4
But few, how few her worshippers! For we
Cast at a myriad shrines our souls, to rise
Beliefless, unanointed, bound not free,
To sacrificing a vain sacrifice!
Let thy lone innocence then quickly null
Within our veins doubt-led and wrong desire
Or drugging knowledge that but fills o'erfull
Of feverous mystery the days we drain!
Be thy warm notes like an Orphean lyre
To lead us to life's Arcady again!
[AT TINTERN ABBEY]
(June, 1903)
O Tintern, Tintern! evermore my dreams
Troubled of thy grave beauty shall be born;
Thy crumbling loveliness and ivy streams
Shall speak to me for ever, from this morn;
The wind-wild daws about thy arches drifting,
Clouds sweeping o'er thy ruin to the sea,
Gray Tintern, all the hills about thee, lifting
Their misty waving woodland verdancy!
The centuries that draw thee to the earth
In envy of thy desolated charm,
The summers and the winters, the sky's girth
Of sunny blue or bleakness, seek thy harm.
But would that I were Time, then only tender
Touch upon thee should fall as on I sped;
Of every pillar would I be defender,
Of every mossy window—of thy dead!
Thy dead beneath obliterated stones
Upon the sod that is at last thy floor,
Who list the Wye not as it lonely moans
Nor heed thy Gothic shadows grieving o'er.
O Tintern, Tintern! trysting-place, where never
Is wanting mysteries that move the breast,
I'll hear thy beauty calling, ah, for ever—
Till sinks within me the last voice to rest!
[THE VICTORY]
See, see!—the blows at his breast,
Abyss at his back,
The peril of dark that pressed,
The doubts in a pack,
That hunted to drag him down
Have triumphed? and now
He sinks who climbed for the crown
To the Summit's brow?
No!—though at the foot he lies,
Fallen and vain,
With gaze to the peak whose skies,
He could not attain,
The victory is, with strength—
No matter the past!—
He'd dare it again, the dark length,
And the fall at last!
[SEARCHING DEATH'S DARK]
When Autumn's melancholy robes the land
With silence and sad fadings mystical
Of other years move thro' the mellow fields,
I turn unto this meadow of the dead
Strewn with the leaves stormed from October trees,
And wonder if my resting shall be dug
Here by this cedar's moan or under the sway
Of yonder cypress—lair of winds that rove
As Valkyries from Valhalla's court
In search of worthy slain.
And sundry times with questioning I tease
The entombed of their estate—seeking to know
Whether 'tis sweeter in the grave to feel
The oblivion of Nature's flow, or here
Wander as gleam and shadow flit her face.
Whether the harvesting of pain and joy
Ends with the ivied slab, or whether death
Pours the warm chrism of Immortality
Into each human heart whose glow is spent.
Nor do my askings fall on the chill voids
Of unavailing silence. For a voice
Of sighing wind may answer, or it leaps,
Though wordless, from a marble seraph's face.
Or sometimes from unspeakable deeps of gold
That ebb along the west revealings wing
And tremor, like etherial swift tongues
Unskilled of human speech, about my heart—
Till, youth, age, death ... even earth's all, it seems,
Are but wild moments wakened in that Soul,
To whom infinities are as a span,
Eternities as bird-flights o'er the sun,
And worlds as sands blown from Sahara's wilds
Into the sea....
Then twilight bells ring back
My wandered spirit from the wilderness
Of Mystery, whence none may find a path
To the Unknown, and like one who upborne
Has steered the unmeasured summer skies until
Their calm seems God, I turn transfigured home.
[SERENITY]
And could I love it more—this simple scene
Of cot-strewn hills and fields long-harvested,
That lie as if forgotten were all green,
So bare, so dead?
Or could my gaze more tenderly entwine
Each pallid beech or silvery sycamore,
Outreaching arms in patience to divine
If winter's o'er?
Ah no, the wind has blown into my veins
The blue infinity of sky, the sense
Of meadows free to-day from icy pains—
From wintry vents.
And sunny peace more virgin than the glow
Falling from eve's first star into the night,
Brings hope believing what it ne'er can know
With mortal sight.
[TO THE SPRING WIND]
Ah, what a changeling!
Yester you dashed from the west,
Altho' it is Spring,
And scattered the hail with maniac zest
Thro' the shivering corn—in scorn
For the labour of God and man.
And now from the plentiful South you haste,
With lovingest fingers,
To ruefully lift and wooingly fan
The lily that lingers a-faint on the stalk:
As if the chill waste
Of the earth's May-dreams,
The flowers so full of her joy,
Were not—as it seems—
A wanton attempt to destroy.
[THE RAMBLE]
Down the road
Which asters tangle,
Thro' the gap
Where green-briar twines,
By the path
Where dry leaves dangle
Down from the ivy vines,
We go—
By sedgy fallows
And along
The stifled brook,
Till it stops
In lushy mallows
Just at the bridge's crook.
Then, again,
O'er fence, thro' thicket,
To the mouth
Of the rough ravine—
Where the weird
Leaf-hidden cricket
Chirrs thro' the weirder green—
There's a way
O'er rocks—but quicker
Is the best
Of heart and foot,
As the beams
Above us flicker
Sun upon moss and root!
And we leap—
As wildness tingles
From the air
Into our blood—
With a cry
Thro' golden dingles
Hid in the heart of the wood.
Oh, the wood
With winds a-wrestle!
With the nut
And acorn strown!
Oh, the wood
Where creepers trestle,
Tree unto tree o'ergrown!
With a climb
The ledging summit
Of the hill
Is reached in glee.
For an hour
We gaze off from it
Into the sky's blue sea.
But a bell
And sunset's crimson
Soon recall
The homeward path.
And we turn
As the glory dims on
The hay-fields' mounded math.
Thro' the soft
And silent twilight
We come,
To the stile at last,
As the clear
Undying eyelight
Of the stars tells day is past.
[RETURN]
Ah, it was here—September
And silence filled the air—
I came last year to remember,
And muse, hid away from care.
It was here I came—the thistle
Was trusting her seed to the wind;
The quail in the croft gave whistle
As now—and the fields lay thinned.
I know how the hay was steeping,
Brown mows under mellow haze;
How a frail cloud-flock was creeping
As now over lone sky-ways.
Just there where the cat-bird's calling
Her mock-hurt note by the shed,
The use-worn wain was stalling
In the weedy brook's dry bed.
And the cricket, lone little chimer
Of day-long dreams in the vines,
Chirred on like a doting rhymer
O'er-vain of his firstling lines.
He's near me now by the aster,
Beneath whose shadowy spray
A sultry bee seeps faster
As the sun slips down the day.
And there are the tall primroses
Like maidens waiting to dance.
They stood in the same shy poses
Last year, as if to entrance
The stately mulleins to waken
From death and lead them around:
And still they will stand untaken,
Till drops their gold to the ground.
Yes, it was here—September
And silence round me yearned.
Again I've come to remember,
Again for musing returned
To the searing fields assuaging,
And the falling leaves' sad balm:
Away from the world's keen waging—
To harvest and hills and calm.
[THE EMPTY CROSS]
The eve of Golgotha had come,
And Christ lay shrouded in the garden's tomb:
Among the olives, Oh, how dumb,
How sad the sun incarnadined the gloom!
The hill grew dim—the pleading cross
Reached empty arms toward the closing gate.
Jerusalem, oh, count thy loss!
Oh, hear ye! hear ye! ere it be too late!
Reached bleeding arms—but how in vain!
The murmurous multitude within the wall
Already had forgot His pain—
To-morrow would forget the cross—and all!
They knew not Rome before its sign,
Bending her brow bound with the nations' threne,
Would sweep all lands from Nile to Rhine
In servitude unto the Nazarene.
Nor knew that millions would forsake
Ancestral shrines great with the glow of time,
And lifting up its token shake
Aeons with thrill of love or battle's crime.
With empty arms aloft it stood:
Ah, Scribe and Pharisee, ye builded well!
The cross emblotted with His blood
Mounts, highest Hope of men against earth's hell!
[SUNSET-LOVERS]
Upon how many a hill,
Across how many a field,
Beside how many a river's whispery flowing,
They stand, with eyes a-thrill,
And hearts of day-rue healed,
Gazing, O wistful sun, upon thy going!
They have forgotten life,
Forgotten sunless death;
Desire is gone—is it not gone for ever?
No memory of strife
Have they, or pain-sick breath,
No hopes to fear or fears hope cannot sever.
Silent the gold steals down
The west, and mystery
Moves deeper in their hearts and settles darker.
'Tis faded—the day's crown;
But strange and shadowy
They see the Unseen as night falls stark and starker.
Like priests whose altar fires
Are spent, immovable
They stand, in awful ecstasy uplifted.
Zephyrs awake tree-lyres,
The starry deeps are full,
Earth with a mystic majesty is gifted.
Ah, sunset-lovers, though
Time were but pulsing pain,
And death no more than its eternal ceasing,
Would you not choose the throe,
Hold the oblivion vain,
To have beheld so many days releasing?
[TO A ROSE]
(In a Hospital)
Why do I love thee?—
Not because thy wak'ning lips
Were wooed to bloom by minstrel wind
Of Araby or Ind.
Not because thy fragrance slips
Into my soul—as if thou must
Be sprung of a mother's dust.
Not because she gave her breast
To thee for one long night—she whose
Pure heart I ne'er shall lose.
But when I lay in sick unrest
Afar from those who are my own,
Thou camest from hands unknown:
Therefore I love thee!
[UNBURTHENED]
Not pain nor the sunny wine
Of gladness steepeth my still spirit as
I lift my gaze across the winter meads
Engarmented in stubble robes of brown.
For, as those solitary trees afar
Have reached unbudding boughs
To the dim warmth of the February sun,
And melted on the infinite calm of space,
So I have reached—and am no more distraught
With the quivering pangs of memory's yesterday.
But the boon of blue skies deeper than despair,
Of rests that rise
As tides of sleep,
And care borne on the plumes
Of swan-swift clouds away to the sullen shades
Of quelled snow-storms low-lying in the west,
Have lulled my soul with soft infinitude.
And now ... down sinks the sun,
Until, half-arched above the marge of earth,
It hangs, a golden door,
Through which effulgent Paradise beyond
Burns seeming forth along the path of those
Who, crowned by Death with Life, pass to its portal.
How soon 'tis closed—how soon! The trumpetings
Of seraphs whose gold blasts of light break o'er
Purplescent passing battlements of cloud,
Sound clear ... then comes the dusk!
[WHERE PEACE IS DUTY]
Dimming in sunniness, aerily distant,
Valley and hillside float;
Up to me wavering, softly insistent,
Wanders the wood-brook's note.
Anchored beyond in azure unending
Cloud-sails await wind-tide.
Oh, for the skylands where soon they'll be wending—
And, unabiding, bide.
Where Time aflow thro' infinite spaces
Stays for no throttle of pain!
Where the stars go at eve to their places;
Where silence never shall wane!
Where there's no sense but of beauty's wild sweetness,
Thought but of sweetening beauty!
Where wanting's stilled in unwanting's completeness—
Where peace is duty!
[WANTON JUNE]
I knew she would come!
Sarcastic November
Laughed cold and glum
On the last red ember
Of forest leaves.
He was laughing, the scorner,
At me forlorner
Than any that grieves—
Because I asked him if June would come!
But I knew she would come!
When snow-hearted winter
Gripped river and loam,
And the wind sped flinter
On icy heel,
I was chafing my sorrow
And yearning to borrow
A hope that would steal
Across the hours—till June should come.
And now she is here.—
The wanton!—I follow
Her steps, ever near,
To the shade of the hollow
Where violets blow:
And chide her for leaving,
Tho' half, still, believing
She taunted me so,
To make her abided return more dear.
[AUTUMN AT THE BRIDGE]
Brown dropping of leaves,
Soft rush of the wind,
Slow searing of sheaves
On the hill;
Green plunging of frogs,
Cool lisp of the brook,
Far barking of dogs
At the mill;
Hot hanging of clouds,
High poise of the hawk,
Flush laughter of crowds
From the Ridge;
Nut-falling, quail-calling,
Wheel-rumbling, bee-mumbling—
Oh, sadness, gladness, madness,
Of an autumn day at the bridge!
[SONG]
Her voice is vibrant beauty dipt
In dreams of infinite sorrow and delight.
Thro' an awaiting soul 'tis slipt
And lo, words spring that breathe immortal might.