! BERKELEY "\ IRDAPY | JNIVBRSITY OP I CALIFORNIA/ SELECTED POEMS BY GEORGE MEREDITH SELECTED POEMS BY GEORGE MEREDITH WESTMINSTER ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO. 2 WHITEHALL GARDENS 1897 LOAN STACK Edinburgh : T. and A CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty CONTENTS PAGB WOODLAND PEACE 1 THE LARK ASCENDING ...... 3 THE ORCHARD AND THE HEATH .... 9 SEED-TIME .... ... 12 OUTER AND INNER ....... 15 WIND ON THE LYRE 18 DIRGE IN WOODS ....... 19 CHANGE IN RECURRENCE 20 HARD WEATHER 22 THE SOUTH-WESTER . .... 27 THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY 33 TARDY SPRING 42 BREATH OF THE BRIAR ...... 45 YOUNG REYNARD 46 165 d CONTENTS PAGE LOVE IN THE VALLEY 47 MARIAN .......61 HYMN TO COLOUR 63 MOTHER TO BABE 69 NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY ...... 71 WHIMPER OF SYMPATHY 75 A BALLAD OF PAST MERIDIAN . 76 PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS ... 77 MELAMPUS 83 THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER . . . 92 THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES . , 100 THE YOUNG PRINCESS . . . . . ,127 THE SONG OF THEODOL1NDA . , . 139 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 147 PENETRATION AND TRUST 173 LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT 175 THE STAR SIRIUS .. 176 THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE . . , . .177 THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE Continued . . 178 CONTENTS vii PAGE THE WORLD'S ADVANCE ..,.. 179 EARTH'S SECRET 180 SENSE AND SPIRIT 181 GRACE AND LOVE 182 WINTER HEAVENS 183 MODERN LOVE 184 JUGGLING JERRY 188 THE OLD CHARTIST 194 MARTIN'S PUZZLE . . . . , . 201 A BALLAD OP FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT . . . 207 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN ... . 225 The selection here made has been under the supervision of the Author WOODLAND PEACE SWEET as Eden is the air, And Eden-sweet the ray. No Paradise is lost for them Who foot by branching root and stem ; And lightly with the woodland share The change of night and day. Here all say, We serve her, even as I : We brood, we strive to sky, We gaze upon decay, We wot of life through death, How each feeds each we spy ; And is a tangle round, Are patient ; what is dumb, We question not, nor ask The silent to give sound, The hidden to unmask, The distant to draw near. A WOODLAND PEACE And this the woodland saith : I know not hope or fear ; I take whate'er may come ; I raise my head to aspects fair, From foul I turn away. Sweet as Eden is the air. And Eden-sweet the ray. THE LARK ASCENDING HE rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, All intervolved and spreading wide, Like water-dimples down a tide Where ripple ripple overcurls And eddy into eddy whirls ; A press of hurried notes that run So fleet they scarce are more than one, Yet changeingly the trills repeat And linger ringing while they fleet, Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear To her beyond the handmaid ear, Who sits beside our inner springs, Too often dry for this he brings, THE LARK ASCENDING Which seems the very jet of earth At sight of sun, her music's mirth, As up he wings the spiral stair, A song of light, and pierces air With fountain ardour, fountain play, To reach the shining tops of day, And drink in everything discerned An ecstasy to music turned, Impelled by what his happy bill Disperses ; drinking, showering still, Unthinking save that he may give His voice the outlet, there to live Renewed in endless notes of glee, So thirsty of his voice is he, For all to hear and all to know That he is joy, awake, aglow ; The tumult of the heart to hear Through pureness filtered crystal-clear, And know the pleasure sprinkled bright By simple singing of delight ; Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained, Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained Without a break, without a fall, Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, THE LARK ASCENDING i Perennial, quavering up the chord Like myriad dews of sunny sward That trembling into fulness shine, And sparkle dropping argentine ; Such wooing as the ear receives From zephyr caught in choric leaves Of aspens when their chattering net Is flushed to white with shivers wet ; And such the water-spirit's chime On mountain heights in morning's prime, Too freshly sweet to seem excess, Too animate to need a stress ; But wider over many heads The starry voice ascending spreads, Awakening, as it waxes thin, The best in us to him akin ; And every face to watch him raised, Puts on the light of children praised ; So rich our human pleasure ripes When sweetness on sincereness pipes, Though nought be promised from the seas, But only a soft-ruffling breeze Sweep glittering on a still content, Serenity in ravishment THE LARK ASCENDING For singing till his heaven fills, Tis love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which overflows To lift us with him as he goes : The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine, He is, the hills, the human line, The meadows green, the fallows brown, The dreams of labour in the town ; He sings the sap, the quickened veins; The wedding song of sun and rains He is, the dance of children, thanks Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, And eye of violets while they breathe ; All these the circling song will wreathe, And you shall hear the herb and tree, The better heart of men shall see, Shall feel celestially, as long As you crave nothing save the song. Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, THE LARK ASCENDING f Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink. Our wisdom speaks from failing blood. Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat ; The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice. Yet men have we, whom we revere, Now names, and men still housing here, Whose lives, by many a battle-dint Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint, Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet For song our highest heaven to greet : Whom heavenly singing gives us new, Enspheres them brilliant in our blue, From firmest base to farthest leap, Because their love of Earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve, and pass reward, THE LARK ASCENDING So touching purest and so heard In the brain's reflex of yon bird : Wherefore their soul in me, or mine, Through self-forgetfulness divine, In them, that song aloft maintains, To fill the sky and thrill the plains With showerings drawn from human stores, As he to silence nearer soars, Extends the world at wings and dome, More spacious making more our home, Till lost on his aerial rings In light, and then the fancy sings. THE ORCHARD AND THE HEATH I CHANCED upon an early walk to spy A troop of children through an orchard gate : The boughs hung low, the grass was high ; They had but to lift hands or wait For fruits to fill them ; fruits were all their sky. They shouted, running on from tree to tree, And played the game the wind plays, on and round. 'Twas visible invisible glee Pursuing ; and a fountain's sound Of laughter spouted, pattering fresh on me. I could have watched them till the daylight fled, Their pretty bower made such a light of day. A small one tumbling sang, ' Oh ! head ! ' The rest to comfort her straightway Seized on a branch and thumped down apples red. 10 THE ORCHARD AND THE HEATH The tiny creature flashing through green grass, And laughing with her feet and eyes among Fresh apples, while a little lass Over as o'er breeze-ripples hung : That sight I saw, and passed as aliens pass. My footpath left the pleasant farms and lanes, Soft cottage-smoke, straight cocks a-crow, gay flowers ; Beyond the wheel-ruts of the wains, Across a heath I walked for hours, And met its rival tenants, rays and rains. Still in my view mile-distant firs appeared, When, under a patched channel-bank enriched With foxglove whose late bells drooped seared, Behold, a family had pitched Their camp, and labouring the low tent upreared. Here, too, were many children, quick to scan A new thing coming ; swarthy cheeks, white teeth : In many-coloured rags they ran, Like iron runlets of the heath. Dispersed lay broth-pot, sticks, and drinking-can. THE ORCHARD AND THE HEATH 11 Three girls, with shoulders like a boat at sea Tipped sideways by the wave (their clothing slid From either ridge unequally), Lean, swift and voluble, bestrid A starting-point, unfrocked to the bent knee. They raced ; their brothers yelled them on, and broke In act to follow, but as one they snuffed Wood-fumes, and by the fire that spoke Of provender, its pale flame puffed, And rolled athwart dwarf furzes grey-blue smoke. Soon on the dark edge of a ruddier gleam, The mother-pot perusing, all, stretched flat, Paused for its bubbling-up supreme : A dog upright in circle sat, And oft his nose went with the flying steam. I turned and looked on heaven awhile, where now The moor-faced sunset broadened with red light ; Threw high aloft a golden bough, And seemed the desert of the night Far down with mellow orchards to endow. SEED-TIME z FLOWERS of the willow-herb are wool ; Flowers of the briar berries red ; Speeding their seed as the breeze may rule, Flowers of the thistle loosen the thread. Flowers of the clematis drip in beard, Slack from the fir-tree youngly climbed ; Chaplets in air, flies foliage seared; Heeled upon earth, lie clusters rimed. ii Where were skies of the mantle stained Orange and scarlet, a coat of frieze Travels from North till day has waned, Tattered, soaked in the ditch's dyes ; Tumbles the rook under grey or slate ; Else enfolding us, damps to the bone ; Narrows the world to my neighbour's gate ; Paints me Life as a wheezy crone. 12 SEED-TIME 13 in Now seems none but the spider lord ; Star in circle his web waits prey, Silvering bush-mounds, blue brushing sward : Slow runs the hour, swift flits the ray. Now to his thread-shroud is he nigh, Nigh to the tangle where wings are sealed, He who frolicked the jewelled fly ; All is adroop on the down and the weald. rv Mists more lone for the sheep-bell enwrap Nights that tardily let slip a morn Paler than moons, and on noontide's lap Flame dies cold, like the rose late born. Rose born late, born withered in bud .' I, even I, for a zenith of sun Cry, to fulfil me, nourish my blood : O for a day of the long light, one ! v Master the blood, nor read by chills, Earth admonishes : Hast thou ploughed, 14 SEED-TIME Sown, reaped, harvested grain for the mills, Thou hast the light over shadow of cloud. Steadily eyeing, before that wail Animal-infant, thy mind began, Momently nearer me : should sight fail, Plod in the track of the husbandman. VI Verily now is our season of seed, Now in our Autumn ; and Earth discerns Them that have served her in them that can read, Glassing, where under the surface she burns, Quick at her wheel, while the fuel, decay, Brightens the fire of renewal : and we ? Death is the word of a bovine day, Know you the breast of the springing To-be. OUTER AND INNER i FROM twig to twig the spider weaves At noon his webbing fine. So near to mute the zephyrs flute That only leaflets dance. The sun draws out of hazel leaves A smell of woodland wine. I wake a swarm to sudden storm At any step's advance. Along my path is bugloss blue, The star with fruit in moss ; The foxgloves drop from throat to top A daily lesser bell. The blackest shadow, nurse of dew, Has orange skeins across ; And keenly red is one thin thread That flashing seems to swell. 15 1(5 OUTER AND INNER in My world I note ere fancy comes, Minutest hushed observe ; What busy bits of motioned wits Through an tiered mosswork strive. But now so low the stillness hums, My springs of seeing swerve, For half a wink to thrill and think The woods with nymphs alive. IV I neighbour the invisible So close that my consent Is only asked for spirits masked To leap from trees and flowers. And this because with them I dwell In thought, while calmly bent To read the lines dear Earth designs Shall speak her life on ours. v Accept, she says ; it is not hard In woods ; but she in towns OUTER AND INNER 17 Repeats,, accept ; and have we wept, And have we quailed with fears, Or shrunk with horrors, sure reward We have whom knowledge crowns ; Who see in mould the rose unfold, The soul through blood and tears. WIND ON THE LYRE THAT was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell, And wing our green to wed our blue ; But whether note of joy or knell, Not his own Father-singer knew ; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through ; The breast of us a sounded shell, The blood of us a lighted dew. is DIRGE IN WOODS A WIND sways the pines, And below Not a breath of wild air ; Still as the mosses that glow On the flooring and over the lines Of the roots here and there. The pine-tree drops its dead ; They are quiet, as under the sea. Overhead, overhead Rushes life in a race, As the clouds the clouds chase ; And we go, And we drop like the fruits of the tree, Even we, Even so. 19 CHANGE IN RECURRENCE I STOOD at the gate of the cot Where my darling, with side-glance demure, Would spy, on her trim garden-plot, The busy wild things chase and lure. For these with their ways were her feast; They had surety no enemy lurked. Their deftest of tricks to their least, She gathered in watch as she worked. II When berries were red on her ash. The blackbird would rifle them rough, Till the ground underneath looked a gash, And her rogue grew the round of a chough. 20 CHANGE IN RECURRENCE 21 The squirrel cocked ear o'er his hoop, Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush. She knew any tit of the troop All as well as the snail-tapping thrush. HI I gazed : 'twas the scene of the frame, With the face, the dear life for me, fled. No window a lute to my name, No watcher there plying the thread. But the blackbird hung pecking at will ; The squirrel from cone hopped to cone ; The thrush had a snail in his bill, And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone. HARD WEATHER BURSTS from a rending East in flaws The young green leaflet's harrier, sworn To strew the garden, strip the shaws, And show our Spring with banner torn. Was ever such virago morn ? The wind has teeth, the wind has claws. All the wind's wolves through woods are loose, The wild wind's falconry aloft. Shrill underfoot the grassblade shrews, At gallop, clumped, and down the croft Bestrid by shadows, beaten, tossed ; It seems a scythe, it seems a rod. The howl is up at the howl's accost; The shivers greet and the shivers nod. Is the land ship ? we are rolled, we drive Tritonly, cleaving hiss and hum ; Whirl with the dead, or mount or dive, Or d9wn in dregs, or on in scum. 22 HARD WEATHER 23 And drums the distant, pipes the near, And vale and hill are grey in grey, As when the surge is crumbling sheer, And sea-mews wing the haze of spray. Clouds are they bony witches ? swarms, Darting swift on the robber's flight, Hurry an infant sky in arms : It peeps, it becks ; 'tis day, 'tis night. Black while over the loop of blue The swathe is closed, like shroud on corse. Lo, as if swift the Furies flew, The Fates at heel at a cry to horse ; Interpret me the savage whirr : And is it Nature scourged, or she, Her offspring's executioner, Reducing land to barren sea ? But is there meaning in a day When this fierce angel of the air, Intent to throw, and haply slay, Can for what breath of life we bear, Exact the wrestle ? Call to mind The many meanings glistening up 24 HARD WEATHER When Nature to her nurslings kind, Hands them the fruitage and the cup ! And seek we rich significance Not otherwhere than with those tides Of pleasure on the sunned expanse, Whose flow deludes, whose ebb derides ? Look in the face of men who fare Lock-mouthed, a match in lungs and thews For this fierce angel of the air, To twist with him and take his bruise. That is the face beloved of old Of Earth, young mother of her brood : Nor broken for us shows the mould When muscle is in mind renewed : Though farther from her nature rude, Yet nearer to her spirit's hold : And though of gentler mood serene, Still forceful of her fountain-jet. So shall her blows be shrewdly met, Be luminously read the scene Where Life is at her grindstone set, That she may give us edgeing keen, HARD WEATHER 25 String us for battle, till as play The common strokes of fortune shower. Such meaning in a dagger-day Our wits may clasp to wax in power. Yea, feel us warmer at her breast, By spin of blood in lusty drill, Than when her honeyed hands caressed, And Pleasure, sapping, seemed to fill. Behold the life at ease ; it drifts. The sharpened life commands its course. She winnows, winnows roughly ; sifts, To dip her chosen in her source : Contention is the vital force, Whence pluck they brain, her prize of gifts, Sky of the senses ! on which height, Not disconnected, yet released, They see how spirit cpmes to light, Through conquest of the inner beast, Which Measure tames to movement sane, In harmony with what is fair. Never is Earth misread by brain : That is the welling of her, there 26 HARD WEATHER The mirror : with one step beyond, For likewise is it voice ; and more, Benignest kinship bids respond, When wail the weak, and them restore Whom days as fell as this may rive, While Earth sits ebon in her gloom, Us atomies of life alive Unheeding, bent on life to come. Her children of the labouring brain, These are the champions of the race, True parents, and the sole humane, With understanding for their base. Earth yields the milk, but all her mind Is vowed to thresh for stouter stock. Her passion for old giantkind, That scaled the mount, uphurled the rock, Devolves on them who read aright Her meaning and devoutly serve ; Nor in her starlessness of night Peruse her with the craven nerve But even as she from grass to corn, To eagle high from grubbing mole, Prove in strong brain her noblest born, The station for the flight of soul. THE SOUTH-WESTER \ DAY of the cloud in fleets ! O day Of wedded white and blue, that sail Immingled, with a footing ray In shadow-sandals down our vale ! And swift to ravish golden meads, Swift up the run of turf it speeds, Thy bright of head and dark of heel, To where the hilltop flings on sky, As hawk from wrist or dust from wheel, The tiptoe sealers tossed to fly : Thee the last thunder's caverned peal Delivered from a wailful night : All dusky round thy cradled light, Those brine-born issues, now in bloom Transfigured, wreathed as raven's plume And briony-leaf to watch thee lie : Dark eyebrows o'er a dreamful eye 28 THE SOUTH-WESTER Nigh opening : till in the braid Of purpled vapours thou wert rosed . Till that new babe a Goddess maid Appeared and vividly disclosed Her beat of life : then crimson played On edges of the plume and leaf: Shape had they and fair feature brief, The wings, the smiles : they flew the breast, Earth's milk. But what imperial march Their standards led for earth, none guessed Ere upward of a coloured arch, An arrow straining eager head Lightened, and high for zenith sped. Fierier followed ; followed Fire. Name the young lord of Earth's desire, Whose look her wine is, and whose mouth Her music ! Beauteous was she seen Beneath her midway West of South ; And sister was her quivered green To sapphire of the Nereid eyes On sea when sun is breeze ; she winked As they, and waved, heaved waterwise Her flood of leaves and grasses linked : A myriad lustrous butterflies THE SOUTH-WESTER 29 A moment in the fluttering sheen ; Becapped with the slate air that throws The reindeer's antlers black between Low-frowning and wide-fallen snows, A minute after ; hooded, stoled To suit a graveside Season's dirge. Lo, but the breaking of a surge, And she is in her lover's fold, Illumined o'er a boundless range Anew : and through quick morning hours The Tropic-Arctic counterchange Did seem to pant in beams and showers. But noon beheld a larger heaven; Beheld on our reflecting field The Sower to the Bearer given, And both their inner sweetest yield, Fresh as when dews were grey or first Received the flush of hues athirst. Heard we the woodland, eyeing sun, As harp and harper were they one. A murky cloud a fair pursued, Assailed, and felt the limbs elude : 30 THE SOUTH-WESTER He sat him down to pipe his woe, And some strange beast of sky became : A giant's club withheld the blow ; A milky cloud went all to flame. And there were groups where silvery springs The ethereal forest showed begirt By companies in choric rings, Whom but to see made ear alert. For music did each movement rouse, And motion was a minstrel's rage To have our spirits out of house, And bathe them on the open page. This was a day that knew not age. Since flew the vapoury twos and threes From western pile to eastern rack ; As on from peaks of Pyrenees To Graians ; youngness ruled the track. When songful beams were shut in caves, And rainy drapery swept across ; When the ranked clouds were downy waves, Breast of swan, eagle, albatross, In ordered lines to screen the blue, Youngest of light was nigh, we knew. The silver finger of it laughed THE SOUTH-WESTER 31 Along the narrow rift : it shot, Slew the huge gloom with golden shaft. Then haled on high the volumed blot, To build the hurling palace, cleave The dazzling chasm ; the flying nests, The many glory-garlands weave, Whose presence not our sight attests Till wonder with the splendour blent. And passion for the beauty flown, Make evanescence permanent, The thing at heart our endless own. Only at gathered eve knew we The marvels of the day: for then Mount upon mountain out of sea Arose, and to our spacious ken Trebled sublime Olympus round In towering amphitheatre. Colossal on enormous mound, Majestic gods we saw confer. They wafted the Dream-messenger From off the loftiest, the crowned : That Lady of the hues of foam In sun-rays : who, close under dome, THE SOUTH-WESTER A figure on the foot's descent, Irradiate to vapour went, As one whose mission was resigned, Dispieced, undraped, dissolved to threads Melting she passed into the mind, Where immortal with mortal weds. Whereby was known that we had viewed The union of our earth and skies Renewed : nor less alive renewed Than when old bards, in nature wise, Conceived pure beauty given to eyes, And with undyingness imbued. Pageant of man's poetic brain, His grand procession of the song, It was ; the Muses and their train ; Their God to lead the glittering throng : At whiles a beat of forest gong ; At whiles a glimpse of Python slain. Mostly divinest harmony, The lyre, the dance. We could believe A life in orb and brook and tree And cloud ; and still holds Memory A morning in the eyes of eve. THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY I KNOW him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines. Now ere the foreign singer thrills Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours, A herald of the million bills ; And heed him not, the loss is yours. My study, flanked with ivied fir And budded beech with dry leaves curled, Perched over yew and jumper, He neighbours, piping to his world : c 34 THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY The wooded pathways dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image of the deluge -ebb : And farther, they may hear along The stream beneath the poplar row. By fits, like welling rocks, the song Spouts of a blushful Spring in flow. But most he loves to front the vale When waves of warm South-western rains Have left our heavens clear in pale, With faintest beck of moist red veins . Vermilion wings, by distance held To pause aflight while fleeting swift : And high aloft the pearl inshelled Her lucid glow in glow will lift ; A little south of coloured sky ; Directing, gravely amorous, The human of a tender eye Through pure celestial on us : THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY 35 Remote, not alien ; still, not cold ; Unraying yet, more pearl than star ; She seems a while the vale to hold In trance, and homelier makes the far. Then Earth her sweet unscented breathes, An orb of lustre quits the height ; And like blue iris-flags, in wreaths The sky takes darkness, long ere quite. His Island voice then shall you hear, Nor ever after separate From such a twilight of the year Advancing to the vernal gate. He sings me, out of Winter's throat, The young time with the life ahead ; And my young time his leaping note Recalls to spirit-mirth from dead. Imbedded in a land of greed, Of mammon-quakings dire as Earth's, My care was but to soothe my need ; At peace among the littleworths. 36 THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY To light and song my yearning aimed ; To that deep breast of song and light Which men have barrenest proclaimed ; As 'tis to senses pricked with fright. So mine are these new fruitings rich The simple to the common brings ; I keep the youth of souls who pitch Their joy in this old heart of things : Who feel the Coming young as aye, Thrice hopeful on the ground we plough ; Alive for life, awake to die ; One voice to cheer the seedling Now. Full lasting is the song, though he, The singer, passes : lasting too, For souls not lent in usury, The rapture of the forward view. With that I bear my senses fraught Till what I am fast shoreward drives. They are the vessel of the Thought. The vessel splits, the Thought survives. THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY 37 Nought else are we when sailing brave, Save husks to raise and bid it burn. Glimpse of its livingness will wave A light the senses can discern Across the river of the death, Their close. Meanwhile, O twilight bird Of promise ! bird of happy breath ! I hear, I would the City heard. The City of the smoky fray ; A prodded ox, it drags and moans : Its Morrow no man's child ; its Day A vulture's morsel beaked to bones. It strives without a mark for strife ; It feasts beside a famished host : The loose restraint of wanton life, That threatened penance in the ghost ! Yet there our battle urges ; there Spring heroes many : issuing thence, Names that should leave no vacant air For fresh delight in confidence. 38 THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY Life was to them the bag of grain, And Death the weedy harrow's tooth. Those warriors of the sighting brain Give worn Humanity new youth. Our song and star are they to lead The tidal multitude and blind From bestial to the higher breed By fighting souls of love divined. They scorned the ventral dream of peace, Unknown in nature. This they knew : That life begets with fair increase Beyond the flesh, if life be true. Just reason based on valiant blood, The instinct bred afield would match To pipe thereof a swelling flood, Were men of Earth made wise in watch. Though now the numbers count as drops An urn might bear, they father Time. She shapes anew her dusty crops ; Her quick in their own likeness climb. THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY ( Of their own force do they create ; They climb to light, in her their root. Your brutish cry at muffled fate She smites with pangs of worse than brute. She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears A Mother whom no cry can melt ; But read her past desires and fears, The letters on her breast are spelt. A slayer, yea, as when she pressed Her savage to the slaughter-heaps, To sacrifice she prompts her best : She reaps them as the sower reaps. But read her thought to speed the race, And stars rush forth of blackest night : You chill not at a cold embrace To come, nor dread a dubious might. Her double visage, double voice, In oneness rise to quench the doubt. This breath, her gift, has only choice Of service, breathe we in or out. 40 THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY Since Pain and Pleasure on each hand Led our wild steps from slimy rock To yonder sweeps of gardenland, We breathe but to be sword or block. The sighting brain her good decree Accepts ; obeys those guides, in faith, By reason hourly fed, that she, To some the clod, to some the wraith, Is more, no mask ; a flame, a stream. Flame, stream, are we, in mid career From torrent source, delirious dream, To heaven-reflecting currents clear. And why the sons of Strength have been Her cherished offspring ever ; how The Spirit served by her is seen Through Law ; perusing love will show. Love born of knowledge, love that gains Vitality as Earth it mates, The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains, The Life, the Death, illuminates. THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY 41 For love we Earth, then serve we all ; Her mystic secret then is ours : We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire. TARDY SPRING Now the North wind ceases, The warm South-west awakes ; Swift fly the fleeces, Thick the blossom-flakes. Now hill to hill has made the stride, And distance waves the without end : Now in the breast a door flings wide ; Our farthest smiles, our next is friend. And song of England's rush of flowers Is this full breeze with mellow stops, That spins the lark for shine, for showers ; He drinks his hurried flight, and drops. The stir in memory seem these things, Which out of moistened turf and clay Astrain for light push patient rings, Or leap to find the waterway. 42 TARDY SPRING 43 'Tis equal to a wonder done, Whatever simple lives renew Their tricks beneath the father sun, As though they caught a broken clue ; So hard was earth an eyewink back : But now the common life has come, The blotting cloud a dappled pack, The grasses one vast underhum. A City clothed in snow and soot, With lamps for day in ghostly rows, Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot, The river that reflective flows : And there did fog down crypts of street Play spectre upon eye and mouth : Their faces are a glass to greet This magic of the whirl for South. A burly joy each creature swells With sound of its own hungry quest ; Earth has to fill her empty wells, And speed the service of the nest ; The phantom of the snow-wreath melt, That haunts the farmer's look abroad, Who sees what tomb a white night built, Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod. 44 TARDY SPRING For iron Winter held her firm ; Across her sky he laid his hand ; And bird he starved, he stiffened worm ; A sightless heaven, a shaven land. Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep, The bitten buds dared not unfold : We raced on roads and ice to keep Thought of the girl we love from cold. But now the North wind ceases, The warm South-west awakes, The heavens are out in fleeces, And earth's green banner shakes. BREATH OF THE BRIAR i O BRIAR-SCENTS, on yon wet wing Of warm South-west wind brushing by, You mind me of the sweetest thing That ever mingled frank and shy : When she and I, by love enticed, Beneath the orchard-apples met, In equal halves a ripe one sliced, And smelt the juices ere we ate. ii That apple of the briar-scent, Among our lost in Britain now, Was green of rind, and redolent Of sweetness as a milking cow. The briar gives it back, well nigh The damsel with her teeth on it ; Her twinkle between frank and shy, My thirst to bite where she had bit. YOUNG REYNARD i GRACEFULLEST leaper, the dappled fox-cub Curves over brambles with berries and buds, Light as a bubble that flies from the tub, Whisked by the laundry-wife out of her suds. Wavy he comes, woolly, all at his ease, Elegant, fashioned to foot with the deuce ; Nature's own prince of the dance : then he sees Me, and retires as if making excuse. ii Never closed minuet courtlier ! Soon Cub-hunting troops were abroad, and a yelp Told of sure scent : ere the stroke upon noon Reynard the younger lay far beyond help. Wild, my poor friend, has the fate to be chased ; Civil will conquer : were t' other 'twere worse, Fair, by the flushed early morning embraced, Haply you live a day longer in verse. LOVE IN THE VALLEY UNDER yonder beech-tree single on the green- sward, Couched with her arms behind her golden head, Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly, Lies my young love sleeping in the shade. Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her, Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow, Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me: Then would she hold me and never let me go ? Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow, Swift as the swallow along the river's light Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets, Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight. 47 48 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun, She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won ! When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror, Tying up her laces, looping up her hair, Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, More love should I have, and much less care. When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror, Loosening her laces, combing down her curls, Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded, I should miss but one for the many boys and girls. Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon. No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder : Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon. LOVE IN THE VALLEY 49 Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure. Even as in a dance ; and her smile can heal no less: Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless. * * * Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting . So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled. * * * Stepping down the hill with her fair companions, Arm in arm, all against the raying West, Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches, Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed. 50 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking Whispered the world was ; morning light is she. Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless , Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free. Happy happy time, when the white star hovers Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew, Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness, Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew. Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells. Maiden still the morn is ; and strange she is, and secret ; Strange her eyes ; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells. Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along, Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter Chill as a dull face frowning on a song. LOVE IN THE VALLEY 51 Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset Rich, deep like love in beauty without end. * * * When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams, Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams. When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May, Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily Pure from the night, and splendid for the day. * * * Mother of the dews, dark eye-lashed twilight, Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim, 52 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark, Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him. Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet, Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain- showers. Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers. * * * All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose ; Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands. My sweet leads : she knows not why, but now she loiters, Eyes bent anemones, and hangs her hands. Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping, Coming the rose : and unaware a cry Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour, Covert and the nightingale ; she knows not why. LOVE IN THE VALLEY 63 Kerchiefed head and chin, she darts between her tulips, Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain : Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel She will be ; she lifts them, and on she speeds again. Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gate- way : She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth. So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder, Saw I once a white dove, sole light of earth. * * * Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden, Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please. I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones. O my wild ones ! they tell me more than these. You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose, Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they, 54 LOVE IN THE VALLEY They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness, You are of life's, on the banks that line the way. * * * Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose, Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three. Parted is the window ; she sleeps ; the starry jasmine Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me. Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest ? Not while she sleeps : while she sleeps the jasmine breathes, Luring her to love ; she sleeps ; the starry jasmine Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths, Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades ; Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf: Yellow with stonecrop ; the moss-mounds are yellow ; Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf. LOVE IN THE VALLEY 55 Green-yellow, bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle; Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine : Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens, Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine. * * * This I may know : her dressing and undressing Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport Shift from cloud to moonlight ; or edging over thunder Slips a ray of sun ; or sweeping into port White sails furl ; or on the ocean borders White sails lean along the waves leaping green. Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen. * * * Front door and back of the mossed old farmhouse Open with the morn, and in a breezy link Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard, Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink. 50 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Busy in the grass the early sun of summer Swarms, and the blackbird's mellow fluting notes Call my darling up with round and roguish chal- lenge : Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats ! Cool was the woodside ; cool as her white dairy Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school, Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sun- shine ; O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool ! Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak. Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe, Said, ' I will kiss you' : she laughed and leaned her cheek. Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo. LOVE IN THE VALLEY 57 Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy road- way Sometimes pipes a chaffinch ; loose droops the blue. Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river, Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly. Nowhere is she seen ; and if I see her nowhere, Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky. O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced ! O the treasure-tresses one another over Nodding ! O the girdle slack about the waist ! Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet Quick amid the wheatears : wound about the waist, Gathered, see these brides of earth one blush of ripeness ! O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced ! * * * Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops, Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow : 58 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moon rise, Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow. Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree Gazes in this whiteness : nightlong could I. Here may life on death or death on life be painted. Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die ! * * * Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber Where there is no window, read not heaven or her. * When she was a tiny,' one aged woman quavers, Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear. Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled : Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete. Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet. * * * Hither she comes ; she comes to me ; she lingers, Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new sur- prise LOVE IN THE VALLEY 59 High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger ; Yet am I the light and living of her eyes. Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming, Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames. Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting, Arms up, she dropped : our souls were in our names. * * # Soon will she lie like a white-frost sunrise. Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale as rye, Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher, Felt the girdle loosened, seen the tresses fly. Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset. Swift with the to-morrow, green-winged Spring ! Sing from the South-west, bring her back the truants, Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing. * * * Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you 60 LOVE IN THE VALLEY Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields, Youngest green transfused in silver shining through : Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry : Fair as in image my seraph love appears Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eye- lids : Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears. Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out : heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood, Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed. Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October ; Streaming like the flag-reed South-west blown ; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam: All seem to know what is for heaven alone. MARIAN 1 SHE can be as wise as we, And wiser when she wishes ; She can knit with cunning wit, And dress the homely dishes. She can flourish staff or pen, And deal a wound that lingers She can talk the talk of men, And touch with thrilling fingers. Match her ye across the sea, Natures fond and fiery ; Ye who zest the turtle's nest With the eagle's eyrie. Soft and loving is her soul, Swift and lofty soaring ; Mixing with its dove-like dole Passionate adoring. 61 62 MARIAN in Such a she who '11 match with me ? In flying or pursuing, Subtle wiles are in her smiles To set the world a-wooing. She is steadfast as a star. And yet the maddest maiden : She can wage a gallant war, And give the peace of Eden. HYMN TO COLOUR i WITH Life and Death I walked when Love appeared, And made them 011 each side a shadow seem. Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared, Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream To fall on daylight ; and night puts away Her darker veil for grey. n In that grey veil green grassblades brushed we by ; We came where woods breathed sharp, and over- head Rocks raised clear horns on a transforming sky : Around, save for those shapes, with him who led And linked them, desert varied by no sign Of other life than mine. 64 HYMN TO COLOUR in By this the dark-winged planet, raying wide, From the mild pearl-glow to the rose upborne, Drew in his fires, less faint than far descried, Pure-fronted on a stronger wave of morn : And those two shapes the splendour interweaved, Hung web-like, sank and heaved. IV Love took my hand when hidden stood the sun To fling his robe on shoulder-heights of snow. Then said : There lie they, Life and Death in one. Whichever is, the other is : but know, It is thy craving self that thou dost see, Not in them seeing me. Shall man into the mystery of breath, From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy ? Or learn the secret of the shrouded death, By lifting up the lid of a white eye ? Cleave thou thy way with fathering desire Of fire to reach to fire. HYMN TO COLOUR 65 VI Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The house of heaven splendid for the bride. To him as leaps a fountain she awakes,, In knotting arms, yet boundless : him beside, She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power Brings heaven to the flower. VII He gives her homeliness in desert air, And sovereignty in spaciousness ; he leads Through widening chambers of surprise to where Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes, Because his touch is infinite and lends A yonder to all ends. VIII Death begs of Life his blush ; Life Death persuades To keep long day with his caresses graced. He is the heart of light, the wing of shades, The crown of beauty : never soul embraced Of him can harbour unfaith ; soul of him Possessed walks never dim. E 66 HYMN TO COLOUR IX Love eyed his rosy memories : he sang : O bloom of dawn, breathed up from the gold sheaf Held springing beneath Orient ! that dost hang The space of dewdrops running over leaf; Thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost Than Time with all his host 1 x Of thee to say behold, has said adieu : But love remembers how the sky was green, And how the grasses glimmered lightest blue ; How saint-like grey took fervour : how the screen Of cloud grew violet ; how thy moment came Between a blush and flame. XI Love saw the emissary eglantine Break wave round thy white feet above the gloom ; Lay finger on thy star ; thy raiment line With cherub wing and limb ; wed thy soft bloom, Gold-quivering like sunrays in thistle-down, Earth under rolling brown. HYMN TO COLOUR 67 XII They do not look through love to look on thee, Grave heavenliness ! nor know they joy of sight, Who deem the wave of rapt desire must be Its wrecking and last issue of delight. Dead seasons quicken in one petal-spot Of colour unforgot. XIII This way have men come out of brutishness To spell the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless. With thee, O fount of the Untimed ! to lead, Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged Shall on through brave wars waged. XIV More gardens will they win than any lost ; The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain. Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed, To stature of the Gods will they attain. They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord, Themselves the attuning chord ! 08 HYMN TO COLOUR xv The song had ceased ; my vision with the song. Then of those Shadows, which one made descent Beside me I knew not: but Life ere long Came on me in the public ways and bent Eyes deeper than of old : Death met I too, And saw the dawn glow through. MOTHER TO BABE FLECK of sky you are, Dropped through branches dark, O my little one, mine ! Promise of the star, Outpour of the lark , Beam and song divine. See this precious gift, Steeping in new birth All my being, for sign Earth to heaven can lift, Heaven descend on earth, Both in one be mine ! m 70 MOTHER TO BABE in Life in light you glass When you peep and coo, You, my little one, mine ! Brooklet chirps to grass, Daisy looks in dew Up to dear sunshine. NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY WITH splendour of a silver day, A frosted night had opened May : And on that plumed and armoured night, As one close temple hove our wood, Its border leafage virgin white. Remote down air an owl hallooed. The black twig dropped without a twirl ; The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped ; The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl ; A crystal off the green leaf slipped. Across the tracks of rimy tan, Some busy thread at whiles would shoot ; A limping minnow-rillet ran, To hang upon an icy foot. In this shrill hush of quietude, The ear conceived a severing cry. Almost it let the sound elude, When chuckles three, a warble shy, 71 72 NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY From hazels of the garden came, Near by the crimson-windowed farm. They laid the trance on breath and frame, A prelude of the passion-charm. Then soon was heard, not sooner heard Than answered, doubled, trebled, more, Voice of an Eden in the bird Renewing with his pipe of four The sob : a troubled Eden, rich In throb of heart : unnumbered throats Flung upward at a fountain's pitch, The fervour of the four long notes, That on the fountain's pool subside, Exult and ruffle and upspring : Endless the crossing multiplied Of silver and of golden string. There chimed a bubbled underbrew With witch-wild spray of vocal dew. It seemed a single harper swept Our wild wood's inner chords and waked A spirit that for yearning ached Ere men desired and joyed or wept. NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY 73 Or now a legion ravishing Musician rivals did unite In love of sweetness high to sing The subtle song that rivals light; From breast of earth to breast of sky : And they were secret, they were nigh : A hand the magic might disperse ; The magic swung my universe. Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream, Where all was visionary gleam ; Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed ; And feelings, passing joy and woe, Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed, Nor either was the one we know : Nor pregnant of the heart contained In us were they, that griefless plained, That plaining soared ; and through the heart Struck to one note the wide apart : A passion surgent from despair ; A paining bliss in fervid cold ; Off the last vital edge of air, Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled, 74 NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY For rapture of a wine of tears ; As had a star among the spheres Caught up our earth to some mid-height Of double life to ear and sight, She giving voice to thought that shines Keen-brilliant of her deepest mines ; While steely drips the rillet clinked, And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled. Then was the lyre of earth beheld, Then heard by me : it holds me linked ; Across the years to dead-ebb shores I stand on, my blood-thrill restores. But would I conjure into me Those issue notes, I must review What serious breath the woodland drew , The low throb of expectancy ; How the white mother-muteness pressed On leaf and meadow-herb ; how shook, Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crest Seen spinning on the bracken-crook. WHIMPER OF SYMPATHY HAWK or shrike has done this deed Of downy feathers : rueful sight ! Sweet sentimentalist, invite Your bosom's Power to intercede. So hard it seems that one must bleed Because another needs will bite ! All round we find cold Nature slight The feelings of the totter-knee'd. O it were pleasant, with you To fly from this tussle of foes, The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle ! To dwell in yon dribble of dew On the cheek of your sovereign rose, And live the young life of a twinkle. 75 A BALLAD OF PAST MERIDIAN LAST night returning from my twilight walk I met the grey mist Death, whose eyeless brow Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk He reached me flowers as from a withered bough : O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou ! ii Death said, I gather, and pursued his way. Another stood by me, a shape in stone, Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay, And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone : O Life, how naked and how hard when known ! HI Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I. Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine, And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky, Joined notes of Death and Life till night's decline Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine. 76 PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS i WHEN by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked, Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God, Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked, Who : and what a track showed the upturned sod ' Mindful were the shepherds, as now the noon severe Bent a burning eyebrow to brown evetide, How the rustic flute drew the silver to the sphere, Sister of his own, till her rays fell wide. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. n Chirping none, the scarlet cicadas crouched in racks : Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey : 77 78 PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS Scarce the stony lizard sucked hollows in his flanks Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay Suddenbowed the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard Lengthened ran the grasses, the sky grew slate : Then amid a swift flight of winged seed white as curd, Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. in Water, first of singers, o'er rocky mount and mead, First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill, Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed, Seeking whom to waken and what ear fill. Water, sweetest soother to kiss a wound and cool, Sweetest and divinest, the sky-born brook, Chuckled, with a whimper, and made a mirror-pool Round the guest we welcomed, the strange hand shook. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS 79 Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields : Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high : Big of heart we laboured at storing mighty yields, Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry ! Hand-like rushed the vintage ; we strung the bellied skins Plump, and at the sealing the Youth's voice rose : Maidens clung in circle, on little fists their chins ; Gentle beasties through pushed a cold long nose. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. v Foot to fire in snowtime we trimmed the slender shaft : Often down the pit spied the lean wolf's teeth Grin against his will, trapped by masterstrokes of craft ; Helpless in his froth-wrath as green logs seethe ! 80 PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS Safe the tender lambs tugged the teats, and winter sped Whirled before the crocus, the year's new gold. Hung the hooky beak up aloft, the arrowhead Reddened through his feathers for our dear fold. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. Tales we drank of giants at war with Gods above : Rocks were they to look on, and earth climbed air! Tales of search for simples, and those who sought of love Ease because the creature was all too fair. Pleasant ran our thinking that while our work was good, Sure as fruits for sweat would the praise come fast. PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS 81 He that wrestled stoutest and tamed the billow- brood Danced in rings with girls, like a sail-flapped mast. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. VII Lo, the herb of healing, when once the herb is known, Shines in shady woods bright as new-sprung flame. Ere the string was tightened we heard the mellow tone, After he had taught how the sweet sounds came. Stretched about his feet, labour done, 'twas as you see Red pomegranates tumble and burst hard rind. So began contention to give delight and be Excellent in things aimed to make life kind. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. F 82 PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS VIII You with shelly horns, rams ! and, promontory goats, You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew ! Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats ! Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few ! You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays, You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent : He has been our fellow, the morning of our days ! Us he chose for housemates, and this way went. God ! of whom music And song and blood are pure, The day is never darkened That had thee here obscure. MELAMPUS i love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck ; Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck; Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball ; Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook; The good physician Melampus, loving them all, Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book. ii For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. 84 MELAMPUS The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours: And where alike we are, unlike where, and the veined Division, veined parallel, of a blood that flows In them, in us, from the source by man unattained Save marks he well what the mystical woods dis- close. in And this he deemed might be boon of love to a breast Embracing tenderly each little motive shape, The prone, the flitting, who seek their food whither best Their wits direct, whither best from their foes escape. For closer drawn to our mother's natural milk, As babes they learn where her motherly help is great : They know the juice for the honey, juice for the silk, And need they medical antidotes, find them straight. MELAMPUS 85 IV Of earth and sun they are wise, they nourish their broods, Weave, build, hive, burrow and battle, take joy and pain Like swimmers varying billows : never in woods Runs white insanity fleeing itself: all sane The woods revolve : as the tree its shadowing limns To some resemblance in motion, the rooted life Restrains disorder : you hear the primitive hymns Of earth in woods issue wild of the web of strife. v Now sleeping once on a day of marvellous fire, A brood of snakes he had cherished in grave regret That death his people had dealt their dam and their sire, Through savage dread of them, crept to his neck, and set Their tongues to lick him : the swift affectionate tongue Of each ran licking the slumberer : then his ears 86 MELAMPUS A forked red tongue tickled shrewdly r sudden upsprung, He heard a voice piping : Ay, for he has no fears ! VI A bird said that, in the notes of birds, and the speech Of men, it seemed : and another renewed : He moves To learn and not to pursue, he gathers to teach ; He feeds his young as do we, and as we love loves. No fears have I of a man who goes with his head To earth, chance looking aloft at us, kind of hand : I feel to him as to earth of whom we are fed ; I pipe him much for his good could he understand. VII Melampus touched at his ears, laid finger on wrist : He was not dreaming, he sensibly felt and heard. Above, through leaves, where the tree-twigs thick intertwist, He spied the birds and the bill of the speaking bird. MELAMPUS 87 His cushion mosses in shades of various green, The lumped, the antlered, he pressed, while the sunny snake Slipped under: draughts he had drunk of clear Hippocrene, It seemed, and sat with a gift of the Gods awake. VIII Divinely thrilled was the man, exultingly full, As quick well-waters that come of the heart of earth, Ere yet they dart in a brook are one bubble-pool To light and sound, wedding both at the leap of birth. The soul of light vivid shone, a stream within stream; The soul of sound from a musical shell outflew; Where others hear but a hum and see but a beam, The tongue and eye of the fountain of life he knew. IX He knew the Hours : they were round him, laden with seed Of hours bestrewn upon vapour, and one by one 88 MELAMPUS They winged as ripened in fruit the burden decreed For each to scatter ; they flushed like the buds in sun, Bequeathing seed to successive similar rings. Their sisters, bearers to men of what men have earned : He knew them, talked with the yet unreddened; the stings, The sweets, they warmed at their bosoms divined, discerned. x Not unsolicited, sought by diligent feet, By riddling fingers expanded, oft watched in growth With brooding deep as the noon-ray's quickening wheat, Ere touch'd, the pendulous flower of the plants of sloth, The plants of rigidness, answered question and squeeze, Revealing wherefore it bloomed uninviting, bent, Yet making harmony breathe of life and disease, The deeper chord of a wonderful instrument. MELAMPUS 89 XI So passed he luminous-eyed for earth and the fates We arm to bruise or caress us : his ears were charged With tones of love in a whirl of voluble hates, With music wrought of distraction his heart enlarged. Celestial-shining, though mortal, singer, though mute, He drew the Master of harmonies, voiced or stilled, To seek him ; heard at the silent medicine-root A song, beheld in fulfilment the unfulfilled. XII Him Phoebus, lending to darkness colour and form Of light's excess, many lessons and counsels gave, Showed Wisdom lord of the human intricate swarm, And whence prophetic it looks on the hives that rave, And how acquired, of the zeal of love to acquire, And where it stands, in the centre of life a sphere ; And Measure, mood of the lyre, the rapturous lyre, He said was Wisdom, and struck him the notes to hear. 90 MELAMPUS XIII Sweet, sweet : 'twas glory of vision, honey, the breeze In heat, the run of the river on root and stone, All senses joined, as the sister Pierides Are one, uplifting their chorus, the Nine, his own. In stately order, evolved of sound into sight, From sight to sound intershifting, the man descried The growths of earth, his adored, like day out of night, Ascend in song, seeing nature and song allied. XIV And there vitality, there, there solely in song, Resides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs, Their forceful cravings, the theme are : there is it strong, The Master said : and the studious eye that reads, (Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount), In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound. MELAMPUS 91 Pursue thy craft : it is music drawn of a fount To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground. xv Melampus dwelt among men : physician and sage, He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed, Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage Outran the measure, his juice of the woods re- claimed. He played on men, as his master, Phoebus, on strings Melodious : as the God did he drive and check, Through love exceeding a simple love of the things That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck. THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER i DEMETER devastated our good land, In blackness for her daughter snatched below. Smoke-pillar or loose hillock was the sand, Where soil had been to clasp warm seed and throw The wheat, vine, olive, ripe to Summer's ray. Now whether night advancing, whether day, Scarce did the baldness show : The hand of man was a defeated hand. Necessity, the primal goad to growth, Stood shrunken ; Youth and Age appeared as one ; Like Winter Summer ; good as labour sloth ; Nor was there answer wherefore beamed the sun, 92 THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER 93 Or why men drew the breath to carry pain. High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain, Idly the flax-wheel spun Unridered : starving lords were wasp and moth. in Lean grassblades losing green on their bent flags, Sang chilly to themselves ; lone honey-bees Pursued the flowers that were not with dry bags ; Sole sound aloud the snap of sapless trees,, More sharp than slingstpnes on hard breastplates hurled. Back to first chaos tumbled the stopped world, Careless to lure or please. A nature of gaunt ribs, an earth of crags. IV No smile Demeter cast : the gloom she saw, Well draped her direful musing ; for in gloom, In thicker gloom, deep down the cavern-maw, Her sweet had vanished ; liker unto whom, And whose pale place of habitation mute, She and all seemed where Seasons, pledged for fruit Anciently, gaped for bloom : Where hand of man was as a plucked fowl's claw. 94 THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER v The wrathful Queen descended on a vale, That ere the ravished hour for richness heaved. lambe, maiden of the merry tale, Beside her eyed the once red-cheeked, green-leaved. It looked as if the Deluge had withdrawn. Pity caught at her throat, her jests were gone. More than for her who grieved, She could for this waste home have piped the wail. VI lambe, her dear mountain-rivulet To waken laughter from cold stones, beheld A riven wheatfield cracking for the wet, And seed like infant's teeth, that never swelled, Apeep up flinty ridges, milkless round. Teeth of the giants marked she where thin ground Rocky in spikes rebelled Against the hand here slack as rotted net. VII The valley people up the ashen scoop She beckoned, aiming hopelessly to win Her Mistress in compassion of yon group THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER 5 So pinched and wizened ; with their aged grin, For lack of warmth to smile on mouths of woe, White as in chalk outlining little 0, Dumb, from a falling chin ; Young, old, alike half-bent to make the hoop. VIII Their tongues of birds they wagged, weak-voiced as when Dark underwaters the recesses choke ; With cluck and upper quiver of a hen In grasp, past pecking : cry before the croak. Relentlessly their gold-haired Heaven, their fount Bountiful of old days, heard them recount This and that cruel stroke : Nor eye nor ear had she for piteous men. IX A figure of black rock by sunbeams crowned Through stormclouds, where the volumed shades enfold An earth in awe before the claps resound And woods and dwellings are as billows rolled. 96 THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER The barren Nourisher unmelted shed Death from the looks that wandered with the dead Out of the realms of gold, In famine for her lost, her lost imfound. lambe from her Mistress tripped ; she raised The cattle-call above the moan of prayer ; And slowly out of fields their fancy grazed, Among the droves, defiled a horse and mare : The wrecks of horse and mare : such ribs as view Seas that have struck brave ships ashore, while through Shoots the swift foamspit : bare They nodded, and Demeter on them gazed. XI Howbeit the season of the dancing blood Forgot was horse of mare,, yea, mare of horse : Reversed,, each head at cither's flank, they stood. Whereat the Goddess, in a dim remorse, THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER 97 Laid hand on them, and smacked ; and her touch pricked. Neighing within, at cither's flank they licked ; Played on a moment's force At courtship, withering to the crazy nod. XII The nod was that we gather for consent ; And mournfully amid the group a dame, Interpreting the thing in nature meant, Her hands held out like bearers of the flame, And nodded for the negative sideways. Keen at her Mistress glanced lambe : rays From the Great Mother came : Her lips were opened wide ; the curse was rent. XIII She laughed: since our first harvesting heard none Like thunder of the song of heart : her face, The dreadful darkness, shook to mounted sun, And peal on peal across the hills held chase. G 98 THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER She laughed herself to water ; laughed to fire; Laughed the torrential laugh of dam and sire Full of the marrowy race. Her laughter, Gods ! was flesh on skeleton. XIV The valley people huddled, broke, afraid, Assured, and taking lightning in the veins, They puffed, they leaped, linked hands, together swayed, Unwitting happiness till golden rains Of tears in laughter, laughter weeping, smote Knowledge of milky mercy from that throat Pouring to heal their pains : And one bold youth set mouth at a shy maid. xv lambe clapped to see the kindly lusts Inspire the valley people, still on seas, Like poplar-tops relieved from stress of gusts, With rapture in their wonderment ; but these, Low homage being rendered, ran to plough, Fed by the laugh, as by the mother cow Calves at the teats they tease : Soon drove they through the yielding furrow-crusts. THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER 99 XVI Uprose the blade in green, the leaf in red, The tree of water and the tree of wood : And soon among the branches overhead Gave beauty juicy issue sweet for food. O Laughter ! beauty plumped and love had birth. Laughter ! O thou reviver of sick Earth ! Good for the spirit, good For body, thou ! to both art wine and bread ! THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES I HE who has looked upon Earth Deeper than flower and fruit, Losing some hue of his mirth, As the tree striking rock at the root, Unto him shall the marvellous tale Of Callistes more humanly come With the touch on his breast than a hail From the markets that hum. II Now the youth footed swift to the dawn. 'Twas the season when wintertide, In the higher rock-hollows updrawn, Leaves meadows to bud, and he spied, 100 THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 101 By light throwing shallow shade, Between the beam and the gloom, Sicilian Enna, whose Maid Such aspect wears in her bloom Underneath since the Charioteer Of Darkness whirled her away, On a reaped afternoon of the year, Nigh the poppy-droop of Day. O and naked of her, all dust, The majestic Mother and Nurse, Ringing cries to the God, the Just, Curled the land with the blight of her curse : Recollected of this glad isle Still quaking. But now more fair, And momently fraying the while The veil of the shadow's there, Soft Enna that prostrate grief Sang through, and revealed round the vines, Bronze-orange, the crisp young leaf, The wheat-blades tripping in lines, A hue unillumined by sun Of the flowers flooding grass as from founts : All the penetrable dun Of the morn ere she mounts. 102 THE DAY OF in Nor had saffron and sapphire and red Waved aloft to their sisters below, When gaped by the rock-channel head Of the lake, black, a cave at one blow, Reverberant over the plain : A sound oft fearfully swung For the coming of wrathful rain : And forth, like the dragon-tongue Of a fire beaten flat by the gale, But more as the smoke to behold, A chariot burst. Then a wail Quivered high of the love that would fold Bliss immeasurable, bigger than heart, Though a God's : and the wheels were stayed, And the team of the chariot swart Reared in marble, the six, dismayed, Like hoofs that by night plashing sea Curve and ramp from the vast s warn- wave : For, lo, the Great Mother, She ! And Callistes gazed, he gave His eyeballs up to the sight : THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 103 The embrace of the Twain, of whom To men are their day, their night, Mellow fruits and the shearing tomb Our Lady of the Sheaves And the Lily of Hades, the Sweet Of Enna : he saw through leaves The Mother and Daughter meet. They stood by the chariot-wheel, Embraced, very tall, most like Fellow poplars, wind-taken, that reel Down their shivering columns and strike Head to head, crossing throats : and apart, For the feast of the look, they drew, Which Darkness no longer could thwart ; And they broke together anew, Exulting to tears, flower and bud. But the mate of the Rayless was grave : She smiled like Sleep on its flood, That washes of all we crave : Like the trance of eyes awake And the spirit enshrouded, she cast The wan underworld on the lake. They were so, and they passed. 104 THE DAY OF IV He tells it, who knew the law Upon mortals : he stood alive Declaring that this he saw : He could see, and survive. v Now the youth was not ware of the beams With the grasses intertwined, For each thing seen, as in dreams, Came stepping to rear through his mind, Till it struck his remembered prayer To be witness of this which had flown Like a smoke melted thinner than air, That the vacancy doth disown. And viewing a maiden, he thought It might now be morn, and afar Within him the memory wrought Of a something that slipped from the car When those, the august, moved by : Perchance a scarf, and perchance This maiden. She did not fly, Nor started at his advance : THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 105 She looked, as when infinite thirst Pants pausing to bless the springs, Refreshed, unsated. Then first He trembled with awe of the things He had seen ; and he did transfer, Divining and doubting in turn, His reverence unto her ; Nor asked what he crouched to learn : The whence of her, whither, and why Her presence there, and her name, Her parentage : under which sky Her birth, and how hither she came, So young, a virgin, alone, Unfriended, having no fear, As Oreads have ; no moan, Like the lost upon earth ; no tear ; Not a sign of the torch in the blood, Though her stature had reached the height When mantles a tender rud In maids that of youths have sight, If maids of our seed they be : For he said : A glad vision art thou ! And she answered him : Thou to me As men utter a vow. 106 THE DAY OF VI Then said she, quick as the cries Of the rainy cranes : Light ! light ! And Helios rose in her eyes, That were full as the dew-balls bright, Relucent to him as dews Unshaded. Breathing, she sent Her voice to the God of the Muse, And along the vale it went, Strange to hear : not thin, not shrill . Sweet, but no young maid's throat : The echo beyond the hill Ran falling on half the note : And under the shaken ground Where the Hundred-headed groans By the roots of great JEtua. bound, As of him were hollow tones Of wondering roared : a tale Repeated to sunless halls. But now off the face of the vale Shadows fled in a breath, and the walls Of the lake's rock-head were gold, And the breast of the lake, that swell THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 107 Of the crestless long wave rolled To shore-bubble, pebble and shell. A morning of radiant lids O'er the dance of the earth opened wide : The bees chose their flowers, the snub kids Upon hindlegs went sportive, or plied, Nosing, hard at the dugs to be filled : There was milk, honey, music to make : Up their branches the little birds billed : Chirrup, drone, bleat and buzz ringed the lake. O shining in sunlight, chief After water and water's caress, Was the young bronze-orange leaf, That clung to the tree as a tress, Shooting lucid tendrils to wed With the vine-hook tree or pole, Like Arachne launched out on her thread. Then the maiden her dusky stole In the span of the black-starred zone, Gathered up for her footing fleet. As one that had toil of her own She followed the lines of wheat Tripping straight through the fields, green blades, 108 THE DAY OF To the groves of olive grey, Downy-grey, golden-tinged : and to glades Where the pear-blossom thickens the spray In a night, like the snow-packed storm : Pear, apple, almond, plum : Not wintry now : pushing, warm ! And she touched them with finger and thumb, As the vine-hook closes : she smiled, Recounting again and again, Corn, wine, fruit, oil ! like a child, With the meaning known to men. For hours in the track of the plough And the priming-knife she stepped, And of how the seed works, and of how Yields the soil, she seemed adept. Then she murmured that name of the dearth, The Beneficent, Hers, who bade Our husbandmen sow for the birth Of the grain making earth full glad. She murmured that Other's : the dirge Of life-light : for whose dark lap Our locks are clipped on the verge Of the realm where runs no sap. She said : We have looked on both ! THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 109 And her eyes had a wavering beam Of various lights, like the froth Of the storm-swollen ravine stream In flame of the bolt. What links Were these which had made him her friend ? He eyed her, as one who drinks, And would drink to the end. VII Now the meadows with crocus besprent, And the asphodel woodsides she left, And the lake-slopes, the ravishing scent Of narcissus, dark-sweet, for the cleft That tutors the torrent-brook, Delaying its forceful spleen With many a wind and crook Through rock to the broad ravine. By the hyacinth-bells in the brakes, And the shade-loved white windflower, half hid, And the sun-loving lizards and snakes On the cleft's barren ledges, that slid Out of sight, smooth as waterdrops, all, At a snap of twig or bark In the track of the foreign foot-fall, 110 THE DAY OF She climbed to the pineforest dark, Over-brewing an emerald chine Of the grass-billows. Thence, as a wreath, Running poplar and cypress to pine, The lake-banks are seen, and beneath, Vineyard, village, groves, rivers, towers, farms, The citadel watching the bay, The bay with the town in its arms, The town shining white as the spray Of the sapphire sea-wave on the rock, Where the rock stars the girdle of sea, White-ringed, as the midday flock, Clipped by heat, rings the round of the tree. That hour of the piercing shaft Transfixes bough-shadows, confused In veins of fire, and she laughed, With her quiet mouth amused, To see the whole flock, adroop, Asleep, hug the tree-stem as one, Imperceptibly filling the loop Of its shade at a slant of sun. The pipes under pent of the crag, Where the goatherds in piping recline, Have whimsical stops, burst and flag THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 111 Unconnected as outstretched swine : For the fingers are slack and unsure, And the wind issues querulous : thorns And snakes ! but she listened demure, Comparing day's music with morn's. Of the gentle spirit that slips From the bark of the tree she discoursed, And of her of the wells, whose lips Are coolness enchanting, rock-sourced. And much of the sacred loon, The frolic, the Goatfoot God, For stories of indolent noon In the pineforest's odorous nod, She questioned, not knowing : he can Be waspish, irascible, rude, He is often er friendly to man, And ever to beasts and their brood. For the which did she love him well, She said, and his pipes of the reed, His twitched lips puffing to tell In music his tears and his need, Against the sharp catch of his hurt. Not as shepherds of Pan did she speak, Nor spake as the schools, to divert, 112 THE DAY OF But fondly, perceiving him weak Before Gods, and to shepherds a fear, A holiness, horn and heel. All this she had learnt in her ear From Callistes, and taught him to feel. Yea, the solemn divinity flushed Through the shaggy brown skin of the beast, And the steeps where the cataract rushed, And the wilds where the forest is priest, Were his temple to clothe him in awe, While she spake : 'twas a wonder : she read The haunts of the beak and the claw As plain as the land of bread, But Cities and martial States, Whither soon the youth veered his theme, Were impervious barrier-gates To her : and that ship, a trireme, Nearing harbour, scarce wakened her glance, Though he dwelt on the message it bore Of sceptre and sword and lance To the bee-swarms black on the shore, Which were audible almost, So black they were. It befel That he called up the warrior host THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 113 Of the Song pouring hydromel In thunder, the wide-winged Song. And he named with his boyish pride The heroes,, the noble throng Past Acheron now, foul tide ! With his joy of the godlike band And the verse divine, he named The chiefs pressing hot on the strand, Seen of Gods, of Gods aided, and maimed. The fleetfoot and ireful ; the King ; Him, the prompter in stratagem, Many-shifted and masterful : Sing, O Muse ! But she cried : Not of them ! She breathed as if breath had failed, And her eyes, while she bade him desist, Held the lost-to-light ghosts grey-mailed, As you see the grey river-mist Hold shapes on the yonder bank. A moment her body waned, The light of her sprang and sank : Then she looked at the sun, she regained Clear feature, and she breathed deep. She wore the wan smile he had seen, As the flow of the river of Sleep, H 114 THE DAY OF On the mouth of the Shadow-Queen In sunlight she craved to bask. Saying : Life ! And who was she ? who ? Of what issue ? He dared not ask, For that partly he knew. VIII A noise of the hollow ground Turned the eye to the ear in debate : Not the soft overflowing of sound Of the pines, ranked, lofty, straight, Barely swayed to some whispers remote, Some swarming whispers above : Not the pines with the faint airs afloat, Hush-hushing the nested dove : It was not the pines, or the rout Oft heard from mid-forest in chase, But the long muffled roar of a shout Subterranean. Sharp grew her face. She rose, yet not moved by affright ; 'Twas rather good haste to use Her holiday of delight In the beams of the God of the Muse. THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 115 And the steeps of the forest she crossed, On its dry red sheddings and cones Up the paths by roots green-mossed, Spotted amber, and old mossed stones. Then out where the brook-torrent starts To her leap, and from bend to curve A hurrying elbow darts For the instant-glancing swerve, Decisive, with violent will In the action formed, like hers, The maiden's, ascending ; and still Ascending, the bud of the furze, The broom, and all blue-berried shoots Of stubborn and prickly kind, The juniper flat on its roots, The dwarf rhododaphne, behind She left, and the mountain sheep Far behind, goat, herbage and flower. The island was hers, and the deep, All heaven, a golden hour. Then with wonderful voice, that rang Through air as the swan's nigh death, Of the glory of Light she sang, She sang of the rapture of Breath. 116 THE DAY OF Nor ever, says he who heard, Heard Earth in her boundaries broad, From bosom of singer or bird A sweetness thus rich of the God Whose harmonies always are sane. She sang of furrow and seed, The burial, birth of the grain, The growth, and the showers that feed, And the green blades waxing mature For the husbandman's armful brown. O, the song in its burden ran pure, And burden to song was a crown. Callistes, a singer, skilled In the gift he could measure and praise, By a rival's art was thrilled, Though she sang but a Song of Days, Where the husbandman's toil and strife Little varies to strife and toil : But the milky kernel of life, With her numbered : corn, wine, fruit, oil The song did give him to eat : Gave the first rapt vision of Good, And the fresh young sense of Sweet The grace of the battle for food, THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 117 With the issue Earth cannot refuse When men to their labour are sworn. 'Twas a song of the God of the Muse To the forehead of Morn. IX Him loved she. Lo, now was he veiled Over sea stood a swelled cloud-rack : The fishing-boat havenward sailed, Bent abeam, with a whitened track, Surprised, fast hauling the net, As it flew : sea dashed, earth shook. She said : Is it night ? O not yet ! With a travail of thoughts in her look. The mountain heaved up to its peak : Sea darkened : earth gathered her fowl Of bird or of branch rose the shriek. Night ? but never so fell a scowl Wore night, nor the sky since then When ocean ran swallowing shore, And the Gods looked down for men. Broke tempest with that stern roar 118 THE DAY OF Never yet, save when black on the whirl Rode wrath of a sovereign Power. Then the youth and the shuddering girl, Dim as shades in the angry shower, Joined hands and descended a maze Of the paths that were racing alive Round boulder and bush, cleaving ways, Incessant, with sound of a hive. The height was a fountain-urn Pouring streams, and the whole solid height Leaped, chasing at every turn The pair in one spirit of flight To the folding pineforest. Yet here, Like the pause to things hunted, in doubt, The stillness bred spectral fear Of the awfulness ranging without, And imminent. Downward they fled, From under the haunted roof, To the valley aquake with the tread Of an iron-resounding hoof, As of legions of thunderful horse Broken loose and in line tramping hard. For the rage of a hungry force Roamed blind of its mark over sward : THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 119 They saw it rush dense in the cloak Of its travelling swathe of steam ; All the vale through a thin thread-smoke Was thrown back to distance extreme : And dull the full breast of it blinked, Like a buckler of steel breathed o'er, Diminished, in strangeness distinct, Glowing cold, unearthly, hoar : An Enna of fields beyond sun, Out of light, in a lurid web ; And the traversing fury spun Up and down with a wave's flow and ebb ; As the wave breaks to grasp and to spurn, Retire, and in ravenous greed, Inveterate, swell its return. Up and down, as if wringing from speed Sights that made the unsighted appear, Delude and dissolve, on it scoured. Lo, a sea upon land held career Through the plain of the vale half-devoured. Callistes of home and escape Muttered swiftly, unwitting of speech. She gazed at the Void of shape, She put her white hand to his reach, 120 THE DAY OF Saying : Now have we looked on the Three. And divided -from day, from night, From air that is breath, stood she, Like the vale,, out of light. x Then again in disorderly words He muttered of home, and was mute, With the heart of the cowering birds Ere they burst off the fowler's foot. He gave her some redness that streamed Through her limbs in a flitting glow. The sigh of our life she seemed, The bliss of it clothing in woe. Frailer than flower when the round Of the sickle encircles it : strong To tell of the things profound, Our inmost uttering song, Unspoken. So stood she awhile In the gloom of the terror afield, And the silence about her smile Said more than of tongue is revealed. I have breathed : I have gazed : I have been It said : and not joylessly shone THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 121 The remembrance of light through the screen Of a face that seemed shadow and stone. She led the youth trembling, appalled, To the lake-banks he saw sink and rise Like a panic-struck breast. Then she called, And the hurricane blackness had eyes. It launched like the Thunderer's bolt. Pale she drooped, and the youth by her side Would have clasped her and dared a revolt Sacrilegious as ever defied High Olympus, but vainly for strength His compassionate heart shook a frame Stricken rigid to ice all its length. On amain the black traveller came. Lo, a chariot, cleaving the storm, Clove the fountaining lake with a plough, And the lord of the steeds was in form He, the God of implacable brow, Darkness : he : he in person : he raged Through the wave like a boar of the wilds From the hunters and hounds disengaged, And a name shouted hoarsely : his child's. Horror melted in anguish to hear. Lo, the wave hissed apart for the path 122 THE DAY OF Of the terrible Charioteer, With the foam and torn features of wrath, Hurled aloft on each arm in a sheet ; And the steeds clove it, rushing at land Like the teeth of the famished at meat. Then he swept out his hand. XI This, no more, doth Callistes recall : He saw, ere he dropped in swoon, On the maiden the chariot fall, As a thundercloud swings on the moon. Forth, free of the deluge, one cry From the vanishing gallop rose clear : And : Skiageneia ! the sky Rang ; Skiageneia ! the sphere. And she left him therewith, to rejoice, Repine, yearn, and know not his aim, The life of their day in her voice, Left her life in her name. XII Now the valley in ruin of fields And fair meadowland, showing at eve THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 123 Like the spear-pitted warrior's shields After battle, bade men believe That no other than wrathfullest God Had been loose on her beautiful breast, Where the flowery grass was clod, Wheat and vine as a trailing nest. The valley, discreet in grief, Disclosed but the open truth, And Enna had hope of the sheaf: There was none for the desolate youth Devoted to mourn and to crave. Of the secret he had divined Of his friend of a day would he rave How for light of our earth she pined : For the olive, the vine and the wheat, Burning through with inherited fire : And when Mother went Mother to meet, She was prompted by simple desire In the day-destined car to have place At the skirts of the Goddess, unseen, And be drawn to the dear earth's face. She was fire for the blue and the green Of our earth, dark fire ; athirst As a seed of her bosom for dawn, 124 THE DAY OF White air that had robed and nursed Her mother. Now was she gone With the Silent, the God without tear, Like a bud peeping out of its sheath To be sundered and stamped with the sere. And Callistes to her beneath, As she to our beams, extinct, Strained arms : he was shade of her shade. In division so were they linked. But the song which had betrayed Her flight to the cavernous ear For its own keenly wakeful : that song Of the sowing and reaping, and cheer Of the husbandman's heart made strong Through droughts and deluging rains With his faith in the Great Mother's love : O the joy of the breath she sustains, And the lyre of the light above, And the first rapt vision of Good, And the fresh young sense of Sweet : That song the youth ever pursued In the track of her footing fleet. For men to be profited much By her day upon earth did he sing : THE DAUGHTER OF HADES 125 Of her voice, and her steps, and her touch On the blossoms of tender Spring, Immortal : and how in her soul She is with them, and tearless abides, Folding grain of a love for one goal In patience, past flowing of tides. And if unto him she was tears, He wept not : he wasted within : Seeming sane in the song, to his peers, Only crazed where the cravings begin. Our Lady of Gifts prized he less Than her issue in darkness : the dim Lost Skiageneia's caress Of our earth made it richest for him. And for that was a curse on him raised, And he withered rathe, dry to his prime, Though the bounteous Giver be praised Through the island with rites of old time Exceedingly fervent, and reaped Veneration for teachings devout, Pious hymns when the corn-sheaves are heaped And the wine-presses ri ddily spout, And the olive and apple are juice At a touch light as hers lost below. 126 THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES Whatsoever to men is of use Sprang his worship of them who bestow, In a measure of songs unexcelled : But that soul loving earth and the sun From her home of the shadows he held For his beacon where beam there is none : And to join her, or have her brought back, In his frenzy the singer would call, Till he followed where never was track, On the path trod of all. THE YOUNG PRINCESS A BALLAD OF OLD LAWS OF LOVE I WHEN the South sang like a nightingale Above a bower in May, The training of Love's vine of flame Was writ in laws, for lord and dame To say their yea and nay. IT When the South sang like a nightingale Across the flowering night, And lord and dame held gentle sport, There came a young princess to Court, A frost of beauty white. 127 128 THE YOUNG PRINCESS in The South sang like a nightingale To thaw her glittering dream : No vine of Love her bosom gave, She drank no wine of Love, but grave She held them to Love's theme. IV The South grew all a nightingale Beneath a moon unmoved : Like the banner of war she led them on ; She left them to lie, like the light that has gone From wine-cups overproved. v When the South was a fervid nightingale, And she a chilling moon, 'Twas pity to see on the garden swards, Against Love's laws, those rival lords As willow-wands lie strewn. VI The South had throat of a nightingale For her, the young princess : THE YOUNG PRINCESS She gave no vine of Love to rear, Love's wine drank not, yet bent her ear To themes of Love no less. II I THE lords of the Court they sighed heart-sick, Heart-free Lord Dusiote laughed : I prize her no more than a fling o' the dice, But, or shame to my manhood, a lady of ice, We master her by craft ! ii Heart-sick the lords of joyance yawned, Lord Dusiote laughed heart-free : I count her as much as a crack o' my thumb, But, or shame of my manhood, to me she shall come Like the bird to roost in the tree ! in At dead of night when the palace-guard Had passed the measured rounds, i 130 THE YOUNG PRINCESS The young princess awoke to feel A shudder of blood at the crackle of steel Within the garden-bounds. IV It ceased^ and she thought of whom was need, The friar or the leech ; When lo, stood her tirewoman breathless by : Lord Dusiote, madam, to death is nigh, Of you he would have speech. He prays you of your gentleness, To light him to his dark end. The princess rose, and forth she went, For charity was her intent, Devoutly to befriend. VI Lord Dusiote hung on his good squire's arm, The priest beside him knelt : A weeping handkerchief was pressed To stay the red flood at his breast, And bid cold ladies melt. THE YOUNG PRINCESS 131 VII O lady, though you are ice to men, All pure to heaven as light Within the dew within the flower, Of you 'tis whispered that love has power When secret is the night. I have silenced the slanderers, peace to their souls ! Save one was too cunning for me. I die, whose love is late avowed, He lives, who boasts the lily has bowed To the oath of a bended knee. IX Lord Dusiote drew breath with pain, And she with pain drew breath : On him she looked, on his like above ; She flew in the folds of a marvel of love Revealed to pass to death. x You are dying, O great-hearted lord, You are dying for me, she cried ; 132 THE YOUNG PRINCESS O take my hand, O take my kiss, And take of your right for love like this, The vow that plights me bride. XI She bade the priest recite his words While hand in hand were they, Lord Dusiote's soul to waft to bliss ; He had her hand, her vow, her kiss, And his body was borne away. Ill I LORD DUSIOTE sprang from priest and squire ; He gazed at her lighted room : The laughter in his heart grew slack ; He knew not the force that pushed him back From her and the morn in bloom. ii Like a drowned man's length on the strong flood-tide, Like the shade of a bird in the sun, THE YOUNG PRINCESS 133 He fled from his lady whom he might claim As ghost, and who made the daybeams flame To scare what he had done. in There was grief at Court for one so gay. Though he was a lord less keen For training the vine than at vintage-press ; But in her soul the young princess Believed that love had been. IV Lord Dusiote fled the Court and land, He crossed the woeful seas, Till his traitorous doing seemed clearer to burn, And the lady beloved drew his heart for return, Like the banner of war in the breeze. v He neared the palace, he spied the Court, And music he heard, and they told Of foreign lords arrived to bring The nuptial gifts of a bridegroom king To the princess grave and cold. 134 THE YOUNG PRINCESS VI The masque and the dance were cloud on wave, And down the masque and the dance Lord Dusiote stepped from dame to dame, And to the young princess he came, With a bow and a burning glance. VII Do you take a new husband to-morrow, lady ? She shrank as at prick of steel. Must the first yield place to the second, he sighed. Her eyes were like the grave that is wide For the corpse from head to heel. VIII My lady, my love, that little hand Has mine ringed fast in plight : I bear for your lips a lawful thirst, And as justly the second should follow the first, I come to your door this night. IX If a ghost should come a ghost will go : No more the lady said, THE YOUNG PRINCESS 135 Save that ever when he in wrath began To swear by the faith of a living man, She answered him, You are dead. IV I THE soft night-wind went laden to death With smell of the orange in flower ; The light leaves prattled to neighbour ears ; The bird of the passion sang over his tears The night named hour by hour. ii Sang loud, sang low the rapturous bird Till the yellow hour was nigh, Behind the folds of a darker cloud : He chuckled, he sobbed, alow, aloud ; The voice between earth and sky. in O will you, will you, women are weak ; The proudest are yielding mates 136 THE YOUNG PRINCESS For a forward foot and a tongue of fire : So thought Lord Dusiote's trusty squire, At watch by the palace-gates. IV The song of the bird was wine in his blood, And woman the odorous bloom : His master's great adventure stirred Within him to mingle the bloom and bird, And morn ere its coming illume. Beside him strangely a piece of the dark Had moved, and the undertones Of a priest in prayer, like a cavernous wave, He heard, as were there a soul to save For urgency now in the groans. VI No priest was hired for the play this night : And the squire tossed head like a deer At sniff of the tainted wind ; he gazed Where cresset-lamps in a door were raised, Belike on a passing bier. THE YOUNG PRINCESS 137 VII All cloaked and masked, with naked blades, That flashed of a judgement done, The lords of the Court, from the palace-door, Came issuing silently, bearers four, And flat on their shoulders one. VIII They marched the body to squire and priest, They lowered it sad to earth : The priest they gave the burial dole, Bade wrestle hourly for his soul, Who was a lord of worth. IX One said, farewell to a gallant knight ! And one, but a restless ghost ! 'Tis a year and a day since in this place He died, sped high by a lady of grace To join the blissful host. Not vainly on us she charged her cause The lady whom we revere 138 THE YOUNG PRINCESS For faith in the mask of a love untrue To the Love we honour, the Love her due, The Love we have vowed to rear. XI A trap for the sweet tooth, lures for the light, For the fortress defiant a mine : Right well ! But not in the South, princess, Shall the lady snared of her nobleness Ever shamed or a captive pine. XII When the South had voice of a nightingale Above a Maying bower, On the heights of Love walked radiant peers ; The bird of the passion sang over his tears To the breeze and the orange-flower. THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA i QUEEN THEODOLIND has built In the earth a furnace-bed : There the Traitor Nail that spilt Blood of the anointed Head, Red of heat, resolves in shame . White of heat, awakes to flame. Beat, beat ! white of heat, Red of heat, beat, beat ! ii Mark the skeleton of fire Lightening from its thunder-roof: So comes this that saw expire Him we love, for our behoof! Red of heat, O white of heat, This from off the Cross we greet. 189 140 THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA in Brown-cowled hammermen around Nerve their naked arms to strike Death with Resurrection crowned, Each upon that cruel spike. Red of heat the furnace leaps, White of heat transfigured sleeps. IV Hard against the furnace core Holds the Queen her streaming eyes Lo ! that thing of piteous gore In the lap of radiance lies, Red of heat, as when He takes, White of heat, whom earth forsakes. v Forth with it, and crushing ring Iron hymns, for men to hear Echoes of the deeds that sting Earth into its graves, and fear ! Red of heat, He maketh thus, White of heat, a crown of us. THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA 141 VI This that killed Thee, kissed Thee, Lord ! Touched Thee, and we touch it : dear, Dark it is ; adored, abhorred : Vilest, yet most sainted here. Red of heat, O white of heat, In it hell and heaven meet. VII I behold our morning day When they chased Him out with rods Up to where this traitor lay Thirsting ; and the blood was God's ' Red of heat, it shall be pressed, White of heat, once on my breast ! VIII Quick ! the reptile in me shrieks, Not the soul. Again ; the Cross Burn there. Oh ! this pain it wreaks Rapture is : pain is not loss. Red of heat, the tooth of Death, White of heat, has caught my breath. 142 THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA IX Brand me, bite me, bitter thing ' Thus He felt, and thus I am One with Him in suffering, One with Him in bliss, the Lamb. Red of heat, O white of heat, Thus is bitterness made sweet. x Now am I, who bear that stamp Scorched in me, the living sign Sole on earth the lighted lamp Of the dreadful Day divine. White of heat, beat on it fast ! Red of heat, its shape has passed. XI Out in angry sparks they fly, They that sentenced Him to bleed Pontius and his troop : they die, Damned for ever for the deed ! White of heat in vain they soar : Red of heat they strew the floor. THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA 143 XII Fury on it ! have its debt ! Thunder on the Hill accurst, Golgotha, be ye ! and sweat Blood, and thirst the Passion's thirst. Red of heat and white of heat, Champ it like fierce teeth that eat. XIII Strike it as the ages crush Towers ! for while a shape is seen I am rivalled. Quench its blush, Devil ! But it crowns me Queen, Red of heat, as none before, White of heat, the circlet wore. XIV Lowly I will be, and quail, Crawling, with a beggar's hand . On my breast the branded Nail, On my head the iron band. Red of heat, are none so base ! White of heat, none know such grace ' 144 THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA xv In their heaven the sainted hosts, Robed in violet unflecked, Gaze on humankind as ghosts : I draw down a ray direct. Red of heat, across my brow, White of heat, I touch Him now. XVI Robed in violet, robed in gold, Robed in pearl, they make our dawn. What am I to them ? Behold What ye are to me, and fawn. Red of heat, be humble, ye ! White of heat, O teach it me ' XVII Martyrs ! hungry peaks in air, Rent with lightnings, clad with snow, Crowned with stars ! you strip me bare, Pierce me, shame me, stretch me low, Red of heat, but it may be, White of heat, some envy me 1 THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA 145 XVIII poor enviers ! God's own gifts Have a devil for the weak. Yea, the very force that lifts Finds the vessel's secret leak. Red of heat, I rise o'er all : White of heat, I faint, I fall. XIX Those old Martyrs sloughed their pride, Taking humbleness like mirth. 1 am to His Glory tied, I that witness Him on earth ! Red of heat, my pride of dust, White of heat, feeds fire in trust xx Kindle me to constant fire, Lest the nail be but a nail ! Give me wings of great desire, Lest I look within, and fail ! Red of heat, the furnace light, White of heat, fix on my sight. K 146 THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA XXI Never for the Chosen peace ! Know, by me tormented know, Never shall the wrestling cease Till with our outlasting Foe, Red of heat to white of heat, Roll we to the Godhead's feet ! Beat, beat ! white of heat, Red of heat, beat, beat ! THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA FLAT as to an eagle's eye, Earth hung under Attila. Sign for carnage gave he none. In the peace of his disdain, Sun and rain, and rain and sun, Cherished men to wax again, Crawl, and in their manner die. On his people stood a frost. Like the charger cut in stone, Rearing stiff, the warrior host, Which had life from him alone, Craved the trumpet's eager note, As the bridled earth the Spring. Rusty was the trumpet's throat, He let chief and prophet rave ; Venturous earth around him string 147 148 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Threads of grass and slender rye, Wave them, and untrampled wave. O for the time when God did cry, Eye and have, my Attila ! Scorn of conquest filled like sleep Him that drank of havoc deep When the Green Cat pawed the globe When the horsemen from his bow Shot in sheaves and made the foe Crimson fringes of a robe, Trailed o'er towns and fields in woe ; When they streaked the rivers red, When the saddle was the bed. Attila, my Attila ' in He breathed peace and pulled a flower. Eye and have, my Attila ! This was the damsel Ildico, Rich in bloom until that hour : THE NUPTIALS OF ATT1LA 149 Shyer than the forest doe Twinkling slim through branches green. Yet the shyest shall be seen. Make the bed for Attila ! IV Seen of Attila, desired, She was led to him straightway : Radiantly was she attired ; Rifled lands were her array, Jewels bled from weeping crowns, Gold of woeful fields and towns. She stood pallid in the light. How she walked, how withered white, From the blessing to the board, She who would have proudly blushed, Women whispered, asking why, Hinting of a youth, and hushed. Was it terror of her lord ? Was she childish ? was she sly ? Was it the bright mantle's dye Drained her blood to hues of grief Like the ash that shoots the spark ? 150 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA See the green tree all in leaf: See the green tree stripped of bark i Make the bed for Attila : v Round the banquet-table's load Scores of iron horsemen rode ; Chosen warriors, keen and hard ; Grain of threshing battle-dints ; Attila's fierce body-guard, Smelling war like fire in flints. Grant them peace be fugitive I Iron-capped and iron-heeled, Each against his fellow's shield Smote the spear-head, shouting, Live, Attila ! my Attila ! Eagle, eagle of our breed, Eagle, beak the lamb, and feed ! Have her, and unleash us ! live, Attila ! my Attila ! VI He was of the blood to shine Bronze in joy, like skies that scorch. THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 151 Beaming with the goblet wine In the wavering of the torch, Looked he backward on his bride. Eye and have, my Attila ! Fair in her wide robe was she : Where the robe and vest divide, Fair she seemed surpassingly : Soft, yet vivid as the stream Danube rolls in the moonbeam Through rock-barriers : but she smiled Never, she sat cold as salt : Open-mouthed as a young child Wondering with a mind at fault. Make the bed for Attila ! VII Under the thin hoop of gold Whence in waves her hair outrolled, 'Twixt her brows the women saw Shadows of a vulture's claw Gript in flight : strange knots that sped Closing and dissolving aye : Such as wicked dreams betray When pale dawn creeps o'er the bed. 152 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA They might show the common pang Known to virgins, in whom dread Hunts their bliss like famished hounds; While the chiefs with roaring rounds Tossed her to her lord, and sang Praise of him whose hand was large, Cheers for bsauty brought to yield, Chirrups of the trot afield, Hurrahs of the battle-charge. VIII Those rock-faces hung with weed Reddened : their great days of speed, Slaughter, triumph, flood and flame, Like a jealous frenzy wrought, Scoffed at them and did them shame, Quaffing idle, conquering nought. O for the time when God decreed Earth the prey of Attila ! God called on thee in his wrath, Trample it to mire ! 'Twas done. Swift as Danube clove our path Down from East to Western sun. THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 153 Huns ! behold your pasture, gaze, Take, our king said : heel to flank (Whisper it, the war-horse neighs !) Forth we drove, and blood we drank Fresh as dawn-dew : earth was ours : Men were flocks we lashed and spurned : Fast as windy flame devours, Flame along the wind, we burned. Arrow, javelin, spear, and sword ! Here the snows and there the plains ; On ! our signal : onward poured Torrents of the tightened reins, Foaming over vine and corn Hot against the city-wall. Whisper it, you sound a horn To the grey beast in the stall ! Yea, he whinnies at a nod. O for sound of the trumpet-notes ! O for the time when thunder-shod, He that scarce can munch his oats, Hung on the peaks, brooded aloof, Champed the grain of the wrath of God, Pressed a cloud on the cowering roof, Snorted out of the blackness fire ' 154 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Scarlet broke the sky, and down, Hammering West with print of his hoof, He burst out of the bosom of ire Sharp as eyelight under thy frown, Attila, my Attila ! IX Ravaged cities rolling smoke Thick on cornfields dry and black, Wave his banners, bear his yoke. Track the lightning, and you track Attila. They moan : 'tis he ! Bleed : 'tis he ! Beneath his foot Leagues are deserts charred and mute ; Where he passed, there passed a sea. Attila, my Attila ! x Who breathed on the king cold breath? Said a voice amid the host, He is Death that weds a ghost, Else a ghost that weds with Death ? Ildico's chill little hand Shuddering he beheld : austere THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 155 Stared, as one who would command Sight of what has filled his ear : Plucked his thin beard, laughed disdain. Feast, ye Huns ! His arm be raised, Like the warrior, battle-dazed, Joining to the fight amain. Make the bed for Attila ! XI Silent Ildico stood up. King and chief to pledge her well, Shocked sword sword and cup on cup, Clamouring like a brazen bell. Silent stepped the queenly slave. Fair, by heaven ! she was to meet On a midnight, near a grave, Flapping wide the winding-sheet. XII Death and she walked through the crowd, Out beyond the flush of light. Ceremonious women bowed Following her : 'twas middle night. 156 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Then the warriors each on each Spied,, nor overloudly laughed ; Like the victims of the leech, Who have drunk of a strange draught. XIII Attila remained. Even so Frowned he when he struck the blow, Brained his horse, that stumbled twice On a bloody day in Gaul, Bellowing, Perish omens ! All Marvelled at the sacrifice, But the battle, swinging dim, Rang off that axe-blow for him. Attila, my Attila ! XIV Brightening over Danube wheeled Star by star ; and she, most fair, Sweet as victory half-revealed, Seized to make him glad and young ; She, O sweet as the dark sign Given him oft in battles gone, THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 157 When the voice within said, Dare ! And the trumpet-notes were sprung Rapturous for the charge in line : She lay waiting : fair as dawn Wrapped in folds of night she lay ; Secret, lustrous ; flaglike there, Waiting him to stream and ray, With one loosening blush outflung, Colours of his hordes of horse Ranked for combat ; still he hung Like the fever dreading air, Cursed of heat ; and as a corse Gathers vultures, in his brain Images of her eyes and kiss Plucked at the limbs that could remain Loitering nigh the doors of bliss. Make the bed for Attila ! xv Passion on one hand, on one, Destiny led forth the Hun. Heard ye outcries of affright, Voices that through many a fray, 158 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA In the press of flag and spear, Warned the king of peril near ? Men were dumb, they gave him way, Eager heads to left and right, Like the bearded standard, thrust, As in battle, for a nod From their lord of battle-dust. Attila, my Attila ! Slow between the lines he trod. Saw ye not the sun drop slow On this nuptial day, ere eve Pierced him on the couch aglow ? Attila, my Attila ! Here and there his heart would cleave Clotted memory for a space : Some stout chief's familiar face, Choicest of his fighting brood, Touched him, as 'twere one to know Ere he met his bride's embrace. Attila, my Attila ! Twisting fingers in a beard Scant as winter underwood, With a narrowed eye he peered ; Like the sunset's graver red THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 159 Up old pine-stems. Grave he stood Eyeing them on whom was shed Burning light from him alone. Attila, my Attila ! Red were they whose mouths recalled Where the slaughter mounted high, High on it, o'er earth appalled, He ; heaven's finger in their sight Raising him on waves of dead, Up to heaven his trumpets blown. O for the time when God's delight Crowned the head of Attila ! Hungry river of the crag Stretching hands for earth he came : Force and Speed astride his name Pointed back to spear and flag. He came out of miracle cloud, Lightning-swift and spectre-lean. Now those days are in a shroud : Have him to his ghostly queen. Make the bed for Attila ! XVI One, with winecups overstrung, Cried him farewell in Rome's tongue. 160 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Who ? for the great king turned as though Wrath to the shaft's head strained the bow. Nay, not wrath the king possessed, But a radiance of the breast. In that sound he had the key Of his cunning malady. Lo, where gleamed the sapphire lake, Leo, with his Rome at stake, Drew blank air to hues and forms ; Whereof Two that shone distinct, Linked as orbed stars are linked, Clear among the myriad swarms, In a constellation, dashed Full on horse and rider's eyes Sunless light, but light it was Light that blinded and abashed, Froze his members, bade him pause, Caught him mid-gallop, blazed him home. Attila, my Attila ! What are streams that cease to flow ? What was Attila, rolled thence, Cheated by a juggler's show ? Like that lake of blue intense, THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 161 Under tempest lashed to foam, Lurid radiance, as he passed, Filled him, and around was glassed, When deep-voiced he uttered, Rome ! XVII Rome ! the word was : and like meat Flung to dogs the word was torn. Soon Rome's magic priests shall bleat Round their magic Pope forlorn ! Loud they swore the king had sworn Vengeance on the Roman cheat, Ere he passed, as, grave and still, Danube through the shouting hill . Sworn it by his naked life ! Eagle, snakes these women are : Take them on the wing ! but war, Smoking war's the warrior's wife! Then for plunder ! then for brides Won without a winking priest ! Danube whirled his train of tides Black toward the yellow East. Make the bed for Attila ! L 162 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA XVIII Chirrups of the trot afield, Hurrahs of the battle- charge, How they answered, how they pealed, When the morning rose and drew Bow and javelin, lance and targe, In the nuptial casement's view 1 Attila, my Attila ! Down the hillspurs, out of tents Glimmering in mid-forest, through Mists of the cool morning scents, Forth from city-alley, court, Arch, the bounding horsemen flew, Joined along the plains of dew, Raced and gave the rein to sport, Closed and streamed like curtain-rents Fluttered by a wind, and flowed Into squadrons : trumpets blew, Chargers neighed, and trappings glowed Brave as the bright Orient's. Look on the seas that run to greet Sunrise : look on the leagues of wheat Look on the lines and squares that fret Leaping to level the lance blood-wet. THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 163 Tens of thousands, man and steed, Tossing like field-flowers in Spring ; Ready to be hurled at need Whither their great lord may sling. Finger Homeward, Homeward, King ! Attila, my Attila ! Still the woman holds him fast As a night-flag round the mast. XIX Nigh upon the fiery noon, Out of ranks a roaring burst. 'Ware white women like the moon ! They are poison : they have thirst First for love, and next for rule. Jealous of the army, she ? Ho, the little wanton fool ! We were his before she squealed Blind for mother's milk, and heeled Kicking on her mother's knee, His in life and death are we : She but one flower of a field. We have given him. bliss tenfold 164 THE NUPTIALS OF ATT1LA In an hour to match her night : Attila, my Attila ! Still her arms the master hold, As on wounds the scarf winds tight. xx Over Danube day no more, Like the warrior's planted spear, Stood to hail the King : in fear Western day knocked at his door. Attila, my Attila ! Sudden in the army's eyes Rolled a blast of lights and cries : Flashing through them : Dead are ye ! Dead, ye Huns, and torn piecemeal ! See the ordered army reel Stricken through the ribs : and see, Wild for speed to cheat despair, Horsemen, clutching knee to chin, Crouch and dart they know not where. Attila, my Attila ! Faces covered, faces bare, Light the palace-front like jets Of a dreadful fire within. THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 165 Beating hands and driving hair Start on roof and parapets. Dust rolls up ; the slaughter din. Death to them who call him dead ! Death to them who doubt the tale ! Choking in his dusty veil, Sank the sun on his death-bed. Make the bed for Attila I XXI 'Tis the room where thunder sleeps. Frenzy, as a wave to shore Surging, burst the silent door, And drew back to awful deeps Breath beaten out, foam-white. Anew Howled and pressed the ghastly crew, Like storm-waters over rocks. Attila, my Attila ! One long shaft of sunset red Laid a finger on the bed. Horror, with the snaky locks, Shocked the surge to stiffened heaps, Hoary as the glacier's head 166 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Faced to the moon. Insane they look. God it is in heaven who weeps Fallen from his hand the Scourge he shook. Make the bed for Attila ! XXII Square along the couch, and Like the sea-rejected thing Sea-sucked white, behold their King. Attila, my Attila ! Beams that panted black and bright, Scornful lightnings danced their sight Him they see an oak in bud, Him an oaklog stripped of bark : Him, their lord of day and night, White, and lifting up his blood Dumb for vengeance. Name us that, Huddled in the corner dark, Humped and grinning like a cat, Teeth for lips ! 'tis she ! she stares, Glittering through her bristled hairs. Rend her ! Pierce her to the hilt ! She is Murder : have her out . THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 167 What ! this little fist, as big As the southern summer fig ! She is Madness, none may doubt. Death, who dares deny her guilt . Death, who says his blood she spilt ' Make the bed for Attila ! XXIII Torch and lamp and sunset-red Fell three-fingered on the bed. In the torch the beard-hair scant With the great breast seemed to pant : In the yellow lamp the limbs Wavered, as the lake-flower swims : In the sunset red the dead Dead avowed him, dry blood-red. XXIV Hatred of that abject slave, Earth, was in each chieftain's heart. Earth has got him, whom God gave, Earth may sing, and earth shall smart Attila, my Attila ! 168 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA XXV Thus their prayer was raved and ceased. Then had Vengeance of her feast Scent in their quick pang to smite Which they knew not, but huge pain Urged them for some victim slain Swift, and blotted from the sight. Each at each, a crouching beast, Glared, and quivered for the word. Each at each, and all on that, Humped and grinning like a cat, Head-bound with its bridal-wreath. Then the bitter chamber heard Vengeance in a cauldron seethe. Hurried counsel rage and craft Yelped to hungry men, whose teeth Hard the grey lip-ringlet gnawed, Gleaming till their fury laughed. With the steel-hilt in the clutch, Eyes were shot on her that froze In their blood-thirst overawed ; Burned to rend, yet feared to touch. She that was his nuptial rose, She was of his heart's blood clad : THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 169 Oh ! the last of him she had ! Could a little fist as big As the southern summer fig, Push a dagger's point to pierce Ribs like those ? Who else ! They glared Each at each. Suspicion fierce Many a black remembrance bared. Attila, my Attila ! Death, who dares deny her guilt ! Death, who says his blood she spilt ! Traitor he, who stands between ! Swift to hell, who harms the Queen ! She, the wild contention's cause, Combed her hair with quiet paws. Make the bed for Attila ! XXVI Night was on the host in arms. Night, as never night before, Hearkened to an army's roar Breaking up in snaky swarms : Torch and steel and snorting steed, Hunted by the cry of blood, 170 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Cursed with blindness, mad for day. Where the torches ran a flood, Tales of him and of the deed Showered like a torrent spray. Fear of silence made them strive Loud in warrior-hymns that grew Hoarse for slaughter yet unwreaked. Ghostly Night across the hive, With a crimson finger drew Letters on her breast and shrieked. Night was on them like the mould On the buried half alive. Night, their bloody Queen, her fold Wound on them and struck them through. Make the bed for Attila ! XXVII Earth has got him whom God gave, Earth may sing, and earth shall smart ! None of earth shall know his grave. They that dig with Death depart. Attila, my Attila ! THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA 171 XXVIII Thus their prayer was raved and passed : Passed in peace their red sunset : Hewn and earthed those men of sweat Who had housed him in the vast, Where no mortal might declare, There lies he his end was there ! Attila, my Attila ! XXIX Kingless was the army left : Of its head the race bereft. Every fury of the pit Tortured and dismembered it. Lo, upon a silent hour, When the pitch of frost subsides, Danube with a shout of power Loosens his imprisoned tides : Wide around the frighted plains Shake to hear his riven chains, Dreadfuller than heaven in wrath, As he makes himself a path : High leap the ice-cracks, towering pile Floes to bergs, and giant peers 172 THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA Wrestle on a drifted isle ; Island on ice-island rears ; Dissolution battles fast : Big the senseless Titans loom, Through a mist of common doom Striving which shall die the last : Till a gentle-breathing morn Frees the stream from bank to bank. So the Empire built of scorn Agonized, dissolved and sank. Of the Queen no more was told Than of leaf on Danube rolled. Make the bed for Attila ' PENETRATION AND TRUST i SLEEK as a lizard at round of a stone, The look of her heart slipped out and in. Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone, As innocents clear of a shade of sin. ii He laid a finger under her chin, His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown Now, what will happen and who will win, With me in the fight and my lady lone ? in He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone ; Was fire on her eyes till they let him in. Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone, And never a corner for serpent sin. 173 174 PENETRATION AND TRUST IV Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin ; Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown : At home to the death my lord shall win, When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT ON a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank, Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law. 175 THE STAR SIRIUS BRIGHT Sirius ! that when Orion pales To dotlings under moonlight still art keen With cheerful fervour of a warrior's mien Who holds in his great heart the battle-scales : Unquenched of flame though swift the flood assails, Reducing many lustrous to the lean : Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen To show what source divine is, and prevails. Long watches through, at one with godly night, I mark thee planting joy in constant fire ; And thy quick beams, whose jets of life inspire Life to the spirit, passion for the light, Dark Earth since first she lost her lord from sight Has viewed and felt them sweep her as a lyre. 178 THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE THY greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell Of human passions, but of love deflowered His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well. Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips, The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, Yet full of speech and intershifting tales, Close mirrors of us : thence had he the laugh We feel is thine : broad as ten thousand beeves At pasture ! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff From grain, bid sick Philosophy's last leaves Whirl, if they have no response they enforced To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced. THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE Continued How smiles he at a generation ranked In gloomy noddings over life ! They pass. Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked, Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass. But he can spy that little twist of brain Which moved some weighty leader of the blind, Unwitting 'twas the goad of persona] pain, To view in curst eclipse our Mother's mind, And show us of some rigid harridan The wretched bondmen till the end of time. O lived the Master now to paint us Man, That little twist of brain would ring a chime Of whence it came and what it caused, to start Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart. 178 THE WORLD'S ADVANCE JUDGE mildly the tasked world ; and disincline To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack. You have perchance observed the inebriate's track At night when he has quitted the inn-sign : He plays diversions on the homeward line, Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack : A hedge may take him, but he turns not back, Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine. ' Spiral/ the memorable Lady terms Our mind's ascent : our world's advance presents That figure on a flat ; the way of worms. Cherish the promise of its good intents, And warn it, not one instinct to efface Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place. 179 EARTH'S SECRET NOT solitarily in fields we find Earth's secret open, though one page is there ; Her plainest, such as children spell, and share With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind. Not where the troubled passions toss the mind, In turbid cities, can the key be bare. It hangs for those who hither thither fare, Close interthreading nature with our kind. They, hearing History speak, of what men were, And have become, are wise. The gain is great In vision and solidity ; it lives. Yet at a thought of life apart from her, Solidity and vision lose their state, For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives. ISO SENSE AND SPIRIT THE senses loving Earth or well or ill, Ravel yet more the riddle of our lot. The mind is in their trammels, and lights not By trimming fear-bred tales ; nor does the will To find in nature things which less may chill An ardour that desires, unknowing what. Till we conceive her living we go distraught, At best but circle-windsails of a mill. Seeing she lives, and of her joy of life Creatively has given us blood and breath For endless war and never wound unhealed, The gloomy Wherefore of our battle-field Solves in the Spirit, wrought of her through strife To read her own and trust her down to death. 131 GRACE AND LOVE Two flower-enfolding crystal vases she I love fills daily, mindful but of one : And close behind pale morn she,, like the sun Priming our world with light, pours, sweet to see, Clear water in the cup, and into me The image of herself: and that being done, Choice of what blooms round her fair garden run In climbers or in creepers or the tree, She ranges with unerring fingers fine, To harmony so vivid that through sight I hear, I have her heavenliness to fold Beyond the senses, where such love as mine, Such grace as hers, should the strange Fates with- hold Their starry more from her and me, unite. 182 WINTER HEAVENS SHARP is the night, but stars with frost alive, Leap off the rim of earth across the dome. It is a night to make the heavens our home More than the nest whereto apace we strive. Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, In swarms outrushing from the golden comb. They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam : The living throb in me, the dead revive. Yon mantle clothes us : there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death. It folds us flesh and dust; and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, the radiance enrings : And this is the soul's haven to have felt. 183 MODERN LOVE IN our old shipwrecked days there was an hour, When in the firelight steadily aglow, Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower That eve was left to us ; and hushed we sat As lovers to whom Time is whispering. From sudden-opened doors we heard them sing : The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat. Well knew we that Life's greatest treasure lay With us, and of it was our talk. ' Ah, yes ! Love dies ! ' I said : I never thought it less. She yearned to me that sentence to unsay. Then when the fire domed blackening, I found Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift : Now am I haunted by that taste ! that sound ! 184 MODERN LOVE 185 Mark where the pressing wind shoots javelin-like, Its skeleton shadow on the broad-backed wave ! Here is a fitting spot to dig Love's grave ; Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and strike, And dart their hissing tongues high up the sand ; In hearing of the ocean, and in sight Of those ribbed wind-streaks running into white. If I the death of Love had deeply planned, I never could have made it half so sure, As by the unblest kisses which upbraid The full-waked sense ; or failing that, degrade ! 'Tis morning : but no morning can restore What we have forfeited. I see no sin : The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be ! Passions spin the plot : We are betrayed by what is false within. 186 MODERN LOVE We saw the swallows gathering in the sky, And in the osier-isle we heard their noise. We had not to look back on Summer joys, Or forward to a Summer of bright dye : But in the largeness of the evening earth Our spirits grew as we went side by side. The hour became her husband and my bride. Love that had robbed us so, thus blessed our dearth ! The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood Full brown came from the West, and like pale blood Expanded to the upper crimson cloud, Love that had robbed us of immortal things, This little moment mercifully gave, Where I have seen across the twilight wave The swan sail with her young beneath her wings. MODERN LOVE 187 Thus piteously Love closed what he begat : The union of this ever-diverse pair ! These two were rapid falcons in a snare, Condemned to do the flitting of the bat. Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, They wandered once ; clear as the dew on flowers. But they fed not on the advancing hours : Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. Then each applied to each that fatal knife, Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life ! In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! JUGGLING JERRY i PITCH here the tent, while the old horse grazes By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage. It 's nigh my last above the daisies : My next leaf '11 be man's blank page. Yes, my old girl ! and it 's no use crying : Juggler, constable, king, must bow. One that outjuggles all's been spying Long to have me, and he has me now. II We 've travelled times to this old common : Often we've hung our pots in the gorse. We 've had a stirring life, old woman ! You, and I, and the old grey horse. Races, and fairs, and royal occasions, Found us coming to their call : Now they '11 miss us at our stations : There's a Juggler outjuggles all ! 188 JUGGLING JERRY 189 HI Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly ! Over the duck-pond the willow shakes. Easy to think that grieving 's folly, When the hand's firm as driven stakes! Ay, when we're strong, and braced, and manful. Life's a sweet fiddle : but we 're a batch Born to become the Great Juggler's han'ful : Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch. IV Here's where the lads of the village cricket : I was a lad not wide from here : Couldn't I whip off the bail from the wicket ? Like an old world those days appear ! Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatched ale-house I know them ! They are old friends of my halts, and seem, Somehow, as if kind thanks I owe them : Juggling don't hinder the heart's esteem. v Juggling 's no sin, for we must have victual : Nature allows us to bait for the fool. 190 JUGGLING JERRY Holding one's own makes us juggle no little ; But, to increase it, hard juggling 's the rule. You that are sneering at my profession, Haven't you juggled a vast amount ? There 's the Prime Minister, in one Session, Juggles more games than my sins '11 count. VI I've murdered insects with mock thunder: Conscience, for that, in men don't quail. I 've made bread from the bump of wonder : That's my business, and there's my tale. Fashion and rank all praised the professor : Ay ! and I 've had my smile from the Queen Bravo, Jerry ! she meant : God bless her ! Ain't this a sermon on that scene ? VII I 've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and, I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows : some, right scurvy : Most, a dash between the two. JUGGLING JERRY 191 But it 's a woman, old girl, that makes me Think more kindly of the race : And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me When the Great Juggler I must face. VIII We two were married, due and legal : Honest we 've lived since we Ve been one. Lord ! I could then jump like an eagle : You danced bright as a bit o' the sun. Birds in a May-bush we were ! right meriy ! All night we kiss'd, we juggled all day. Joy was the heart of Juggling Jerry ! Now from his old girl he 's juggled away. IX It's past parsons to console us : No, nor no doctor fetch for me : I can die without my bolus ; Two of a trade, lass, never agree ! Parson and Doctor ! don't they love rarely, Fighting the devil in other men's fields ! Stand up yourself and match him fairly : Then see how the rascal yields ! 192 JUGGLING JERRY x I, lass, have lived no gipsy, flaunting Finery while his poor helpmate grubs : Coin I 've stored, and you won't be wanting : You shan't beg from the troughs and tubs. Nobly you 've stuck to me, though in his kitchen Many a Marquis would hail you Cook ! Palaces you could have ruled and grown rich in, But your old Jerry you never forsook. IX Hand up the chirper ! ripe ale winks in it; Let J s have comfort and be at peace. Once a stout draught made me light as a linnet. Cheer up ! the Lord must have his lease. May be for none see in that black hollow It's just a place where we're held in pawn, And, when the Great Juggler makes as to swallow, It's just the sword-trick I ain't quite gone ! XII Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty, Gold-like and warm : it's the prime of May. JUGGLING JERRY 193 Better than mortar, brick and putty, Is God's house on a blowing day. Lean me more up the mound ; now I feel it : All the old heath-smells ! Ain't it strange ? There 's the world laughing, as if to conceal it, But He's by us, juggling the change, XIII I mind it well, by the sea-beach lying, Once it 's long gone when two gulls we beheld, Which, as the moon got up, were flying Down a big wave that sparked and swelled. Crack, went a gun : one fell : the second Wheeled round him twice, and was off for new luck : There in the dark her white wing beckon'd : Drop me a kiss I 'm the bird dead-struck ! THE OLD CHARTIST i WHATE'ER I be, old England is my dam ! So there 's my answer to the judges, clear, I 'm nothing of a fox, nor of a lamb ; I don't know how to bleat nor how to leer : I 'm for the nation ! That's why you see me by the wayside here, Returning home from transportation. ii It 's Summer in her bath this morn, I think. T *m fresh as dew, and chirpy as the birds : And just for joy to see old England wink rhro' leaves again, I could harangue the herds : Isn't it something To speak out like a man when you 've got words, And prove you 're not a stupid dumb thing ? 194 THE OLD CHARTIST 195 in They shipp'd me off for it ; I'm here again. Old England is my dam, whatever I be ! Says I, I '11 tramp it home, and see the grain : If you see well, you 're king of what you see : Eyesight is having, If you're not given, I said, to gluttony. Such talk to ignorance sounds as raving. nr You dear old brook, that from his Grace's park Come bounding ! on you run near my old town My lord can't lock the water; nor the lark, Unless he kills him, can my lord keep down. Up, is the song-note ! I 've tried it, too : for comfort and renown, I rather pitch'd upon the wrong note. I 'm not ashamed : Not beaten 's still my boast : Again I '11 rouse the people up to strike. 196 THE OLD CHARTIST But home's where different politics jar most. Respectability the women like. This form, or that form, The Government may be hungry pike, But don't you mount a Chartist platform ! VI Well, well ! Not beaten spite of them, I shout And my estate is suffering for the Cause. No, what is yon brown water-rat about, Who washes his old poll with busy paws ? What does he mean by't? It 's like defying all our natural laws, For him to hope that he '11 get clean by 't. VII His seat is on a mud-bank, and his trade Is dirt : he 's quite contemptible ; and yet The fellow 's all as anxious as a maid To show a decent dress, and dry the wet. Now it 's his whisker, And now his nose, and ear : he seems to get Each moment at the motion brisker ! THE OLD CHARTIST 197 VIII To see him squat like little chaps at school, I could let fly a laugh with all my might. He peers, hangs both his fore-paws : bless that fool, He 's bobbing at his frill now ! what a sight ! Licking the dish up, As if he thought to pass from black to white, Like parson into lawny bishop. IX The elms and yellow reed-flags in the sun, Look on quite grave : the sunlight flecks his side; And links of bindweed-flowers round him run, And shine up doubled with him in the tide. 7'm nearly splitting, But nature seems like seconding his pride, And thinks that his behaviour 's fitting. x That isle o' mud looks baking dry with gold. His needle-muzzle still works out and in. 198 THE OLD CHARTIST It really is a wonder to behold, And makes me feel the bristles of my chin. Judged by appearance, I fancy of the two I 'm nearer Sin, And might as well commence a clearance. XI And that 's what my fine daughter said : she meant : Pray, hold your tongue, and wear a Sunday face. Her husband, the young linendraper, spent Much argument thereon : I 'm their disgrace. Bother the couple ! I feel superior to a chap whose place Commands him to be neat and supple. XII But if I go and say to my old hen : I '11 mend the gentry's boots, and keep discreet, Until they grow too violent, why, then, A warmer welcome I might chance to meet : Warmer and better. And if she fancies her old cock is beat, And drops upon her knees so let her ! THE OLD CHARTIST 199 XIII She suffered for me : women, you'll observe, Don't suffer for a Cause, but for a man. When I was in the dock she show'd her nerve : I saw beneath her shawl my old tea-can Trembling . . . she brought it To screw me for my work : she loath'd my plan, And therefore doubly kind I thought it. XIV I 've never lost the taste of that same tea : That liquor on my logic floats like oil, When I state facts, and fellows disagree. For human creatures all are in a coil ; All may want pardon. I see a day when every pot will boil Harmonious in one great Tea-garden ! xv We wait the setting of the Dandy's day, Before that time ! He 's furbishing his dress, He will be ready for it I and I say, That yon old dandy rat amid the cress, Thanks to hard labour ! 200 THE OLD CHARTIST If cleanliness is next to godliness, The old fat fellow 's heaven's neighbour ! XVI You teach me a fine lesson, my old boy ! I 've looked on my superiors far too long, And small has been my profit as my joy. You've done the right while I've denounced the wrong. Prosper me later ! Like you I will despise the sniggering throng, And please myself and my Creator. XVII I '11 bring the linendraper and his wife Some day to see you ; taking off my hat. Should they ask why, I '11 answer : in my life I never found so true a democrat. Base occupation Can't rob you of your own esteem, old rat ! I '11 preach you to the British nation. MARTIN'S PUZZLE i THERE she goes up the street with her book in her hand, And her Good morning, Martin ! Ay, lass, how d' ye do ? Very well, thank you, Martin ! I can't understand ! I might just as well never have cobbled a shoe ! I can't understand it. She talks like a song ; Her voice takes your ear like the ring of a glass ; She seems to give gladness while limping along, Yet sinner ne'er suffer'd like that little lass. ii First, a fool of a boy ran her down with a cart. Then, her fool of a father a blacksmith by trade Why the deuce does he tell us it half broke his heart ? His heart ! where 's the leg of the poor little maid ! 201 202 MARTIN'S PUZZLE Well, that 's not enough ; they must push her downstairs, To make her go crooked: but why count the list ? If it's right to suppose that our human affairs Are all order'd by heaven there, bang goes my fist! in For if angels can look on such sights never mind ! When you 're next to blaspheming, it 's best to be mum. The parson declares that her woes weren't designed ; But, then, with the parson it 's all kingdom-come. Lose a leg, save a soul a convenient text ; I call it Tea doctrine, not savouring of God. When poor little Molly wants ' chastening,' why, next The Archangel Michael might taste of the rod. IV But, to see the poor darling go limping for miles To read books to sick people! and just of an age When girls learn the meaning of ribands and smiles ! Makes me feel like a squirrel that turns in a cage. MARTIN'S PUZZLE 203 The more I push thinking the more I revolve : I never get farther : and as to her face, It starts up when near on my puzzle I solve, And says, ' This crush'd body seems such a sad case/ v Not that she 's for complaining : she reads to earn pence ; And from those who can't pay, simple thanks are enough. Does she leave lamentation for chaps without sense ? Howsoever, she 's made up of wonderful stuff. Ay, the soul in her body must be a stout cord ; She sings little hymns at the close of the day, Though she has but three fingers to lift to the Lord, And only one leg to kneel down with to pray. VI What I ask is, Why persecute such a poor dear, If there 's Law above all ? Answer that if you can ! Irreligious I 'm not ; but I look on this sphere As a place where a man should just think like a man. 204 MARTIN'S PUZZLE It isn't fair dealing ! But, contrariwise, Do bullets in battle the wicked select ? Why, then it 's all chance-work ! And yet, in her eyes, She holds a fixed something by which I am checked, VII Yonder riband of sunshine aslope on the wall, If you eye it a minute '11 have the same look : So kind ! and so merciful ! God of us all ! It's the very same lesson we get from the Book. Then, is Life but a trial ? Is that what is meant ? Some must toil, and some perish, for others below : The injustice to each spreads a common content; Ay ! I 've lost it again, for it can't be quite so. VIII She 's the victim of fools : that seems nearer the mark. On earth there are engines and numerous fools. MARTIN'S PUZZLE 205 Why the Lord can permit them, we 're still in the dark ; He does, and in some sort of way they're His tools. It 's a roundabout way, with respect let me add, If Molly goes crippled that we may be taught : But, perhaps, it's the only way, though it's so bad; In that case we '11 bow down our heads, as we ought. IX But the worst of me is, that when I bow my head, I perceive a thought wriggling away in the dust, And I follow its tracks, quite forgetful, instead Of humble acceptance : for, question I must ! Here 's a creature made carefully carefully made ! Put together with craft, and then stamped on, and why ? The answer seems nowhere : it 's discord that 's played. The sky 's a blue dish ! an implacable sky ! 206 MARTIN'S PUZZLE Stop a moment. I seize an idea from the pit. They tell us that discord, though discord, alone, Can be harmony when the notes properly fit : Am I judging all things from a single fake tone ? Is the Universe one immense Organ, that rolls From devils to angels ? I'm blind with the sight. It pours such a splendour on heaps of poor souls ! I might try at kneeling with Molly to-night. A BALLAD OF FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT SEE the sweet women, friend, that lean beneath The ever-falling fountain of green leaves Round the white bending stem, and like a wreath Of our most blushful flower shine trembling through, To teach philosophers the thirst of thieves : Is one for me ? is one for you ? -Fair sirs, we give you welcome, yield you place, And you shall choose among us which you will, Without the idle pastime of the chase, If to this treaty you can well agree : To wed our cause, and its high task fulfil. He who 's for us, for him are we ! 207 208 A BALLAD OF in Most gracious ladies, nigh when light has birth, A troop of maids, brown as burnt heather-bells, And rich with life as moss-roots breathe of earth In the first plucking of them, past us flew To labour, singing rustic ritornells : Had they a cause ? are they of you ? IV Sirs, they are as unthinking armies are To thoughtful leaders, and our cause is theirs. When they know men they know the state of war: But now they dream like sunlight on a sea, And deem you hold the half of happy pairs. He who 's for us, for him are we ! v Ladies, I listened to a ring of dames ; Judicial in the robe and wig ; secure As venerated portraits in their frames ; And they denounced some insurrection new Against sound laws which keep you good and pure. Are you of them ? are they of you ? FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 209 VI -Sirs, they are of us, as their dress denotes, And by as much : let them together chime : It is an ancient bell within their throats, Pulled by an aged ringer ; with what glee Befits the yellow yesterdays of time. He who's for us, for him are we ! VII -Sweet ladies, you with beauty, you with wit ; Dowered of all favours and all blessed things Whereat the ruddy torch of Love is lit ; Wherefore this vain and outworn strife renew, Which stays the tide no more than eddy-rings ? Who is for love must be for you. VIII -The manners of the market, honest sirs, 'Tis hard to quit when you behold the wares. You flatter us, or perchance our milliners You flatter ; so this vain and outworn She May still be the charmed snake to your soft airs ! A higher lord than Love claim we. o 210 A BALLAD OF IX One day, dear lady, missing the broad track, I came on a wood's border, by a mead, Where golden May ran up to moted black : And there I saw Queen Beauty hold review, With Love before her throne in act to plead Take him for me, take her for you. x Ingenious gentleman, the tale is known. Love pleaded sweetly : Beauty would not melt : She would not melt : he turned in wrath : her throne The shadow of his back froze witheringly, And sobbing at his feet Queen Beauty knelt. O not such slaves of Love are we ' XI Love, lady, like the star above that lance Of radiance flung by sunset on ridged cloud, Sad as the last line of a brave romance ! Young Love hung dim, yet quivering round him threw FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 211 Beams of fresh fire, while Beauty waned and bowed. Scorn Love, and dread the doom for you. XII -Called she not for her mirror, sir ? Forth ran Her women : I am lost, she cried, when lo, Love in the form of an admiring man Once more in adoration bent the knee, And brought the faded Pagan to full blow : For which her throne she gave : not we ! XIII -My version, madam, runs not to that end. A certain madness of an hour half past, Caught her like fever ; her just lord no friend She fancied; aimed beyond beauty, and thence grew The prim acerbity, sweet Love's outcast. Great heaven ward off that stroke from you ! XIV -Your prayer to heaven, good sir, is generous : How generous likewise that you do not name 212 A BALLAD OF Offended nature ! She from all of us Couched idle underneath our showering tree, May quite withhold her most destructive flame ; And then what woeful women we ! xv Quite, could not be, fair lady ; yet your youth May run to drought in visionary schemes : And a late waking to perceive the truth, When day falls shrouding her supreme adieu, Shows darker wastes than unaccomplished dreams: And that may be in store for you. XVI O sir, the truth, the truth ! is 't in the skies, Or in the grass, or in this heart of ours ? But O the truth, the truth ! the many eyes That look on it ! the diverse things they see, According to their thirst for fruit or flowers ! Pass on : it is the truth seek we. XVII Lady, there is a truth of settled laws That down the past burns like a great watch-fire. FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 213 Let youth hail changeful mornings ; but your cause, Whetting its edge to cut the race in two, Is felony : you forfeit the bright lyre. Much honour and much glory you ! XVIII -Sir, was it glory, was it honour, pride, And not as cat and serpent and poor slave, Wherewith we walked in union by your side ? Spare to false womanliness her delicacy, Or bid true manliness give ear, we crave : In our defence thus chained are we. XIX -Yours, madam, were the privileges of life Proper to man's ideal ; you were the mark Of action, and the banner in the strife : Yea, of your very weakness once you drew The strength that sounds the wells, outflies the lark: Wrapped in a robe of flame were you ! 214 A BALLAD OF xx Your friend looks thoughtful. Sir, when we were chill. You clothed us warmly ; all in honour ! when We starved you fed us ; all in honour still : Oh, all in honour, ultra-honourably ! Deep is the gratitude we owe to men, For privileged indeed were we ! XXI You cite exceptions, madam, that are sad, But come in the red struggle of our growth, Alas, that I should have to say it ! bad Is two-sexed upon earth : this which you do, Shows animal impatience, mental' sloth : Man monstrous ! pining seraphs you ! XXII I fain would ask your friend . . . but I will ask You, sir, how if in place of numbers vague, Your sad exceptions were to break that mask They wear for your cool mind historically, And blaze like black lists of a present plague ? But in that light behold them we. FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 215 XXIII -Your spirit breathes a mist upon our world, Lady, and like a rain to pierce the roof And drench the bed where toil-tossed man lies curled In his hard-earned oblivion ! You are few, Scattered, ill-counselled, blinded : for a proof, I have lived, and have known none like you. XXIV -We may be blind to men, sir : we embrace A future now beyond the fowler's nets. Though few, we hold a promise for the race That was not at our rising : you are free To win brave mates ; you lose but marionnettes. He who 's for us, for him are we. XXV -Ah ! madam, were they puppets who withstood Youth's cravings for adventure to preserve The dedicated ways of womanhood ? The light which leads us from the paths of rue, That light above us, never seen to swerve, Should be the home-lamp trimmed by you. 216 A BALLAD OF XXVI Ah ! sir, our worshipped posture we perchance Shall not abandon, though we see not how, Being to that lamp-post fixed, we may advance Beside our lords in any real degree, Unless we move : and to advance is now A sovereign need, think more than we. XXVII So push you out of harbour in small craft, With little seamanship ; and comes a gale, The world will laugh, the world has often laughed, Lady, to see how bold when skies are blue, When black winds churn the deeps how panic-pale, How swift to the old nest fly you ! XXVIII What thinks your friend, kind sir? We have escaped But partly that old half-tamed wild beast's paw Whereunder woman, the weak thing, was shaped : Men, too, have known the cramping enemy FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 217 In grim brute force, whom force of brain shall awe: Him our deliverer, await we ! XXIX -Delusions are with eloquence endowed, And yours might pluck an angel from the spheres To play in this revolt whereto you are vowed, Deliverer, lady ! but like summer dew O'er fields that crack for rain your friends drop tears, Who see the awakening for you. XXX -Is he our friend, there silent ? he weeps not. O sir, delusion mounting like a sun On a mind blank as the white wife of Lot, Giving it warmth and movement ! if this be Delusion, think of what thereby was won For men, and dream of what win we. XXXI -Lady, the destiny of minor powers, Who would recast us, is but to convulse : 218 A BALLAD OF You enter on a strife that frets and sours ; You can but win sick disappointment's hue ; And simply an accelerated pulse, Some tonic you have drunk moves you. XXXII -Thinks your friend so? Good sir, your wit is bright ; But wit that strives to speak the popular voice, Puts on its nightcap and puts out its light. Curfew, would seem your conqueror's decree To women likewise : and we have no choice Save darkness or rebellion, we ! XXXIII -A plain safe intermediate way is cleft By reason foiling passion : you that rave Of mad alternatives to right and left Echo the tempter, madam : and 'tis due Unto your sex to shun it as the grave, This later apple offered you. FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 219 XXXIV -This apple is not ripe, it is not sweet ; Nor rosy, sir, nor golden : eye and mouth Are little wooed by it ; yet we would eat. We are somewhat tired of Eden, is our plea. We have thirsted long ; this apple suits our drouth : 'Tis good for men to halve, think we. XXXV -But say, what seek you, madam ? 'Tis enough That you should have dominion o'er the springs Domestic and man's heart: those ways, how rough, How vile, outside the stately avenue Where you walk sheltered by your angel's wings, Are happily unknown to you. XXXVI -We hear women's shrieks on them. We like your phrase, Dominion domestic ! And that roar, ' What seek you ? ' is of tyrants in all days. Sir, get you something of our purity 220 A BALLAD OF And we will of your strength : we ask no more. That is the sum of what seek we. XXXVII O for an image, madam, in one word, To show you as the lightning night reveals, Your error and your perils : you have erred In mind only, and the perils that ensue Swift heels may soften ; wherefore to swift heels Address your hopes of safety you ! XXXVIII To err in mind, sir ... your friend smiles : he may ! To err in mind, if err in mind we can, Is grievous error you do well to stay. But O how different from reality Men's fiction is ! how like you in the plan, Is woman, knew you her as we ! XXXIX Look, lady, where yon river winds its line Toward sunset, and receives on breast and face FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 221 The splendour of fair life : to be divine, 'Tis nature bids you be to nature true, Flowing with beauty, lending earth your grace, Reflecting heaven in clearness you. XL -Sir, you speak well : your friend no word vouch- safes. To flow with beauty, breeding fools and worse, Cowards and worse : at such fair life she chafes, Who is not wholly of the nursery, Nor of your schools : we share the primal curse ; Together shake it off, say we ! XLI -Hear, then, my friend, madam ! Tongue-restrained he stands Till words are thoughts, and thoughts, like swords enriched With traceries of the artificer's hands, Are fire-proved steel to cut, fair flowers to view. Do I hear him ? Oh, he is bewitched, bewitched ! Heed him not ! Traitress beauties you ! 222 A BALLAD OF XLII We have won a champion, sisters, and a sage ! Ladies, you win a guest to a good feast ! Sir spokesman, sneers are weakness veiling rage. Of weakness, and wise men, you have the key. Then are there fresher mornings mounting East Than ever yet have dawned, sing we ! XLIII False ends as false began, madam, be sure ! What lure there is the pure cause purifies ! Who purifies the victim of the lure ? That soul which bids us our high light pursue. Some heights are measured down : the wary wise Shun Reason in the masque with you ! XLIV Sir, for the friend you bring us, take our thanks. Yes, Beauty was of old this barren goal ; A thing with claws; and brute-like in her pranks ! But could she give more loyal guarantee Than wooing Wisdom, that in her a soul Has risen ? Adieu : content are we ! FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT 223 XLV Those ladies led their captive to the flood's Green edge. He floating with them seemed the most Fool-flushed old noddy ever crowned with buds. Happier than I ! Then, why not wiser too ? For he that lives with Beauty, he may boast His comrade over me and you. XLVI Have women nursed some dream since Helen sailed Over the sea of blood the blushing star, That beauty, whom frail man as Goddess hailed, When not possessing her (for such is he !), Might in a wondering season seen afar, Be tamed to say not ' I/ but ' we ' ? XLVII And shall they make of Beauty their estate, The fortress and the weapon of their sex ? Shall she in her frost-brilliancy dictate, More queenly than of old, how we must woo, Ere she will melt ? The halter 's on our necks, Kick as it likes us, I and you. 224 A BALLAD OF FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT XLVIII Certain it is, if Beauty has disdained Her ancient conquests, with an aim thus high If this, if that, if more, the fight is gained. But can she keep her followers without fee ? Yet ah ! to hear anew those ladies cry, He who 's for us, for him are we THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN ENTER these enchanted woods, You who dare. Nothing harms beneath the leaves More than waves a swimmer cleaves. Toss your heart up with the lark, Foot at peace with mouse and worm, Fair you fare. Only at a dread of dark Quaver, and they quit their form : Thousand eyeballs under hoods Have you by the hair. Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare. p 226 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN ii Here the snake across your path Stretches in his golden bath : Mossy-footed squirrels leap Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep : Yaffles on a chuckle skim Low to laugh from branches dim : Up the pine, where sits the star, Rattles deep the moth- winged jar. Each has business of his own ; But should you distrust a tone, Then beware. Shudder all the haunted roods, All the eyeballs under hoods Shroud you in their glare. Enter these enchanted woods,, You who dare. m Open hither, open hence. Scarce a bramble weaves a fence, Where the strawberry runs red, With white star-flower overhead ; THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 227 Cumbered by dry twig and cone, Shredded husks of seedlings flown, Mine of mole and spotted flint : Of dire wizardry no hint, Save mayhap the print that shows Hasty outward-tripping toes, Heels to terror on the mould. These, the woods of Westermain, Are as others to behold, Rich of wreathing sun and rain ; Foliage lustreful around Shadowed leagues of slumbering sound. Wavy tree-tops, yellow whins, Shelter eager minikins, Myriads, free to peck and pipe : Would you better ? would you worse ? You with them may gather ripe Pleasures flowing not from purse. Quick and far as Colour flies Taking the delighted eyes, You of any well that springs May unfold the heaven of things ; Have it homely and within, And thereof its likeness win, 228 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Will you so in soul's desire : This do sages grant t' the lyre. This is being bird and more, More than glad musician this ; Granaries you will have a store Past the world of woe and bliss ; Sharing still its bliss and woe ; Harnessed to its hungers, no. On the throne Success usurps, You shall seat the joy you feel Where a race of water chirps, Twisting hues of flourished steel : Or where light is caught in hoop Up a clearing's leafy rise, Where the crossing deerherds troop Classic splendours, knightly dyes. Or, where old-eyed oxen chew Speculation with the cud, Read their pool of vision through, Back to hours when mind was mud ; Nigh the knot, which did untwine Timelessly to drowsy suns ; Seeing Earth a slimy spine, Heaven a space for winging tons. THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 229 Farther, deeper, may you read. Have you sight for things afield, Where peeps she, the Nurse of seed, Cloaked, but in the peep revealed ; Showing a kind face and sweet : Look you with the soul you see't. Glory narrowing to grace, Grace to glory magnified, Following that will you embrace Close in arms or aery wide. Banished is the white Foam-born Not from here, nor under ban Phoebus lyrist, Phoebe's horn, Pipings of the reedy Pan. Loved of Earth of old they were, Loving did interpret her ; And the sterner worship bars None whom Song has made her stars. You have seen the huntress moon Radiantly facing dawn, Dusky meads between them strewn Glimmering like downy awn : Argent Westward glows the hunt, East the blush about to climb ; 230 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN One another fair they front, Transient, yet outshine the time ; Even as dewlight off the rose In the mind a jewel sows. Thus opposing grandeurs live Here if Beauty be their dower : Doth she of her spirit give, Fleetingness will spare her flower. This is in the tune we play, Which no spring of strength would quell ; In subduing does not slay ; Guides the channel, guards the well : Tempered holds the young blood-heat, Yet through measured grave accord, Hears the heart of wildness beat Like a centaur's hoof on sward. Drink the sense the notes infuse, You a larger self will find : Sweetest fellowship ensues With the creatures of your kind. Ay, and Love, if Love it be Flaming over 7 and ME, Love meet they who do not shove Cravings in the van of Love. THE WOODS OF WESTERMA1N 231 Courtly dames are here to woo, Knowing love if it be true. Reverence the blossom-shoot Fervently, they are the fruit. Mark them stepping, hear them talk, Goddess, is no myth inane, You will say of those who walk In the woods of Westermain. Waters that from throat and thigh Dart the sun his arrows back ; Leaves that on a woodland sigh Chat of secret things no lack ; Shadowy branch-leaves, waters clear, Bare or veiled they move sincere ; Not by slavish terrors tripped Being anew in nature dipped, Growths of what they step on, these ; With the roots the grace of trees. Casket-breasts they give, nor hide, For a tyrant's flattered pride, Mind, which nourished not by light, Lurks the shuffling trickster sprite : Whereof are strange tales to tell ; Some in blood writ, tombed in bell. 232 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Here the ancient battle ends, Joining two astonished friends, Who the kiss can give and take With more warmth than in that world Where the tiger claws the snake, Snake her tiger clasps infurled, And the issue of their fight People lands in snarling plight. Here her splendid beast she leads Silken-leashed and decked with weeds Wild as he, but breathing faint Sweetness of unfelt constraint. Love, the great volcano, flings Fires of lower Earth to sky ; Love, the sole permitted, sings Sovereignly of ME and /. Bowers he has of sacred shade, Spaces of superb parade, Voiceful . . . But bring you a note Wrangling, howsoe'er remote, Discords out of discord spin Round and round derisive din : Sudden will a pallor pant Chill at screeches miscreant ; THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 233 Owls or spectres, thick they flee ; Nightmare upon horror broods ; Hooded laughter, monkish glee, Gaps the vital air. Enter these enchanted woods You who dare. IV You must love the light so well That no darkness will seem fell. Love it so you could accost Fellowly a livid ghost. Whish ! the phantom wisps away, Owns him smoke to cocks of day. In your breast the light must burn Fed of you, like corn in quern Ever plumping while the wheel Speeds the mill and drains the meal. Light to light sees little strange, Only features heavenly new ; Then you touch the nerve of Change, Then of Earth you have the clue ; Then her two-sexed meanings melt Through you, wed the thought and felt. 234 - THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Sameness locks no scurfy pond Here for Custom, crazy-fond : Change is on the wing to bud Rose in brain from rose in blood. Wisdom throbbing shall you see Central in complexity ; From her pasture 'mid the beasts Rise to her ethereal feasts, Not, though lightnings track your wit Starward, scorning them you quit : For be sure the bravest wing Preens it in our common spring, Thence along the vault to soar, You with others, gathering more, Glad of more, till you reject Your proud title of elect, Perilous even here while few Roam the arched greenwood with you. Heed that snare. Muffled by his cavern-cowl Squats the scaly Dragon-fowl, Who was lord ere light you drank, And lest blood of knightly rank Stream, let not your fair princess THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 235 Stray : he holds the leagues in stress, Watches keenly there. Oft has he been riven ; slain Is no force in Westermain. Wait, and we shall forge him curbs, Put his fangs to uses, tame, Teach him, quick as cunning herbs, How to cure him sick and lame. Much restricted, much enringed, Much he frets, the hooked and winged, Never known to spare. 'Tis enough : the name of Sage Hits no thing in nature, nought ; Man the least, save when grave Age From yon Dragon guards his thought. Eye him when you hearken dumb To what words from Wisdom come. When she says how few are by Listening to her, eye his eye. Self, his name declare. Him shall Change, transforming late, Wonderously renovate. Hug himself the creature may : What he hugs is loathed decay. 236 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Crying, slip thy scales, and slough ! Change will strip his armour off; Make of him who was all maw, Inly only thrilling-shrewd, Such a servant as none saw Through his days of dragonhood. Days when growling o'er his bone, Sharpened he for mine and thine ; Sensitive within alone ; Scaly as the bark of pine. Change, the strongest son of Life, Has the Spirit here to wife. Lo, their young of vivid breed, Bear the lights that onward speed, Threading thickets, mounting glades, Up the verdurous colonnades, Round the fluttered curves, and down, Out of sight of Earth's blue crown, Whither, in her central space, Spouts the Fount and Lure o' the chase. Fount unresting, Lure divine ! There meet all : too late look most. Fire in water hued as wine, Springs amid a shadowy host, THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 237 Circled : one close-headed mob, Breathless, scanning divers heaps, Where a Heart begins to throb, Where it ceases, slow, with leaps. And 'tis very strange, 'tis said, How you spy in each of them Semblance of that Dragon red, As the oak in bracken-stem. And, 'tis said, how each and each : Which commences, which subsides : First my Dragon ! doth beseech Her who food for all provides. And she answers with no sign, Utters neither yea nor nay ; Fires the water hued as wine ; Kneads another spark in clay. Terror is about her hid ; Silence of the thunders locked ; Lightnings lining the shut lid ; Fixity on quaking rocked. Lo, you look at Flow and Drought Interflashed and interwrought : Ended is begun, begun Ended, quick as torrents run. 238 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Young Impulsion spouts to sink ; Luridness and lustre link; Tis your come and go of breath ; Mirrored pants the Life, the Death ; Each of either reaped and sown : Rosiest rosy wanes to crone. See you so ? your senses drift ; 'Tis a shuttle weaving swift. Look with spirit past the sense, Spirit shines in permanence. That is She, the view of whom Is the dust within the tomb, Is the inner blush above, Look to loathe, or look to love ; Think her Lump, or know her Flame ; Dread her scourge, or read her aim ; Shoot your hungers from their nerve ; Or, in her example, serve. Some have found her sitting grave ; Laughing, some ; or, browed with sweat, Hurling dust of fool and knave In a hissing smithy's jet. More it were not well to speak ; Burn to see, you need but seek. THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 239 Once beheld she gives the key Airing every doorway, she. Little can you stop or steer Ere of her you are the seer. On the surface she will witch, Rendering Beauty yours, but gaze Under, and the soul is rich Past computing, past amaze. Then is courage that endures Even her awful tremble yours. Then, the reflex of that Fount Spied below, will Reason mount Lordly and a quenchless force, Lighting Pain to its mad source, Scaring Fear till Fear escapes, Shot through all its phantom shapes. Then your spirit will perceive Fleshly seed of fleshly sins ; Where the passions interweave, How the serpent tangle spins Of the sense of Earth misprised, Brainlessly unrecognized ; She being Spirit in her clods, Footway to the God of Gods. 240 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Then for you are pleasures pure, Sureties as the stars are sure : Not the wanton beckoning flags Which, of flattery and delight, Wax to the grim Habit-Hags Riding souls of men to night : Pleasures that through blood run sane, Quickening spirit from the brain. Each of each in sequent birth, Blood and brain and spirit, three (Say the deepest gnomes of Earth;, Join for true felicity. Are they parted, then expect Some one sailing will be wrecked : Separate hunting are they sped, Scan the morsel coveted. Earth that Triad is : she hides Joy from him who that divides ; Showers it when the three are one Glassing her in union. Earth your haven, Earth your helm, You command a double realm , Labouring here to pay your debt, Till your little sun shall set ; THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 241 Leaving her the future task : Loving her too well to ask. Eglantine that climbs the yew, She her darkest wreathes for those Knowing her the Ever-new, And themselves the kin o' the rose. Life, the chisel, axe and sword, Wield who have her depths explored : Life, the dream, shall be their robe Large as air about the globe ; Life, the question, hear its cry Echoed with concordant Why; Life, the small self-dragon ramped, Thrill for service to be stamped. Ay, and over every height Life for them shall wave a wand : That, the last, where sits affright, Homely shows the stream beyond. Love the light and be its lynx, You will track her and attain ; Read her as no cruel Sphinx In the woods of Westermain. Daily fresh the woods are ranged ; Glooms which otherwhere appal, Q 242 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Sounded : here, their worths exchanged Urban joins with pastoral : Little lost, save what may drop Husk-like, and the mind preserves. Natural overgrowths they lop, Yet from nature neither swerves, Trained or savage : for this cause : Of our Earth they ply the laws, Have in Earth their feeding root, Mind of man and bent of brute. Hear that song ; both wild and ruled. Hear it : is it wail or mirth ? Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled ? None, and all : it springs of Earth. O but hear it ! 'tis the mind ; Mind that with deep Earth unites, Round the solid trunk to wind Rings of clasping parasites. Music have you there to feed Simplest and most soaring need. Free to wind, and in desire Winding, they to her attached Feel the trunk a spring of fire, And ascend to heights unmatched, THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 243 Whence the tidal world is viewed As a sea of windy wheat, Momently black, barren, rude ; Golden-brown, for harvest meet, Dragon-reaped from folly-sown ; Bride-like to the sickle-blade : Quick it varies, while the moan, Moan of a sad creature strayed, Chiefly is its voice. So flesh Conjures tempest-flails to thresh Good from worthless. Some clear lamps Light it ; more of dead marsh-damps. Monster is it still, and blind, Fit but to be led by Pain. Glance we at the paths behind, Fruitful sight has Westermain. There we laboured, and in turn Forward our blown lamps discern, As you see on the dark deep Far the loftier billows leap, Foam for beacon bear. Hither, hither, if you will, Drink instruction, or instil, Run the woods like vernal sap, 244 THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN Crying, hail to luminousness ! But have care. In yourself may lurk the trap : On conditions they caress. Here you meet the light invoked Here is never secret cloaked. Doubt you with the monster's fry All his orbit may exclude ; Are you of the stiff, the dry, Cursing the not understood ; Grasp you with the monster's claws Govern with his truncheon-saws ; Hate, the shadow of a grain ; You are lost in Westermain : Earthward swoops a vulture sun, Nighted upon carrion : Straightway venom wine-cups shout Toasts to One whose eyes are out : Flowers along the reeling floor Drip henbane and hellebore : Beauty,, of her tresses shorn, Shrieks as nature's maniac : Hideousness on hoof and horn Tumbles, yapping in her track : THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN 245 Haggard Wisdom, stately once, Leers fantastical and trips : Allegory drums the sconce, Impiousness nibblenips. Imp that dances, imp that flits, Imp o' the demon-growing girl, Maddest ! whirl with imp o' the pits Round you, and with them you whirl Fast where pours the fountain-rout Out of Him whose eyes are out : Multitudes on multitudes, Drenched in wallowing devilry : And you ask where you may be, In what reek of a lair Given to bones and ogre-broods : And they yell you Where. Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare. Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty THE AMAZING MARRIAGE BY GEORGE MEREDITH Crown Sv0. 6s. 'To say that Mr. Meredith is at his best in " The Amazing Marriage " is to say that he has given us a masterpiece." Daily News. ' Mr. Meredith belongs to the great school of writers, of whom Aristo- phanes, Rabelais, Montaigne, Fielding, are some of the most splendid examples. Mr. Meredith's style is not . . so obscure as it is often represented to be.' Athenaeum. 'Carinthia will take her place ... in the long gallery of those Meredithian women whom all literary Europe delights to honour.' Daily Chronicle. 1 By George Meredith ! Those three words have a welcome sound for reviewers.' Literary World. 'We have said enough to show that Mr. Meredith's plot is excellently conceived and excellently carried out.' Standard. ' Most novels are merely dramas with padded stage directions. Mr. Meredith's, everybody knows, are otherwise. His novels are always human life . . .' The Star. 'Wholly delightful.' Black and White. 'This is a book in which, to use Mr. Meredith's own expression, you jump to his meaning.' Westminster Gazette. ' The book is full of wise, deep, and brilliant things. 'Scotsman. ' This latest example of Mr. Meredith's quality is marked by observa- tion, wit, and variegated fancy enough to deck out a gross of novels of the average sort.' Morning Post CONSTABLE'S LIMITED EDITION DE LUXE OF THE WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH IN 32 VOLUMES ioj. 6d. net per volume. Sold in Sets only. Extracts from a Leading Article which appeared in the 'Daily Chronicle,' November aoth, 1896. '"The Works of George Meredith," Vols. I. and II. (Westminster- Archibald Constable and Co.), mean more, vastly more, than a handsome addition to the library shelves. They are a formal recognition that Mr. Meredith has at last come into his own, tangible evidence of a reputation long in the making, now triumphantly crowned. . . . To-day, by the general consent of the English-speaking world, he is accepted as our foremost living novelist, with Thomas Hardy by his side.' Extract from a Special Article in 'The Westminster Gazette,' December ist, 1896. 'Once more we are impressed with the essential sincerity of Mr. Meredith's writing. However much it is written from the head and the intellectual pleasure of it is immense it is also written from the heart. ' The size is convenient, the cover simple and good, the paper of the best, and the printing so brilliant that you might suppose it to come straight from a hand-press.' The Scotsman. ' Mr. Meredith's most fervent worshipper could not desire a more charm- ing edition of his works to read and reverence.' The Academy. ' Mr. Meredith, who in generous youth gave to the world an imperish- able literature, in full maturity of judgment confirms the now inalienable gift.' The Times. ' This edition of Mr. Meredith's works ... is certainly one which every admirer of our first novelist will desire to possess.' The Quarterly Review. ' His solid strength of substance, his elaboration of picturesque detail, his careful finish of language, at once set off, and are in turn set off by, the typographic beauty of the edition which Messrs. Constable are now publishing. The volumes satisfy the most fastidious taste, and the richly painted figures of this Burne-Jones of Victorian prose writers look out from a page which, in its way, is as individual and decorative a product as are the creations of Mr. Meredith's imagination.' 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to "which renewed. Renewals only- Tel. No. 642-3405 Renewals may be made 4 days priod to date due. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. EK'DLD OCT 5--s>PM 71 , .a* LD21A-60m-8,'70 (N8837slO)476 A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley U. C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES