot weep ? Ill Oh marvel of misfortune that a soul So full of liberty and love should be Tired, ever tired, to creep like any mole From wall to wall in darkling vacancy. To wrap the rich thought of the brain in death, For never any sound may let it forth Oh God, who givest consecrated breath To holy truth, why tarryeth Thy wrath ? IV Beloved of all spirits that achieve Through agony Oh, miserable, thou, Who hast all suffering, but cannot leave Thy burden ever ! What is breathing now But a poor disinheritance of days ? And even that poor remnant is defiled ; For thee that shouldst have trod delicious ways No morn, no eve, no love, no roof, no child. 72 VERA FIGNER Thou canst not be endungeoned evermore : Thy soul is where the breezes blow with pain Past Ladoga : there is not any shore That hath not felt thy yearning. If again Thou hast all agony, thou hast the crown, The heaven within the spirit that shall save, Though earth be cruel. Death hath his renown, But cannot pass our conquerable grave. SCHLUSSELBURG 73 SCHLUSSELBURG (From the Russian of Vera Figner) THE best are gone. Within the earth They lie where never foot will fall. Not any tear had holy birth When Death and they were all in all Strange hands their bearers ; and no word Of any heart for them was stirred. This turf alone their altar-cloth, Whose sacrifice beneath is laid. The wave that beats the rock in wrath About their silence never made Through its eternity of pain A psalm too mournful for the slain. /4 DEAD DEAD SILENT, silent, when the dawn Through the ashen room is drawn, And it lingers on thy face, Counterfeiting a fled grace ! As the shadows slip away To the meadow of the day, Does not thy persistent heart Yearn to all its wonted part ? All the fond, vibrating bars From the flame of viewless stars Will not ope the fretted lid Where thy lovely soul was hid. Though thou liest there so still God has shown thee all His will, And His universe is whole Unto thy expanding soul. Thou hast fled from love and moan, Little children here alone Stumble for the lamp of love Thou didst bring them from above. A DIRGE 75 A DIRGE COME not with sundered flowers to strew her grave ; Nor be there any curtain but the grass, Dewed by the Night and by the winds that pass Tranced with the slumber of the level wave ; Or if one cloud of the empyrean nave Shall float a shadow on her shrouded face, Be it the shrine of this mysterious place, Bestowing shelter she for ever gave : And if the anthem of this holy rood Fall from the throat of some forgotten bird, Faint with the press of heaven upon his wings, Be it the bruised fragrance that is stirred In the sad heart, remembering happier things That are the angels of this solitude. 76 ODE ODE BREAK as all vows of love that unabides, Roll on thy strand the slow, smooth arch that gleams With fettered magic of the girdling tides And the ungathered glories of youth's dreams ; Pierce thy green depths on rocks that are a-cold, Touch with thy rainbow curve this lonely shore, But even as thou diest, oh ! unfold The voices I have heard, and hear no more. O Sanctuary ! whose eternal foam Drapes for thanksgiving pedestals profound Sunk in the depths, whose altar tops are home For the white clouds, shed on me what was wound In the young years about my heart, and rolled Through all my being, a celestial sense . . . Love that still lips and shuttered eyes have told, Smiles that elude sad Memory's impotence ! Then thy too solemn dirge shall softly float Upon the muted strings of Memory's pain, As a tired wind that fades upon a moat Too still to welcome its secluded rain ; And if one tremor shall recall a throb Long buried hi old graves, Oh ! Lord, how sweet To feel thy benediction in a sob, And see thee in the tears about my feet. AT EVENTIDE IT SHALL BE LIGHT 77 "AT EVENTIDE IT SHALL BE LIGHT Is daylight fading, Margaret ? Are those the bells of eventide ? Does Darkness gather in her net The stars that in the sunbeams hide ? The children's voices, are they not Hushed in the garden's dewy breath To whisper in some far-off spot The simple things of love and death ? Your hand is cold, my Margaret, Your eyes are dim through stealthy tears; Ah, all my soul with grief is wet To know you not in all these years ! Sweet, now too late I see in vain Your heart was poured to shallow mould That could not hold it : once again Kiss me, and let me lie a-cold. 78 PARACLETE PARACLETE TAKE heart of grace, and bear The burden God has held Apart for thee, for there A secret fount has welled. The gull that frets the foam That cannot wet its wing Has made a rock a home Where Love alone could cling. And every utter star Thrown desolately dim Inclines its planets far From us, but nearer Him. The shadow on thy heart Is but the moving sign That God is near, thou art Veiled by Him, divine EPITAPH 79 EPITAPH UNDERNEATH this stone I give Roots the sap by which they live ; And the bird that plucks a blade Knows through me the deep, black shade. Not when I had power to thrill Heart that loved me good or ill Gave I all the strength divine God ordained to be mine. Now, within my shrunken grave, Death has left me power to save, To ennoble, them that knew Though I slumber, I indue. 80 EPITAPH EPITAPH Hie jacet. Here he lies, and is a-cold, Quiet as any feather of the owl ; More motionless than weeping clay or mould, The worm his Carmelite, with dusk for cowl. Shut, shut the gate, bar out the fruitful world ; Look where the dandelion is low bending Above his grave, as if the soul were sending A muffled message through the darnel curled. As if the flower could hear, and we not hear it ; As we do follow Love, but never near it, Close, close, but still impenetrably furled. Now all his gains are the strange rewards of Death, Who took no measure of the shadow thrown Along the path of life, where Evil saith : "Come live with me, and lie with me, alone." Now all he strove for, like the wave denied The habitual sand, for ever is forsaken. Indifferent, command can not awaken The fretted spirit death hath sanctified ; Who the wild heath has chosen for abiding ; Deep, deep within its roots, as if in hiding, Where the day helpeth not, with night allied, HYMN 81 HYMN FOR thy tender mercies, Lord ! Hear me when the night hath stored All her dark leagues with the Sin I have made my Cherubin. In my chamber they do stand, Though I shrink they clasp my hand. I remembering they have made My delight, Lord, am afraid. Canst Thou enter, Lord, again With Thy mercy's cleansing rain ; Make defilement pure and sweet With the whiteness of Thy feet ? Let me not be thrust aside ! Thou art more than crucified If withholding when adored For Thy tender mercies, Lord ! 82 TUA MARINA TUA MARINA THE tall pine in the bracken. 'Tis the place, Still as a catacomb ; the waving mound, Manuka-braided, where they buried deep Wakefield's beleaguered men. A massacre May roll from memory like a drinking song Chorused in murky taverns, dead the throats That hurtled it ; or stab us through the years " This was a field unholy for our race." You will not walk to-night, old pioneers, Te Rauparaha's stroke was curt and shrewd, And Charon paddled you. Forgetfulness Enwraps your slumber ; not a foot will come But hers, like ghost uneasy from the grave. If you do walk to punish guilty men, Why, break your cerements, curdle up my blood, Lest it play traitor this is treachery, My prologue, drama, epilogue, to-night. Traitor to friend and bond of coupled years That he and I have garnered from old Time, While Happiness looked smiling on ; her eyes Will never look on us together more. Traitor to her ? Ah, tell me if I be. I know not in the skidding train of thought That irks me if I do weigh down the scale TUA MARINA 83 Against her, or bid life upspring for her. Beshrew me, it is cold ; the hour has gone She should have trembled here. But roads are dank, And servants difficult to gull ; a child May whimper for the moon, one face must be Bended like cloud to summit of the hills. There falls a shooting star. How many worlds It girdled through the aeons till it touched Our cloying atmosphere ? To pass the blaze Of Jupiter, or Saturn's meteor rings, At last impinging on this little ball, A gape sight for the yokel for a gleam, Then dust strewn in the desert and the sea. How like a woman, who has Love's white zone Around her like the cincture of the eve Round Hesperus and then she falls, and lo There is not any glory. Must I snatch From this one all the imperceptible grace She brings me unassoiled ; which though I guard From all malevolence never shall be mine ? Doth she delay that I may sift the mind, Dropping the cloudy slack, to know, to seize The residue ; to take it on my shield, And nevermore deny ? Well, be it so ; The die is cast, the unpolluted sand Gleams in the amphitheatre for our blood, And we must drag past stony eyes when dead, 84 TUA MARINA Aye dead to the dead years and loyal hearts. But she is hindered. Never surge, nor fire, Nor any thunder counts when passion drives ; Nor any peering through of conscience drugged May lurk in the orillon of the brain To keep away all infidelity ; And all the repetition Duty drones Beats like a surf upon a rocky shore, Defeated by its own monotony. That was a weka's cry it may be sound. The waste night treasures for her loneliness ; But I do shiver let it be the morn Draws with her icy fingers all my thews Till they are like a child's. Oh, Eleanor ; The hour is falling to the zero sun, And I am beggared of proud estimate. The dawn will nip me till I look askance, Shameful to meet an eye. The horses yearn To lose stagnation in a league of foam Beyond Waitohi. Be it so. I touch Again the level squalor of a life .Where day is like all other days that ever Dropped from the hand of a neglecting God. The chamber I have burdened with my sleep, So full of thee my heart could not awake As redolent of merry morn as dew, Opens again in silence. Eleanor, A cursed jangle of cross tides has swept TUA MARINA 85 Thy boat from the proud current that had borne Thee and thy beauty to a magic gulf Beyond the mountains ; where the day retards Happiness in her golden sandals, mazed Between the morning and the evening, so There is not any place for sorrow there. A winking taper through a cottage pane Gleams by the pallet of a f reward child. It is my soul that is so poor and thin Amid the darkness ; at the dawn the flame Will vanish, and upon the foam of light The Orient rolls above the hills, fiords, My heart will draw into itself and find The empty gourd of Hope that nourished it. How chill the cloven sides of darkling hills, How numb the ripple of the creek that knew Your laugh that day the sun fell down the sky, Irradiated waters underneath, And Love slipped through us when we did not know. Never may I behold the pine that leans To some forgotten song of Maori girl The stream has folded, lest I think thy face Uplifts its incommunicable eyes Yearning beyond all whisper ; never look Through this entangled glade of reverie, By every dream endowed, lest I do break For ever and for ever with the hour The twilight clothed thee since f hou art not there. 86 NEW ZEALAND NEW ZEALAND As one who with the first foot of hoar Time Passed to forgotten gulfs of Memory, here My gaze is on the moving waters, woven With no tradition of delivering sails Baffling hate and ruin. No gorgeous phrase Exorbitant of poetry pinnacled Upon ethereal height involves the path Of the inheritors of pageantry Dreamt by redeemers, carven with their sword ! Nor ever on the waste and hilly moors Old battlefields where hopeless chivalry Of sovran obsolescence foamed away ; Glittering with pride beneath the morning star, Ghosts of old castles in the cobweb eve. I cannot see with Memory's inward eye The lanceolated light of holy deeds Flamed through the gloom of evil ; never hear A nation wrestle to a perilous fall With its iniquity, and render up To the Almighty bruised heart of prayer, Wrung from its tribulation, dear to Him. Methought that as I climbed this virgin peak My spirit sealed mortality, forgot The toll of Time, and absolution given For the inexorable hours, emerged NEW ZEALAND 87 Suddenly into joy ; not interspaced With sorrow, not an oasis that fades For ever on the verge, but breaking dawn, Before the Olympian thunder shook the wave, Or ever shepherd 'neath the folding star Stole to the thicket where the oracle Spun her delirium. Here is no renown Of fabled genii, of twins who bore The spear consummate of battle, elf or gnome, Dragon or deity ; but the clear fane Of meditation, and a sanctuary For the seclusion of the passive mind, When all volition of the teeming brain, Still-chambered from the arrowy light of thought, Lulls in the flower, or undulating wave, Or with the lark pillowing on the breeze Touches the point of heaven in hidden song. Ye wandering winds that from your threshing floor, The immemorial ocean, gather up Fragrances of the forgotten, if their tears Weight your vast wings, your indestructible Motion is girdled with the joy of being Fresh from the hand of God ; and you do take A path through forests leaning so to hear Your harmony, until the setting sun Nets you within his beams ; then you do fall On range and gully, creek and cataract, And even on the unapportioned strand 88 NEW ZEALAND Shaken by every billow, as a prayer Moveth a stubborn heart, and with it sleeps. What courts are these that ye so vainly urge For an echoing answer ; that are dumb, Dark oubliettes of foam, and haggard walls Of terror shaken by the avalanche, Ever above a desolating fall Of thunder to a ravine the kea knows, But nevermore the sun ? Oh, surely Time Here would receive the penitential hours, As a dear father his returning son, So loved, and so deplored ! But let me stand Hither apace in sunnier abodes For shadowing clouds, sliding from the breast Of amber slopes into a gulf of blue ; Colourless to the neighbouring eye, afar A lake of thought for the fond fancy's riot. Mothed chambers of forgotten queens who lie Within a rose's perfume, dewy sails, With paladins becalmed where Love has flamed Sole star athwart his consecrated Sea ! There was a slumber on our virgin isles, Strewn like a shadow where the trembling East Broke through the night each dawn above a sea Absolute heritage of Caliph stars, Outwatching silence till the morning lit Her undiscoverable temple hid NEW ZEALAND 89 In lakeland forests. 'Twas a magic air Wreathed cape and estuary, and bade the pines Diffuse the symphony of ocean's song, Sole anthem of a battlemented fane Entered alone by congregated clouds. Pardoner of offences, holy Time, That with thy shadowy flight encompassest Orbits of constellations, secret stars, Invisible, though Earth respond to them With dumb emotion ; thine, all worlds, and thine Nebulae through the darkness interspaced As tears within unutterable grief For lips closed, unresponsive evermore ! Thou dost remember for all knowledge lies Within thee, thou canst not forget nor hope To loosen the intolerable brain Of immortality the light that fell On Babylonian years, the winds that smote Through Erythrean sails, where dusky foam Leaps to the moon above Colonna's scar. These isles that were so silent that a voice Were sacrilege laid upon thee no stain ; Here every morn where thy refulgent robe Flames to the zenith first unbridled hours Heard thy melodious thunder, leaving thee With path celestial flawless. If there came All cankers that do shrivel up the soul, Making a bloody pact with Hell, to Rome, 90 NEW ZEALAND Breasting a bestial flood ; if Egypt paled To the terrific star of tyranny ; And nothing but the foul dust of old crime Spotted the legendary kingdoms lost Beyond tradition's border ; thou dost know We lay sweet, unadulterized, to the sun Yielding delicious sanctuary, each rood A temple for the unpolluted mind. Airy abodes of shadowy thought that loves The consecration of the hills revered By immemorial clouds ; within whose sleep Dreams float like silence in a solemn wood. Oh, who would prize the haggard world that toils Day after day for the disordered gain Reeking of strife ; where all the gold that lies In hungry palms is counterfeit despair ! So many broken hearts, subjected souls, Smoke on its altars, piteous sacrifice. This haven of antiquity whose tide Bears evermore unfreighted hours shall keep All that the glowing world forgets ; a peace That is not slumber's nor the minster hushed, Is round us, one with us ; ay, God has moved Within these forests that are eremites Brooding upon his glory ; and I feel An incorporeal chain draws me beyond Mountain and city, far above the voice Of cataract or thunder ; till I merge NEW ZEALAND 91 In the vast dome of wheeling hemisphere, Shedding infirmity of being, and lull My soul in its eternal cradle, Him ! Let me be one with thee that I may leave, Still Aorangi, far beneath me toils That shall impede ! Though oft the tempest rocks The barren precipice thine arch supreme Glitters triumphant ; thou hast conquered, thou Lookest athwart the mist below that veils The world from thee invulnerable ; thou Art nearest heaven, and dost not know the hour Is seldom with us we are one with God ! Oh, cleansed from all impurity, dost thou Remember from thy peak the thorny path Circling thy base, the struggling heath that toil To give the wildernesses charity, With stony barricadoes evermore Interminably defended ? Thou hast soared Above the desolation ; at thy feet Colossal ruin in remote moraines, Wild architecture of embattled cliffs Crumbling with agony of silences, Hearing far off the avalanche's fall, And never other sound but thunder spent In coliseum tented by the clouds. An exaltation and a glory shine 92 NEW ZEALAND About thee ; where thy slopes are faintly limned Are apparitions felt ; hoar castles frown, Sheer precipices are the towers wherein The alchemy of brooding floats, and feigns A dreary cell of sorrow evermore ! Then, with the flowing oriflamme of joy My spirit is upon thy sanctuary, Amid the wide circumfluent loop of air, Ineffable and remote we fade, we fade Alike into its blue. Oh, could I be Like thee, releasing all my soul from weight, The importunity of lonely pain, The long groove in a shallow circle scored Even from sorrow unto sorrow again ! Like thee, mount, losing all the cerements rolled Of Earth's pollution ; greatly winning through Clouds compassing to stainless purity, The world beneath me, with me perfect peace. This fiord is a still monastery aloof, Where tired eyes that do beseech the morn Her soft step to retard below the gleam And let them slumber feel the eider fall From Solitude's delicious wings that float Unheard by them that hearken evermore. She is thy lord, O sea, and thou art led To her secluded chamber, at her feet Thy wave is the enchantment of a prayer NEW ZEALAND 98 Murmuring for forgiveness ; she has made Thee anthem to inviolable walls, Chancels of mist upgathering from the foam The melancholy of thy wilderness. Thou art Callirrhoe asleep, and sounds That are forgotten here shall not disturb Thy quiet penance ; thou art one with those Who to themselves are a remembrance given Of a remote and shadowy past ; a day Is round them with its congregated lights That may not pierce the vesture. I have heard Voices within the waterfall that spake More than was ever graved in holy writ, Or weaved to music where the organ fails Through minster towers, and all the tapestries Upon the altars tremble to His shade ! It may be that a falling leaf shall ope The door of secret hinges ; that the sound Of slided air through fluted wings escaping In undiscoverable glooms of moss Shall be the trumpets to throw down the walls Oppugnant to the spirit that pursues Paths to the light for ever visionary. The bell-bird has her belfry here and rings Intenser thought to the diviner fane ; That chancel where ethereal spirits approach, Apart, but nearer to the seraphim In forest aisles than where roofed marble shades 94 NEW ZEALAND Long tinted lights, and cools the organ flame Voluted and remote. There is a dower Falls from these branches, trembles in the breeze ; And where the light falls variable on a gull Oaring her snowy breast a power has raised The splendid motion of the lordless sea Within our bosom ; we are folded in Harmonious clouds and sunsets, loveliest home Of the serenest thought, the shadowy eaves Pale of the lucent temple of His glory. As in a cathedral prayer has made a gloom, The tribulation of a thousand years Fallen upon the pillars, here we move Through cloister precincts Time has drowsed with winds From the inexorable West. The wave Tells not the secret of the mocking past ; The cloud floats lonely from the sea, her heart Breaks on the mountains ; there her song is sung To alien ears ; let the pines draw her down To weep herself away. We are apart From this hoar convocation of the hills, Cataracts, and innumerable groves Pathed by the bell -bird's anthem, and no more. Oh ! forest listening to eternal years, And looking to the stars that may have died, Quenched ere your branches bulbed, if we hear not The subtle music of the universe NEW ZEALAND 95 That was before us, and will murmur round The grave of our last generation wrapped In ribbed ice, an exhalation falls From the invisible balm ; a spider thread Of ecstasy floats where our feet have touched The border-land of Nature's harmony. We know not what we gather, but we reap Charm undecipherable ; and a woof Pours with a flame of glamour through us, pressed To her inordinate bosom unperceived. Oh ! charge us with Thy tender counsel strewn Wherever winds have blown. What Thou hast given To these make fruitful in us, what of strength Is theirs make our delight, and what of prayer In their dumb instinct lies make suppliant Within our hearts. There is a majesty Of still endurance here ; woods recreate Splendour of mighty shade though tempests reel Athwart a sail-less hemisphere ; the sea Squanders ablution over the sea wrack Where mermen lie, and lulls the albatross Far in her secret South ; but never fails Her due step to these lonely isles and fiords, Nor ever though the stars and moon be hid Late cometh to the mountains' inner shrine. I know not if the heart ever deceived 96 NEW ZEALAND The brain that trusted her when ways were dark, Thought a complexity, triumph despaired, Paths steep to the far-shining goal, and pain A fabric in the shuttle of the mind For ever wearing doubt, despondency. Thence to be led by secret prophecies, Welled in the heart and to her scarce revealed Till her own desolation gushed them forth To be a strength inscrutable to the mind Faint with endeavour, this is ecstasy ! To take from evil its celestial part, Warped and dishonoured, the imperial force Turned to debasing ends ; in the lowest deep Of tyranny to feel the chambering light Through all the darkness ; and to brave renown, The pride precipitant of sovereignty Rooted within tradition ; to amaze The spirit within herself ; to storm the towers Sodden with blood and tears, where cruelty Broke humanity's heart ; to wake with horn Loveliest Freedom in her castle woods, She with soft invocation murmuring ; " Be with me, my beloved, evermore ! " Oh, this was potency of being ! . Life Swirls a confusing main of tediousness Day after day till the Olympian hour Rolls a colossal wave of thought that breaks In trembling glory on strange promontories NEW ZEALAND 97 Hearts are but human, and would slumber where Fond other hearts have nourished them and died. Sweet is remembrance trellising a grave. But the fierce hour will come, though it do wait A thousand years, when all is flung amain Into a rushing tide. Faith, memory, love, Pity, and agony, and wrath are fused ; And the transfigured soul no more abides Within a temple builded on the sand. Much do we feel who with the woods commune, Bearing a salutation in our eyes To every bird scattering rainbow song. Thoughts in us are as fountains gushing forth The splendour and austerity of peace Untroubled evermore; we hear a sound That to the utter world is barrenness, A river of commingling love, resolves, Repentances, and adorations, woven As border for His robe who touched the pines And streamlets with a blessed wonder shed On e'en the poorest shadow. Far away, Here we inherit life that has not broken Passionate and regretful waves on shores Cold and repellent, with their harvest strewn, The wrecked and drowned. Streams are our lenten thoughts, Holy and chaste, gathering from the flowers, P Q 98 NEW ZEALAND The useful, idle fields, winds blowing through The secrecies of silence, manna fallen From invisible boughs, wherewith we break Communion with the spirit shrined in God. Ye that inhabit cities from the light Of nature sundered, where grim towers let fall Shadows not deep enough to bury grief, Homeless, that alway has a home unseen Within men's bosoms, go ye to the hills Stand where the forest lifts a bridal veil Before the glancing sun, and hearken with joy To birds, winds, brooks, and tufted flowers that wave Through pastures and majestic scars a hymn Unearthly, yet upon the heart bespread With dew of solace of uplifted prayer. Can ye not wander through the loitering path Of Arcady and Tempe in these isles, Suddenly treading where a song has slept, Fallen from birds in darkness, and revealed To bending ferns the triumph of high heaven Ruffling silky wings. Too much do we gain The temporal, losing the immortal part. Less have we than Leucadian youths and maids, Who leaped with Sappho, of the flawless heart, That broods upon a creek and with it flows Contented to the shores of old romance. Oh, barren lives that have forsaken fields NEW ZEALAND 99 For stony commerce, know ye not the hour Cometh when all the trappings of the world Fall like a column when volcanoes quake; And with veiled eyes we look athwart the wave Once floating sails by youth's enchanted mere Beyond the mountains, where the naiads hid All day the moon from the beleaguering sun. Pools with a shadowy ottoman of fern Come to us where the creek had thrown a loop, Too happy to haste by the trees wherein Birds framed a stair of imperceptible song. They are no more but, hark ! we hear old, strange, Forgotten noises, seneschals of sleep In tangled solitude, who, never seen, Drowsed every breath of Summer in our eyes. 'Tis but Imagination ! Children start, Hearing a voice that music woos to live In her soft palace ; they do know her charm That lies upon her brow ; they cannot touch The estuary of glory floating them Far from the forest to the world's great sea. Now it is strange to us, the magi live No more who could interpret ; ah, the pain ! Our hearts were those magicians long ago; But we have bartered them for sudden gold, And the most blessed can but faintly call From a remote recess some shining words, 100 NEW ZEALAND That once caressed the heart from lips a-cold ; Covering their sweetness with unbidden tears. Ah ! 'tis the saddest lot humanity Has drawn from the impassive urn of fate That in the mirk air of high-shouldering towns The spinning vertigoes of labour cramp The wild emotion born into the soul ; That would make boats of every ivory cloud To sail far down to the Oceanides. The statesman, the philosopher, the priest, Looking upon the smouldering vent that smokes, Threatening evermore, speak parables To ears that understand not ; oh, forsooth, They offer suffrages, shibboleths, prayers, To children sundered from delight ; for such Are the enkennelled poor, who never see The sun but over clanking factories, Nor feel a wind that is not drenched with soot. Men are we, and we do not lick the stones For slimy offal, and curl down to sleep Like pariahs satisfied. The sleepless eye Of sorrow staring at oppressive walls Bounding the mental world of poverty Looks far beyond the main to where a foot Makes happy bells of laughter through the fields For children who romp with Joy, she lulling down Her tirelessness so they shall clutch her robe, NEW ZEALAND 101 Vain images of anguish ! Have we not Child aching hands, so many prized assets In budge statistics ; do they not lead on The car of commerce ; do not children toil Drab days laborious, to the sullen hour Of tired monotony ? I look where vice Comes specious, debonair, slanting a ray Gilded with blithesomeness to these that moan : The day is heavy on us, labour waits With still persistence ; through the Summer morn, The Winter fog, her rugged frown is near ; And we do sit impatient to be done With fardels too oppressive. Let us be Something the light resembles, or the kid Leaping within the shadow of the fern In glades the tui knows. Virtue will give A twenty years of toiling evermore For pittances, hard usage welcome vice, Hard paymaster, but not so hard as men, Pillars of prayer, masters of sweating jails ! Ah ! 'tis the saddest of all truths revealing Fair destiny dishonoured. Men must grieve At immemorial tears the weak shall shed, Who struggling fall to the catastrophe The most reverberating, souls debased. The price we pay for garrets mullet packed, Infancy with decrepitude of crime, Innocence the plaything of the debauched, 102 NEW ZEALAND Breaks at the source the majesty of race ; The fountain is polluted, babes are found Not in the cradle, but the sepulchre. Dear land, for this I blame thee not alone, That we lack little feet about the door; That now a pantomime of gaiety Is dearer to the woman's heart than love, That is indeed love most when dowered with pain. Oh ! to be homely is too obsolete ; Better the giddy emptiness of froth Spun in the whirlpool of a tide that sweeps Inevitably from the heights to fill Unfathomable gulfs than mountain tarn ; All day the mirror of revolving clouds, Grey, vestal forests holy ; through the night A recompense for the tired flame of stars Soothing itself within the softness lapped Through the adulced shade. The time has been Our days were nearer friends to quietness Than strutting clamour. Never pioneer Loved labour but his being was transfigured Upon the summit. Prone the mighty woods Before his lion heart ; and oft eve's star Glowed through her veil uplifting ere he returned From battle with his peers the stubborn hills. Year after year a sacrament of toil Purified, thought came like a Summer cloud, Slow, but persuading from the heat of day NEW ZEALAND 108 Delicious depth of shadow. Nature gave Her broad, beneficent bosom, that has held A thousand generations. What is man But her faint acolyte where she is priest ; Drawing the subtle essence of His love From toil and torment of her globed powers. Oh, softly blow ye winds where Cloudy Bay Yearns to that happy vale where I have breathed Morn of a perished day. If eyes long closed. That watched me in the vintage fields of youth, Look farther than your compass of proud leagues, Never shall they behold a happiness. Within me wheresoe'er I go that falls E'en as the shadow of the shade that fell From Joy's wings ever folding to unfold. Ye radiant hills that share a blessed light No more to me revealed since I have lost That ecstasy of life that all receives Unconscious as the bird receives the shade, The airy tent of his emerging song ; What shall inhabit your serene abodes If not the thought of them that sadly build Fond altars of remembrance far away ! They have no other dower, no song makes moan, No legend like a vine-leaf clings to them, Plaintive of glory. In the azure past Not e'en a cloud has wreathed a secret spot 104 NEW ZEALAND Where gods have smiled and loosed a hidden brook To gush from rocks impregnable, to thank With an immortal song the shades austere Linked evermore to their divinity. Lovely as are the hills, and flecked the Sounds With light and shadow floating evermore Imperishable peace, I would the cloud And the long stair of gold disturbed the dust Scattered on graves where ancient melody Breathes an imaginary lore, and moves The springs of solemn meditation sunk Far from the garish day. There is a power Folded within us that the stubborn pride The world nets round us never can unveil. It moveth for the pure and contrite heart, Loving the holy past and all dear words, Comfort from unremembered lips that speak From darkness a revealing equity. There is a sacred temple, we may touch The precincts of its glory and receive Rapture we know not whither, and rejoice Like cuckoo loosened through the breath of Spring, That never knew the parent of its joy. Isles, had ye been where Greece beheld the morn Touch with soft foot the looping Cyclades Ye had been worshipped at Achaean hearths ; Yon mighty talisman of crag that proves The ponderable fall of the tired sea NEW ZEALAND 105 Had loomed mysterious and dread before Antiquity's young heart. Far, far aloof, Where Egmont fades into the sleeping blue, Forlorn Hephaestus of the utter world With fire outworn, furies had flung repulse, Their adamantine cruelty, and disdain For all men. Islands, capes, peninsulas, Ye have no brede of sorrow, if no might Impregnates us beholding. Magic sails Blow not around ye, nor a mermaid cries For the lost foam where Aphrodite sprung Irradiate, lighter upon the morn Than all the vows Love ever smiled away ! What if we keep no sacrificial day, When all the heart of a mysterious time Moves in us far-descended, if we wreathe No tower, no altar, colonnade, or cliff, Where Time has let a fascination fall, Unperceivable magic, to awake Remembrances enchanted evermore. There is a light far-shining, yet unseen, Beyond the verge of our dim day, where glow Thought and achievement, and the creeping globe, That Time retardeth infinitely slow, Shall gather moments when our souls are lit With inexpressible delight that cleaves To invocation flowing from above, 106 NEW ZEALAND Higher than ever highest here has dwelled. To live through exaltation of an hour. Lifting us from the dank and trodden fields Where multitudinous feet have worn a path Searching for Truth shall be an ecstasy Poured through us. Far away the trumpets sound For man ascending, overwhelming powers That shall retard his utterance with the true ; The shadow of the perfect that shall be Within us when the people see the flame Lucent of righteousness and equity Fall on the palaces and lowly roofs, Portion of all men, standing in the light With marvelling awe but equal to the blaze. Whatsoever we do, whate'er is willed By the inscrutable, the path lies hid Oft through the swamp of desolation, fog Bewildering, and harsh thorns ; but, oh, we rise To things unutterable in the past ; Reason, the sanctuary of weary faith, Justice, and the sweet savour of shut deeds, Bestowal unrevealed ; renouncement sweet, Whose sovereignty is sacrifice, shall be Crown of all glories ! Never do I doubt That in the large life of a clearer day, Loftier than Lucretian majesty, Purer than holiest thought of Socrates, Unladen by divine hands of foul wrong, NEW ZEALAND 107 Where men are more than shadows of the light, Ay, even stars through lowly orbits strewn, Thy children, land of promise, shall break bread Of solemn sacrament with them that strive To win fulfilling heights ! And they shall be Dowered with the splendid heart that aches to rise Above the limitation of the mind, Illuminated by the lamp of soul ! What though we dwell a little while and sleep Beneath the drums and tramplings, men shall hold From our dead bones the fief of majesty That shall encompass the wide world ; our thoughts Lie not within our graves, but, purified To the last bourn, perfection, live in men Hereafter to arise ; to whom our names Are shadowy nebulae, that do illume, Remote, mysterious, the ancient night, Poised in the darkness like delivering stars. Thus we inherit from the mighty dead Thought too impalpable for them to fuse To glowing words, the trail of Wisdom's robe ; Sounds that we gather into harmony Above their adoration. We shall pass Like the foam by the beacon still it points The doubting sailor ; and when Time has slipped A soft fold over us, and we are stirred Never by silken murmur of a wind Bathed with the tears of those remembering us, 108 NEW ZEALAND And they themselves are memory-sunk, a light Will fall from the invisible that flames Fervent and radiant through our good deeds. Oh, blessed father who in children sees A vein too rich for his subduing mind Hardly conquering evil, a delight Nearer, though immeasurable, to the throne Than he has soared through all the agony Of soul aspiring. Be this tender joy Infinity for us when we are shades Watching the orbit of a world that moves For ever to the highest. Oh, ye that breathe The common air, who hear the thunder roll ; Whose day is bordered with the loveliness Entangling all things, let their beauty be Even unworthy of the loveliness Suffused through all our hearts, that shall attain, By power above the storm of circumstance, And wandering mists of error that retard, To triumph more enduring than we know ! TO THE LIGHT 109 TO THE LIGHT I CANNOT pace the castle of old Time, With tapestry of thought upon the walls Woven by poets and philosophers, Martyrs and rulers, but the nave is lit With all their shining glory ; and it seems I am a part of their divinity, Make struggle with them to the goal, despair Not ever though fallen under harness laid By heavenly hands upon me ; till the end Comes that is greater than all triumph, Death. The prelibation they have realized, (The chance souls glory-driven, chance, yet culled,) Is taught me through their struggle, is all mine, If I do follow with humility Unto their altar. In my frankincense, My myrrh, my offering of turtle-doves, Some sweetness that was theirs, some shade of heaven, Some light that was bestowal of its love, Shall be the essential grace I could not gain Had they not suffered, had not won the way. These marvellous men and women are our kind, And over magic pages they clasp hand With our delightful eagerness to fly Far, far away from the retarding world To a land of heroism, magic sea. 110 TO THE LIGHT That never broke in thunder, but a-slope In gleaming tenderness for all the beach. What dissonance of age has curdled thought That loved the ideal ? Oh, how fall'n the eye That held with level courage unto theirs, The heart that never looked for other goal Than the clear peak above the draggled plain. Degenerate is the mind that cannot leap To them. Oh, holy pioneers, forget Our indolence of virtue, luxury, As you remembered not the slothful ease, The counterpart of struggle for the height For ever and for ever your renown. In this sea-sounding land of changefulness, Dropped from the cluster of the strenuous world Into a welter bordered by the Pole, The radiance of your names is wan indeed. For we have never trembled at the voice Of prophecy, nor ever heard the sound, That makes a people fear, of secret truth Delivered from the crucible of soul Some man of agony has burned for us. Fain would I at your shadowy tombs desire Some part of your devotion, would discern A light that touched not your saluting eyes, Though your imagination fondled it Like a child's lips her mother. It may be That even here are feet as sanctified TO THE LIGHT 111 As ever trod the unillumined bleaks Of the far ages, when the trumpet blew Breathed by your lips, unburdening man's soul. Oh, who would cherish then the fond desire For wealth o'er-running, who would not despise The specious bounty of the gold and glare So hard achieved, so indeterminate, For the delivering clarity of Truth From lips that broke their silence at our door ? What eyes that would not worship and dissolve In tears before the robe of one who knew That never wound but had medicinal balm In the clear ether ; bidding us to see, Blind moles with darkness girdled evermore. And never since the morn that Christ arose To purge the temple has a grosser clay Shut heart of man from heaven than our mischance Of all dubiety : the film of mud Material of the senses. We prefer The impact of reality, unhear All spiritual sound. The orb of gold, The diadem of pearl, the king, the queen ; And even their embroidery of knaves, Courtiers and courtesans, are truer held Than prayer that doth entreat us, than all heaven Upon the wings of music falling through The mystic flight of arches where olcl tombs 112 TO THE LIGHT Hold dust that made a covenant with God. But, mark, I would not re-create the spell Thrown on the spirit peregrine by monk, Augur or medicine-man ; the dolt of text, Shibboleth, mummery of faculence. Thanks be to God, the heart can not be bound For ever by such sticky cozenage. Methought there was a God threw from His hand A little world that spun far off, involved With seraphim of stars ; that never eye Save the omnipotent could know it turned Obedient or broke with inner fire, Remained forlorn, unnoticed and unnamed, A darkened sphere, not ev'n a fitful shade To eye devout of pale astronomer. This Being, whose delight, I think, is such That all things do delight Him ; when He moves Through the vast undiscernible to man, That never e'en imagination knows, That nothing penetrates of ours but prayer ; What 1 shall He count it glory rendered Him From our imponderable little ball If prayer is measured with a ruled grimace, A genuflection an automaton Could ape with steadier balance ? Will He take To His own essence spiritual film Stuck over with grotesques ? Alas, we have made A motley coat of ritual to conceal TO THE LIGHT 113 What is not fit or decent to disclose, The garish emptiness we call our soul. A man shall give, like Crates, all the gold Of his high temperament, and it shall be Laid on the holy table of the mind, Fanned by the wings of cherubim who stand Before the mercy-seat. Let no one dare Be mediator bland, accomplice pat With rigmarole the votary to disturb. Let no one stand between me and my God ; We have a sacrament none ever knew, A reconciliation nightly sealed By His divineness and my orisons. Yet you, and you, that follow where the bell Of your high altar immaterial Calls you to penance, you are bound to me And every little piping chorister Pouring his song of praise; be it a bird, A nightingale : an air-communing rose Whose sound we cannot hear : a wayward child Who runs and sings because his heart is heaven. And here, believe me, is the festival Uncalendared of contrite heart that holds God and His tabernacle and His flame Remotest of all glory deep in it. What if we never hear an oracle Spinning his leaves o' the Bible, over-drenched With too much subtlety of argument, P, H 114 TO THE LIGHT Till neither hearer nor expounder knows The why, the wherefore, pardon ! let us meet The spiritual beings God dispels To every humble prayer ; be it by creek In murmuring forest, or the overarch With fret of leaves that syllable His name. These though unworthy in their substances, Finite and overborne with sense of death That shall be (yet remote) are like the pearl Made beautiful by Him, but unadorned To its own seeing. They are rich through Him Who hath bestowal of all sacrifice And all dominion, but who loveth best A temple builded in the heart of man. 'Tis better, richer, for the soul to live So little looped to rubric as the lark To shade of bramble. When he towers the air, Delivering the fountain of his song The farther that he revels in the blue, Dim to our eyes but nearer to our soul, He is a parable for us below. What have we in our blood that we must creep Too often on the ground ? Ah, take away Toys that we snap asunder, like a child Perplexed and angered with stale cheatery. It never was the truth the heart exists To be the fool of fools and charlatans, To be entangled in a web of words, TO THE LIGHT 115 Be fed with husks of sterileness, and cribbed The sluggard of abiding commonplace. Oh, Time, that folded once all happiness, Dutiful adoration, all desire Fruitful of thankfulness, why do our hearts No more control thee to their own content ? Oh, surely thou canst never find in us The enraptured offspring of thy prime ; no more The inevitable ecstasy to live Thrills in our languid pulses. We must stand (So fall'n are we) like caryatides With eyes of staggering and knotted brow, Bearing the weight enormous of all life. What drug of Thessaly has drowned the sense Pursuing happiness as it were a cloud Following its fellow all a summer day ? The scribes that have embalmed the idle past, They have forgotten, or they never knew, Whither the road led for the fainting day, Tired, when his shadow fell on waiting eve, Whose eyes shone with the discs of happiness Reflected from him at the set of sun ; And all their deepness told felicity, Never remembered, never, never known Now that we end the shallow day of toil With clank and clatter. Beauty now must tire The kennelled lackey of utility. 116 TO THE LIGHT What is the sum of knowledge if it close The labyrinth of beauty where the elf Of happiness leaped to us unaware ? How is it with your children who are held Beleaguered by professors, overdosed With more than megatherium could stuff, Till the poor heart forgets the glow that makes Thought wedded to the nightingale and rose ? How happens it when we are in the woods, The ancient breeze reverberating through The branches with old tongue the children know, That is so soft they love the sound of it, That is so true they never can misdoubt ? We are denied the frontier of the land That never was, and never will be, tired Of happiness. Ah me, the wand is lost ; The trembling spell embodying argosies From leaf and twisted bough and rivulet We have forgotten, we are guilty things. Alas, we sail our shallop but a league Down the far stream of Time, and if our glance Lie softer on one temple in one bay, Lie nearer to its worship, it is well. Sure am I we had not possessed the world And broken all its stubborn harmonies To be the music of our life if men Had fretted Time to nothing with the buzz Of being everything ; if caitive thought TO THE LIGHT 117 Had bound them fast with cords of formula, Green, muddied in stagnation. Look around This pleasant land what recked the pioneers, The axemen, of your art fritillary ? In truth, we had not in this chamber met But for the stubborn will of men who fought For their ideal. It is realized. Where'er we breathe, and stand, and look, and smile. If one of them should enter Pardon, sir, If I am not confederate with you, Not called by Nature to a proud design. I have not your dominion over toil ; Some cantrip nerve has jarred me out of tune With heroism and endeavour hid Under a guise of labour. I am one, Such as abound, who know the pitch of flute To whistle their own trouble. 'Tis the age Has flattered us to impotence with ease. Hardly have we conception what is brave, Unselfish, and unspringing to the true. Oh, pardon, sir, that we are not the same The dear, dead souls have been who struggled on To an achievement borne of fiery strength, Else never an achievement. You have left Name that we sprinkle freely on the map, And prate about at tepid jubilee, 118 TO THE LIGHT Crying " The splendid fellow "that is all. Laughable to the Gods ? But there is pain Within the laughter ; like a fire that burns Determinedly consuming though unseen. Ah, friend, the shade of valour would be shamed ; Let him repose in his forgotten grave Beside the hills he conquered, near the streams He quanted and explored. All day the sun Has message for him, and at night the moon And stars remember his weed-guttered mound Our shameful eye has lost. The bell-bird sings Misericordia in the rata bough ; The heavenly ministrants, the scattered song, Have nothing of our memory ; they are God's. I know not if the truth be less desired, I dare not think that heaven is farther off; That God who visiteth the world with pain Hath yet abolished His atoning grace, The peace that is the lintel of the heart Open to Him whatever may befall. The proud sea through the renovating tide Retards the interminable roll of Earth Till Time shall be forgotten. Shall the heart Beat less heroic, less with fire to burn The unprofitable idols of the world ? When the slow centuries have moved and shade Inseparable like nebula is all Our cloudy triumph ; when the earth revolves TO THE LIGHT 119 On her delaying spindle overwrought In weary circle of the Sun ; shall we Be sympathetic in the motion hid Deep in our heart and founded in the sky ? Doth not all beauty lie beneath the lid Imagination opens to the brain ? Hath not the soul a greater path than light For ever and for ever through the waste ? Where doth the beam dissolve ? What ever bound Hath Light's dominion ? What is all the Earth, Mountain and river, hurricane and calm, Palace and monastery, but alphabet Of one brief word Infinity has writ ; Whose essence is the passion of the soul To be the chamber of Eternity ? Would God the silent spirit of the hills Were the forerunner in the mind of men Of the Messiah, Truth, who cannot bear One blade of grass denied ; who can but look And in her eyes are all the splendours told, And all the miseries ; nothing glozed or hid Beneath a lying lace. What sacrifice Is too exorbitant for rich design To build a temple for the mind ; wherein All snare and trickery are maladroit, And withered where the glance of Truth compels The soul to be a music sung by her ? She hath her precinct where the foot must fall 120 TO THE LIGHT Still to the rapture of the holy place ; Light clouded by the mullioned shaft of aisle Makes softer prayer that wells within the heart Softer than moonlit sea, or taper flame The abbess burns before her crucifix. Art thou her votary ? Dost thou contend In struggle of the world to overcome Reefs perilous of many seas, and pierce The vast, bare main, unbroken yet behind Thy boat that with the setting of thy sun Hath visionary light upon its sail ? Oh, fortunate if thou hast her domain Alone thy covenanted walk and shade ; One chosen from the multitude art thou That know not thy impending glory, a light Making the dim paths clear. It is for thee The sun hath matins and the moon desires The water with her vespers ; they respond To her soft prayer and follow her ; the Earth Rolls round for thee and all her joy is thine. Oh, large, slow day, when Time was dearer Friend, Whose charm came like the shadow of a cloud Over the summer fields, with poise of mind That took the tranquil morning and the eve With equable delight, thine hour returns No more to our bare breast. The long, gloomed fields, TO THE LIGHT 121 That lie beneath the darkness, through the night, Her tempest and dismay, await the morn Forgetting the blown hour of midnight drear When dawn is at the peak ; for ever the same, Still with the strength of looking to the stars. There is regard in patient hope, a power Comes to the mind revolving its own light Through mist and darkness ; fullness in the sap Wells with deliberation, and the tree Stands mightier for the slowness of its shade, The mind returning to its inner sphere, The depth unseen the vacant day forgets, Untroubled by the phantasies of life, The airy sham philosophy of ease, The timid herd of frettings, in the pool Bathes in delicious thought ; a fountain sealed To brassy hedonists and gaping fools; And all the dodderers who never see The day-star is awakened to their eyes. This solitary splendour of the mind In her pavilion where the light hath shed Its wavering elements, has been the star Regenerators followed. What is good Oft seems impracticable, harsh, severe ; Eyes are unwistful for the seamless robe, Ear hath no delicacy for the sound, Pregnant of revelation to the soul, Save with the unperturbed, full-dreaming men 122 TO THE LIGHT Whose feet are for the mountains, to explore The caverns far above the multitude ; That they may ope to every muffled heart Ere death may seal them to a greater truth. To labour without guerdon, through the toil Insufferable break the rugged path With resolution sterner, is the task Laid on our leaders now. There was a time The ignorant revered philosophy ; Unknowing, yet experiencing awe Within the presence of the future kings. Then* footsteps were a-legended, their birth Gave aura to the tale of oracle ; Some border of the fairy-land o'er-lapped The desert places where they did abide ; Their meditation was a sacrament, Their murmur darkly threatened prodigy ; And Death who came like elder brother fond To claim his own made more renownable Names whispered where the peasant lay a-cold By Pelion, or sweated in the sand By Brahmaputra over against Ind. High thought is its own solvent, it reveals Through chastened clarity what never eye Beheld but through the vigil and the pain. No substitute for that immortal dower Hath medicine for our disquietude ; For knowledge dwelleth not in palaces, TO THE LIGHT 123 Nor has refreshing from the grapes of life Or sound upon the trumpet ; he that loves The voice of Truth knows many paths that lead Away from her, but only one is sure. Still do the ungovernable spirits hail Light in the darkness ; but they watch the star Above all others, with no cry of hope Disciples give the master, with no flame Burning delaying withes about the feet Of those who follow trusting. We are made Such that the loving heart that doth believe Great teachers undismayed is more than they, Because its darkness doth receive with joy Truths unperceivable, unrealized. Oh, for a voice forlorn in wilderness To bid the shadows flee that darken us Till we forget there is a greater light, And we are friend to the accustomed gloom ; Like tired tree that leans with scrannel wind, Moaning, distorted. What is life that pours Infinite strength to waste amid the sand, Till it is sunk beneath its pyramid Misshapen, huge, the callous monument Of spiritual atrophy ? Oh, hear Thou spirit that hast dominated men In the heroic past, and poured a shower Celestial on the grossness ; bend thy wings 124 TO THE LIGHT Again upon the waters of the mind, Making the stagnancy a wave ; thou beam Of inexpressible glory bid to ope The oubliettes that would confine the soul That has a chamber in the peace of God. This generation vague has wandered forth, Broken, unstrung, and spurning unashamed The staff, the scrip, the proud humility That knew not incommunicable things Visioned by seraphs, but had greater part With God because the humble and the pure Have their imagination overarched, The dome of all aspiring, with all heaven. As not so much as one poor leaf may fall, One heart break in its cincture sad-arrayed With sorrow and remorse, but God doth bend To the unhappy, and the dying leaf ; Even as thou, O light and life of all, That art the joy, dominion, and the fire, Hast jubilance with thy poor children here Great as thy glory in a molten star; Thou canst not turn away though we forget Infinite thought has infinite concern For all the most unhappy, even the base, Gathering the cactus of a desert world. Soon must we weary of the bronze and blare ; Peace shall revisit her soft cradle hid TO THE LIGHT 125 Deep, deep within the heart, too long inurned By too material days ; and if we watch With the eye plaintive of astronomer, Who knoweth the blazed curve of Mercury Within the secret borders of the sun, How shall we not discern the path of Truth ? Ay, let us look. Some witch may strew the path With undevouring fire that cannot hurt, Although it flame like sacrifice of old By dolmen of the moors, full-fed by hands That would have struck save barred by ritual. Tush ! This may frighten children ; we are men Who know the horoscope of fallen Time That was bedimmed to Druids, Oracles. It may be we are no wise nearer Heaven By our own thought that is less musical Than their adoring ; but we read the scroll, And Wisdom must peep out to less than fools. Wherefore, our way of life shall be disposed, Despite a threatening spectre, undisturbed. Shall be ? Ah, friend, how cynical your smile. The foolish herd, you say, have never sense, Or, having it, denies it, to desire Memorabilia for their stars of life To lead them on ; great actions of the great, Averring truths of dying eyes that dared Shine pity on the gladiator's sword. Somewhere there lies a wand of potency 126 TO THE LIGHT To touch their hebetude to darting life, That would have gospel for a daily food, A sacrifice for daily task, a load Of others parted for the joy of it. Beneath the scoria of the centuries The heart must burn like those that palsied doubt And suffering with the faith that men are here, Not superimposed like sluggards on the world, But archons of true living, love and death. Bredes of old doubt have smothered up the nest Where grew the young, delivering thought that flew, Like cuckoo through the spring, through all the earth, With message that had strange and solemn sound Humanity loved like Aurora's breath. So be it ; ours the duty, ours the time, To find the purple blossom and the bough Whereon the nest was laid ; to build again That little palace of pure embryo. Then to avoid the old fallacious paths, The withered gourd, the marble portico Where Vanity has pose ; how easy 'tis, After bewildered years have reckoned up New systems, new philosophies, new worlds, To prove them all a jungle. There they lie Like an old doll a child trailed on the floor In garret, huddled with stale mustiness, TO THE LIGHT 127 Cobweb, belated moonbeam, and the bat; Forgotten, unlamented. Thus we show With Time's touch and the little eminence, Induction, in the close-knit, curded brain, That Seneca, half Christian and half rake, Aurelius and all the Stoic band That would have Wisdom for their spinster bed, Were nothing more than weathercocks who turned Just as the wind of speculation blew. Here's our advantage that we do not ope Dark doors of darker aisles, a cross is made Over their beams ; they lead us everywhere, And nowhere to fruition ; leave them closed. Thus the imagination is not lured Where the great dead groped through a teasing fog, Stumbling at last on their own footprints, sad That all their divination was a maze. We shall take wing where never thought has flown ; Let the dead's striving lie within the grave, Not all unhonoured, unconsidered, now ; Since they were holiest in the holy lives Of Socrates and his ambrosial lords, Kings not of earth but that diviner land The shadeless border of Eternity. The sceptre of the soul lies far beyond All motion of the globe ; the spirit calls 128 TO THE LIGHT Through ether to the planet, it has bonds Sealed to us, but we know not our domain Spaced through the firmament. Alone we know Imagination lost in God returns With dew of myriad mercies in our prayer, Poured on us like the still Arabian night. Ah, cozenage of our weakness ; let the man Know what is good and subtle with the fire Of elemental truth, he turns away ; Eager for some deluding phantasy Begotten of a maggot in the brain. It is himself, his own sheer impotence He follows with a daring foolery, As if it were Ecclesiastes' song, Or smile of Jesus in a glade of corn. Ourselves we do misprize, make deity, So little and so large the soul of man. If he has nature, he has all, yet more, Take nature from him, he is greater still If he is God's receptacle, the fount Where heaven's pure rain is gathered. To disturb That eider stream is our malfeasance, marred Through vacancy of thought, sense puerile, Mad cluster of desires for wantonness, Impenetrable vanity, an itch For being something ever new and free From duty, manumitted from old law. Thence come the arid ditties that pollute TO THE LIGHT 129 Lips that have broken sound before the shrine Of chancelled glory ; songs that are infused With challenges to pleasure, thoughts that creep Over the mud of limitless desire. Enjoyment, always joy, and pleasure vain, Half sister to abasement ; where the sense Loses the hemisphere of thought that shapes Full globe of beauty in the ordered mind. How else the desolation of the path Towards the satisfying woods whose shade Had charm of the incomparable word Once flame of all desire supremely touched And burning through the pulses of the world ; That felt it was divinity that walked With fiery feet, and healing, through the soul. Where are the temples in the past beloved ? Who knoweth where the bramble and the thorn Conceal them of their pity that is all The anthem of their ancient solitude ? Methought there was a grace beat happy wings Above the portals where a peace had wov'n Her snare of delicate and wavering thought To catch you in its heaven's similitude. There to find heart of age that had not thrown All quiet to the winds it were a boon I would unburden for my soul of orts, The uncompanionable joys, remote 130 TO THE LIGHT From all content, the shallow age has fished From ooze of foundered years, what Rome had spurned Loathing, with aspiration. Ah, to forget The uncontaminated light of God In dreary swamps, with wandering marish lights Our only altar ; what ignoble aim And insolence of our peculiar time, That hath all riches, all the opulence Of Syracuse and Carthage with the ghost Haunting, it has forgotten lowly things That are the fountain feet of happiness. Oh, miserable trifles, know ye not It is ourselves are our salvation ; all The tale of years, the wisdom of the great, The suffering of the wretched, never teach, Never unweave the light of Truth ourselves Must be the protomartyrs. In our soul Are deeps where angels do descend to touch The fountain of all tears and all remorse, All adoration, all compelling pain To be alone with God or we are stones. The madness of distraction, the disdain Of sober life and quiet prayer of work Illuminated by calm Duty chosen To be the castellan of God Himself, Holding the world for him this foolish craze TO THE LIGHT 131 For bauble, fife and cymbal, turns to dust Or ever we are tired within the grave. There never was a sound of trumpet thrown, Imperial bugles blowing through the world, But echoed drearily at last in halls And palaces the spider darkened, still. Oh listen, and you hear the music yearn, Born in the habitation of the mind Shut in her own communing ; she must know The texture of her brooding, not deceive Herself with surface hue. No rapture fills The mind with irritant poison when she stands Steadfast, and unreturning to the pool Whirling of yeasty joy ; but looks within Her monastery of grey and holy walls Builded for her alone by heavenly hands. All harmony of earth, all wizardy, Of trumpet, organ, flute and violin, Seraphs that are the healers of the world, From viewless paradise they can but breathe, Unwind their beauty, die ; for death is theirs, Like the wind lifting every happy wave. All things of earthly mould, though cast with fire Infused with genius poured with lavish hand, Flow fainter with the ages, till no man Shall say " This was the son that glorified Hearts too insurgent to know happiness, Hidden behind the bouldered hills afar, 132 TO THE LIGHT Till they were lifted up by magic air." What was the song the Argonauts caressed Their sails with, folding stationary masts ? Never remembered now. Then let us find The still peace of the human heart that tolls A bell recalling to the inner shrine Thought that is compassed with too much of earth. I know not if these islands ever knew The impatient hours of men who cannot face The splendour of the morning, like a god Wheeling his orient wings, nor feel the breath Of evening whose soft footfall is the dew, And know that heaven is all around their home. But the hot scirrhus of a jaded heart That in divinely-legended old lands Eats into rest and wise content is here, And doth corrupt the pleasant-scheming life The pioneers have worshipped ; not to know Fretfulness for distraction ; to endure Hours solemn in the woods, and learn the song The waterfall has scattered over hills Untrodden and unknown. I think the men Who carved our heritage would all despise Some idols of the market we set up ; Glib politicians oozing fond desire For votes as purchasable as a hog ; Marching with banner to a brassy song, TO THE LIGHT 133 Caligula's own mob to gather shells. This corybantic frenzy to forget Things good though inconspicuous, boughs that bend With sweetest fruit, makes saffron of the brain, Too oft the vulgar mirror and response To gold and nothing more. 'Twould seem our life Disparted from the cool and leafy shade The forest builded when good Cole was King, To follow blistered roads of dusty glare Refreshing as a dollar from the Mint, Aesthetic as a belching motor-car. But soft ! we cannot have the twang of coin, Advertisement, vulgarity, pretence, And all the circus tricks Society Imposes now, and still retain the orb The placid mind retiring wields o'er life, That is its servitor till death inurns. The gracious garments Nature weaves for men Who love her are no raiment for the mob Who snuff the dust o' the curricle that rolls The harlot through the ring ; who make a coil For swindlers ambidextrous, slim to steal With one hand while the other smoothes you down. Such build like Caracalla let us in, Forget Aurelius, and the Stoic thread Of argument that Truth is fairer gold 134 TO THE LIGHT Than all the wealth of Indies. What if he Whose Marcobrunner thrills our palate slew An old man with a snare of finance, filched The bed from children, wronged the fatherless, And turned the widow on the streets ? We know That money gilds the pill ; the orchids bloom Rarer for him than for the honest poor, Who never robbed, nor schemed, nor duped, nor lied, Have nothing but the citadel of Truth To hie them there when all the world assails. Wealth is your only motley But for me, And those who have the freedom of the woods, The fairy-mullioned tent of wandering boughs, With laughing rainbow for a porch, the air Of Robin Hood, the song of merry birds, The acolytes of morning, were a string Of pearls of happy moments far above The cloying hours o' the world. Oh, hark a bell Is furrowing ripples through the dawn, I hear A bird who pours an early anthem down Where willows wave to the returning brook. The taper withers, draw the curtain wide ; Ah, friend, here are we children of the sky, And we do wonder and adore again Like a still music from a holy heart. Open the casement, let the morning in, Brighter than ever youth-betangled song, TO THE LIGHT 135 Cradle of love ; the mountains and the sea Guard the horizon, dew is everywhere, And gossamer a ladder to the stars. Oh song that in the dark dawn goest forth When the wild swans are tissue of the cloud Unseen by sleeping meadows, through the day Blow through thy pipes of melody and make Man jubilant that else had too much pain. Do thou sustain me when the night condemns To Memory who bears no felicity When she comes unattended by the hours The partial day makes golden. Do thou ope Not the reluctant stop of melancholy, But let thy happiness be fallen lot To every wretched heart so it may leap Like caracole of multitudinous bells To tarried Easter. Oh, it is not true That thou and thy divine child, Poesy, Have fled your temples, unadorned and bare Of worshippers ; a secret fire has burned, And flames a vestal for the chosen few Who love thee evermore. There I would tell That though thou art withdrawn from me I love Thy shadowy chamber in the brain, though ear May not admit thee, and pale Memory Slurs her allusive song to one who knows Thee only in a sacrifice of all 136 TO THE LIGHT Thy tapestry of sound. Yes, I would be Forlorn of friend, so poor that Envy passed And knew me not, if thou couldst weave again Thy visionary web of ecstasy, Light-laden with all tears of happiness, And wind it round my heart. The bell must toll, The dead lie with the mould, the tree must fall, The good deed be forgotten, and a shade Wrap all renown and splendour of old war. But thou art cradled by the reed and oak, The ruffle of glad plumage at the dawn, The ripple of the waters, and the curve Of wind about the gables ; and unseen Thou playest in the meadow-ripened heart Of children with their virgin eyes agleam For early paradise of day. No more Let grief be too much with us ; thou art here. What though the world put forth a niggard hand To those who have entreated it, and dreamed Its vacant glories were for them, I trow Some melancholy abbey may at last Give peace to them that have not loved thee less. A FUGUE 137 A FUGUE I You see that door, that through the day must ope, Pushed by the busy finger of the clerk ; Then back on its revolving hinge it sways To be at rest a moment ; then again, To open and reveal. Day after day Through all the undiverted years of toil Of droning men who never think of it, That door so facile to the slender touch Of curious baby, or a timid bride, Lets in a slip o' the world ; an outer light To lance the thick-hatched darkness of the room. The portal is a voiceless eremite None value or deplore ; a casual thing, Part of the tangle of the day. Observe The uncharted things we hardly heed : or know Without a knowledge such as breathing deep ; Catching the fugitive sunbeam through a cloud, With eye more flying, to the parapet That takes the golden circumstance of heaven That very moment. Ah, the lichened wall Beside the mullion felt the warming kiss Through and through every fibre of the stone, And thanked it for the passing step of God. Often we hear a bell above the swarm Hived in the dusty city; just a note 138 A FUGUE That colours all the drab, grey hours with glow, The under side of an angel's wing. We hear ; But know it not, too full of rhapsody Of merchandise, the scrivener's pounce, the quill, The jurist's prabble all the teetotum Spinning for pantler gold. Our thought's a babe, Filching the splendour of a father's pride ; Absorbing all the mother's love that falls On the little thing fu 1, full of its soft robe. And thus we close and open every hour Like a sleek door ; and let the whimsies in, To people the imagination full Of idleness and contradiction. Soul ! That art my heritage and more than life ; Thou immaterial mirror of divine And shameful thought ; shalt thou achieve no rest, Swaying like door the long, long day of life ? Pass, pass all day the windy clouds of thought ; Dropping a rain of welcome or of grief ; Louvring the light that irks a tortured brain Wherefore will enter, soft or swift like men, A multitude that gathers in the mind ; Some ponk from shadow of a charnel place ; A wave of the sea importuning the scar ; Thought of the plaint heart-eating in a jail ; Or where a housewife sings, or harlot broods ; Or, farthest from the wheeling of the globe, A FUGUE 130 A shaft of light from Cassiopoeia's Chair. All folded in the mind, and packed away ; Never to be remembered any more, Save here and there a chanceling seed that grows Deep-rooted in the fibre of the brain. So they shall come, like servants through the door To do the endless offices of life ; And we must stand at gaze and let them whirl Like midgets in a stair of winter sun o Beside a bramble till our star be dead ; And all the wonderful delight of thought Is like a cobweb shattered and befouled. What knowest thou of these that enter in ? Which truly were thine own ; which were engraved Upon the master mint of greater souls, That thou hast taken as the sorcery For the enchantment of an alchemy Most secret and most prodigal of gold ? Some largesse of a mighty spirit dead, Scattered through all the windings of the way, Finds you, and falls like manna to revive The wilderness heart like rich Diadochi, Inheriting the vast and sweet renown Of such as shine to us like Alexander. Then all their triumph is a part of us ; The proud prophetic archons who have taught And trod the thorny road be it Isaiah, 140 A FUGUE Lucretius, Dante, Verulam, or he That knew the utter string of harmony ' Whose ending is the secret bower of God. If Shakespeare be a parcel of my thought, That finer essence ever making me A child of air above the murky way Too often my sad causey, let me cling To that enchantment weaved long, long ago By his adorable and tranquil soul. Now glittering for a moment where I stand Irresolute 'twixt good and evil, so It turns me to the unattainable star High over my frail footsteps ; beckoning me As though it loved me even in the mire. If part of his divineness is a web To take me with illuminating dreams, So glorifying, though impalpable, And truly my most rich and perfect dower Shall I not think 'tis immortality Irradiates the spirit that subdues With few rare words dropped from his golden pen My heart insurgent, asking all of Time ? II Rested you ever in Saint Mary's porch ; The searing noon upon the street corralled fr; ; - A FUGUE 141 Shut in for ever from the fields and pools ? There's a wild jasmine curls about the plinth, With flowers like honey prayers, or treble hymns The children chant of a morning. Silvester, The Saint who died before a stone was shaped To found the minster, has, this frozen day, A niche in the calendar ; when sleet and snow Make the warmth warmer and the cold so cold. Not any wayfarer along the kerb ; Only a wind, cater-cousin to Death, Wailing in keyhole when the night is dumb, And the death-watch is ticking at your ear. Aye here's the porch, a darker shade of shade ; With snowflakes eddying in like tavern boors To escape the bitter earth. Here, where I sate, Holding a lily hand ensconcing hope, Radiance, and all joy, now nothing bides Save the shrill blowing and the film of snow. But there is something bleaks the whitening floor. A light. This is a poor thing like a smear Of mud where rain has huddled, leaving track Guttered and tangled. 'Tis a woman's shape, And when it was a girl's there may have been A woman's soul delivered long ago To the pollution unavowed, whereof Each man hath made his portion wherefore shrink ? 142 A FUGUE She was a losel. She is better now Than the be-ribboned, plastic honour showered On her deceiver, though he climbed the top O'the greasy pole in mundane fair. That's rouge Part slit by track of snowflake wandered in, As homeless as herself the drowned, drowned shoe Is meek with water and cross-hatched with slime Gathered in every Carfax. Oh, how drawn That cheek where hollow laughter came and fled Light as a dicer's oath, more incomplete. There was a music throbbed athwart the street Few chimes agone. Our charity was wrapped In a melodious anthem thanking God We were His chosen twenty rods away The music faltered and was heard no more. Our charity had lived and died therein, Full as a semibreve, and rich with love Through a belated bar. The organ shut; Lights out ; and we went home, fast wrapped from cold ; And charity drew not a cuddled hand From placket to reprieve a soul from death ; Urged on by slow starvation. She will lie, Through the monotonous, dull minster chime Till half her gown is swaddled with a wreath Most pure, most cold God's silent messengers ; For silence doth forgive and cancel all, A FUGUE 143 Thou child of desolation in the hour Thou hast the secret, and art part of it ; Not far, I think, from Mercy can I make The formalist my role ; and with a saw, Ancient and clogged with cruelty, dispose Of thy poor presence for eternity ? What is't thou hast achieved. Didst e'er betray One heart to sorrow as thine was betrayed ? Thou hadst not foul hypocrisy unless 'Twere such to favour a deluding joy When grief was maggot in thy breast of buds. Thy sin (thy sin ?) was open as the day ; Bare as thy punishment but what of them I see and touch this day about my walk In very shadow of this fane ? Concealed Their derelictions, crimes, and sophistries To make the evil good. Still, still they ban Thy sisterhood of miserable truth, Self-sacrificed, self -tarnished, self-deceived ; Too poor to add a lie to wretchedness. Old bones must ache for that's the end of man When the insufferable light draws near That is the shadow of Death. But who should make Of the fair Summer years a purgatory ? What power hath given thee thy keen insolence To damn the youthful soul to weigh awry 144 A FUGUE The impulse, the restraint, the flowing thread Cast in the steel of the will to thrust aside A being moving through emotion drawn To sacrificing height, and thence cast down To hell of its own torment ? Knowest thou If she I look upon had sundered all The anchorage to God ; and turned, misproud, Sails drenched and torn to evil hurricane, And Sin's disaster thence to fall on rocks ; Never to float upon the tide again ? Or looked she with a dying heart to find An incorporeal hand that in the grope Of darkness had the shining power of God ? There lieth she the years have waited on, Each grimmer with despair with pale remorse Hidden behind each opening door of Time. And here, upon the Summer of her life, She hath begotten in herself with Death An immortality. Dost thou condemn ? Ill Is God's own truth an arid gift escrow, Revealed through mediation of a third ? Do I not take the essence of His being, The very quintessence of all His love, The shining, and the mercy, and the peace, A FUGUE 145 That make the deep pavilion where He waits For me, far off descrying ? If He send To me one particle of all that holds Him in conspicuous glory, shall I wait, Doubting like one bemused, till other hand Has lifted up the temple curtain veiled By light of inconceivable cherubim ? Am I not man ? Do I require a priest To pace with ritual of ordered feet Far down the nave, where chancel fires are lit, Cold in the winter moon but not so cold As all vicarious prayer, emotion swayed Like rocking-horse, for ever and for ever Advancing and retiring, but the same. Ah ! Never does my soul reach forth to God Through such automaton ; but rather floats Like spider filament beneath the stars ; No eye perceiving, with no hand to guide, But led by instinct, deep, and swift, and strong. And more than all desired, if I may shed Corporeal bar too gross for thought intense, Dissolve within my ecstasy of prayer, Take wing to other realm, and ev'n forget I am a child of my encumbering world. Then somewhat nearer to His entity, Less earthly in myself, with thought infused Till all my being in solution held p. K 146 A FUGUE In holy and devout suspense, I call Beneath the tower of heaven with voice austere, Cleansed of all infelicity ; aspire To hear upon the harpings of the wind A chord Infinity deferred for me ; Loosed once, and only once, that once for me. Whereat the guarding seraphs with their blaze Bend, as I were Heaven's most exalted child. Forfend me not from this divine aspiring ; Tell me not any other voice can find The chariot words that bear my soul aloft Like an invisible cloud irradiate, Ethereal, pure, above the robe of air. Ah ! Never other but myself can reach The ultimate white pole of silences Clashed only by the harmonies of God. Let no one touch me when my foot essays To stumble for the holy path. I fall, If God so will, and stand if He shall choose. Rather to fall, if solely from my heart Pours the delighted worship, than to snatch An exigent devotion from the prayer Some other, though the saintliest, breathes for me. For, though I fall a hundred times, the hour Waiteth when I shall find the pathway in, Be it with doubtful and with weary heart ; So long outwatching for His loving-kindness, That Mercy when she enters in will kneel A FUGUE 147 In unresisting tabernacle, veiled ; Dark, yet so sweet God's slumber shall be there. IV If I should build for my own spirit a fane, As one who would be lonely through the world, Disdaining all companionship. If I, Through some proud appetence of intellect, Made for myself a sanctuary retired ; Casting upon my hidden altar spice To wreathe a murrey cloud for trance of prayer ; Would any other heart aspire with me To make my world delightful, to elude The wile of all things hateful ? Would one man Find in my underwood of worship, lit According to my impulse, whim, desire, A thousandth part of that medicinal balm, The dropping voice of God ? If I delude My poor, thin soul with such apocrypha, Pretended good that cannot equipoise The balance of a shade ; how is't with him I cozen to my altar ? Am I not The blind to lead the blind ? And never shall My name be blessed like to Orient kings, Who through the desert, for heart-easing grace, Deep trenched the sweet ineffable shade of wells. Ah, proud and pure the spirit that may leave 148 A FUGUE The last of life, to lie within the grave Under the dust of oecumenic years Full of their hoarded wisdom ; yet remain A sound delightful on the lips of men Blessing their benefactors. Who for this Would not disdain the cavalier renown Blown on the smoke of battle ; or the fame Of chancellor, of pilgrim to the shrine Of Learning ; or the potency of kings Mirrored in shambles of the slain ? Alone May win an equal palm the mind that looks Within the soul of man, and singing, bids Serenity float from the glowing words. Did Nature ever throw a disc that fell Like any of the multitudinous spun Through her eternity ? Could she repeat For any prayer the song she scattered once To poets in the grave ? Can light achieve The very glory of the yesterday ? To-morrow be the image, very twin, Of what is dead and buried ? Can the heart Recover the irrevocable joy ; Or grief discard the mantle she must wear For the beloved sleeping, dust for ever ? Wherefore should I disturb the idle bones ; Unprofitable ghosts that Time has laid ; Seeking to smoothe in visionary walls An altar long decayed ? For, who would look A FUGUE 149 To muddy issue that will disembogue From splintered Ganges for the sheer delight Lifting the water of the well-head lost Aloof within the Himalayan cloud ? And if I do accomplish what I seek, Finding a faith that laps me in a wave Drawn through the tidefull ages unto Him, Who, of all creatures breathing Time with me, Can share my pain, my joy, my hope, my grief ? Whose parallax of thought consists with mine ; So that we see afar the light revealed, God's presence to the very limit last, Like souls that are but one ? Not any man Will ever know with me ; nor hope with me ; Nor love with me ; nor live and die with me. When eve comes wandering in like timid fawn, One foot in poise, as if her shadow delayed To cool the glimmering wall the sun has crisped, Far off I hear a bell Bartholomew, Or Winifred beyond the City Bar ; Where the old portcullis lurks within a groove Like withered tooth forgotten in the gum. And here, within my parvis of a court, (Shut in by hospital, and ghostly trod By shadows from old casements and old walls 150 A FUGUE High-turreted on Fontainebleau, Delorme ; Or where the sea breaks over emerald isles The meadows of the mermaid ;) Curfew calls The children from the ripple and the field, The hay-cock, apple branches, and the plot Involved with roses trooping all to bed Laughing their happiness so I must hear Miles upon miles away ; or is't a dream ? But Joy is never wasted upon earth ; A child must give it, over-running sweet ; The airy Pallas leaping from the heart. Ye children, where the apricot falls down Through Summer's eager breath ; lo, my sere heart Lets in through stifled fountains, long ago Deserted, all your laughter and your tears, Equally holy till the world shall come To teach you other ev'n though many a roof Of shame and sorrow circle me and shut The fond horizon of your glebe from eyes Once sweet as yours, and dearer to one love. The furtive court, the lichened cope, the shade Cast by the lazar battlement will gleam Benign as colonnade of oaks that fanned Plantagenet in youth, and leant in age To whisper me of glory. Ah, the song ! You never sang it Lo ! it swings again Through the still lock of Memory, where my boat A FUGUE 151 Of happiness is falling. Ye have made Your wand recall the unavailing years, Shadows of their own shade ; and through the gloom Deepening below my casement, where the dusk Flits like a bat in stealth for fear the eye Gather too swift her coming, I do hear The footfall risen from desolated graves ; A whisper that is not the vigil wind, But love long buried now my balm again. What if a thought should come, which once I held Before me like a star ; but could not keep The radiance of its being ? Dare I look, Though hidden in mirk of eve ; or must mine eyes Fall down before that virgin bud of day I could not keep in purity ; but let Sin touch the unobliterated path Hope sparkled for a moment ? Oh, I fell By the hard stone Experience has laid For every man's outstepping. If the thought, Once holy in me, girding me to strive So fellow men should watch my path to know The true, the difficult way Oh, if that wish, That high resolve, to follow the light went down, Buried in twisted surf of waywardness That never gathers higher up the shore, For ever and for ever impotent ; Can I dare look and conjure up the past, 152 A FUGUE And say I followed but the track of men God made around me, of His image, full Of His divinity ; and they fell down Like Dagon and his panders ? Should not I, Who had particular star to lead me on, Have found a greater continent, smoother sea Beyond the latitude of clouded men, Less fortunate in star ? How base to serve God with less highly tempered steel than forged To be invincible armoury for me ; To take the bridle path of green delight, Leaving the hard, straight road of duty, bare To uttermost region of the world ; to shut Within the last recesses of the mind Immortal yearning for the good, the strength That never meets in wickedness a thew To master it To stifle in fond dreams, In adoration of myself and mine, The lofty psalm, the melancholy hour Calling to penance and release from God ! And this was mine, O Memory, that giv'st With partial hand too little of the sweet, Too much of sorrow ; dropping one by one The bitter distillation of your tinct To rack the tiny bowl of happiness Set before every man. Oh, not alone Am I in Grief's unconsecrated grove. But this is left to every hand that feels A FUGUE 153 For close, sustaining grasping to bring again A thankfulness that all is not a wreck (Blow high the gale, and shattering all the sea), I know a fellow wanderer will give forth, Unalienated by the dice of Fate, Heart to encourage them that are dismayed, To beat for them with double ardour bold. VI Thou, thou that sleepest with the grave to watch Over the slumber I would fain disturb ; I will not let my fingers pluck one blade, Lest somewhat of thy spirit be confined Within the tender sap, and 'twould endure Once more the pain of the disloyal world That loved thee not that were't so lovable. Tired, tired thy feet, and tired thy shrinking soul Of all too shameful revelations bared ; The evil things of poor humanity That are so many, and the good so few. Fain would I bring to thee a happiness That never was thy girdle, would addulce Thy lovely heart, so silent and so true ; If melancholy thought would not retain Her cry, that thou art never more to look With gratitude's unutterable eyes For any kindness shown. If I could spell 154 A FUGUE Enchantment, so thy beauty wore again Her Una purity, it might not be That, though my chastisement has followed far Through mournful days, I could achieve the height To make thine exquisite and darling soul Stoop equal to my own. How drugged the steps Of man too heavy with the impotence To touch the perfect way. Yet through my love, Through many tears, I might so shine in gloom That thou wouldst know me, and wouldst lift me up. Look, the unkindled moon is on the pine, Steel -dark like an old engraving. Now the bat Flits by me, dearest ; soon the night will find Her oratory among the kneeling graves. Now all the echoes of the dusty day Sink like a weary flock about the trail, And sleep remembers even the tired air. Here I will be sole listener. If my heart Entreat thee and thou canst not speak again, I shall enfold its music in my mind, And consecrate the angelus for both. And God will be about thy grave, and here, Where I have made his altar pure, alone Thine angel soul shall be His cherubim. Not for myself alone would I recall The time I held a part of heaven, to be A FUGUE 155 Companion of my darkness now no more. Would she delight again to be the sun To penetrate and flood my drugget day With such an empery of light and love That every mote, and beam, and shadow and warmth, Seemed like Arabian palaces upbuilt Still in the rosy dawn, forerunner of Time ? And if she brought my past so truly mirrored That it should be the self-same arrogance I bred i' my bone and scattered like a pard The loose leaves of the forest ; could I dare Look to her face and say, " Thou art the slain I loved, yet killed with slow intensity, While pleasure filled my lap, and thou hadst tears "? Or if her chanting face so looked me through With pity for my stubborn self, that tears Never had softened long ago, should I Know that I saw the droppings on a stone For ever and for ever, realized In her forlorn neglect ? I will not call Thee, dearest, from thy sleep ; lest some despair Unknown to me of all life's misery Should through thy resurrection wither up The small and sullen soul affliction left. For what I have been let the living atone ; And what I am let me reveal alone When I am true to my own self with trust 156 A FUGUE That somewhere is a mercy spared for me, That some time God will send fulfilling tears To be my sacrament, release and joy. And let me bear all this alone for thou Wouldst take it all to thy abundant heart To lift another's burden. It is meet That I who from the tower expectant gazed Into a promised land, yet stooped to stir The dark ditch of unrighteousness below, Should follow like a felon to the sheers Harsh steps that promise no releasing hand Often I wonder, till my thought is shut In some forgotten corner of the brain, Small as the clenched hand of a babe asleep ; If Death permitted her to come again Through his dark portal should I be afraid To hear what she will know and tell to me Just as a wave speaks through the knitted tide Up to the star that drew its motion forth ? If to the other side of the grave a wind Blows scent of immortality, a sound From our unhearing stillness too remote ; The dead must know the secret, and their eyes Will soften and their speech make mellowness In answer to our questioning perplexed. Then I would ask through one clear word to know The incorruptibility of God, A FUGUE 157 The perfect, most adoring, truth concealed From life and struggle. Though I be shut out Far from the precinct, better to resolve Within my spirit divided all the good Some dear oblating dead one wins for me. Not fully comprehended, not sustained By reason, or the bow extreme of Faith Looping for ever higher ; Truth would be Hid like a chambered bride within my soul, So close that not one other heart should know. But men should see my lips had touched a vow Above all oracle, or holy rood ; With fire so cleansed ; and all revolving thought Moved like a starry orbit, knowing God. VII If I should die to-night, my shade would come, Timid, as from the body new released, To find the old familiar walls wherein I have been cater-cousin to the fire, And child to many a tattered book beloved. Although my body lay aloof, withdrawn From eyes that ministered to me, and hands Caressful ; never more to look for day Like robin through the dark edge of his sleep, Feeling in slumber that the dawn is there ; My spirit would desire the children's room, 158 A FUGUE And with their toys, reluctant hid away, Would find their love within the cupboard door. And I would hover about time-honoured things, Through many years true friends to me, and touched A thousand and a thousand evenings fled. All put away, and never more to be Familiar to the hand but there to lie Still as a rocky splinter on the shore, A child of earth that never will have friend. The cherry-wood the true merisier Green-papered with a newel curve, embrowned In evening's idle saunter through the hour Smoke shed her delicate beatitude For heart and brain alike ; and else, the board The crusty King, beleaguered and betrayed, Less than a squatting pawn. Her love will fold About them, and behind a wealth of flower Vased in the coolth the dead man's toys will wait, For ever and for ever undisturbed. In that soft time my soul shall come and watch The silence, and the laughter, and the tears, Of her who gathered from curmudgeon Time Part of his hoarded joy, to give to me. And I will breathe softer than spider air The sun betrays softer than green light falls Through agate caves porch-opened to the sea ; To lie about her heart that will not stir A FUGUE 159 Much farther from my memory than a bird Forgets the thicket archway to her home. The cornice holds a spider. Many a time The afternoon beam from the lazy sun Made magic though the intricate design Wherein she spun outwatching all the hours. Even in that last remnant of the light, Far from the casement and the plumbless breath Of meadow breezes through the curtain poured With gusto for the room, I shall surround The dimness with my patience It shall be Part of me ; for the very, blank, cold wall Holds charm unutterable when the shade Of one beloved head falls greyly there ; And to its silence all my soul will speak Unwinding ravels of love's memory. So, when she looks to faces of the dead, Of children sleeping by the eaves, the frame Of every smiling picture shall be mine. But I shall be a veil invisible Even to Sorrow's eye, who loves the gloom ; And when with tears she looks upon my face I shall be fountain of their bitterness, Be somewhat of their joy when grief is tired. Oh, what a terrible default were Death, If never to the world our love returned 160 A FUGUE How exquisite the dolour and the pain The living suffer if no soul attend, Making the stupor less unbearable. Ye know it not, companions of my day, Struggling and never happy ; still amazed That life will not lie down like a tired tree, And be the earth again. Ye know it not, The secret of the angel who suspends Your prayer, like Moses on the Mount withdrawn ; Near to your footsteps like the shadow true, And listening to the fainting heart that calls. It is the souls of the departed come To watch the pillow lest a dread shall lurk Within the crevice of a dream I wake, With eyes that see not all the trust of day, With ears that hear not all the squandered song, But both more tuneable to a sound that breaks Audible through the long rout of the world. Often we wish our thought might be revealed E'en as it leaps, with no impediment Vexing like reeds the clear pulse of the brook. But all we do conceive we cannot say, The brain hath not the soft delivery Respondent to the soul ; and it falls out That what we wholly see, and know is good, Through warp of structure in ourselves comes forth Like a mis-minted token of full gold, A FUGUE 161 Not in itself unreal, but so made. Our broken utterance makes harsh the sound Flushed through the limpid spirit like a bow From the rosy sun low-laughing at the rain. Ears that would love our thought, whate'er it be, Because we are the source, will understand Partly, and twisted, what we held within So beautiful but giving it, so marred. Therefore, the very thought that would delight God in His Heaven, as coming from Himself To dip the earth in light serene, is made, Like anything we touch, the residue Of something blest, whose shadow is our shine. Behold, the spirit knoweth what shall come, Far off ordained, shaped by the demiurge In clouds, and silver lightning, and the fire Of comet whose proud orbit doth debel Restraint of planets. Where the asteroid Is elemental loneliness, apart, Far sunken in the vain endeavour of sight To be the faintest star's compeador, Inevitable Destiny awaits. The asteroid shall pass her like a sigh, And her unhearing shall be like the dead. She hath not any lot with stars that creep, The leanness of a planet time hath slain. But Earth with burlaps of the atmosphere, And ominous sorrow evermore the sound P. I. 162 A FUGUE Never capitulating unto joy Leaping from very heaven, shall spin with cloud And thunder for her heralds. Fate will look Her blade be very silent, very keen. I would evoke oh, that 'twere possible The secret hidden like the pyramid Kings ; Calling the hour devout to wrap me round With the immortal destiny, and show To eyes not sundered from the earth the light Invisible to prophets, poets old. There, mingling with the spirits who conceive God's melancholy triumph over men ; Who touch not any stop of sweetness held By Mercy to retard the heavy bale ; I'd take them to my bosom. They'd reveal All answer that is speculation here ; Rounding with airy light a flitch of thought, Shadowy as the fitful reef that tears A solitary medley in the sea. Never for me magnificat. Oh, God ! Thou knowest where my step shall be, afar, What love I shall inbreathe, what magic give ; What gladness shall be mine to know till death, Still as a stone awaiting, shall arise, Where he has sate to intercept, and lay A finger on my forehead, and I die. Oh, let it be that when the stroke shall fall, A FUGUE 163 The earth dissolve within my dying eyes, A righteousness shall harbour in my soul That moment with a goodly duty done ; A sweet word winnowed from the tares of toil Shall make my heart as lovely by its sound As river chanting to deserted hills. Of old we knew a glade Whose morn and evening shade Were dearer than the shine Of all the hills divine. One flower is alway best ; And, hidden near the nest, One bird of all the brood Will sanctify the wood. Philosophy can show Why you delight me so ; I never opened book To analyse a look. Since you and I were thrown Together, let a stone Be sacred to the day We loved and rode away 164 A FUGUE VIII The pink of Tasman, or the bark of Cook ; Fortresses of endurance. Joyous souls, Who took Adventure for their brother, and held Talk with the sea as though the silky wave Fell for them into sparkling syllables Calling the secret of the utter main. The wonder of Medea's Argonaut, Flushed with the dawn remote of secret gulfs, Passed to their listening face. Methinks I see Cook, where the royal reeled within the mist, Leaning upon the rampart of a sail Bellied below the dipping yard. His eyes No longer tire of the enlacing sea Drifting him near unmeditated isles. Hush ! Do you think he ever trod this rood ? Mayhap his pinnace furrowed wave and sand Twin-shadowed by the rata and the pine. And where the f antails float on branching stair Not three feet from the ripple it may be He stooped to pluck a lucid stalk that held In sap old memories of the Yorkshire wold. His keen gray eye would mark the creek that slid Through yonder thicket like a fugue that winds Through organ pipes to fall at last, desired, Smooth, delicate, a messenger of peace. Suppose he carved a name upon the pine, A FUGUE 165 One word, a letter only if it strayed Long after through the moss and fret of years, A tortive hieroglyph ; why, we would stoop To let it lie entangled in our eyes, Seeing no other, for a moment fused Suddenly with the past. Then we should be Kindred to the Olympian days when Time Stole through the fiord like a rower who delays To watch the sunset ; all forgetting, all Inheriting the magic of the place. The father of our waters. If he be One that we share with islands of the foam Of prodigal madrepores, how great the Star That shines within the double hemisphere. What are we worthy if we gather up The richness of our land, and falter not When ouf remembrance lingers in this cove Like aureole of his brightness ? Let the tide Flow ever through impediment of calm To lull the ancient haunt of great design, And great achievement. Where a full- veined heart Hath made a covenant, established it, Never should any vexing of espial Come near to palter with the memory. But troubled gratitude that cannot pour Enough in thankfulness should be our veil ; And thoughts that are too pure, too deep, for words Should wreathe a sanctity that is not ours, 166 A FUGUE Let us forget ourselves one hour and be Kin to that larger undiluted race Who took the turbulent and sullen sea To be their bosom friend ; who never found Duty a sad encumbrance, nor the grave A poor relation screened lest jaunty life Lose somewhat of the savour. What is man, Low-lapped in pleasure's way ? A hedonist, Soft as the herring roe ; a reed that trails To every stealthy sin. Lo ! here I touch A rood of rock, and something in me stirs That will not let me lose the affluence Poured from a great example. If I slack A thong too harshly bound, how swift the blood Replenishes the veins. So, let me drop The eider cloak of ease that never warmed One heart to nobleness ; and let the wind Blow me the tang of irritant latitudes Scourged by the meeting thunders. Better strength That knows the Omnipotent alone for Lord ; That, given the unequal lot of Fate, resolves To be the ruler of itself ; than grace Of sentimental delicacy spun So fine you cannot see the web of it. Come, let us drop the hypercritic flair That we are everything the gods require ; All Time has watched for while the dead and gone Have blundered through the world, scarce making it A FUGUE 167 A habitable place. Why, men have lain Cold in the tundra, parched in Afric sand, That we should find a clearer radiance thrown Across the path of knowledge. I would bear A palm to the temple of the dead renowned, If such we builded. There before the lamp Shining through vestal anthems I would kneel To give in that full moment all my heart, How poor soever in the great and true Compared to them, to such as fought for me When I lay buried in the womb of Time. This is the vanity of life ; the years Are given with affluence to such as lie Like fallen monolith, to take the sun, The darkness, sans emotion to exalt. The kauri I do lean upon to watch The last oblation of the pilgrim tide Upon the secret altar of the beach Never beheld the dolphin rays expire, Nor heard the channel music. But the huge, The unimpassioned, warder of the bush Felt through its branches breezes that had blown The spinaker of Tasman, that had smote De Gama with a terror when the night Fell like a pall about the Stormy Cape. The tree will never tell a rosary Of sad and sweet remembrance while the proud, 168 A FUGUE Most excellent, and quick desire of man To scatter to his fellows knowledge won With fierce derision of all pain and stress Is snapped asunder when he would achieve A greater glory than the pyramid. This is the vanity of vanities Time hath so little for conquistador Who wills, with Cook, to find beyond the foam Atlantis deified ; the isles, the sea, That Joy alone replenishes in dreams With all the beauty of their votary, Sleep. Ah, poor delusion of all hope, to woo A larger day to catch the flying gleam For ever on the verge. Oh great, and proud, Your dying, conquerors of land and sea, Who fail not through your fainting ; who withhold No pith of any purpose. Time has let Some bubbles on Eternity's white stream Float for a little hour, and they are gone ; Received within the mother of their being. And this the saddest of all hopelessness That never is the destiny complete, For ever unobtainable the prayer Born in the highest for the highest star ; They asking much of Time who give him much. IX A bowshot from my casement Wakefield died ; A FUGUE 169 A poplar loiters in the morning breeze, Not yet awakened by the winking sun Over the Rimutaka. In the shade Its early branches threw I doubt he sate, And watched through afternoon with dreaming eyes, Drowsy with birds' delight and full of wings, The old, old days when youth drew silky whip Through burning palm, to lash the fiery steeds, Harnessed, but loosed by every wild desire. Long before Charon took his obolus Wakefield had thrown with Fate in many a main, And still he conquered ; every hazard won A golden province born for soft renown. I see his grave, above he city roar, Not forty rods from Parliament and plebs ; Too fast belimed with spinnerules of gold To touch a finer issue. If they came Where shadows are upon the withering stone, I know not if a shame would compass them For their untiring brigandage of trade That makes the pocket rule the royal heart ; If from the loud, impetuous wind a strength Would fall ; and from the trees a holy shade Glide through the heart to make it pure and sweet, Companionable to the quiet dead, Woven within the brooding air of heaven, Each day I pass where he withdrew to look 170 A FUGUE Through habitations of old years decayed, Glowing within his memory as they shone When genius fused ideals into deeds. Beneath the arbutus I think I find Some brightness of his brain ; some thought he held In high communion with the past may sleep Where the rose trembles. So I gather it, Folding the great conception to my soul, Where all its beauty hath eternity, Like every noble instinct of the dead. Ah, city, with thy gold too much desired, And too forgetful of the men who made Thy heritage, it would be well for thee To seek the temple arch of spiritual things, Dropping the fardel of the world below The portico of quiet reverence, Within whose shadow are the dreams of Christ, Humility, Simplicity, and Truth. As sometimes in a meadow I have found The Arab tent of a song a bird had loosed, To be one night's enchantment till my feet Came to disturb it in the motley green ; So, in this grey, old domicile and glebe, Spider and mouse delivered to, I choose A mossy stone behind a clematis, Where stiff geranium faces out the wind A FUGUE 171 Scrannel and cold through winter afternoon. Here let me with the privilege of mind, That weaves the paradise, or plumbs the hell, Conceive myself a spirit unobserved, Moving within the branches where he sate Long, long ago in droning winds of warmth. Near me the plash of undefiling waves Throwing the beach aroma of the isles League-threaded through the North ; whence came the race Dark-visaged, admirals of carved canoes. Round me the littoral hamlet, with no spire, Turret, or citadel or college thrown Athwart the hill like an immovable cloud. Nothing but penury of ease and the heart Sovereign of all that is, and is to be. Here, in this partial retrospect of time, Where all familiar objects bear a hue Most strange, not dedicated in our heart Toward them when Hope looked joyous to their coming, The grand old prophet of this garden wild, Where apples redden like the morn's romance, Sighed (for the heart must ever pair with grief, Her twin), for all the shattered disarray ; The melancholy shroud Experience weaves. The eyas of his splendid youth that flew In its abounding triumph over seas 172 A FUGUE And continents tired, tired the tireless wing Of Hope who follows not the mountain tops, But cleaves the indecipherable air. With mind that was the plectrum of the lyre No other mastered ; from the stubborn strings To draw the harmony that never stirred Wooed by the doubtful knowledge that was bliss. Sundered by the inevitable sea From these dim islands ; there he weaved a web To catch the dewy dawn again, to make The distant the delightful. Others felt That large dominion of the furrowing brain That turned the barren soil of ignorance, Dropping the seed of potency therein. And lo, a people gathered here and looked Morning and evening to diviner stars Than glittered in the North. And they had tilth, Who knew of old but beggary and shame When England heard no mournful cry for land. But these, far, far aloof, and so infused With toil thrice blessed toil they scarcely knew Joy had her tent for ever here, forgot The mighty spirit who had led them forth ; Whose rod of Prospero could turn the wave Into a sounding sea of happiness; Where it was squandered on a tapu Cape, The summer reef of the Oceanides. A FUGUE 173 Dying in this retreat, I think he felt The home-thrust given by sour ingratitude ; The fruit so bitter gathered by the mob From choicest seed bestowal of the proud. How large had been the sowing, how austere The clarity of cloister hours that chose From many a loosened thought the true design To make a Kingdom happy though there be No inference of wealth in such a plan For him who schemed, drew, built, and stablished it. There comes, like doled subsistence to the poor Without a monastery, the hour that tells Our memory, unilluminate with joy, The magic of ideal life has fled. The thought as ample as the hemisphere, The generous hand that never would withhold Till nothing more was left it Ah, they died Like autumn sunsets over silver peaks, So beautiful, so fleeting, long ago. No one of all the world had fathomed it, Our heart so sweet and subtle with the flame Of God Himself ; and now it is amort, Plundered by evil-generated hours That wore its shining armour through at last ; That turned the fountain of the arching wave The sunbeam loved to alienating dust. Crusader was the soul ; and never day Could wear to eye but some parched paynim wall 174 A FUGUE Should shatter ere we laid the lance at rest. For men were we whose blazonry of strength Could never tire of steadfastness or guard ; Could never let the rust of idleness Creep like a petty insolence to rule. And we must stand like grenadiers who watch The very shadow of a shade at night, Lest lurk an Indian terror, blood on blade. And some have rolled away the stone that barred The cleft of their most blessed thought, and found The cool, dim fragrance of the holy place ; But not the sanctifying face of Christ That made our life a pilgrimage of grace ; That showed the path, so we imagined it, The strait way to the oracle of God. Wherefore has come a desolation swift Over the armoury of thought. It seems How high we soar, the deeper is the fall, How low we creep, the shock is less amaze. The weaving of bright, incorporeal chain To loop us to a fixity of star Hath failed ; and from the tangled filament We gather but the mockery of Fate, Wooing us with withdrawing hand to touch Vacuum, airy nothing, emptiness. Then is the fond ideal gone. I sink, Withdrawn into myself, and shiver again. A FUGUE 175 Is all the obstinate, full press of things A phantasy of my brain like my desire, My will to beautify the way of life ? If that adorable birth of my Soul Hath failed me, and is very fairy child Imposed on my delusion ; can the rest, The common, calendared, uncounted things Truly exist, or are they but the shade Of the poor shadow I have dowered with life ? Is this my dream, my fallibility That what I do conceive in truth to be Is but hallucination of my brain ? All thought, all power, all light, divinity, All essence of the visible, the heard, All sentiment, all error, all regard ; Are they the filmy tracery of my brain, That in its achromatic fastness limns A world and all the mystery therein ? No ! Thanks to thee, O heart, that must endu e Whether the day be equal to the task, Or fail like retiarius, Time will give From his full placket kind medicinal oil To soothe the spirit inflamed. If heart should break For every disappointment, we should be Like nautilus upon the sand, a shell Cold with the marcid wind, a derelict 176 A FUGUE Unvisited within by merry beam. Thou heart, that givest me my Song of life, Keyed to my utmost fervour, I will guard Thy benefaction as my very blood. For without thee I could not live indeed ; Without thine aspiration I should die, Buried beneath my broken vows, ashamed. I hold it for a faith that every man Who greatly hoped, and suffered, and revealed Unconquerable will, hath made a pact With oracles unseen, who dare not leave Such great confessing souls to utter ruin. And such was Wakefield. Though he sleep un- known, Far above battle, triumph and despair, Troubled by no forgetfulness of them Who reap his bounteous sowing he hath made A covenant with all that do uphold The spirit where the flesh is imminent. We should be his, and Washington's, and Cook's, And Frobisher's, and all the goodly band Who struggled through the fall, and hardly found The way to perfect duty ; undismayed, And snatching strength from each retarding fate. X The shining cuckoo comes with alchemy He meditated not a breath, but throws A FUGUE 177 From the wet turret of the Spring. I hear The breaking of the wind's suspense of arms ; The clouds shine pomp above the lowly sun Far, far beneath the blue ineffable The eagle has criss-crossed until he fades. The waters ermined like a herald coat, Grey with the soft and dappled slope of wave Lifted enough to let a shadow fall, Fold every promontory, and call the woods With name beyond our hearing to look down, And cast a shade like mercy on a grief. The salt sea, tired of its eternity Outwatching mountains, rivers, trees, and towns, The very human race, the sky itself, Still, still doth loathe its immortality. And that is our companionship with life, Till Death arrives. We sicken of the form, The shape intense of labour, and the sweat Of being our own being like the sea, I have washed many an idle promontory, Letting my wave of life surround, to lapse Beneath the temples there. My mind has made Entry within deep Aulic bays and found Inestimable largesse unacclaimed. I have sunk down before the taper gleam Darkling the altar ; but no peace hath made Irrevocable holiness within. And like the sea I wandered forth again, p. M 178 A FUGUE Tired with my full volition ; till a sail, A lift of Hope, a wing, a changing cloud, Were very summit of a sweetness hid Below the verge for ever. When I came To the unwinded place all, all were gone. Thus I am loath to be. For never wave Had my monotony of life ; a joy Gleams somewhere momentarily through the tide Breaking upon the parapet of cliff To crumble in a thunder God must hear; While my faint voice is only thistledown, Puffed by the airy wind a fathom high, To tumble into crevices of stone, Companion to the curlew and the owl. The varlet wind, tattered and torn by boughs Older than Charlemagne, must laugh at me ; A pantler spirit in the lapse of time Filling the topmost day the world hath known. The most supreme dominion of the arts, Battened upon the knowledge of the past, Produces me. If I had beggary ; Apparel open to the jibe of sleet, Enlacement of the rain ; a beard too grey Through poverty to be the eye's contempt ; I should bulk larger to the inner eye Of Contemplation that will see the ring Humility wears wedding it to heaven. But such a child of gathered arrogance A FUGUE 179 Of nineteen hundred years oh, whip me, Time, That I am foundered with misdoubt ; that greed, Satiety, indifference, the sloth The rout of Comus love, are on my shield Emblazoned for the tournament of life. Youth placed a frontlet of pure light serene Immortal on my helmet. What the touch Coming like thief at night that did deplume ? Oh, softness of the soul that loses fire Like the wild heath in fog. I never knew That Truth had left me, till her latch was loose, Clicked in the night by every wheedling air ; And all my hearth was ashen and forlorn. Not leaning to malignity, not prone To sly malevolence, my heart ; not slack To know the good, to cherish it to fall From the good company of soldiers true Treading the battled road ! No ; it was mine To be the shuttlecock of maladies Too subtle, insignificant to name. But last they left me with a mind besmirched; Like one not taken in adultery, But looking for it like a hind who waits A master where the booths and tapsters blare. And thus o'er weeded like an urchin's plot A short month since the mother planted all ; Sketching a shaggy forest of wall-flower, 180 A FUGUE A castle of forget-me-not, a hedge Of violet and primrose where the dove Could lurk, a part in the entangled sun, A part in shade, like a corrupted text ; My loose endeavour fell derisively. The darnel was my fruit for wholesome age, That should with harvesting and sober eye Take all good things God gives and say, Amen. And I preferred the idle draff, the scum Such as a tallow-chandler loves to smear Because his children's living lurks therein ; But shameful, niggard, to the fruited mind Knowing the throb of Plato, and the gleam Wordsworth has netted, watching old romance. Thus labour with decisive spade must stand Baffled behind sheer thickets of dead days, And wandering- Willie thorns a bird must skim Like a grey arrow flying ; evermore Deserted by the jocund day ; and I With fumbling impotence of old resolve Not dead, but smouldering like a wrack of weeds, Think tidy ingenuity is strength. Thus every duty is encumbrance ; toil Hateful necessity to me. I feel The ever-present shape of carvel Time, Wrought so it cannot drown. Oh, I am made One with the dusty creatures whom a wheel Slays with a tepid insolence, and leaves A FUGUE 181 A remnant terrified, stone-hid, and cold. The mamelon where I sit apart hath known The marvel of the constellation drift, With planets of pale systems dimly guessed In the unfathomable gulf untold ; And heard the lapsing of the tide beneath, That bares a rock malignant and bereaved By devastating onset of the sea, Sounding the self-same song the planets chaunt. But, oh, insufferable, I am near The secret that no agonies disclose, No voice ameliorates for me. My heart Will beat for ever like the formal wave, And never know the hiddenness divine. The bullace is akin to me ; the flax Blue-lit athwart the swamp hath cradled scent Ages, with only birds and butterflies To dip their shining in. So, welcome, wind, That with thine insolence wilt take the sea Between thy palms to churn it into foam ; Wilt shoulder Atlantean leagues in play, Squandering them on the quaking Finisterre, Still trembling when thou hast forgotten them ; Thou far away a fifty latitudes. Joyful for me to find a power endures Like Caesar knew it, and the Mongol Kings Creeping through dawn of Time. How many hills 182 A FUGUE Have crumbled at the peak through thy rapine, Snatching at parapet of snowy towers Impetuously for centuries to loose An ell of granite. Oh, be thou the star That men should follow. Nothing is awry If aught be done, though imperceptible, To move the stubborn forces of the world. Be thou the guidon of my lance, to urge Me whom the desultory hours combine To make a laggard like a thistle-down. Oh, lift me like thine earth-disdaining feet Beyond the arc of light-alluring cloud, Or Coma Berenices faint and far. God drew, in contradiction to His smile, A tier of famished rock the wolves that work The Jeddart justice of the sea. I'd lief Not look below, lest somewhere in the sand, Like a grey log the Katipo will haunt, A sailor breaks the parapet of the wave Flicking his cheek ; and in his body bears The crucifixion of a thousand years The tired foam has endured like blinking child Whose sight God hath forgotten at its birth. The wind may whistle me the harmonies Of islets where the palm is sentinel For ever by the derelicts of Time, The wandering billows booming evermore. A FUGUE 183 Leap up, ye traceries of foam, to snatch A moment peace in coralline lagoons, Ere power inexorable thrust you forth To turmoil of tide immortality, The handmaid of the moon. Within our hearts Dwells your unhappiness, uncertainty. Here Sorrow is for ever tilting Joy Beneath the towers and battlements of Hope ; And with her sad face like the servile moon Is alway with us when we know it not. XI Look, farther than the eye perceives the wave, Pendent a fortalice of cloud. How still ! It will not move although I watch all day. Almost I think a phantom army wheels Along the plain of heaven through that array Of cumulus on cumulus. Methinks A thousand leagues of rolling down are hid, And viewless valleys, in the snowy whorls. Castles are perpendicular to slopes Deeper than dark Cantabrian ravine. Far off, beyond Imagination's ken, Squadrons may charge athwart the sluggard plain Under the shining peaks of snow ; and war Break at the feet of cataract of cloud Leaping from heaven to the sea. Old armoury 184 A FUGUE Of knights, compeadors, and bannerets Clash by the precipices ; screams of fear Frighten the sea-fowl fearless of the wave. I'll look no more. The brain is giddy now ; Full of the passion of the past, and tired That man for ever is a beast of pain, Blood, wrath, and sorrow, evil and despair. Such power Imagination hath o'er us That even to the solid earth we give A breath, a being, hope, and burial Of hope unrealized. It is our heart Calls to respond the mountain and the sea ; Bids them to shine or gloom as we are made Sad or delighted. We are children all Who weave from tapestry of cloud and light A fragment of God's temple. We would hear With the evoking spirit music blown From the wild bugles of romance ; and give To airy pencils of the shadeless clouds The sombre pillars of eternity. Thus I conceive beyond the last lean rib Of cirro-stratus, in a meadow of foam Three islets like three minsters. If I chose This for abundance of delight, and calm Like the full shadow of a Grecian god, The other twain would laugh so inwardly Across the netted channel of the three A FUGUE 185 That every leaf voiced by the wind's metee Would call me judge mischanced of loveliness. Then I, too happy for unhappiness, Still would desire the sister isles, would think Imperfect the consummate, unachieved The unachievable Hope satisfied. Within a grove of boscage never trod By faun or naiad ; where the rain would come Like Vesper to a moat at Sylvester Eve ; Would I conceal from men the thought I held, But dare not utter. Are we not enslaved By circumstance ? And what I think, I hold More deeply than the rose her tender core. And thou, O brother of my broken seal Partly revealing, but withdrawn again Doth not thy spirit long to fly like bird Far, far away from eyes that are too cold To look upon the sudden sacrament Thou wouldst uplift most secretly to God ? Doth not the wish to be alone with tears Make part of our divinity ? Would God, Who loveth solitude, instil in us That super-sense to be alone, if tears Held not the quintessence of all He gives ? Here, if I grieve apart from alien life, Shut in by waves which, netted by the sun, Make meshes of a Coan robe, I draw From unobtruding fall of foliage, 186 A FUGUE Low murmur of a fountain never seen, And flight of dewy birds ; a sound that makes Music that never shall be gathered in Save by the fitful ear of Solitude. Come ; let me people, with my fancy tinged By cast of ancient thought, this isle of sleep. I let it wait a thousand years alone ; Many and many an age shall creep away, And not one step shall touch the virgin beach. Last, comes the happy warrior of the sea, The Englishman with careless patronage Of shadowy Cape he names ; then sails away To stumble upon archipelagoes, Shoals, continents, and rivers thick with reed Where he will find the air of Abraham Unmoved in sluggish pools four thousand years. Yes ; let him be forerunner in my nook. His yawl hath floundered through the coral gate, And mermaids have fled thence where England gazed From eyes as blue as their enfolding seas. That happy band of men who scorned to know The nerves of lesser children. When the threat Came large their soul was greater. Such the joy Of striving aye for England it became, Like a bird's morning melody, a part A FUGUE 187 Of life as Heaven ordained it. So the task Fulfilled in duty done, their spirit turned With an Olympian zest to frolic days ; And beauty was their constellation broad. There Jenny threw the smile a frigate loved Nay, line-of-battle ship and every man, With pride of battle in his blood, held fast Above all else to cult of frolic girls. To caper as though earth were Fiddlers' Green, Rum, shag, and shining dollars, easy love (And sword-play with the French to top them all) ; That was a pantomime but harlequin Slapped with a potent sword the arch where- through Gleamed morning with a tumble of far sails. Forgotten then the windfall of a smile That warmed the frozen marrow in the bones, Making one think the pale Magellan clouds A dream. Forgotten ankles trim and arms So rounded 'twere a sin to let them slip Their cable from the breast and, ho for War ! Give me the spacious heart that turns the way To smile of beauty ; but hath element That only solitary Duty knows. Some footsteps we may guess have folded down The patine of pale moss beneath the palm ; And voices have re-echoed through the wood With sound that to the rock of Quiberon 188 A FUGUE Or Basque made answer of the thunder. Here I conjure up the far-delivered flame, The cannon shaking all the Channel isles, Keeping for England her unfettered air. But they are gone. Only to me shall come The air blown over wave and reef and palm, With not one other face to listen to it. Oh, envy me, that I shall be alone, Like the clear eye of the astronomer Watching the dykes of Mars, that were built up Ere the gorilla was the lord of earth. Like Dantes, I shall leave my Castle D'lf Only to be a film in sepulchre In the vast circumverging sea ; my boat Shall bear me when my dying hands shall thrust The little strength I have through thickening wave. And every time I lift the weeping oar The drops shall be my last long thoughts that fall For ever to the earth ; to be no more My secret Kingdom, holding in suspense The being I was made. So I shall sink Deeper than plummet ever shall amaze The silent, half-lit creatures of the ooze ; Be one with them that are the spoil of Time, Gotten with his tense hand beneath the sea. Ere God shall call me from the beaten field A FUGUE 189 Where toil no longer loads my harvest full ; When what He hath ordained should come to me Has passed into the motion of the world (Not in itself excrescence, but a mould Shaped to the huge endeavour of the globe) ; I shall embattle all my fugitive hope Behind this coral reef ; to seek a heaven The pool of my own stirring morn and eve. Like all the men and women who have found Animal life a sheer deceit, a gourd Withered in taste and substance, I shall look Ever upon the breeze, the canticle Of towering birds, the tide ; to ravel out The staple of full thought. And I shall probe These simple, marvellous delights dispersed Like a bride's seed of blessing at the porch ; To win the glory of their diligence, The secret of their fused eternity, And their delaying not at dark and dawn To be the symbol of God's going forth. Here, if I look through Catherine-window leaves Looping a turquoise acre of the main, In small I see the universe of foam. The whiteness where a gull will dip to spy Chance-medley of the deep-encumbered sea Holds an apocalypse the seer world Carries within her wheeling evermore 190 A FUGUE From the uttermost unto the uttermost. Ah, teasing sight and sound permitted men To know, as far as eye and ear may learn, Like a poor scholar with the abacus. But why the coloured beads make harmony Of numbers, or opposed, his heart will ache To solve the riddle. So, the elements Come to me like the gossamer at dawn Floats from the night ; and whither it shall go, And where it has been cradled, I ignore. But I can never leave the sorcery Of the unknowable. The blue expanse Of wave is yielding liquid melody Pealing about the rocks within my mind Like bell-buoy swaying to the sunken reef ; But what it utters never do I know, More than the sea-fowl in her nest can prize The carving of the precipice, her home. Hark ! Hark ! Diana's horn. Hide, my merry men, and lean Where the water- course has torn Thorough crevices unseen. Not a bird will crisp or preen, Though it be the top of morn. Hear, hear Diana's horn ! Hark ! Hark ! Diana's horn. Piercing glory through the boughs ; A FUGUE 191 Madly we are overborne By Olympian airs that drowse. We are sunk beyond all vows ; Spear and quiver overworn. Hear, hear Diana's horn ! Hark ! Hark ! Diana's horn. Far away, below a peak, Haunts a bugle song forlorn That no man may ever seek ; Mortal man shall never speak Love that turneth him to scorn. Hear . . . hear . . . Diana's horn ! XII This is the round earth In my sept of mind, Enclosed by pale conclusive from the rest, So never any soul may enter in Completely, be my shadow, fire, or strength, I am the microcosm of them all ; The creatures made like me. Can I select From all their humour, idiosyncrasy, A portioned nerve, like stop to play upon, And beg you listen to the song of man, That I must know because it is myself ? Silent Necessity has never made One man so like another, he is he. 192 A FUGUE And spite of all enforcement, I should lapse Upon a marred endeavour to be true Toward likeness and unlikeness to myself ; And what was beauty, truth, and heaven concealed Come through my formal singing tense and bare. Let me be my own mind's inquisitor To rack the secret out. Yet, Truth is hid So close behind a velvet visor mask That thou, my soul, knowst not her lineaments As God created them. I cover up Features I will not love because they tell The worthlessness of what I do accord With pleasure. Somewhat of the Stoic school Is warp and woof of Conscience, unavowed To this way or the other ; who hath eye For the strict middle path that I have loathed Alway because God was the architect. I, child of heaven with my stain-spotted robe ; Wilful with knowledge and laborious guile Culled from my paramours of worldly lore, Fret me if any shape disturb my browse Of battening thought on wickedness and gold. How stand I then with Truth who shows severe The alienation of my heart from right ; Who will not soften for my quaking feet One stone, not ev'n to Jesus' self denied ? Ah, Truth, I know not if thy face is sweet, A FUGUE 198 Thyself a blessing ; for my days have been Led through the quags of evil, and my sight Is muddied with the feculence of doubt. Would'st know me if I held with shame thy robe, Pressing the folds to reassure myself I had thee safe beyond all disarray Of thought encumbered with old felonies I have conceived 'gainst righteousness ? I'd lief Tread where thy foot should not be all ashamed To guide me ; Evil has beleaguered me, And I have followed her unequal star ; Before the sin so bright achieved, so base. I wonder if my soul came unto me Far back delayed through many an eery change ? Was it the lamp of an Athenian lord Who touched the topmost bough of life and joy With Pericles, with Sappho ? Did I look Through heavy-lidded eyes at Nero's pimps Drugged with red wine and murder ? Ovid knew The thing the Imperator would conceal. Were we entombed at Tomi ; did we quaff Deep the dark vintage of antiquity To drown our grief ? Perhaps Ambubajae Sang to my drowsy ear, and thought of sands Lapping the Syrian oasis. Drop, drop Oh, Time, thy melancholy curtain, weaved Too much from sorrow and remembrance drear; P. N 194 A FUGUE Lest I do search too close to my dead past. Starting a terror that will make me look Never again to thee. Yes, I have been So twilled to my environment, I wore The supple look, magnanimous, the sleek, Proud, lustful, treacherous, bold, impotent ; Carried within my bosom bird and swine Now saviour to my brethren, now a slave To the libidinous and cruel night. So are we children of our heritage ; Made carnal, spiritual, by the fold Wrapping us loosely as we grow in strength ; Become the harlot or the nun ; the sweet And blessed light of heaven, or murky air Bats wing of brothel. Thou, O God, hast made Our circumstance, and often we are hid From thy sustaining love ; we cannot hold The sanctity thou givest. Lift me up ! Inscrutable though all thy judgments be ; If my poor step must stumble in the mire, Forget me not for my infirmity. Ah, if my soul has played the harlequin, And like the puppet of the pantomime Changed the integument from sea to air, Palace or jail ; if, like the wave of Time I have forgotten the emotion breathed Through me when I began to look on earth A FUGUE 195 How tired, tired, tired ; how fretful of the gain That I have struggled for, the gossamer Sliding within my grasp. When Aaron changed His rod to serpent did I not look down With cozened eyes ; and Pharaoh made with me A sigh of dreadful fear. I knew the stone Founding the pyramid, I saw the blood Ooze for the mortar. Once Archimedes Drew me the parable of Titan force To shake the rugged earth. All, all are gone. The learning I have won with beggary Becomes a tribulation and a scoff. Truth that inhabited their altar graved Lies like an adder by a ruined arch Pillared in Thebes ; and all the many shapes I have been guiding star for make a sleep. Wherefore has come from our monotony Of proving ever false the painted true A staleness in the mind. Of what accompt To take the heaped up riches of the past, If there is not one man hath need of it ? If Adam were a sophist, shall I nurse The axiom he marvelled with, and prove The round earth flat ? And when the night makes moan Shall I lie shivering in the matted grass With slimy paddocks, sith I dare not stand 196 A FUGUE Lest Satan stab me in the knotted gloom ? God did not make me for the countenance Of thought exploded ; did not give me brain To play mnemonics with old bric-a-brac Which had a faint, fine meaning long ago. Something it is to gain a pathway sure Beyond the dismal swamp, the blackness passed The fair land blown with February rains Bowed along all the verge. Remains the end We are created for to single out, Fight and endeavour, triumph and endure. Like an old tree that has outwatched the stars, And knows that Nature never can be snared To leave her rugged path, my soul that hid, Submissive, innocent, when first it lay Concealed in primitive man, can not forget The splendour of the fable once believed. Neither can I assume the face to think True is the false that some Diogenes Made surly answer to benighted fools. What is Experience but God's mannja thrown To feed the hungry soul that cannot live Without His sustenance ? Oh, heaven forbid That to our voluntary feet which press To higher equity a chain must cling, A murderer of sweet thought, once forged for hearts Beating for freedom ever and for ever. A FUGUE 197 For all the lapsed and broken- winged desires To reach the Unknowable the heart is sick. We that have cast upon the troubled wave Bread to return again through many tears ; Can we establish, hope to rectify, The inconstant smile of God who turns away, Leaving us with imperishable desire To be a part of Him ; to find the path His angels tread, who waver like the corn Beneath the setting sun, before His flame ? XIII Doubtless, if God had willed, a greater soul Had compassed men ; and to the Infinite The struggle had been nearer. But He knows, Who hath accomplished all, foreseeing all ; All dedicated, all intensified, To be their own fulfilment. We shall make Through boundless issue of far-flowing streams The ford to reach the farther bank, whereon Lie all the quiet witnesses of God ; Souls who have sought, and found the Paraclete. God will outshake the thunder with His step ; Darkness shall be His chamber if we dare Ope eyes before the glory of His coming. 198 A FUGUE Oh, Father, if Thy splendour be too high For us to probe save in the questioning Of all Thou art ; it may be yonder star Whose light hath taken cycles of cold years To reach our vestiges may find Thee near ; Knowing Thine awful Spirit as a child Learneth the fondness of the mother's smile. The whiteness of one star may be the flame Of knowledge at the centre. Oh, 'tis ill To think the innumerable dead who broke The stubborn glebe of life have watched the fall And rise of that magnificent abode Of God fulfilling all things ; and none knew His sovranty was shining. I will dare To wander in my thought from earth that cloy With too much of desire to look, to find, In the far brightness God made manifest, Illuminated, and the ultimate Conception of the beings there. Perhaps The star a babe may watch into a cloud Over the wood, that shuts it in, may be The home of those most fortunate, most blessed, Whom God has chosen, from the myriad cast Through His eternity, for truth revealed. Oh, bitterness for the uncounted dead. To seek, to ponder, agonize, aspire ; Die with the thirst to know Him unappeased ; While wheeling nightly to the cresset earth A FUGUE 199 The star has shone to unresponsive eyes, Blind, blind, that knew not God within His fane. Whither have led jejune philosophies, Shining with their own phosphorescence pale ? Where are the revelations too beloved, Now but the symmetry of idle tales Not lulling even children ? Thou, O God, Hast teased us with such texture. If it be Another world doth hold Thyself revealed, How canst Thou count it for a wickedness We have not been so blest ? How could we know That nightly in Thy temple silvery-poised Beyond the Pleiades Thyself wast one With larger souls than ours ; who long ago Met Tribulation ere we knew her face, Older than shredded hills ; who by the fire Of agony were purified to Thee ? Sun-worshipper be thou, O Earth, lament No more the Inconceivable. Behold, He is within that arc of glory flamed Over the tired sea when Night has weaved Sleep and perpetual dream for all the world. Oh, think of it, thou earth of many tears. Remember all the martyrs who have died To show Thee, if they might, the glowing path Which thou wouldst not accept. Oh, irony Of Providence, to slay the fairest souls 200 A FUGUE Ever were squandered to the world ; to find Nothing to take their place but sullenness, Stupidity, and arrogance unhealed. Earth, I must be like one who finds at last Thou art not all his duty. If we break The salutary bonds of youth, to breast The surges, and the desert, and the hills, Only to build a nest for loving hearts, And little children to be deities ; And, last, to lay the body in the grave Shall we not turn the fascinated thought From old enchantment ? Earth, thou art my home, My providence, my comforter, my grave. But evermore mine eyes are turned from thee, Though not ungrateful for thy tenderness That has been softer than my mood deserved. But thou wilt never know, or know too late For any poor believer now with breath, All the transfiguration deified, Familiar to the eyes of lordlier men, Encompassing their daily life, their death. Oh, men, who strive, and hope, and die with me ; Oh, hearts that are the riddle of our pain, And our delight ; how will it be with us When God is in our life, and we partake His Essence as we breathe the loyal air ? A FUGUE 201 I know not if our nature shall go forth Like the indomitable wave that curves League-long through latitudes of light and dark, As something driven by the hand of God That no small thing of all the globe can stay ; A being given a new glory, shaped Unlike the trembling creature that would know The taste of evil ere it touched the pure. Such shade are we of goodness that our sleep Even is fretted by the dross of earth. Far out at sea men pray to-night, " O Lord ! Have mercy on the King ; be Thou his stay." Ah, bitter fruit within the mouth we know Through all the land the King is one with Death. Not any more now than the womb-cold child ; Not so much as the wind that breathes a flower So soft the motion is invisible. Yet, Thou, O Lord, permittest at Thy feet The useless, late imploring of the men Who give Thee all their suppliance for Thou Hast slain the pitiable prayer before Thine altar hath received it. What is man ; And what art Thou ; that even our deep of soul Made manifest in tears is nothing worth ; Since Thou hast shut us in, and never word May let us know Thine entity. O God, Thus to deprive Thy creatures of Thine aid 202 A FUGUE They stumble for in darkness. Is Thy soul Too limitless to feel the limit thrown Even around the largest of Thy thralls, Creeping to find Thee near ? Art Thou benumbed By countless generations of old wrong, The wicked, and the foolish till Thy wrath Has burned Thy Mercy, and Thy smile is turned To a tormenting irony that makes The tears of men a foolishness ? Forbid, O, God, forbid that everlasting night Shall lie upon the arching world of thought ; Dark, dark as the intense beam of the sun Upon the wasted sight. Have we thus toiled, Yea, those before us through a million years, To touch Thy robe, and followed ever agleam Of glory that hath failed us ? It is good The labourer hath his hire. But, wilt Thou pay The monstrous debt Thou owest unto us ? The imperishable heart of man has held Thee fast in shadowy splendour ; is it not As holy as Thy angels ; is our grief Less fruitful of Thine alms than joy that sings About Thy Courts of Glory ? I would fain Believe the miserable thank me most, As wanting joy the most ; and surely Thou Art not below my charity to grief The creature Thou hast made a light to Thee ? Look ! The unconquerable star of morn, A FUGUE 203 Too steely for the prying telescope, Heralds with greater flame than white Capella The smooth, far-sunken sun. Is that the abode Of wanderers like the men and women here ? Is that supreme dominion of all light Wracked with our melancholy dread that life Lies like a shell upon the shore to be Forsaken, and forgotten, and foredoomed, Sport for the passive atmosphere. Hast Thou Revealed to them thereon what is denied To us appealing ? Thou, O Lord, hast made Equal in stature of the soul the shapes Moving upon the planets. Canst Thou give To these infinity of Truth and Joy, To those the miserable husk of Doubt ? They cannot be a nearer part of Thee ; For we are Thine alone, and Thou art us. And though we wander evermore delayed By a malignant hour, we turn to Thee. XIV The lapwing thought that leads me from the nest Holding the secret I would fain disturb Ah, teasing strength of brain that God has dowered With somewhat of His Majesty ; yet flawed With imperceptible weakness which we prove 204 A FUGUE For ever and for ever when we probe. I grasp a thought that shall attain an end Above the faculty of words ; I lean My spirit to infinity, to catch A gleam beyond the planetary world. A moment I am victor ; then, the fall, Eternally the shadow. My poor thread Of labouring light is scattered like the plume Of tenuous comet fading. I have snatched A partial thread slack clinging to my hand ; The farther end is where the sunbeams join The frontier of a land we never knew. Ask, and it shall be given you, said He. But He has looped our path with obstacles, A criss-cross of amaze. Our very eyes See not one thing a whole. We are allured Sidelong to glittering valleys full of bones, Under the turf, of men who straggled down ; The incomplete but chosen sons of God, Filled with His spirit but denied His grace. What is anticipation but the gleam Of coming hail that leaves the stark field cold ' Hadst ever thou a joy soft-conjured up That left thee happy with no happiness Possible for thee in the rich round world Coequal with that triumph ? No no no Janus that looked with level eyes to war A FUGUE 205 And peace was not indifferent like Joy To thy extremest prayer. She poured for thee Her draught Olympian ; but her shining cup Retained the last full ripeness of the vine Thy very adoration craved. She held To other lips the fragrance, leaving thee Unsatisfied, unthankful, unbenign. And sorrow is ever near ! Ah, bolt the door, Lest the lush curls of children turn to dust Beneath her numbing hand lest all thy life Depart with the departing breath of one Who loves thee as the cloud loves the last ray Of the depending sun ; lest with the eyes That hold thy spiritual image, loved by love Undoubting, fades the morning of the world For thee in death, and thou art desolate. Oh, closest friend we love not, Sorrow pale, Who sparest me to strike a dearer heart Full wedded to all innocence and love, Touch not the border of her robe ; but shoot Thy sharp sleet through my bones till I am one Finding no warmth of joy, nor any more A smile in the day-break, in the eve a breath Submissive like a woman's love to soothe. Press me the hyssop, if thy hand must fall Upon the lintel of my door ; perceive No other in this house. For I am made, 206 A FUGUE By Time and dereliction of my dues, Least worthy to be blest. For we are trash If we make no atonement to the earth By raising it a little. Silence, rest, Be my reward, and all forgetfulness, Save in one bosom bearing evermore The torch I lit with my caressing hand. Oh, world too old for disappointment's hour To cark thee any more, Time cannot tell A grief thou hast not known. And I will be A child of thy submitting strength and pain ; Too proud to weep for any load I bear, And shining with reflected light through all. I am the conqueror though I am slain, If to my spirit true. So let it be; No never shall I cry aloud though Fate Cutting a swath through human life, let fall Harshest on me her wayward sullen blade. Once, Time was all awry But now I smile, Thanking the good intent Fate folded up, Unknowing, in her fardel. Surely, the blind, Forbidding Fury misses half her aim, And when she would be devilish is our friend. Yes, I have gathered from the stony field Fate chose for me a hidden recompense. For every stone, I think, has shielded flower A FUGUE 207 From wind with agony of snow-heaped cloud. Without that chastening blow I had not sailed To that delicious land that held thee, dear, Awaiting me ; another hand had culled The unobtrusive rose of all the world Ere I had found the trellis. Dear, thy face Breaks through the darkness, letting slips of gold Lie on the furrowed field of wretchedness, Every furrow a sorrow. Thou art here, And I have thankfulness within my breast. The world I dimly probed in youthful dreams Long, long ago dissolved ; and I have left The moorland of the sunrise where I stood Looking 'neath shading palm for fairy gold, And dewy paths to gulfs of ample shore Spread like a praying fjord. But thou art here; And disappointment like a withered leaf Slides to the verge away at lightest sigh Embalmment of thy love. Oh, take all power, All pride, pre-eminence, all wizardry To win the earth's full riches leave me love That wears but constancy for woof, and brings, Like a dim compline bell, peace, grace, and kind Memorial of soft thought in softer word. Thine, dearest, all are thine ; and so I let The footfall of the searcher for the gold, Renown and pomp, desert me in the glade Where thou art fountain, bird, and song, and palm. 208 A FUGUE This for the eyes that lit A lamp before my feet To show life incomplete, Though Love encircle it, Unless it intertwine With sacrifice divine. To her alone I give The last full thought withheld From words the tongue has spelled ; Where secrecy may live As sweet as only she Can bid a thought to be. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 01 L9-50wi-4,'61(B8994s4)444 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000495195 o PR 6005 1912