5<^ And each so absolute in woe, It makes perdition pleasant. Let me be ! Sit with your knees hunched, looking out to sea, And borrowing from the future all you miss I n the refused or unattempted kiss. Be once again, and be forever now, Young and unhappy, with a grief as dear As that horizon slowly coming clear Between discurtaining vapours, which allow First but a silver dimness, then the pale Gleam of lost sea, and then the golden sail. O griefs as fatal as the unfolding hour, Rich and perpetual as the thrusting flower, Urgent as all creation, and as mist Tenuous ! O broken heart and lips unkissed ! Your eyes are shadowed with the thoughts unknown, Stored in the brain your masters, yet your own : Shadow of thought is mixed with light of tears : Your world is spangled with a double fire Of opal-coloured cloud the clouds aspire, Part, and the sea gleams, and the sail appears. Your grief is gathered, concentrated, spent On that one ship's one message : sweet, You are so gentle and so innocent, You cannot, though you would, Into your own unhappiness retreat : 38 Your grief's as large as your love, and as free ; They run like spells and blessings on the sea, And reach your ship, and bid its luck be good. What have I said, or what recalled ? The sin That burst my mind and let the madness in ! For I it was no other man than I Who came where you sat pouring out your youth On fragile falsehoods of the mist, and truth Of sea, and sand, and sky, And tore you from the peace of tears, And gave leave to the jealous years To tread your flower-like fortunes in the mud, And break the pride that blossomed in your blood. So, all was spent. And who has led me back, By what unguessable track, To first perfection and the best of day ? And is it you at all, and not some wraith, Born of my dead contentment's graveyard breath ? Should I not rather say That here through years it has been mine to stay, And that you went, and now return ? Alas, The old tormenting question ! pictures twain Stamped on the civil warfare of the brain, That cross each other as they pass and pass, And yet are both so certain and so plain ! Well, wraith or whim or memory, what you will, 39 Let me sit down beside you, and be still, And watch the pale dislimning of the cloud, The sun so faithful and the sail so proud, And all so apt unto the still-fresh youth And shattering sweetness of accepted truth. I will not travel further. The ship's gone, The mists close in again, and night comes on, And when it falls we shall be sitting so, I , all too sorry for the wrong I did you long years since so strangely long ! To know, or ask to know, The comfort of repentance : you, restored, By exquisite alchemy of Love the Lord, To that clear, beautiful and early sorrow. The gulls will cry about us as we sit. As for our love, I shall not speak of it, And you will have no word of it to say. Night's black but deepens the diurnal gray. Here's peace, and night, and after that the morrow. 40 X The big procession of the year begins ; The dark earth breaks beneath the covering frost ; The thrust of buried hope and beauty lost Joins issue with old tyranny, and wins. Hark! the thin horn beyond the furthest hill Proclaims the day of pageant ; laughter comes Along the water-course like beaten drums ; The world's a cup for ecstasy to fill. Against the sun a fleece of cloud hangs white ; Adventure knows not what it has to find ; And up into the rainy brilliant wind The childish fingers push, expecting light. The first thoughts coming in your head Are of content and fellowship ; A dust of green from tip to tip Of boughs innumerable is shed; And joy is what must happen soon, And faith is what the blackbird knows, And colour linked with colour flows About the country like a tune ; And are these bells, or whirring wings, That lure, and climb, and call, and float? Is that a bird, taking the perfect note, Or my own blood that sings? Lo ! as the master's gesture lifts together Tumult and wings of music in one flight, So the clear-fronted spirit of spring weather Has turned all airs and echoes to delight! Yet were spring wasted, dissipated, Squandered, abandoned, casual here and there, In points and pinions of etherial brightness : In sudden whiteness Of waves that curl and break far out to sea : I n sunny-sparkling peaks, elated Where only light can find them : in the free And wandering colour of the spray-cloud that shades The thunder and the glitter of cascades : I n delicate, terrible, imperious, rare Jets of aspiring and enkindled air So were spring spent, gone ere it came, In broken promise and lost flame, In memory of a voice heard calling through The hollow hour of sunset gone and spent, Had it not been that you were innocent, And all spring's innocent fires at one in you. For how shall man's unhappy heart Not fear the future's various ghost, When, seeking to embrace the most, He lets the least depart? Mocked and tormented by his own wid'ning scope, And range of sorrow with sorrow still further ranging, 42 Dazzled by the changeless infinite in things changing, And disappointed in the act of hope, He turns like a blind child to the warmth of spring This way, then that the flame's in everything, And peace not anywhere. What you have done I s to give place and meaning to the sun. I n you, achievement's real : in you, the hour Comes with intention and departs with power; Essential to the turning day, I n evanescence fulfilling its very soul, Since its due purpose is to pass away The cipher that illuminates the scroll, The part that means the whole. O sanity of swift desires, O unity of wandering fires, O chaste and free, serene and wild, O lovely mother-hearted child, To you, for you, to be in you fulfilled, The winds shake out the rain, the brown birds build, The sun comes up, the moments intervene, And the stars follow where the .sun has been! Punctual the moments that the seasons breed, And packed with purpose as a flower with seed ! The captured and escaping airs Of forest and attuning hill 43 Enrich your praying with their prayers, And mix their music in your will. Your look consoles the quenched spark That should have crowned the Pleiades : For you the heav'n-defying lark Scatters his notes to find the seas : In you those earth-entangling lights, The fireflies of our mental nights, That make a million dawns at once, Pretending to the place of suns The rhythm, the range, the bud, the flower, The music and the marching hour, The phantom cities that apire Through cloud, and set the cloud on fire ; All seeking, whispering, burning things ; The ships with sails like sea-gulls' wings; The voices on the hills, the voice That tells the valley to rejoice ; Confusion, wonder, effort, stir; Danger the bright discomforter ; Spring's broken plenitude of light Here in one harmony unite. You have plucked the flower nor lost the dew, And I have loved the world in you. 44 SONNETS I OCOLD remembrance, careful-careless kiss, That does not wake to hope with waking day, And at the hour of bed-time does not say : 'That was for rapture, that for peace, but this Burns for the night's more terrible auspices, And pangs and sweets of doubt and disarray!' Yet in one kiss two hearts found once the way From perfect ignorance to perfect bliss. Love has so many voices, low and high, Such range of reason, such delight of rhyme ! Yet when I asked love such a simple thing As why the autumn comes where came the spring, The only soul that answered me was I, And love was silent then for the first time. 47 II Dear, think of youth ! the shining vassalage Of doubt to dream, of time to timeless birth ; The worthiness of ardours hardly worth Their hour of posture on the morning stage, When wrong and insult called for happy rage, Not for lean compromise and sideways mirth ; And grief, because it blacked the total earth, Was brighter than the guarded gleams of age. Was youth so fair then, and was youth so kind? Was youth so true ? Was youth indeed so young ? The body tense with soul, and every wind Loose in the hedgerows ! Well, that song is sung : Heap up the embers, dear, and draw the blind : Upon the fire the last, best dream is flung. 48 Ill See how our dreams are shrivelled in the fire ! And shall we close our books and nod our heads, And take our cold ways to our separate beds, And shut our eyes and hearts against desire? Nay, one last glance will never overtire The heart that locks its tears, the eye that sheds : Mark how the vibrant blues and lambent reds Mix their thin hisses in a muted choir! The little worms of death have eaten love Where it lies buried with a tomb above The little worms that know no other game, The fiery worms that die not, worms of hell ! Yet ah, the flaming beauty, loved too well, Of dreams that we abandon to the flame! 49 IV The Prince of Darkness, as I understand, Is a most affable, complacent prince: His words that soothe, his theses that convince, Are like a green shade in a thirsty land. At the cross-roads he takes you by the hand : He cannot bear to watch you shiver and wince Between the painful and the pleasant since The pleasant is the path himself has planned. In the cold hour when we no longer care Whether our souls be saved or damned, we strain And agonise iri impotence of prayer, Not for the saint's, not for the angel's station, But for the strength, the strength to choose again To see salvation and to choose damnation. V It is not so, though men have made it so Till they have graven falsehood in truth's eyes : They have set happiness for virtue's prize, But happiness is virtue, as we know Who have staked all upon life's mortal throw, And wrung from death our immortalities: Only the moment's happiness is wise, And all the centuries are cold in woe. Truth's eyes must still look outward : turned within, They by inversion grow to falsehood. Far Apart as the two selves of one self are Is virtue's quiet from the trouble of sin : And lo, the moment we were wise to win, Hung in the dome of silence like a star ! VI The creeping hours have caught us unawares, And while we yet stand breathless from the thrill Of the warm noon, the twilight wide and chill Has stol'n the colour from the golden airs: The dead and equal light of evening bares The world of shade ere shade shall have its fill ; And the vague gleams on river, fold, and hill Are lost and lonely as unanswered prayers. Draw closer to me, dear : the greater need Must breed the greater solace. All about The moods and marvels of the day go out Like candles blown upon : the heat, the speed, Are sped : but all things bring their own redress, And love that's weary is not love the less. VII We had no test, no standard there's the fault : We gauged not what we earned nor what we spent We loved, but knew not whither love was bent, Till to itself its blindness called a halt. 'Love is the salt of life but if the salt Have lost its savour?' runs the argument: What's left of lovely, what of excellent? What shall we trust? what cleave to? what exalt? Ah ! dear, the test is that there is no test, And the unanswering silences ring true. How should the doers tell us what they do, Or the deep heart's confession stand confessed? Once, to love love then, to love you seemed best ; But now the love of love is love of you. 53 VIII I marvel at you in the morning light, Whereto your subtle braveries unfold : You look so tragic-pure, so crystal-cold, So warm with wonder and with love so bright. O beauty's strength that makes the world seem slight! O beauty's youth that makes our hopes seem old ! Withdrawn, withdrawn! O hard to have and hold! O lost, and lost again, like faith in flight ! Could I but fix you thus ! with lips apart Drooping for melancholy of memories, Not yours but ours ! with eyes where ardours start Of childhood, avid of infinities! Now music's cry is hushed at music's heart, And beauty knows the thing that beauty is. 54 IX I walk the noisy streets, and all the while Women and men throng me on every side,. And suddenly falls something to divide Them the divine from me the vain and vile: Suddenly I am lonely as an isle - I n seas unvoyaged and unverified, And from me, wave on wave and tide on tide, The world recedes, and mile on endless mile. Some call the world a shadow-world : to me I 1 seems too much a world of flesh and bone, Of will and action, resolute and free, Loud as a tempest, solid as a stone. All these are real and must always be, And I alone a shadow, I alone. 55 X I have an enemy far worse than hate, Far worse than danger, worse than any wrong That's cried upon the wind in any song, Or feared in prophecy of any fate. My bonds, impalpable and uncreate, Are each as sly as thought, and each as strong ; And when I turn for hope where hopes belong, My enemy is always at the gate. You alone can, dispersing my despair, Draw me from shadows into vital air : You alone heal me with your tranquil touch. To you it means so little, as you pass Like light along the fields : to me, alas ! In solitude, it means so much, so much. XI Love, do you love me ? All the winds go by, And all the days therewith; and still, and still, The lonely tree upon the lonely hill Stands dark and changeless in the changing sky : Beneath it cry the waves, and the winds cry About it, and have never cried their fill ; They cry for wasted faith and broken will, And every wave and every wind is I . Love, will you love me when the winds forsake The hollow day and hollow night, and leave, In place of our warm human hearts that grieve, Only the lack of all worth grieving for? When there's no faith to waste nor will to break, And the waves cry and the winds cry no more. 57 XII Once was I loved according to my need, When, for supreme assurance, breast to breast, We through the beat of mutual blood confessed The spirit's purpose in the body's deed. Then morning was my thought, and youth my creed, And spring my music ; then the ultimate test ! We did not plead with love to yield its best, We lived the best for which all lovers plead. But now a note of difference brings despair; The leaping flame that fed the vaunting fires Flickers and pales ; now breath can scarcely dare To tempt the moment of immense desires, And that great starry castle in the air Shakes, and doubt walks among the thousand spires. XIII They say that dying men see all their past, But that, I think, can never be : the vice Of brainless brooding over passion's price; The surging dark ; the day that stands aghast At its own cynic loveliness ; the vast And idiot world of terror's fire and ice These are for once, no soul could bear them twice ; They kill us, but we are done with them at last. We are done with them, we sleep, we shut our eyes ; I n death we are free and fortunate and wise Yet, if that moment of my final breath Can call, from all my memories, you alone, Your beauty for my grief shall half atone, And life shall almost be worth while, in death. 59 XIV A pretty picture of the innocent May, When night and day reciprocate the hour The Milky Way a hawthorn hedge in flower, And every hawthorn hedge a Milky Way! Such has love seemed to some : they have their day ; They take their pleasant impotence for power ; They are good and happy who decries their dower ? Who that has loved would not be ev'n as they ? For love is born in pain and bred to loss ; Others it saves, itself it cannot save; Its dreams are thick with fears past dreaming of: The lover is naked ; all he had, he gave : Only he bears, as Christ bore his own cross, The burden of intolerable love. 60 XV Despairs I have met and conquered who has not? Man's high and restless heart is braced for these; He has his candour for the mysteries, His spring and summer for the years that rot I nto oblivion ; bravery is hot Against the cold leap of the seeking seas ; The soul is lawful by its own decrees ; And grief remembers what mere joy forgot. But happiness defeats me : in the sun I shiver with chill fear and sick surmise, Suddenly : when my easy task is done, I know my task too hard, my way too steep. Beauty is young and happy in your eyes, And when I see that beauty I must weep. 61 XVI I tracked my sin and bound it but they err Who have set different worlds for love and sin I forced my sin to silence, shut it in The night of memory where stars confer- Dumb stars and strong, sequel and harbinger : But all without is marred by what's within, And lo, my best thought to my worst akin, Myself half gaoler and half prisoner! Shall it not be, when all things cease to be ; When God fulfils his purpose, and lets go The tortured twisting flames of life, and so Discrowns the mountain and dispels the sea That he shall look in his own heart, and know The thing he caged, the thing he hurt, was he? 62 XVI I Come, dear, and play this game with me undo The pattern of mixed lives, the interplay Of slender-footed shade and dancing day : The glade is green and clear, the air is blue, The dark leaves push between, the flames spill through, And like a flight of starlings break away, Till, netted in the shadows, they portray The irreparable oneness of us two. For thus two lives, divided and distract, Obey a common music, move together, See double hopes curbed in a single act, And hold one purpose by alternate tether. The shade must answer where the flame must fall, And each be saved in both or not at all. XVIII Those were our freedoms, and we come to this ! The climbing road that lures the climbing feet Is lost: there lies no mist above the wheat, Wherethrough to glimpse the silver precipice, Far off, about whose base the white seas hiss I n spray : the world grows narrow and complete : We have lost our perils in the certain sweet : We have sold our great horizons for a kiss. To every hill there is a lowly slope, But some have heights beyond all height so high, They make new worlds for the adventuring eye. We for achievement have forgone our hope, And shall not see another morning ope, Nor the new moon come into the new sky. 64 XIX. Where is our freedom sought, and where to seek? The voices of the various world agree The future's ours : to hope is to be free : Only to doubt, to fear, is to be weak. Have you not felt upon your calm, clear cheek The kiss of the bright wind of liberty? What more is there to ask, what more to be ? Peace, peace, my soul, and let the silence speak! To hope is to be free? Nay, hope's a slave To every chance ; hope is the same as fear ; Hope trembles at the wind, the star, the wave, The voice, the mood, the music ; hope stands near The chilly threshold of the waiting grave, And when the silence speaks, hope does not hear. XX There was a noise of voices in the wood, And then the shine of knives, and after that Only his lovely body lying flat, And dreadful bubbling of his bitter blood. I made a pillow for his head, a hood Of shadow for his eyes he smiled thereat. They say that death's the only democrat, For all men die, the bad men and the good. And is this all that we have done with life, And have we wasted living on this wise The summer wood, the sudden noise of strife, The fading body and the swarming flies, With none to judge the justice of the knife, Or read the heart of him that smiles and dies? 66 XXI This is the horror that, night after night, Sits grinning on my pillow that I meant To mix the peace of being innocent With the warm thrill of seeking out delight : This is the final blasphemy, the blight On all pure purpose and divine intent To dress the selfish thought, the indolent, In the priest's sable or the angel's white. For God's sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it, And do it for the pleasure. Do not say : 'Behold the spirit's liberty! a minute Will see the earthly vesture break away And God shine through.' Say: 'Here's a sin I'll sin it ; And there's the price of sinning and I'll pay.' 67 XXII Three lovely angels guard the gates of Hell Three great archangels with the saddest eyes That ever held memories of Paradise, As the dusk pool we know of in the dell Gathered last night a host of stars that fell, And kept them still and clear. The three surmise The purpose of their mournful enterprise : By name they are Michael, Raphael, Gabriel. The guards of Heav'n have mournful work to do: They are Michael, Raphael, Gabriel by name: Their eyes are sadder than the fallen flame In the dusk pool we know of, I and you. Some souls say: 'It is Hell we are travelling to;' Some: 'It is Heav'n.' The angels are the same. 68 XXIII Our love is hurt, and the bad world goes on Moving to its conclusion : in a year This corn now reaped will come again to ear, The moon will shine as last night the moon shone; The tide, whose thought is the moon's thought, will don The silver livery of subjection. Dear, Is it not strange that hearts will hope and fear And break, when our hearts, broken now, are gone ? If this were true, life's movement would rebel, And curdle to its source, as blood to the heart When the cold fires of indignation start From their obscure lair in the body. Well, I f for us two to part were just to part, All years would have one pointless tale to tell. XXIV In the old days came freedom with a sword. Ev'n so : but also freedom came with wings Fanning the faint and purple bloom that clings To the great twilight where our dreams are stored. Freedom was what the waters would afford That yet obeyed the white moon's whisperings, And freedom leapt and listened in the strings Of dulcimer and lute and clavichord. In the old days? But those old days are now. O merciful, O bright, O valiant brow, Can you seek freedom that way and I this? Not in the single note is music free, But where creation's climbing fires agree In multitudes, in flights, in silences. 70 XXV Shall we mark off our little patch of power From time's compulsive process ? Shall we sit With memory, warming our weak hands at it, And say : 'So be it ; we have had one hour' ? Surely the mountains are a better dower, With their dark scope and cloudy infinite, Than small perfection, trivial exquisite, 'Mid all that dark the brightness of a flower! Lovers are not themselves : they are more, they are all: For them are past and future spread together Like a green landscape lit by golden weather : For them the rhythmic change conjectural Of time and place is but the question whether Their God shall stand (as stand he must) or fall. XXVI In you I see more than yourself, the thing, The proud and perfect thing, that now you are I see you restless, young, irregular ; Unmarried yet, unmeet for marrying; Slim as a flower-stem in a windy Spring, Shy as the first weak splendour of a star With all your years untried, to make or mar A child, presaging and remembering. Is any life than a child's life more strange, Or any memory longer than a child's? I n you I see old age, whose thoughts can range Over a continent of woods and wilds And find how the kind towns at last befriend And the long road leads to the journey's end. 72 XXVII Between your two hands have I put my faith You know not what a precious thing you hold, Rarer than alabaster or fine gold ; A piece of God, a loving thought, a wraith Elusive as the word the sibyl saith When the ambiguous messages are told A single spirit unshared, a manifold Of them whose journey is from birth to death. Be careful of it, dear! If it should slip, And at your scornful feet should break in two, Therein would die more than our fellowship, More than the firm earth and ethereal blue ! It is not I whose heart's 'dear blood would drip From the sad wound not I, not I, but you. 73 XXVIII The town of ending on the road of years, The little golden windows bright with rest I n restless night, the welcoming warm breast Where the tired head may stoop itself with tears What are they but a dream that disappears When the night draws its armies to the west, When the cold east is tortured by the zest Of dawn's new follies and returning fears? The end of journeying there's none that knows: The slow o'ertake the swift, the weak the strong ; Here the vague saint, there the gross sinner goes, Step matched with step, song interlaced with song. All we know of the wind is that it blows, And of the long road that the road is long. 74 XXIX God also is an artist in his way, Like these young men of the complacent brush He made a canvas of the evening hush, And smeared it with a trembling veil of gray ; Then with the sunset fire made sudden play, Framing his hills in that fantastic flush, And tore it all and opened at a rush Arches and avenues of flaming day. The artist sees the light behind the forms (So the wise tell us), and, unknowing, storms God's secret mind, the meaning of God's plan : Maybe the Master 'neath whose hand and eye Grew this impetuous pageant in the sky Has read the meaning of the mind of man. 75 XXX I am frightened, sweetheart that's the long and short Of the bad mind I bear : the scent comes back Of an unhappy garden gone to wrack, The flower-beds trampled for an idiot's sport, A mass of vermin batt'ning there, a mort Of weeds a-f ester, all the green turned black, And through the sodden glades of loss and lack The dead winds blown of hate and false report. There was a music in the early air, When our young love was virgin as we were, Ripe for the rose, new to the nightingale ; But now two ghosts walk showing each to each The empty grace of ceremonious speech, And I am frightened, and the air is stale. XXXI This is the law of life : the same's the same Only by virtue of its changing shape. My dear, they have derived you from the ape, But, for the difference, God's to praise or blame. Shall we be sorrowful and call it shame Because, in love, desires of love escape? Time is a virgin born to suffer rape : We tamed the wild heart, and the heart is tame. But here's the best of it that, full of tears, Supine across my arm, with lips athirst For dizzying draughts of passion, you can win Back from the long and reasonable years, From faith and patience, the sharp joy that first To virtue lent the savour of a sin. 77 XXXII I have moods in which I almost blame the wide And simple gesture of your liberal soul, Whereby I am enfranchised of the whole Of that great kingdom at a single stride. Said I : 'the whole' ? then do no hills divide Valley from valley, and no waters roll Unbridged, unplumbed? can ev'n your gift control The still retreating solace still denied ? Why, to give all is to deny much more, Since consummation hungers for increase : Achievement is a prison, and release Comes not by op'ning of the dungeon door : There is one life to live, one world to explore, And not to ask for peace is to have peace. XXXIII I f you were nothing but a sight to share, A coloured grace, a bird of beauty preening Pale flames of plumage in the overweening Light of the insolent and crystal air, Still to my thought you would be more than fair But lo, compassionate, out of glory leaning, You have called forth the music and the meaning From doubt, retreat, confusion and despair. This is because you love me all this scope Of happy courage and insurgent hope, This simple power to understand and save, This great contempt of shame, this careless trust In the divine occasion of our dust This is the strength that love to beauty gave. 79 XXXIV Your sleep is like a child's : the thoughts that roam, Vague in the lucid and diurnal vast, Here, in the night, are harmonised, held fast, Like music bounded in a temple's dome. Here is no eddy of wind or flight of foam, But such a peace as shall absorb the past When, with torn rigging and dejected mast, From the last voyage the last ship comes home. Some cry in sleep the failure of success Reaches to hurt them there : not so with you : You are so young in sleep, you touch the close That the beginning of desire foreknew, And all the interim in your loveliness Is quiet, knowing what none waking knows. 80 XXXV Why is it that the things we hope and fear Are merged in disappointment, and betray? That the fine fringes of the hour decay Before we grasp them ; that the shadowed mere Flickers and murmurs and is never clear, And facts are always different from our play ? November follows six months after May, But why is May not May when it is here? Because the subtlety of things to be Dies in the pain of being; because we Must frame our visions for a coffin's length; Because what's lost is lost for ill or good, And what's to gain is never understood, And time is strong, and only time has strength. 81 XXXVI My dim tumultuous hell of sleep is blurred With shapes fantastic and unfortunate That make the gestures and the mouths of hate : An idiot gaping after a lost word ; A green corpse from the green earth disinterred, Walking the world with the same arrogant gait As when, alive, it feigned to challenge fate ; And broods obscene of fish and beast and bird. Yet here, ev'n here, in the grotesque alcove And secret chamber of the unplumbed mind, Your sweetness penetrates, and brings the wind Of healing, and the innocent dews of love. Wise as the serpent, simple as the dove, To dove and serpent love alike is kind. 82 XXXVII Your beauty comes with banners, and the town That might resist you, armouried with time, Stoops to a tune, surrenders to a rhyme, Before your laugh puts all defences down : Your eyes have tamed the spears ; you bear the crown Of mercy; pennants flutter and bells chime Delicious praise of you ; your glories climb The pinnacles that have forgot renown. In perfect calm, in confident quietude, Where the only flags are feathery clouds of gold, And the only bells the sheep-bells from the wold, Or summons from the spire beyond the wood, We two sit hand-in-hand, and find it good To meditate, to wonder, to withhold. XXXVIII The silver mist along the river dims The middle landscape and the distant hills; It waxes imperceptibly, and fills The evening with a sense of dreams and whims, And great Orion of the starry limbs Is blotted out, and melancholy kills Earth's wandering hopes with its insistent chills, And the late birds forget their twilight hymns. The mist clings in your eyebrows and your hair The silver starry web, the net of tears ; Your slim and startled body, unaware, Clings in my arms for warmth ; a thousand fears Torment the cloudy texture of the air, As, bit by bit, our known world disappears. XXXIX Now must we gather up and comprehend The volume of vicissitude, and take Account of loving, for each other's sake, And ask how love began and how will end (If there be any end of love, O friend Of my worst hours and best desires!) and stake Our all upon the sweetness and the ache Of what men's stories and God's stars intend. You have my all : you are my all : you give, Out of your bounty and content of soul, The only strength that makes me fit to live Since earth of spirit takes such heavy toll : Yet I, the weak, the faint, the fugitive, Stand here, an equal part of the great whole. XL This is my plea before the accusing nod Of that imaginary judge whose frown Has held the giant generations down With the pretence that judgment comes from God This is the wonder stirring in the clod : This is the angel speaking through the clown : This changes the poor girls who walk the town To innocent flowers, starring the April sod. This is the secret, this is the clear voice, This is the little soon-forgotten word That the pale prophet in the desert heard When he looked up and saw the heav'ns rejoice : This is the law we know and will not know : Ev'n this is love., So be it : it is so. 86 XLI You told me I had saved you from the gloom Of dubious purpose, ardour unfulfilled : You said, you would not have the heart to build A house whereof I shared not every room : You said, without me life would be a doom Of vision mocked, truth pierced, and glory spilled; A ship that knew no sea ; a field untilled ; A morning baulked of day; a trance; a tomb. You said, to love me was to yield my due ; To serve was all you could of life require You, you, said this, the incomparable you ! The soul and satisfaction of desire ! Whose beauty turns the waters into fire Of sunlight and of moonlight. Is it true? XLII I will believe the thing that you have said, Though chances challenge it and doubts deny, And every planet moving in the sky Mock it with music ; though my thoughts be led Back and still back to that unhappy bed Where my first faith laid itself down to die; Though I be only such a thing as I , And all the living laugh, and all the dead. The ocean has its treasure, and the earth. I grudge to none his treasure I have mine. In solitude and darkness I incline To the last question of the final worth : But stronger than all death of light is birth Of the one human light that burns divine. 88 XLIII Two stars there are that with an equal flame Illuminate the distant air, and trace Indifferent legends on the heav'nly face Of evening. As the altering evenings came To haunt and hurt my childhood, I would blame The hours that checked my stars, and mourn the case Of those strange wanderers in the vast of space That night by night were different, and the same. A child no longer, I must watch them still, And still they journey through the night : one leads, One follows symbol of a thousand creeds, Since both move subject to an alien will ! Each asks not each the doom that both fulfil ; But the star summons, and the star succeeds. 89 XLIV What have we stayed out of the rushing course Of days and weeks and months and years, that heap Awaking on awaking, sleep on sleep, And drown occasion as a charge of horse O'erwhelms an enemy of little force And leaves the dead behind it? Must we weep Life drenched and dazed by that unpitying sweep, And nothing left of effort but remorse ? To have loved, my dear, is to have put to pause The violence of time to have gathered up Experience like water in a cup And held it tranquil to have found the key Of silence to have mingled with the cause That bids the days, weeks, months, and years to be. 90 XLV Not to be bounded ev'n by life's content, But to get up and go out to track The river of adventure back and back To the dark heart of the dark continent : Or to take ship, and seek what the seas meant By crying to the land: 'Alack, alack!' To tempt the last horizon, and to crack Our final jest in face of the event All this were much : but should we see thereby Mountains more cloudy with the foam of streams Loosed from their sides, more bright with snow, more high? Should we be wiser in the ocean-themes Than love can make us? should we draw our dreams From deeper founts of life, before we die? XLVI Perhaps, perhaps, since silence comes so soon, And none can tell what torment waits obscure For when love and delight become manure I n the small churchyard under the big moon, We should do better, while we may, to tune Our heartstrings to the tragic to endure The tortured soul's extremes than to be sure Of the small compass and the easy boon. Easy and small ? O lamentable love, O eyes uncomforted, untranquil hands, I s there one grief we are not native of ? One cruel hell's one corner that withstands Our search? one page of pain we have not read?- Lovers need have no fear of being dead. 92 XLVII The little things, the little restless things, The base and barren things, the things that spite The day, and trail processions through the night Of sad remembrances and questionings; The poverties, stupidities and stings; The silted misery, the hovering blight ; The things that block the paths of sound and sight ; The things that snare our thought and break its wings How shall we bear these? we who suffer so The shattering sacrifice, the huge despair, The terrors loosed like lightnings on the air, To leave all nature blackened from that curse! The big things are the enemies we know, The little things the traitors. Which are worse? 93 XLVIII I f you had been a woman when the alarms Of childhood still were vagrant in my blood And I was driven by life's morning mood, You would have caught me up into your arms, And told me stories of escape from harms, And made me sure my fears were understood : So, childlike, now, I draw my simple good From the mysterious chamber of your charms. But, dear, if you had been the dreaming child And I your refuge would you have brought to me All childhood's infinite infelicity? O not less solitary, not less wild, Than when for you harsh life began to be, Here in my arms with life be reconciled ! 94 XLIX We shall live, maybe, till our world turns gray, And peace comes on us as our powers grow less, And scarce we shall distinguish happiness From the opprobrious process of decay : Yet, 'mid the droop and pathos of that day, 'Mid songs that cease and wings that acquiesce, The fading skies shall one last fire confess, And love in a great sunset burn away. Or else, perhaps, because we loved so well, And found love apt to life, the end will prove A consummation rather than a change ; And, tired in the twilight, we shall spell Familiar meanings from the text of love, And only find the words a little strange. 95 L Give me love's absolution : all is clear And noble, and the peace long held in trust Is here enfranchised, and the dark of lust Breaks into beauty, being free. My dear, Whose lonely courage has affronted fear, I f death should come between us now, it must Obey the spirit that retrieved our dust To this communion. Love has conquered here. What of the road we strive and famish o'er ? Lo, that old symbol of the waves unfree ! The shore still limits and defeats the sea, The sea still breaks its heart upon the shore : But love to us has taught the less and more, And where our journey was, our home must be. 96 Printed by the Yale University Press at the Earl Trumbull Williams Memorial. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below Form L-9-15m-3,'34 UNI Y OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LIBRARY PR Gould G75j The journey odes ancT" : sonnets . A 000 862 899 2