human
Can you continue this poem for me?
  Author of "Women of the Classics" etc.
Mr Masefield and "John Presland"; Mr John Lane for the work of Mr
Wilt thou not come again, thou godly sword,
Into the Spirit's hands?
Against our ugly wickedness,
Against our wanton dealing of distress,
The forced defilement of humanity,
And shall there be no end to life's expense
In mills and yards and factories,
With no more recompense
Than sleep in warrens and low styes,
And undelighted food?
Shall still our ravenous and unhandsome mood
Make men poor and keep them poor?--
It's sorry I am for that perverted tramp,
As having gone from being the earth's friend,
Whom she would have at all her private treats.
Now with the foolery called possession he
Has dirtied his own freedom, cozen'd all
His hearing with the lies of ownership.
The earth may call to him in vain henceforth,
He's got a step-dame now, his Goods....
O but my heart is dying in me, waiting:
For us, with lives so hazardous, to love
Is like a poor girl's game of being a queen.
... there's something sacred about lovers.
For there is wondrous more than the joy of life
In lovers; there's in them God Himself
Taking great joy to love the life He made:
We are God's desires more than our own, we lovers,
You dare not injure God!
Why was I like a man sworn to a thing
Working to have my wains in every curve,
Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be?
Not for myself, not even for those wains:
But to keep in me living at its best
The skill that must go forward and shape the world,
Helping it on to make some masterpiece.
Words: they are messengers from out God's heart,
Intimate with him; through his deed they go,
This passion of him called the world, approving
All of fierce gladness in it, bidding leap
To a yet higher rapture ere it sink.
Who hold words made of thought. But as stars slide
Through air, so words, bright aliens, slide through thought,
Leaving a kindled way.
The fact sends us back to the contrast with the Victorians. The
consciousness.
Thus there arises a duality, and a sense of conflict, which would
God, when all the multitudinous flow
Of Being sets backward to Him; God, when He
Is only glory....
Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear;
Easily may a man crouch down for fear,
And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face
The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin,
And one that groweth deep into a life,
With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.
For this refuses faith in the unknown powers
Within man's nature; shrewdly bringeth all
Their inspiration of strange eagerness
To a judgment bought by safe experience;
Narrows desire into the scope of thought.
But it is written in the heart of man,
Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night which is thy greater soul;
Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul,
Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,
And of created purpose reach the ends.
characteristic.
... like a wing's shelter bending down.
I've often thought, if I were tall enough
And reacht my hand up, I should touch the soft
Spread feathers of the resting flight of him
Who covers us with night, so near he seems
Stooping and holding shadow over us,
Roofing the air with wings. It's plain to feel
Some large thing's near, and being good to us.
together and made them friends before they had any knowledge of
SON. What are words?
TRAMP. God's love! Here's a man after my own heart;
We must be brothers, lad.
And didst thou think this present sensible world
It is a name, ...
The name Lord God chooses to go by, made
In languages of stars and heavens and life.
SEEKER. Then thou art God?
WITHIN. Ay, many call me so.
And yet, though words were never large enough
To take me made, I have a better name.
SEEKER. Then truly, who art thou?
WITHIN. I am Thy Self.
revelation of perhaps a fraction of a minute:
I was exalted above surety
And out of time did fall.
As from a slander that did long distress,
A sudden justice vindicated me
From the customary wrong of Great and Small.
I stood outside the burning rims of place,
Outside that corner, consciousness.
Then was I not in the midst of thee
Desire of infinite things, desire of finite.
... 'tis the wrestle of the twain makes man.
--As two young winds, schooled 'mong the slopes and caves
Of rival hills that each to other look
Across a sunken tarn, on a still day
Run forth from their sundered nurseries, and meet
In the middle air....
And when they close, their struggle is called Man,
Distressing with his strife and flurry the bland
Pool of existence, that lay quiet before
Holding the calm watch of Eternity.
Thou wilt miss the wonder I have made for thee
Of this dear world with my fashioning senses,
The blue, the fragrance, the singing, and the green.
Great spaces of grassy land, and all the air
One quiet, the sun taking golden ease
Upon an afternoon:
Tall hills that stand in weather-blinded trances
As if they heard, drawn upward and held there,
Some god's eternal tune;
Golden within me the whole fate of man:
That every flesh and soul belongs to one
Continual joyward ravishment ...
That life hath highest gone which hath most joy.
For like great wings forcefully smiting air
And driving it along in rushing rivers,
Desire of joy beats mightily pulsing forward
The world's one nature....
... so we are driven
Onward and upward in a wind of beauty,
Until man's race be wielded by its joy
Into some high incomparable day,
Where perfectly delight may know itself,--
No longer need a strife to know itself,
Only by its prevailing over pain.
Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft,--
Life with her skill of a million years' perfection
To make her heart's delighted glorying
Of sunlight, and of clouds about the moon,
Spring lighting her daffodils, and corn
Ripening gold to ruddy, and giant seas,
And mountains sitting in their purple clothes--
O life I am thinking of, life the wonder,
All blotcht out by a brutal thrust of fire
Like a midge that a clumsy thumb squashes and smears.
We have already seen that spiritual vision is here united with
Life, the mother who lets her children play
So seriously busy, trade and craft--
rejuvenated England, seem to the same hopeful eye a complete
Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage.
Out of the nothingness of sleep,
The slow dreams of Eternity,
There was a thunder on the deep:
I came, because you called to me.
I broke the Night's primeval bars,
I dared the old abysmal curse,
And flashed through ranks of frightened stars
Suddenly on the universe!
I'll break and forge the stars anew,
Shatter the heavens with a song;
Immortal in my love for you,
Because I love you, very strong.
But on the opposite page, the sonnet called "Dawn" swings to the
unfortunate Teutons.
One of them wakes, and spits, and sleeps again.
The darkness shivers. A wan light through the rain
Strikes on our faces, drawn and white. Somewhere
A new day sprawls; and, inside, the foul air
Is chill, and damp, and fouler than before....
Opposite me two Germans sweat and snore.
It is not long, however, before we find that the two elements are
Lo! from quiet skies
In through the window my Lord the Sun!
And my eyes
Were dazzled and drunk with the misty gold,
And a full tumultuous murmur of wings
Grew through the hall;
And I knew the white undying Fire,
And, through open portals,
Gyre on gyre,
Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing,
And a Face unshaded ...
Till the light faded;
And they were but fools again, fools unknowing,
Still scribbling, blear-eyed and stolid immortals.
In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be; the clinging stream
Closes his memory, glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare;
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.
When you were there, and you, and you,
Happiness crowned the night; I too,
Laughing and looking, one of all,
I watched the quivering lamplight fall
Flung all the dancing moments by
With jest and glitter....
Till suddenly, and otherwhence,
I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange
From the dark woven flow of change
Under a vast and starless sky
I saw the immortal moment lie.
One instant I, an instant, knew
As God knows all. And it and you
I, above Time, oh, blind! could see
In witless immortality.
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." "And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
--"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
--And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Perception so keen and fearless, piercing readily through the
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto Mud!--Death eddies near--
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
Of such is "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester," in which the poet is
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where _das Betreten's_ not _verboten_.
=eithe genoimen= ... would I were
sentimentality: better risk rough weather, it seems to say, than
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?... oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
century.
It has, however, inherent interest apart from this aesthetic joy,
If I were gusty April now,
How I would blow at laughing Rose;
I'd make her ribbons slip their knots,
And all her hair come loose.
If I were merry April now,
How I would pelt her cheeks with showers;
I'd make carnations rich and warm,
Of her vermilion flowers.
Since she will laugh in April's face,
No matter how he rains or blows--
Then O that I wild April were,
To play with laughing Rose.
curiously impressive, for its art.
magnificence.
Ye saints, that sing in rooms above,
Do ye want souls to consecrate?
I am a jolly tramp: I whine to you,
Then whistles till I meet another fool.
I call the labourer sir, the boy young man,
The maid young lady, and the mother I
Will flatter through the youngest child that walks.
There came a man to sell his shirt,
A drunken man, in life low down;
When Riley, who was sitting near,
Made use of these strange words to Brown.
"Yon fallen man, that's just gone past,
I knew in better days than these;
Three shillings he could make a day,
As an adept at picking peas."
"You'd scarcely credit it, I knew
A man in this same house, low down,
Who owns a fish-shop now--believe
Me, or believe me not," said Brown.
"He was a civil sort of cove,
But did queer things, for one low down:
Oft have I watched him clean his teeth--
As true as Heaven's above!" cried Brown.
This humorous quality is the most marked form of an attitude of
We're in the garden, where are bees
And flowers, and birds, and butterflies;
There is one greedy fledgling cries
For all the food his parent sees!
I see them all: flowers of all kind,
The sheep and cattle on the leas;
The houses up the hills, and trees--
Since Jesus came with mercy and love,
'Tis nineteen hundred years and five:
They made that dying man break stones,
In faith that Christ is still alive.
A hideous scrap of notoriety for A.D. 1905!--and proof enough to
Had they no dreamer who might have remained
To sing for them these desolated scenes?
One who might on a starved body take
Strong flights beyond the fiery larks in song,
With awful music, passionate with hate?
He who loves Nature truly, hath
His wealth in her kind hands; and it
Is in safe trust until his death,
Increasing as he uses it.
Or a passage from "Music," invoking the memory of childhood:
O happy days of childhood, when
We taught shy Echo in the glen
Words she had never used before--
Ere Age lost heart to summon her.
Life's river, with its early rush,
Falls into a mysterious hush
When nearing the eternal sea:
Yet we would not forgetful be,
In these deep, silent days so wise,
Of shallows making mighty noise
When we were young, when we were gay,
And never thought Death lived--that day.
But are these pleasant days to keep?
Where shall I be when Summer comes?
When, with a bee's mouth closed, she hums
Sounds not to wake, but soft and deep,
To make her pretty charges sleep?
For Lord, how merry now am I!
Tickling with straw the butterfly,
Where she doth in her clean, white dress,
Sit on a green leaf, motionless,
To hear Bees hum away the hours.
Or again, from "Leisure," in _Songs of Joy_:
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
And a "Greeting," from the volume called _Foliage_:
Good morning, Life--and all
Things glad and beautiful.
My pockets nothing hold,
But he that owns the gold,
The Sun, is my great friend--
His spending has no end.
Hail to the morning sky,
Which bright clouds measure high;
Hail to you birds whose throats
Would number leaves by notes;
Hail to you shady bowers,
And you green fields of flowers.
delightful effect. One could hardly call it by so big a name as
It was a day of rest in heaven, which seemed
A blue grass field thick dotted with white tents
Which Life slept late in, though 'twere holiday.
It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,
And left thee all her lovely hues;
And, as her mother's name was Tears,
So runs it in thy blood to choose
For haunts the lonely pools, and keep
In company with trees that weep.
Or a fancy about the sound of rain from _Nature Poems_:
I hear leaves drinking rain;
I hear rich leaves on top
Giving the poor beneath
Drop after drop;
'Tis a sweet noise to hear
Those green leaves drinking near.
I thought my true love slept;
Behind her chair I crept
And pulled out a long pin;
The golden flood came out,
She shook it all about,
With both our faces in.
Ah! little wren I know
Your mossy, small nest now
A windy, cold place is:
No eye can see my face,
Howe'er it watch the place
Where I half drown in bliss.
There was a battle in her face,
My Love would have the Lily win
And I the Lily lose.
I saw with joy that strife, first one,
And then the other uppermost;
Until the Rose roused all its blood,
And then the Lily lost.
When she's alone, the Lily rules,
By her consent, without mistake:
But when I come that red Rose leaps
To battle for my sake.
Mary and Maud have met at the door,
Oh, now for a din; I told you so:
They're laughing at once with sweet, round mouths,
Laughing for what? does anyone know?
Is it known to the bird in the cage,
That shrieketh for joy his high top notes,
After a silence so long and grave--
What started at once those two sweet throats?
Is it known to the Wind that takes
Advantage at once and comes right in?
Is it known to the cock in the yard,
That crows--the cause of that merry din?
Is it known to the babe that he shouts?
Is it known to the old, purring cat?
Is it known to the dog, that he barks
For joy--what Mary and Maud laugh at?
Is it known to themselves? It is not,
But beware of their great shining eyes;
For Mary and Maud will soon, I swear,
Find cause to make far merrier cries.
Some one is always sitting there,
In the little green orchard;
When you are most alone,
All but the silence gone ...
Some one is waiting and watching there,
In the little green orchard.
Teasle and tansy, meadowsweet,
Campion, toadflax, and rough hawksbit;
Brown bee orchis, and Peals of Bells;
Clover, burnet, and thyme....
violence to one or both of the poets compared; and even when used
romance.
Like a dream you dream in the night,
Fairies and gnomes stole out
In the leaf-green light.
And her beauty far away
Would fade, as her voice ran on,
Till hazel and summer sun
And all were gone:--
All fordone and forgot;
And like clouds in the height of the sky,
Our hearts stood still in the hush
Of an age gone by.
And out the dead came stumbling,
From every rift and crack,
Silent as moss, and plundered
The gaping pack.
They wish them, three times over,
Away they skip full soon:
Under the rising moon.
They take their shapes and creep,
Silent as churchyard lichen,
While she squats asleep.
Names may be writ; and mounds rise;
Purporting, Here be bones:
But empty is that churchyard
Of all save stones.
Haunt and call in the twilight,
Where she slept, poor soul.
... only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
'Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
'Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,' he said.
Can death haunt silence with a silver sound?
Can death, that hushes all music to a close,
Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,
As if a little child, called Purity,
Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen?
Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the briar's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are--
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.
Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
By Eve's nightingales;
We walk and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.
inexplicable charm as the romantic work of Coleridge.
Now his day is done,
And all his children
Far away are gone.
He sits beneath his jasmined porch,
His stick between his knees,
His eyes fixed vacant
On his moss-grown trees.
But as in pale high autumn skies
The swallows float and play,
His restless thoughts pass to and fro,
But nowhere stay.
Soft, on the morrow, they are gone;
His garden then will be
Denser and shadier and greener,
Greener the moss-grown tree.
I can't abear a Butcher,
I can't abide his meat,
The ugliest shop of all is his,
The ugliest in the street;
Bakers' are warm, cobblers' dark,
Chemists' burn watery lights;
But oh, the sawdust butcher's shop,
That ugliest of sights!
Wonder I very much do, Tom Noddy,
If ever, when you are a-roam,
An Ogre from space will stoop a lean face,
And lug you home:
Lug you home over his fence, Tom Noddy,
Of thorn-stocks nine yards high,
With your bent knees strung round his old iron gun
And your head dan-dangling by:
And hang you up stiff on a hook, Tom Noddy,
From a stone-cold pantry shelf,
Whence your eyes will glare in an empty stare,
Till you are cooked yourself!
But a wonderful gumption was under his skin,
And a clear calm light in his eye,
And once in a while: he'd smile:--
Seem to be smiling at me, he would,
From his bush in the corner, of may,--
Bony and ownerless, widowed and worn,
Knobble-kneed, lonely and grey;
And over the grass would seem to pass
'Neath the deep dark blue of the sky,
Something much better than words between me
I sang of lovers, and she praised my song,
The while the King looked on her with cold eyes,
And 'twixt them on the throne sat mailed wrong.
I sang of Launcelot and Guenevere,
While in her face I saw old sorrows rise,
And throned between them cowered naked Fear.
I sang of Tristram and La Belle Isoud,
And how they fled the anger of King Mark
To live and love, deep sheltered in a wood.
Then bending low, she spake sad voiced and sweet,
The while grey terror crouched between them stark,
Give me the lamps along the Old Kent Road;
And I'm content to leave the stars to you.
They're well enough; but hung a trifle high
For walking with clean boots. Now a lamp or so....
How is it you came to leave it?
But I was scared: the loneliness and all;
The quietness, and the queer creepy noises;
And something that I couldn't put a name to,
A kind of feeling in my marrow-bones,
As though the great black hills against the sky
Had come alive about me in the night,
And they were watching me; as though I stood
Naked, in a big room, with blind men sitting,
Unseen, all round me, in the quiet darkness,
That was not dark to them. And all the stars
Were eyeing me; and whisperings in the heather
Were like cold water trickling down my spine:
contemporary thought, quickened in him too.
assistant
Sure, a continuation for this poem could be:
  As one, at midnight, wakened by the call
Of golden-plovers in their seaward flight,
Who lies and listens, as the clear notes fall
Through tingling silence of the frosty night--
Who lies and listens, till the last note fails,
And then, in fancy, faring with the flock
Far over slumbering hills and dreaming dales,
Soon hears the surges break on reef and rock;
And, hearkening, till all sense of self is drowned
Within the mightier music of the deep,
No more remembers the sweet piping sound
That startled him from dull, undreaming sleep:
So I, first waking from oblivion, heard,
With heart that kindled to the call of song,
The voice of young life, fluting like a bird,
And echoed that light lilting; till, ere long,
Lured onward by that happy, singing-flight,
I caught the stormy summons of the sea,
And dared the restless deeps that, day and night,
Surge with the life-song of humanity.
With folded arms, against his staff he stands,
Sun-soaking, rapt, within the August blaze
The while his sheep with moving rustle graze
The lean, parched undergrowth of stubble lands.
Indifferent 'neath the low blue-laden sky
He gazes fearless in the eyes of noon;
And earth, because he craves of her no boon,
Yields him deep-breasted, sun-steeped destiny.
Spring comes no more for me: though young March blow
To flame the larches, and from tree to tree
The green fire leap, till all the woodland, glow--
Though every runnel, filled to overflow,
Bear sea-ward, loud and brown with melted snow,
Spring comes no more for me!
Spring comes no more for me: though May will shake
White flame of hawthorn over all the lea,
Till every thick-set hedge and tangled brake
Puts on fresh flower of beauty for her sake;
Though all the world from winter-sleep awake,
Spring comes no more for me!
We are no lovers, pale with dreams,
Who languish by Lethean streams.
Upon our bodies warm day gleams;
And love that tingles warm and red
From sole of foot to crown of head
Is lord of all pale lovers dead!
With her alone is immortality;
For still men reverently
Adore within her shrine:
The sole immortal time has not cast down,
She wields a power yet more divine
Than when of old she rose from out the sea
Of night, with starry crown.
Though all things perish, Beauty never dies.
Yet, are we friends: the gods have granted this.
Withholding wine, they brimmed for us the cup
With cool, sweet waters, ever welling up,
That we might drink, and, drinking, dream of bliss.
O gods, in your cold mercy, merciless,
Heed lest time raze your thrones; and at the sign,
The cool, sweet-welling waters turn to wine;
The spark to day, and dearth to bounteousness.
Helen has fallen: she for whom Troy fell
Has fallen, even as the fallen towers.
O wanderers in dim fields of asphodel,
Who spilt for her the wine of earthly hours,
With you for evermore
By Lethe's darkling shore
Your souls' desire shall dwell.
But we who sojourn yet in earthly ways;
How shall we sing, now Helen lieth dead?
Break every lyre and burn the withered bays,
For song's sweet solace is with Helen fled.
Let sorrow's silence be
The only threnody
O'er beauty's fallen head.
I want naught with their money.
I want my husband,
And my children's father.
Let them pitch all their money in the furnace
I wouldn't touch a penny;
'Twould burn my fingers.
For him!
Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the
Fine morning, mate and mistress!
Might you be looking for a job, my lad?
Well ... there's a heap of stones to break, down yonder.
I was just on my way ...
But I am old;
And, maybe, a bit idle;
And you look young,
And not afraid of work,
Or I'm an ill judge of a workman's hands.
And when the job's done, lad,
There'll be a shilling.
Nay, but there's naught to thank me for.
And I've no wife and children,
And so, don't need the shilling.
Well, the heap's down yonder--
There, at the turning.
Ah, the bonnie babe!
We had no children, mistress.
And what can any old man do with shillings,
With no one but himself to spend them on--
An idle, good-for-nothing, lone old man?
The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance--the
Nay! There's naught to screen.
'Twas I that ... Nay!
And, if he's hot, at times,
You know he's much to try him;
The racket that he works in, all day long,
Would wear the best of tempers.
Why, mother, who should know as well as you
How soon a riveter is done?
The hammers break a man, before his time;
And father was a shattered man at forty;
And Philip's thirty-five;
And if he's failed a bit ...
And, sometimes, over-hasty,
Well, I am hasty, too;
You know my temper; no one knows it better.
Next night, as I went in, I caught
A strange, fresh smell. The postman had just brought
A precious box from Cornwall, and the shop
Was lit with primroses, that lay atop
A Cornish pasty, and a pot of cream:
And as, with gentle hands, the father lifted
The flowers his little son had plucked for him,
He stood a moment in a far-off dream,
As though in glad remembrances he drifted
On Western seas: and, as his eyes grew dim,
He stooped, and buried them in deep, sweet bloom:
Till, hearing, once again, the poor child's cough,
He served her hurriedly, and sent her off,
Quite happily, with thin hands filled with flowers.
And, as I followed to the street, the gloom
Was starred with primroses; and many hours
The strange, shy flickering surprise
Of that child's keen, enchanted eyes
Lit up my heart, and brightened my dull room.
satisfying.
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me,
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.
Here we touch the main feature of this poet's gift--his power to
Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning, and in the crush
Under Paul's dome;
Under Paul's dial
You tighten your rein--
Only a moment,
And off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that's in the tomb.
Picking a dish of sweet
Berries and plums to eat,
or presents her, when the serpent is softly calling her name, as
Wondering, listening,
Listening, wondering,
Eve with a berry
Half-way to her lips.
Now to get even and
Humble proud heaven and
Now was the moment or
Never at all.
How the birds rated him,
How they all hated him!
How they all pitied
Poor motherless Eve!
Cranes and gaudy parrots go
Up and down the burning sky;
Tree-top cats purr drowsily
In the dim-day green below;
And troops of monkeys, nutting, some,
All disputing, go and come;
And a dotted serpent curled
Round and round and round a tree,
Yellowing its greenery,
Keeps a watch on all the world,
All the world and this old bull
In the forest beautiful.
I climbed a hill as light fell short,
And rooks came home in scramble sort,
And filled the trees and flapped and fought
And sang themselves to sleep;
I heard no more of bird or bell,
The mastiff in a slumber fell,
I stared into the sky,
As wondering men have always done
Since beauty and the stars were one,
Though none so hard as I.
It seemed, so still the valleys were,
As if the whole world knelt at prayer,
Save me and me alone;
I heard the universal choir,
The Sons of Light exalt their Sire
With universal song,
Earth's lowliest and loudest notes,
Her million times ten million throats
Exalt Him loud and long,
The everlasting pipe and flute
Of wind and sea and bird and brute,
And lips deaf men imagine mute
In wood and stone and clay,
The music of a lion strong
That shakes a hill a whole night long,
A hill as loud as he,
The twitter of a mouse among
Melodious greenery,
The ruby's and the rainbow's song,
The nightingale's--all three,
The song of life that wells and flows
From every leopard, lark and rose
And everything that gleams or goes
Lack-lustre in the sea.
I heard the hymn of being sound
From every well of honour found
In human sense and soul:
The song of poets when they write
The testament of Beautysprite
Upon a flying scroll,
The song of painters when they take
A burning brush for Beauty's sake
And limn her features whole--
The song of beggars when they throw
The crust of pity all men owe
To hungry sparrows in the snow,
Old beggars hungry too--
The song of kings of kingdoms when
They rise above their fortune men,
And crown themselves anew,--
impatient at recurrent signs of a romantic temperament.
With slanting eyes you would say were blind--
In a dead white face.
She should have been dead nine thousand year....
consciousness, fades even out of hearing--
... I lost them
At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them;
A scene no more nor less than a vision,
All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.
And suddenly we saw a beach--
A grey old beach and some old grey mounds
That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds;
So still and old and grey and ragged.
For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,
The Indian graves....
And good to better you say we go._"
(There's an owl overhead.) "_You say that's so?_"
My American friend of the rue de la Paix?
"_Grow better and better from day to day._"
Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day;
Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay
Of a suburban cemetery.
And so beside the woodland in the sheen
And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon
And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips!
Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat,
It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed,
The call of the dead. A multitudinous
And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed,
Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips
Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms
The coldness of the dew--and all a gleam
Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses,
Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders
Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods....
She sits upon a tombstone in the shade;
Being life amid piled up remembrances
Of the tranquil dead.
... So she sits and waits.
And she rejoices us who pass her by,
And she rejoices those who here lie still,
And she makes glad the little wandering airs,
And doth make glad the shaken beams of light
That fall upon her forehead: all the world
Moves round her, sitting on forgotten tombs
And lighting in to-morrow.
"Have still the best to come." But you
Bowed down your brooding, silent head,
Patient and sad and still....
What would I give to climb our down,
Where the wind hisses in each stalk
And, from the high brown crest to see,
Beyond the ancient, sea-grey town,
The sky-line of our foam-flecked sea;
And, looking out to sea, to hear,
Ah! Dear, once more your pleasant talk;
And to go home as twilight falls
Along the old sea-walls!
The best to come! The best! The best!
One says the wildest things at times,
Merely for comfort. But--_The best!_
Small brother, flit in here, since all around
The frost hath gripped the ground;
And oh! I would not like to have you die.
We's help each other,
Little Brother Beady-eye.
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.
Doubtless we owe this air of newness largely to the rebirth of
supposed that the rival _ollamh_ would remain silent under the
Now Edward Carson MacIntyre
Was old, his eyes were dim,
But when he heard the crackling sound,
New life returned to him.
"Some tax-collector's skull," he swore,
"We used to crack them by the score."
"Why did you crack them, grandpapa?"
"It surely was a wicked thing
These hapless men to slay."
"The cause I have forgot," said Mac,
"All I remember is the crack."
"And some men said the Government
Were very much to blame;
And I myself," says MacIntyre,
"Got my own share of fame.
I don't know why we fought," says he,
"But 'twas the devil of a spree."
especially in "Hail and Farewell": the delightful garrulity, the
I haven't tried potato cake or Irish stew as yet;
I've lived on eggs and bacon, and striven to forget
A naughty past of ortolan and frothy omelette.
But W. B. was the boy for me--he of the dim, wan clothes;
And--don't let on I said it--not above a bit of pose;
And they call his writing literature, as everybody knows.
If you like a stir, or want a stage, or would admired be,
Prepare with care a naughty past, and then repent like me.
My past, alas! was blameless, but this the world won't see.
I can't love Plato any more
Because a man called Sophocles,
Who lived in distant Attica,
Wrote a great drama _Oedipus_,
About a Greek who killed his da.
I know now Plato was a sham,
And Socrates I brush aside,
For Phidias I don't care a damn,
For every Greek's a parricide.
Lord of our proud Ascendancy,
Soon there'll be none of us extant,
We want a few plain words with thee.
Thou know'st our hearts are always set
On what we get, on what we get.
We are a pleasant people, the laugh upon our lip
Gives answer back to your laugh in gay good fellowship;
We dance unto your piping, we weep when you want tears;
Wear a clown's dress to please you, and to your friendly jeers
Turn up a broad fool's face and wave a flag of green--
But the naked heart of Ireland, who, who has ever seen?
The treasury of Irish romance has been eagerly drawn upon by the
magnificently paying the penalty of death.
But, as upon the breathless hour of eve,
The gentle moon, smiling amid the wreck
And splendid remnant of the flaming feast
Wherewith Day's lord had sated half the world,
Sets a cool hand on the tumultuous waves,
And soothes them into peace, and takes the throne,
And beams white love that wakens soft desire
In waiting hearts; so in that throbbing pause
Came Niav, daughter of the King whose name
May not be named till First and Last are one.
... And He who stood
Unseen, apart, marked how about Her form,
Clothed white as foam, Her sea-green girdle hung
Like mermaid weed, and how within her wake
There came the sound and odour of the sea,
The swift and silent stroke of unseen wings,
And little happy cries of mating birds;
--the King whose name
May not be named till First and Last are one.
Thus, too, we find the frequent use of simile of an involved and
He ceased, and all the faces of the crowd
Shone with the light that kindles when the boon
Of speech has eased the heart; as when a cloud
Falls from the labouring shoulder of the moon,
And all the world stands smiling silver-browed.
"She shall be found in some most quiet place
Where Beauty sits all day beside her knee
And looks with happy envy on her face;
Where Virtue blushes, her own guilt to see,
And Grace learns new, sweet meanings from her grace;
Where all that ever was or will be wise
Pales at the burning wisdom of her eyes."
There by the sea, Etain his destined bride
Sat unabashed, unwitting of the sight
Of him who gazed upon her gleaming side,
Fair as the snowfall of a single night;
Her arms like foam upon the flowing tide;
Her curd-white limbs in all their beauty bare,
Straight as the rule of Dagda's carpenter.
Somewhere the snipe now taps his tiny drum;
The moth goes fluttering upward from the heath;
And where no lightest foot unmarked may come,
The rabbit, tiptoe, plies his shiny teeth
On luscious herbage; and with strident hum
The yellow bees, blustering from flower to flower,
Scatter from dew-filled cups a sparkling shower.
The meadowsweet shakes out its feathery mass;
And rumorous winds, that stir the silent eaves,
Bearing abroad faint perfumes as they pass,
Thrill with some wondrous tale the fluttering leaves,
And whisper secretly along the grass
Where gossamers, for day's triumphal march,
Hang out from blade to blade their diamond arch.
extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart." And to
And I know that the deed that is in my heart is her deed;
And my soul is blown about by the wild winds of her will,
For always the living must follow whither the dead would lead--
I have seen Maeve of the Battles wandering over the hill.
As I came down the valley after dark,
The little golden dagger at my breast
Flashed into fire lit by a sudden spark;
I saw the lights flame on the haunted hill,
My soul was blown about by a strange wind.
Though the green fir trees rose up stark and still
Against the sky, yet in my haunted mind
They bent and swayed before a magic storm:
A wave of darkness thundered through the sky,
And drowned the world....
I bring you all my dreams, O golden Maeve,
There are no dreams in all the world like these
The dreams of Spring, the golden fronds that wave
In faery land beneath dark forest-trees,--
I bring you all my dreams.
I bring you all my dreams, Fionavar,
From that dim land where every dream is sweet,
I have brought you a little shining star,
I strew my primroses beneath your feet,
I bring you all my dreams.
"Brian, my brother," said the King, in a tone of scornful wonder,
Tell us the count of thy prey of deer, and what cattleherds thou
hast harried."
"I have hunted no deer since yester year, I have harried no
neighbour's cattle,
And I come from the desert-lands alone, since none are alive to
follow.
Some were slain on the plundered plain, and some in the midnight
marching;
And some by hunger and some by thirst, and all are dead; but they
Their tenfold more of their foemen."
"I want no cattle from out your herds, no share of your shining
treasure;
"A hundred more of the clan Dal Cas, to follow me over plain and
pass:
To die, as fitteth the brave Dal Cas, at war with the Outland
starling:
I clink my castanet,
And beat my little drum;
For spring at last has come,
And on my parapet
Of chestnut, gummy-wet,
Where bees begin to hum,
I clink my castanet,
And beat my little drum.
"Spring goes," you say, "suns set."
So be it! Why be glum?
Enough, the spring has come;
And without fear or fret
I clink my castanet,
And beat my little drum.
High on my hedge of bush and tree
A blackbird sings his song to me,
And far above my lined book
I hear the voice of wren and rook.
From the bush-top, in garb of grey,
The cuckoo calls the hours of day.
Right well do I--God send me good!--
Set down my thoughts within the wood.
Oh, what to us your little slights and scorns,
You who dethrone us with a careless breath.
God made us awful queens of birth and death,
And set upon our brows His crown of thorns.
The princess in her world-old tower pined
A prisoner, brazen-caged, without a gleam
Of sunlight, or a windowful of wind;
She lived but in a long lamp-lighted dream.
They brought her forth at last when she was old;
The sunlight on her blanched hair was shed
Too late to turn its silver into gold.
"Ah, shield me from this brazen glare!" she said.
Who sets her shoulder to the Cross of Christ,
Lo! she shall wear sharp scorn upon her brow;
And she whose hand is put to Freedom's plough
May not with sleek Expediency make tryst:
O fateful heralds, charged with Time's decree,
Whose feet with doom have compassed Error's wall;
Whose lips have blown the trump of Destiny
Till ancient thrones are shaking toward their fall;
Shout! for the Lord hath given to you the free
New age that comes with great new hope to all.
moreover, it is incomplete. No room is found for the wanderers in
conventional terminology, begins to create a new kind of poetry.
I am the mountainy singer--
The voice of the peasant's dream,
The cry of the wind on the wooded hill,
The leap of the fish in the stream.
Quiet and love I sing--
The carn on the mountain crest,
The cailin in her lover's arms,
The child at its mother's breast.
Sorrow and death I sing--
The canker come on the corn,
The fisher lost in the mountain loch,
The cry at the mouth of morn.
No other life I sing,
For I am sprung of the stock
That broke the hilly land for bread,
And built the nest in the rock!
I will go with my father a-ploughing
To the green field by the sea,
And the rooks and the crows and the seagulls
Will come flocking after me.
I will sing to the patient horses
With the lark in the white of the air,
And my father will sing the plough-song
That blesses the cleaving share.
My little dark love is a wineberry,
As swarth and as sweet, I hold;
But as the dew on the wineberry
Her heart is a-cold.
As a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.
As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is a woman
When her travail done.
Her brood gone from her,
And her thoughts as still
As the waters
Under a ruined mill.
I met a walking-man;
His head was old and grey.
I gave him what I had
To crutch him on his way.
The man was Mary's Son, I'll swear;
A glory trembled in his hair!
And since that blessed day
I've never known the pinch:
I plough a broad townland,
And dig a river-inch;
And on my hearth the fire is bright
For all that walk by day or night.
O, men from the fields!
Come softly within.
Tread softly, softly,
O! men coming in.
Mavourneen is going
From me and from you,
Whose mantle is blue!
From reek of the smoke
And cold of the floor,
And the peering of things
Across the half-door.
O, men from the fields!
Soft, softly come thro'.
Mary puts round him
Her mantle of blue.
Once I loved a maiden fair,
_Over the hills and far away_.
Lands she had and lovers to spare,
_Over the hills and far away_.
And I was stooped and troubled sore,
And my face was pale, and the coat I wore
Was thin as my supper the night before.
_Over the hills and far away_.
To-morrow, Mavourneen a sleeveen weds,
_Over the hills and far away_;
With corn in haggard and cattle in shed,
_Over the hills and far away_.
And I who have lost her--the dear, the rare,
Well, I got me this ballad to sing at the fair,
'Twill bring enough money to drown my care,
_Over the hills and far away_.
blissful quietude which are familiar in Irish poetry.
Now Day's worn out, and Dusk has claimed a share
Of earth and sky and all the things that be,
I lay my tired head against your knee,
And feel your fingers smooth my tangled hair.
I loved you once, when I had heart to dare,
And sought you over many a land and sea;
Yet all the while you waited here for me
In a sweet stillness shut away from care.
I have no longing now, no dreams of bliss.
But drowsed in peace through the soft gloom I wait
Until the stars be kindled by God's breath;
For then you'll bend above me with the kiss
Earth's children long for when the hour grows late,
The sky is silver-pale with just one star,
One lonely wanderer from the shining host
Of Night's companions. Through the drowsy woods
The shadows creep and touch with quietness
The curling fern-heads and the ancient trees.
The sea is all a-glimmer with faint lights
That change and move as if the unseen prow
Of Niamh's galley cleft its waveless floor,
And Niamh stood there with the magic token,
The apple-branch with silver singing leaves.
The wind has stolen away as though it feared
To stir the fringes of her faery mantle
Dream-woven in the Land of Heart's Desire,
And all the world is hushed as though she called
Ossian again, and no one answered her.
To Ara of Connacht's isles,
As I went sailing o'er the sea,
The wind's word, the brook's word,
The wave's word, was plain to me----
"_As we are, though she is not
As we are, shall Banba be----
There is no King can rule the wind
There is no fetter for the sea._"
Fallen in Erin are all those leafy forests;
The oaks lie buried under bogland mould;
Only in legends dim are they remembered,
Only in ancient books their fame is told.
But seers, who dream of times to come, have promised
Forests shall rise again where perished these;
And of this desolate land it shall be spoken,
"In Tir-Conal of the territories there are trees."
Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, earth broken;
Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn-man there in the
Dear, they are praising your beauty,
The grass and the sky:
The sky in a silence of wonder,
The grass in a sigh.
I too would sing for your praising,
Speech as the whispering grass,
Or the silent sky.
These have an art for the praising
Beauty so high.
Sweet, you are praised in a silence,
Sung in a sigh.
Bundle the gods away:
Richer than Danaan gold,
The whisper of leaves in the rain,
The secrets the wet hills hold.
A Piper in the streets to-day
Set up, and tuned, and started to play,
And away, away, away on the tide
Of his music we started; on every side
Doors and windows were opened wide,
And men left down their work and came,
And women with petticoats coloured like flame
And little bare feet that were blue with cold,
Went dancing back to the age of gold,
And all the world went gay, went gay,
For half an hour in the street to-day.
Draw nigh, O foolish worshippers who mock
With pious woe of sainted imagery
The kingly-human presence of your God.
Draw near, and with new reverence gaze on her.
See you, these hands have toiled, these feet have trod
In all a woman's business; bend the knee.
For this of very certainty is she
Ordained of heavenly hierarchies to rock
The cradle of the infant carpenter.
... From a sleep I emerge. I am clothed again with this woven
vesture of laws;
But I am not, and never again shall be the man that I was.
At the zenith of life I am born again, I begin.
Know ye, I am awake, outside and within.
I have heard, I have seen, I have known; I feel the bite of this
shackle of place and name,
And nothing can be the same.
I have sent three shouts of freedom along the wind.
I am awake. I shall never sleep again.
One is compelled, however, though one may a little regret the
... muffled speech
Of a world of folk.
Only through a crack in the door's blind face
He would reach a thieving hand,
To draw some clue to his own strange place
From the other land.
But his closed hand came back emptily,
As a dream drops from him who wakes;
And naught might he know but how a muffled sea
In whispers breaks.
On either side of a gray barrier
The two blind countries lie;
But he knew not which held him prisoner,
Nor yet know I.
The pleasant ditch is a milky way,
So alight with stars it is,
And over it breaks, like pale sea-spray,
The laughing cataract of the may
In luminous harmonies.
(Cloak with a flower-wrought veil
The face of the dream-country.
The fields of the moon are kind, are pale,
And quiet is she.)
I will weave, of the clear clean shapes of things,
A curtain to shelter me;
I will paint it with kingcups and sunrisings,
And glints of blue for the swallow's wings,
And green for the apple-tree.
(Oh, a whisper has pierced the veil
Out of the dream-country,
As a wind moans in the straining sail
Of a ship lost at sea.)
assurance of it in the clarity and precision of her thought. But
The jolly donkeys that love me well
Nuzzle with thistly lips;
The harebell is song made visible,
The dandelion's lamp a miracle,
When the day's lamp dips and dips.
supernatural a mere shadow. In "Cards" the scene is a 'dim
But, like swords clashing, my love on their hate
Struck sharp, and drove, and pushed.... Grimly round you
Fought we that fight, they pressing passionate
Into the lit circle which called and drew
Shadows and moths of night.... I held the gate.
You said, "Our game," more truly than you knew.
I laughed at her over the sticky larch fence,
And said, "Who's down-hearted, Dolly?"
And Dolly sobbed at me, "They saw you, too!"
(And so the liars said they had,
Though I've not wasted paper nor rhymes telling you),
"But since you and me must die within the year,
What if we went together
To make cowslip balls in the fields, and hear
The blackbirds whistling to the weather?"
So in the water-fields till blue mists rose
We loitered, Dolly and I,
And pulled wet kingcups where the cold brook goes,
And when we've done living, we'll die.
In the long grass and tall nettles
I lay abed,
With hawthorn and bryony
Tangled o'erhead.
And I was alone with Hobson,
Two centuries dead.
Hidden by sprawling brambles
The Nine Waters were;
From a chalky bed they bubbled up,
Clean, green, and fair.
And I was alone with Hobson,
Whose ghost walks there.
And something yawned, and from the grass
A head upreared;
And I was not alone with Hobson,
For at me leered
A great, gaunt, greasy tramp
With a golden beard.
He had a beard like a dandelion,
And I had none;
He had tea in a beer-bottle,
Warm with the sun;
He had pie in a paper bag,
Not yet begun.
He stood at the world's secret heart
In the haze-wrapt mystery;
And fat pears, mellow on the lip,
He supped like a honey-bee;
But the apples he crunched with sharp white teeth
Were pungent, like the sea.
Probably it is in work like this, where both blind countries find
Cambridge town is a beleaguered city;
For south and north, like a sea,
There beat on its gates, without haste or pity,
The downs and the fen country.
Cambridge towers, so old, so wise,
They were builded but yesterday,
Watched by sleepy gray secret eyes
That smiled as at children's play.
And the fens were not. (For fens are dreams
Dreamt by a race long dead;
And the earth is naught, and the sun but seems:
And so those who know have said.)
So veil beyond veil illimitably lifted:
And I saw the world's naked face,
Before, reeling and baffled and blind, I drifted
Back within the bounds of space.
Now I know that there are cultured persons to whom this fact of
complaint; an impertinent grumble that Mr Masefield happens to be
So hey for the road, the west road, by mill and forge and fold,
Scent of the fern and song of the lark by brook, and field, and
wold;
Or again, in "Tewkesbury Road,"
And the blessed green comely meadows are all a-ripple with mirth
At the noise of the lambs at play and the dear wild cry of the
birds.
sailor-men and strange harbourages, its breath of romance sharply
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
buoyant--
Laugh and be merry, remember, better the world with a song,
Better the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong.
Laugh, for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span.
Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.
Not for us are content, and quiet, and peace of mind,
For we go seeking a city that we shall never find.
There is no solace on earth for us--for such as we--
Who search for a hidden city that we shall never see.
perception of the meaning of life. The Dauber, with that precious
The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the shout,
There the poet is responding consciously to the time-spirit: the
But, putting aside the prejudice which has been fostered by a
conventional poetic language, this realistic method does seem to
conflict with certain other characteristics of the work--with the
I opened window wide and leaned
Out of that pigstye of the fiend
And felt a cool wind go like grace
About the sleeping market-place.
The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
The bells chimed Holy, Holy, Holy;
And summat made me think of things.
How long those ticking clocks had gone
From church and chapel, on and on,
Ticking the time out, ticking slow
To men and girls who'd come and go,
And how a change had come. And then
I thought, "You tick to different men."
What with the fight and what with drinking
And being awake alone there thinking,
My mind began to carp and tetter,
"If this life's all, the beasts are better."
The men who don't know to the root
The joy of being swift of foot,
Have never known divine and fresh
The glory of the gift of flesh,
Nor felt the feet exult, nor gone
Along a dim road, on and on,
Knowing again the bursting glows,
The mating hare in April knows,
Who tingles to the pads with mirth
At being the swiftest thing on earth.
O, if you want to know delight,
Run naked in an autumn night,
And laugh, as I laughed then....
The sensuous ecstasy of that is as strongly contrasted with the
Chaucer. At first, reflection made the transition seem abrupt to
Xristus, thy sone, that in this world alighte,
Up-on the cros to suffre his passioun,
And eek, that Longius his herte pighte,
And made his herte blood to renne adoun;
And al was this for my salvacioun;
And I to him am fals and eek unkinde,
And yit he wol not my dampnacioun--
This thanke I you, socour of al mankinde.
O Christ who holds the open gate,
O Christ who drives the furrow straight,
O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after,
Lo, all my heart's field red and torn,
And Thou wilt bring the young green corn,
The young green corn divinely springing,
The young green corn for ever singing;
And when the field is fresh and fair
Thy blessed feet shall glitter there.
And we will walk the weeded field,
And tell the golden harvest's yield,
The corn that makes the holy bread
By which the soul of man is fed,
The holy bread, the food unpriced,
Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.
The root of the matter lies in a stanza of "Dauber." The young
... a thought occurred
Within the painter's brain like a bright bird:
That this, and so much like it, of man's toil,
Compassed by naked manhood in strange places,
Was all heroic, but outside the coil
Within which modern art gleams or grimaces;
That if he drew that line of sailors' faces
Sweating the sail, their passionate play and change,
It would be new, and wonderful, and strange.
That that was what his work meant; it would be
A training in new vision....
One might almost accept that as Mr Masefield's own confession of
He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck
Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow.
... all was an icy blast.
Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice,
Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage,
An utter bridle given to utter vice,
Limitless power mad with endless rage
Withering the soul;
"This is the end," he muttered, "come at last!
I've got to go aloft, facing this cold.
I can't. I can't. I'll never keep my hold.
... I'm a failure. All
My life has been a failure. They were right.
I'll never paint. Best let it end to-night.
I'll slip over the side. I've tried and failed."
He dipped his brush and tried to fix a line,
And then came peace, and gentle beauty came,
Turning his spirit's water into wine,
Lightening his darkness with a touch of flame:
And then he bit his lips, clenching his mind,
And staggered out to muster, beating back
The coward frozen self of him that whined.
She was young and blithe and fair,
Firm of purpose, sweet and strong,
Perfect was her crown of hair,
Perfect most of all her song.
Yesterday beneath an oak,
She was chanting in the wood:
Wandering harmonies awoke;
Sleeping echoes understood.
To-day without a song, without a word,
She seems to drag one piteous fallen wing
Along the ground, and, like a wounded bird,
Move silent, having lost the heart to sing.
She was young and blithe and fair,
Firm of purpose, sweet and strong,
Perfect was her crown of hair,
Perfect most of all her song.
To what God
Shall we chant
Our songs of Battle?
Hefty barbarians,
Roaring for war,
Are breaking upon us;
Clouds of their cavalry,
Waves of their infantry,
Mountains of guns.
Winged they are coming,
Plated and mailed,
Snorting their jargon.
Oh to whom shall a song of battle be chanted?
Not to our lord of the hosts on his ancient throne,
Drowsing the ages out in Heaven alone.
The celestial choirs are mute, the angels have fled:
Word is gone forth abroad that our lord is dead.
To what God
Shall we chant
Our songs of Battle?
analogous to the technical connexion that we have already noted.
... God is a spirit, not a creed;
He is an inner outward-moving power:
He is that one Desire, that life, that breath,
That Soul which, with infinity of pain,
Passes through revelation and through death
Onward and upward to itself again.
Out of the lives of heroes and their deeds,
Out of the miracle of human thought,
Out of the songs of singers, God proceeds;
And of the soul of them his Soul is wrought.
replies--
God? God! There is no GOD.
Oh, I, with light and airy change,
Across the azure sky shall range,
When I am dead.
I shall be one
Of all the misty, fresh and healing powers.
Dew I shall be, and fragrance of the morn,
And quietly shall lie dreaming all the noon,
Or oft shall sparkle underneath the moon,
A million times shall die and be reborn,
Because the sun again and yet again
Shall snatch me softly from the earth away:
I shall be rain;
I shall be spray;
At night shall oft among the misty shades
Pass dreamily across the open lea;
And I shall live in the loud cascades,
Pouring their waters into the sea.
... Nought can die:
All belongs to the living Soul,
Makes, and partakes, and is the whole,
All--and therefore, I.
So much then for the poet's cosmic theory, presented more or less
Light, light your fires,
That they may purify your own desires!
They will not injure me.
This fire of mine
Was kindled from the torch that will outshine
Proud, you disclaim
That fair desire from which all came;
Unworthy of your lofty human birth,
Despise the earth.
O crowd funereal,
Lifting your anxious brows because of sin,
There is no Heaven such as you would win,
Nor any other Paradise at all,
Save in fulfilling some superb desire
With all the spirit's fire.
Suddenly came
Running along to him naked, with curly hair,
That rogue of the lovely world,
That other beautiful child whom the virgin Venus bare.
The holy boy
Gazed with those sad blue eyes that all men know.
Impudent Cupid stood
Panting, holding an arrow and pointing his bow.
(Will you not play?
Jesus, run to him, run to him, swift for our joy.
Is he not holy, like you?
Are you afraid of his arrows, O beautiful dreaming boy?)
Marvellous dream!
Cupid has offered his arrows for Jesus to try;
He has offered his bow for the game.
But Jesus went weeping away, and left him there
wondering why.
immediately preceding.
When I returned at sunset,
The serving-maid was singing softly
Under the dark stairs, and in the house
Twilight had entered like a moonray.
Time was so dead I could not understand
The meaning of midday or of midnight,
But like falling waters, falling, hissing, falling,
Silence seemed an everlasting sound.
I want nothing but your fireside now.
Your book has dropped unnoticed: you have read
So long you cannot send your brain to bed.
The low quiet room and all its things are caught
And linger in the meshes of your thought.
(Some people think they know time cannot pause.)
Your eyes are closing now though not because
Of sleep. You are searching something with your brain;
You have let the old dog's paw drop down again ...
Now suddenly you hum a little catch,
And pick up the book. The wind rattles the latch;
There's a patter of light cool rain and the curtain shakes;
The silly dog growls, moves, and almost wakes.
The kettle near the fire one moment hums.
Then a long peace upon the whole room comes.
So the sweet evening will draw to its bedtime end.
I want nothing now but your fireside, friend.
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
Give them me. Give them me.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
Hush I stole them out of the moon.
Give me your beads, I desire them.
I will howl in a deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
It is plain now what you are. Your head has dropped
Into a furrow. And the lovely curve
Of your strong leg has wasted and is propped
Against a ridge of the ploughed land's watery swerve.
You are fuel for a coming spring if they leave you here;
The crop that will rise from your bones is healthy bread.
You died--we know you--without a word of fear,
And as they loved you living I love you dead.
No girl would kiss you. But then
No girls would ever kiss the earth
In the manner they hug the lips of men:
You are not known to them in this, your second birth.
Hush, I hear the guns. Are you still asleep?
Surely I saw you a little heave to reply.
I can hardly think you will not turn over and creep
Along the furrows trenchward as if to die.
Both of these poets are lyrists born; both come of an old and
contemplative, remaining oriental therefore to that degree; and
permitting a doubt of the _Quarterly_ reviewer's dictum that
"Gitanjali" is a synthesis of western and oriental elements. The
What care I for the world's loud weariness,
Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost bless
With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?
We hear of birth and childhood in Hyderabad; of early scientific
For thy dark altars, balm nor milk nor rice,
But mine own soul thou'st ta'en for sacrifice.
Tarry a while, till I am satisfied
Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky;
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled,
O Death, I cannot die!
Nought shall conquer or control
The heavenward hunger of our soul.
Alike in his ear sound the temple bells and the cry of the
Shatter her shining bracelets, break the string
Threading the mystic marriage-beads that cling
Loth to desert a sobbing throat so sweet,
Unbind the golden anklets on her feet,
Divest her of her azure veils and cloud
Her living beauty in a living shroud.
There is all the hemisphere between these lyrics and those of
The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings,
And happy and simple and sorrowful things.
Sweet, shut your eyes,
The wild fire-flies
Dance through the fairy _neem_;
From the poppy-bole,
For you I stole
A little, lovely dream.
Or golden lamps for a fairy shrine,
Or golden pitchers for fairy wine.
Perchance you are, O frail and sweet!
Bright anklet-bells from the wild spring's feet,
Or the gleaming tears that some fair bride shed
Remembering her lost maidenhead.
employed and the subject of the poem--
And exquisite, subtle and slow are the tinkle and tread of their
rhythmical, slumber-soft feet.
Shelter my soul, O my love!
My soul is bent low with the pain
And the burden of love, like the grace
Of a flower that is smitten with rain:
O shelter my soul from thy face!
When twinkling twilight o'er the gay bazaars,
Unfurls a sudden canopy of stars,
When lutes are strung and fragrant torches lit
On white roof-terraces where lovers sit
Drinking together of life's poignant sweet,
_Buy flowers, buy flowers_, floats down the singing street.
Weavers, weaving at break of day,
Why do you weave a garment so gay?...
Blue as the wing of a halcyon wild,
We weave the robes of a new-born child.
Weavers, weaving solemn and still,
Why do you weave in the moonlight chill?...
White as a feather and white as a cloud,
We weave a dead man's funeral shroud.
Hearken to your dead heroes, Italy;
Hearken to those who made your history
A bright and splendid thing ...
... What Mazzini said
Have you so soon forgotten? You, who bled
With Garibaldi, and the thousand more?
He spoke, and your young men to battle bore
His gospel with them, of men's brotherhood,
Of Justice, that before the tyrant, stood
Accusing, and of truth and charity.
His dust to-day lies with you, Italy;
Where lie his words? That sword is in your hand
To seize unrighteously another's land--
Your fleet in foreign waters. By what right
Dare you act so, save arrogance of might,
Such cruel force as ground the Austrian heel
Upon your Lombard cities, ringed with steel
Unhappy Naples and despairing Rome,
That exiled Garibaldi from his home,
That served itself with sycophants and knaves,
That filled the prisons and the nameless graves,
Till, like a sunrise o'er a stormy sea,
Flashed out the spirit of free Italy?
... so near eternity
The evil dwindles, good alone remains,
And good triumphant--God is merciful.
There will be other days as fair as these
Which I shall never see; for other eyes
The lyric loveliness of cherry trees
Shall bloom milk-white against the windy skies
And I not praise them; where upon the stream
The faery tracery of willows lies
I shall not see the sunlight's flying gleam,
Nor watch the swallows sudden dip and rise.
Most mutable the forms of beauty are,
Yet Beauty most eternal and unchanged,
Perfect for us, and for posterity
Still perfect; yearly is the pageant ranged.
And dare we wish that our poor dust should mar
The wonder of such immortality?
The wistfulness of that wins by its grace where a more strenuous
There are fair flowers that never came to fruit;
Cut by sharp winds, or eaten by late frost,
Barrenly in forgetfulness, they're lost
To little-heedful Nature; so, in suit,
Beneath the footsteps of calamity
Young lives and lovely innocently come
To total up old evil's deadly sum--
Do the gods pity dead Antigone?
We look too close, we look too close on earth
At good and evil; blind are Nature's laws
That kill, or make alive, and so are done.
Not in the circle of this death and birth
May we perceive a justifying cause,
Beyond, perhaps, for God and good are one.
To-night I hear the soft Spring rain that falls
Across the gardens, in the falling dusk,
The Spring dusk, very slow;
And that clear, single-noted bird that calls
Insistently, from somewhere in the gloom
Of one tall pear-tree.
On, on, on, they go,
Those single, sweet, reiterated sounds,
Having no passion, similarly free
Of laughter, and of memory, and of tears,
Poignantly sweet, across the falling rain,
They fall upon my ears.
Do you dare face the wind now? Such a wind,
Bending the hardy cliff-grass all one way,
Hurling the breakers in huge battle-play
On these old rocks, whose age leaves Time behind,
--The whorls and rockets of the fiery mass
Ere earth was earth--shoots over them the spray
In furious beauty, then is twisted, wreathed,
Dispersed, flung inland, beaten in our face,
Until we pant as if we hardly breathed
The common air. See how the billows race
Landward in white-maned squadrons that are shot
With sparks of sunshine.
Where they leap in sight
First, on the clear horizon, they fleck white
The blue profundity; then, as clouds shift,
Are grey, and umber, and pale amethyst;
Then, great green ramparts in the bay uplift,
Perfect a moment, ere they break and fall
In fierce white smother on the rocky wall.
outraged pride in his eyes.
Speech leapt from out the King, as leaps
A sword-blade, dazzling in the sun
From out its scabbard; as there leaps
Fire from the mountain, ere it run
Destruction-dealing, far and wide.
"Rather as Satan damned, I say,
Falling through pride, yet keeping pride,
Than buy salvation at this price...."
Through the door
The King has hurled the dagger, holds
His son against his breast, and pain
Contorts him, like a smitten oak;
Then sets the child upon the floor,
And rises, and undoes the clasp
Of his great mantle (like a stain
Of blood it lies about his feet).
Next from his head he takes the crown,
Holds it arm's-length, and drops it down
Suddenly, from his loosened grasp,
And for the third time goes he forth,
Bare-footed as a penitent,
Humble, and excommunicate,
To stand all day in falling snow
Outside Canossa's guarded gate,
Till Hildebrand shall mercy show.
distinction.
conception of the theme which stresses the element of spiritual
Again, in _Joan of Arc_, one may see how the poet uses the human
elements of a story to make the stirring scenes through which the
incomparable beauty of her character is revealed.
I do declare to you
That I, no other,--neither duke, nor prince,
Nor captain,--no, nor learned gentlemen,
But I alone, a girl of Domremy,--
Am sent to save you.
JOAN. Sire, it was in the spring; one afternoon
When I was in a meadow all alone,
Lying among the grasses (over head
The scurrying clouds were like a flock of sheep,
Chased by a sheep-dog); then, all suddenly,
I heard a voice--nay, heard I cannot say,
There _was_ a voice took hold upon my sense,
As if it swallowed up all other sounds
In all the world; the birds, the sheep, the bees,
The sound of children calling far away,
The rustling of the rushes in the stream,
Were only like the cloth, whereon appears
The gold embroidery, the voice of God.
ARCHBISHOP. Did you see aught?
JOAN. Yea, see! Our earthly words
Cannot express divinity, but like
Small vessels over-filled with generous wine,
They leave the surplus wasted. If I say,
I saw, or heard, that seems to leave untouched
The other senses; but indeed, my lords,
All of my body seemed transformed to soul.
So I should say I _saw_ the voice of God,
And _heard_ the light effulgent all around,
Nay, heard, and saw, and felt through all of me
The radiance of the message of the Lord.
... Here, beneath my hand,
Are laid the hidden hearts of many men.
What shall I read therein? Ingratitude,
Lies, envy, spite, the barbed and venomous word
Of those that called me Emperor, I called friend;
... Break the seal, and read
Which of our subjects, of our intimates,
Our friends of many years, are netted here.
How thickly fall the shadows in the tent!
Almost I fancied, with my tired eyes,
I saw Faustina there ... Faustina, you!
If I should find
_Her_ name among the friends of Cassius?
Ah no, Faustina, not such perfidy!
The gods must blush at it! Am I grown grey
And learnt no wisdom? Though it should be so--
Though yet it cannot be--what's that to me?
Am _I_ wronged by it? Yet it cannot be,
With that frank brow. I've loved you faithfully;
It could not be so....
... I will not know
More than I must of unprofitable things,
Lest they should, in the garden of my soul,
Nourish rank weeds of hate and bitterness;
I will not hate that which I cannot change.
(_He drops the papers into a tripod._)
Burn! Go into oblivion! The gods
Permit themselves to pity good and bad,
Giving to each the sunshine and sweet rain,
And hiding all things in the mist of years.
May I not do as gods do? Burn away,
Consume all hate and evil into smoke!
I will not know of them; assuredly
For me such ills exist not----
(_The body of Faustina is brought in._)
deferred, that it must ultimately come. Manin replies:
I shall not see it.
I shall be blind beneath my coffin lid
There in a foreign land; I shall not see
The glory and the splendour of St. Mark's
When our Italian flag salutes the sun;
I shall be deaf, and never hear the peal
Of our triumphant bells, and volleying guns;
And never say "My people, for this hour
I saved you when I sacrificed you most."
The second passage burns with the fire of triumph, tragical but
Of this one thing be sure. A little time,
A little hour, in the span of years
That history devours, we submit
To bow before the flail of tyranny;
Ay, it may strike us down, and we may die
With Europe passive round our Calvary;
Yet that for which we stand, for liberty,
For equal justice, and the right of laws
Purely administered, can never die,
Being of the nature of eternity;
Nor all the blood that Austria has shed
Mar the indelibility of truth;
Nor all the graves that Austria has dug
Bury it deep enough; nor all the lies
That coward hearts have bandied to and fro,
And coward hearts received to trick themselves,
Smother the face of it.
... look you there
On these good gentlemen, all friends of ours,
The earls of Morton, Ruthven, and Argyll:
For friends they are--upon their countenance
We see it written.
She turns to the English ambassador:
... Here's Sir Nicholas.
What news of our dear cousin? Has she come
At last to give that virgin heart away
Into another's keeping, that brave Archduke,
Who'd bite your hand, they say, as soon as kiss it--
Such manners are in Austria--or Charles,
My dear French brother, who is well enough,
And only fourteen years her junior?
Not yet the happy moment? Patience, then,
Another day you'll have that news for us.
By my beard!
MARY. No! No!
Not by your beard, dear Henry, or your oath
Is emptier than a prince's promises--
Some princes we have heard of, we would say,
Though cannot think it truth. Nay, let me hear
What is it that my sister Princess wills
Out of the largeness of her heart for me?
MARY. ... On my life,
I'll not be pitied: pity is a chafe
On open wounds of pride. To pity me
Makes me a beggar--dare you pity me?
BEATON. Sweet lady, I would not, but must perforce!
MARY. Nay, would you have me weep? What thing am I
That three soft words should drive the tear drops forth
Like floods in winter? Nay, nay, good my girl,
This is my body's weakness, not my soul's.
MARY. Nay, swear not; nay, I know you what you are--
Hotter than flame in your desires; false--
Falser than water.
BOTHWELL (_embracing her_). Be a salamander,
To live for ever in the midst of fire.
MARY. Oh, Bothwell! Oh, my love! I am bewitched
To love you so. You are a deadly poison
That's crept through all my veins; you are the North,
And I the needle; I must turn to you
From every quarter of the hemispheres.
... I am yours
Utterly, wholly; when I walk abroad,
Can see me naked, and, from head to foot,
Branded in red-hot letters with your name.
BOTHWELL. This is indeed love!
MARY. You may call it so!
It is not that which most men mean by love--
A moment's idle fancy. No, this love
Is like a dragon, laying waste the land
Of all my life; it is a deadly sickness,
Of which we both shall die; it is a sin,
Of which we both are damned, the saints of God
Not finding mercy; there's no pleasure in it,
But dust in the mouth and saltness in the eyes.
MARY. I am yours, Bothwell.
BOTHWELL.                  Will you go with me?
MARY. Ay, to the world's end, in my petticoat.
BOTHWELL. Let go her hands, my lord.
MORTON.                       Ay, let them go,
And let _her_ go, for naught can save her now.
Not ours the fault.
MARY.    Not yours, nor his, nor mine.
'Tis not the fault of floods to drown, nor fire
To burn and shrivel--no, nor beasts to bite,
Nor frosts to kill the flowers--not the fault,
Only the property. There's something here
That's stronger than our wishes and our wills.
There is no going back; our course is laid,
And we must keep it, though it lead to death.
Good-bye, my lords. My husband, let us go.
unfortunate companions have vanished before so much exuberance.
... You are more sweetly new
Than a May moon: you are my store,
My secret and my treasure and the pulse
Of my heart's core.
You'll go--then listen, you are just a pig,
A little wrinkled pig out of a sty;
Your legs are crooked and your nose is big,
You've got no calves, you have a silly eye,
I don't know why I stopped to talk to you,
I hope you'll die.
Scraping old moons and twisting heels and head
A chuckle in the void....
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world's curve, and there was light
Most fearful from His forehead ...
He lifted up His hand--
I say He heaved a dreadful hand
Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay,
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way;
And I will never move from where I stand."
He said "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"
And stayed His hand.
Gabriel without a frown,
Uriel without a spear,
Raphael came singing down
Welcoming their ancient peer,
And they seated him beside
One who had been crucified.
impertinent gaze fixed for the moment on the changing form of the
So Eden was deserted, and at eve
Into the quiet place God came to grieve.
His face was sad, His hands hung slackly down
Along his robe ...
... All the birds had gone
Out to the world, and singing was not one
To cheer the lonely God out of His grief--
Chaste and remote, so tiny and so shy,
So new withal, so lost to any eye,
So pac't of memories all innocent....
... Many days I sped
Hard to the west, a thousand years I fled
Eastwards in fury, but I could not find
The fringes of the Infinite....
--till at last
Dizzied with distance, thrilling to a pain
Unnameable, I turned to Heaven again.
And there My angels were prepared to fling
The cloudy incense, there prepared to sing
My praise and glory--O, in fury I
Then roared them senseless, then threw down the sky
And stamped upon it, buffeted a star
With My great fist, and flung the sun afar:
Shouted My anger till the mighty sound
Rung to the width, frighting the furthest bound
And scope of hearing: tumult vaster still,
Thronging the echo, dinned my ears, until
I fled in silence, seeking out a place
To hide Me from the very thought of Space.
Let ye be still, ye tortured ones, nor strive
Where striving's futile. Ye can ne'er attain
To lay your burdens down.
God help the horse and the driver too,
And the people and beasts who have never a friend,
For the driver easily might have been you,
And the horse be me by a different end.
O, I can tell and I can know
What the wind rehearses:
"A poet loved a lady so,
Loved her well, and let her go
While he wrote his verses."
That's the tale the winds relate
Soon as night is shady.
If it's true, I'll simply state
A poet is a fool to rate
His art above his lady.
The best to him who wants the best."
Everything that I can spy
Through the circle of my eye,
Everything that I can see
Has been woven out of me;
I have sown the stars, and threw
Clouds of morning and of eve
Up into the vacant blue;
Everything that I perceive,
Sun and sea and mountain high,
All are moulded by my eye:
Closing it, what shall I find?
--Darkness, and a little wind.
inexplicable changes that marriage has wrought for her--on her
I am separate still,
I am I and not you:
And my mind and my will,
As in secret they grew,
Still are secret, unreached and untouched and not subject to you.
Thus, too, "The Rebel" finds an answer to an importunate lover--
You sob you love me--What,
Must I desert my soul
Because you wish to kiss my lips,
I must be I, not you,
That says the thing in brief.
I grew to this without your aid,
Can face the future unafraid,
Nor pine away with grief
Because I'm lonely....
delighted liberty lives in it. But we cannot apply our little
Reach up my wings!
Now broaden into space and carry me
Beyond where any lark that sings
Can get:
Into the utmost sharp tenuity,
The breathing-point, the start, the scarcely-stirred
High slenderness where never any bird
Has winged to yet!
The moon peace and the star peace and the peace
Of chilly sunlight: to the void of space,
The emptiness, the giant curve, the great
Wide-stretching arms wherein the gods embrace
And stars are born and suns....
There the flower springs,
Therein does grow
The bud of hope, the miracle to come
And joyless: Garden of Delight
That God has sowed!
In thee the flower of flowers,
The apple of our tree,
The banner of our towers,
The recompense for every misery,
The angel-man, the purity, the light
Whom we are working to has his abode;
Until our back and forth, our life and death
And life again, our going and return
Prepare the way: until our latest breath,
Deep-drawn and agonized, for him shall burn
A path: for him prepare
Laughter and love and singing everywhere;
A morning and a sunrise and a day!
Swarthy and handsome and broad of face
'Twixt the banded brown of her glossy hair.
In her ears are shining silver rings,
Her head and massive throat are bare,
She needs good length in her apron strings
And has a jolly voice and loud
To cry her wares and draw the crowd.
--Fine Coker-nuts! My lads, we're giving
Clean away! Who wants to win 'em?
Fresh Coker-nuts! The milk's yet in 'em.
Come boys! Only a penny a shot,
Three nuts if you hit and the fun if not.
FIRST OLD MAN.   It bean't for j'y I taak the road.
But, Mester, I be getten awld.
Do seem as though in all the e'th
There bean't no plaace,
No room on e'th for awld volk.
SECOND OLD MAN.      The e'th do lie
Yonder, so wide as Heaven a'most,
And God as made un
Made room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.
To the forgotten dead,
Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.
To every fervent yet resolved heart
That brought its tameless passion and its tears,
Renunciation and laborious years,
To lay the deep foundations of our race,
To rear its mighty ramparts overhead
And light its pinnacles with golden grace.
To the unhonoured dead.
To the forgotten dead,
Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the rein
Of Fate and hurl into the void again
Her thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blind
Earthward along the courses of the wind.
Among the stars along the wind in vain
Their souls were scattered and their blood was shed,
And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.
To the thrice-perished dead.
Unconcerned I sat and heard
Little things,
Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,
A frightened bird--
Or faint hands at the window-pane?
And now he will never come again,
The little soul. He is quite lost.
Because if I did not remember him,
My little child--Ah! what should we have,
He and I? Not even a grave
With a name of his own by the river's brim.
Because if among the poppies gay
On the hill-side, now my eyes are dim,
I could not fancy a child at play,
And if I should pass by the pool in the quarry
And never see him, a darling ghost,
Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry--
If in the firelit, lone December
I never heard him come scampering post
Haste down the stair--if the soul that is lost
Came back, and I did not remember.
When the stars are muffled and under them all the earth
Is a fiery fog and the sinister roar of London,
They lament for the toil of their hands, their souls' travail--
"Ah, the beautiful work!"
It was set to shine in the sun, to companion the stars
To endure as the hills, the ancient hills, endure,
Lo, like a brand
It lies, a brand consumed and blackened of fire,
In the fierce heart of London.
Fain would my spirit,
My living soul beat up the wind of death
To the inaccessible shore and with warm voice
Deep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:
I also would bring
To the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;
Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,
And how above St. Edward's bones the Minister
Gloriously stands, how it no more beholds
The silver Thames broadening among green meadows
And gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streams
And the clear mild blue hills.
Rather so high it stands the whole earth under
Spreads boundless and the illimitable sea.
Over what dust the atom footfall passes!
Out of what distant lands, by what adventures
Superbly gathered
To lie so still in the unquiet heart of London!
Is not the balm of Africa yet clinging
About the bones of Livingstone? Consider
The long life-wandering, the strange last journey
Of this, the heroic lion-branded corpse,
Still urging to the sea!
And here the eventual far-off deep repose.
Then suddenly the earth was white
With faces turned towards his light.
The nations' pale expectancy
Sobbed far beneath him like the sea,
But men exulted in their dread,
And drunken with an awful glee
Beat at the portals of the dead.
I saw this monstrous grave the earth
Shake with a spasm as though of birth,
And shudder with a sullen sound,
As though the dead stirred in the ground.
And that great angel girt with flame
Cried till the heavens were rent around,
"Come forth ye dead!"--Yet no man came.
With thoughts too lovely to be true,
With thousand, thousand dreams I strew
The path that you must come. And you
Will find but dew.
I break my heart here, love, to dower
With all its inmost sweet your bower.
What scent will greet you in an hour?
The gorse in flower.
"Then help me out, devil, O help me, good devil!"
"A price must be paid to a spirit of evil.
Will you pay me the price?" said the spirit from Hell.
"The price shall be paid, the bargain is made."
Boom! boom! boom!
From the tower in the silence there sounds the great bell.
"I am fixing the price," said the devil from Hell.
The angels are fled, and the sexton is sleeping,
And I am a devil, a devil from Hell.
GWYLLIM. ... Come on. Why don't you come on? I'm making no
defence.
SHONNIN. Mother?
GWYLLIM. Leave her alone. Strike me, boy. I bid you do it.
SHONNIN. Then I will; with all my might, and may God
increase it!
OWAIN. There is no God.
In the third scene the plan of wild justice is formulated. It had
But then I have done nothing to deserve
To be made a parricide.
... Down slips the moon.
NELTO. Broken and tarnished too? Now she hangs motionless
As 'twere amazed, in a silver strait of sky
Between the long black cloud and the long black sea;
The sea crawls like a snake.
All's fallen from me now
But naked motherhood. What! Shall a hare
Turn on the red-jawed dogs, being a mother,
The unpitying lioness suckle her whelps
Smeared with her heart's blood, this one law be stamped
For ever on the imperishable stuff
Of our mortality, and I, I only,
Forbidden to obey it?
MRS. GWYLLIM. Ellen, you are too young;
You should be innocent--
NELTO. Never again
After this night. Come, mother, I am yours;
Make me a wanton or an avenger.
That set my spirit to swing on such a thread
Over mere blackness, teach me now to guide it!
NELTO. Mother, the moon dips.
MRS. GWYLLIM. Go, my daughter, go!
And let these hands, these miserable hands,
Too weak to avenge my children, let them be
Yet strong enough to pull upon my head
God's everlasting judgment! All that weight
Fall on me only!
We see what follows in the closing scenes as a fulfilment of that
MRS. GWYLLIM. Where are my children, if they are not there?
They cannot both be--Owain, where are they?
OWAIN _[Makes a gesture towards the sea]_. Mother,
May God have mercy on us!
MRS. GWYLLIM. No, not both,
Not both! She's somewhere in the house. Come, Ellen!
She is afraid to come. Come, Nelto, Nelto!
Shonnin, my heart's adored, Shonnin, my love,
Do not be angry with me, answer, Shonnin,
Shonnin! Not dead--not dead!
OWAIN. O hush--hush--hush!
intensity and gloomy grandeur of this play.
I am not sure that it suits _The Princess of Hanover_ quite so
LEONORA. Weeping, dear lady,
Will balm our misery better than laughter.
PRINCESS. Misery? I am mad with all the joy
Of all my years, my youth-consuming years'
Hoarded, unspent delight.
Where are my wings? Do they not shoot up radiant,
A splendour of snowy vans, swimming the air
Just ere the rush of rapture?
PRINCESS. The night is almost over,
Soon will the topmost towers discern the day.
The day! The day! O last of all the days
I have spent in extreme penury of joy,
In garish misery, unhelped wrong,
And in unpardonable dishonour....
Up lingering dawn!
Why dost thou creep so pale, like one afraid?
I want the sun! I want to-morrow!
There was a hand on the door. What can these builders
Be doing here at this hour?
PRINCESS. Why, they're building.
What does it matter? Let them build all night,
I warrant they'll not build a wall so high
Love cannot overleap it.
Contributions to _New Numbers_. (See ABERCROMBIE.)
_The Soul's Destroyer._ Alston Rivers. 1906.
_Urlyn the Harper_ and _The Queen's Vigil_. Elkin Mathews (Vigo
_All the above re-issued by_ The Poetry Bookshop.
_Songs from the Clay._ Macmillan. 1915.