X
Therefore when Gorgon-headed Night was gone—
In labyrinthine marble calm and dread
Unearthly glitter, death to look upon—
Beauty arose to birth, and so was wed
To every dawn-lit dell and mountain-head
And dream of man; wherewith in flowing guise
Unto the heavenly lands she lightly sped,
To be Earth’s lovely envoy in the skies
And chosen Cynosure of Gods’ and mortals’ eyes.
SCHRECKHORN
Upward all day we toiled athwart the rain,
Henry and I, through Alpine pastures green
And great firwoods that overhung the vale
Far spread below; but ever, as evening fell,
Day’s cloudy curtain parted, and the mists
Thinned more and more, and fled among the hills,
Or dropped beneath, or clung in silver threads
To tresses of dim forest; and we saw
A clear blue arch of space spanned high above,
And, burning behind the utmost mountain edge,
Gold altar-glories of the stricken sun.
And high amid the snows we found a crag,
Hung darkly on that argent slope, within
Stamped hollow as by rage of Titan foot;
And there we lit the flame, and made ourselves
Good cheer, while round us dreamed a silent world.
But ere we slept, he, my beloved, arose
And lightly left our firelit cave and stood
Night-circled on a jutting rock beyond;
And with the setting stars about his head
And at his feet that purple vale profound,
He sang the song he sings me evermore.
He sang to watchful heaven and weary earth,
To glittering peak and star and crescent moon,
And high Love, and the loveworn Heart of all.
And all the vales were filled with melody,
And o’er the wide wide night and clear profound,
And over the blank snows and barren crags,
His song came floating back unto his feet:
Unto his feet, and deep into my heart,
There as I lay by the fire and saw him stand,
Saw him there in the night, and see him now,
Now, and for ever.
For he came not back.
At morning dawn, when earth was dashed with light,
Beside the golden summit he slipped and fell,
And slid, and passed to his own home beyond.
THE VEILED ISIS
Ἐγὼ εἰμὶ πᾶν τὸ γεγονὸς καὶ ὂν καὶ ἐσόμενον
καὶ τὸν ἐμὸν πέπλον οὐδείς πω θνητὸς ἀπεκάλυψε.
Now know I that the white-winged hours of heaven
’Twixt me and thee in endless retinue,
Each after each, shall pass; nor ever pause
To lift the least light corner of thy veil,
Or grant thine eyes to mine. O hidden One,
Supreme-set Mother of all mystery,
And myriad-named of men, now know I well
Thou dost endure us but a moment’s span
Upon thy heaving bosom to behold
The wonder of thy movement, at thy grace
To fall and worship—ay, we know not what!
And then, or ever thou hast heard, to fall
And pass, remembering ourselves and thee
No more. O strange, O unassailable,
Thou that with myriad bright play of eyes
Provokest our desire, thy seamless robe,
Set close about for our bewilderment,
Folds thee in perfect proof. For I have toiled
And tarried long by thy familiar ways,
Have known thee going out and coming in,
And watched thy daily wont; have felt the flame
Flash from thy face almost to scathe mine eyes,
And heard at night thy breath about my ears
Beat, and pass quickly by; yea, I have tracked
Thy fingers in and out through woven clouds,
And passionless ebb and flow of waves and streams,
And rockings of the air, only to know
The weft is woven without any flaw
From flight of stars to atoms: rent is none,
No gap, no visionary gleam, and Thou
Art hid for ever.
Therefore now, once more,
I see the Spring descend upon the Earth—
The new life quivering upwards into light;
I see the plaited green on plant and tree
Slide from the soil and break the knotted bark;
The grey elm quickens with a strange delight;
The golden chestnut-buds against the blue
Gleam like a thousand lamps; and melody
Thrills through the woodland air. O now once more
The primal splendour of the sun returns
With a most welcome triumph. Thorn and may
Stand white with bridal blossom unto him;
The ground is cloven and the sleeping flowers
Have heard and known their lord: through wood and dell
Yellow primroses leap and peer to heaven—
He rideth by begirt with azure wings—
And bloom and beauty multitudinous
Break on his path. The violet stands by
Glad in her grassy covert. In the meads
Like angel hosts white daisies wave their wings,
And as he passes bend like one and rise,
And, while he fires with light the Western lands,
Close their bright eyes and blush for very joy.
Once more o’er vale and mountain do I hear
The voice of Spring’s sweet trouble: nightingales
And thrushes in the thicket numberless
Tremble to utter on the quiet air
The mystery of eve; where all night Earth,
Orbed in her dreams of star-related life,
Floats in a flood of moonlight and of dew.
Once more I see it all, and, seeing, know
The infinite of beauty—how thy world
Is charactered with wisdom: each winged sense
Faints with the weight of wonder, till I walk
Like one enchanted to a magic sound,
A king whose eyes are feasted with a play
Of endless scenic change, a child to whom
Earth has no bounds for joy.
And yet, ah! yet,
Deeper than all, and deeper than my joy,
Thou whom I know, nor yet can ever see,
Thou, mother Isis, mother over all,
Thou radiant life and one Reality,
Vanishest for ever: like the Northern beam
Decking the far-off mountains, all untouched,
Unheard, inviolable, Thou movest on
In the great silence of our hearts, through leaf
And bud and fairy bloom fleeting for aye
Wherever we are not. And though our spirits
Burst through their woven chambers till the heart
Ache for the stress of passion; though our dreams
Be girt about with one dull cloud of death
For hope that cannot pierce; yea, though our eyes
For gazing vainly on thy vanishings
Waste away in their orbits; yet at last
We fall, our arms stretched outward on the earth
And features folded in the clay-cold ground,
Nor e’er behold thee face to face at all.
THE TIDE
Six hours it voiceless sank along the shore
In the soft cloud-girt eve; turned in its bed,
And dreamed of other lands. But when the night
Grew to its stillest, and none knew thereof,
There crept across the world a wind-like sigh—
Sweet breath of waking lips—that rose, and passed,
And died along the night, and rose again
Ineffable. And Ocean knew once more
Her crescent tide-mark with its golden range
Of fretted sands and shell-impearlèd weeds,
And once more, joyous, filled with rolling waves
Her creeks and inland waterways; then paused,
And, wondering at herself, sank back to rest,
And dreamed again the dream that has no end.
SUMMER LIGHTNING
Like a dawn the distant lightning,
Fitful, shadow-crowned,
O’er the twilit ocean brightening
Breaks without a sound.
Softly-fair the clouds are riven
Crimsoning in bliss,
As the heights and depths of heaven
Open to its kiss.
Calm in western lake-like splendour
Floats the star of eve:
All hues opaline and tender
Round about it weave;
And that other crystal ocean
Holds its image clear,
Like a smile with soft emotion
Shining through a tear.
Faintly rings a silver laughter
As the ripples die,
And the rising stars thereafter
Answer, and their cry,
As of love to passion risen,
Passes o’er the strand
From Night’s gloomy eastern prison
To the golden land
Where flushed Eve with shining fingers
For an instant keeps
Back the curtained dark, and lingers,
Lovely, ere she sleeps.
So upon the beachy margent
Love a moment stands,
Takes the ocean and the argent
Starlight on the sands;
Takes the sunset slowly whitening
From its golden bloom,
Takes the cloud-girt summer lightning
And the distant gloom;
Orbs them all from world-mutation,
Whole and unforgot,
Into his divine creation
Of immortal thought;
Where, like essences supernal,
They nor pass nor range,
Lifted high in Love’s eternal
O’er eternal change.
IN THE GRASS
BY A MONAD (OF LEIBNITZ)
Here in the grass they laid me long ago,
Far from the tumult and the tears of men,
Soft in the summer grass, forlorn and low—
The face of all the world is changed since then.
Here, on my back and scarce beneath the turf,
To lie and lie for many a summer day,
Hearing the faint far ocean-sweeping surf,
Seeing the blue midnoon and twilight grey.
Yea, though you seek and find me not at all
In these wide meadows and the shoreward plain,
Though in the ground and tangled grasses tall
No vestige of my mortal part remain.
Yet, peradventure, where you plant your heel
And heedless start the lizard on the sand,
I am, and all day watch wild duck and teal
Fly northward in a blue-enamelled band.
Here, void of will, of action unaware,
And dwindled to a mere perceptive point,
Changeless I watch the light divide the air
And glitter on each reedy knot and joint.
Changeless I watch the changes of the sky,
Its liquid blue, its motionless light clouds,—
A solitary seagull sailing by,
A butterfly that him from sight enshrouds.
Now midway-down a thin mist thunder-driven
Moves on the air-built battlements beyond;
Still is the land, until the heights of heaven
Burst and break backward, detonant with sound.
And on the earth fire and a flood are spilled,
The air is no more sultry, but the wind
Drives forward in the grass. The moor-fowl, chilled,
Huddle and crouch in hollows water-lined.
Then, all night long, grey spectres of the dark
Fly onward overhead in strange disguise,
With shriekings of the wind, and weird blue spark
Lighting their myriad white hail-like eyes.
But in the morning with a song the land
Resumes the primal harmony of dawn;
A lark the latest of its tuneful band,
Into the heart of Paradise is drawn
To sing that sweet and slender hymn that I
Have heard so many ages ever new,
Never the same, yet, as the world goes by,
The same hymn steeped in sunlight and in dew.
And sometimes in the reeds a feathered thing
Will shyly peer about, as though it sought
Some old forgotten love of kindred wing
Amid the grass with last year’s dead leaves fraught.
Sometimes a mouse will move, or spider thread
His amber beads betwixt the sky and me,
Sometimes a frozen swallow will fall dead,
Sometimes the southern winds will bring a bee.
Or sometimes in the later autumn days
A red-fanged rough retriever will come nigh,
Threading the scent all through that reedy maze,
And anxious, earnest, panting, pass me by.
But oftenest the world is very still;
A light breeze o’er the land will break and shiver
With musical low melancholy thrill
Among the grasses and the reeds for ever.
I ask no more. The liquid summer light
About this poplar, when its leaves are green,
The change, when glitteringly bare and white
Its branches on the wintry blue are seen.
All are but changes of delight to me,
In each I lose myself, and live, and die,
And rise upon the next with equal glee,
Like one who feasts for ever with his eye.
I ask no more. The slender drooping grace
Of stem and blade seen thus obliquely clear
Suffice me while the moments interlace
To minutes and the minutes to a year.
The centuries soon pass, and, while I live,
The world, which without me were but a dream,
Its changing image to my mind shall give,—
One image and one aspect of its scheme.
THE WORLD-SPIRIT
Like soundless summer lightning seen afar,
A halo o’er the grave of all mankind,
O undefinèd dream-embosomed star,
O charm of human love and sorrow twined:
Far, far away beyond the world’s bright streams,
Over the ruined spaces of the lands,
Thy beauty, floating slowly, ever seems
To shine most glorious; then from out our hands
To fade and vanish, evermore to be
Our sorrow, our sweet longing sadly borne,
Our incommunicable mystery
Shrined in the soul’s long night before the morn.
Ah! in the far fled days, how fair the sun
Fell sloping o’er the green flax by the Nile,
Kissed the slow water’s breast, and glancing shone
Where laboured men and maidens, with a smile
Cheating the laggard hours; o’er them the doves
Sailed high in evening blue; the river-wheel
Sang, and was still; and lamps of many loves
Were lit in hearts, long dead to woe or weal.
And, where a shady headland cleaves the light
That like a silver swan floats o’er the deep
Dark purple-stained Ægean, oft the height
Felt from of old some poet-soul upleap,
As in the womb a child before its birth,
Foreboding higher life. Of old, as now,
Smiling the calm sea slept, and woke with mirth
To kiss the strand, and slept again below.
So, without end, o’er Athens’ god-crowned steep
Or round the shattered bases of great Rome,
Fleeting and passing, as in dreamful sleep,
The shadow-peopled ages go and come:
Sounds of a far-awakened multitude,
With cry of countless voices intertwined,
Harsh strife and stormy roar of battle rude,
Labour and peaceful arts and growth of mind.
And yet, o’er all, the One through many seen,
The phantom Presence moving without fail,
Sweet sense of closelinked life and passion keen
As of the grass waving before the gale.
What art Thou, O that wast and art to be?
Ye forms that once through shady forest-glade
Or golden light-flood wandered lovingly,
What are ye? Nay, though all the past do fade
Ye are not therefore perished, ye whom erst
The eternal Spirit struck with quick desire,
And led and beckoned onward till the first
Slow spark of life became a flaming fire.
Ye are not therefore perished: for behold
To-day ye move about us, and the same
Dark murmur of the past is forward rolled
Another age, and grows with louder fame
Unto the morrow: newer ways are ours,
New thoughts, new fancies, and we deem our lives
New-fashioned in a mould of vaster powers;
But as of old with flesh the spirit strives,
And we but head the strife. Soon shall the song
That rolls all down the ages blend its voice
With our weak utterance and make us strong;
That we, borne forward still, may still rejoice
Fronting the wave of change. Thou who alone
Changeless remainest, O most mighty Soul,
Hear us before we vanish! O make known
Thyself in us, us in thy living whole.
TO A FRIEND
Fair friend, of the sweet hours that are no more,
Canst thou not charm from chambers of the Past
Those happy days of old, the summer wore
Like roses in her emerald zone set fast?
The dawn returns o’er ocean-meadows blue,
And still the moon in ancient splendour glows;
Alas, the mortal mind no magic knows
To render back the joys that once it knew.
Ah me! that day we sat, two souls in one,
Couched in a rocky vale, the summer hours,
And heard in trance the murmurous waters run,
And saw the sunbeam sleep amid the flowers.
A mighty boulder, cloven from the steep,
Cast on the meadow-green its silent shade,
Where we our pleasant rest together made
Till day dipped downwards on the fields of sleep.
From noon till eve the mountain shadows wheeled
And slid from slope to slope and cleft the air,
The hollow vale with laughing light was filled,
Like sunny wine that brims a flagon fair.
The barren crags gleamed moist with heavenly dew,
Forthstreaming from a thousand rills of snow
And dripping dark through mountain halls below
Or leaping with the cataract into view.
The clouds rode overhead, as in a dream,
Piled high in shifting splendour grandly calm,
Until, by magic moved, on us did seem
To fall delicious sleep, like some sweet balm
That steeps the soul in memories divine;
And Fancy, soaring high on wings of Love,
Held revel in the heaven of hope above,
Where dawned the daystar of my life and thine.
So were the happy hours that were; but now
Only sad echoes of sweet voices heard—
Visions that flit along the rugged brow
Of that broad-featured past: like some swift bird
That touching slowly stirs a sleeping flood,
And while its broad face brightens into smiles
Is past already westward many miles,
To where the red sun sinks in fire and blood.
So pass the years, and ever in the past
Old Nature smiles at us frail houseless things;
And if in love or in derision vast
Men scarcely know; alone thy memory brings
To me a hope that cannot fail: a calm
That spreads where else despair: for in thy soul
I see the mould of Nature’s mirrored whole—
One love, like thine, to shield mankind from harm.
BY THE MOUTH OF THE ARNO
Here, where the crawling river seaward sets,
And riverward the sea, about a land
Laid under heaven in lonely flats of sand
Saltblackened, where the sluggish water frets
Its margin till marsh-deltas interlace
In reedy desolation; on each hand
The long gray grasses shiver in their grace
Through sun and shadow, till salt winds deface,
Their wasted beauty; here—by such a strand—
Pale Shelley passed, and so his course did keep
To sail Death’s unexplored and open deep.
* * *
AS ROUND A LIGHTHOUSE
TO——
As round a lighthouse swept of sea and air
The waves plunge many fathom deep, and flow
Unresting o’er the rocky base below,
And glimmer shifting in the fitful glare;
So great unrest about thy heart doth go,
So deep a flood of turbulent despair.
Stand true, O tender heart and strong, stand true:
For I, who steer alone across the deep,
By thee, unknown of thee, my course must keep
O’er the foam-crested fields for ever new;
And thou, alone, unknowing, on the steep,
Must watch the waves with ruin all bestrew.
Not overnear to thee my course may run;
Yet pray I, somewhere on the bitter tide
Thy beam the shuddering night for me divide,
And show the heart-red splendour of thy sun
Reorient with delight upon the wide
Waters of gloomy death when life is done.
THE COMPLAINT OF JOB
CHAP. III
O perish the day I was born, and the night when my mother conceived;
Let that day be darkness, let God regard it no more from on high;
Let fear fright it back to the gloom, and let it no more be reprieved
From the shadowy challenge of death and clouds that about it lie.
O let it no more rejoice with the light-footed days of the year,
Let the pale moon know it no more, let it not be reckoned as one;
O curse it all ye that curse the day! let that night be dear
To them that pray to the Dragon that preys on the light of the Sun.
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark: let it long for the day,
And know it not, nor behold the fragrant eyelids of morn,
Since it shut not the doors of the womb when my mother in travail lay,
Nor hid mine eyes from the dawning light of sorrow and scorn.
Why died I not from the womb, nor gave life back to the deep?
O why was I nursed on the knee, and suckled so well at the breast?
For now should I long have lain in quiet and folded in sleep,
And gathered of old to the great assembly of them that rest:
With judges and kings of earth in their pyramid-sepulchres lone,
With mighty princes that stuffed their tombs with treasures of worth;
So had I not been; so had I sweet peace and nothingness known,
As infants that never saw light, as a hidden untimely birth.
Ah! there do the wicked cease from troubling, the weary rest;
The prisoners rest together, they hear not the tyrant’s word.
Both small and great are there, the oppressor with the opprest;
But the small man hath not fear, the servant is free from his lord.
O wherefore is sweet life given to a soul in bitterness clad?
And wherefore light unto him whom sorrow and darkness hold?
Who waiteth for death all day, and seeing the grave is glad;
But finds it not though he dig for it more than treasures of gold.
O wherefore light unto him whose way is circled with gloom,
Whom God hath girt with a hedge, that he cannot or see or think?
O wherefore light unto me, or meat for my life, to whom
Sighing comes sooner than bread and weeping quicker than drink?
For even all things that I feared have alighted on me from the air;
I have nought of rest, or peace or quiet, but trouble is there.
THE EVERNEW
I walk as one who, walking through the night
From village unto village far withdrawn,
Sees here and there a light and men who wake
With confused murmur growing unto dawn.
And suddenly the birds start into song,
And cart-wheels creak along the flinty ways,
And men are in the field, and lights are out,
While the first sunbeam fills the air with praise.
So louder, as I wander through the world,
Sounds that glad anthem of the glimmering day,
And lamps of men that grope within the dark
Flash quick and quicker through the morning grey,
Ere they grow dim. O glance a thousandwise
Through cold airs wreathing round my brow,
Ye heralds of a sun, before whose face,
The whiles ye fade, men hasten forth to bow.
* * *
ON A CRUCIFIX
IN THE CHURCH OF ST. JOHN LATERAN ROME
Still, still they crucify thee, O great Christ.
They took thee from thy cross on Calvary,
And nailed thee in a splendid place unpriced
Of malachite and gold and porphyry.
They counted all the wounds thy body bore,
They measured all the hours of misery,
On spear and reed and sponge they set great store:
Still, still they crucify thee, gentle Christ.
They used thy name, because thou wast so meek,
To be the watchword of all godless pride;
Because thou wast so gracious to the weak,
They held thy flaming cross up far and wide,
A curse and terror in the common street
To poor and ignorant and world-untried,
And then they came and crouched and kissed thy feet,
With folded hands and lips slavish and sleek.
Still, still they crucify thee, who didst say
Suffer the little ones to come to me,
Whose heart with love beguiled the beaten way,
And made all men behold thee joyfully;
For now they wave away the vulgar crowd,
No simple child of man may come nigh thee:
With obscure rites and incantations loud
They crucify thy love fresh every day.
Once, where the churches offer stones for bread,
And in their Holy Place call darkness light,
Thy sun-like truth-revealing presence shed
Shame on each false and Pharisaic rite:
Till, as thy lustre more intensely shone,
They took thee from thy chosen lowly site,
And set thee for their own especial sun,
And called thee by the name of Church’s Head.
And now, when in an aisle loud trumpets bray,
And facing thee the priests go to and fro,
And, distanced off, the kneeling people pray
And breathe thy name in trembling accents low:
High o’er the incense and the altar cloud,
Afar, and folded in thine own great woe,
Alone, thy head in deep dejection bowed,
Great Christ, they crucify thee every day.
Thy face is turned aside from all that scene,
Thine eyes are weary of their age-long gaze,
Thy frame is worn, thy shrunken limbs grow lean,
Thou seem’st to tremble at the song of praise;
For here, and in thy name, the evil word,
The ban, the curse, and damning pious phrase,
Century after century were heard,
Christ, as if thou their Counsellor hadst been.
So long? These twice ten hundred years, O Christ?
Hath no one yet come near to lift thee down?
Hath no one yet thy holy spirit priced
Above the three nails and the thorny crown?
Thy seamless robe the Roman soldiers took,
But these have woven thee another gown
Of all thy bitter shame and sharp rebuke
Wherein to crucify thee still, great Christ.
Slowly the days run on, the time is long,
The kneeling generations come and go,
Thy word is to them as an empty gong,
They look upon thee, but they do not know.
Thine arms, wide-spread for all the world’s embrace,
Are empty evermore of friend or foe,
Still, still set stiff and rigid in their place,
And straightened back from love with rivets strong.
Ah, surely in the seeming endless years
Some momentary glance hath gladdened thee,
Some smile of recognition reached through tears
Hath shed light on thy later Calvary.
Yet is thy love more like a thing untold,
To stay and suffer still so patiently,
By suffering to overcome the cold
Heart of estrangement of thy loved compeers.
And now, the end, what is it? For each day
The magic ceremonious circle, drawn
Betwixt thee and the people, doth betray
Less room for love and more for serge and lawn;
The world grows weary seeking thee in vain,
And leaves thee to the priests, who self-withdrawn
In secret pride find popular disdain
And pitiful desertion and dismay.
The Papal pride has triumphed: it has set
Itself for thee. The world has turned away.
The Papal pride has fallen. Wilt thou yet
Remain to lead us in this later day?
Or will thy name, as something that is not,
Pass from the ears of men unlearned to pray,
Thy centuries of suffering forgot,
Thy love to men for evermore unmet?
Ah! greater is thy love than this, great Christ.
Thou givest, but thou askest not again:
And though our wayward worship be enticed
To other shrines, thy spirit shall remain,
Unknown, to breathe upon us purer life,
Refine us with the flame of earthly pain,
Until, our hearts with thine no more at strife,
We learn how not to crucify thee, Christ.