iViODSSRN THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BEQUEST OF Alice R. Hilgard THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF FRANCIS THOMPSON Turn to the end of this volume for a complete list of titles in the Modern Library. COMPLETE Poetical works OF FRANCIS THOMPSON ^f^i^ BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC. PUBLISHERS NEW YORK Printed ill the United States of America GIFT. DEDICATION OF POEMS / 9 /"-^ (1893) /^)« )/l^ To Wilfrid and Alice Meynell If the rose in meek duty- May dedicate humbly To her grower the beauty Wherewith she is comely; If the mine to the miner The jewels that pined in it, Earth to diviner The springs he divined in it ; To the grapes the wine-pitcher Their juice that was crushed in it, Viol to its witcher The music lay hushed in it; If the lips may pay Gladness In laughters she wakened, And the heart to its sadness Weeping unslakened, If the hid and sealed coffer. Whose having not his is. To the loosers may proffer Their finding — here this is; Their lives if all livers To the Life of all living,— To you, O dear givers! I give your o^vn giving. A NOTE BY FRANCIS THOMPSON'S LITERARY EXECUTOR In making this Collection I have been governed by Francis Thompson's express instructions, or guided by a knowledge of his feelings and pref- erences acquired during an unbroken intimacy of nineteen years. His own list of new inclusions and his own suggested reconsiderations of his formerly published text have been followed in this edition of his Poetical Works. May 1913. W, M. CONTENTS Dedication Poems on Children Daisy i The Poppy 3 To Monica Thought Dying . . • . 6 The Making of Viola 9 To My Godchild 12 To Olivia 15 Little Jesus 15 Sister Songs i^ Love in Dian's Lap Proemion 59 Before Her Portrait in Youth .... 64 To A Poet Breaking Silence .... 66 'Manus Animam Pinxit' 68 A Carrier Song 71 ScALA Jacobi Portaque Eburnea .... 74 Gilded Gold 75 Her Portrait 77 Epilogue to the Poet's Sitter .... 82 DOMUS TuA 84 In Her Paths 84 After Her Going . » c o . . . 85 Beneath a Photograph 86 The Hound of Heaven SS Ode to the Setting Sun 94 CONTENTS After-strain 103 To THE Dead Cardinal of Westminster . .105 a corymbus for autumn 1x2 Ecclesiastical Ballads The Veteran of Heaven 117 LiLiuM Regis 118 Translations A Sunset 120 Heard on the Mountain 122 An Echo of Victor Hugo 126 Miscellaneous Poems Dream-tryst 128 Buona Notte 130 The Passion of Mary 131 L'Envoy 132 Messages 132 At Lord's i33 Love and the Child 134 Daphne 134 Absence 136 A Fallen Yew 138 A Judgment in Heaven 141 The Sere of the Leaf 147 To Stars 152 Lines for a Drawing of Our Lady of the Night 154 Orison-tryst 155 'Whereto Art Thou Come' . . . .156 Song of the Hours i57 Pastoral . . „ . o « . . 164 CONTENTS Past Thinking of Solomon . . . .166 A Dead Astronomer 167 Cheated Elsie . 167 The Fair Inconstant 170 Threatened Tears 171 The House of Sorrows 172 Insentience 174 Envoy i75 Dedication of New Poems 176 Sight and Insight The Mistress of Vision 177 Contemplation 186 'By Reason of Thy Law' 189 The Dread of Height 190 Orient Ode . i94 New Year's Chimes 201 From the Night of Forebeing .... 203 Any Saint 215 AssuMPTA Maria 222 Carmen Genesis 226 Ad Castitatem 230 The After Woman .233 Grace of the Way 236 Retrospect .238 A Narrow Vessel A Girl's Sin 240 Love Declared 246 The Way of a Maid 247 Beginning of End 248 CONTENTS Penelope 249 The End of It 250 Epilogue 250 Ultima Love's Almsman's Plaineth His Fare , . .252 A Holocaust 253 My Lady the Tyranness 254 Onto This Last 257 Ultimum 259 An Anthem of Earth Proemion 261 Anthem 262 Miscellaneous Odes Laus Amara Doloris . . . , • 275 A Captain of Song 280 Against Urania 282 To THE English Martyrs 284 Ode for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Vic- toria, 1897 290 The Nineteenth Century 298 Peace . . . 304 Cecil Rhodes 308 Of Nature: Laud and Plaint . . . .312 Sonnets Ad Amicam . . . . . . . .319 To A Child . , 322 Hermes 323 House of Bondage 324 CONTENTS The Heart 324 Desideratum Indesideratum . . . -325 Love's Varlets 326 NoN Pax — Expectatio 326 Not Even in Dream 327 Miscellaneous Poems A Hollow Wood 32S To Daisies 329 To THE Sinking Sun 33 ^ A May Burden 333 July Fugitive 334 Field Flower 337 To A Snow-flake 339 A Question 339 The Cloud's Swan-song 34 1 Of My Friend 345 To Monica— After Nine Years . . . .346 A Double Need . . . . • • .348 Grief's Harmonics 349 Memorat Memoria 349 NOCTURN 35^ Heaven and Hell 352 'Chose Vue' 352 St. Monica 352 Marriage in Two Moods 353 All Flesh 355 The Kingdom of God 35^ The Singer Saith of His Song . . . -357 POEMS ON CHILDREN DAISY Where the thistle lifts a purple crown Six foot out of the turf, And the harebell shakes on the windy hill- O breath of the distant surf! — The hills look over on the South, And southward dreams the sea; And with the sea-breeze hand in hand Came innocence and she. Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry- Red for the gatherer springs, Two children did we stray and talk Wise, idle, childish things. She listened with big-lipped surprise, Breast-deep mid flower and spine: Her skin was like a grape whose veins Run snow instead of wine. She knew not those sweet words she spake, Nor knew her own sweet way ; But there's never a bird, so sweet a song Thronged in whose throat that day. FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Oh, there were flowers in Storrington On the turf and on the spray; But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills Was the Daisy-flower that day! Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. She gave me tokens three: — A look, a word of her winsome mouth, And a wild raspberry. A berry red, a guileless look, A still word, — strings of sand! And yet they made my wild, wild heart Fly down to her little hand. For standing artless as the air, And candid as the skies, She took the berries with her hand, And the love with her sweet eyes. The fairest things have fleetest end, Their scent survives their close: But the rose's scent is bitterness To him that loved the rose. She looked a little wistfully, Then went her sunshine way: — The sea's eye had a mist on it. And the leaves fell from the day. She went her unremembering way, She went and left in me The pang of all the partings gone. And partings yet to be. POEMS ON CHILDREN She left me marvelling why my soul Was sad that she was glad; At all the sadness in the sweet, The sweetness in the sad. Still, still I seemed to see her, still Look up with soft replies. And take the berries with her hand, And the love with her lovely eyes. Nothing begins, and nothing ends, That is not paid with moan; For we are born in other's pain, And perish in our own. THE POPPY To Monica Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, And left the flushed print in a poppy there: Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came. And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame. With burnt mouth, red like a lion's, it drank The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank, And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine When the Eastern conduits ran with wine. Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss. And hot as a swinked gipsy is, And drowsed in sleepy savageries. With mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kisz. FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS A child and man paced side by side, Treading the skirts of eventide; But between the clasp of his hand and hers Lay, felt not, twenty withered years. She turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair, And saw the sleeping gipsy there: And snatched and snapped it in swift child's whim, With — "Keep it, long as you live!" — to him. And his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres, Trembled up from a bath of tears; And joy, like a mew sea-rocked apart, Tossed on the waves of his troubled heart. For he saw what she did not see, That — as kindled by its own fervency — The verge shrivelled inward smoulderingly: And suddenly 'twixt his hand and hers He knew the twenty withered years — No flower, but twenty shrivelled years. "Was never such thing until this hour," Low to his heart he said; "the flower Of sleep brings wakening to me. And of oblivion, memory." "Was never this thing to me," he said, "Though with bruised poppies my feet are red!" And again to his o^vn heart very low: "Oh child! I love, for I love and know; POEMS ON CHILDREN "But you, who love nor know at all The diverse chambers in Love's guest-hall, Where some rise early, few sit long: In how differing accents hear the throng His great Pentecostal tongue; *'\Vho know not fove from amity, Nor my reported self from me; A fair fit gift is this, meseems, You give — this withering flower of dreams. "O frankly fickle, and fickly true, Do you know what the days will do to you? To your love and you what the days will do, O frankly fickle, and fickly true? "You have loved me, Fair, three lives — or days: 'Twill pass with the passing of my face. But where / go, your face goes too. To watch lest I play false to you. "I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover, Knowing well when certain years are over You vanish from me to another; Yet I know, and love, like the foster-mother. "So, frankly fickle, and fickly true! For my brief life-while I take from you This token, fair and fit, meseems. For me — this withering flower of dreams.'^ FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head, Heavy with dreams, as that with bread: The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper. I hang 'mid men my needless head, And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread: The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper Time shall reap, but after the reaper The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper. Love, love! your flower of withered dream In leaved rhyme lies safe, I deem. Sheltered and shut in a nook of rhyme, From the reaper man, and his reaper Time. Love! / fall into the claws of Time: Bu' lasts within a leaved rhyme All that the world of me esteems — My withered dreams, my withered dreams. TO MONICA THOUGHT DYING You, O the piteous you! Who all the long night through Anticipatedly Disclose yourself to me Already in the ways Beyond our human comfortable days; How can you deem what Death Impitiably saith To me, who listening wake For your poor sake? i>OEMS ON CHILDREN 7 When a grown woman dies You know we think unceasingly What things she said, how sweet, how wise; And these do make our misery. But you were (you to me The dead anticipatedly ! ) You — eleven years, was't not, or so? — Were just a child, you know; And so you never said Things sweet immeditatably and wise To interdict from closure my wet eyes: But foolish things, my dead, my dead! Little and laughable. Your age that fitted well. And was it such things all unmemorable, Was it such things could make Me sob all night for our implacable sake? Yet, as you said to me. In pretty make-believe of revelry, So the night long said Death With his magniloquent breath; (And that remem-bered laughter. Which in our daily uses followed after, Was all untuned to pity and to awe:) 'M cup of chocolate, One farthing is the rate, You drink it through a straw" How could I know, how know Those laughing words when drenched with sobbing so? Another voice than yours, he hath. My dear, was't worth his breath. His mighty utterance? — yet he saith, and saith! FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness Doth dreadful wrong, This dreadful childish babble on his tongue. That iron tongue made to speak sentences, And wisdom insupportably complete, Why should it only say the long night through, In mimicry of you, — "A cup of chocolate, One farthing is the rate, You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw/" Oh, of all sentences, Piercingly incomplete! Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw. Child, impermissible awe, From your old trivialness? Why have you done me this Most unsustainable wrong, And into Death's control Betrayed the secret places of my soul? — Teaching him that his lips, Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse, Could never so avail To rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil Of this most desolate Spirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate, — Nay, never so have wrung From eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unm.eet. As when his terrible dotage to repeat Its little lesson learneth at your feet; As when he sits among His sepulchres, to play POEMS ON CHILDREN «; With broken toys your hand has cast away, With dereHct trinkets of the darhng young. Why have you taught — that he might so complete His awful panoply From your cast playthings — why, This dreadful childish babble to his tongue, Dreadful and sweet? THE MAKING OF VIOLA I The Father of Heaven. Spin, daughter Mary, spin, Twirl your wheel with silver din; Spin, daughter Mary, spin, Spin a tress for Viola. Angels. Spin, Queen Mary, a Brown tress for Viola! II The Father of Heaven. Weave, hands angelical. Weave a woof of flesh to pall- Weave, hands angelical — Flesh to pall our Viola. Angels. Weave, singing brothers, a Velvet flesh for Viola! 10 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS III The Father of Heaven. Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes, Wood-browned pools of Paradise — Young Jesus, for the eyes. For the eyes of Viola. Angels. Tint, Prince Jesus, a Dusked eye for Viola! IV The Father of Heaven. Cast a star therein to drown, Like a torch in cavern brown, Sink a burning star to drown Whelmed in eyes of Viola. Angels. Lave, Prince Jesus, a Star in eyes of Viola! V The Father of Heaven. Breathe, Lord Paraclete, To a bubbled crystal meet — Breathe, Lord Paraclete- Crystal soul for Viola. Angels. Breathe, Regal Spirit, a Flashing soul for Viola! POEMS ON CHILDREN ii Vi The Father of Heaven. Child-angels, from your wings Fall the roseal hoverings, Child-angels, from your wings, On the cheeks of Viola. Angels. Linger, rosy reflex, a Quenchless stain, on Viola! VII All things being accomplished, saith the Father of Heaven: Bear her down, and bearing, sing, Bear her do\Yn on spyless wing. Bear her down, and bearing, sing, With a sound of viola. Angels. Angels. Music as her name is, a Sweet sound of Viola! VIII AVheeling angels, past espial. Danced her down with sound of viol; WTieeling angels, past espial. Descanting on "Viola." Sing, in our footing, a Lovely lilt of "Viola!" 12 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Baby smiled, mother wailed, Earthward while the sweetling sailed; Mother smiled, baby wailed, When to earth came Viola. And her elders shall say: So soon have we taught you a Way to weep, poor Viola! X Smile, sweet baby, smile. For you will have weeping- while; Native in your Heaven is smile, — But your weeping, Viola? Whence your smiles we know, but ah! Whence your weeping, Viola? — Our first gift to you is a Gift of tears, my Viola! TO MY GODCHILD Francis M. W. M. This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon, Riding at anchor off the orient sun. Had broken its cable, and stood out to space Down same frore Arctic of the aerial ways: And now, back warping from the inclement main, Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain, It swung into its azure roads again; When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid our frozen crew. POEMS ON CHILDREN 13 To the Sun, stranger, surely you belong, Giver of golden days and golden song; Nor is it by an all-unhappy plan You bear the name of me, his constant Magian. Yet ah ! from any other that it came. Lest fated to my fate you be, as to my name. When at first those tidings did they bring, My heart turned troubled at the ominous thing: Though well may such a title him endower, For whom a poet's prayer implores a poet's power. The Assisian, who kept plighted faith to three, To Song, to Sanctitude, and Poverty, (In two alone of whom most singers prove A fatal faithfulness of during love!); He the sweet Sales, of whom we scarcely ken How God he could love more, he so loved men; The crown and crowned of Laura and Italy; And Fletcher's fellow — from these, and not from me, Take you your name, and take your legacy! Or, if a right successive you declare When worms, or ivies, intertwine my hair. Take but this Poesy that now followeth My clayey best with sullen servile breath, Made then your happy freedman by testating death. My song I do but hold for you in trust, I ask you but to blossom from my dust. When you have compassed all weak I began, Diviner poet, and ah! diviner man; The man at feud with the perduring child In you before Song's altar nobly reconciled; From the wise heavens I half shall smile to see How little a world, which owned you, needed me. 14 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS If, while you keep the vigils of the night, For your wild tears make darkness all too bright, Some lone orb through your lonely windovv peeps, As it played lover over your sweet sleeps; Think it a golden crevice in the sky, Which I have pierced but to behold you by! And when, immortal mortal, droops your head. And you, the child of deathless song, are dead; Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance The ranks of Paradise for my countenance, Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod Among the bearded counsellors of God; For if in Eden as on earth are we, I sure shall keep a younger company: Pass where beneath their ranged gonfalons The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns, The dreadful mass of their enridged spears; Pass where majestical the eternal peers, The stately choice of the great Saintdom, meet — A silvern segregation, globed complete In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet; Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer. Your cousined clusters, emulous to share With you the roseal lightnings burnin.g^ 'mid their hair; Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven: — Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven. POEMS ON CHILDREN 15 TO OLIVIA I FEAR to love thee, Sweet, because Love's the ambassador of loss; White flake of childhood, clinging so To my soiled raiment, thy shy snow At tenderest touch will shrink and go. Love me not, delightful child. My heart, by many snares beguiled, Has grown timorous and wild. It would fear thee not at all, Wert thou not so harmless-small. Because thy arrows, not yet dire, Are still unbarbed w^ith destined fire, I fear thee more than hadst thou stood Full-panoplied in womanhood. LITTLE JESUS Ex ore injantium, Deus, et lactentium perfecisti laudem Little Jesus, wast Thou shy Once, and just so small as I? And what did it feel like to be Out of Heaven, and just like me? Didst Thou sometimes think of there. And ask where all the angels were? I should think that I would cry For my house all made of sky; I would look about the air. And w^onder where my angels w^re; 1 6 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And at waking 'twould distress me — Not an angel there to dress me! Hadst Thou ever any toys, Like us little girls and boys? And didst Thou play in Heaven with all The angels that were not too tall, With stars for marbles? Did the things Play Can you see me? through their wings? And did Thy Mother let Thee spoil Thy robes, with playing on our soil? How nice to have them always new In Heaven, because 'twas quite clean blue! Didst Thou kneel at night to pray, And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way? And did they tire sometimes, being young, And make the prayer seem very long? And dost Thou like it best, that we Should join our hands to pray to Thee? I used to think, before I knew. The prayer not said unless we do. And did Thy Mother at the night Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right? And didst Thou feel quite good in bed, Kissed, and sweet, and Thy prayers said? Thou canst not have forgotten all That it feels like to be small: And Thou know'st I cannot pray To Thee in my father's way — When Thou wast so little, say, Couldst Thou talk Thy Father's way?— POEMS ON CHILDREN 17- So, a little Child, come down And hear a child's tongue like Thy own; Take me by the hand and walk. And listen to my baby-talk. To Thy Father show my prayer (He will look, Thou art so fair), And say: "O Father, I, Thy Son, Bring the prayer of a little one." And He will smile, that children's tongue Has not changed since Thou wast young I I SISTER SONGS AN OFFERING TO TWO SISTERS MONICA & MADELINE (SYLVIA) THE PROEM Shrewd winds and shrill — were these the speech of May? A ragged, slag-grey sky — invested so, Mary's spoilt nursling! wert thou wont to go? Or thou, Sun-god and song-god, say Could singer pipe one tiniest linnet-lay, Wliile Song did turn away his face from song? Or who could be In spirit or in body hale for long, — Old ^cculap's best Master! — lacking thee? At length, then, thou art here! On the earth's lethed ear Thy voice of light rings out exultant, strong; Through dreams she stirs and murmurs at that summons dear: Fiom its red leash my heart strains tamelessly, For Spring leaps in the womb of the young year! Nay. was it not brought forth before. And we waited, to behold it, Till the sun's hand should unfold it, \^^nat the year's young bosom bore? Even so; it came, nor knew we that it came, t8 SISTER SONGS 19 In the sun's eclipse. Yet the birds have plighted vows, And from the branches piped each other's name; Yet the season all the boughs Has kindled to the finger-tips, — Mark yonder, how the long laburnum drips Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame! Yea, and myself put on swift quickening, And answer to the presence of a sudden Spring. From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret spirit Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams; And, like a mountain-hold when war-shouts stir it, The mind's recessed fastness casts to light Its gleaming multitudes, that from every height Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams. Now therefore, thou who bring'st-the year to birth, Who guid'st the bare and dabbled feet of May; Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth Suck'st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him; Be aidant, tender Lady, to my lay! Of thy two maidens somewhat must I say, Ere shadowy twilight lashes, drooping, dim Day's dreamy eyes from us; Ere eve has struck and furled The beamy-textured tent transpicuous. Of webbed ccerule wrought and woven calms. Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun. And thou disclose my flower of song upcurled, Who from thy fair irradiant palms Scatterest all love and loveliness as alms; Yea, holy one, • Who coin'st thyself to beauty for the world! 20 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Then, Spring's little children, your lauds do ye tipraise To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways! Your lovesome labours lay away, And trick you out in holiday, For syllabling to Sylvia; And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen, For singing to Sylvia. PART THE FIRST The leaves dance, the leaves sing, The leaves dance in the breath of the Spring. I bid them dance, I bid them sing, For the limpid glance Of my ladyling; For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring, For God's good grace of this ladyling! I know in the lane, by the hedgerow track, The long, broad grasses underneath Are warted with rain like a toad's knobbed back; But here May weareth a rainless wreath. In the new-sucked milk of the sun's bosom Is dabbled the mouth of the daisy-blossom: The smouldering rosebud chars through its sheath; The lily stirs her snowy limbs, Ere she swims Naked up through her cloven green. Like the wave-born Lady of Love Hellene; And the scattered snowdrop exquisite Twinkles and gleams. SISTER SONGS 21 As if the showers of the sunny beams Were splashed from the earth in drops of light. Everything That is child of Spring Casts its bud or blossoming Upon the stream of my delight. Tlieir voices, that scents are, now let them upraise To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways; Their lovely mother them array. And prank them out in holiday. For syllabling to Sylvia; And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen, For singing to Sylvia. While thus I stood in mazes bound Of vernal sorcery, I heard a dainty dubious sound, As of goodly melody; Which first was faint as if in swound, Then burst so suddenly In warring concord all around. That, whence this thing might be, To see The very marrow longed in me! It seemed of air, it seemed of ground, And never any witchery Drawn from pipe, or reed, or string, Made such dulcet ravishing. 'Twas like no earthly instrument. Yet had something of them all In its rise, and in its fall; 22 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS As if in one sweet consort there were blent Those archetypes celestial Which our endeavouring instruments recall. So heavenly flutes made murmurous plain To heavenly viols, that again — Aching with music — wailed back pain; Regals release their notes, which rise Welling, like tears from heart to eyes; And the harp thrills with thronging sighs. Horns in mellow flattering Parley with the cithern-string: — Hark! — the floating, long-drawn note Woos the throbbing cithern-string! Their petty, petty prating those citherns sure upaisi For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways: Those flutes do flute their vowelled lay, Their lovely languid language say. For lisping to Sylvia; Those viols' lissom bowings break the heart of May^ And harps harp their burthen. For singing to Sylvia. Now at that music and that mirth Rose, as 'twere, veils from earth; And I spied How beside Bud, bell, bloom, an elf Stood, or was the flower itself; 'Mid radiant air All the fair Frequency swayed in irised wavers Some against the gleaming rims SISTER SONGS 23 Their bosoms prest Of the kingcups, to the brims Filled with sun, and their white limbs Bathed in those golden lavers; Some on the brown, glowing breast Of that Indian maid, the pansy (Through its tenuous veils confest Of swathing light), in a quaint fancy Tied her knot of yellow favours; Others dared open draw Snapdragon's dreadful jaw: Some, just sprung from out the soil, Sleeked and shook their rumpled fans Dropt with sheen Of moony green; Others, not yet extricate. On their hands leaned their weight, And writhed them free with mickle toil, Still folded in their veiny vans: And all with an unsought accord Sang together from the sward; Whence had come, and from sprites Yet unseen, those delights. As of tempered musics blent. Which had given me such content. For haply our best instrument, Pipe or cithern, stopped or strung, Mimics but some spirit tongue. Their amiable voices, I bid them upraise To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways; Their lovesome labours laid away, To linger out this holiday 24 JbRANCiS THOMPSON'S POEMS hi syllabling to Sylvia; While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May_ To bear with me this burthen. For singing to Sylvia. Next I saw, wonder-whist, How from the atmosphere a mist. So it seemed, slow uprist; And, looking from those elfin swarms, I was 'ware How the air Was all populous with forms Of the Hours, floating down, Like Nereids through a watery town. Some, with languors of waved arms, Fiuctuous oared their flexile way; Some were borne half resupine On the aerial hyaline, Their fluid limbs and rare array Flickering on the wind, as quivers Trailing weed in running rivers; And others, in far prospect seen, Newly loosed on this terrene, Shot in piercing swiftness came. With hair a-stream like pale and goblin flame. As crystalline ice in water, Lay in air each faint daughter; Inseparate (or but separate dim) Circumfused wind from wind-like vest, Wind-like vest from wind-like limb. But outward from each lucid breast. When some passion left its haunt, Radiate surge of colour came, SISTER SONGS 25 Diffusing blush-wise, palpitant, Dying all the filmy frame. With some sweet tenderness they would Turn to an amber-clear and glossy gold; Or a fine sorrow, lovely to behold. Would sweep them as the sun and wind's joined flood Sweeps a greening-sapphire sea; Or they would glow enamouredly Illustrious sanguine, like a grape of blood; Or with mantling poetry Curd to the tincture which the opal hath, Like rainbows thawing in a moonbeam bath. So paled they, flushed they, swam they, sang melodiously. Their chanting, soon fading, let them, too, upraise For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways; Weave with suave float their waved way, And colours take of holiday. For syllabling to Sylvia; And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen, For singing to Sylvia. Then, through those translucencies, As grew my senses clearer clear, Did I see, and did I hear. How under an elm's canopy Wheeled a flight of Dryades Murmuring measured melody. Gyre in gyre their treading was, Wheeling with an adverse flight, In twi-circle o'er the grass. These to left, and those to right; 26 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS All the band Linked by each other's hand; Decked in raiment stained as The blue-helmed aconite. And they advance with flutter, with grace, To the dance, Moving on with a dainty pace, As blossoms mince it on river swells. Over their heads their cymbals shine, Round each ankle gleams a twine Of twinkling bells — Tune twirled golden from their cells. Every step was a tinkling sound, As they glanced in their dancing-ground. Clouds in cluster with such a sailing Float o'er the light of the wasting moon, As the cloud of their gliding veiling Swung in the sway of the dancing-tune. There was the clash of their cymbals clanging, Ringing of swinging bells clinging their feet; And the clang on wing it seemed a-hanging, Hovering round their dancing so fleet. — I stirred, I rustled more than meet; Whereat they broke to the left and right, With eddying robes like aconite Blue of helm; And I beheld to the foot o' the elm. They have not tripped those dances, betrayed to my gaze, To glad the heart of Sylvia, beholding of their maze; Through barky walls have slid away, And tricked them in their holiday. For other than for Sylvia; SISTER SONGS 27 While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May, And bear with me this burthen, For singing to Sylvia. Where its umbrage was enrooted, Sat, white-suited, Sat, green-amiced and bare-footed, Spring, amid her minstrelsy; There she sat amid her ladies, Where the shade is Sheen as Enna mead ere Hades' Gloom fell 'thwart Persephone. Dewy buds were interstrown Through her tresses hanging down. And her feet Were most sweet, Tinged like sea-stars, rosied brown. A throng of children like to flowers were sown About the grass beside, or clomb her knee: I looked who were that favoured company. And one there stood Against the beamy flood Of sinking day, which, pouring its abundance. Sublimed the illuminous and volute redundance Of locks that, half dissolving, floated round her face; As see I might Far off a lily-cluster poised in sun Dispread its gracile curls of light. I knew what chosen child was there in place! I knew there might no brows be, save of one, With such Hesperian fulgence compassed, Which in her moving seemed to wheel about her head. 28 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS O Springes little children, more loud your lauds upraise, For this is even Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways! Your lovesome labours lay away, And prank you out in holiday, For syllabling to Sylvia; And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen. For singing to Sylvia! Spring, goddess, is it thou, desired long? And art thou girded round with this young train? — If ever I did do thee ease in song. Now of thy grace let me one meed obtain, And list thou to one plain. Oh, keep still in thy train, After the years when others therefrom fade, This tiny, well-beloved maid ! To whom the gate of my heart's fortalice, With all which in it is. And the shy self who doth therein immew him 'Gainst what loud leaguerers battailously woo him, I, bribed traitor to him. Set open for one kiss. Then suffer. Spring, thy children, that lauds they should upraise To Sylvia, this Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways; Their lovely labours lay away. And trick them out in holiday. For syllabling to Sylvia; And that all birds on branches lave their mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen, For singing to Sylvia. SISTER SONGS 29 A kiss? for a child's kiss? Aye, goddess, even for this. Once, bright Sylviola, in days not far, Once— in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant — Forlorn, and faint, and stark, I had endured through watches of the dark The abashless inquisition of each star, Yea, was the outcast mark Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny; Stood bound and helplessly For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me; Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour In night's slow- wheeled car; Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength, I waited the inevitable last. Then there came past A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring, And through the city-streets blown withering. She passed, — O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thingl And of her own scant pittance did she give, That I might eat and live: Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive. Therefore I kissed in thee The heart of Childhood, so divine for me; And her, through what sore ways, And what unchildish days. Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive. Therefore I kissed in thee Her, child! and innocency. And spring, and all things that have gone from me, j^^ FRANCIS THOMPSON'S l^OKMS And that shall never be; All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss, Came with thee to my kiss. And ah! so long myself had strayed afar From child, and woman, and the boon earth's green, And all wherewith life's face is fair beseen; Journeying its journey bare Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun Unkissed of one; Almost I had forgot The healing harms. And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that Authentic cestus of two girdling arms: And I remembered not The subtle sanctities which dart From childish lips' unvalued precious brush, Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push Between the loosening fibres of the heart. Then, that thy little kiss Should be to me all this. Let workaday wisdom blink sage lids thereat; Which towers a flight three hedgerows high, poor bat! And straightway charts me out the empyreal air. Its chart I wing not by, its canon of worth Scorn not, nor reck though mine should breed it mirth: And howso thou and I may be disjoint, Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point Over the covert where Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her! (Soul, hush these sad numbers, too sad to upraise In hymning bright Sylvia, unlearn'd in such ivaysl Our mournful moods lay we away. SISTER SONGS 31 And prank our thoughts in holiday, For syllabling to Sylvia; When all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May . To bear with us this burthen, For singing to Sylvia!) Then thus Spring, bounteous lady, made reply: 'O lover of me and all my progeny, For grace to you I take her ever to my retinue. Over thy form, dear child, alas! my art Cannot prevail; but mine immortalizing Touch I lay upon thy heart. Thy soul's fair shape In my unfading mantle's green I drape, And thy white mind shall rest by my devising A Gideon-fleece amid life's dusty drouth. If Even burst yon globed yellow grape (Which is the sun to mortals' sealed sight) Against her stained mouth; Or if white-handed light Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools, Still lucencies and cools. Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams; Like to the sign which led the Israelite, Thy soul, through day or dark, A visible brightness on the chosen ark Of thy sweet body and pure, Shall it assure. With auspice large and tutelary gleams. Appointed solemn courts, and covenanted streams.* 32 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Cease, Spring's little children, now cease your lauds to raise; That dream is past, and Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways. Our loved labour, laid away, Is smoothly ended; said our say, Our syllabling to Sylvia. Make sweet, you birds on branches! make sweet your mouths with May! But borne is this burthen, Sung unto Sylvia. PART THE SECOND And now, thou elder nursling of the nest; Ere all the intertangled west Be one magnificence Of multitudinous blossoms that o'errun The flaming brazen bowl o' the burnished sun Which they do flower from, How shall I 'stablish thy memorial? Nay, how or with what countenance shall I come To plead in my defence For loving thee at all? I who can scarcely speak my fellows' speech, Love their love, or mine own love to them, teach; A bastard barred from their inheritance, AVho seem, in this dim shape's uneasy nook. Some sun-flower's spirit which by luckless chance Has mournfully its tenement mistook; "When it were better in its right abode. Heartless and happy lackeying its god. How com'st thou, little tender thing of white, Whose very toiirh fnll scantlv me beseems, SISTER SONGS 33 How com'st thou resting on my vaporous dreams, Kindling a wraith there of earth's vernal green? Even so as I have seen, In night's aerial sea with no wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous Medusa newly w^ashed up from the tide, Lay in an oozy pool of its own deliquious light. Yet hear how my excuses may prevail, Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite! Life and life's beauty only hold their revels In the abysmal ocean's luminous levels. There, like the phantasms of a poet pale, The exquisite marvels sail: Clarified silver; greens and azures frail As if the colours sighed themselves away, And blent in supersubtile interplay As if they swooned into each other's arms; Repured vermilion, Like ear-tips 'gainst the sun; And beings that, under night's swart pinion, Make every wave upon the harbour-bars A beaten yolk of stars. But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps, Die out those lovely swarms; And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps. Love and love's beauty only hold their revels In life's familiar, penetrable levels: What of its ocean-floor? I dwell there evermore. 34 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS From almost earliest youth I raised the lids o' the truth, And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight; Ever I knew me Beauty's eremite, In antre of this lowly body set, Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul. Natheless I not forget How I have, even as the anchorite, I too, imperishing essences that console. Under my ruined passions, fallen and sere. The wild dreams stir, like little radiant girls Whom in the moulted plumage of the year Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls. Yet, though their dedicated amorist, How often do I bid my visions hist,, Deaf to them, pleading all their piteous fills; ^Vho weep, as weep the maidens of the mist Clinging the necks of the unheeding hills: And their tears wash them lovelier than before, That from grief's self our sad delight grows more. Fair are the soul's uncrisped calms, indeed, En diapered with many a spiritual form Of blosmy- tinctured weed; But scarce itself is conscious of the store Suckled by it, and only after storm Casts up its loosened thoughts upon the shore. To this end my deeps are stirred; And I deem well why life unshared Was ordained me of yore. In pairing-time, we know, the bird Kindles to its deepmost splendour, And the tender Voice is tenderest in its throat: SISTER SONGS 35 Were its love, for ever nigh it, Never by it, It might keep a vernal note. The crocean and amethystine In their pristine Lustre linger on its coat. Therefore must my song-bower lone be, That my tone be Fresh with dewy pain alway; She, who scorns my dearest care ta'en. An uncertain Shadow of the sprite of May. And is my song sweet, as they say? *Tis sweet for one whose voice has no reply. Save silence's sad cry: And are its plumes a burning bright array? They burn for an unincamated eye. A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure, Urges me glittering to aerial death, I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour; Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny Obeying of my heart's impetuous might. The earth and all its planetary kin, Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair That flames round the Phoebean wassailer. Speed no more ignorant, more predestined flight, Than I, her viewless tresses netted in. As some most beautiful one, with lovely taunting, Her eyes of guileless guile o'ercanopies, Does her hid visage bow, And miserly your covetous gaze allow, By inchmeal, coy degrees. 36 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Saying — 'Can you see me now?' Yet from the mouth's reflex you guess the wanting Smile of the coming eyes In all their upturned grievous witcheries, Before that sunbreak rise; And each still hidden feature view within Your mind, as eager scrutinies detail The moon's young rondure through the shamefast veil Drawn to her gleaming chin; After this wise. From the enticing smile of earth and skies I dream my unknown Fair's refused gaze; And guessingly her love's close traits devise, Which she with subtile coquetries Through little human glimpses slow displays, Cozening my mateless days By sick, intolerable delays. And so I keep mine uncompanioned ways; And so my touch, to golden poesies Turning love's bread, is bought at hunger's price. So, — in the inextinguishable wars Which roll song's Orient on the sullen night Whose ragged banners in their own despite Take on the tinges of the hated light,— So Sultan Phoebus has his Janizars. But if mine unappeased cicatrices Might get them lawful ease; Were any gentle passion hallowed me, Who must none other breath of passion feel Save such as winnows to the fled.Gjpd heel The tremulous Paradisal plumages; The conscious sacramental trees Which ever be SISTER SONGS 37 Shaken celestially, Consentient with enamoured wings, might know my love for thee. Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love! Upon the ending of my deadly night (Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight Is all that any mortal knows thereof), Thou wert to me that earnest of day's light, When, like the back of a gold-mailed saurian Heaving its slow length from Nilotic slime, The first long gleaming fissure runs Aurorian Athwart the yet dun firmament of prime. Stretched on the margin of the cruel sea Whence they had rescued me. With faint and painful pulses was I lying; Not yet discerning well If I had 'scaped, or were an icicle. Whose thawing is its dying. Like one who sweats before a despot's gate. Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate, And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait; And all so sickened is his countenance. The courtiers buzz, 'Lo, doomed!' and look at him askance: — At Fate's dread portal then Even so stood I, I ken. Even so stood I, between a joy and fear, And said to mine own heart, 'Now if the end be here!' They say. Earth's beauty seems completes! To them that on their death-beds rest; Gentle lady! she smiles sweetest Just ere she clasps us to her breast. 38 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And I, — now my Earth's countenance grew bright, Did she but smile me towards that nuptial-night? But, whileas on such dubious bed I lay, One unforgotten day, As a sick child waking sees Wide-eyed daisies Gazing on it from its hand, Slipped there for its dear amazes; So between thy father's knees I saw thee stand, And through my hazes Of pain and fear thine eyes' young wonder shone. Then, as flies scatter from a carrion. Or rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke Wheel, when some sound their quietude has broke, Fled, at thy countenance, all that doubting spawn: The heart which I had questioned spoke, A cry impetuous from its depth was drawn, — ^I take the omen of this face of dawn!' And with the omen to my heart cam'st thou. Even with a spray of tears That one light draft was fixed there for the years. And now? — The hours I tread ooze memories of thee. Sweet, Beneath my casual feet. With rainfall as the lea, The day is drenched with thee; In little exquisite surprises Bubbling deliciousness of thee arises From sudden places, Under the common traces Of my most lethargied and customed paces. SISTER SONGS 39 As an Arab journeyetii Through a sand of Ayaman, Lean Thirst, lolHng its cracked tongue, Lagging by his side along; And a rusty-winged Death Grating its low flight before, Casting ribbed shadows o'er The blank desert, blank and tan: He lifts by hap toward where the morning's roots are His weary stare, — Sees, although they plashless mutes are, Set in a silver air Fountains of gelid shoots are. Making the daylight fairest fair; Sees the palm and tamarind Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind; — A sight like innocence when one has sinned! A green and maiden freshness smiling there, While with unblinking glare The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her. Tis a vision: Yet the greeneries Elysian He has known in tracts afar; Thus the enamouring fountains flow, Those the very palms that grow, By, rare-gummed Sava, or Herbalimar. — Such a watered dream has tarried Trembling on my desert arid; Even so Its lovely gleamings Seemings show Of things not seemings; 40 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And I gaze, Knowing that, beyond my ways, Verily All these are, for these are She. Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek On the burning brow of the sick earth, Sick with death, and sick with birth. Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled. Than thy shadow soothes this weak And distempered being of mine. In all I work, my hand includeth thine; Thou rushest down in every stream Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge; Unhood'st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream; Thou swing'st the hammers of my forge; As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine. Moves all the labouring surges of the world. Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me, And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled, As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree. This poor song that sings of thee, This fragile song, is but a curled Shell outgathered from thy sea. And murmurous still of its nativity. Princess of Smiles, Sorceress of most unlawful-lawful wiles, Cunning pit for gazers' senses, Overstrewn with innocences! Purities gleam white like statues In the fair lakes of thine eyes. And I watch the sparkles that use There to rise, SISTER SONGS 4S Knowing these Are bubbles from the calyces Of the lovely thoughts that breathe Paving, like water-flowers, thy spirit's floor beneath. O thou most dear! Who art thy sex's complex harmony God-set more facilely; To thee may love draw near Without one blame or fear, Unchidden save by his humility: Thou Perseus' Shield wherein I view secure The mirrored Woman's fateful-fair allure! Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity, As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free; With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind The bared limbs of the rebukeless mind. Wild Dryad, all unconscious of thy tree. With which indissolubly The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole; Whose frank arms pass unf retted through its bole; Who wear'st thy femineity Light as entrailed blossoms, that shalt find It erelong silver shackles unto thee: Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul; — As hoarded in the vine Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine, As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze; — In whom the mystery which lures and sunders, Grapples and thrusts apart, endears, estranges, — The dragon to its own Hesperides — Is gated under slow-revolving changes, Manifold doors of heavy-hinged years: — 42 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS So once, ere Heaven's eyes were filled with wonders To see Laughter rise from Tears, Lay in beauty not yet mighty, Conched in translucencies, The antenatal Aphrodite, Caved magically under magic seas; Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas. 'Whose sex is in thy soul!' What think we of thy soul? Which has no parts, and cannot grow, Unfurled not from an embryo; Born of full stature, lineal to control; And yet a pigmy's yoke must undergo: Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind, With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind; Must be obsequious to the body's powers, Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways; Must do obeisance to the days, And wait the little pleasure of the hours; Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be Captive in statuted minority! So is all power fulfilled, as soul in thee. So still the ruler by the ruled takes rule, And wisdom weaves itself i' the loom o' the fool. The splendent sun no splendour can display Till on gross things he dash his broken ray. From cloud and tree and flower re-tossed in prismy spray. Did not obstruction's vessel hem it in, Force were not force, would spill itself in vain; We know the Titan by his champed chain. Stay is heat's cradle, it is rocked therein. And by check's hand is burnished into light; SISTER SUiNOc) 45 If hate were none, would love burn lowlier bright? God's Fair were guessed scarce but for opposite sin; Yea, and His Mercy, I do think it well, Is flashed back from the brazen gates of Hell. The heavens decree All power fulfil itself as soul in thee. For supreme Spirit subject was to clay. And Law from its own servants learned a law, And Light besought a lamp unto its way, And Awe was reined in awe, At one small house of Nazareth; And Golgotha Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath, And Life do homage for its crown to death. So is all power, as soul in thee, increased! But, knowing this, in knowledge's despite I fret against the law severe that stains Thy spirit with eclipse; When — as a nymph's carven head sweet water drips, For others oozing so the cool delight Which cannot steep her stiffened mouth of stone — Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains. Memnonian lips! Smitten with singing from thy mother's East, And murmurous with music not their own: Nay, the lips flexile, while the mind alone A passionless statue stands. Oh, pardon, innocent one! Pardon at thine unconscious hands! 'Murmurous with music not their own,* I say? And in that saying how do I missay. When from the common sands 44 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Of poorest common speech of common day Thine accents sift the golden musics out! And ah, we poets, I misdoubt, Are little more than thou! We speak a lesson taught we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows. Thou canst foreshape thy word; The poet is not lord Of the next syllable may come With the returning pendulum; And what he plans to-day in song, To-morrow sings it in another tongue. Where the last leaf fell from his bough, He knows not if a leaf shall grow; Where he sows he doth not reap, He reapeth where h did not sow: He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep To meet him on his waking way. Vision will mate him not by law and vow: Disguised in life's most hodden-grey, By the most beaten road of everyday She waits him, unsuspected and unknown. The hardest pang whereon He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone. In the most iron crag his foot can tread A Dream may strew her bed, And suddenly his limbs entwine, And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might through brine. But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who In guerdon of a night the lover slew. SISTER SONGS 45 When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled, Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead! And though he cherisheth The babe most strangely born from out her death, Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, — It is not she! Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray Before the first shafts of the sun's onslaught From gloom's black harness splinter, And Summer move on Winter With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of the May; As gesture outstrips thought; So haply, toyer with ethereal strings. Are thy blind repetitions of high things The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings Reveal song's summer in the air; The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare, Yet is thought's harbinger. These strains the way for thine own strains prepare; We feel the music moist upon this breeze, And hope the congregating poesies. Sundered yet by thee from us Wait, with wild eyes luminous, All thy winged things that are to be; They flit against thee. Gate of Ivory! They clamour on the portress Destiny, — 'Set her wide, so we may issue through. Our vans are quick for that they have to do ! ' Suffer still your young desire; Your plumes but bicker at the tips with fire; Tarry their kindling — they will beat the higher. 46 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat Idly the music from thy mother caught; Not vainly has she wrought, Not vainly from the cloudv/ard-jetting turret Of her aerial mind for thy weak feet Let down the silken ladder of her thought. She bare thee with a double pain, Of the body and the spirit; Thou thy fleshly weeds hast ta'en, Thy diviner weeds inherit! The precious streams which through thy young lips roll Shall leave their lovely delta in thy soul: Where sprites of so essential kind Set their paces. Surely they shall leave behind The green traces Of their sportance in the mind; And thou shalt, ere we well may know it, Turn that daintiness, a poet, — Elfin-ring Where sweet fancies foot and sing. So it may be, so it shall be, — Oh, take the prophecy from me! What if the old fastidious sculptor. Time, This crescent marvel of his hands Carveth all too painfully, And I who prophesy shall never see? What if the niche of its predestined rhyme, Its aching niche, too long expectant stands? Yet shall he after sore delays On some exultant day of days The white enshrouding childhood raise From thy fair spirit, finished for our gaze; SISTER SONGS 47 While we (but 'mongst that happy 'we The prophet cannot be!) — While we behold with no astonishments, With that serene fulfilment of delight Wherewith we view the sight When the stars pitch the golden tents Of their high campment on the plains of night. Why should amazement be our satellite? What wonder in such things? If angels have hereditary wings, If not by Salic law is handed down The poet's crown, To thee, bom in the purple of the throne, The laurel must belong: Thou, in thy mother's right Descendant of Castalian-chrismed kings — Princess of the Blood of Song! Peace! Too impetuously have I been winging Toward vaporous heights which beckon and beguile, 1 sink back, saddened to my inmost mind; Even as I list a-dream that mother singing The poesy of sweet tone, and sadden while Her voice is cast in troubled wake behind The keel of her keen spirit. Thou art enshrined In a too primal innocence for this eye — Intent on such imtempered radiancy — Not to be pained; my clay can scarce endure Ungrieved the effluence near of essences so pure. Therefore, little tender maiden. Never be thou overshaden With a mind whose canopy Would shut out the sky from thee; 46 FRANCib THOMPSON'S POEMS "Whose tangled branches intercept Heaven's light: I will not feed my unpastured heart On thee, green pleasaunce as thou art, To lessen by one flower thy happy daisies white. The water-rat is earth-hued like the runlet Whereon he swims; and how in me should lurk Thoughts apt to neighbour thine, thou creature sunlit? If through long fret and irk Thine eyes within their browed recesses were Worn caves where thought lay couchant in its lair; Wert thou a spark among dank leaves, ah ruth! With age in all thy veins, while all thy heart was youth; Our contact might run smooth. But life's Eoan dews still moist thy ringed hair; Dian's chill finger-tips Thaw if at night they happen on thy lips; The flying fringes of the sun's cloak frush The fragile leaves which on those warm lips blush; And joy only lurks retired In the dim gloaming of thine irid. Then since my love drags this poor shadow, me, And one without the other may not be, From both I guard thee free. It still is much, yes, it is much, Only — my dream! — to love my love of thee; And it is much, yes, it is much, In hands which thou hast touched to feel thy touch, In voices which have mingled with thine owti To hear a double tone. As anguish, for supreme expression prest, Borrows its saddest tongue from jest, Thou h^st of absence so create A presence more importunate; SISTER SONGS 49 And tbv voice pleads its sweetest ^uit vVnen it is mute. I thank the once accursed star Which did me teach To make of Silence my familiar, WTio hath the rich reversion of thy speech, Since the most charming sounds thy thoughts can wear, Cast off, fall to that pale attendant's share; And thank the gift which made my mind A shadow-world, wherethrough the shadows wind Of all the loved and lovely of my kind. Like a maiden Saxon, folden, As she flits, in moon-drenched mist; WTiose curls streaming flaxen-golden. By the misted moonbeams kist, Dispread their filmy floating silk Like honey steeped in milk: So, vague goidenness remote. Through my thoughts I watch thee float. When the snake summer casts her blazoned skin We find it at the turn of autumn's path, And think it summer that rewinded hath, Joying therein; And this enamouring slough of thee, thine elf, I take it for thyself; Content. Content? Yea, title it content. The very loves that belt thee must prevent My love, I know, with their legitimacy: As the metallic vapours, that are swept Athwart the sun, in his light intercept The very hues Which their con.lagrant elements effuse. 50 FRANCIS THOMPSON'^ POliMS But, my love, my heart, my fair, That only I should see thee rare. Or tent to the hid core thy rarity, — This were a mournfulness more piercing far Than that those other loves my own must bat, Or thine for others leave thee none for me. But on a day whereof I think. One shall dip his hand to drink In that still water of thy soul, And its imaged tremors race Over thy joy-troubled face. As the intervolved reflections roll From a shaken fountain's brink, With swift light wrinkling its alcove. From the hovering wing of Love The warm stain shall flit roseal on thy cheek. Then, sweet blushet! whenas he. The destined paramount of thy universe. Who has no worlds to sigh for, ruling thee, Ascends his vermeil throne of empery. One grace alone I seek. Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse, Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rl;;/me. Set with a towering press of fantasies. Drop safely down the time. Leaving mine isled self behind it far Soon to be sunken in the abysm cf seas {As down the years the splendour voyages From some long ruined and night-submei'ged star). And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore; .Add'ng its wasteful mce i SISTER SONGS 51 To his own overflowing treasury. So through his river mine shall reach thy sea, Bearing its confluent part; In his pulse mine shall thrill; And the quick heart shall quicken from the heart that's still. Ah, help, my Daemon, that hast served me well! Not at this last, oh, do not me disgrace! I faint, I sicken, darkens all my sight. As, poised upon this unprevisioned height, I lift into its place The utmost aery traceried pinnacle. So; it is builded, the high tenement, — God grant! — to mine intent: Most like a palace of the Occident, Up-thrusting, toppling maze on maze. Its mounded blaze, And washed by the sunset's rosy waves. Whose sea drinks rarer hue from those rare walls it laves. Yet wail, my spirits, wail! So few therein to enter shall prevail. Scarce fewer could win way, if their desire A dragon baulked, with involuted spire. And writhen snout spattered with yeasty fire. For at the elfin portal hangs a horn Which none can wind aright Save the appointed knight Whose lids the fay-wings brushed when he was bom. All others stray forlorn, Or glimpsing, through the blazoned windows scrolled, Receding labyrinths lessening tortuouslv 52 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS In half obscurity; With mystic images, inhuman, cold, That flameless torches hold. But who can wind that horn of migh. (The horn of dead Heliades) aright, — Straight Open for him shall roll the conscious gate; And light leap up from all the torches there, And life leap up in every torchbearer, And the stone faces kindle in the glow, And into the blank eyes the irids grow, And through the dawning irids ambushed meanings show. Illumined this wise on, He threads securely the far intricacies. With brede from Heaven's v/rought vesture overstrewn Swift Tellus' purfled tunic, girt upon With the blown chlamys of her fluttering seas; And the freaked kirtle of the pearled moon: Until he gain the structure's core, where stands — A toil of magic hands — The unbodied spirit of the sorcerer. Most strangely rare, As is a vision remembered in the noon; Unbodied, yet to mortal seeing clear, ' Like sighs exhaled in eager atmosphere. From human haps and mutabilities It rests exempt, beneath the edifice To which itself gave rise; Sustaining centre to the bubble of stone Which, breathed from it, exists by it alone. Yea, ere Saturnian earth her child consumes. And I lie down with outworn ossuaries, Ere death's grim tongue anticipates the tomb's SISTER SONGS S3 Siste viator, in this storied urn My living heart is laid to throb and bum, Till end be ended, and till ceasing cease. And thou by whom this strain hath parentage; Wantoner between the yet untreacherous claws Of newly- whelped existence! ere he pause, What gift to thee can yield the archimage? For coming seasons' frets What aids, w^hat amulets, What softenings, or what brightenings? As Thunder writhes the lash of his long lightnings About the growling heads of the brute main Foaming at mouth, until it wallow again In the scooped oozes of its bed of pain ; So all the gnashing jaws, the leaping heads Of hungry menaces, and of ravening dreads, Of pangs Twitch-lipped, with quivering nostrils and immitigate fangs, I scourge beneath the torment of my charms That their repentless nature fear to w^ork thee harms. And as yon Apollonian harp-player, Yon w^andering psalterist of the sky. With flickering strings which scatter melody. The silver-stoled damsels of the sea, Or lake, or fount, or stream. Enchants from their ancestral heaven of waters To Naiad it through the unfrothing air; My song enchants so out of undulous dream The glimmering shapes of its dim-tressed daughters, And missions each to be thy minister, Saying: 'O ye. The organ-stops of being's harmony; 54 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The blushes on existence's pale face, Lending it sudden grace; Without whom we should but guess Heaven's worth By blank negations of this sordid earth (So haply to the blind may light Be but gloom's undetermined opposite) ; Ye who are thus as the refracting air Whereby we see Heaven's sun before it rise Above the dull line of our mortal skies; As breathing on the strained ear that sighs From comrades viewless unto strained eyes, Soothing our terrors in the lampless night; Ye who can make this v/orld, where all is deeming, What world ye list, being arbiters of seeming; Attend upon her ways, benignant powers! Unroll ye life a carpet for her feet, And cast ye down before them blossomy hours. Until her going shall be clogged with sweet! All dear emotions whose new-bathed hair. Still streaming from the soul, in love's warm air Smokes with a mist of tender fantasies; All these, And all the heart's wild growths which, swiftly bright, Spring up the crimson agarics of a night. No pain in withering, yet a joy arisen; And all thin shapes more exquisitely rare. More subtly fair, Than these weak ministering words have spell to prison Within the magic circle of this rhyme; And all the fays who in our creedless clime Have sadly ceased, Bearing to other children childhood's proper feast; Whose robes are fluent crystal, crocus-hued, SISTER SONGS 55 Whose wings are wind a-fire, whose mantles wrought From spray that falling rainbows shake to air; These, ye familiars to my wizard thought, Make things of journal custom unto her; With lucent feet imbrued, If young Day tread, a glorious vintager, The wine-press of the purple-foamed east; Or round the nodding sun, flush-faced and sunken, His wild Bacchantes drunken Reel, with rent woofs a-flaunt, their westering rout.' — But lo! at length the day is lingered out, At length my Ariel lays his viol by; We sing no more to thee, child, he and I; The day is lingered out: In slow wreaths folden Around yon censer, sphered, golden, Vague Vesper's fumes aspire; And, glimmering to eclipse, The long laburnum drips Its honey ef wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire. Now pass your ways, fair bird, and pass your ways, If you will; I have you through the days! And flit or hold you still. And perch you where you list On what wrist, — You are mine through the times! I have caught you fast for ever in a tangle of sweet rhymes. And in your young maiden morn You may scorn, But you must be S6 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Bound and sociate to me; With this thread from out the tomb my dead hand shall tether thee I Go, Sister-songs, to that sweet Sister-pair For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned, And framed feateously; — For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned With how great shamefastness and how great dread, Knowing you frail, but not if you be fair, Though framed feateously; Go unto them from me. Go from my shadow to their sunshine sight. Made for all sights' delight; Go like twin swans that oar the surgy storms To bate with pennoned snows in candent air: Nigh with abased head, Yourselves linked sisterly, that Sister-pair, And go in presence there; Saying — 'Your young eyes cannot see our forms, Nor read the yearning of our looks aright; But Time shall trail the veilings form our hair, And cleanse your seeing with his euphrasy (Yea, even your bright seeing m.ake more bright. Which is all sights' delight), And ye shall know us for what things we be. 'Whilom, within a poet's calyxed heart, A dewy love we trembled all apart ; Whence it took rise Beneath your radiant eyes, SISTER SONGS 57 Which misted it to music. We must long, A floating haze of silver subtile song, Await love-laden Above each maiden The appointed hour that o'er the hearts of you — As vapours into dew Unweave, whence they were wove, — Shall turn our loosening musics back to love.' INSCRIPTION When the last stir of bubbling melodies Broke, as my chants sank underneath the wave Of dulcitude, but sank again to rise WTiere man's embaying mind those waters lave (For music hath its Oceanides Flexuously floating through their parent seas, And such are these), I saw a vision — or may it be The effluence of a dear desired reality? I saw two spirits high, — Two spirits, dim within the silver smoke \Vhich is for ever woke By snowing lights of fountained Poesy. Two shapes they were, familiar as love; They were those souls, whereof One twines from finest gracious daily things, Strong, constant, noticeless, as are heart-strings. The golden cage wherein this song-bird sings; And the other's sun gives hue to all my flowers. Which else pale flowers of Tartarus would grow, Where ghosts watch ghosts of blooms in ghostly bowers;- 58 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS For we do know The hidden player by his harmonies, And by my thoughts I know what still hands thrill the keys. And to these twain — as from the mind's abysses All thoughts draw toward the awakening heart's sweet kisses, With proffer of their wreathen fantasies, — Even so to these I saw how many brought their garlands fair, Whether of song, or simple love, they were, — Of simple love, that makes best garlands fair. But one I marked who lingered still behind. As for such souls no seemly gift had he: He was not of their strain. Nor worthy of so bright beings to entertain. Nor fit compeer for such high company. Yet was he, surely, bom to them in mind. Their youngest nursling of the soirit's kind. Last stole this one. With timid glance, of watching eyes adread. And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone; And where the frail flower fell, it withered. But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon; As when a child, upstraining at your knees Some fond and fancied nothings, says, 'I give you these!' LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP PROEMION Hear, my Muses, I demand A little labour at your hand, Ere quite is loosed our amity: A little husband out the sand That times the gasps of Poesy! beloved, O ye Two, W^en the Years last met, to you I sent a gift exultingly. My song's sands, like the Year's, are few But take this last weak gift from me. One year ago (one year, one year!) 1 had no prescience, no, nor fear; I said to Oblivion: 'Dread thou me!' What cared I for the mortal year? I was not of its company. Before mine own Elect stood I, And said to Death: 'Not these shall did' I issued mandate royally. I bade Decay: 'Avoid and fly, For I am fatal unto thee.' 59 6o FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS I sprinkled a few drops of verse. And said to Ruin: 'Quit thy hearse;' To my Loved: 'Pale not, come with me; I will escort thee down the years, With me thou walk'st immortally.' Rhyme did I as a charmed cup give, That who I would might drink and live. 'Enter,' I cried, 'Song's ark with me!' And knew not that a witch's sieve Were built somewhat more seamanly. I said unto my heart: 'Be light! Thy grain will soon for long delight Oppress the future's granary:' Poor fool! and did not hear — 'This night They shall demand thy song of thee.' Of God and you I pardon crave; Who would save others, nor can save My own self from mortality : I throw my whole songs in the grave — They ^vill not fill that pit for me. But thou, to whom I sing this last — The bitterest bitterness I taste Is that thy children have from me The best I had where all is waste. And but the crumbs were cast to thee. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 6x It may be I did little wrong; Since no notes of thy lyre belong To them; thou leftest them for me; And what didst thou want of my song, — Thou, thine own immortality? Ah, I would that I had yet Given thy head one coronet With thine ivies to agree! Ere thou restest where are set Wreaths but on the breast of thee. Though what avails? — The ivies twined By thine own hand thou must unbind. When there thy temples laid shall be: 'Tis haply Death's prevision kind That ungirt brows lie easily. *0j all thy trees thou lovest so, None with thee to grave shall go, Save the abhorred cypress tree.'"^ The abhorred? — Ah, I know, I know, Thy dearest follower it would be! Thou would 'st sweetly lie in death The dark southerner beneath: We should interpret, knowing thee, — > 'Here I rest' (her symbol saith), 'And above me, Italy.' The words of Horace. 62 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS But above thy English grave Who knows if a tree shall wave? Save — when the far certainty Of thy fame fulfilled is — save The laurel that shall spring from thee. Very little carest thou If ihe world no laurel-bough Set in thy dead hand, ah me! But my heart to grieve allow For the fame thou shalt not seel Yet my heart to grieve allow, With the grief that grieves it now, Looking to futurity, With too sure presaging how Fools will blind blind eyes from thee: Bitterly presaging how Sightless death must them endow With sight, who gladder blind would be. Though our eyes be blind enow, Let us hide them, lest we see!' I would their hearts but hardened were In the way that I aver All men shall find this heart of me: Which is so hard, thy name cut there Never worn or blurred can be. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 63 it my song as much might say! But in all too late a day I use thy name for melody; And with the sweet theme assay To hide my descant's poverty. When that last song gave I you, Ye and I, beloved Two, Were each to each half mystery! Now the tender veil is through; Unafraid the whole we see. Small for you the danger was! Statued deity but thaws In you to warm divinity; Some fair defect completion flaws With a completing grace to me. But when / my veiling raised — The Milonian less were crazed To talk with men incarnately: The poor goddess but appraised By her lacking arms would be. Though Pan may have delicious throat, 'Tis hard to tolerate the goat. What if Pan were suddenly To lose his singing, every note? — Then pity have of Pan, and mel 04 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Love and Song together sing; Song is weak and fain to cling About Love's shoulder wearily. Let her voice, poor fainting thing, In his strong voice drowTied be! In my soul's Temple seems a sound Of unfolding wings around The vacant shrine of poesy: Voices of parting songs resound: — 'Let us go hence!' A space let be! A space, my Muses, — / demand This last of labours at your hand, Ere quite is loosed our amity: A little stay the cruel sand That times the gasps of Poesy! BEFORE HER PORTRAIT IN YOUTH As lovers, banished from their lady's face, And hopeless of her grace, Fashion a ghostly sweetness in its place, Fondly adore Some stealth-won cast attire she wore, A kerchief, or a glove: And at the lover's beck Into the glove there fleets a hand. Or at impetuous command Up from the kerchief floats a virgin neck: So I, in very lowlihead of love, — Too shyly reverencing LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 65 To let one thought's light footfall smooth Tread near the living, consecrated thing, — Treasure me thy cast youth. This outworn vesture, tenantless of thee, Hath yet my knee, For that, with show and semblance fair Of the past Her Who once the beautiful, discarded raimant bare, It cheateth me. As gale to gale drifts breath Of blossoms' death. So, dropping down the years from hour to hour, This dead youth's scent is wafted to me to-day: I sit, and from the fragrance dream the flower. So, then, she looked (I say); And so her front sank down Heavy beneath the poet's iron crown: On her mouth museful sweet (Even as the twin lips meet) Did thought and sadness greet: Sighs In those mournful eyes So put on visibilities; As viewless ether turns, in deep on deep, to dyes. Thus, long ago, She kept her meditative paces slow Through maiden meads, with waved shadow and gleam Of locks half-lifted on the winds of dream. Till Love up-caught her to his chariot's glow. Yet, voluntary, happier Proserpine! This drooping flower of youth thou lettest fall I, faring in the cockshut-light, astray, Find on my 'lated way, 00 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And stoop, and gather for memorial, And lay it on my bosom, and make it mine. To this, the all of love the stars allow me, I dedicate and vow me. I reach back through the days A trothed hand to the dead the last trump shall not raise. The water-wraith that cries From those eternal sorrows of thy pictured eyes Entwines and draws me down their soundless intricacies. TO A POET BREAKING SILENCE Too wearily had we and song Been left to look and left to long. Yea, song and we to long and look. Since thine acquainted feet forsook The mountain where the Muses hymn For Sinai and the Seraphim. Now in both the mountains' shine Dress thy countenance, twice divine! From Moses and the Muses draw The Tables of thy double Law! His rod-born fount and Castaly Let the one rock brins; forth for thee, Renewing so from either spring The somjs which both thv countries sing: Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long, Thou should'st forcet thv native song, And mar thy mortal melodies With brokp.n stammer of the skies. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 67 An ! let the sweet birds of the Lord With earth's waters make accord; Teach how the crucifix may be Carven from the laurel-tree, Fruit of the Hesperides Burnish take on Eden-trees, The Muses' sacred grove be wet With the red dew of Olivet, And Sappho lay her burning brows In white Cecilia's lap of snows! Thy childhood must have felt the stings Of too divine o'ershado wings; Its odorous heart have been a blossom That in darkness did unbosom, Those fire-flies of God to invite, Burning spirits, which by night Bear upon their laden wing To such hearts impregnating. For flowers that night-wings fertilize Mock do\Vn the stars' unsteady eyes, And with a happy, sleepless glance Gaze the moon out of countenance. I think thy girlhood's watchers must Have took thy folded songs on trust, And felt them, as one feels the stir Of still lightnmgs in the hair. When conscious hush expects the clouii To speak the golden secret loud Which tacit air is privy to; Flasked in the grape the wine t^ey knew, Ere thy poet-mouth was able For its first young starry babble. 68 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Keep'st thou not yet that subtle grace? Yea, in this silent interspace, God sets His poems in thy face! The loom which mortal verse affords, Out of weak and mortal words, Wovest thou thy singing-weed in, To a rune of thy far Eden. Vain are all disguises! Ah, Heavenly incognita! Thy mien bewrayeth through that wrong The great Uranian House of Song! As the vintages of earth Taste of the sun that riped their birth, We know what never-cadent Sun Thy lamped clusters throbbed upon. What plumed feet the winepress trod; Thy wine is flavorous of God. Whatever singing-robe thou wear Has the Paradisal air; And some gold feather it has kept Shows what Floor it lately swept! "MANUS ANIMAM PINXIT" Lady who hold'st on me dominion! Within your spirit's arms I stay me fast Against the fell Immitigate ravening of the gates of hell; And claiming my right in you, most hardly won, Of chaste fidelity upon the chaste: Hold me and hold by me, lest both should fall LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 69 (O in high escalade high companion!) Even in the breach of Heaven's assaulted wall. Like to a wind-sown sapling grow I from The clift, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul, — Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome By all its clouds incumbent: O be true To your soul, dearest, as my life to you! For if that soil grow sterile, then the whole Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot Of climbing posey, and my life, killed through, Dry down and perish to the foodless root. Sweet Summer! unto you this swallow drew. By secret instincts inappeasable, That did direct him well. Lured from his gelid North which wrought him wrong, Wintered of sunning song; — By happy instincts inappeasable, Ah yes! that led him well. Lured to the untried regions and the new Climes of auspicious you; To twitter there, and in his singing dwell. But ah! if you, my Summer, should grow waste, With grieving skies o'ercast. For such migration my poor wing was strong But once; it has no power to fare again Forth o'er the heads of men. Nor other Summers for its Sanctuary: But from your mind's chilled sky It needs must drop, and lie with stiffened wings Among your soui's forlomest things; A speck upon your m^-nory, alack! A dead fly in a dusty window-crack. 70 ■ FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS O therefore you who are What words, being to such mysteries As raiment to the body is, Should rather hide than tell; Chaste and intelligential love: Whose form is as a grove Hushed with the cooing of an unseen dove; Whose spirit to my touch thrills purer far Than is the tingling of a silver bell; Whose body other ladies well might bear As soul, — yea, which it profanation were For all but you to take as fleshly woof, Being spirit truest proof; Whose spirit sure is lineal to that WHiich sang Magnificat: Chastest, since such you are, . Take this curbed spirit of mine, Which your own eyes invest with light divine, For lofty love and high auxiliar In daily exalt emprise Which outsoars mortal eyes; This soul which on your soul is laid, As maid's breast against breast of maid; Beholding how your own I have engraved On it, and with what purging thoughts have laved This love of mine from all mortality. Indeed the copy is a painful one, And with long labour done! O ii you doubt the thing you are, lady, Come then, and look in me; Your beauty, Dian, dress and contemplate Within a pool to Dian consecrate! LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 71 Unveil this spirit, lady, when you will, For unto all but you 'tis veiled still: Unveil, and fearless gaze there, you alone. And if you love the image — 'tis your own! A CARRIER SONG I Since you have waned from us, Fairest of women! I am a darkened cage Songs cannot hymn in. My songs have followed you, Like birds the summer; Ah! bring them back to me, Swiftly, dear comer! Seraphim, Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! II Where wings to rustle use, But this poor tarrier — Searching my spirit's eaves — Find I for carrier. Ah! bring them back to me Swiftly, sweet comer — Swift, swift, and bring with you Song's Indian summer! FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Seraphim^ Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! Ill Whereso your angel is, My angel goeth; I am left guardianless, Paradise knoweth! I have no Heaven left To weep my wrongs to; Heaven, when you went from us, Went with my songs too. Seraphim, Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! IV I have no angels left Now, Sweet, to pray to: Where you have made your shrine They are away to. They have struck Heaven's tent, And gone to cover you: Whereso you keep your state Heaven is pitched over youi LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 73 Serapnim. Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! V She that is Heaven's Queen Her title borrows, For that she, pitiful, Beareth our sorrows. So thou, Regina mi, Spes infirmorum; With all our grieving crowned Mater dolorum! Seraphim, Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! VI Yet, envious coveter Of others' grieving! This lonely longing yet 'Scapeth your reaving. Cruel, to take from a Sinner his Heaven! Think you with contrite smiles To be forgiven? 74 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S PQEMS Seraphim, Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my jeet learn The harping of mortals/ VII Penitent! give me back Angels, and Heaven; Render your stolen self, And be forgiven! How frontier Heaven from you? For my soul prays, Sweet, Still to your face in Heaven, Heaven in yoiir face. Sweet! Seraphim, Her to hymn, Might leave their portals; And at my feet learn The harping of mortals! SCALA JACOBI PORTAQUE EBURNEA Her soul from earth to Heaven lies, Like the ladder of the vision, Whereon go To and fro, In ascension and demission, Star-flecked feet of Paradise. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 75 Now she is drawn up from me, All my angels, wet-eyed, tristful, Gaze from great Heaven's gate Like pent children, very wistful, That below a playmate see. Dream-dispensing face of hers! Ivory port which loosed upon me Wings, I wist, Whose amethyst Trepidations have forgone me, — Hesper's filmy traffickers! GILDED GOLD Thou dost to rich attire a grace To let it deck itself with thee, And teachest pomp strange cunning ways To be thought simplicity. But lilies, stolen from grassy mold, No more curled state unfold Translated to a vase of gold; In burning throne though they keep still Serenities unthawed and chill. Therefore, albeit thou'rt stately so, In statelier state thou us'dst to go. Though jewels should phosphoric burn^ Through those night-waters of thine hair, A flower from its translucid urn Poured silver flame more lunar-fair. 76 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS These futile trappings but recall Degenerate worshippers who fall In purfled kirtle and brocade To 'parel the white Mother-Maid. For, as her image stood arrayed In vests of its self -substance wrought To measure of the sculpior's thought — Slurred by those added braveries; So for thy spirit did devise Its Maker seemly garniture, Of its own essence parcel pure, — From grave simplicities a dress. And reticent demurenesses. And love encinctured with reserve ; Which the v/oven vesture should subserve. For outward robes in their ostents Should show the soul's habiliments. Therefore I say,— Thou'rt fair even so, But better Fair I used to know. The violet would thy dusk hair deck With graces like thine own unsought. Ah! but such place would daze and wreck Its simple, lowly, rustic thought; For so advanced, dear, to thee. It would unlearn humiUty! Yet do not, with an altered look. In these weak numbers read rebuke; Which are but jealous lest too much God's master-piece thou shouldst retouch. Where a sweetness is complete. Add not sweets unto the sweet! Or, as thou wilt, for others so LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 77 In unfamiliar richness go; But keep for mine acquainted eyes The fashions of thy Paradise. HER PORTRAIT Oh, but the heavenly grammar did I hold Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold! So should her deathless beauty take no wrong, Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue: Or if that language yet with us abode Which Adam in the garden talked with God! But our untempered speech descends — poor heirs! Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's bricklayers: Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit, Strong but to damn, not memorize, a spirit! A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they Move with light ease in speech of working-day; And women we do use to praise even so. But here the gates we burst, and to the temple go. Their praise were her dispraise: who dare, who dare, Adulate the seraphim for their burning hair? How, if with them I dared, here should I dare it? How praise the woman, who but know the spirit? How praise the colour of her eyes, uncaught While they were coloured with her varying thought? How her mouth's shape, who only use to know What tender shape her speech will fit it to? Or her lips' redness, when their joined veil Song's fervid hand has parted till it wore them pale? 78 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS If I would praise her soul (temerarious if!), All must be mystery and hieroglyph. Heaven, which not oft is prodigal of its more To singers, in their song too great before (By which the hierarch of large poesy is Restrained to his one sacred benefice), Only for her the salutary awe Relaxes and stern canon of its law; To her alone concedes pluralities, In her alone to reconcile agrees The Muse, the Graces, and the Charities; To her, who can the trust so well conduct, To her it gives the use, to us the usufruct. What of the dear administress then may I utter, though I spoke her own carved perfect way? What of her daily gracious converse known. Whose heavenly despotism must needs dethrone And subjugate all sweetness but its own? Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word, And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird. What of her silence, that outsweetens speech? What of her thoughts, high marks for mine own thoughts to reach? Yet, (Chaucer's antique sentence so to turn) Most gladly will she teach, and gladly learn; And teaching her, by her enchanting art. The master threefold learns for all he can impart. Now all is said, and all being said,— aye me! There yet remains unsaid the very She. Nay, to conclude (so to conclude I dare), If of her virtues you evade the snare. Then for her faults you'll fall in love with her. LOVx. IN DIAN'S LAP 79 Alas, and I have spoken of her Muse — Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews! Learn, the wise cherubim from harps of gold Seduce a trepidating music manifold; But the superior seraphim do know None other music but to flame and glow. So she first lighted on our frosty earth, A sad musician, of cherubic birth, Playing to alien ears — which did not prize The uncomprehended music of the skies — The exiled airs of her far Paradise. But soon, from her own harpings taking fire, In love and light her melodies expire. Now Heaven affords her, for her silenced hymn, A double portion of the seraphim. At the rich odours from her heart that rise, My soul remembers its lost Paradise, And antenatal gales blow from Heaven's shores of spice; I grow essential all, uncloaking me From this encumbering virility, And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry: And, parting from her, in me linger on Vague snatches of Uranian antiphon. How to the petty prison could she shrink Of femineity?— Nay, but I think In a dear courtesy her spirit would Woman assume, for grace to womanhood. Or, votaress to the virgin Sanctitude Of reticent withdrawal's sweet, courted pale, She took the cloistral flesh, the sexual veil, Of her sad, aboriginal sisterhood; The habit of cloistral flesh which founding Eve indued. CO FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Thus do I know her. But for what men call Beauty — the loveliness corporeal, its most just praise a thing unproper were To singer or to listener, me or her. She wears that body but as one indues; A robe, half careless, for it is the use; Although her soul and it so fair agree, We sure may, unattaint of heresy, Conceit it might the souFs begetter be. The immortal could we cease to contemplate, The mortal part suggests its every trait. God laid His fingers on the ivories Of her pure members as on smoothed keys. And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies. I'll speak a little proudly: — I disdain To count the beauty worth my VN^ish or gain. Which the dull daily fool can covet or obtain. I do confess the fairness of the spoil, But from such rivalry it takes a soil. For her I'll proudlier speak: — how could it be That I should praise the gilding on the psaltery? 'Tis not for her to hold that prize a prize. Or praise much praise, though proudest in its wise, To which even hopes of merely women rise. Such strife would to the vanquished laurels yield, Against her suffered to have lost a field. Herself must with herself be sole compeer, Unless the people of her distant sphere Some gold migration send to melodize the year. But first our hearts must burn in larger guise, To reformate the uncharitable skies. And so the deathless plumage to acclimatize: Since this, their sole congener in our clime, Droops her sad, ruffled thoughts for half the shivering time. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP »i Yet I have felt what terrors may conscri In women's cheeks, the Graces' soft resort; My hand hath shook at gentle hands' access, And trembled at the waving of a tress; My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed, Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade; The rustle of a robe hath been to me The very rattle of love's musketry; Although my heart hath beat the loud advance, I have recoiled before a challenging glance, Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance. And from it all, this knowledge have I got, — The whole that others have, is less than they have not; All which makes other women noted fair, Unnoted would remain and overshone in her. How should I gauge what beauty is her dole. Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, As birds see not the casement for the sky? And, as 'tis check they prove its presence by, I know not of her body till I find My flight debarred the heaven of her mind. Hers is the face whence all should copied be. Did God make replicas of such as she; Its presence felt by what it does abate, Because the soul shines through tempered and mitigate: Where — as a figure labouring at night Beside the body of a splendid light — Dark Time works hidden by its luminousness; And every line he labours to impress Turns added beauty, like the veins that run Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun. S2 FRANCIS THOMF'SON'S POEMS There regent Melancholy wide controls; There Earth- and Heaven-Love play for aureoles; There Sweetness out of Sadness breaks at fits, Like bubbles on dark water, or as flits A sudden silver fin through its deep infinites: There amorous Thought has sucked pale Fancy's breath, And Tenderness sits looking toward the lands of Death: There Feeling stills her breathing with her hand, And Dream from Melancholy part wrests the wand; And on this lady's heart, looked you so deep, Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep: Upon the heavy blossom of her lips Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse Each half-occulted star beneath that lies; And, in the contemplation of those eyes. Passionless passion, wild tranquillities. EPILOGUE TO THE POET'S SITTER Wherein he excuseth himself for the manner of the Portrau. Alas! now wilt thou chide, ai.d say (I deem) My figure descant hides the simple theme: Or, in another wise reproving, say I ill observe thine own high reticent way. Oh, pardon, that I testify of thee What thou couldst never speak, nor others be! Yet (for the book is not more innocent Of what the gazer's eyes make 30 intent), She will but smile, perhaps, that I find my fair Sufficing scope in such a straU tlieme as her. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 83 'Bird of the sun! the stars' wild honey-bee' Is your gold browsing done so thoroughly? Or sinks a singed wing to narrow nest in me?* (Thus she might say: for not this lowly vein Out-deprecates her deprecating strain.) Oh, you mistake, dear lady, quite; nor know Ether was strict as you, its loftiness as low! The heavens do not advance their majesty ' Over their marge; beyond his empery The ensigns of the wind are not unfurled, His reign is hooped in by the pale o' the world. 'Tis not the continent, but the contained. That pleasaunce makes or prison, loose or chained. Too much alike or little captives me. For all oppression is captivity. What groweth to its height demands no higher; The limit limits not, but the desire. Our minds make their own Termini, nor call The issuing circumscriptions great or small ; So high constructing Nature lessons to us all: Who optics gives accommodate to see Your countenance large as looks the sun to be, And distant greatness less than near humanity. We, therefore, with a sure instinctive mind. An equal spaciousness of bondage find In confines far or near, of air or our own kind. Our looks and longings, which affronts the stars, Most richly bruised against their golden bars. Delighted captives of their flaming spears. Find a restraint restrainless which appears 84 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS As that is, and so simply natural, In you; — the fair detention freedom call, And overscroll with fancies the loved prison-wall Such sweet captivity, and only such, In you, as in those golden bars, we touch! Our gazes for sufficing limits know The firmament above, your face below; Our longings are contented with the skies, Contented with the heaven, and your eyes. My restless wings, that beat the v/hole world through. Flag on the confines of the sun and you; And find the human pale remoter of the two. DOMUS TUA A PERFECT woman — Thine be laud! Her body is a Temple of God. At Doom-bar dare I make avows: I have loved the beauty of Thy house. IN HER PATHS And she has trod before me in these ways! I think that she has left here heavenlier days; And I do guess her passage, as the skies Of holy Paradise Turn deeply holier, And, looking up with sudden new delight, One knows a seraph-wing has passed in flight. LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 85 The air is purer for her breathing, sure! And all the fields do wear The beauty fallen from her; The winds do brush me with her robe's allure. 'Tis she has taught the heavens to look sweet, And they do but repeat The heaven, heaven, heaven of her face! The clouds have studied going from her grace! The pools whose marges had forgot the tread Of Naiad, disenchanted, fled, A second time must mourn, Bereaven and forlorn. Ah, foolish pools and meads! You did not see Essence of old, essential pure as she. For this v/as even that Lady, and none other. The man in me calls 'Love,' the child calls 'Mother/ AFTER HER GOING The after-even! Ah, did I walk, Indeed, in her or even? For nothing of me or around But absent She did leaven. Felt in my body as its soul, And in my soul its heaven. 'Ah me! my very flesh turns soul, Essenced,' I sighed, 'with bliss!' And the blackbird held his lutany. All fragrant- through with bliss; And all things stilled were as a maid Sweet with a single kiss. 86 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS For grief of perfect fairness, eve Could nothing do but smile; The time was far too perfect fair, Being but for a while; And ah, in me, too happy grief Blinded herself with smile! The sunset at its radiant heart Had somewhat unconfest: The bird was loath of speech, its song Half-refluent on its breast, And made melodious toyings with A note or two at best. And she was gone, my sole, my Fair, Ah, sole my Fair, was gone! Methinks, throughout the world 'twere right I had been sad alone; And yet, such sweet in all things' heart. And such sweet in my own! BENEATH A PHOTOGRAPH Phoebus, who taught me art divine. Here tried his hand where I did mine; And his white fingers in this face Set my Fair's sigh-suggesting grace. O sweetness past profaning guess. Grievous with its own exquisiteness! Vesper-like face, its shadows bright With meanings of sequestered light; Drooped with shamefast sanctities LOVE IN DIAN'S LAP 87 She purely fears eyes cannot miss, Yet would blush to know she is. Ah, who can view with passionless glance Ihis tear-compelling countenance? He has cozened it to tell Almost its own miracle. Yet I, all-viewing though he be, Methinks saw further here than he; And, Master gay, I swear I drew Something the better of the two! » THE HOUND OF HEAVEN I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped; And shot, precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, .followed after. But with unhurrying chase. And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. They beat — and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet — 'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.' I pleaded, outlaw-wise. By many a hearted casement, curtained red, Trellised with intertwining charities; (For, though I knew His love Who followed, Yet was I sore adread Lest- having Him, I must have naught beside.) But, if one little casement parted wide. The gust of His approach would clash it to: Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue. Across the margent of the world I fled, THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 89 And troubled the gold gateways of the stars, Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars; Fretted to dulcet jars And silvern chatter the pale ports 0' the moon. I said to Dawn: Be sudden — to Eve: Be soon; With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over From this tremendous Lover — Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see! I tempted all His servitors, but to find My own betrayal in their constancy, In faith to Him their fickleness to me, Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit. To all swift things for swiftness did I sue; Clung to the whistling mane of every wind. But whether they swept, smoothly fleet, The long savannahs of tlie blue; Or whether, Thunder-driven, They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven, Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn 0' their feet: — Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue. Still with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. Came on the following Feet, And a Voice above their beat— 'Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.' I sought no more that after which I strayed In face or man or maid; But still within the little children's eyes Seems something, something that replies, They at least are for me, surely for me! I turned me to them very wistfully; 90 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair With dawning answers there, Their angel plucked them from me by the hair. •Come then, ye other children. Nature's — share With me' (said I) 'your delicate fellowship; Let me greet you lip to lip. Let me twine with you caresses. Wantoning With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses, Banqueting With her in her wind-walled palace, Underneath her azured dais. Quaffing, as your taintless way is, From a chalice Lucent-weeping oui oi the dayspring.' So it was done: / in their delicate fellowship was one — Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies. / knew all the swift importings On the wilful face of skies; I knew how the clouds arise Spumed of the wild sea-snortings; All that's born or dies Rose and drooped with; made them shapers Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine; With them joyed and was bereaven. I was heavy with the even. When she lit her glimmering tapers Round the day's dead sanctities. I laughed in the r-i^rniT^or's eyes. I triumphed and I saddened with all weather, Heaven and I wept together. And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine; THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 91 Against the red throb of its sunset-heart I laid my own to beat, And share commingling heat; But net by that, by that, was eased my human smart. In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek. For ah! we know not what each other says. These things and I; in sound / speak — Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences. Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth; Let her, if she would owe me, Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me The breasts 0' her tenderness; Never did any milk of hers once bless My thirsting mouth. Nigh and nigh draws the chase. With unperturbed pace. Deliberate speed, majestic instancy; And past those noised Feet A voice comes yet more fleet — 'Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me.' Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me, And smitten me to my knee; I am defenceless utterly. I slept, methinks, and woke, And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep. In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears, I stand amid the dust 0' the mounded years — My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. My days have crackled and gone up in smoke, 92 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream. Yea, faileth now even dream The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist- Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist. Are yielmng; cords of all too weak account For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed. Ah! is Thy love indeed A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? Ah! must — Designer infinite! — Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust; And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind? I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity; Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again. But not ere him who summoneth I first have seen, enwound With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; His name I know, and what his trumpet saith. Whether man's heart or life it be which yields Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields Be dunged with rotten death? THE HOUND OF HEAVEN 93 Now of that long pursuit Comes on at hand the bruit; That Voice is round me like a bursting sea: 'And is thy earth so marred, Shattered in shard on shard? Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me! Strange, piteous, futile thing! Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Seeing none but I makes much of naught' (He said), 'And human love needs human meriting: How hast thou merited — Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot? Alack, thou knowest not How little worthy of any love thou art! Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but take^ Not for thy harms. But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms. All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home: Rise, clasp My hand, and come!' Halts by me that footfall: Is my gloom, after all, Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? 'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He Whom thou seekest! Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.' ODE TO THE SETTING SUN PRELUDE The wailful sweetness of the violin Floats down the hushed waters of the wind, The heart-strings of the throbbing harp begin To long in aching music. Spirit-pined, In wafts that poignant sweetness drifts, until The wounded soul ooze sadness. The red sun, A bubble of fire, drops slowly toward the hill. While one bird prattles that the day is done. O setting Sun, that as in reverent days Sinkest in music to thy smoothed sleep. Discrowned of homage, though yet crowned with rays, Hymned not at harvest more, though reapers reap: For thee this music wakes not. O deceived. If thou hear in these thoughtless harmonies A pious phantom of adorings reaved, And echo of fair ancient flatteries! Yet, in this field where the Cross planted reigns, I know not what strange passion bows my head To thee, whose great command upon my veins Proves thee a god for me not dead, not dead! 94 ODE TO THE SETTlxNG SUN 95 For worship it is too incredulous, For doubt — oh, too believing-passionate* What wild divinity makes my heart thus A fount of most baptismal tears? — Thy straight Long geam lies steady on the Cross. Ah me! What secret would thy radiant finger show? Of thy bright mastership is this the key? Is this thy secret, then? And is it woe? Fling from thine ear the burning curls, and hark A song thou hast not heard in Northern day; For Rome too daring, and for Greece too dark, Sweet with wild things that pass, that pass away! ODE Alpha and Omega, sadness and mirth. The springing music, and its wasting breath — The fairest things in life are Death and Birth, And of these two the fairer thing is Death. Mystical twins of Time inseparable, The younger hath the holier array. And hath the awfuUer sway: It is the falling star that trails the light. It is the breaking wave that hath the might, The passing shower that rainbows maniple. Is it not so, O thou down-striken Day, That draw'st thy splendours round thee in thy fall? High was thine Eastern pomp inaugural; But thou dost set in statelier pageantry, Lauded with tumults of a firmament: Ob FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky, Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident, Thou dost thy dying so triumphally: I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms! VVhy doth those lucent palms Strew thy feet's failing thicklier than their might, Who dost but hood thy glorious eyes with night, And vex the heels of all the yesterdays? Lo! this loud, lackeying praise Will stay behind to greet the usurping moon, When they have cloud-barred over thee the West. Oh, shake the bright dust from thy parting shoon! The earth not paeans thee, nor serves thy hest; Be godded not by Heaven! avert thy face, And leave to blank disgrace The oblivious world! unsccptre thee of state and place! Ha! but bethink thee what thou gazedst on, Ere yet the snake Decay had venomed tooth; The name thou bar'st in those vast seasons gone — Candid Hyperion, Clad in the light of thine immortal youth! Ere Dionysus bled thy vines, Or Artemis drave her clamours through the wood, Thou saw'st how once against Olympus' height The brawny Titans stood, And shook the gods' world 'bout their ears, and how Enceladus (whom Etna cumbers now) Shouldered me Pelion w^ith its swinging pines. The river unrecked, that did its broken flood Spurt on his back: before the mountainous shock The ranked gods dislock, Scared to their skies; wide o'er rout- trampled night ODE TO THE SETTING SUN 97 Flew spurned the pebbled stars: those splendours then Had tempested on earth, star upon star Mounded in ruin, if a longer war Had quaked Olympus and cold-fearing men. Then did the ample marge And circuit of thy targe Sullenly redden all the vaward fight, Above the blusterous clash Wheeled thy swung falchion's flash, And hewed their forces into splintered flight. Yet ere Olympus thou wast, and a god! Though we deny thy nod, We cannot spoil thee of thy divinity. What know we elder than thee? When thou didst, bursting from the great void's husk, Leap like a lion on the throat 0' the dusk; When the angels rose-chapleted Sang each to other, The vaulted blaze overhead Of their vast pinions spread, Hailing thee brother; How chaos rolled back from the wonder. And the First Morn knelt down to thy visage of thunder! Thou didst draw to thy side Thy young Auroral bride. And lift her veil of night and mystery; Tellus with baby hands Shook off her swaddling-bands, And from the unswathed vapours laughed to thee. 98 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Thou twi-form deity, nurse at once and sire! Thou geiiitor that all things nourishest! The earth was suckled at thy shining breast, And in her veins is quick thy milky fire. Who scarfed her with the morning? and who set Upon her brow the day-fall's carcanet? Who queened her front with the enrondured moon? Who dug nights' jewels from their vaulty mine To dower her, past an eastern wizard's dreams, When, hovering on him through his haschish-swoon, All the rained gems of the old Tartarian line Shiver in lustrous throbbings of tinged flame? Whereof a moiety in the Paolis' seams Statelily builded their Venetian name. Thou hast enwoofed her An empress of the air, And all her births are propertied by thee: Her teeming centuries Drew being from thine eyes: Thou fatt'st the marrow of all quality. Who lit the furnace of the mammoth's heart? Who shagged him like Pilatus' ribbed flanks? Who raised the columned ranks Of that old pre-diluvian forestry, Which like a continent torn oppressed the sea, When the ancient heavens did in rains depart, While the high-danced whirls Of the tossed scud made hiss thy drenched curls? Thou rear'dst the enormous brood; Who hast with life imbued The lion maned in tawny majesty, ODE TO THE SETTING SUN 99 The tiger velvet-barred, The stealthy-stepping pard, And the lithe panther's flexous symmetry? How came the entombed tree a light-bearer. Though sunk in lightless lair? Friend of the forgers of earth, Mate of the earthquake and thunders volcanic. Clasped in the arms of the forces Titanic Which rock like a cradle the girth Of the ether-hung world; Swart son of the swarthy mine, When flame on the breath of his nostrils feeds How is his countenance half-divine, Like thee in thy sanguine weeds? Thou gavest him his light. Though sepultured in night Beneath the dead bones of a perished world; Over his prostrate form Though cold, and heat, and storm. The mountainous wrark of a creation hurled. Who made the splendid rose Saturate with purple glows; Cupped to the marge with beauty; a perfume-press Whence the wind vintages Gushes of warmed fragrance richer far Than all the flavorous ooze of Cyprus' vats? Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar. With dusky cheeks burnt red She sways her heavy head. Drunk with the must of her own odorousness; While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats 100 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush. Who girt dissolved lightnings in the grape? Summered the opal with an Irised flush? Is it not thou that dost the tulip drape, And huest the daffodilly, Yet who hast snowed the lily. And her frail sister, whom the waters name. Dost vestal-vesture 'mid the blaze of June, Cold as the new-sprung girlhood of the moon Ere Autumn's kiss sultry her cheek with flame? Thou sway'st thy sceptred beam O'er all delight and dream, Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance: And like a jocund maid In garland-flowers arrayed, Before thy ark Earth keeps her sacred dance. And now, O shaken from thine antique throne, And sunken from thy coerule empery, Now that the red glare of thy fall is blown In smoke and flame about the windy sky. Where are the wailing voices that should meet From hill, stream, grove, and all of mortal shape Who tread thy gifts, in vineyards as stray feet Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape? Where is the threne o' the sea? And why not dirges thee The wind, that sings to himself as he makes stride Lonely and terrible on the Andean height? Where is the Naid 'mid her s worded sedge? The Nymph wan-glimmering by her wan fouxit's verge? The Dryad at timid gaze by the wood-side? The Oread jutting light ODE TO THE SETTING SUN loi On one up-strained sole from the rock-ledge? The Nereid tip-toe on the scud o' the surge, With whistling tresses dank athwart her face, And all her figure poised in lithe Circean grace? Why withers their lament? Their tresses tear-besprent, Have they sighed hence with trailing garment-hem? sweet, O sad, O fair, 1 catch your flying hair, Draw your eyes down to me, and dream on them ! A space, and they fleet from me. Must ye fade — O old, essential candours, ye who made The earth a living and a radiant thing — And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms? Lo ever thus, when Song with chorded charms Draws from dull death his lost Eurydice, Lo ever thus, even at consummating. Even in the swooning minute that claims her his, Even as he trembles to the impassioned kiss Of reincarnate Beauty, his control Clasps the cold body, and forgoes the soul! Whatso looks lovelily Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain. Why have we longings of immortal pain, And all we long for mortal? Woe is me, And all our chants but chaplet some decay. As mine this vanishing — nay, vanished Day. The low sky-line dusks to a leaden hue, No rift disturbs the heavy shade and chill. Save one, where the charred firmament lets throu^' The scorching dazzle of Heaven; 'gainst \<)h'\f'i- .Lv hil); Out-flattened sombrely, 102 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Stands black as life against eternity. Against eternity? A rifting light in me Burns through the leaden broodings of the mind: O blessed Sun, thy state Uprisen or derogate Dafts me no more with doubt; I seek and find. If with exultant tread Thou foot the Eastern sea, Or like a golden bee Sting the West to angry red, Thou dost image, thou dost follow That King-Maker of Creation, Who, ere Hellas hailed Apollo, Gave thee, angel-god, thy station; Thou art of Him a type memorial. Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood Upon thy Western rood; And His stained brow did vail like thine to night, Yet lift once more Its light, And, risen, again departed from our ball, But when It set on earth arose in Heaven. Thus hath He unto death His beauty given: And so of all which form inheriteth The fall doth pass the rise in worth; For birth hath in itself the germ of death, But death hath in itself the germ of birth. It is the falling acorn buds the tree. The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise. For there is nothing lives but something dies, And there is nothing dies but something lives. ODE TO THE SETTING SUN 103 Till skies be fugitives, Till Time, the hidden root of change, updries. Are Birth and Death inseparable on earth; For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth. AFTER-STRAIN Now with wan ray that other sun of Song Sets in the bleakening waters of my soul: One step, and lo ! the Cross stands gaunt and long 'Twixt me and yet bright skies, a presaged dole. Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory. Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields; Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee. Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields. Of reaped joys thou art the heavy sheaf Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan; Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf, But we must bear thee, and must bear alone. Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes Our night not borrows the superfluous day. Yet woe to him that from his burden flees, Crushed in the fall of what he cast away. Therefore, O tender Lady, Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity. Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. 104 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS 'Lo, though suns rise and set, but crosses stay, I leave thee ever,' saith she, 'light of cheer.' 'Tis so: yon sky still thinks upon the Day, And showers aerial blossoms on his bier. Yon cloud with wrinkled fire is edged sharp; And once more welling through the air, ah me! How the sweet viol plains him to the harp. Whose panged sobbings throng tumultuously. Oh, this Medusa-pleasure with her stings! This essence of all suffering, w^hich is joy! I am not thankless for the spell it brings. Though tears must be told down for the charmed toy. No; while soul, sky, and music bleed together, Let me give thanks even for those griefs in me, The restless windward stirrings of whose feather Prove them the brood of immortality. My soul is quitted of death-neighbouring swoon, Who shall not slake her immitigable scars Until she hear 'My sister!' from the moon. And take the kindred kisses of the stars. TO THE DEAD CARDINAL OF WESTMINSTER {Heiiry Edward Mantling: Died January 1892) I WILL not perturbate Thy Paradisal state With praise Of thy dead days; To the new-heavened say, 'Spirit, thou wert fine clay': This do, Thy praise who knew. Therefore my spirit clings Heaven's porter by the wings, And holds Its gated golds Apart, with thee to press A private business: — Whence, Deign me audience. Anchorite, who didst dwell With all the world for cell. My soul Round me doth roll Tctr io6 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS A sequestration bare. Too far alike we were, To far Dissimilar. , For its burning fruitage I Do climb the tree o' the sky; Do prize Some human eyes. You smelt the Heaven-blossoms, And all the sweet embosoms The dear Uranian year. Those Eyes my weak gaze shuns, Which to the suns are Suns, Did Not affray your lid. The carpet was let down (With golden moultings strewn) For you Of the angels' blue. But I, ex-Paradised, The shoulder of your Christ Find high To lean thereby. So flaps my helpless sail, Bellying with neither gale, Of Heaven Nor Orcus even. TO THE DEAD CARDINAL 107 Life is coquetry Of death, which wearies me, Too sure Of the amour; A tiring-room where I Death's divers garments try, Till fit Some fashion sit. It seemeth me too much I do rehearse for fuch A mean And single scene. The sandy glass hence bear- Antique remembrancer: My veins Do spare its pains. With secret sympathy My thoughts repeat in me Infirm The turn 0' the worm Beneath my appointed sod; The grave is in my blood ; I shake To winds that take Its grasses by the top; The rains thereon that drop Perturb With drip acerb io2 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS My subtly answering soul; The feet across its knoll Do jar Me from afar. As sap foretastes the spring; As Earth ere blossoming Thrills With far daffodils, And feels her breast turn sweet With the unconceived wheat ; So doth My flesh foreloathe The abhorred spring of Dis, With seething presciences Affirm The preparate worm. I have no thought that I, When at the last I die, Shall reach To gain your speech. But you, should that be so, May very well, I know. May well To me in hell With recognizing eyes Look down from your Paradise — 'God bless Thy hopelessness!' TO THE DEAD CARDINAL 109 Call, holy soul, O call The hosts angelical. And say, — ■ 'See, far away ^Lies one I saw on earth; One stricken from his birth With curse Of destinate verse. 'What place doth He ye serve For such sad spirit reserve, — Given, In dark lieu of Heaven, 'The impitiable Daemon, Beauty, to adore and dream on. To be Perpetually 'Hers, but she never his? He reapeth miseries; Foreknows His wages woes; 'He lives detached days; He serveth not for praise; For gold He is not sold; 'Deaf is he to world's tongue; He scometh for his song The loud Shouts of the crowd; no FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS *He asketh not world's eyes; Not to world's ears he cries; Saith,— "These Shut, if ye please!" *He measureth world's pleasure, World's ease, as Saints might measure For hire Just love entire *He asks, not grudgi"ng pain; And knows his asking vain. And cries — "Love! Love!" and dies, *In guerdon of long duty. Unowned by Love or Beauty; And goes — Tell, tell, who knows! 'Aliens from Heaven's worth, Fine beasts who nose i' the earth, Do there Reward prepare. 'But are his great desires Food but for nether fires? Ah me, A mystery! *Can it be his alone, To find when all is known, That Tvhat He solely sought iO THu: DEAD L.ARDINAL i" Is lost, and thereto lost All that its seeking cost? That he Must finally, ^Through sacrificial tears, And anchoretic years. Tryst With the sensualist?* So ask; and if they tell The secret terrible, Good friend, I pray thee send Some high gold embassage To teach my unripe age. Tell! Lest my feet walk hell. A CORY M BUS FOR AUTUMN Hearken my chant, 'tis As a Bacchante's, A grape-spurt, a vine-splash, a tossed tress, flown vaunt 'tis Suffer my singing, Gipsy of Seasons, ere thou go winging; Ere Winter throws His slaking snows In thy f easting-flagon's impurpurate glows! The sopped sun — toper as ever drank hard — Stares foolish, hazed, Rubicund, dazed, Totty with thine October tankard. Tanned maiden! with cheeks like apples russet, And breast a brown agaric faint-flushing at tip, And a mouth too red for the moon to buss it But her cheek unvow its vestalship; Thy mists enclip Her steel-clear circuit Aluminous, Until it crust Rubiginous With tlie glorious gules of a glowing rust. Far other saw we, other indeed. The crescent moon, in the May-days dead. Fly up with its slender white wings spread Out of its nest in the sea's waved mead. 112 A CORYMBUS FOR AUTUMN 113 How are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden? Umbered juices, And pulped oozes Pappy out of the cherry-bruises, Froth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden 1 With hair that musters In globed clusters. In tumbling clusters, like swarty grapes, Round thy brow and thine ears o'ershaden; With the burning darkness of eyes like pansies, Like velvet pansies Wherethrough escapes The splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies; With robe gold-ta\vny not hiding the shapes Of the feet whereunto it falleth down, Thy naked feet unsandalled; With robe gold-tawny that does not veil Feet where the red Is meshed in the brown, Like a rubied sun in a Venice-sail. The wassailous heart of the Year is thine! His Bacchic fingers disentwine His coronal At thy festival; His revelling fingers disentwine Leaf, flower, and all. And let them fall Blossom and all in thy wavering wine. The Summer looks out from her brazen tower, Through the flashing bars of July, Waiting thy ripened golden shower; Whereof there cometh, with sandals fleet. 114 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The North-west flying viewlessly, With a sword to sheer, and untameable teet, And the gorgon-head of the Winter shown To stiffen the gazing earth as stone. In crystal Heaven's magic sphere Poised in the palm of thy fervid hand, Thou seest the enchanted shows appear That stain Favonian firmament; Richer than ever the Occident Gave up to bygone Summer's wand. Day's dying dragon lies drooping his crest. Panting red pants into the West. Or the butterfly sunset claps its wings With flitter alit on the swinging blossom, The gusty blossom, that tosses and swings, Of the sea with its blown and ruffled bosom; Its ruffled bosom wherethrough the wind sings Till the crisped petals are loosened c>nd strown Overblown, on the sand; Shed, curling as dead Rose-leaves curl, on the flecked strand. Or higher, holier, saintlier when, as now, All Nature sacerdotal seems, and thou. The calm hour strikes on yon goldeL gong, In tones of floating and mellow light A spreading summons to even- song: See how there The cowled Night Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary-stair. What is this feel of incense everywhere? Clings it round folds of the blanch-ar;iiced clouds. A CORYMBUS FOR AUTUMN iiS Upwafted by the solemn thurifer, The mighty Spirit unknown, That swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne? Or is't the Season under all these shrouds Of light, and sense, and silence, makes her known A presence everywhere, An inarticulate prayer, A hand on the soothed tresses of the air? But there is one hour scant Of this Titanian, pirmal liturgy; As there is but one hour for me and thee, Autumn, for thee and thine hierophant. Of this grave-ending chant. Round the earth still and stark Heaven's death-lights kindle, yellow spark by spark, Beneath the dreadful catafalque of the dark. And I had ended there: But a great wind blew all the stars to flare, And cried, T sweep the path before the moon! Tarry ye now the coming of the moon, For she is coming soon'; Then died before the coming of the moon. And she came forth upon the trepidant air, In vesture unimagined-fair. Woven as woof of flag-lilies; And curdled as of flag-lilies The vapour at the feet of her, And a haze about her tinged in fainter wise; As if she had trodden the stars in press, Till the gold wine spurted over her dress. Till the gold wine gushed out round her feet; ii6 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Spouted over her stained wear, And bubbled in golden froth at her feet, And hung like a whirlpool's mist round her. Still, mighty Season, do I see't, Thy sway is still majestical! Thou hold'st of God, by title sure, Thine indefeasible investiture. And that right round thy locks are native to; The heavens upon thy brow imperial, This huge terrene thy ball, And o'er thy shoulders thrown wide air's depending pall. What if thine earth be blear and bleak of hue? Still, still the skies are sweet! Still, Season, still thou hast thy triumphs there! How have I, unaware. Forgetful of my strain inaugural. Cleft the great rondure of thy reign complete. Yielding thee half, who hast indeed the all? I will not think thy sovereignty begun But with the shepherd Sun That washes in the sea the stars' gold fleeces; Or that with Day it ceases. Who sets his burning lips to the salt brine, And purples it to wine; While I behold how ermined Artemis Ordained weed must wear, And toil thy business; Who witness am of her, Her too in autumn turned a vintager; And, laden with its lamped clusters bright, The fiery-fruited vineyard of this night. ECCLESIASTICAL BALLADS THE VETERAN OF HEAVEN O CAPTAIN of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars? In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe? Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about, Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow? * Twas on a day of rout they girded Me about, They wounded all My brow, and they smote Me through the side: My hand held no sword when I met their armed horde, And the conqueror fell down, and the Conquered bruised his pride.' What is this, unheard before, that the Unarmed makes war, And the Slain hath the gain, and the Victor hath the rout? What wars, then, are these, and what the enemies, Strange Chief, with the scars of Thy conquest trenched about? The Prince I drave forth held the Mount of the North, Girt with the guards of flame that roll round the pole. 117 ii8 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS I drave him with My wars from all his fortress-stars, And the sea of death divided that My march might strike its goal. 'In the heart of Northern Guard, many a great dasmonian sword Burns as it turns round the Mount occult, apart: There is given him power and place still for some certain days. And his name would turn the Sun's blood back upon its heart.' What is Thy Name? Oh, show! — 'My Name ye may not know; 'Tis a going forth with banners, and a baring of much swords: But My titles that are high, are they not upon My thigh? "King of Kings!" are the words, "Lord of Lords!"; It is written "King of Kings, Lord of Lords." ' II LILIUM REGIS LILY of the King! low lies thy silver wing, And long has been the hour of thine unqueening; And thy scent of Paradise on the night-wind spills its sighs, Nor any take the secrets of its meaning. O Lily of the King! I speak a heavy thing, O patience, most sorrowful of daughters! Lo, the hour is at hand for the troubling of the land, And red shall be the breaking of the waters. ECCLESIASTICAL BALLADS 119 Sit fast upon thy stalk, when the blast shall with thee talk, With the mercies of the King for thine awning; And the just understand that thine hour is at hand, Thine hour at hand with power in the dawning. When the nations lie in blood, and their kings a broken brood, Look up, O most sorrowful of daughters! Lift up thy head and hark what sounds are in the dark, For His feet are coming to thee on the waters! O Lily of the King! I shall not see, that sing, I shall not see the hour of thy queening! But my Song shall see, and wake like a flower that dawn- winds shake, And sigh with joy the odours of its meaning. O Lily of the King, remember then the thing That this dead mouth sang; and thy daughters, As they dance before His way, sing there on the Day What I sang when the Night was on the waters! TRANSLATIONS A SUNSET FROM Hugo's 'feuilles d'automne' I LOVE the evenings, passionless and fair, I love the evens, Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, In numerous leafage bosomed close; Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere On cloudy archipelagos. Oh gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion, Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion. Their unimagined shapes accord: Under their waves at intervals flames a pale levin through, As if some giant of the air amid the vapours drew A sudden elemental sword. The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold. The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; Or on the blurred horizon joins his battle with the haze: Or pools the glooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze, Great moveless meres of radiance. 120 TRANSLATIONS 121 Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track, Yonder, a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, A triple row of pointed teeth? Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds its tenebrous side With scales of golden mail ensheathe. Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates — the vision flees. Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice Ruins immense in mounded wrack: Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains over- thrown When the earthquake heaves its hugy back. These vapours, with their leaden, golden, iron, bronzed glows, Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and hell repose. Muttering hoarse dreams of destined harms, — 'Tis God who hangs their multitude amid the skiey deep, As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep His dreadful and resounding arms! All vanishes! The sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, Like a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red Into the furnace stirred to fume, Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire The vaporous and inflamed spume. 122 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS O contemplate the heavens! Whenas the vein- drawn day dies pale, In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil, With love that has not speech for need! Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: If winter hue them like a pall, or if the summer night Fantasy them with starry brede. HEARD ON THE MOUNTAIN FROM Hugo's 'feuilles d'automne' Have you sometimes, calm, silent, let your tread aspirant rise Up to the mountain's summit, in the presence of the skies? Was't on the borders of the South? or on the Bretagne coast? And at the basis of the mount had you the Ocean tossed? And there, leaned o'er the wave and o'er the immeasur- ableness. Calm, silent, have you harkened what it says? Lo, what it says! One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicensed to muse. Had drooped its wing above the beached margent of the ooze, And, plunging from the mountain height into the immensity. Beheld upon one side the land, on the other side the sea. I hearkened, comprehended, — never, as from those abysses. No, never issued from a mouth, nor moved an ear such voice as this is! TRANSLATIONS 123 A sound it was, at outset, immeasurable, confused, Vaguer than is the wind among the tufted trees effused. Full of magnificent accords, suave murmurs, sweet as is The evensong, and mighty as the shock of panoplies When the hoarse 77ielee in its arms the closing squadrons grips, And pants, in furious breathings, from the clarions' brazen lips. Unutterable the harmony, unsearchable its deep, Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep, And through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed young. Its ihfinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng, Evcii to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre Its shattered flood englut with time, with space and form and number. Like to another atmosphere, with thin o'erflowing robe. The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe: And the world, swathed about with this investuring sym- phony, Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the har- mony. And pensive, I attended the ethereal lutany. Lost within this containing voice as if within the sea. Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils confuse and smother. Amid this voice two voices, one commingled with the other, Which did from off the land and seas even to the heavens aspire; Chanting the universal chant in simultaneous quire. 124 FRANCIS THOxMPSON'S POEMS And I distinguished them amid that deep and nimorous sound, As who beholds two currents thwart amid the fluctuous profound. The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal speech 1 That was the voice o' the surges, as they parleyed each with each. The other, which arose from our abode terranean, Was sorrowful; and that, alack! the murmur was of man; And in this mighty quire, whose chantings day and night resound, Every wave had its utterance, and every man his sound. Now, the magnificent Ocean, as I said, unbannering A voice of joy, a voice of peace, did never stint to sing, Most like in Sion's temples to a psaltery psaltering, And to creation's beauty reared the great lauds of his song. Upon the gale, upon the squall, his clamour borne along Unpausingly arose to God in more triumphal swell; And every one among his waves, that God alone can quell, When the other of its song made end, into the singing pressed. Like that majestic lion whereof Daniel was the guest, At intervals the Ocean his tremendous murmur awed; And, toward where the sunset fires fell shaggily and broad, Under his golden mane, methought that I saw pass the hand of God. Meanwhile, and side by side wnth that august fanfaronnade The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier affrayed, Tike an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat, Like to a bow of iron that gn-^rls umn an iron rote, TRANSLATIONS 125 Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd taunt, Refusal of viaticum, refusal of the font, And clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among That hurtling crowd of rumour from the diverse human tongue. Went by as who beholdeth, when the valleys thick t'ward night. The long drifts of the birds of dusk pass, blackening flight on flight. What was this sound whose thousand echoes vibrated unsleeping? Alas! the sound was earth's and man's, for earth and man were weeping. Brothers! of these two voices strange, most unimaginably, Unceasingly regenerated, dying unceasingly, Hearkened of the Eternal throughout His Eternity, The one voice uttereth Nature, and the other voice Humanity. Then I alit in reverie; for my ministering sprite, Alack! had never yet deployed a pinion of an ampler flight. Nor ever had my shadow endured so large a day to bum: And long I rested dreaming, contemplating turn by turn Now that abyss obscure which lurked beneath the water's roll. And now that other untemptable abyss which opened in my soul. And I made question of me, to w^hat issues are we here, Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear; 126 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS What doth the soul ; to be or live if better worth it is ; And why the Lord, Who, only, reads within that book of His, In fatal hymeneals hath eternally entwined The vintage-chant of nature with the dirging cry of human- kind? The metre of the second of these two translations is an ex- periment. The splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman I have treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics, with the occasional triplet, and even the occasional Alexandrine, a treatment which can well extend, I believe, the majestic re- sources of the metre. AN ECHO OF VICTOR HUGO Life's a veil the real has: All the shadows of our scene Are but shows of things that pass On the other side the screen. Time his glass sits nodding by; 'Twixt its turn and turn a spawn Of universes buzz and die Like the ephemeris of the dawn. Turn again the wasted glass! Kingly crown and warrior's crest Are not worth the blade of grass God fashions for the swallow's nest. Kings must lay gold circlets down In God's sepulchral ante-rooms. The wear of Heaven's the thorny crown: He paves His temples with their tombs. heakd on the mountain 127 O our towered altitudes! O the lustres of our thrones! What! old Time shall have his moods Like Caesars and Napoleons; Have his towers and conquerors forth, Till he, weary of the toys, Put back Rameses in the earth And break his Ninevehs and Troys. The first two stanzas and the last are my own: the thoughts of the others are Victor Hugo's. The metre of the original is departed from. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS DREAM-TRYST The breaths of kissing night and day Were mingled in the eastern Heaven: Throbbing with unheard melody Shook Lyra all its star-chord seven: When the dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy, And dawn's grey eyes were troubled grey; And souls went palely up the sky, And mine to Lucide. There was no change in her sweet eyes Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine; There was no change in her deep heart Since last that deep heart knocked at mine. Her eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope's, Wherein did ever come and go The sparkle of the fountain-drops From her sweet soul below. The chambers in the house of dreams Are fed with so divine an air, That Time's hoar wings f/row young therein, And they who walk th< re are most fair. I2S MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 129 I joyed for me, I joyed for her, Who with the Past meet girt about: Where our last kiss still warms the air, Nor can her eyes go out. AN ARAB LOVE-SONG The hunched camels of the night* Trouble the bright And silver waters of the moon. The Maiden of the Mom will soon Through Heaven stray and sing, Star gathering. Now while the dark about our loves is strewn, Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come! And night will catch her breath up, and be dumb. Leave thy father, leave thy mother And thy brother; Leave the black tents of thy tribe apart! Am I not thy father and thy brother. And thy mother? And thou — what needest with thy tribe's black tents Who hast the red pavilion of my heart? * Cloud-shapes observed by travellers in the East. 130 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS BUONA NOTTE Jane Williams, in her last letter to Shelley, wrote: 'Why do you talk of never enjoying moments like the past? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do you expect I shall do so soon? Buona Notte.' This letter was dated July 6th, and Shelley was drowned on the 8th. These verses are sup- posed to be addressed to Jane by the poet's spirit while his ^fi)dy is tossing on the waters of Spezzia. Ariel to Miranda: — Hear This good-night the sea- winds bear; And let thine unacquainted ear Take grief for their interpreter. Good-night! I have risen so high Into slumber's rarity, Not a dream can beat its feather Through the unsustaining ether. Let the sea-winds make avouch How thunder summoned me to couch, Tempest curtained me about And turned the sun with his own hand out: And though I toss upon my bed My dream is not disquieted; Nay, deep I sleep upon the deep, And my eyes are wet, but I do not weep; And I fell to sleep so suddenly That my lips are moist yet — could 'st thou see — With the good-night draught I have drunk to thee. Thou canst not wipe them; for it was Death Damped my lips that has dried my breath. A little while — it is not long — The salt shall dry on them like the song. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 131 Now know'st thou that voice desolate, — Mourning ruined joy's estate, — Reached thee through a closing gate. 'Go'st thou to Plato?' Ah, girl, no! It is to Pluto that I go. THE PASSION OF MARY VERSES IN PASSION-TIDE O Lady Mary, thy bright crown Is no mere crown of majesty; For with the reflex of His own Resplendent thorns Christ circled thee. The red rose of this Passion-tide Doth take a deeper hue from thee, In the five wounds of Jesus dyed, And in thy bleeding thoughts, Mary! The soldier struck a triple stroke, That smote thy Jesus on the tree: He broke the Heart of Hearts, and broke The Saint's and Mother's heart in thee. Thy Son w^ent up the angels' ways. His passion ended; but, ah me! Thou found'st the road of further days A longer way of Calvary: On the hard cross of hope deferred Thou hung'st in loving agony, Until the mortal-dreaded word Which chills our mirth, spake mirth to thee. 132 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The angel Death from this cold tomb Of life did roll the stone away ; And He thou barest in thy womb Caught thee at last into the day, Before the living throne of Whom The Lights of Heaven burning pray. L'ENVOY O thou who dwellest in the day! Behold, I pace amidst the gloom: Darkness is ever round my way With little space for sunbeam-room. Yet Christian sadness is divine Even as thy patient sadness was: The salt tears in our life's dark wine Fell in it from the saving cross. Bitter the bread of our repast; Yet doth a sweet the bitter leaven: Our sorrow is the shadow cast Around it by the light of Heaven. O light in Light, shine down from Heaven! MESSAGES What shall I your true-love tell, Earth-forsaking maid? What shall I your true-love tell, When life's spectre's laid? MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 133 'Tell him that, our side the grave, Maid may not conceive Life should be so sad to have. That's so sad to leave!' What shall I your true-love tell, When I come to him? What shall I your true-love tell — Eyes growing dim! Tell him this, when you shall part From a maiden pined; That I see him with my heart. Now my eyes are blind.' What shall I your true-love tell? Speaking-while is scant. What shall I your true-love tell, Death's white postulant? 'Tell him— love, with speech at strife, For last utterance saith: I, who loved with all my life, Love with all my death.' AT LORD'S [t is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk, Though my owm red roses there may blow; It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk, Though the red roses crest the caps, I know. For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast, 134 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost, And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host As the run-stealers flicker to and fro, To and fro: — O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago! LOVE AND THE CHILD 'Why do you so clasp me. And draw me to your knee? Forsooth, you do but chafe me, I pray you let me be: I will be loved but now and then When it liketh me!' So I heard a young child, A thwart child, a young child Rebellious against love's arms, Make its peevish cry. To the tender God I turn:— Tardon, Love most High! For I think those arms were even Thine, And that child was even L' DAPHNE The river-god's daughter,— the sun-god sought her, Sleeping with never a zephyr by her. Under the noon he made his prey sure, Woofed in weeds of a woven azure. As down he shot in a whistle of fire. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 1,^5 Slid off, fair daughter! her vesturing water; Like a cloud from the scourge of the winds fled she: With the breath in her hair of the keen Apollo, And feet less fleet than the feet that follow, She throes in his arms to a laurel-tree. Risen out of birth's waters the soul distraught errs, Nor whom nor whither she flieth knows she: With the breath in her hair of the keen Apollo, And fleet the beat of the feet that follow. She throes in his arms to a poet, woe's me! You plucked the boughed verse the poet bears — It shudders and bleeds as it snaps from the tree. A love-banning love, did the god but know it, Which barks the man about with the poet, And muffles his heart of mortality! Yet I translate — ward of song's gate ! — Perchance all ill this mystery. We both are struck with the self-same quarrel; We grasp the maiden, and clasp the laurel — Do we weep or we laugh more, Phoebe mi? ^His own green lays, unwithering bays, Gird Keats' unwithering brow,' say ye? O fools, that is only the empty crown! The sacred head has laid it down With Hob, Dick, Marian, and Margery. 136 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS ABSENCE When music's fading's faded, And the rose's death is dead, And my heart is fain of tears, because Mine eyes have none to shed; I said, Whence shall faith be fed? Canst thou be what thou hast been? No, no more what thou hast! Lo, all last things that I have known, And all that shall be last. Went past With the thing thou wast! If the petal of this Spring be As of the Spring that's flown, If the thought that now is sweet is As the sweet thought overblown; Alone Canst thou be thy self gone. To yester-rose a richer The rose-spray may bear; Thrice thousand fairer you may be, — > But tears for the fair You were When you first were fair! Know you where they have laid her, Maiden May that died — With the loves that lived not MISCELLANEOUS POExMS 137 Strewing her soft side? I cried, Where Has-been may hide? To him that waiteth, all things! Even death, if thou wait! And they that part too early May meet again too late: — Ah, fate! If meeting be too late! And when the year new-launched Shall from its wake extend The blossomy foam of Summer, What shall I attend. My friend! Flower of thee, my friend? Sweet shall have its sorrow, The rainbow its rain, Loving have its leaving, And bliss is of pain So fain. Ah, is she bliss or pain? TO W. M. O TREE of many branches! One thou hast Thou barest not, but grafted'st on thee. Now, Should all men's thunders break on thee, and leave Thee reft of bough and blossom, that one branch Shall cling to thee, my Father, Brother, Friend, Shall cling to thee, until the end of end. 1^8 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS A FALLEN YEW It seemed corrival of the world's great prime, Made to un-cdge the scythe of Time, And last with stateliest rhyme. No tender Dryad ever did indue That rigid chiton of rough yew. To fret her white flesh through: But some god like to those grim Asgard lords, Who walk the fables of the hordes From Scandinavian fjords, Upheaved its stubborn girth, and raised unriven, Against the whirl-blast and the levin. Defiant arms to Heaven. When doom puffed out the stars, we might have said, It would decline its heavy head, And see the world to bed. For this firm yew did from the vassal leas, And rain and air, its tributaries, Its revenues increase, And levy impost on the golden sun. Take the blind years as they might run, And no fate seek or shun. But now our yew is strook, is fallen — yea. Hacked like dull wood of every day To this and that, men say. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 139 Never! — To Hades' shadowy shipyards gone, Dim barge of Dis, down Acheron It drops, or Lethe wan. Stirred by its fall — poor destined bark of Dis! — Along my soul a bruit there is Of echoing images, Reverberations of mortality: Spelt backward from its death, to me Its life reads saddenedly. Its breast was hollowed as the tooth of eld; And boys, there creeping unbeheld, A laughing moment dwelled. Yet they, within its very heart so crept, Reached not the heart that courage kept With winds and years beswept. And in its boughs did close and kindly nest The birds, as they within its breast, By all its leaves caressed. But bird nor child might touch by any art Each other's or the tree's hid heart, A whole God's breadth apart; The breadth of God, the breadth of death and life! Even so, even so, in undreamed strife With pulseless Law, the wife, — 140 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The sweetest wife on sweetest marriage- day, — Their souls at grapple in mid-way, Sweet to her sweet may say: *I take you to my inmost heart, my true!* Ah, fool! but there is one heart you Shall never take him to! The hold that falls not when the town it got, The heart's heart, whose immured plot Hath keys yourself keep not! Its ports you cannot burst — you are withstood— For him that to your listening blood Sends precepts as he would. [ts gates are deaf to Love, high summoner; Yea, love's great warrant runs not there: You are your prisoner. Yourself are with yourself the sole consor tress In that unleaguerable fortress; It knows you not for portress. Its keys are at the cincture hung of God; Its gates are trepidant to His nod; By Him its floors are trod. And if His feet shall rock those floors in wrath, Or blest aspersion sleek His path, Is only choice it hath. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS XAl Yea, in that ultimate heart's occult abode To lie as in an oubliette of God, Or in a bower untrod, Built by a secret Lover for His Spouse;— Sole choice is this your life allows, Sad tree, whose perishing boughs So few birds house! A JUDGMENT IN HEAVEN I have throughout this poem used an asterisk to indicate the caesura in the middle of the line, after the manner of the old Saxon section-point. Athwart the sod which is treading for God * the Poet paced with his splendid eyes; Paradise-verdure he stately passes * to win to the Father of Paradise, Through the conscious and palpitant grasses * of inter- tangled relucent dyes. The angels a-play on its fields of Summer * (their wild wings rustled his guides' cymars) Looked up from disport at the passing comer, * as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars; And the warden-spirits with startled feet rose, * hand on sword, by their tethered cars. With plumes night-tinctured englobed and cinctured * of Saints, his guided steps held on 142 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS To where on the far crystalline pale * of that transtellar Heaven there shone The immutable crocean da\vn * effusing from the Father's Throne. Through the reverberant Eden-ways * the bruit of his great advent driven, Back from the fulgent justle and press * with mighty echo- ing so was given, As when the surly thunder smites * upon the clanged gates of Heaven. Over the bickering gonfalons, * far-ranged as for Tartarean wars, Went a waver of ribbed fire * — as night-seas on phosphoric bars Like a flame-plumed fan shake slowly out * their ridgy reach of crumbling stars. At length to where on His fretted Throne * sat in the heart of His aged dominions The great Triune, and Mary nigh, * lit round with spears of their hauberked minions. The Poet drew, in the thunderous blue * involved dread of those mounted pinions. As in a secret and tenebrous cloud * the watcher from the disquiet earth At momentary intervals * beholds from its ragged rifts break forth The flash of a golden perturbation, * the travelling threat of a witched birth; MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 143 Till heavily parts a sinister chasm, * a grisly jaw, whose verges soon. Slowly and ominously filled * by the on-coming plenilune, Supportlessly congest with fire, * and suddenly spit forth the moon: — With beauty, not terror, through tangled error * of night- dipt plumes so burned their charge; Swayed and parted the globing clusters * so, disclosed from their kindling marge, Roseal-chapleted, splendent-vestured, * the Poet there where God's light lay large. Hu, hu! a wonder! a wonder! see, * clasping the Poet's glories clings A dingy creature, even to laughter * cloaked and clad in patchwork things, Shrinking close from the unused glows * of the seraphs' versicoloured wings. A Rhymer, rhyming a futile rhyme, * he had crept for con- voy through Eden-ways Into the shade of the Poet's glory, * darkened under his prevalent rays. Fearfully hoping a distant welcome * as a poor kinsman of his lays. The angels laughed with a lovely scorning: * — 'Who has done this sorry deed in The garden of our Father, God? * 'mid his blossoms to sow this weed in? Never our fingers knew this stuff: * not so fashion the looms of Eden!' 144 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The Poet bowed nis orow majesuc, -^ searcning that patch- work through and through, Feeling God's lucent gazes traverse * his singing-stoling and spirit too: The hallowed harpers were fain to frown * on the strange thing come 'mid their sacred crew. Only the Poet that was earth * his fellow-earth and his own self knew. Then the Poet rent off robe and wreath, * so as a sloughing serpent doth, Laid them at the Rhymer's feet, * shed down wreath and raiment both, Stood in a dim and shamed stole, * like the tattered wing of a musty moth. (The Poet addresses his Maker) 'Thou gav'st the weed 2md wreath of song, * the weed and wreath are solely Thine, And this dishonest vesture * is the only vesture that is mine; The life / textured. Thou the song: * my handicraft Vs not divine!' (The Poet addresses the Rhymer) He wrested o'er the Rhymer's head * that garmenting which wrought him wrong; A flickering tissue argentine * down dripped its shivering silvers long: — 'Better thou wov'st thy woof of life * than thou didst weave thy woof of song!' MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 145 Never a chief in Saintdom was, * but turnea him trom the Poet then; Never an eye looked mild on him * 'mid all the ang^' my- riads ten, Save sinless Mary, and sinful Mary * — the Mary titled Magdalen. 'Turn yon robe,' spake Magdalen, * 'of torn bright song, and see and feel.' They turned the raiment, saw and felt * what their turning did reveal — All the inner surface piled * with bloodied hairs, like hairs of steel. Take, I pray, yon chaplet up, * thrown down ruddied from his head.' They took the roseal chaplet up, * and they stood aston- ished : Every leaf between their fingers, * as they bruised it, burst and bled. *See his torn flesh through those rents; * see the punctures round his hair, As if the chaplet-fiowers had driven * deep roots in to nour- ish there — Lord, who gav'st him robe and wreath, * what was this Thou gav'st for wear?' 'Fetch forth the Paradisal garb!'* spake the Father, sweet and low; Drew them both by the frightened hand * where Mary's throne made irised bow — •Take, Princess Mary, of thy good grace, * two spirits greater than they know.' 146 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S FOEldS EPILOGUE TO 'A JUDGMENT IN HEAVEN' Virtue may unlock hell, or even A sin turn in the wards of Heaven, (As ethics of the text-book go,) So little men their own deeds know, Or through the intricate melee Guess witherward drav/s the battle-sway; So little, if they know the deed, Discern what therefrom shall succeed. To wisest moralists 'tis but given To work rough border-law of Heaven, V^ithin this narrow life of ours. These marches 'twixt delimitless Powers. Is it, if Heaven the future showed. Is it the all-severest mode To see ourselves with the eyes of God? God rather grant, at Hie assize. He see us not with our own eyes! Heaven, which man's generations draws. Nor deviates into replicas, Must of as deep diversity In judgement as creation be. The-re is no expeditious road Tc pack and label men for God, An] save them by the barrel -load. Some may perchance, v/ith strange surprise. Have blundered into Paradise. In vasty dusk of life abroad, They fondly thought to err from God, Nc: knew the circle that ihey trod; MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 147 And, wandering all the night about, Found them at mom where they set out. Death dawned; Heaven lay in prospect wide: — Lo! they were standing by His side! The Rhymer a life uncomplex, With just such cares as mortals vex, So simply felt as all men feel, Lived purely out to his soul's weal. A double life the Poet lived. And with a double burthen grieved; The life of flesh and life of song. The pangs to both lives that belong; Immortal knew and mortal pain, Who in two worlds could lose and gain, And found immortal fruits must be Mortal through his mortality. The life of flesh and life of song! If one life worked the other wrong, What expiating agony May for him, damned to poesy, Shut in that little sentence be — What deep austerities of strife — 'He lived his life.' He lived his life! THE SERE OF THE LEAF Winter wore a flapping wind, and his beard, disentwined, Blew cloudy in the face of the Fall, When a poet-soul flew South, with a singing in her mouth, O'er the azure Irish parting-wall. * * Miss Katharine Tynan's visit to London, 1889. 148 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS There stood one beneath a tree whose matted greenery- Was fruited with the songs of birds; By the melancholy water drooped the slender sedge, its daughter, Whose silence was a sadness passing words: He held him very still, And he heard the running rill, And the soul-voice singing blither than the birds. All Summer the sunbeams drew the curtains from the dreams Of the rose-fay, while the sweet South wind Lapped the silken swathing close round her virginal repose When night swathed folding slumbers round her mind. Now the elf of the flower had sickened in her bower, And fainted in a thrill of scent; But her lover of the South, with a moan upon his mouth, Caught her spirit to his arms as it went: Then the storms of West and North Sent a gusty vaward forth, Sent a skirring desolation, and he went. And a troop of roving gales rent the lily's silver veils, And tore her from, her trembling leaves; And the Autumn's smitten face flushed to a red disgrace, And she grieved as a captive grieves. Once the gold-barred cage of skies with the sunset's moulted dyes Was splendorously littered at the even; Beauty-fraught o'er shining sea, once the sun's argosy To rich wreck on the Western reefs was driven; Now the sun, in Indian pall, Treads the russet-amber fall From the ruined trees of Heaven, MISCELLANEOUS POEMS i 49 Too soon fails the light, and the swart boar, night, Gores to death the bleeding day; And the dusk has no more a calm at its core, But is turbid with obscene array. For the cloud, a thing of ill dilating baleful o'er the jftill, Spreads a bulk like a huge Afreet Drifting in gigantic sloth, or a murky behemoth, For the moon to set her silver feet; For the moon's white paces. And its nostril for her traces, As she urges it with wild witch feet. And the stars, forlornly fair, shiver keenly through tKt air, All an-aching till their watch be ceased; And the hours like maimed flies lag on, ere night hatch her golden dragon In the mold of the upheaved East. 'As the cadent languor lingers after Music droops W fin- gers. Beauty still falls dying, dying through the days; But ah!' said he who stood in that Autumn solitude 'Singing- soul, thou art 'lated with thy lays! All things that on this globe err Fleet into dark October, When day and night encounter, the nights war dos/m the days. 'For the song in thy mouth is all of the South, Though Winter wax in strength more and more. And at eve with breath of malice the stained winrfows of day's palace Pile in shatters on the Western floor.' 150 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS But the song sank down his soul like a Naiad through her pool, He could not bid the visitant depart; For he felt the melody make tune like a bee In the red rose of his heart: Like a Naiad in her pool It lay within his soul, Like a bee in the red rose of his heart. She sang of the shrill East fled and bitterness surceased: — 'O the blue South wind is musical! >nd the garden's drenched with scent, and my soul hath its content. This eve or any eve at all.' 1 his form the blushing shames of her ruby-plumaged flames Flickered hotly, like a quivering crimson snow: 'And hast thou thy content? Were som.e rain of it besprent On the soil where I am drifted to and fro, My soul, blown o'er the ways Of these arid latter days, Would blossom like a rose of Jericho. *I know not equipoise, only purgatorial joys, Grief's singing to the soul's instrument, And forgetfulness which yet knoweth that it doth forget; But content — what is content? For a harp of singeing wire, and a goblet dripping fire, And desires that hunt down Beauty through the Heaven With unslackenable bounds, as the deep-mouthed thunder- hounds Bay at heel the fleeing levin, — The chaliced lucencies From pure holy-wells of eyes, And the bliss unbarbed with pain I have given. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 151 *Is — O framed to suffer joys! — thine the sweet without al- loys Of the many, who art numbered with the few? And thy flashing breath of song, does it do thy lips no wrong, Nor sear them as the heats spill through? When the welling musics rise, like tears from heart to eye^, Is there not a pang dissolved in them for thee? Does not Song, like the Queen of radiant Love, Hellene, Float up dripping from a bitter sea? No tuned metal known Unless stricken yields a tone. Be it silver, or sad iron like to me. 'Yet the rhymes still roll from the bell-tower of thy soul, Though no tongued griefs give them vent; If they ring to me no gladness, if my joy be sceptred sad- ness, I am glad, yet, for thy content. Not always does the lost, 'twixt the fires of heat and frost, Envy those whom the healing lustres bless; But may sometimes, in the pain of a yearning past attain, Thank the angels for their happiness; 'Twixt the fire and fiery ice, Looking up to Paradise, Thank the angels for their happiness. The heart, a censered fire whence fuming chants aspire. Is fed with oozed gums of precious pain ; And unrest swings denser, denser, the fragrance from that censer, With the heart-strings for its quivering chain. Yet 'tis vain to scale the turret of the cloud-uplifted spirit, And bar the immortal \u, the mortal out; 152 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS For sometime unaware comes a footfall up the stair, And a soft knock under which no bolts are stout, And lo, there pleadeth sore The heart's voice at the door, "I am your child, you may not shut me out!" *The breath of poetry in the mind's autumnal tree Shakes down the saddened thoughts in singing showers, But fallen from their stem, what part have we in them? "Nay," pine the trees, "they were, but are not ours." Not for the mind's delight these sered leaves alight, But, loosened by the breezes, fall they must. What ill if they decay? yet some a little way May flit before deserted by the gust, May touch some spirit's hair, May cling one moment there, — She turns; they tremble down. Drift o'er them, dust!' TO STARS You, my unrest, and Night's tranquillity, Bringers of peace to it, and pang to me: You that on heaven and on my heart cast fire. To heaven a purging light, my heart unpurged desire; Bright juts for foothold to the climbing sight Which else must slip from the steep infinite; Reared standards which the sequent centuries Snatch, each from his forerunner's gracp who dies, To lead our forlorn hope upon the skies; Bells that from night's great bell-tower hang in gold, Whereon God rings His changes manifold; Meek guides and daughters to the blinded heaven MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 153 In (Edipean, remitless wandering driven; The burning rhetoric, quenchless oratory, Of the magniloquent and all-suasive sky; I see and feel you — but to feel and see How two child-eyes have dulled a firmament for me. Once did I bring her, hurt upon her bed, Flowers we had loved together; brought, and said:^- 'I plucked them; yester-mom you liked them wild.' And then she laid them on my eyes, and smiled. And now, poor Stars, your fairness is not fair, Because I cannot gather it for her; I cannot sheave you in my arms, and say: — 'See, sweet, you liked these yester-eve; like them for me to-day!' She has no care, my Stars, of you or me; She has no care, we tire her speedily; She has no care, because she cannot see — She cannot see, who sees not past her sight. We are set too high, we tire her with our height: Her years are small, and ill to strain above. She may not love us: wherefore keep we love To her who may not love us — you and I? And yet you thrill down towards her, even as I, With all your golden eloquence held in mute. We may not plead, we may not plead our suit; Our winged love must beat against its bars: For should she enter once within those guarding bars, Our love would do her hurt — oh, think of that, my Stars! 154 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS LINES FOR A DRAWING OF OUR LADY OF THE NIGHT This, could I paint my inward sight, This were Our Lady of the Night: She bears on her front's lucency The stariight of her purity: For as the white rays of that star The union of all colours are, She sums all virtues that may be In her sweet light of purity. The mantle which she holds on high Is the great mantle of the sky. Think, O sick toiler, when the night Comes on thee, sad and infinite. Think, sometimes, 'tis our own Lady Spreads her blue mantle over thee, And folds the earth, a wearied thing. Beneath its gentle shadowing; Then rest a little; and in sleep Forget to weep, forget to weep! MISCELLANEOUS POEMS i s s ORISON-TRYST She told me, in the morning her white thought Did beat to Godward, like a carrier-dove, My name beneath its wing. And I — how long! — That, like a bubble from a water-flower Released as it withdraws itself up-curled Into the nightly lake, her sighed name So loosened from my sleepward-sinking heart; And in the morning did like Phosphor set it To lead the vanward of my orient soul When it storms Heaven; and did all alone, Methought, upon the live coals of my love Those distillations of rich memory cast To feed the fumes of prayer: — oh! I was then Like one who, dreaming solitude, awakes In sobbing from his dream; and, straining arms That ache for their own void, with sudden shock Takes a dear form beside him. Now, when light Pricks at my lids, I never rouse but think — *Is 't orison-time with her?' — And then my hand Presses thy letters in my pulses shook; Where, neighboured on my heart with those pure lines In amity of kindred pureness, lies Image of Her conceived Immaculate ; And on the purple inward, thine, — ah! thine O' the purple-lined side. And I do set Tryst with thy soul in its own Paradise; As lovers of an earthly rate that use. In severance, for their sweet messages Some concave of a tree, and do their hearts 156 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Enharbour in its continent heart — I drop My message in the hollow breast of God. Thy name is known in Heaven ; yea, Heaven is weary With the reverberation of thy name; I fill with it the gap between two sleeps, The inter-pause of dream: hell's gates have learned To shake in it; and their fierce forayers Before the iterate echoing recoil, In armed watches when my preparate soul (A war-cry in the alarums of the Night) Conjoins thy name with Hers, Auxiliatrix. 'WHERETO ART THOU COME?' 'Friend, whereto art thou come?' Thus Verity; Of each that to the world's sad Olivet Comes with no multitude, but alone by night, Lit with the one torch of his lifted soul. Seeking her that he may lay hands on her ; Thus: and waits answer from the mouth of deed. Truth is a maid, whom men woo diversely; This, as a spouse; that, as a light-o'-love. To know, and having known, to make his brag. But woe to him that takes the immortal kiss, And not estates her in his housing life, Mother of all his seed! So he betrays, Not Truth, the unbetrayable, but himself: And with his kiss's rated traitor-craft The Haceldama of a plot of days He buys, to consummate his Judasry Therein with Judas' guerdon of despair. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 157 SONG OF THE HOURS SCENE: Before the Palace of the Sun, into which a god has just passed as the guest of Hyperion. Time: Dawn. The Hours of Night and Day advance on each other as the gates close. MORNING HOURS In curbed expanses our wheeling dances Meet from the left and right; Under this vaporous awning Tarrying awhile in our flight, Waiting the day's advances, We, the children of light, Clasp you on verge of the dawning, Sisters of Even and Night! CHORUS We who lash from the way of the sun With the whip of the winds the thronging cltmds, Who puff out the lights of the stars, or run To scare dreams back to their shrouds, Or tiar the temples of Heaven With a crystalline gleam of showers; EVENING HOURS While to flit with the soft moth, Even, Round the lamp of the day is ours; 58 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS NIGHT HOURS And ours with her crescent argentine, To make Night's forehead fair, To wheel up her throne of the earth, and twine The daffodils in her hair; ALL We, moulted as plumes are. From the wings whereon Time is borne; MORNING HOURS We, buds who in blossoming foretell The date when our leaves shall be torn; NIGHT HOURS We, knowing our dooms are to plunge with the gloom's car Down the steep ruin of mom; ALL We hail thee, Immortal! We robes of Life, mouldering while worn. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS NIGHT HOURS Sea-birds, winging o'er sea calm-strewn To the lure of the beacon-stars, are we, O'er the foamy wake of the white-sailed moon, Which to men is the Galaxy. MORNING HOURS Our eyes, through our pinions folden, By the filtered flame are teased As we bow when the sun makes golden Earthquake in the East. EVENING HOURS And we shake on the sky a dusted fire From the ripened sunset's anther, While the flecked main, drowsing in gorged desire, Purrs like an outstretched panther. MORNING HOURS O'er the dead moon-maid We draw softly the day's white pall; And our children the Moments we see as In drops of the dew they fall, Or on light plumes laid they shoot the cascade Of colours some Heaven's bow call; ^o FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS ALL And we sing, Guest, to thee, as Thou pacest the crystal-paved hall! We, while the sun with his hid chain swings Like a censer around him the blossom-sweet earth, Who dare the lark with our passionate wings, And its mirth with our masterless mirth; Or — when that flying laughter Has sunk and died away Which beat against Heaven's rafter — Who vex the clear eyes of day, Who weave for the sky in the loom of the cloud A mantle of waving rain. We, whose hair is jewelled with joys, or bowed Under veilings of misty pain; We hymn thee at leaving Who strew thy feet's coming, O Guest! We, the linked cincture which girdles Mortality's feverous breast, Who heave in its heaving, who grieve in its grieving, Are restless in its unrest; Our beings unstirred else Were it not for the bosom they pressed. We see the wind, like a light swift leopard Leap on the flocks of the cloud that flee, As we follow the feet of the radiant shepherd Whose bright sheep drink of the sea. When that drunken Titan the Thunder Stumbles through staggered Heaven, And spills on the scorched earth under MISCELLANEOUS POEMS i6i The fiery wine of the levin, With our mystic measure of rhythmic motion We charm him in snorting sleep, While round him the sun enchants from ocean , The walls of a cloudy keep. Beneath the deep umbers Of night as we watch and hark, The dim-winged dreams which feed on The blossoms of day we mark. As in murmurous numbers they swarm to the slum- bers That cell the hive of the dark; And life shakes, a reed on Our tide, in the death-wind stark. Time, Eternity's fountain, whose waters Fall back thither from whence they rose, Deweth with us, its showery daughters. The Life that is green in its flows. But whether in grief or mirth we shower, We make not the thing we breed. For what may come of the passing Hour Is what was hid in the seed. And now as wakes, Like love in its first blind guesses, Or a snake just stirring its coils, Sweet tune into half-caresses, Before the sun shakes the clinging flakes Of gloom from his spouting tresses. Let winds have toils To catch at our fluttering dresses! Winter, that numbeth the throstle and stilled wren, Has keen frost-edges our plumes to pare, i62 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Till we break, with the Summer's laughing children, Over the fields of air. While the winds in their tricksome courses The snowy steeds vault upon That are foaled of the white sea-horses And washed in the streams of the sun. Thaw, O thaw the enchanted throbbings Curdled at Music's heart; Tread she her grapes till from their englobings The melodies spurt and smart! We fleet as a rain, Nor yearn for the being men own, With whom is naught beginneth Or endeth without some moan; We soar to our zenith And are panglessly overblown. Yet, if the roots of the truth were bare, Our transience is only a mortal seeming; Fond men, we are fixed as a still despair, And we fleet but in your dreaming. We are columns in Time's hall, mortals, Wherethrough Life hurrieth; You pass in at birth's wide portals, And out at the postern of death. As you chase down the vista your dream or your love The swift pillars race you by. And you think it is we who move, who move, — It is you who die, who die! O firmament, even You pass, by whose fixture man voweth; God breathes you forth as a bubble MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 1O3 And shall suck you back into His mouth! Through earth, sea, and heaven a doom shall be driven, And, sown in the furrows it plougheth. As fire bursts from stubble Shall spring the new wonders none troweth. The bowed East lifteth the dripping sun, A golden cup, to the lips of Night, Over whose cheek in flushes run The heats of the liquid light. MORNING HOURS To our very pinions' ridge We tremble expectantly; — Is it ready, the burnished bridge We must cast for our King o'er the sea? And who will kneel with sunbeam-slips To dry the flowers' sweet eyes? Who touch with fire her finger-tips For the lamp of the grape, as she flies? ALL List, list to the prances, his chariot advances, It comes in a dust of light! From under our brightening awning We wheel in a diverse flight: Yet the hands we unclasp, as our dances Sweep off to the left and the right. Are but loosed on the verge of the da\vning To join on the verge of the night. 1 64 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS PASTORAL Pan-Imbued Tempe wood, Pretty player's sporting-place; Tempe wood's Solitude's Everywhere a courting-place. Kiss me, sweet Gipsy fleet. Though a kissed maid hath her red; Kisses grow — Trust me so — Faster than they're gathered! I will flute a tune On the pipes of ivory; All long noon Piping of a melody; A merry, merry, merry, merry, Merry, merry melody. Dance, ho! foot it so! Feat fleets the melody f Let the wise Say, youth dies; — 'Tis for pleasure's mending, Sweet! Kisses are Costlier far. That they have an ending, Sweet! Half a kiss's Dainty bliss is From the day of kiss-no-more; When we shall, Roseal MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 16$ Lass, do this and this no more! And we pipe a tune On the pipes of ivory; All long noon Fluting of a melody: — A merry, merry, merry, merry, Merry, merry melody. Dance, ho! trip it so! Feat fleets the melody! My love must Be to trust, While you safely fold me close: Yours will smile A kissing-while. For the hours I hold you close. Maiden gold! Clipping bold Here the truest mintage is: Lips will bear But, I swear. In the press their vintages! I will flute a tune On the pipes of ivory; All long noon Piping of a melody: — A merry, merry, merry, merry, Merry, merry melody. Dance, ho! foot it so! Feat fleets the melody! 1 66 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS PAST THINKING OF SOLOMON Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth, before the years draw nigh of which thou shalt say: They please me not; before the sun, and the light, and the moon, and the stars be darkened, and the clouds return after the rain. Ecclesiastes. Wise-Unto-Hell Ecclesiast, Who siev'dst life to the gritted last! This thy sting, thy darkness, Mage — Cloud upon sun, upon youth age? Now is come a darker thing, And is come a colder sting. Unto us, who find the womb Opes on the courtyard of the tomb. Now in this fuliginous City of flesh our sires for us Darkly built, the sun at prime Is hidden, and betwixt the time Of day and night is variance none, Who know not altern moon and sun ; Whose deposed heaven through dungeon-bars Looks down blinded of its stars. Yea, in the days of youth, God wot. Now we say: They please me not. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 167 A DEAD ASTRONOMER STEPHEN PERRY, S.J. Starry amorist, starward gone, Thou art — what thou didst gaze upon! Passed through thy golden garden's bars, Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars. She, about whose mooned brows Seven stars make seven glows, Seven lights for seven woes; She, like thine own Galaxy, All lustres in one purity: — What said'st thou. Astronomer, When thou did'st discover her? When thy hand its tube let fall. Thou found'st the fairest Star of all! CHEATED ELSIE Elsie was a maiden fair As the sun Shone upon: Born to teach her swains despair By smiling on them every one; Bom to win all hearts to her Just because herself had none; All the day she had no care. For she was a maiden fair As the sun Shone upon, Heartless as the brooks that run. t68 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS All the maids, with envy tart, Sneering said, 'She has no heart.' All the youths, with bitter smart, Sighing said, 'She has no heart!' Could she care For their sneers or their despair When she was a maiden fair As the sun Shone upon, Heartless as the brooks that run? But one day whenas she stood In a wood Haunted by the fairy brood, Did she view, or dream she viewed In a vision's Wild misprisions, How a pedlar, dry and rude As a crook'd branch taking flesh, Caught the spirit in a mesh. Singing of — 'What is't ye lack?' Wizard-pack On twisted back, Still he sang, 'What is't ye lack? *Lack ye land or lack ye gold. What I give, I give unsold; Lack ye wisdom, lack ye beauty, To your suit he Gives unpaid, the pedlar old!* MISCELLANEOUS POExMS i6g Faciei. Elsie. Pedlar, Elsie. Pedlar. Elsie. Pedlar. Beware, beware! the gifts he gives One pays for, sweetheart, while one lives! What is it the maidens say That I lack? By this bright day, Can so fair a maiden lack? Maid so sweet Should be complete. Yet a thing they say I lack. In thy pack, — Pedlar, tell— Hast thou ever a heart to sell? Yea, a heart I have, as tender As the mood of evening air. Name thy price! The price, by Sorrow! Only is, the heart to wear. Elsie. Not great the. price, as was my fear. 170 Fairies. Elsie. Fairies. Elsie. Fairies. FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS So cheap a price was ne'er so dear. Beware, beware, O rash and fair! The gifts he gives, Sweetheart, one pays for while one lives! Scarce the present did she take, When the heart began to ache. Ah, what is this? Take back thy gift! I had not, and I knew no lack; Now I have, I lack for ever! The gifts he gives, he takes not back. Ah! why the present did I take, And knew not tb.at a heart would ache? Ache! and is that all thy sorrow? — Beware, beware — a heart will break! THE FAIR INCONSTANT Dost thou still hope thou shalt be fair, When no more fair to me? Or those that by thee taken were MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 171 Hold their captivity? Is this thy confidence? No, no; Trust it not; it can not ha so. But thou too late, too late shalt find 'Twas I that made thee fair; Thy beauties never from thy mind But from my loving were; And those delights that did thee stole Confessed the vicinage of my soul. The rosy reflex of my heart Did thy pale cheek attire; And what I was, not what thou art, Did gazers-on admire. Go, and too late thou shalt confess I looked thee into loveliness! THREATENED TEARS Do not loose those rains thy wet Eyes, my Fair, unsurely threat; Do not, Sweet, do not so! Thou canst not have a single woe, But this sad and doubtful weather Overcasts us both together. In the aspect of those known eyes My soul's a captain weatherwise. Ah me! what presages it sees In those watery Hyades. 172 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS THE HOUSE OF SORROWS * Of the white purity They wrought my wedding-dress, Inwoven silverly — For tears, as I do guess. Oh, why did they with tears inweave my marriage-dress? A girl, I did espouse Destiny, grief, and fears; The love of Austria's house And its ancestral years I learned; and my salt eyes grew erudite in tears. Devote our tragic line — One to his rebel's aim. One to his ignorant brine, One to the eyeless flame: Who should be skilled to weep but I, O Christ's dear Dame? [* In the opening stanzas the Empress Elizabeth of Austria addresses Our Lady, then the 'Dark Fool' Death, and finally the Son of Sorrows, in allusion to the griefs of her own and her husband's line : the shooting of Maximilian of Mexico, her sis- ter's burning at the Paris Bazar de la Charite, the drowning of the Archduke John and of the mad King of Bavaria, and the tragedy of the Crown Prince Rudolph. Her own assassination was the immediate occasion of these verses ; and the traditional offering of her wedding-wreath to a Madonna-shrine and the making of her wedding-gown into priestly vestments elucidate other references in the text.l MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 173 Give one more to the fire, One more for water keep: Death, wilt thou not tire? Still Austria must thou reap? Can I have plummetless tears, that still thou bidd'st 'Weep, weep!'? No — thou at length with me Too far. Dark Fool, hast gone! One costly cruelty Voids thy dominion: I am drained to the uttermost tear: O Rudolph, O my son! Take this woof of sorrows, Son of all Women's Tears! 1 am not for the morrows, I am dead with the dead years. Lo, I vest Thee, Christ, with my woven tears! My bridal wreath take thou, Mary! Take Thou, O Christ, My bridal garment! Now Is all my fate sufficed, And, robed and garlanded, the victim sacrificed. II The Son of Weeping heard. The gift benignly saw; The Women's Pitier heard. Together, by hid law. The life-gashed heart, the assassin's healing poniard, draw. 174 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Too long that consummation The obdurate seasons thwart; Too long were the sharp consolation And her breast apart; — The remedy of steel has gone home to her sick heart. Her breast, dishabited, Revealed, her heart above, A little blot of red,— Death's reverent sign to approve He had sealed up that royal tomb of martyred love. Now, Death, if thou wouldst show Some ruth still left in store, Guide thou the armed blow To strike one bosom more, Where any blow were pity, to this it struck before! INSENTIENCE O SWEET is Love, and sweet is Lack! But is there any charm When Lack from round the neck of Love Drops her languid arm? Weary, I no longer love, Weary, no more lack; O for a pang, that listless Loss Might wake, and, with a playmate's voice, Call the tired Love back! MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 175 ENVOY Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play; Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow: And some are sung, and that was yesterday, And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow. Go forth; and if it be o'er stony way, Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow: And it was sweet, and that was yesterday, And sweet is sweet, though purchased with sorrow. Go, songs, and come not back from your far way: And if men ask you why ye smile and sorrow. Tell them ye grieve, for your hearts know To-day, Tell them ye smile, for your eyes know To-morrow. DEDICATION OF NEW POEMS (1897) To Coventry Patmore Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down, Under the banner of your spread renown! Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time, Yet this one page shall fend oblivious shame, Armed with your crested and prevailing Name. This dedication was written while the dear friend and great Poet to whom it was addressed yet lived. It is left as he saw it — the last verses of mine that were to pass under his eyes. 176 SIGHT AND INSIGHT Wisdom is easily seen by them that love her, and is found by them that seek her. To think therefore upon her is perfect understanding. WISDOM, vi. THE MISTRESS OF VISION I Secret was the garden; Set i' the pathless awe Where no star its breath can draw. Life, that is its warden, Sits behind the fosse of death. Mine eyes saw not, and I saw. II It was a mazeful wonder; Thrice three times it was enwalled With an emerald — Sealed so asunder. All its birds in middle air hung a-dream, their music thralled. 177 178 FRAHCIS THOMPSON'S P0F;M9 in The Lady of fair weeping, At the garden's core, Sang a song of sweet and sore And the after-sleeping ; In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore. IV With sweet-panged singing, Sang she through a dream-night's day; That the bowers might stay. Birds bate their winging. Nor the wall of emerald float in wreathed haze away. V The lily kept its gleaming, In her tears (divine conservers!) Washed with sad art; And the flowers of dreaming Paled not their fervours. For her blood flowed through their nervures; .And the roses were most red, for she dipt them in her heart. VI There was never moon, Save the white sufficing woman: Light most heavenly-human — Like the unseen form of sound SIGHT AND INSIGHT 179 Sensed invisibly in tune, — With a sun-derived stole Did inaureole All her lovely body round; jLovelily her lucid body with that light was interstrewn. VII The sun which lit that garden wholly, Low and vibrant visible, Tempered glory woke; And it seemed solely Like a silver thurible Solemnly swung, slowly. Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense-smoke VIII But woe's me, and woe's me. For the secrets of her eyes! In my visions fearfully They are ever shown to be As fringed pools, whereof each lies Pallid-dark beneath the skies Of a night that is But one blear necropolis. And her eyes a little tremble, in the wind of her own siehs. i8o FRANCIS THOiMPSON'S POEMS IX Many changes rise on Their phantasmal mysteries. They grow to an horizon Where earth and heaven meet; And like a wing that dies on The vague twilight-verges, Many a sinking dream doth fleet Lessening down their secrecies. And, as dusk with day converges, Their orbs are troublously Over-gloomed and over-glowed with hope and fear of things to be. There is a peak on Himalay, And on the peak undeluged snow, And on the snow not eagles stray; There if your strong feet could go, — Looking over tow'rd Cathay From the never-deluged snow — Farthest ken might not survey A\^ere the peoples underground dwell whom antique fables know. XI East, ah, east of Himalay, Dwell the nations underground; Hiding from the shock of Day, For the sun's uprising-sound: SIGHT AND INSIGHT i8i Dare not issue from the ground At the tumults of the Day, So fearfully the sun doth sound Clanging up beyond Cathay; For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay. XII Lend me, O lend me The terrors of that sound, That its music may attend me, Wrap my chant in thunders round; While I tell the ancient secrets in that Lady's singing found. XIII On Ararat there grew a vine; When Asia from her bathing rose, Our first sailor made a twine Thereof for his prefiguring brows. Canst divine Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows? XIV On Golgotha there grew a thorn Round the long-prefigured Brows. Mourn, O mourn! For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven allows? i82 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS XV On Calvary was shook a spear; Press the point into thy heart — Joy and fear! All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start. XVI O dismay! I, a wingless mortal, sporting With the tresses of the sun? I, that dare my hand to lay On the thunder in its snorting? Ere begun, Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old Icarian way. XVII From the fall precipitant These dim snatches of her chant Only have remained mine; — That from spear and thorn alone May be grown For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine. XVIII Her song saiu that no springing Paradise but evermore Hangeth on a singing That has chords of weeping, SIGHT AND INSIGHT 183 And that sings the after-sleeping To souls which wake too sore. 'But woe the singer, woe!' she said; 'beyond the dead his singing-lore, All its art of sweet and sore, He learns, in Elenore!" XIX Where is the land of Luthany, Where is the tract of Elenore? I am bound therefor. XX Tierce thy heart, to find the key; With thee take Only what none else would keep; Learn to dream when thou dost wake, Learn to wake when thou dost sleep; Learn to water joy with tears, Learn from fears to vanquish fears, To hope, for thou dar'st not despair. Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve; Plough thou the rock until it bear; Know, for thou else couldst not believe; Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive; Die, for none other way canst live. When earth and heaven lay down their veil. And that apocalypse turns thee pale; When thy seeing blindeth thee 1 84 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS To what thy fellow-mortals see; When their sight to thee is sightless; Their living, death; their light, most lightless; Search no more — Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore." XXI Where is the land of Luthany, And where the region Elenore? I do faint therefor. XXII 'When to the new eyes of thee All things by immortal power, Near or far, Hiddenly To each other linked are, That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star; When thy song is shield and mirror To the fair snake-curled Pain, Where thou dar'st affront her terror That on her thou may'st attain Persean conquest; seek no more, O seek no more! Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore, SIGHT AND INSIGHT 185 XXIII So sang she, so wept she, Through a dream-night's day; And with her magic singing kept she — Mystical in music — That garden of enchanting In visionary May; Swayless for my spirit's haunting, Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal morn- ings grey. XXIV And as a necromancer Raises from the rose-ash The ghost of the rose; My heart so made answer To her voice's silver plash, — Stirred in reddening flash. And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal phantom blows. XXV Her tears made dulcet fretting, Her voice had no word, More than thunder or the bird. Yet, unforgetting. The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears heard not, and I heard. 1 86 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS XXVI When she shall unwind All those wiles she wound about me, Tears shall break from out me, That I cannot find Music in the holy poets to my wistful want, I doubt me! CONTEMPLATION This morning saw I, fled the shower, The earth reclining in a lull of power: The heavens, pursuing not their path, Lay stretched out naked after bath, Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still. Nor was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill. The hill, which sometimes visibly is Wrought with unresting energies. Looked idly; from the musing wood, And every rock, a life renewed Exhaled like an unconscious thought When poets, dreaming unperplexed. Dream that they dream of nought. Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed. Or to such serene balance brought That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms, And sleep in one another's arms. The sun with resting pulses seems to brood, And slacken its command upon my unurged blood. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 18/ The river has not any care Its passionless water to the sea to bear; The leaves have brown content; The wall to me has freshness like a scent, And takes half-animate the air, Making one life with its green moss and stain; And life with all things seems too perfect blent For anything of life to be aware. The very shades on hill, and tree, and plain. Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain. No hill can idler be than I ; No stone its inter-particled vibration Investeth with a stiller lie; No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays The eyes that on it gaze. We are too near akin that thou shouldst cheat Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit. In poets floating like a water-flower Upon the bosom of the glassy hour, In skies that no man sees to move, Lurk untumultuous vortices of power, For joy too native, and for agitation Too instant, too entire for sense thereof. Motion like gnats when autumn suns are low, Perpetual as the prisoned feet of love On the heart's floors with pained pace that go. From stones and poets you may know, Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so. i88 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS For he, that conduit running wine of song, Then to himself does most belong When he his mortal house unbars To the importunate and thronging feet That round our corporal walls unheeded beat; Till, all containing, he exalt His stature to the stars, or stars Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault: When like a city under ocean. To human things he grows a desolation, And is made a habitation For the fluctuous universe To lave with unimpeded motion. He scarcely frets the atmosphere With breathing, and his body shares The immobility of rocks; His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity; His mind more still is than the limbs of fear, And yet its unperturbed velocity The spirit of the simoom mocks. He round the solemn centre of his soul Wheels like a dervish, while his being is Streamed with the set of the world's harmonies, In the long draft of whatsoever sphere He lists the sweet and clear Clangour of his high orbit on to roll, So gracious is his heavenly grace; And the bold stars does hear. Every one in his airy soar. For evermore Shout to each other from the peaks of space. As 'thwart ravines of azure shouts the mountaineer. SIGHT AND Ix\SIGHT 189 'BY REASON OF THY LAW Here I make oath — Although the heart that knows its bitterness Hear loath, And credit less — That he who kens to meet Pain's kisses fierce Which hiss against his tears, Dread, loss, nor love frustrate, Nor all iniquity of the froward years Shall his inured wing make idly bate, Nor of the appointed quarry his staunch sight To lose observance quite; Seal from half-sad and all-elate Sagacious eyes Ultimate Paradise; Nor shake his certitude of haughty fate. Pacing the burning shares of many dooms, I with stern tread do the clear-witting stars To judgment cite, If I have borne aright The proving of their pure-willed ordeal. From food of all delight The heavenly Falconer my heart debars, And tames with fearful glooms The haggard to His call; Yet sometimes comes a hand, sometimes a voice withal, And she sits meek now, and expects the light. In this Avernian sky, This sultry and incumbent canopy Of dull and doomed regret; Where on the unseen verges yet, O yet. 190 FRANCIS THOMPSON^IS POEMS At intervals, Trembles, and falls, Faint lightning of remembered transient sweet — Ah, far too sweet But to be sweet a little, a little sweet, and fleet; Leaving this pallid trace. This loitering and most fitful light, a space, Still some sad space. For Grief to see her own poor face: — Here where I keep my stand With all o'er-anguished feet, And no live comfort near on any hand; Lo, I proclaim the unavoided term. When this morass of tears, then drained and firm, Shall be a land — Unshaken I affirm — Where seven-quired psalterings meet; And all the gods move with calm hand in hand, And eyes that know not trouble and the worm. THE DREAD OF HEIGHT // ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say. We see: your sin remaineth. John ix. 41. Not the Circean wine Most perilous is for pain: Grapes of the heavens' star-loaden vine, Whereto the lofty-placed Thoughts of fair souls attain, Tempt with a more retributive delight, And do disrelish all life's sober taste. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 191 'Tis to have drunk too well The drink that is divine, Maketh the kind earth waste, And breath intolerable. Ah me! How shall my mouth content it with mortality? Lo, secret music, sweetest music. From distances of distance drifting its lone flight, Down the arcane where Night would perish in night. Like a god's loosened locks slips undulously: Music that is too grievous of the height For safe and low delight. Too infinite For bounded hearts which yet would girth the sea! So let it be, Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small: So let it be, O music, music, though you wake in me No joy, no joy at all; Although you only wake Uttermost sadness, measure of delight, Which else I could not credit to the height, Did I not know, That ill is statured to its opposite; Did I not know. And even of sadness so, Of utter sadness, make Of extreme sad a rod to mete The incredible excess of unsensed sweet, And mystic wall of strange felicity. So let it be. 192 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small, And bitter meat The food of gods for men to eat; Yea, John ate daintier, and did tread Less ways of heat, Than whom to their wind-carpeted High banquet-hall. And golden love-feasts, the fair stars entreat. But ah! withal. Some hold, some stay, O difficult Joy, I pray, Some arms of thine. Not only, only arms of mine! Lest like a weary girl I fall From clasping love so high. And lacking thus thine arms, then may Most hapless I Turn utterly to love of basest rate; For low they fall whose fall is from the sky. Yea, who me shall secure But I, of height grown desperate. Surcease my wing, and my lost fate Be dashed from pure To broken writhings in the shameful slime: Lower than man, for I dreamed higher, Thrust down, by how much I aspire. And damned with drink of immortality? For such things be, Yea, and the lowest reach of reeky Hell Is but made possible By foreta'en breath of Heaven's austerest clime. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 193 These tidings from the vast to bring Needeth not doctor nor divine, Too well, too well My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing; That dread theology alone Is mine. Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil "When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock. As at my feet the abyss is cloven then. With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire; That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock. My fearful powers retire. No longer strong, Reversing the shook banners of their song. Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven, A hooded eye, for jesses and restraint. Or for a will accipitrine to pursue! — The veil of tutelar flesh to simple livers given, Or those brave-fledging fervours of the Saint, Whose heavenly falcon-craft doth never taint, Nor they in sickest time their ample virtue /iiew. 194 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS ORIENT ODE Lo, in the sancturaried East, Day, a dedicated priest In all his robes pontifical exprest, Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly. From out its Orient tabernacle drawn, Yon orbed sacrament confest Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn; And when the grave procession's ceased. The earth with due illustrious rite Blessed, — ere the frail fingers featly Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte, His sacerdotal stoles unvest — Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast. The sun in august exposition meetly Within the flaming monstrance of the West. O salutaris hostia, Quce coeli pandis ostium! Through breached darkness' rampart, a Divine assaulter, art thou come! God whom none may live and mark! Borne within thy radiant ark, While the Earth, a joyous David, Dances before thee from the dawn to dark. The moon, O leave, pale ruined Eve; Behold her fair and greater daughter* Offers to thee her fruitful water. Which at thy first white Ave shall conceive! *The earth. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 19S Thy gazes do on simple her Desirable allures confer; What happy comelinesses rise Beneath thy beautifying eyes! Who was, indeed, at first a maid Such as, with sighs, misgives she is not fair, And secret views herself afraid, Till flatteries sweet provoke the charms they swear: Yea, thy gazes, blissful Lover, Make the beauties they discover! What dainty guiles and treacheries caught From artful promptings of love's artless thought Her lowly loveliness teach her to adorn, When thy plumes shiver against the conscious gates of mom! And so the love which is thy dower. Earth, though her first-frightened breast Against the exigent boon protest (For she, poor maid, of her own power Has nothing in herself, not even love. But an unwitting void thereof), Gives back to thee in sanctities of flower; And holy odours do her bosom invest, That sweeter grows for being prest: Though dear recoil, the tremorous nurse of joy, From thine embrace still startles coy, Till Phosphor lead, at thy returning hour. The laughing captive from the wishing West. Nor the majestic heavens less Thy formidable sweets approve, Thy dreads and thy delights confess, That do draw, and that remove. 196 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Thou as a lion roar'st, O Sun, Upon thy satellites' vexed heels; Before thy terrible hunt thy planets run; Each in his frighted orbit wheels, Each flies through inassuageable chase, Since the hunt o' the world begun, The puissant approaches of thy face, And yet thy radiant leash he feels. Since the hunt o' the world begun^ Lashed with terror, leashed with longing, The mighty course is ever run; Pricked with terror, leashed with longing, Thy rein they love, and thy rebuke they shun. Since the hunt o' the world began, With love that trembleth, fear that loveth, Thou join'st the woman to the man; And Life with Death In obscure nuptials moveth, Commingling alien yet affined breath. Thou art the incarnated Light Whose Sire is aboriginal, and beyond Death and resurgence of our day and night; From him is thy vicegerent wand With double potence of the black and white. Giver of Love, and Beauty, and Desire, The terror, and the loveliness, and purging, The deathfulness and lifefulness of fire! Samson's riddling meanings merging In thy twofold sceptre meet: Out of thy minatory might. Burning Lion, burning Lion, Comes the honey of all sweet. SIGHT AND INSIGHT i97 And out of thee, the Eater, comes forth meat. And though, by thine alternate breath, Every kiss thou dost inspire Echoeth Back from the windy vaultages of death; Yet thy clear warranty above Augurs the wings of death too must Occult reverberations stir of love Crescent, and life incredible; That even the kisses of the just Go down not unresurgent to the dust. Yea, not a kiss which I have given. But shall triumph upon my lips in heaven. Or cling a shameful fungus there in hell. Know'st thou me not, O Sun? Yea, well Thou know'st the ancient miracle. The children know'st of Zeus and May; And still thou teachest them, O splendent Brother, To incarnate, the antique way, The truth which is their heritage from their Sire In sweet disguise of flesh from their sweet Mother. My fingers thou hast taught to con Thy flame-chorded psalterion, Till I can translate into mortal wire — Till I can translate passing well — The heavenly harping harmony. Melodious, sealed, inaudible. Which makes the dulcet psalter of the world's desire. Thou whisperest in the Moon's white ear. And she does whisper into mine, — By night together, I and she — 198 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS With her virgin voice divine, llie things I cannot half so sweetly tell As she can sweetly speak, I sweetly hear. By her, the Woman, does Earth live, O Lord, Yet she for Earth, and both in Thee. Light out of Light! Resplendent and prevailing Word Of the Unheard! Not unto thee, great Image, not to thee Did the wise heathen bend an idle knee; And in an age of faith grown frore If I too shall adore. Be it accounted unto me A bright sciential idolatry! God has given thee visible thunders To utter thine apocalypse of wonders; And what want I of prophecy. That at the sounding from thy station Of thy flagrant trumpet, see The seals that melt, the open revelation? Or who a God-persuading angel needs, That only heeds The rhetoric of thy burning deeds? Which but to sing, if it may be. In worship-warranting moiety. So I would win In such a song as hath within A smouldering core of mystery, Bi.mmed with nimbler meanings up Than hasty Gideons in their hands may sup; — Lo, my suit pleads SIGHT AND INSIGHT 199 That thou, Isaian coal of fire, Touch from yon altar my poor mouths' desire. And the relucent song take for thy sacred meeds. To thine own shape Thou round 'st the chrysolite of the grape, Bind'st thy gold lightnings in his veins; Thou storest the white garners of the rains. Destroyer and preserver, thou Who medicinest sickness, and to health Art the unthanked marrow of its wealth; To those apparent sovereignties we bow And bright appurtenances of thy brow ! Thy proper blood dost thou not give. That Earth, the gusty Msenad, drink and dance? Art thou not life of them that live? Yea, in a glad twinkling advent, thou dost dwell Within our body as a tabernacle! Thou bittest with thine ordinance The jaws of Time, and thou dost mete The unstable treading of his feet. Thou to thy spousal universe Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church; Who in most dusk and vidual curch, Her Lord being hence. Keeps her cold sorrows by thy hearse. The heavens renew their innocence And morning state But by thy sacrament communicate; Their weeping night the symbol of our prayers, Our darkened search, And sinful vigil desolate. 200 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Yea, biune in imploring dumb, Essential Heavens and corporal Earth await; The Spirit and the Bride say: Come! Lo, of thy Magians I the least Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs, To thy desired epiphany, from the spiced Regions and odorous of Song's traded East. Thou, for the life of all that live The victim daily born and sacrificed; To whom the pinion of this longing verse Beats but with fire which first thyself didst give, To thee, O Sun — or is't perchance to Christ? Ay, if men say that on all high heaven's face The saintly signs I trace Which round my stoled altars hold their solemn place, Amen, amen! For oh, how could it be, — When I with winged feet had run Through all the windy earth about, Quested its secret of the sun, And heard what things the stars together shout,— I should not heed thereout Consenting counsel won: — 'By this, O Singer, know w^e if thou see. When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is here, When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is there. Believe them: yea, and this — then art thou seer. When all thy crying clear Is but: Lo here! lo there! — ah me, lo everywhere!* SIGHT AND INSIGHT 20i NEW YEAR'S CHIMES What is the song the stars sing? {And a million songs are as song of one) This is the song the stars sing: (Sweeter song's none) {Sweeter song's none) One to set, and many to sing, {And a million songs are as song of one) One to stand, and many to cling, The many things, and the one Thing, The one that runs not, the many that run. The ever new weaveth the ever old, {And a million songs are as song of one) Ever telling the never told; The silver saith, and the saith is gold, And done ever the never done. The Chase that's chased is the Lord o' the chase, {And a million songs are as song of one) And the Pursued cries on the race; And the hounds in leash are the hounds that run. Hidden stars by the shown stars' sheen; {And a million suns are but as one) Colours unseen by the colours seen. And sounds unheard heard sounds between, And a night is in the light of the sun. 202 FRANCIb THOMPSON'S POEMS An ambuscade of light in night, (And a million secrets are but as one) And a night is dark in the sun's light, And a world in the world man looks upon. Hidden stars by the shown stars' wings, (And a million cycles are but as one) And a world with unapparent strings Knits the simulant world of things; Behold, and vision thereof is none. The world above in the world below, (And a million worlds are but as one) And the One in all; as the sun's strength so Strives in all strength, glows in all glow Of the earth that wits not, and man thereon. Braced in its own fourfold embrace {And a million strengths are as strength of one) And round it all God's arms of grace. The v^/orld, so as the Vision says, Doth with great lightning-tramples run. And thunder bruiteth into thunder, {And a million sounds are as sound of one) From stellate peak to peak is tossed a voice of wonder, And the height stoops down to the depths thereunder, And sun leans forth to his brother-sun. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 20.^ And the more ample years unfold (With a million songs as song of one) A little new of the ever old, A little told of the never told, Added act of the never done. Loud the descant, and low the theme, {A million songs are as song of one) And the dream of the world is dream in dream, But the one Is is, or nought could seem; And the song runs round to the song begun. This is the song the stars sing, {Toned all in time) Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring A multitudinous-single thing {Rung all in rhyme). FROM THE NIGHT OF FOREBEING AN ODE AFTER EASTER In the chaos of preordination, and night of our foreheings. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. Et lux in tenebris erat, et tenchrco earn non comprehenderunt. ST. JOHN. Cast wide the folding doorways of the East, For now is light increased ! And the wind-besomed chambers of the air, See they be garnished fair; 204 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And look the ways exhale some precious odours, And set ye all about wild-breathing spice, JNlost fit for Paradise ! Now is no time for sober gravity, Season enough has Nature to be wise; But now disinct, with raiment glittering free. Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies With festal footing and bold joyance sweet. And let the earth be drunken and carouse ! For lo, into her house Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, And all things are made young with young desires; And all for her is light increased In yellow stars and yellow daffodils, And East to West, and West to East, Fling answering welcome-fires, By dawn and day-fall, on the jocund hills. And ye, winged minstrels of her fair meinie. Being newly coated in glad livery. Upon her steps attend, And round her treading dance, and without end Reel your shrill lutany. What popular breath her coming does out-tell The garrulous leaves among! What little noises stir and pass From blade to blade along the voluble grass! O Nature, never-done Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue! Break, elemental children, break ye loose From the strict frosty rule Of grey-beard Winter's school. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 205 Vault, O young winds, vault in your tricksome courses Upon the snowy steeds that reinless use In coerule pampas of the heaven to run; Foaled of the white sea-horses, Washed in the lambent waters of the sun. Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn Put forth a conscious horn! Mine elemental co-mates, joy each one; And ah, my foster-brethren, seem not sad — No, seem not sad, That my strange heart and I should be so little glad. Suffer me at your leafy feast To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest, And watch your mirth, Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth; Yet with a sympathy Begot of wholly sad and half-sweet memory — The little sweetness making grief complete; Faint wind of wings from hours that distant beat, When I, I too, Was once, O wild companions, as are you, — Ran with such wilful feet; Wraith of a recent day and dead. Risen wanly overhead. Frail, strengthless as a noon-belated moon. Or as the glazing eyes of watery heaven. When the sick night sinks into deathly swoon. A higher and a solemn voice I heard through your gay-hearted noise; A solemn meaning and a stiller voice Sounds to me from far days when I too shall rejoice, 206 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Nor more be with your jollity at strife. O prophecy Of things that are, and are not, and shall be! The great-vanned Angel March Hath trumpeted His clangorous 'Sleep no more' to all the dead — Beat his strong vans o'er earth, and air, and sea. And they have heard ; Hark to the Jubilate of the bird For them that found the dying way to life! And they have heard, And quicken to the great precursive word; Green spray showers lightly down the cascade of the larch; The graves are riven, And the Sun cames with power amid the clouds of heaven! Before his way Went forth the trumpet of the March; Before his way, before his way Dances the pennon of the May! O Earth, unchilded, widowed Earth, so long Lifting in patient pine and ivy-tree Mournful belief and steadfast prophecy. Behold how all things are made true! Behold your bridegroom cometh in to you, Exceeding glad and strong. Raise up your eyes, raise your eyes abroad! No more shall you sit sole and vidual. Searching, in servile pall. Upon the hieratic night the star-sealed sense of all: Rejoice, O barren, and look forth abroad! Your children gathered back to your embrace See with a mother's face; SIGHT AND INSIGHT 207 Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed! In very deed. Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth, Reintegrated are the heavens and earth; From sky to sod, The world's unfolded blossom smells of God. O imagery Of that which was the first, and is the last! For, as the dark profound nativity, God saw the end should be, When the world's infant horoscope He cast. Qnshackled from the bright Phoebean awe, In leaf, flower, mold, and tree. Resolved into individual liberty. Most strengthless, unparticipant, inane, Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy, Lo, the Earth eased of rule: Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart The dear wish of the fool — Disintegration, merely which man's heart For freedom understands. Amid the frog-like errors from the damp And quaking swamp Of the low popular levels spawned in all the lands. But thou, O Earth, dost much disdain The bondage of thy waste and futile reign, And sweetly to the great compulsion draw Of God's alone true-manumitting law. And Freedom, only which the wise intend, To work thine innate end. Over thy vacant counterfeit of death 2oS FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Broods with sott urgent oreath Love, that is child of Beauty and of Awei To intercleavage of sharp warring pain, As of contending chaos come again, Thou wak'st, O Earth, And work'st from change to change and birth to birth Creation old as hope, and new as sight ; For meed of toil not vain, Hearing once more the primal fiat toll: 'Let there be light!' And there is light ! Light fragrant, manifest, Light to the zenith, light from pole to pole, Light from the East that waxeth to the West, And with its puissant goings-forth Encroaches on the South and on the North; And with its great approaches does prevail Upon the sullen fastness of the height, And summoning its levied power Crescent and confident through the crescent hour, Goes down with laughters on the subject vale: Light flagrant, manifest. Light to the sentient closeness of the breast. Light to the secret chambers of the brain! And thou up-floatest, warm, and newly-bathed, Earth, through delicious air. And with thine own apparent beauties swathed, Wringing the waters from thine arborous hair; That all men's hearts, which do behold and see, Crow weak with their exceeding much desire, And turn to thee on fire, Enamoured with their utter wish of thee. SIGHT ^NB INSIGHT 209 Anadyomene! What vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup How it does leap, and twinkle headily! Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round in bacchanal rout reel the swift spheres intemperably! My little-worlded self! the shadows pass In this thy sister-world, as in a glass. Of all processions that revolve in thee: Not only of cyclic Man Thou here discem'st the plan, Not only of cyclic Man, but of the cyclic Me. Not solely of Mortality's great years The reflex just appears. But thine own bosom's year, still circling round In ample and in ampler gyre Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire. How many trampled and deciduous joys Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still, Before the distance shall fulfil Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise ! Happiness is the shadow of things past, Which fools still take for that which is to be! And not all foolishly: For all the past, read true, is prophecy, And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last, And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring. Then leaf, and flower, and fall-less fruit Shall hang together on the unyellowing bough; And silence shall be Music mute I 2 so FRANCIS THOMI^SON'S i-OEMS For her surcharged heart. Hush thou! These things are far too sure that thou should'st dream Thereof, lest they appear as things that seem. Shade within shade! for deeper in the glass Now other imaged meanings pass; And as the man, the poet there is read. Winter with me, alack! Winter on every hand I find : Soul, brain, and pulses dead, The mind no further by the warm sense fed, The soul weak-stirring in the arid mind, More tearless- weak to flash itself abroad Than the earth's life beneath the frosi".- scorched sod. My lips have drought, and crack, By laving music long unvisited. Beneath the austere and macerating rime Draws back constricted in its icy urns The genial flame of Earth, and there With torment and with tension does prepare The lush disclosures of the vernal time. All joys draw inward to their icy urns. Tormented by constraining rime, Ane. there With undelight and throe prepare The bounteous efflux of the vernal time. Nor less beneath compulsi' : Law Rebuked draw The numbed musics back upon my heart; Whose yet-triumphant course I know And prevalent pulses forth shall start. Like cataracts that with thunderous hoof charge the disband- ,ig snow. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 211 All power is bound In quickening refusal so ; And silence is the lair of sound ; In act its impulse to deliver, With fluctuance and quiver The endeavouring thew grows rigid. Strong From its retracted coil strikes the resilient song. Giver of spring, And song, and every young new thing! Thou only seest in me, so stripped and bare. The lyric secret waiting to be born, The patient term allowed Before it stretch and flutteringly unfold Its rumpled webs of amethyst- freaked, diaphanous gold. And what hard task abstracts me from delight, Filling with hopeless hope and dear despair The still-born day and parched fields of night. That my old way of song, no longer fair. For lack of serene care. Is grown a stony and a weed-choked plot, Thou only know'st aright. Thou only know'st, for I know not. How many songs must die that this may live! And shall this most rash hope and fugitive. Fulfilled with beauty and with might In days whose feet are rumorous on the air. Make me forget to grieve For songs which might have been, nor ever were? Stem the denial, the travail slow. The struggling wall will scantly grow: 212 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And though with that dread rite of sacrifice Ordained for during edifice, How long, how long ago! Into that wall which will not thrive I build myself alive, Ah, who shall tell me will the wall uprise? Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know! Yet still in mind I keep. He that observes the wind shall hardly sow. He that regards the clouds shall hardly reap. Thine ancient way! I give, Nor wit if I receive; Risk all, who all would gain; and blindly. Be it so. 'And blindly,' said I?— No! That saying I unsay: the wings Hear I not in prt^venient winnowings Of coming songs, that lift my hair and stir it? What winds with music wet do the sweet storm foreshow! Utter stagnation Is the solstitial slumber of the spirit, The blear and blank negation of all life: But these sharp questionings mean strife, and strife Is the negation of negation. The thing from which I turn my troubled look, Fearing the god's rebuke; That perturbation putting glory on, As is the golden vortex in the West Over the foundered sun; That — but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis Unchild me, vaunting this — Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss! SIGHT AND INSIGHT 213 O youngling Joy carest! That on my now first-mothered breast Pliest the strange wonder of thine infant lip, What this aghast surprise of keenest panging, Wherefrom I blench, and cry thy soft mouth rest? Ah hold, withhold, and let the sweet mouth slip! So, with such pain, recoils the woolly dam, l^nused, affrighted, from her yeanling lamb: I . one with her in cruel fellowship, Marvel what unmaternal thing I am. Nature enough! Within thy glass Too many and too stern the shadows pass. In this delighted season, flaming For thy resurrection-feast, Ah, more I think the long ensepulture cold, Than stony winter rolled From the unsealed mouth of the holy East; The snowdrop's saintly stoles less heed Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed. 'Tis the weak flesh reclaiming Against the ordinance Which yet for just the accepting spirit scans. Earth waits, and patient heaven. Self-bonded God doth wait Thrice-promulgated bans Of his fair nuptial-date. And power is man's, With that great word of 'Wait,' To still the sea of tears, And shake the iron heart of Fate. In that one word is strong 2 14 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And else, alas, much-mortal song; With sight to pass the frontier of all spheres. And voice which does my sight such wrong. Not without fortitude I wait The dark majestical ensuit Of destiny, nor peevish rate Calm-knowledged Fate. I, that no part have in the time's bragged way, And its loud bruit; I, in this house so rifted, marred, So ill to live in, hard to leave; I, so star-weary, over-warred, That have no joy in this your day — Rather foul fume englutting, that of day Confounds all ray — But only stand aside and grieve; I yet have sight beyond the smoke, And kiss the gods' feet, though they wreak Upon me stroke and again stroke; And this my seeing is not weak. The Woman I behold, whose vision seek All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb The steps o' the world, and beats all wing of rhyme, And knows not ; 'twixt the sun and moon Her inexpressible front enstarred Tempers the wrangling spheres to tune; Their divergent harmonies Concluded in the concord of her eyes. And vestal dances of her glad regard. I see, which fretteth with surmise Much heads grown unsagacious-grey. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 215 The slow aim of wise-hearted Time, Which folded cycles within cycles cloak: We pass, we pass, we pass; this does not pass away, But holds the furrowing earth still harnessed to its yoke. The stars still write their golden purposes On heaven's high palimpsest, and no man sees, Nor any therein Daniel; I do hear From the revolving year A voice which cries: 'All dies; Lo, how all dies! O seer, And all things too arise: All dies, and all is born; But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the Perfect Morn.' Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast Of Fortune's game, and the iniquitous hour, Whose falcon soul sits fast, And not intends her high sagacious tour Or ere the quarry sighted; who looks past To slow much sweet from little instant sour, And in the first does always see the last. ANY SAINT His shoulder did I hold Too high that I, o'erbold Weak one. Should lean thereon. FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS But He a little hath Declined His stately path And my Feet set more high; That the slack arm may reach His shoulder, and faint speech Stir His unwithering hair. And bolder now and bolder I lean upon that shoulder, So dear He is and near: And with His aureole The tresses of my soul Are blent In wished content. Yea, this too gentle Lover Hath flattering words to move her To pride By His sweet side. Ah, Love! somewhat let be — Lest my humility Grow weak When Thou dost speak. Rebate Thy tender suit, Lest to herself impute Some worth Thy bride of earth! SIGHT AND INSIGHT 217 A maid too easily Conceits herself to be Those things Her lover sings; And being straitly wooed, Believes herself the Good And Fair He seeks in her. Turn something of Thy look, And fear me with rebuke, That I May timorously Take tremors in Thy arms, And with contrived charms Allure A love unsure. Not to me, not to me, Builded so lawfully, O God, Thy humbling laudl Not to this man, but Man, — Universe in a span; Point Of the spheres conjoint; FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS In whom eternally Thou, Light, dost focus Thee!— Didst pave The way o' the wave; Rivet with stars the Heaven, For causeways to Thy driven Car In its coming far Unto him, only him; In Thy deific whim Didst bound Thy works' great round In this small ring of flesh; The sky's gold-knotted mesh Thy wrist Did only twist To take him in that net. — Man! swinging- wicket set Between The Unseen and Seen; Lo, God's two worlds immense, Of spirit and of sense, Wed In this narrow bed; Yea, and the midge's hymn Answers the seraphim Athwart Thy body's court! SIGHT AND INSIGHT 219 Great arm-fellow of God! To the ancestral clod Kin, And to cherubin; Bread predilectedly O' the worm and Deity! Hark, O God's clay-sealed Ark^ To praise that fits thee, clear To the ear within the ear, But dense To clay-sealed sense. All the Omnific made When, in a word he said, (Mystery!) He uttered thee; Thee His great utterance bore, O secret metaphor Of what Thou dream'st no jot! Cosmic metonymy; Weak world-unshuttering key; One Seal of Solomon! 2 20 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Trope that itself not scans Its huge significance, Which tries Cherubic eyes! Primer where the angels all God's grammar spell in small, Nor spell The highest too well! Point for the great descants Of starry disputants: Equation Of creation! Thou meaning, couldst thou see, Of all which dafteth thee; So plain. It mocks thy pain. Stone of the Law indeed, Thine own self couldst thou read; Thy bliss Within thee is. Compost of Heaven and mire, Slow foot and swift desire! Lo, To have Yes, choose No; SIGHT AND INSIGHT 221 Gird, and thou shalt unbind ; Seek not, and thou shalt find; To eat, Deny thy meat; And thou shalt be fulfilled With all sweet things unwilled: So best God loves to jest With children small— a freak Of heavenly hide-and-seek Fit For thy wayward wit. Who are thyself a thing Of whim and w^avering; Free WTien His wings pen thee; Sole fully blest, to feel God whistle thee at heel; Drunk up As a dew-drop, When He bends down, sun-wise, Intemperable eyes; Most proud. When utterly bowed, 222 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS To feel thyself and be His dear nonentity — Caught Beyond human thought In the thunder-spout of Him, Until thy being dim, And be Dead deathlessly. Stoop, stoop; for thou dost fear The nettle's wrathful spear, So slight Art thou of might! Rise; for Heaven hath no frown When thou to thee pluck'st down, Strong clod! The neck of God. ASSUMPTA MARIA Thou needst not make new songs, but say the old. —COWLEY. 'Mortals, that behold a Woman Rising 'twixt the Moon and Sun; Who am I the heavens assume? an All am I, and I am one. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 223 'Multitudinous ascend I, Dreadful as a battle arrayed, For I bear you whither tend I; Ye are I: be undismayed! I, the Ark that for the graven Tables of the Law was made; Man's own heart was one; one, Heaven; Both within my womb were laid. For there Anteros with Eros, Heaven with man, conjoined was,- Twin-stone of the Law, Ischyros, Agios Athanatos. % the flesh-girt Paradises Gardenered by the Adam new, Daintied o'er with dear devices Which He loved, for He grew. I, the boundless strict Savannah Which God's leaping feet go through; I, the Heaven whence the Manna, Weary Israel, slid on you! He the Anteros and Eros, I the body. He the Cross; He upbeareth me, Ischyros, Agios Athanatos! *I am Daniel's mystic Mountain, Whence the mighty stone was rolled; I am the four Rivers' Fountain, Watering Paradise of old; Cloud down-raining the Just One am, Danae of the Shower of Gold; !i24 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS I the Hostel of the Sun am; He the Lamb, and I the Fold. He the Anteros and Eros, I the body, He the Cross; He is fast to me, Ischyros, Agios Athanatos! % the Presence-hall v;here Angels Do enwheel their placed King — Even my thoughts which, without change else, CycUc burn and cyclic sing. To the hollow of Heaven transplanted, I a breathing Eden spring, Where with venom all outpanted Lies the slimed Curse shrivelling. For the brazen Serpent clear on That old fanged knowledge shone; I to Wisdom rise, Ischyron, Agion Athanaton! Then commanded and spake to me He who framed all things that be; And my Maker entered through me, In my tent His rest took He. Lo! He standeth. Spouse and Brother, I to Him, and He to me, Who upraised me where my mother Fell, beneath the apple-tree. Risen 'twixt Anteros and Eros, Blood and Water, Moon and Sun, He upbears me, He Ischyros, I bear Him, the At/ianafonf SIGHT AND INSIGHT 225 Where is laid the Lord arisen? In the light we walk in gloom; Though the Sun has burst his prison, We know not his biding-room. Tell us where the Lord sojoumeth, For we find an empty tomb. Whence He sprung, there He returneth. Mystic Sim, — the Virgin's Womb.' Hidden Sun, His beams so near us, Cloud-enpillared as He was From of old, there He, Ischyros, Waits our search, Athanatos. Who is She, in candid vesture, Rushing up from out the brine? Treading with resilient gesture Air, and with that Cup divine? She in us and we in her are, Beating Godward: all that pine, Lo, a wonder and a terror — The Sim hath blushed the Sea to Wine! He the Anteros and Eros, She the Bride and Spirit; for Now the days of promise near us. And the Sea shall be no more. Open wide thy gates, O Virgin, That the King may enter thee! At all gates the clangours gurge in, God's paludament lightens, see! Camp of Angels! Weil we even Of this thing may doubtful be, — 226 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS If thou art assumed to Heaven, Or is Heaven assumed to thee! Consummatum. Christ the promised, Thy maiden realm, is won, O Strong! Since to such sweet Kingdom comest, Remember me, poor Thief of Song! Cadent fails the stars along: — Mortals, that behold a woman Rising 'twixt the Moon and Sun; Who am I the heavens assume? an All am I, and I am one. CARMEN GENESIS Sing how the uncreated Light Moved first upon the deep and night, And, at Its jiat lux, Created light unfurled, to be God's pinions — stirred perpetually In flux and in reflux. From light create, and the vexed ooze, God shaped to potency and thews All things we see, and all Which lessen, beyond human mark, Into the spaces Man calls dark Because his day is small. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 227 Far-storied, lanterned with the skies, All Nature, magic-palace-wise, Did from the waters come: The angelic singing-masons knew How many centuried centuries through The awful courses clomb. The regent light his strong decree Then laid upon the snarling sea; Shook all its wallowing girth The shaggy brute, and did (for wrath Low bellowing in its chafed path) Sullen disglut the Earth. Meanwhile the universal light Broke itself into bounds; and Night And Day were two, yet one: Dividual splendour did begin Its procreant task, and, globing, spin In moon, and stars, and sun. With interspheral counterdance Consenting contraries advance. And plan is hid for plan: In roaring harmonies would burst The thunder's throat; the heavens, uncurst, Restlessly steady ran. All day Earth waded in the sun. Free-bosomed; and, when Night begun, Spelt in the secret stars. 228 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Day unto Day did utter speech, Night unto Night the knowledge teach Barred in its golden bars. And, last, Man's self, the little world "Where was Creation's semblance furled, Rose at the linking nod: For the first world, the moon and sun Swung orbed. That human second one Was dark, and waited God. His locks He spread upon the breeze, His feet He lifted on the seas. Into His worlds He came: Man made confession: 'There is Light!* And named, while Nature to its height Quailed, the enormous Name. II Poet! still, still thou dost rehearse, In the great fiat of thy Verse, Creation's primal plot; And what thy Maker in the whole Worked, little maker, in thy soul Thou work'st, and men know not. Thine intellect, a luminous voice, Compulsive moved above the noise Of thy still-fluctuous sense; And Song, a water-child like Earth, Stands with feet sea-washed, a wild birth Amid their subsidence. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 229 Bold copyist! who dost relimn The traits, in man's gross mind grown dim, Of the first Masterpiece — Re-marking all in thy one Day: — God give thee Sabbath to repay Thy sad work with full peace! Still Nature, to the clang of doom, Thy Verse rebeareth in her womb; Thou makest all things new, Elias, when thou comest! yea, Mak'st straight the intelligential way For God to pace into. His locks perturb man's eddying thought, His feet man's surgy breast have sought, To man, His World, He came; Man makes confession: 'There is light!* And names, while Being to its height Rocks, the desired Name. Ill God! if not yet the royal siege Of Thee, my terrible sweet Liege, Hath shook my soul to fall; If, 'gainst Thy great investment, still Some broken bands of rebel Will Do man the desperate wall; 230 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Yet, yet, Thy graciousness! I tread, All quick, through tribes of moving dead- Whose life's a sepulchre Sealed with the dull stone of a heart No angel can roll round. I start, Thy sercets lie so bare! With beautiful importunacy All things plead, 'We are fair!' To me Thy world's a morning haunt, A bride whose zone no man hath slipt But I, with baptism still bedript Of the prime water's font. AD CASTITATEM Through thee. Virginity, endure The stars, most integral and pure, And ever contemplate Themselves inviolate In waters, and do love unknown Beauty they dream not is their own! Through thee the waters bare Their bossoms to the air, And with confession never done Admit the sacerdotal sun, Absolved eternally By his asperging eye. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 231 To tread the floor of lofty souls, With thee Love mingles aureoles; Who walk his mountain-peak Thy sister-hand must seek. A hymen all unguessed of men In dreams thou givest to my ken; For lacking of like mate, Eternally frustrate: Where, that the soul of either spouse Securelier clasp in either's house. They never breach at all Their walls corporeal. This was the secret of the great And primal Paradisal state, Which Adam and which Eve Might not again retrieve. Yet hast thou toward my vision taught A way to draw in vernal thought. Not all too far from that Great Paradisal state, Which for that earthy men might wrong, Were't uttered in this earthless song, Thou layest cold finger-tips Upon my histed lips. 232 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS But thou, who knowest the hidden thing ■ Thou hast instructed me to sing, Teach Love the way to be A new Virginity! Do thou with thy protecting hand Shelter the flame thy breath has fanned; Let my heart's reddest glow Be but as sun-flushed snow. And if they say that snow is cold, O Chastity, must they be told The hand that's chafed with snow Takes a redoubled glow? — That extreme cold like heat doth sear? O to this heart of love draw near, And feel how scorching rise Its white-cold purities! Life, ancient and o'er-childed nurse, To turn my thirsting mouth averse, Her breast embittereth With wry foretaste of death- But thou, sweet Lady Chastity, Thou, and thy brother Love with thee, Upon her lap may'st still Sustain me, if thou will. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 233 Out of the terrors of the tomb. And unclean shapes that haunt sleep's gloom, Yet, yet I call on thee, — 'Abandon thou not me!' Now sung is all the singing of this chant. Lord, Lord, be nigh unto me in my want! For to the idols of the Gentiles I Will never make me an hierophant: — Their false-fair gods of gold and ivory, Which have a mouth, nor any speech thereby, Save such as soundeth from the throat of hell The aboriginal lie; And eyes, nor any seeing in the light, — Gods of the obscene night. To whom the darkness is for diadem. Let th«n that serve them be made like to them, Yea, like to him who fell Shattered in Gaza, as the Hebrews tell. Before the simple presence of the Ark. My singing is gone out upon the dark. . THE AFTER WOMAN Daughter of the ancient Eve, We know the gifts ye gave — and give. Who knows the gifts which you shall give, Daughter of the newer Eve? You, if my soul be augur, you Shall — O what shall you not, Sweet, do? 234 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The celestial traitress play, And all mankind to bliss betray; With sacrosanct cajoleries And starry treachery of your eyes, Tempt us back to Paradise! Make heavenly trespass; — ay, press in Where faint the fiedge-foot seraphin, Blest fool! Be ensign of our wars. And shame us all to warriors! Unbanner your bright locks, — advance, Gird, their gilded puissance I' the mystic vaward, and draw on After the lovely gonfalon Us to out-folly the excess Of your sweet foolhardiness; To adventure like intense Assault against Omnipotence! Give me song, as She is, new, Earth should turn in time thereto! New, and new, and thrice so new, All old sweets. New Sweet, meant you! Fair, I had a dream of thee, When my young heart beat prophecy, And in apparition elate Thy little breasts knew waxed great. Sister of the Canticle, And thee for God grown marriageable. How my desire desired your day. That, wheeled in rumour on its way, Shook me thus with presentience ! Then Eden's lopped tree shall shoot again: SIGHT AND INSIGHT 235 For who Christ's eyes shall miss, with those Eyes for evident nuncios? Or who be tardy to His call In your accents augural? Who shall not feel the Heavens hid Impend, at tremble of your lid, And divine advent shine avowed Under that dim and lucid cloud; Yea, 'fore the silver apocalypse, Fail, at the unsealing of your lips? When to love you is (O Christ's Spouse!) To love the beauty of His house; Then come the Isaian days; the old Shall dream; and our young men behold Vision — yea, the vision of Thabor-mount, Which none to other shall recount, Because in all men's hearts shall be The seeing and the prophecy. For ended is the Mystery Play, Wlien Christ is life, and you the way ; When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right, And Day fulfils the married arms of Night. But here my lips are still. Until You and the hour shall be revealed, This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed. 236 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS GRACE OF THE WAY *My brother!' spake she to the sun; The kindred kisses of the stars Were hers; her feet were set upon The moon. If slumber solved the bars Of sense, or sense transpicuous grovm Fulfilled seeing unto sight, I know not; nor if 'twas my own Ingathered self that made her night. The windy trammel of her dress. Her blown locks, took my soul in mesh; God's breath they spake, with visibleness That stirred the raiment of her flesh: And sensible, as her blown locks were, Beyond the precincts of her form I felt the woman flow from her — A calm of intempestuous storm. I failed against the affluent tide; Out of this abject earth of me I was translated and enskied Into the heavenly-regioned She. Now of that vision I bereaven This knowledge keep, that may not dim:- Short arm needs man to reach to Heaven, So ready is Heaven to stoop to him; SIGHT AND INSIGHT 237 Which sets, to measure of man's feet, No aUen Tree for trysting-place ; And who can read, may read the sweet Direction in his Lady's face. And pass and pass the daily crowd, Unwares, occulted Paradise; Love the lost plot cries silver-loud, Nor any know the tongue he cries. The light is in the darkness, and The darkness doth not comprehend: God hath no haste; and God's sons stand Yet a day, tarrying for the end. Dishonoured Rahab still hath hid. Yea still, within her house of shame, The messengers by Jesus bid Forerun the coming of His Name. The Word was flesh, and crucified, From the beginning, and blasphemed: Its profaned raiment men divide, Damned by what, reverenced, had redeemed. Thy Lady, was thy heart not blind, One hour gave to thy witless trust The key thou go'st about to find; And thou hast dropped it in the dust. 238 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Of her, the Way's one mortal grace, Own, save thy seeing be all forgot, That, truly, God was in this place, And thou, unblessed, knew'st it not. But some have eyes, and will not see; And some would see, and have not eyes; And fail the tryst, yet find the Tree, And take the lesson for the prize. RETROSPECT Alas, and I have sung Much song of matters vain. And a heaven-sweetened tongue Turned to unprofiting strain Of vacant things, which though Even so they be, and thoroughly so, It is no boot at all for thee to know, But babble and false pain. What profit if the sun Put forth his radiant thews. And on his circuit run, Even after my device, to this and to that use; And the true Orient, Christ, Make not His cloud of thee? I have sung vanity. And nothing well devised. SIGHT AND INSIGHT 239 And though the cry of stars Give tongue before His way Goldenly, as I say, And each from wide Satumus to hot Mars He calleth by its name, Lest that its bright feet stray; And thou have lore of all, But to thine own Sun's call Thy path disorbed hast never wit to tame; It profits not withal. And my rede is but lame. Only that, 'mid vain vaunt Of wisdom ignorant, A little kiss upon the feet of Love My hasty verse has stayed Sometimes a space to plant; It has not wholly strayed, Not wholly missed near sweet, fanning proud plumes above. Therefore I do repent That with religion vain, And misconceived pain, I have my music bent To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain: Yet shall a wiser day Fulfil more heavenly way And with approved music clear this slip, I trust in God most sweet. Meantime the silent lip. Meantime the climbing feet. A NARROW VESSEL BEING A LITTLE DRAMATIC SEQUENCE ON THE ASPECT OF PRIMITIVE GIRL-NATURE TOWARDS A LOVE BEYOND ITS CAPACITIES A GIRL'S SIN I. IN HER EYES Cross child! red, and frowning so? *I, the day just over, Gave a lock of hair to — no! How dare you say, my lover?' He asked you? — Let me understand; Come, child, let me sound it! *Of course, he would have asked it, and — And so — somehow — ^lie — found it. *He told it out with great loud eyes — Men have such little wit! His sin I ever will chastise Because I gave him it. 'Shameless in me the gift, alas! In him his open bliss: But for the privilege he has A thousand he shall miss! 240 A NARROW VESSEL 241 'His eyes, where once I dreadless laughed, Call up a burning blot: I hate him, for his shameful craft That asked by asking not!' Luckless boy! and all for hair He never asked, you said? ^Not just — but then he gazed — I swear He gazed it from my head! *His silence on my cheek like breath I felt in subtle way; More sweet than aught another saith Was what he did not say. 'He'll think me vanquished, for this lapse^ Who should be above him ; Perhaps he'll think me light; perhaps — Perhaps he'll think I— love him! 'Are his eyes conscious and elate, I hate him that I blush; Or are they innocent, still I hate — They mean a thing's to hush. 'Before he naught amiss could do, Now^ all things show amiss; Twas all my fault, I know that true, But all my fault was his. 24i FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS *I hate him for his mute distress, 'Tis insult he should care! Because my heart's all humbleness, All pride is in my air. 'With him, each favour that I do Is bold suit's hallowing text; Each gift a bastion levelled to The next one and the next. ^Each wish whose grant may him befall Is clogged by those withstood; He trembles, hoping one means all, And I, lest perhaps it should. 'Behind me piecemeal gifts I cast, My fleeing self to save; And that's the thing must go at last, For that's the thing he'd have. *My lock the enforced steel did grate To cut; its root- thrills came Down to my bosom. It might sate His lust for my poor shame? 'His sifted dainty this should be For a score ambrosial years! But his too much humility Alarums me with fears. A NARROW VESSEL 243 'My gracious grace a breach he counts For graceless escalade; And, though he's silent ere he mounts, My watch is not betrayed. 'My heart hides from my soul he's sweet: Ah dread, if he divine! One touch, I might fall at his feet, And he might rise from mine. 'To hear him praise my eyes' brown gleams Was native, safe delight; But now it usurpation seems. Because I've given him right. 'Before, I'd have him not remove; Now, would not have him near; With sacrifice I called on Love, And the apparition's Fear.' Foolish to give it! — ' 'Twas my whim, When he might parted be. To think that I should stay by him In a little piece of me. 'He always said my hair was soft — What touches he will steal! Each touch and look (and he'll look oft) I almost thought I'd feel. I 244 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS 'And then, when first he saw the hair, To think his dear amazement! As if he wished from skies a star, And found it in his casement. 'He'd kiss the lock — and I had toyed With dreamed delight of this: But ah, in proof, delight was void — I could not see his kiss!' So, fond one, half this agony Were spared, which my hand hushes, Could you have played. Sweet, the sweet spy, And blushed not for your blushes! A GIRL'S SIN II. IN HIS EYES Can I forget her cruelty Who, brown miracle, gave you me? Or with unmoisted eyes think on The proud surrender overgone (Lowlihead in haughty dress) Of the tender tyranness? And ere thou for my joy wast given, How rough the road to that blest heaven! With what pangs I fore-expiated Thy cold outlawry from her head; How was I trampled and brought low, Because her virgin neck was so; A NARROW VESSEL 245 How thralled beneath the jealous state She stood at point to abdicate; How sacrificed, before to me She sacrificed her pride and thee; How did she, struggling to abase Herself to do me strange, sweet grace, Enforce unwitting me to share Her throes and ab jectness with her ; Thence heightening that hour when her lover Her grace, with trembling, should discover^ And in adoring trouble be Humbled at her humility! And with what pitilessness was I Afterslain, to pacify The uneasy manes of her shame. Her haunting blushes! — Mine the blame: What fair injustice did I rue For what I — did not tempt her to! Nor aught the judging maid might win Me to assoil from her sweet sin. But naught were extreme punishment For that beyond-divine content. When my with-thee-first-giddied eyes Stooped ere their due on Paradise! O hour of consternating bliss When I heavened me in thy kiss; Thy softness (daring overmuch!) Profaned with my licensed touch; Worshipped, with tears, on happy knee, Her doubt, her trust, her shyness free, Her timorous audacity! 246 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS LOVE DECLARED I LOOKED, she drooped, and neither spake, and cold We stood, how unlike all forecasted thought Of that desired minute! Then I leaned Doubting; whereat she lifted — oh, brave eyes Unf righted: — forward like a wind-blown flame Came bosom and mouth to mine! That falling kiss Touching long-laid expectance, all went up Suddenly into passion; yea, the night Caught, blazed, and wrapt us round in vibrant fire. Time's beating wing subsided, and the winds Caught up their breathing, and the world's great pulse Stayed in mid-throb, and the wild train of life Reeled by, and left us stranded on a hush. This moment is a statue unto Lovo Carved from a fair white silence. Lo, he stands Within us — are we not one now, one, one roof, His roof, and the partition of weak flesh Gone down before him, and no more for ever? — Stands like a bird new-lit, and as he lit, Pcised in our quiet being; only, only Within our shaken hearts the air of passion, Cleft by his sudden coming, eddies still And whirs round his enchanted movelessness. A film of trance between two stirrings! Lo, It bursts; yet dream's snapped links cling round the limbs Of waking: like a running evening stream Which no man hears, or sees, or knows to run, A NARROW VESSEL 247 (Glazed with dim quiet,) save that there the moon Is shattered to a creamy flicker of flame, Our eyes' sweet trouble were hid, save that the love Trembles a little on their impassioned calms. THE WAY OF A MAID The lover whose soul shaken is In some decuman billow of bliss, Who feels his gradual-wading feet Sink in some sudden hollow of sweet, And 'mid love's used converse comes Sharp on a mood which all joy sums, An instant's fine compendium of The liberal-leaved writ of love — His abashed pulses beating thick At the exigent joy and quick. Is dumbed, by aiming utterance great Up to the miracle of his fate. The wise girl, such Icarian fall Saved by her confidence that she's small,- As what no kindred word will fit Is uttered best by opposite. Love in the tongue of hate exprest. And deepest anguish in a jest, — Feeling the infinite must be Best said by triviality. Speaks, where expression bates its wings, Just happy, alien, little things; What of all words is in excess Implies in a sweet nothingness; 248 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS With dailiest babble shows her sense That full speech were full impotence; And, while she feels the heavens lie bare, She only talks about her hair. BEGINNING OF END She was aweary of the hovering Of Love's incessant and tumultuous wing; Her lover's tokens she would answer not — 'Twere well she should be strange with him somewhat: A pretty babe, this Love, — but fie on it. That would not suffer her lay it down a whit! Appointed tryst defiantly she balked. And with her lightest comrade lightly walked. Who scared the chidden Love to hide apart, And peep from some unnoticed corner of her heart. She thought not of her lover, deem it not (There yonder, in the hollow, that's his cot), But she forgot not that he was forgot. She saw him at his gate, yet stilled her tongue— So weak she felt her, that she would feel strong. And she must punish him for doing him wrong: Passed, unoblivious of oblivion still; And, if she turned upon the brow o' the hill. It was so openly, so lightly done. You saw she thought he was not thought upon. He through the gate went back in bitterness; She that night woke and stirred, with no distress. Glad of her doing,— sedulous to be glad, Lest p^ haps her foolish heart suspect that it was sad. A NARROW VESSEL 249 PENELOPE Love, like a wind, shook wide your blossomy eyes; You trembled, and your breath came sobbing-wise. For that you loved me. You were so kind, so sweet, none could withhold To adore, but that you were so strange, so cold, For that you loved me. Like to a box of spikenard did you break Your heart about my feet. What words you spake! For that you loved me. Life fell to dust without me; so you tried All carefullest ways to drive me from your side, For that you loved me. You gave yourself as children give, that weep And snatch back, with — T meant you not to keep!* For that you loved me. I am no woman, girl, nor ever knew That love could teach all ways that hate could do To her that loved me. Have less of love, or less of woman in Your love, or loss may even from this begin — That you so love me. For, wild Penelope, the web you wove You still unweave, unloving all your love. Is this to love me, 2 50 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Or what rights have I that scorn could deny? Even of your love, alas, poor Love must die, If so you love me! THE END OF IT She did not love to love, but hated him For making her to love; and so her whim From passion taught misprision to begin. And all this sin Was because love to cast out had no skill Self, which was regent still. Her own self-will made void her own self's wilL EPILOGUE If I have studied here in part A tale as old as maiden's heart, 'Tis that I do see herein Shadow of more piteous sin. She, that but giving part, not whole. Took even the part back, is the Soul : And that so disdained Lover — Best unthought, since Love is over. To give the pledge, and yet be pined That a pledge should have force to bind, This, O Soul, too often still Is the recreance of thy will! A NARROW VESSEL 251 Out of Love's arms to make fond chain, And, because struggle bringeth pain, Hate Love for Love's sweet constraint, Is the way of Souls that faint. Such a Soul, for saddest end, Finds Love the foe in Love the friend; And — ah, grief incredible! — Treads the way of Heaven, to HelL ULTIMA LOVE'S ALMSMAN PLAINETH HIS FARE You, Love's mendicancy who never tried, How little of your almsman me you know! Your little languid hand in mine you slide. Like to a child says — 'Kiss me and let me go!' And night for this is fretted with my tears, \ATiile I: — 'How soon this heavenly neck doth tire, Bending to me from its transtellar spheres!' Ah, heart all kneaded out of honey and fire! Who bound thee to a body nothing worth. And shamed thee much with an unlovely soul, That the most strainedest charity of earth Distasteth soon to render back the whole Of thine inflamed sweets and gentilesse? WTiereat, like an unpastured Titan, thou Gnaw'st on thyself for famine's bitterness, And leap'st against thy chain. Sweet Lady, how Little a linking of the hand to you! Though I should touch yours careless for a year. Not one blue vein would lie divinelier blue Upon your fragile temple, to unsphere The seraphim for kisses! Not one curve Of your sad mouth would droop more sad and sweet. But little food Love's beggars needs must serve. 252 ULTIMA 253 That eye your plenteous graces from the street. A hand-clasp I must feed on for a night, A noon, although the untasted feast you lay, To mock me, of your beauty. That you might Be lover for one space, and make essay What 'tis to pass unsuppered to your couch, Keep fast from love all day; and so be taught The famine which these craving lines avouch! Ah! miser of good things that cost thee naught, How know'st thou poor men's hunger? — Misery, When I go doleless and unfed by thee! A HOLOCAUST 'No man ever attained supreme knowledge, unless his heart had been torn up by the roots.' When I presage the time shall come — yea, now Perchance is come, when you shall fail from me, Because the mighty spirit, to whom you vow Faith of kin genius unrebukably, Scourges my cloth; and from your side dismissed Henceforth this sad and most, most lonely soul Must, marching fatally through pain and mist, The God-bid levy of its powers enrol; When I presage that none shall hear the voice From the great Mount that clangs my ordained advance. That sullen envy bade the churlish choice Yourself shall say, and turn your altered glance: — O God! Thou knowest if this heart of flesh Quivers like broken entrails, when the wheel 254 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Rolleth some dog in middle street, or fresh Fruit when ye tear it bleeding from the peel; If my soul cries the uncomprehended cry When the red agony oozed on Olivet. Yet not for this, a caitiff, falter I, Beloved whom I must lose, nor thence regret The doubly-vouched and twin allegiance owed To you in Heaven, and Heaven in you. Lady. How could you hope, loose dealer with my God, That I should keep for you my fealty? For still 'tis thus:— because I am so true. My Fair, to Heaven, I am so true to you! MY LADY THE TYRANNESS Me since your fair ambition bows Feodary to those gracious brows. Is nothing mine will not confess Your sovran sweet rapaciousness? Though use to the white yoke inures, Half-petulant is Your loving rebel for somewhat his, Not yours, my love, not yours! Behold my skies, which make with me One passionate tranquillity! Wrap thyself in them as a robe, She shares them not; their azures probe, No countering wings thy flight endures. Nay, they do stole Me like an aura of her soul. I yield them, love, for yours! ULTIMA 255 But mine these hills and fields, which put Not on the sanctity of her foot. Far off, my dear, far off the sweet Grave pianissimo of your feet! My earth, perchance, your sway abjures? — Your absence broods O'er all, a subtler presence. Woods, Fields, hills, all yours, all yours! Nay then, I said, I have my thought, Which never woman's reaching raught; Being strong beyond a woman's might, And high beyond a woman's height, Shaped to my shape in all contours. — I looked, and knew No thought but you were garden to. All yours, my love, all yours! Meseemeth still, I have my life; All-clement Her its resolute strife Evades; contained, relinquishing Her mitigating eyes; a thing Wliich the whole girth of God secures. Ah, fool, pause! pause! I had no life, until it was All yours, my love, all yours! Yet, stern possession! I have my death, Sole yielding up of my sole breath. Which all within myself I die, AH in myself must cry the cry 2 56 FRANCIS THOMPSON S POEMS Which the deaf body's wall immures. — Thought fashioneth My death without her. — Ah, even death All yours, my love, all yours! Death, then, be hers. I have my heaven, For which no arm of hers has striven; Which solitary I must choose, And solitary win or lose. — /ih, but not heaven my own endures! I must perforce Taste you, my stream, in God your source,- So steep my heaven in yours! At last I said — I have my God, Who doth desire me, though a clod, And from His liberal Heaven shall He Bar in mine arms His privacy. Himself for mine Himself assures. — None shall deny God to be mine, but He and I All yours, my love, all yours! I have no fear at all lest I Without her draw felicity. God for His Heaven will not forego Her whom I found such heaven below, And she will train Him to her lures. Naught, lady, I love In you but more is loved above; What made me, makes Him, yours. ULTIMA 257 'I, thy sought own, am I forgot?' Ha, thou? — thou liest, I seek thee not. Why what, thou painted parrot, Fame, WTiat have I taught thee but her name? Hear, thou slave Fame, while Time endures, I give her thee; Page her triumphal name! — Lady, Take her, the thrall is yours. UNTO THIS LAST A boy's young fancy taketh love Most simply, with the rind thereof; A boy's young fancy tasteth more The rind, than the deific core. Ah, Sweet! to cast away the slips Of unessential rind, and lips Fix on the immortal core, is well; But heard'st thou ever any tell Of such a fool would take for food Aspect and scent, however good. Of sweetest core Love's orchards grow? Should such a phantast please him so. Love where Love's reverent self denies Love to feed, but with his eyes, All the savour, all the touch. Another's — was there ever such? Such were fool, if fool there be; Such fool was I, and was for thee! But if the touch and savour too Of this fruit — say. Sweet, of you — 258 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S TOEMS You unto another give For sacrosanct prerogative, Yea, even scent and aspect were Some elected Second's share; And one, gone mad, should rest content With memory of show and scent; Would not thyself vow, if there sigh Such a fool — say, Sweet, as I — Treble frenzy it must be Still to love, and to love thee? Yet had I torn (man knoweth not. Nor scarce the unweeping angels wot Of such dread task the lightest part) Her fingers from about my heart. Heart, did we not think that she Had surceased her tyranny? Heart, we bounded, and were free! O sacrilegious freedom! — Till She came, and taught my apostate will The winnowed sweet mirth cannot guess And tear- fined peace of hopelessness; Looked, spake, simply touched, and went. Now old pain is fresh content. Proved contents is unproved pain. Pangs fore-tempted, which in vain I, faithless, have denied, now bud To untempted fragrance and the mood Of contrite heavenliness; all days Joy affrights me in my ways; Extremities of old delight Afflict me with new exquisite Virgin piercings of surprise, — Stung by those wild brown bees, her eyes! ULTIMA 259 ULTIMUM Now in these last spent drops, slow, slower shed. Love dies, Love dies. Love dies — ah, Love is dead! Sad Love in life, sore Love in agony, Pale Love in death; while all his offspring songs. Like children, versed not in death's chilly wrongs, About him flit, frightened to see him lie So still, who did not know that Love could die. One lifts his wing, where dulls the vermeil all Like clotting blood, and shrinks to find it cold, And when she sees its lapse and nerveless fall Clasps her fans, while her sobs ooze through the webbed gold. Thereat all weep together, and their tears Make lights like shivered moonlight on long waters. Have peace, O piteous daughters! He shall not wake more through the mortal years, Nor comfort come to my soul widowed. Nor breath to your wild wings; for Love is dead! I slew, that moan for him; he lifted me Above myself, and that I might not be Less than myself, need was that he should die; Since Love that first did wing, now clogged me from the sky. Yet lofty Love being dead thus passeth base — There is a soul of nobleness which stays, The spectre of the rose: be comforted, Songs, for the dust that dims his sacred head! The days draw on too dark for Song or Love; O peace, my songs, nor stir ye any wing! For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove, And did Love live, not even Love could sing. 2 6o FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And, Lady, thus I dare to say, Not all with you is passed away! Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright; Beyond your highness, still I follow height; Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view. Beyond your trueness. Lady, Truth stands true. This wisdom sings my song with last firm breath. Caught from the twisted lore of Love and Death, The strange inwoven harmony that wakes From Pallas' straying locks twined with her segis- snakes: 'On him the unpetitioned heavens descend. Who heaven on earth proposes not for end; The perilous and celestial excess Taking with peace, lacking with thankfulness. Bliss in extreme befits thee not, until Thou'rt not extreme in bliss; be equal still: Sweets to be granted think thyself unmeet Till thou have learned to hold sweet not too sweet.* This thing not far is he from wise in art Who teacheth; nor who doth, from wise in heart. AN ANTHEM OF EARTH PROEMION Immeasurable Earth! Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven, Tempested with gold schools of ponderous orbs, That cleav'st with deep-revolving harmonies Passage perpetual, and behind thee draw'st A furrow sweet, a cometary wake Of trailing music! What large effluence. Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas. Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases thee From prying of the stars, and the broad shafts Of thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped near From my removed tour in the serene Of utmost contemplation, I scent lives. This is the efflux of thy rocks and fields, And wind-cuffed forestage, and the souls of men, And aura of all treaders over thee; A sentient exhalation, wherein close The odorous lives of many-throated flowers, • And each thing's mettle effused; that so thou wear'st, Even like a breather on a frosty morn, Thy proper suspiration. For I know. Albeit, with custom-dulled perceivingness, Nestled against thy breast, my sense not take 261 2 62 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The breathings of thy nostrils, there's no tree, No grain of dust, nor no cold-seeming stone, But wears a fume of its circumfluous self. Thine own life and the lives of all that live, The issue of thy loins, Is this thy gaberdine, Wherein thou walkest through thy large demesne And sphery pleasances, — Amazing the unstaled eyes of Heaven, And us that still a precious seeing have Behind this dim and mortal jelly. Ah! If not in all too late and frozen a day I come in rearward of the throats of song, Unto the deaf sense of the aged year Singing with doom upon me; yet give heed! One poet with sick pinion, that still feels Breath through the Orient gateways closing fast, Fast closing t'ward the undelighted night! - ANTHEM In nescientness, in nescientness, Mother, we put these fleshly lendings on Thou yield'stto thy poor children; took thy gift Of life, which must, in all the after days, Be craved again with tears, — With fresh and still-petitionary tears. Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift. We are bound to beggary, nor our own can call The journal dole of customary life, AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 263 But after suit obsequious for't to thee. Indeed this flesh, O Mother, A beggar's gown, a client's badging, We find, which from thy hands we simply took, Naught dreaming of the after penury, In nescientness. In a little joy, in a little joy. We wear awhile thy sore insignia. Nor know thy heel 0' the neck. O Mother! Mother! Then what use knew I of thy solemn robes. But as a child to play with them? I bade thee Leave thy great husbandries, thy grave designs. Thy tedious state which irked my ignorant years, Thy winter- watches, suckling of the grain. Severe premeditation taciturn Upon the brooded Summer, thy chill cares. And all thy ministries majestical. To sport with me, thy darling. Thought I not Thou sett'st thy seasons forth processional To pamper me with pageant, — thou thyself My fellow-gamester, appanage of mine arms? Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal, Danced in thy lap! Ah for thy gravity! Then, O Earth, thou rang'st beneath me. Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward, Even with the shifted Poise and footing of my thought! I brake through thy doors of sunset. Ran before the hooves of sunrise. Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies Wild and wilful As a poet's hand could twine them; 2 64 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice The Bow, as its cataract of colours Plashed to thee downward; Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, Night the abhorred, night was a new dawning, Celestial dawning Over the ultimate marges of the soul; Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me, And like a windy arras waved with dreams. Sleep I took not for my bedfellow, Who could waken To a revel, an inexhaustible Wassail of orgiac imageries; Then while I wore thy sore insignia In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy; Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee, Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman; Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot, But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe New from their mother's morning bosom. So I, Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven, Most Hermes-like, did keep My vital and resilient path, and felt The play of wings about my fledged heel — Sure on the verges of precipitous dream, Swift in its springing From jut to jut of inaccessible fancies. In a little joy. In a little thought, in a little thought, We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay. With sad and doubtful questioning, when first AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 265 Thou speak'st to us as men: like sons who hear Newly their mother's history, unthought Before, and say — ^She is not as we dreamed: Ah me! we are beguiled!' What art thou, then, That art not our conceiving? Art thou not Too old for thy young children? Or perchance, Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long Since Time was first a fledgeling; Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack! For that we seem indeed To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, and come Upon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds. These corporal leavings, thou not cast'st us new, Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies' coats, But foist 'st us off With hasty tarnished piecings negligent, Snippets and waste From old ancestral wearings, That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh After our father's surfeits; nay with chinks, Some of us, that, if speech may have free leave, Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad With more than our sires' heaviness, and with More than their weakness weak; we shall not be Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not Rejoice \\1th all their joy. Ay, Mother! ^Mother! What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, Thou lustingly engender'st, To sweat, and make his brag, and rot. Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness? 2 66 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS From nightly towers He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens, Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, And yet is he successive unto nothing But patrimony of a little mold, And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth Avid of all dominion and all mightiness. All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs. All beauty, and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things; — even that it may, Filled in the ending with a puff of dust. Confess — 'It is enough.' The world left empty What that poor mouthful crams. His heart builded For pride, for potency, infinity. All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, Arrased with purple like the house of kings, — To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries! Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues. Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark As we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young. In a little thought, in a little thought, At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee. And wake disgarmented of glory: as one On a mount standing, and against him stands. On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays, The golden sun, and they two brotherly Gaze each on each; He faring down To the dull vale, his Godhead peels from him Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble — For nothingness of new-found mortality — AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 267 That mutinies against his galled foot. Littly he sets him to the daily way, With all around the valleys growing grave, And known things changed and strange; but he holds on, Though all the land of light be widowed. In a little thought. In a little strength, in a little strength. We affront thy unveiled face intolerable, Which yet we do sustain. Though I the Orient never more shall feel Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart Clang through my shaken body like a gong; Nor ever more with spurted feet shall tread I' the winepresses of song; naught's truly lost That moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on me The high Phcebean priesthood, and that craves An unrash utterance; not with flaunted hem May the Muse enter in behind the veil, Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good, Shall the holy Virgins maenadize: ruled lips Befit a votaress Muse. Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love, I keep, O Earth, thy worship. Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more Athwart its roseal glow Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou puttst on Strange sanctities of pathos; like this knoll Made derelict of day, Couchant and shadowed Under dim Vesper's overloosened hair: 2 68 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS This, where embossed with the half-blown seed The solemn purple thistle stands in grass Grey as an exhalation, when the bank Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall. Not to the boy, although his eyes be pure As the prime snowdrop is Ere the rash Phoebus break her cloister Of sanctimonious snow; Or Winter fasting sole on Himalay Since those dove-nuncioed days When Asia rose from bathing; Not to such eyes, Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchical Vision lies unoccult, rank under rank Through all create down-wheeling, from the Throne Even to the bases of the pregnant ooze. This is the enchantment, this the exaltation, The all-compensating wonder. Giving to common things wild kindred With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove; Linking such heights and such humilities Hand in hand in ordinal dances. That I do think my tread. Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass, Flickers the unwithering stars. This to the shunless fardel of the world Nerves my uncurbed back: that I endure. The monstrous Temple's moveless caryatid, With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things, In a little strength. AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 269 In a little sight, in a little sight, We learn from what in thee is credible The incredible, with bloody clutch and feet Clinging the painful juts of jagged faith. Science, old noser in its prideful straw, That with anatomising scalpel tents Its three-inch of thy skin, and brags 'All's bare' — The eyeless worm, that, boring, works the soil, Making it capable for the crops of God; Against its own dull will Ministers poppies to our troublous thought, A Balaam come to prophecy, — parables. Nor of its parable itself is ware. Grossly un wotting; all things has expounded, Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre The seminary of being, and extinction The Ceres of existence: it discovers Life in putridity, vigour in decay; Dissolution even, and disintegration, Which in our dull thoughts symbolize disorder, Finds in God's thoughts irrefragable order. And admirable the manner of our corruption As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress The tree of Life — Death dies on his own dart Promising to our ashes perpetuity, A'.id to our perishable elements Their proper imperishability; extracting Medicaments from out mortality Against too mortal cogitation; till Even of the caput mortuum we do thus Make a memento vivere. To such uses I put the blinding knowledge of the fool, 2 70 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Who in no order seeth ordinance; Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high, And cry — 'There's naught beyond!' How should I so, That cannot with these arms of mine engirdle All which I am; that am a foreigner In mine own region? Who the chart shall draw Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths, The spacious tenements and wide pleasances, Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn, Wherein I wander darkling, of myself? Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore The long arcane of those dim catacombs. Where the rat memory does its burrows make, Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen tread Starts populace, a gens lucifuga; That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold, And I myself incontinent of me. Then go I, my foul- venting ignorance With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth ! Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o' the world. And vow — A goodly house, but something ancient, And I can find no Master? Rather, nay, By baffled seeing, something I divine Which baffles, and a seeing set beyond; And so with strenuous gazes sounding down, Like to the day-long porer on a stream, Whose last look is his deepest, I beside This slow perpetual Time stand patiently. In a little sight. AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 271 In a little dust, in a little dust, Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage. Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended passions sway it ; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard. The lion maned with curled puissance. The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin. Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin. And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st. Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, And many a floating bank of fangs, The scaly scourges of thy primal brine. And the tower-crested plesiosaure. Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers Are carcase for thee, and to modem sun Disglutt'st their splintered bones. Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi, And perilled cities whose great phantasmata O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis: — Plast not thy fill? 2 72 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink, Even till thy dull throat sicken. The draught thou grow'st most fat on; hear'st thou not The world's knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience! Much offal of a foul world comes thy way. And man's superfluous cloud shall soon be laid In a little blood. In a little peace, in a little peace, Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st Too much, with naught. The westering Phoebus' horse Paws i' the lucent dust as when he shocked The East with rising; O how may I trace In this decline that morning when we did Sport 'twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence, WTiich had not yet learned rending? We did then Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us Sentence had passed of life, nor commutation Petitioning into death. What's he that of The Free State argues? Tellus, bid him stoop, Even where the low hie jacet answers him; Thus low, O Man! there's freedom's seignory, Tellus' most reverend sole free commonweal, And model deeply-policied : there none Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously Woos the impartial worm, whose favour kiss With liberal largesse all; there each is free To be e'en what he must, which here did strive So much to be he could not; there all do Their uses just, with no flown questioning. To be took by the hand of equal earth AN ANTHEM OF EARTH 273 They doff her livery, slip to the worm, Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance, And, that soiled workaday apparel cast, Put on condition: Death's ungentle buffet Alone makes ceremonial manumission; So are the heavenly statutes set, and those Uranian tables of the primal Law. In a little peace, in a little peace, Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers. We draw together to one hid dark lake; In a little peace, in a little peace. We drain with all our burthens of dishonour Into the cleansing sands 0' the thirsty grave. The fiery pomps, brave exhalations, And all the glistering shows o' the seeming world. Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith:? fined The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush The cumbered gutters of humanity; Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned. Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart 0' the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws Of the high-tided man; skull-housed asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth That broker is of immortality. 2 74 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike, To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing, And break the tomb of life; here I shake off The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun, And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set Here in thy bosom; my trouble is ended In a little peace, MISCELLANEOUS ODES LAUS AMARA DOLORIS Implacable sweet daemon, Poetry, What have I lost for thee! Whose lips too sensitively well Have shaped thy shrivelling oracle. So much as I have lost, O world, thou hast, And for thy plenty I am waste; Ah, count, O world, my cost, Ah, count, O world, thy gain. For thou hast nothing gained but I have lost! And ah, my loss is such. If thou have gained as much Thou hast even harvest of Egyptian years, And that great overflow which gives thee grain- The bitter Nilus of my risen tears! I witness call the austere goddess. Pain. Whose mirrored image trembles where it lies In my confronting eyes, If I have learned her sad and solemn scroll: — Have I neglected her high sacrifice. Spared my heart's children to the sacred knife^ Or turned her customed footing from my soul? Yea, thou pale Ashtaroth who rul'st my life, 275 2 76 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Of all my offspring thou hast had the whole. One after one they passed at thy desire To sacrificial sword, or sacrificial fire; 'All, all, — save one, the sole. One have I hid apart, The latest-born and sweetest of my heart, From thy requiring eyes. O hope, most futile of futilities! Thine iron summons comes again, O inevadible Pain! Not faithless to my pact, I yield: — 'tis here, That solitary and fair, That most sweet, last, and dear; Swerv'st thou? behold, I swerve not: — strike, nor spare! Not my will shudders, but my flesh, In awful secrecy to hear The wind of thy great treading sweep afresh Athwart my face, and agitate my hair. The ultimate unnerving dearness take. The extreme rite of abnegation make. And sum in one all renderings that were. The agony is done. Her footstep passes on; — The unchilded chambers of my heart rest bare. The love, but not the loved, remains; As where a flower has pressed a leaf The page yet keeps the trace and stains. For thy delight, world, one more grief. My world, one loss more for thy gains! MISCELLANEOUS ODES 277 Yet, yet, ye few, to whom is given This weak singing, I have learned 111 the starry roll of heaven. Were this all that I discerned Or of Poetry or of Pain. Song! turn on thy hinge again! Thine alternate panel showed, Give the Ode a Palinode! Pain, not thou an Ashtaroth, Glutted with a bloody rite. But the icy bath that doth String the slack sinew^s loosened with delight. O great Key-bearer and Keeper Of the treasuries of God! Wisdom's gifts are buried deeper Than the arm of man can go, Save thou show First the way, and turn the sod. The poet's crown, with misty weakness tarnished, In thy golden fire is burnished To round with more illustrious gleam his forehead. And when with sacrifice of costliest cost On my heart's altar is the Eterne adored. The fire from heaven consumes the holocaust. Nay, to vicegerence o'er the wide-confined And mutinous principate of mans' restless mind With thine anointing oils the singer is designed: To that most desolate station Thine is his deep and dolorous consecration. Oh, where thy chrism shall dry upon my brow, By that authentic sign I know 2 78 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The sway is parted from this tenuous hand : And all the wonted dreams that ranked stand, The high majestic state, And cloud-consorting towers of visionary land. To some young usurpation needs must go; And I am all unsceptred of command. Disdiademed I wait To speak with sieging Death, mine enemy, in the gate. Preceptress in the wars of God! His tyros draw the unmortal sword, And their celestial virtue exercise, Beneath thy rigorous eyes. Thou severe bride, with the glad suit adored Of many a lover whose love is unto blood; Every jewel in their crown Thy lapidary hand does own; Nor that warm jacinth of the heart can put Its lustres forth, till it be cut. Thou settest thine abode A portress in the gateways of all love, And tak'st the toll of joys; no maid is wed, But thou dost draw the curtains of her bed. Yea, on the brow of mother and of wife Descends thy confirmation from above, A Pentecostal flame; love's holy bread. Consecrated, Not sacramental is, but through thy leaven. Thou pacest either frontier where our life Marches with God's; both birth and death are given Into thy lordship; those debated lands Are subject to thy hands: MISCELLANEOUS ODES 279 The border- warden, thou, of Heaven — Yea, that same awful angel with the glaive Which in disparadising orbit swept Lintel and pilaster and architrave Of Eden-gates, and forth before it drave The primal pair, then first whose startled eyes, With pristine drops 0' the no less startled skies Their o\mi commingling, wept; — With strange affright Sin knew the bitter first baptismal rite. Save through thy ministry man is not fed; Thou uninvoked presid'st, and unconfest, The mistress of his feast: From the earth we gain our bread, and — like the bread Dropt and regathered By a child crost and thwart. Whom need makes eat, though sorely weep he for't — It tastes of dust and tears. Iron Ceres of an earth where, since the Curse, Man has had power perverse Beside God's good to set his evil seed! Those shining acres of the musket-spears — Where flame and wither with swift intercease Flowers of red sleep that not the corn-field bears — Do yield thee minatory harvest, when Unto the fallow time of sensual ease Implacably succeed The bristling issues of the sensual deed; And like to meteors from a rotting fen 28o FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS The fiery pennons flit o'er the stagnation Of the world's sluggish and putrescent life, Misleading to engulfing desolation And blind, retributive, unguessing strife, The fatal footsteps of pursuing men. Thy pall in purple sovereignty was dipt Beneath the tree of Golgotha; And from the Hand, wherein the reed was dipt, Thy bare and antique sceptre thou dost draw. That God-sprung Lover to thy front allows, Fairest, the bloody honour of His brows, • The great reversion of that diadem Which did His drenched locks hem. For the predestined Man of Grief, O regnant Pain, to thee His subject sway elected to enfeoff; And from thy sad conferring to endure The sanguine state of liis investiture; Yea, at thy hand, most sombre suzerain, That dreadful crown He held in fealty; O Queen of Calvary, Holy and terrible, anointed Pain! A CAPTAIN OF SONG (on a portrait of COVENTRY PATMORE BY J. S. SARGENT, R.A.) Look on him. This is he whose works ye know; Ye have adored, thanked, loved him, — no, not him! But that of him which proud portentous woe To its own grim MISCELLAx\EOUS ODES 281 Presentment was not potent to subdue, Nor all the reek of Erebus to dim. This, and not him, ye knew. Look on him now. Love, worship if ye can. The very man. Ye may not. He has trod the ways afar, The fatal ways of parting and farewell, Where all the paths of pained greatness are; Where round and always round The abhorred words resound, The words accursed of comfortable men, — Tor ever'; and infinite glooms intolerable With spacious replication give again, And hollow jar. The words abhorred of comfortable men. You the stem pities of the gods debar To drink where he has drunk — The moonless mere of sighs. And pace the places infamous to tell, Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes. Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness are. He knows the perilous rout That all those ways about Sink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk. And if his sole and solemn term thereout He has attained, to love ye shall not dare One who has journeyed there; Ye shall mark well The mighty cruelties which arm and mar That countenance of control, With minatory warnings of a soul 282 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS That hath to its own. selfliood been most fell, And is not weak to spare: And lo, that hair Is blanched with the travel-heats of hell. If any be That shall with rites of reverent piety- Approach this strong Sad soul of sovereign Song, Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng; If such there be, These, these are only they Have trod the self- same way; The never-twice revolving portals heard Behind them clang infernal, and that word Abhorred sighed of kind mortality, As he — Ah, even as he! AGAINST URANIA Lo, I, Song's most true lover, plain me sore That worse than other women she can deceive, For she being goddess, I have given her more Than mortal ladies from their loves receive; And first of her embrace She was not coy, and gracious were her ways, That I forgot all virgins to adore; Nor did I greatly grieve To bear through arid davs The pretty foil of her divine delays; MISCELLANEOUS ODES 2S3 And one by one to cast Life, love, and health, Content, and wealth. Before her, thinking ever on her praise, Until at last Naught had I left she would be gracious for. Now of her cozening I complain me sore. Seeing her uses. That still, more constantly she is pursued, And straitlier wooed. Her only-adored favour more refuses, And leaves me to implore Remembered boon in bitterness of blood. From mortal woman thou may'st know full well, O poet, that dost deem the fair and tall Urania of her ways not mutable, What things shall thee befall When thou art toiled in her sweet, wild spell. Do they strow for thy feet A little tender favour and deceit Over the sudden mouth of hidden hell? — As more intolerable Her pit, as her first kiss is heavenlier-sweet. Are they, the more thou sigh. Still the more watchful-cruel to deny? — Kjiow this, that in her service thou shalt learn How harder than the heart of woman is The immortal cruelty Of the high goddesses. Trae is his witness who doth witness this, Whose gaze too early fell — ■ 284 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Nor thence shall turn, Nor in those fires shall cease to weep and bum- Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible. TO THE ENGLISH MARTYRS Rain, rain on Tyburn tree, Red rain a- falling; Dew, dew on Tyburn tree. Red dew on Tyburn tree, And the swart bird a-calling. The shadow lies on England now Of the deathly-fruited bough: Cold and black with malison Lies between the land and sun; Putting out the sun, the bough Shades England now! The troubled heavens do wan with care, And burthened with the earth's despair Shiver a-cold; the starved heaven Has want, with wanting man bereaven. Blest fruit of the unblest bough, Aid the land that smote you, now I That feels the sentence and the curse Ye died if so ye might reverse. When God was stolen from out man's mouth. Stolen was the bread; then hunger and drouth Went to and fro; began the wail, Struck out the poor-house and the jail. Ere cut the dykes, let through that flood, Ye writ the protest with your blood; MISCELLANEOUS ODES 285 Against this night — wherein our breath Withers, and the toiled heart perisheth, — Entered the caveat of your death, Christ, in the form of His true Bride, Again hung pierced and crucified, And groaned, 'I thirst!' Not still ye stood, — Ye had your hearts, ye had your blood; And pouring out the eager cup, — The wine is weak, yet. Lord Christ, sup!' Ah, blest! who bathed the parched Vine With richer than His Cana-wine, And heard, your most sharp supper past: 'Ye kept the best wine to the last!' Ah, happy who That sequestered secret knew, How sweeter than bee-haunted dells The blosmy blood of martyrs smells! Who did upon the scaffold's bed, The ceremonial steel between you, wed With God's grave proxy, high and reverend Death; Or felt about your neck, sweetly, (While the dull horde Saw but the unrelenting cord) The Bridegroom's arm, and that long kiss That kissed away your breath, and claimed you Hi You did, with thrift of holy gain, Unvenoming the sting of pain. Hive its sharp heather-honey. Ye Had sentience of the mystery 286 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS To make Abaddon's hooked wings Buoy you up to starry things; Pain of heart, and pain of sense, Pain the scourge, ye taught to cleanse; Pain the loss became possessing; Pain the curse was pain the blessing. Chains, rack, hunger, solitude — these. Which did your soul from earth release, Left it free to rush upon And merge in its compulsive Sun. Desolated, bruised, forsaken. Nothing taking, all things taken. Lacerated and tormented, The stifled soul, in naught contented. On all hands straitened, cribbed, denied. Can but fetch breath o' the God ward side. Oh to me, give but to me That flower of felicity. Which on your topmost spirit ware The difficult and snowy air Of high refusal! and the heat Of central love which fed with sweet And holy fire i' the frozen sod Roots that had ta'en hold on God. Unwithering youth in you renewed Those rosy waters of your blood, — The true Pons Juventiitis; ye Pass with conquest that Red Sea, And stretch out your victorious hand Over the Fair and Holy Land. MISCELLANEOUS ODES 287 O, by the Church's pondering art Late set and named upon the chart Of her divine astronomy, Though your influence from on high Long ye shed unnoted! Bright New cluster in our Northern night, Cleanse from its pain and undelight An impotent and tarnished hymn. Whose marish exhalations dim Splendours they would transfuse! And thou Kindle the words which blot thee now. Over whose sacred corse unhearsed Europe veiled her face, and cursed The regal mantle grained in gore Of genius, freedom, faith, and More! Ah, happy Fool of Christ, unawed By familiar sanctities. You served your Lord at holy easel Dear Jester in the Courts of God — In whose spirit, enchanting yet. Wisdom and love, together met. Laughed on each other for content! That an inward merriment, An inviolate soul of pleasure. To your motions taught a measure All your days; which tyrant king. Nor bonds, nor any bitter thing Could embitter or perturb; No daughter's tears, nor, more acerb, A daughter's frail declension from Thy serene example, come 288 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Between thee and thy much content. Nor could the last sharp argument Turn thee from thy sweetest folly; To the keen accolade and holy Thou didst bend low a sprightly knee, And jest Death out of gravity As a too sad-visaged friend; So, jocund, passing to the end Of thy laughing martyrdom; And now from travel art gone home Where, since gain of thee was given, Surely there is more mirth in heaven! Thus, in Fisher and in thee, Arose the purple dynasty, The anointed Kings of Tyburn tree; High in act and word each one: He that spake — and to the sun Pointed — T shall shortly be Above yon fellow.' He too, he No less high of speech and brave. Whose word was: Though I shall have Sharp dinner, yet I trust in Christ To have a most sweet supper.' Priced Much by men that utterance was Of the doomed Leonidas, — Not more exalt than these, which note Men who thought as Shakespeare wrote. But more lofty eloquence That is writ by poets' pens Lives in your great deaths: O these MISCELLANEOUS ODES 289 Have more fire than poesies! And more ardent than all ode, The pomps and raptures of your blood! By that blood ye hold in fee This earth of England; Kings are ye: And ye have armies — Want, and Cold, And heavy Judgements manifold Hung in the unhappy air, and Sins That the sick gorge to heave begins, Agonies, and Alartyrdoms, Love, Hope, Desire, and all that comes From the unwatered soul of man Gaping on God. These are the van Of conquest, these obey you; these. And all the strengths of weaknesses. That brazen walls disbed. Your hand, Princes, put forth to the command. And levy upon the guilty land Your saving wars; on it go down, Black beneath God's and heaven's frown; Your prevalent approaches make With unsustainable Grace, and take Captive the land that captived you; To Christ enslave ye and subdue Her so bragged freedom: for the crime She wrought on you in antique time, Parcel the land among you: reign. Viceroys to your sweet Suzerain! Till she shall know This lesson in her overthrow: Hardest servitude has he 290 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS That's jailed in arrogant liberty; And freedom, spacious and unflawed, Who is walled about with God. ODE FOR THE DIAMOND JUBILEE OF QUEEN VICTORIA, 1897 N'ight; and the street a corpse beneath the moon, Upon the threshold of the jubilant day That was to follow soon; Thickened with inundating dark 'Gainst which the drowning lamps kept struggle; pole And plank cast rigid shadows; 'twas a stark Thing waiting for its soul, The bones of the preluded pomp. I saw m the cloud-sullied moon a pale array, A lengthened apparition, slowly draw; And as it came. Brake all the streets in phantom flame Of flag and flower and hanging, shadowy show Of the to-morrow's glories, as might suit A pageant of the dead; and spectral bruit I heard, where stood the dead to watch the dead. The long Victorian line that passed with printless tread. First went the holy poets, two on two. And music, sown along the hardened ground, Budded like frequence of glad daisies, where Those sacred feet did fare; Arcadian pipe, and psaltery, around, And stringed viol, sound MISCELLANEOUS ODES 291 To make for them melodious due. In the first twain of those great ranks of death Went One, the impress recent on his hair Where it was dinted by the Laureate wreath: Who sang those goddesses with splendours bare On Ida hill, before the Trojan boy; And many a lovely lay, Where Beauty did her beauties unarray In conscious song. I saw young Love his plumes deploy. And shake their shivering lustres, till the night Was sprinkled and bedropt with starry play Of versicoloured light, To see that Poet pass who sang him well; And I could hear his heart Throb like the after-vibrance of a bell. A Strength beside this Beauty, Browning went, With shrewd looks and intent. And meditating still some gnarled theme. Then came, somewhat apart, In a fastidious dream, Arnold, v>^ith a half-discontented calm, Binding up wounds, but pouring in no balm. The fervid breathing of Elizabeth Broke on Christina's gentle-taken breath. Rossetti, whose heart stirred within his breast Like lightning in a cloud, a Spirit without rest. Came on disranked; Song's hand was in his hair, Lest Art should have vv^ithdrawn him from the band. Save for her strong command; And in his eyes high Sadness made its lair. 292 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Last came a Shadow tall, with drooping lid, ViTiich yet not hid The steel-like flashing of his armed glance; Alone he did advance, And all the throngs gave room For one that looked with such a captain's mien. A scornful smile lay keen On lips that, living, prophesied of doom; His one hand held a lightning-bolt, the other A cup of milk and honey blent with fire; It seemed as in that quire He had not, nor desired not, any brother. A space his alien eye surveyed the pride Of meditated pomp, as one that much Disdained the sight, methought; then, at a touch, He turned the heel, and sought with shadowy stride His station in the dim. Where the sole-thoughted Dante waited him. What throngs illustrious next, of Art and Prose, Too long to tell! But other music rose When came the sabre's children: they who led The iron-throated harmonies of war, The march resounding of the armed line, And measured movement of battalia: Accompanied their tread No harps, no pipes of soft Arcadia, But — borne to me afar — The tramp of squadrons, and the bursting mine, The shock of steel, the volleying rifle-crack, And echoes out of ancient battles dead. So Cawnpore unto Alma thundered back. And Delhi's cannon roared to Gujerat: MISCELLANEOUS ODES 293 Carnage through all those iron vents gave out Her thousand-mouthed shout. As balefire answering balefire is unfurled, From mountain-peaks, to tell the foe's approaches, So ran that battle-clangour round the world, From famous field to field So that reverberated war was tossed; And — in the distance lost — Across the plains of France and hills of Spain It swelled once more to birth, And broke on me again, The voice of England's glories girdling in the earth. It caught like fire the main, Where rending planks were heard, and broadsides pealed, That shook were all the seas, Which feared, and thought on Nelson. For with them That struck the Russ, that brake the Mutineer, And smote the stiff Sikh to his knee, — with these Came they that kept our England's sea-swept hem. And held afar from her the foreign fear. After them came They who pushed back the ocean of the Unknown, And fenced some strand of knowledge for our own Against the outgoing sea Of ebbing mystery; And on their banner 'Science' blazoned shone. The rear were they that wore the statesman's fame, From Melbourne, to The arcane face of the much-wrinkled Jew. 294 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Lo, in this day we keep the yesterdays, And those great dead of the Victorian line. They passed, they passed, but cannot pass away, For England feels them in her blood like wine. She was their mother, and she is their daughter, This Lady of the water. And from their loins she draws the greatness which they were. And still their wisdom sways, Their power lives in her. Their thews it is, England, that lift thy sword, They are the splendour, England, in thy song. They sit unbidden at thy council-board. Their fame does compass all thy coasts from wrong, And in thy sinews they are strong. Their absence is a presence and a guest In this day's feast; This living feast is also of the dead. And this, O England, is thine All Souls' Day. And when thy cities flake the night with flames, Thy proudest torches yet shall be their names. O royal England! happy child Of such a more than regal line; Be it said Fair right of jubilee is thine; And surely thou art unbeguiled If thou keep with mirth and play, With dance, and jollity, and praise, Such a To-day which sums such Yesterdays. Pour to the joyless ones thy joy, thy oil And wine to such as faint and toil. MISCELLANEOUS ODES 295 And let thy vales malve haste to be more green Than any vales are seen In less auspicious lands, And let thy trees clap all their leafy hands, And let thy flowers be gladder far of hue Than flowers of other regions may; Let the rose, with her fragrance sweetened through, Flush as young maidens do, With their own inward blissfulness at play. And let the sky twinkle an eagerer blue Over our English isle Than any otherwhere; Till strangers shall behold, and own that she is fair. Play up, play up, ye birds of minstrel June, Play up your reel, play up your giddiest spring, And trouble every tree with lusty tune, Whereto our hearts shall dance For overmuch pleasance. And children's running make the earth to sing. And ye soft winds, and ye white-fingered beams, Aid ye her to invest. Our queenly England, in all circumstance Of fair and feat adorning to be drest; Kirtled in jocund green, Which does befit a Queen, And like cur spirits cast forth lively gleams: And let her robe be goodly garlanded With store of florets white and florets red. With store of florets white and florets gold, A fair thing to behold; Intrailed with the white blossom and the blue, A seemly thing to view! 296 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And thereunto, Set over all a woof of lawny air, From her head wavering to her sea-shod feet, Which shall her lovely beauty well complete. And grace her much to wear. Lo, she is dressed, and lo, she cometh forth, Our stately Lady of the North; Lo, how she doth advance. In her most sovereign eye regard of puissance, And tiar'd with conquest her prevailing brow. While nations to her bow. Come hither, proud and ancient East, Gather ye to this Lady of the North, And sit down with her at her solemn feast, Upon this culminant day of all her days; For ye have heard the thunder of her goings-forth, And wonder of her large imperial ways. Let India send her turbans, and Japan Her pictured vests from that remotest isle Seated in the antechambers of the Sun: And let her Western sisters for a while Remit long envy and disunion, And take in peace Her hand behind the buckler of her seas, 'Gainst which their wrath has splintered; come, for she Her hand ungauntlets in mild amity. Victoria! Queen, whose name is victory, Whose woman's nature sorteth best with peace, Bid thou the cloud of war to cease MISCELLANEOUS ODES 297 Which ever round thy wide-girt empery Fumes, like to smoke about a burning brand, Telling the energies which keep within The light unquenched, as England's light shall be; And let this day hear only peaceful din. For, queenly woman, thou art more than woman; Thy name the often-struck barbarian shuns: Thou art the fear of England to her foemen. The love of England to her sons. And this thy glorious day is England's; who Can separate the two? She joys thy joys and weeps thy tears, And she is one with all thy moods; Thy story is the tale of England's years. And big with all her ills, and all her stately goods. Now unto thee The plenitude of the glories thou didst sow Is garnered up in prosperous memory; And, for the perfect evening of thy day, An untumultuous bliss, serenely gay. Sweetened with silence of the after-glow. Nor does the joyous shout Which all our lips give out Jar on that quietude; more than may do A radiant childish crew. With well-accordant discord fretting the soft hour, Whose hair is yellowed by the sinking blaze Over a low-mouthed sea. Exult, yet be not twirled, England, by gusts of mere Blind and insensate lightness; neither fear The vastness of thy shadow on the world. 298 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS If in the East Still strains against its leash the unglutted beast Of War; if yet the cannon's lip be warm; Thou, whom these portents warn but not alarm, Feastest, but with thy hand upon the sword, As fits a warrior race: Not like the Saxon fools of olden days, With the mead dripping from the hairy mouth, Wliile all the South Filled with the shaven faces of the Norman horde. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY As, fore-announced by threat of flame and smoke, Out of the night's lair broke The sun among the startled stars, whose blood Looses its slow bright flood Beneath the radiant onset of the sun; So crouches he anon, With nostrils breathing threat of smoke and flame, Back to the lairing night wherefrom he came. Say, who is she. With cloudy battle smoking round her feet, That goes out through the exit-doors of death; And at the alternate limit of her path, Where first her nascent footsteps troubled day, Forgotten turmoil curls itself away? Who is she that rose Tumultuous, and in tumult goes? MISCELLANEOUS ODES 299 This is she That rose 'midst dust of a down-tumbled world, And dies with rumour on the air Of preparation For a more ample devastation, And death of ancient fairness no more fair. First when she knew the day, The holy poets sung her on her way: The high, clear band that takes Its name from heaven-acquainted mountain-lakes; And he That like a star set in Italian sea; And he that mangled by the jaws of our Fierce London, from all frets Lies balmed in Roman violets; And other names of power, Too recent but for worship and regret, On whom the tears lie wet. But not to these She gave her heart; her heart she gave To the blind worm that bores the mold. Bloodless, pertinacious, cold, Unweeting what itself upturns, The seer and prophet of the grave. It reared its head from off the earth (Which gives it life and gave it birth) And placed upon its eyeless head a crown. Thereon a name writ new, 'Science,' erstwhile with ampler meanings known; And all the peoples in their turns Before the blind worm bowed them down. 300 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Yet, crowned beyond its due, Working dull way by obdurate, slow degrees, It is a thing of sightless prophecies; And glories, past its own conceit, Wait to complete Its travail, when the mounded time is meet. Nor measured, fit renown, When that hour paces forth, Shall overlook those workers of the North And West, those patient Darwins who forthdrew From humble dust what truth they knew. And greater than they knew, not knowing all they knew. Yet was their knowledge in its scope a Might, Strong and true souls to measure of their sight. Behold the broad globe in their hands comprest, As a boy kneads a pellet, till the East Looks in the eyes o' the West; And as guest whispers guest That counters him at feast. The Northern mouth Leans to the attent ear of the blended South. The fur-skinned garb justling the Northern Bear Crosses the threshold where. With linen wisp girt on. Drowses the next-door neighbour of the sun. Such their laborious worth To change the old face of the wonted earth. Nor were they all o' the dust; as witness may Davy and Faraday; And they Who clomb the cars MISCELLANEOUS ODES 301 And learned to rein the chariots of the stars; Or who in night's dark waters dipt their hands To sift the hid gold from its sands; And theirs the greatest gift, who drew to light By their sciential might, The secret ladder, wherethrough all things climb Upward from the primeval slime. Nor less we praise Him that with burnished tube betrays The multitudinous diminutive Recessed in virtual night Below the surface-seas of sight; Him whose enchanted windows give Upon the populated ways Where the shy universes live Ambushed beyond the unapprehending gaze: The dusted anther's globe of spiky stars ; The beetle flashing in his minute mail Of green and golden scale; And every water-drop a-sting with writhing wars. The unnoted green scale cleaving to the moist earth's face Behold disclosed a conjugal embrace, And womb — Submitting to the tomb — That sprouts its lusty issue:* everywhere conjoins Either glad sex, and from unguessed-at loins Breeds in an opulent ease The liberal earth's increase; * The prothallus of the fern, for example, which contains in itself the two sexes, and decays as the young fern sprouts from it. 302 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Such Valentine's sweet unsurmised diocese. Nor, dying Lady, of the sons Whom proudly owns Thy valedictory and difficult breath. The least are they who followed Death Into his obscure fastnesses, Tracked to her secret lair Disease — Under the candid-seeming and confederate Day Venoming the air's pure lips to kiss and to betray; Who foiled the ancient Tyrant's grey design Unfathomed long, and brake his dusty toils, Spoiling him of his spoils, And man, the loud dull fly, loosed frcm his woven line. Such triumph theirs who at the destined term Descried the arrow flying in the day — The age-long hidden Germ — And threw their prescient shield before its deadly way. Thou, spacious Century! Hast seen the Western knee Set on the Asian neck, The dusky Africa Kneel to imperial Europe's beck; The West for her permitted while didst see Stand rnistress-wise and tutelar To the grey nations dreaming on their days afar, From old forgotten war Folding hands whence has slid disused rule; The while, unprescient, in her regent school She shapes the ample days and things to be, And large new empery. MISCELLANEOUS ODES 303 Thence Asia sbrV re brought to bed Of dominations yet undreamed; Narrow-eyed Egypt lift again the head Whereon the far-seen crown Nilotic gleamed. Thou'st seen the Saxon horde whose veins run brine, Spawned of the salt wave, wet with the salt breeze, Their sails combine. Lash their bold prows together, and turn swords Against the world's knit hordes; The whelps repeat the lioness' roar athwart the windy seas. Yet let it grieve, grey Dame, Thy passing spirit, God wot, Thou wast half-hearted, wishing peace, but not The means of it. The avaricious flame Thou'st fanned, which thou should'st tame: Cluckd'st thy wide brood beneath thy mothering plumes, And coo'dst them from their fumes, Stretched necks provocative, and throats Ruffled with challenging notes; Yet all didst mar, Flattering the too-much-pampered Boy of War: Whence the far-jetting engine, and the globe In labour with her iron progeny, — Infernal litter of sudden-whelped deaths. Vomiting venomous breaths; The growl as of long surf that draweth back Half a beach in its rattling track. When like a tiger-cat The angry rifle spat Its fury in the opposing foeman's eyes; — These are thy consummating victories. For this hast thou been troubled to be wise! 304 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And now what child is this upon thy lap, Born in the red glow of relighted war? That draws Bellona's pap, — Fierce foster-mother! — does already stare With mimicked dark regard And copied threat of brow whose trick it took from her: Young Century, born to hear The cannon talking at its infant ear — The Twentieth of Time's loins, since that Which in the quiet snows of Bethlehem he begat. Ah! with forthbringing such and so ill-starred. After the day of blood and night of fate, Shall it survive with brow no longer marred, Lip no more wry with hate; With all thou hadst of good, But from its blood W^ashed thine hereditary ill. Yet thy child still? PEACE ON THE TREATY IN SOUTH AFRICA IN 1902 Peace: — as a dawn that flares Within the brazier of the barred East, Kindling the ruinous walls of storm surceased To rent and roughened glares, After such night when lateral wind and rain Torment the to-and-fro perplexed trees With thwart encounter; which, of fixture strong, MISCELLANEOUS ODES 305 Take only strength from the endured pain: And throat by thoat begin The birds to make adventure of sweet din, Till all the forest prosper into song: — Peace, even such a peace, (O be my words an auspice!) dawns again Upon our England, from her lethargies Healed by that baptism of her cleansing pain. Ended, the long endeavour of the land: Ended, the set of manhood towards the sand Of thirsty death ; and their more deadly death. Who brought back only what they fain had lost, No more worth-breathing breath, — Gone the laborious and use-working hand. Ended, the patient drip of women's tears, Which joined the patient drip of faithful blood To make of blood and water the sore flood That pays our conquest's costliest cost. This day, if fate dispose. Shall make firm friends from firm and firm-met foes. And now^. Lord, since Thou hast upon hell's floor Bound, like a snoring sea, the blood-drowsed bulk of War. Shall we not cry, on recognising knees, This is Thy peace? If, England, it be l5ut to lay The heavy head down, the old heavy way; Having a space awakened and been bold To break from them that had thee in the snare, — Resume the arms of thy false Dalila, Gold, Shameful and nowise fair: 3o6 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Forget thy sons who have lain down in bed With Dingaan and old dynasties, nor heed The ants that build their empires overhead; Forget their large in thy contracted deed. And that thou stand'st twice-pledged to being great For whom so many children greatly bleed, Trusting thy greatness with their deaths: if thou, England, incapable of proffered fate, See in such deaths as these But purchased pledges of unhindered mart. And hirelings spent that in thy ringed estate For some space longer now Thou mayst add gain to gain, and take thine ease, — God hast made hard thy heart; Thou hast but bought thee respite, nor surcease. Lord, this is not Thy peace! But wilt thou, England, stand With vigilant heart and prescient brain? — Knowing there is no peace Such as fools deem, of equal-balanced ease: — That they who build the State Must, like the builders of Jerusalem, The trowel in their hand. Work with the sword laid ever nigh to them. If thou hold Honour worthy gain At price of gold and pain ; And all thy sail and cannon somewhat more Than the fee'd watchers of the rich man's store. If thou discern the thing which all these ward Is that imperishable thing, a Name, MISCELLANEOUS ODES 30: And that Name, England, which alone is lord Where myriad-armed India owns with awe A few white faces; uttered forth in flame WTiere circling round the earth Has English battle roared; Deep in mid-forest African a Law; That in this Name's small girth The treasure is, thy sword and navies guard: If thou wilt crop the specious sins of ease, WTience still is War's increase, — Proud flesh which asks for War, the knife of God, Save to thyself, thyself use cautery; Wilt stay the war of all with all at odd. And teach thy jarring sons Truth innate once, — That in the whole alone the part is blest and great. O should this fire of war thus purge away The inveterate stains of too-long ease, And yield us back our Empire's clay Into one shoreless State Compact and hardened for its uses: these No futile sounds of joyance are to-day; — Lord, unrebuked we may Call this Thy peace! And in this day be not Wholly forgot They that made possible but shall not see Our solemn jubilee. Peace most to them who lie Beneath unnative sky; 3o8 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS In whose still hearts is dipt Our reconciling script: Peace! Lot when shouts shall start the housetop bird, I^,t *i There was one Shall no more beneath the sun Darkle, fondle, featly play. If to think on her be gloom, Rejoice she has so rich a tomb 1 ' But there's he — Ask thou not who it may be! — That, until Time's boughs are bare, Shall be unconsoled for her. A DOUBLE NEED {To W—) Ah, gone the days when for undying kindness I still could render you undying song! You yet can give, but I can give no more; Fate, in her extreme blindness, Has wrought me so great wrong. I am left poor indeed; Gone is my sole and amends-making store, And I am needy with a double need. Behold that I am like a fountained nymph, Lacking her customed lymph, The longing parched in stone upon her mouth, Unwatered of its ancient plenty. She (Remembering her irrevocable streams), A Thirst made marble, sits perpetually With sundered lips of still-memorial drouth. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 349 GRIEF'S HARMONICS At evening, when the lank and rigid trees, To the mere forms of their sweet da\'-selves drying. On heaven's blank leaf seem pressed and flattened; Or rather, to my sombre thoughts replying, Of plumes funereal the thin effigies; That hour when all old dead things seem most dead, And their death instant most and most undying. That the flesh aches at them; there stirred in me The babe of an unborn calamity, Ere its due time to be delivered. Dead sorrow and sorrow unborn so blent their pain, That which more present v^as were hardly said, But both more now than any Now can be My soul like sackcloth did her body rend, And thus with Heaven contend: — 'Let pass the chalice of this coming dread. Or that fore-drained O bid me not re-drain!' So have I asked, who know my asking vain; Woe against woe in antiphon set over. That grief's soul transmigrates, and lives again, And in new pang old pang's incarnated. MEMORAT MEMORIA Come you living or dead to me, out of the silt of the Past, With the sweet of the piteous first, and the shame of the shameful last? Come with your dear and dreadful face through the passes of Sleep, The terrible mask, and the face it masked — the face you did not keep? 350 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS You are neither two nor one — I would you were one or two, For your awful self is embalmed in the fragrant self I knew: And Above may ken, and Beneath may ken, what I mean by these words of whirl, But by my sleep that sleepeth not, — O Shadow of a Girl I — Naught here but I and my dreams shall know the secret of this thing: — For ever the songs I sing are sad with the songs I never sing, Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs we dare not sing! Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the hateful horror of love! It has sent more souls to the unslaked Pit than it ever will draw above. I damned you, girl, with my pity, who had better by far been thwart, And drave you hard on the track to hell, because I was gentle of heart. I shall have no comfort now in scent, no ease in dew, for this; I shall be afraid of daffodils, and rose-buds are amiss; You have made a thing of innocence as shameful as a sin, I shall never feel a girl's soft arms without horror of the skin. My child! what was it that I sowed, that I so ill should reap? You have done this to me. And I, what I to you? — It lies with Sleep. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 55 1 NOCTURN I WALK, I only, Not I only wake; Nothing is, this sweet night, But doth couch and wake For its love's sake; Everything, this sweet night, Couches with its mate. For whom but for the stealthy-visitant sun Is the naked moon Tremulous and elate? The heaven hath the earth Its own and all apart; The hushed pool holdeth A star to its heart. You may think the rose sleepeth, But though she folded is, The wind doubts her sleepmg; Not all the rose sleeps. But smiles in her sweet heart For crafty bliss. The wind lieth with the rose. And when he stirs, she stirs in her repose: The wind hath the rose, And the rose her kiss. Ah, mouth of me! Is it then that this Seemeth much to thee? — I wander only. The rose hath her kiss. 352 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS HEAVEN AND HELL 'Tis said there were no thought of hell, Save hell were taught; that there should be A Heaven for all's self-credible. Not so the thing appears to me. Tis Heaven that lies beyond our sights, And hell too possible that proves; For all can feel the God that smites, But ah, how few the God that loves! 'CHOSE VUE' A Metrical Caprice Up she rose, fair daughter — well she was graced, As a cloud her going, stept from her chair. As a summer-soft cloud in her going paced, Down dropped her riband-band, and all her waving hair Shook like loosened music cadent to her waist; — Lapsing like music, wavery as water, Slid to her waist. ST MONICA At the Cross thy station keeping With the mournful Mother weeping, Thou, unto the sinless Son, Weepest for thy sinful one. Blood and water from His side MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 353 Gush; in thee the streams divide: From thine eyes the one doth start, But the other from thy heart. Mary, for thy sinner, see, To her Sinless mourns with thee; Could that Son the son not heed, For whom two such mothers plead? So thy child had baptism twice. And the whitest from thine eyes. The floods lift up, lift up their voice, With a many- watered noise! Down the centuries fall those sweet Sobbing waters to our feet, And our laden air still keeps Murmur of a Saint that weeps. Teach us but, to grace our prayers, Such divinity of tears, — Earth should be lustrate again With contrition of that rain: Till celestial floods o'er-rise The high tops of Paradise. MARRIAGE IN TWO MOODS I Love that's loved from day to day Loves itself unto decay: He that eats one daily fruit 354 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Shrivels hunger at the root. Daily pleasure grows a task; Daily smiles become a mask. Daily growth of unpruned strength Expands to feebleness at length. Daily increase thronging fast Must devour itself at last. Daily shining, even content Would with itself grow discontent; And the sun's life witnesseth Daily dying is not death. So Love loved from day to day Loves itself into decay. II Love to daily uses wed Shall be sweetly perfected. Life by repetition grows Unto its appointed close: Day to day fulfils one year — Shall not Love by Love wax dear? All piles by repetition rise — Shall not then Love's edifice? Shall not Love, too, learn his writ, Like Wisdom, by repeating it? By the oft-repeated use All perfections gain their thews; And so, with daily uses wed, Love, too, shall be perfected. MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 3SS ALL FLESH I DO not need the skies' Pomp, when I would be wise; For pleasaunce nor to use Heaven's champaign when I muse. One grass-blade in its veins Wisdom's whole flood contains: Thereon my foundering mind Odyssean fate can And. O little blade, now vaunt Thee, and be arrogant! Tell the proud sun that he Sweated in shaping thee; Night, that she did unvest Her mooned and argent breast To suckle thee. Heaven fain Yearned over thee in rain, And with wide parent wing Shadowed thee, nested thing, Fed thee, and slaved for thy Impotent tyranny. Nature's broad thews bent Meek for thy content. Mastering littleness Which the wise heavens confess, The frail ity which doth draw Magnipotence to its law — These were, O happy one, these Thy laughing puissances! Be confident of thought, Seeing that thou art naught; 356 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS And be thy pride thou'rt all Delectably safe and small. Epitomized in thee Was the mystery Which shakes the spheres conjoint — • God focussed to a point. All thy fine mouths shout Scorn upon dull-eyed doubt. Impenetrable fool Is he thou canst not school To the humility By which the angels see! Unfathomably framed Sister, I am not shamed Before the cherubin To vaunt my flesh thy kin. My one hand thine, and one Imprisoned in God's own, I am as God; alas, And such a god of grass! A little root clay-caught, A wind, a flame, a thought. Inestimably naught! THE KINGDOM OF GOD 'In no Strange Land' O WORLD invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! MISCELLANEOUS POEMS 357 Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air- That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there? Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! — The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our ovm clay-shuttered doors. The angels keep their ancient places;— Turn but a stone, and start a wing! 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing. But (when so sad thou canst not sadder) Cryj—and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross. Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry,— clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth, but Thames! THE SINGER SAITH OF HIS SONG The touches of man's modern speech Perplex her unacquainted tongue; There seems through all her songs a sound Of falling tears. She is not young. 358 FRANCIS THOMPSON'S POEMS Within her eyes' profound arcane Resides the glory of her dreams; Behind her secret cloud of hair. She sees the Is beyond the Seems. Her heart sole-towered in her steep spirit, Somewhat sweet is she, somewhat wan; And she sings the songs of Sion By the streams of Babylon. On the following pages will be found the complete list of titles in 'The Mod- ern Library," including those published during the Fall of Nineteen Hundred and Twenty -one. New titles are added in the Spring and Fall of every year. THE MODERN LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS Hand Bound in Limp Binding, Stained Tops, Gold Decorations, only 95c. per copy Postage 5c. per copy extra FOUR years ago, the Modern Library of the World's Best Books made is appearance with twelve titles. It was immediately recognized, to quote the New York Times, "as filling a need that is not quite covered by any other publication in the field just now." The Dial hastened to say "The moderns put their best foot forward in the Modern Library. There is scarcely a title that fails to awaken interest and. the series is doubly welcome at this time." 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BONI AND LIVERIGHT 105 West 40th Street New York Modern Library of the World's Best Books LIST OF TITLES For convenience w ordering please use number at right of title A MODERN BOOK OF CRITICISMS (8i) Edited with an Introduction by LUDWIG LEWISOHN ANDERSON, SHERWOOD (1876- ) Winesburg, Ohio (104) ANDREYEV, LEONID (1871- ) The Seven That Were Hanged and The Red Laugh (45) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER ATHERTON, GERTRUDE (1859- ) Rezanov (71) Introduction by WILLIAM MARION REEDY BALZAC, HONORE DE (1799-1850) Short Stories (40) BAUDELAIRE, PIERRE CHARLES (1821-1867) His Prose and Poetry (70) BEARDSLEY, THE ART OF AUBREY (1872-1898) 64 Black and White Reproductions (42) Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS BEERBOHM, MAX (1872- ) Zuleika Dobson (50) Introduction by FRANCIS HACKETT BEST GHOST STORIES (73) Introduction by ARTHUR B. REEVE BEST HUMOROUS AMERICAN SHORT STORIES (87) Edited with an Introduction by ALEXANDER JESSUP BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES (18) Edited with an Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER BLAKE, WILLIAM (1757-1827) Poems (91) Edited with notes by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS BUTLER, SAMUEL (1835-1902) The Way of All Flesh (13) CARPENTER, EDWARD (1844- ) Love's Coming: of Age ( ^i) Modern Library of the World's Best Books CHEKHOV, ANTON (1860-1904) Rothschild's Fiddle and Thirteen Other Stories (31) CHESTERTON, G. K. (1874- ) The Man Who Was Thursday (35) CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE (99) Edited with an Introduction by Dr. BENJ. HARROW CRANE, STEPHEN (1870- ) Men, Women and Boats (102) Introduction by VINCENT STARRETT D'ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE (1864- ) The Flame of Life (65) DAUDET, ALPHONSE (1840-1897) Sapho (85) In same volume with Prevost's " Manon Lescaut " DOSTOYEVSKY, FEDOR (1821-1881) Poor People (10) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER DOWSON, ERNEST (1867-1900) Poems and Prose (74) Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS DUNSANY, LORD (Edward John Plunkett) (1878- ) A Dream.er's Tales (34) Introduction by PADRIAC COLUM Book of Wonder (43) ELLIS, HAVELOCK (1859- ) The New Spirit (95) Introduction by the author EVOLUTION IN MODERN THOUGHT (37) A Symposium, including Essays by Haeckel, Thomson, Weismann, etc. FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE (1821-1880) Madame Bovary (28) The Temptation of St. Anthony (92) Translated by LAFCADIO HEARN FLEMING, MARJORIE (1803-1811) Marjorie Fleming's Book (93) Introduction by CLIFFORD SMYTH Modern Library of the World's Best Books FRANCE, ANATOLE (1844- ) At the Sign of the Reine Pedaque (98) Introduction by JAMES BRANCH CABELL The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (22) Introduction by LAFCADIO HEARN The Red Lily (7) FRENSSEN, GUST A V (1863- ) John Uhl (loi) Introduction by LUDWIG LEWISOHN GAUTIER, THEOPHILE (1811-1872) Mlie. de Maupin (53) GEORGE, W. L. (1882- ) A Bed of Roses (75) Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS GILBERT, W. S. (1836-1911) The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, lolanthe, The Gondoliers (26) Introduction by CLARENCE DAY, Jr. GISSING, GEORGE (1857-1903) The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (46) Introduction by PAUL ELMER MORE De GONCOURT, E. and J. (1822-1896) (1830-1870) Renee Mauperin (76) Introduction by EMILE ZOLA GORKY, MAXIM (1868- ) Creatures That Once Were Men and Four Other Stories (48) Introduction by G. K. CHESTERTON HARDY, THOMAS (1840- ) The Mayor of Casterbridge (17) Introduction by JOYCE KILMER HUDSON, W. H. (1862- ) Green Mansions (89) Introduction by JOHN GALSWORTHY IBANEZ, VICENTE BLASCO (1867- ) The Cabin (69) ^.ntroduction by JOHN GARRETT UNDERHILL Modern Library of the World's Best Books IBSEN, HENRIK (1828-1906) A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People (6) ; Hedda Gabler, Pillars of Society, The Master Builder (36) Introduction by H. L. MENCKEN The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The League of Youth (54) JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916) Daisy Miller and An International Episode (63) Introduction by WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865- ) Soldiers Three (3) LATZKO, ANDREAS (1876- ) Men in War (88) LOTI, PIERRE (1850- ) Madame Chrepantheme (94) MACY, JOHN (1877- ) The Spirit of American Literature (56) MAETERLINCK, MAURICE (1862- ) A Miracle of St. Antony, Pelleas and Melisande, The Death of Tintagiles, Alladine and Palomides, Interior, The Intruder (11) De MAUPASSANT, GUY (1850-1893) Love and Other Stories (72) Edited and translated with an Introduction by MICHAEL MONAHAN Mademoiselle Fifi, and Twelve Other Stories (8) Une Vie (57) Introduction by HENRY JAMES MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1909) Diana of the Crossways (14) Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS MOORE, GEORGE (1853- ) Confessions of a Young Man (16) Introduction by FLOYD DELL MORRISON, ARTHUR (1863- ) Tales of Mean Streets (100) Introduction by H. L. MENCKEN Modern Library of the World's Best Books NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844-1900) Thus Spake Zarathustra (9) Introduction by FRAU FOERSTER-NIETZSCHE Beyond Good and Evil (20) Introduction by WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT Genealogy of Morals (62) NORRIS, FRANK (1870-1902) McTeague (60) Introduction by HENRY S. PANCOAST PATER, WALTER (1839-1894) Marius the Epicurean (90) The Renaissance (86) Introduction by ARTHUR SYAIONS Samuel Pepys' Diary (103) Condensed with an Introduction by RICHARD LE GALLIENNE PREVOST, ANTOINE FRANCOIS (1697-1763) Manon Lescaut (85) In same volume with Daudet's Sapho RODIN, THE ART OF (1840-1917) 64 Black and White Reproductions (41) Introduction by LOUIS WEINBERG SCHNITZLER, ARTHUR (1862- ) Anatol, Living Hours, The Green Cockatoo (32) Introduction by ASHLEY DUKES Bertha Garlan (39) SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (1788-1860) Studies in Pessimism (12) Introduction by T. B. SAUNDERS SHAW, G. B. (1856- ) An Unsocial Socialist (15) SINCLAIR, MAY The Belfry (68) STEPHENS, JAMES Mary, Mary (30) Introduction by PADRIAC COLUM STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS (1850-1894) Treasure Island (4) STIRNER, MAX (Johann Caspar Schmidt) (1806-1859) The Ego and His Own (49) Modern Library of the World's Best Books STRINDBERG, AUGUST (1849-1912) Married (2) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER Miss Julie, The Creditor, The Stronger Woman, Motherly Love, Paria, Simoon (52) SUDERMANN, HERMANN (1857- ) Dame Care (33) SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES (1837-1909) Poems (23) Introduction by ERNEST RHYS THOMPSON, FRANCIS (1859-1907) Complete Poems (38) TOLSTOY, LEO (1828-1910) Redemption and Two Other Plays (77) Introduction by ARTHUR HOPKINS The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and Four Other Stories (64) TURGENEV, IVAN (1818-1883) Fathers and Sons (21) Introduction by THOMAS SELTZER Smoke (80) Introduction by JOHN REED VILLON, FRANCOIS (1431-1461) Poems (58) Introduction by JOHN PAYNE VOLTAIRE, (FRANCOIS MARIE AROUET) (1694-1778) Candide (47) Introduction by PHILIP LITTELL WELLS, H. G. (1866- ) Ann Veronica (27) The War in the Air '(5) New Preface by H. G. Wells for this edition WHITMAN, WALT (1819- ) Poems (97) Introduction by CARL SANDBURG WILDE, OSCAR (1859-1900) An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance (84) Dorian Gray (i) Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose (61) Intentions (96) Lady Windermere's Fan (83) Introduction by EDGAR SALTUS Poems (19) Salome. The Importance of Being Ernest. Modern Library of the World's Best Books WILSON, WOODROW (1856- ) Selected Addresses and Public Papers (55) Edited with an Introduction bv ALBERT BUSHNELL HART WOMAN QUESTION, THE (59) A Symposium, including Essays by Ellen Key, Havelock Ellis, G. Lowes Dickinson, etc. Edited by T„ R. SMITH YEATS, W. B. (1865- ) Irish Fairy and Folk Tales (44) I lUii! 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. 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