II
Moonlight planting the world with lilies, so hushed it seems and scented,
But in the chapel is a droning where the negroes chant their hymns
And we in aureoled loneliness go down the street contented,
With hearts that beat for pleasure to the rhythm of our limbs.
1917
[THOUGHTS OF LONDON]
Oh, have I bartered and forgotten thee,
Selling thy tarnished twilights for gold sun,
Relinquishing thy dreams that used to run
A ragged troop along thy streets with me?
Cast off the glitter of thy jewelry,
Thy lamp-light, starlight, colours crudely spun,
The eloquent ugliness, the roofs of dun,
The fogs that swathe in bands of mystery?
Mother of dreams and laughter and despair!
Thy joy my Heaven is, my Hell thy pain,
Thy labyrinthian streets wind everywhere,
Thy sins and passions baffle me again;
And all my hopes thy lamps that flick and glare,
And all my griefs thy beggars in the rain.
1918
[STREETS]
I am going
Up and down the roads and alleys
Through the forests of the city,
Hunting thoughts, hunting dreams.
My mind shall wander through the streets
Whistling to a vague adventure,
Plucking strange fancies where they lurk and peer
And casting them away.
Dusk is creeping through the town
Lighting the lamps and loitering,
Leaving smoky clouds of shadow,
Hovering clouds of peace;
And behind her race the winds
Whining to the scent of darkness,
Scattering the dust
With their swift hounds' feet....
I am a hunter in the city's jungle,
Exploring all her secret mysteries.
I know her well,
The moaning highways,
And whispering alleys,
The chimney-dishevelled roofs
Where the moon walks delicately
As a stray spectral cat;
The little forlorn squares
Where one tree stands
Drooping bedraggled hair and fingers
Over the benches where the people sit
And stir not from their sullen postures,
Staring out where evening passes
With such a sauntering dreamy step.
I know her parks that spring had decked with garlands,
Fluttered with flags and child imaginings,
Powdered with blossoms exquisite and shy,
Haunted with lovers and their last year's ghosts.
Now stripped with autumn, as the ragpicker
Wrapped in his tattered coat emaciate
Picks up the littered wreck of holiday
To mount the dust heap where our memories lie
Sprawled in a mess of ruins....
I know her monotone of gloomy mansions,
Repeating each in each a dull despair,
Indifferent and dignified;
Those tarnished prisons lined with white and gold,
With dismal silences of velvet carpets,
Where starving souls are kept
Feeding upon each other's isolations,
Not daring to escape....
Some roads seem steep as mountains, weary me
With their crude temples built in praise of lust,
Squatting and smiling at some hideous dream
Of fat bejewelled goddesses, or gods
Frock-coated, undismayed by prayers and tears,
Their hats atilt like halos on their heads....
I love the ribald multi-coloured crowd,
Its radiant loves, and laughters, all the faces
That are as songs, as flowers, as hovering stardust....
I love the memory-crusted taverns
In which my heart has leapt to a fiddler's tune
Until the dawn,
Like a white minstrel stopped to sing
Fantastic serenades, and called me forth
Where through the crystal chandeliers of morning
Dew-prismed shone the sun....
I love the narrow streets whose crippled houses
Are bathed in vitriol twilights,
Spitting smoke,
Or making oaths and mouths at one another....
While between
The flaring tinsel lights of shop and window
Are gaps of goblin darkness passaging
Into Cimmerian depths of mystery and sin....
Wan children stare at me, and in their eyes
I see the flickering pallor of the lamps,
Reflective of the solitude of stars....
And I am thrilled
With horror and the hope for tragedies....
But, they surround my heart these weary streets,
Yea, in my soul they cut their mournful paths,
And through them pass forever
Those shadow figures trudging through the grey
Like penitent souls through haunted corridors....
Ah, Grief, thou wanderer,
Thou maker of music, lingering and sweet!
Here dost thou pause to play thy shrill faint tunes,
Thy fingers touch the stops to loose our tears,
And shake our hearts, and fold our hands in prayer.
Through all the winding mazes of the city
Thy stooping shoulders and thy pitiful face are seen,
And thou dost stand before the gate of brass,
And by the iron door,
Under the windows where we sit and wait
For some sweet promise to unfold itself
From the shut scrolls of sleep,
And at the dusty curtain that divides
Glory from Death,
And lover from the lover....
Now in my room I sit
And round me falls the darkness
In rustling folds of peace.
But round my heart I know
No scarves of sleep and silence can be bound
To shut the city out.
For I shall feel the rush of streets
Shooting inquisitive fingers into chaos,
Piercing the night's remote divinity.
And I shall never rid me of these scars
That time and man have cut into my thought,
Never shake off my shoulders
The burden of the city's pain.
Oh, never shall we escape thee,
Mother of mutiny and want,
Thou beautiful mistress of Grief....
Oh, never shall we escape thy insomnial nights
Beating with ineloquent hands
The tambourines of time,
The drums of war;
Fevering our minds
With the swollen traffic of thoughts,
The wheels and rattle of an endless search....
Tired I am with wandering,
Pricked with the lights and jostled by the worlds,
More jaded than the Moon, more hopeless, grey,
Than that sad pilgrim lost amid the stars!...
1918
Laughter and singing come with the morning,
When Life doth mask his face with a gilded visor,
And dons his arrogant clothes.
But in the night,
When the unsheathed moon stands naked and pale,
We too put off our opulent disguise
And stand alone in the baffling darkness,
Fighting with our sins,
Weeping for our loneliness,
That moon-like gropes forever through the desolate air.
1918
In the night I hear my loneliness calling
The long shrill note of the seabird's cry
Over the fuming spite of breakers,
Over the brumous, sulky tides.
All the ocean is craving Heavenward,
And the wild sky crushes downward toward the sea,
Where the clouds stoop their passionate bodies,
And the waves rear their supplicating hands.
Mine eyes grow tired of looking outward forever,
Away from the firelight and my sleeping idols,
To where the darkness is shattered with gusts of white,
Wings of ship, and bird, and cloud, and wave,
Flashing their signals of unrest.—
My longing is a warm thing in a cold street,
Taking refuge by the chinks of lighted doors—
My longing is a pale ghost stepping into the sunlight
That falls in golden curtains sumptuous and hushed—
My longing is a fiddler making a thin tune through the silence,
Through the heavy pauses of sleep.—
Ah! Stop up my ears lest I hear my longing call,
Lest I hear my loneliness crying!
1918
[SUNDAY]
How beautiful is the world's delight,
How trivial, yet as sweet as a passing dream
That makes the harassed sleeper in the night
Smile, and on waking sigh. Forever the stream
Of time moves onward; as in coloured boats
A thousand souls go sailing,
And stilly down the tide my spirit floats
Singing or wailing
To the tune the waters make. Here we forget a space
The crawling sins of man that sting and gloat,
The pain and fear that haggers every face,
But vaguely and remote
The strident trumpet and the clamorous voices sound—
Grief doth forget to curse her Gods or pray,
While pagan follies squander all around
Their brief gay hours in holiday;
For all prayers die when laughter is on the lips.—
How frail the moods of joy, how sweet to see them pass
Like bubbles on the tide, like coloured ships
Sailing on glass!
1918
The leaves are singing, and the sea,
And the sand in the wind,
Blown grass and hurrying people;
Full of melodious strings and lutes and flutes
Rustling and whispering forever.
The sad music of Life is in my ears,
Never ceasing, never asleep,
And my heart is strung between chord and chord
Like a crucifix in a rosary.
1918
How soundly sleepeth the fool,
With profane snore taunting the solemn-pillared night—
He hath no dreams of restless, subtle forms
That shift across a feverish vacancy;
Nor doth he hear the drums of time
Beating against oblivion tunes of war,
Goading the crippled hours on their endless march—
But waketh to yawn in the face of the sun,
Then turneth back to sleep....
How soundly the wise man sleepeth,
Couched royally in the purple of the dark
With his white mistress, Peace—
And when the morning stealeth on his rest,
As a rose he doth pluck her from the spreading tree of days,
And reviveth his heart
With the perfume of the world....
But 'twixt the wise and the foolish
Many nights shed sorrow and fear,
And nets are spread for timid feet,
And the waves beat on the shifting sand....
1918
Moonlit lilacs under the window,
And the pale smell of their falling blossoms,
And the white floating beams like luminous moths
Fluttering from bloom to bloom.
Sprays of lilac flowers
Frothing at the green verge of midnight waves,
Frozen to motionless icicles.
Moonlight flows over me,
Spreads her bright watery hair over my face,
Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes
Wreathed with syringa and plaited with hyacinths;
Hair of the moonlight falling about me,
Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain.
1918
Old woman forever sitting
Alone in the large hotel under the fans,
Infinitely alone where around you spin
So many lives like painted tops,
Smearing the void a moment with their hues,
Giddily catching at balance as they pause.
What crime was yours, old woman,
What sin against the Earth
That she should give you now
A cap of dust and furrows on your cheeks,
And at the end
A hole dug in the mould?
Is death the promise of Fate's last rebound,
Revenge of Time that waits within the clock
And laughs awry at life,
For a kiss, for a dream, for a child that you bore,
For a fresh rose pinned to your bosom?
The owl is in your spirit,
Blinking through the oldest tree of wisdom—
And now your fingers are weaving
The cold pale invisible blossoms of death
Into a waxen wreath,
And Time
Sits down beside you knitting with quick hands
Grey counterpanes to cover up a grave!
1918
Loneliness I love,
And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.
Loneliness I love,
But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands,...
My spirit speaks
In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy
Murmuring the tunes
For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.
The shadowy silences
Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,
And that is why
The noise of tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,
And I am clad
In the lust-lipped whispering of furtive caresses.
Holiness I love,
And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,
The crucified feet
Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.
Holiness I love
And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.
But that is why
Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear
The vesture of secrecy
Which hides the human nakedness of God.
* * * * *
1918
I met an Indian underneath a tree, under a ragged tree,
His face was yellow and wrinkled like some stone whereon a God had writ
And his emaciated fingers drew circles in the dust....
I bent my mouth to his ear, crying "O father, O Prophet!
I have wandered far over the earth troubled with doubts that will not let me rest,
Canst thou not tell me with all thy wizardries and meditations
The purpose of our lives upon this world,
The secret truth Earth shelters in her womb?"
But he was listening to the whispering of the mountains,
To the boom of God's paces on the rocks,
And the swishing steps of his followers in the rivers.
Then suddenly he pointed to the arched doorway in between the hills,
And the mysterious purple curtain of the dusk that drooped from cliff to cliff.
I saw in his eyes the vision of highborn ghosts,
Of divine ivory faces wreathed with the flowers of wisdom—
And I knew that he had found only the half-spoken promises of Heaven....
* * * * *
I saw a drunkard laughing in a tavern,
His cup was tilted and the wine spilt crimson on the sprawled arms and distracted hair of a woman fallen asleep,
I watched him there and wondered
If ever the bubbling goblins of wine had whispered him life's secret.
But he raised the cup of his carousals and gazed at emptiness,
Toasting some wild, irreverent dream,
Some flame-red salamander pirouetting among the dead waste ashes of time—
And I knew that he had found only the secrets of sleep....
* * * * *
A woman sat within a little house,
Scolding and singing ballads to her child,
And all around came the quarrel of children's voices.
Yet one boy sat apart within the furthest corner of the room
Painting an animal with coloured chalks.
I lingered by the fire thinking of life, its vanities and mysteries,
But the woman did not heed me,
Nor her pale son that sat so hunched and still,
Painting his visions with the broken chalks,
For they had discovered the absorbing painful secrets of giving birth....
* * * * *
It was evening as I wandered,
By a lake two lovers leaned, smiling to see their faces in the water,
For they had found within each other's souls
An argent flattering mirror wherein to gaze and see their faces change with all the moods and shadows of the day....
Not here should I discover the answer to bring light into my darkness,
Into the dim psychic crystals of my soul opalled with the changing colours of unrest—
So I went away into the loneliness, asking the forests and the mountains and the sea
The knowledge of life's baffling mysteries.
But they were roaring in a wind of memories,
Gathering the rain into their bodies to make them fierce and strong,
Heaving their shoulders upward to the morning,
Crowning their foreheads with sunlight.
And I knew that they were Life itself,
The pushing vehemence that rushes from the strangling arms of Death,
Nor could they guess
The purpose of God's beauty in their joy....
1918
From the fathomless depth of my boredom, from the
last room of its emptiness, an elf has come to play
with me.
As comes a little gold spider to a prison cell teasing the
criminal from his darkness to tear at a thread of sunlight,
and kiss the mouth of a shy morning whispering through
the window.
An elf has come to dance with me, blown like a leaf on
the path of my autumn lassitude.
Sprightly one, dervish! You are the living adventure
born of my dead childhood, you are the small god in the
temples of my unbelief, you are the bird that nests in ruined
temples, laying your silver eggs by moonlight and singing
when the pagan birds are still.
You are the dream-sower in the fields of sleep, you have
jingled the star-bells on the hood of darkness, and from the
knarled, stark tree of time have flung me the apple of
eternal laughter.
1919
Lolling in snow, like kings in ermine coats, the gilt-crowned
bottles lie.... Our thoughts are dangled in
a laughter of leaves as bunches of blue and yellow grapes
for faery beggars, for ragged fancies to pluck and taste.
Our music shall be the minstrelsy of ghostly ballad-mongers
that have stolen from the ashen banquets of death to bless
our revels.
Our spirits shall flit like those winged faces of cherubs
that never can alight, but swing forever on the azure ribbons
of the sky.
And all our dreams and kisses shall be as the rose-leaves
falling on ancient festivals, as the shadows of rose-leaves
falling on phantom lovers in the sleep-pillared temples of
our first archaic passion.
1918
The roots of our longing are probing the heart of night,
delving and twining together that our ultimate truth
may grow out of the darkness that bewilders and nourishes.
Out of the earth, the dust, the crystals of frost that bind
themselves like a tight crown over our heads.
Through the mould and the frost our hair and fingers shall
prick their spears of pallor and flame, and in the green
ardour of our up-rushing leaves the red goblets of fire
shall open, and masses of white flowers, milky as the star-sprays
that droop over Heaven, shall splash their bright
foam from the darkness, as waves that rise and break into
a fountain of blossoms.
1919
[VAHDAH]
Sun-aureoled lilies are your priestesses,
They stand like choirs in silver surplices,
Melodious streams of silence fill the room,
And pensive listeners lean within the gloom
Of purple quietness. A laughter full of holiness—
Like the wild bells of lilies ringing in the loneliness
Of star-reflected gardens walled with night,—
Thrills from your soul which empties its delight
As rain on lilies, or as sunlight falling slenderly
To gild their ivory temples, and as moonlight shutting tenderly
Their alabaster doors.... A white peace grows,
And love, within your spirit like a lily and a rose.
1918
Starlit silences!
Breeding fears, swarming with sudden deaths,
With separations, burdens, and despairs,
Weaving slow eerie fancies in my brain ...
Forlorn shorn monks go down the cloisters of quietness
With tortured crucifixes cut in ivory
Clasped in their praying hands,
And psalmed with lips renunciate of kisses ...
Forgotten days are painted on the night
In parables and symbols of remorse
That jeer from out the wind-stirred tapestries.
The hangman's rope coils upward like a snake
Out of the death-coloured waters,
While the black barges pass
Funereal,
Carrying doom from mist to mist....
And madmen steal about the wintry parks
Under the high glum walls of an asylum,
With eyes lit up in phosphorescent ecstasies,
With fumbling hands
That grope for things invisibly obscene.
Even the clock
Grown idiot too from keeping madmen's time
Gibbers the hours away in irrelevant chimes....
Silence embalms the dead with scented bands
And is the watchman to deserted houses,
And draws the violet curtain on the day,
And fits a mask of silver to the moon.
Silence brings corpses from the crypts of memory
And sits them round us in the empty chairs,
Opens the secret chambers of our hopes
And shows us there in awful pantomime
Lust wreathing love with poppies and with ashes,
And Beauty dressing Sin for carnival,
And Peace made drunken with a cup of blood.
It winds as ivy round our listening thoughts
Shutting all sounds away, enclosing us
Within its stifled virid twilight....
Cry out, sing, make noises,
Bacchantes, revellers, clowns!
Bring myriad lamps in clusters, likening grapes
That spill the wine of light into our gloom;
Pressing against our lips
The red grape-kisses of pleasure.
Bring the hounds,
The garlanded white ones,
To bay and snarl and tear the flying rags
Of stillness shadowing away!
Lean over me, O Life,
And whisper all thy lying flatteries
That drag me back from Silence and her dead.
I have kept vigil on my soul too long
Within this vast cathedral of dim sleep,
Languidly gathering
The cold grey lilies of the stars
To slip between her passive waxen hands....
1918
The mountain is an Emperor.
The clouds are his beard, and the stars his diadem;
His bauble is the moon;
He is dressed in silver forests, and the mist his train;
His feet are two white rivers.
1917
I know what happiness is—
It is the negation of thought,
The shutting off
Of all those brooding phantoms that surround
As dank trees in a forest
Cutting the daylight into rags,
Caging the sun
In rusted prison bars.
Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge
And make no song,
But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,
The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,
The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill;
Opening wide the violet-petalled doors
Of every shy and cloistered sense,
That all the scent and music of the world
May rush into the soul.
And happiness expands
The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,
For moth-like fancies winged with evening,
For dove-breasted silences,
For shadowy reveries
And starry pilgrims....
I know what happiness is—
It is the giving back to Earth
Of all our furtive thefts,
The lurid jewels that we stole away
From passion, sin and pain,
Because they glittered strangely, luring us
With their forbidden beauty.
Because our childish fingers curiously
Crave the pale secrets of the moon
And grope for dangerous toys.
Happiness comes in giving back to Earth
The things we took from her with violent hands,
Remembering only
That her dust is our garment,
Her fruits our endeavour,
Her waters our priestess,
Her leaves our interpreters to God,
Her hills our infinite patience.
1918
Long hath the pen lain idle in my hand,
Or traced slow sentences without a rhyme,
Words strung at random to beguile the time
As children threading beads upon a strand.
I have strayed far away from fairyland
Whose little hills grow steep and hard to climb;
I creep along the valleys in the slime,
Or hide me like an ostrich in the sand.
For I have sought a mellow idleness,
To be forever buried as a fly
Lies casketed in amber; where the stress
Of peril, hunger, Death can never cry
To wake me from my sanguine weariness,
Or cloud the lucid stillness with a sigh.
1918
I laid my heart on a stone
And stood in the wood to watch.
Presently a priest came by;
He hid it in his cowl
And buried it in the graveyard.
Now is it grown into a cyclamen tree,
Clustering over the wall,
Beckoning far along the twilight road;
Nodding and singing where the cypress moans,
Ringing its little bells while the great bell tolls.
Whiter than ghosts are its flowers,
And its scent is sweeter than ghostly music—
All the men and priests that pass
In the night when the stars lean down,
Smell the heavy fragrance there
And feel the gentle touch of dripping dew.
Then they cross themselves and go
Hurriedly, warily,
Dreaming of pale women,
Under the pale stars.
1918
The cold light steals into my soul
Revealing its emptiness,
The cold winds batter at my heart
And make its lonely tenant shake with fear—
The raindrops slide across the window-glass
Like sighs that fall from patient weariness;
And coldly smiling time
Peers with his clock-face, ticking in my brain
The pulse of a monotonous remorse.
1918
The caravans of spring are in the town,
Lighting their brilliant torches in the park,
Dangling their bells, engirdling each stark
Black tree with coloured rings. The houses frown
Against the beryl sky, yet wear a crown
Of hazy dream, or flash a golden spark
Of sun-fire in their windows glum and dark;
The people blow like petals up and down.
But London tires at evening, each grey street
Mourns as the slow procession passes by,
Traffic and crowd, and Time on loitering feet.
Spring droops his lute, the slender echoes sigh,
And wistfully the jaded revellers meet,
Their pomp in tatters and their wreaths awry.
1918
I dread the beauty of approaching spring
Now the old month is dead and the young moon
Has pierced my heart with her sharp silver horns.
My tired soul is startled out of sleep
By all the urging joy of bud and leaf,
And in the barren yard where I have paced
Content with prison and despair's monotony,
The trees break into music wild and shrill,
And flowers come out like stars amid the dust,
Bewildering my loneliness with beauty....
For winter with her melancholy face
Shone back my miseries as in a glass,
And wept and whined in harmony with me;
And I could listen by the withering ashes
To the ill-omened drum of dropping rain,
And sighing harken sighs and mute feel silence,
And cold stretch forth my hand into the snows,
And hating, hear the laughter of the wind
Whose mad hands tear the sky.
But now again the promise of the spring
Shall lift my martyred spirit from the dust,
To where the lilied altar shines with peace,
And the white priestess comes
Crowning each candle with a gold desire
Engirdling with pallors
The forehead of a divine ghost.
Ah, but they die, these gods, the candles dwindle
And spring is but a radiant beckoning
To death that follows slowly, silently....
O flitting swallows, fleeting laugh of wind,
O flash of silver in the wings of dawn
That are spread out and closed. O hush of night
Breathless with love, oh swish of whispering tide
That swells and shrinks upon the dreaming shore.
O gentle eyes of children wonder-wide
That grow too soon to weariness and close;
O scuttling run of rabbit on the hills,
And flight of lazy rooks above the elm;
O birds' eggs frail, tinged faintly, nestled close,
And mystery of flower in the bud.
O burning galaxy of buttercups,
And drone of bees above the pouting rose,—
O twilit lovers stilled with reverie
And footprints of them swerving on the sand
And darkness of them clasped against the sky!
I see beyond the glory of your days
The grey days marching one behind the other
To the bleak tunes of silence.
When mists shall smear the radiance of the moon
And the lean thief shall pass,
Snatching the glittering toys away from love,
Plucking the feathers from the wings of peace.
And Life herself, grown old and crooked now,
Shall go the way that her long shadow points,
Her long black shadow down the roads of sleep.
1918
[TO MY FATHER]
I cannot think that you have gone away,
You loved the earth—and life lit up your eyes,
And flickered in your smile that would surmise
Death as a song, a poem, or a play.
You were reborn afresh with every day,
And baffled fortune in some new disguise.
Ah! can it perish when the body dies,
Such youth, such love, such passion to be gay?
We shall not see you come to us and leave
A conqueror—nor catch on fairy wing
Some slender fancy—nor new wonders weave
Upon the loom of your imagining.
The world is wearier, grown dark to grieve
Her child that was a pilgrim and a king.
1917
[TO MY MOTHER]
At evening when the twilight curtains fall,
Before the lamps are lit within my room,
My memories hang bright upon the gloom,
Like ancient frescoes painted on the wall.
And I can hear the call of birds and bells
And shadowy sound of waves, and wind through leaves
And wind that rustles through the burnished sheaves,
And far off voices whispering farewells.
I dream again the joy I used to know
While straying by the sea that hardly sighed
A sorrow in my singing, as the tide
Crept up to clasp me, smiled, and let me go.
And I remember all the glad lost hours,
The racing of brown rabbits on the hill,
The winds that prowled around the lonely mill,
Laburnum laughter, music of the flowers.
The berries plucked with loitering delight,
Staining the dusk with purple, till the thought
Of starry little ghosts behind us caught
Our hearts and made us fearful of the night.
The London evenings huddled in the rain
Whose misty prisms shone with lamplight pale,
Making our hearts seem sinister and frail,
Fainting our thoughts with mystery and pain.
I have a world of memories to dream,
To touch with loving fingers as a sigh
Revives a little flame and lets it die.
Ah, were the days as lovely as they seem
Now that they look so peaceful lying dead?
And is it all the hope of Joy we have,
The broken trophies of the things she gave
And took away to give us dreams instead?
The things we love and lose before we find
The way to love them well enough and keep,
That now are woven on the looms of sleep
That now are only music of the wind.
1918
London grows sad at evening,
And we at the windows sit
To watch her moods,
Wearying with her.
Even a noise of laughter from the street
Sounds in our ears
Like something dropped and shattered on the stone.
Then her musician comes,
A wandering, malicious spirit;
The organ grinder, playing those old tunes
We know too well,
That hurt us with fatigue.
Till Hope like a harlequin,
His glitter hidden in a ragged coat,
The lamplighter, goes by,
Planting his pale flames in the dusk.
1918
Ah! the spring,
Sudden, surprising,
Melting the iron scales around the heart
As the earliest sun
Melts the cold case of dew on leaves—
Ah! the streets like odorous rivers
Chanting the echoes of seas—
Ah! the flowers in shop-windows
Beseeching, persuasive,
Reluctant to let their beauty flow away
From thoughts that mirror them in passing—
Beautiful exiles
Fluttering in their chains,
Thrilled with the noise of bees,
The music of meadows
Still hovering around them—
Flower fingers, flower-touches,
Passional, reminiscent,
Rippling the soul's still waters—
Flower galaxies,
Enamelled bridges arching from dream to dream,
Garlands splashing over the eyes of satyrs,
The furtive woodland eyes,
The pointed inquisitive ears—
Pallid flowers foaming on hill-crests,
Gushing heavenwards
From a sea of stormy mountains—
Opening and shutting exquisite doors,
As the senses open to music,
Shut upon silence,
Open to beauty,
Close their caskets upon love—
Ah! the flowers in the windows,
Amorous of poets
Making a chaplet of song!
1919
[THE UNDERTONE OF THE VOLGA BOAT SONG]
O God,
We have nothing to give Thee,
We are as fog that drifts on the river,
As the wailing of voices blown through mist—
We are as those that carry bags of dust
Heaping them with the dust—
We are covered with the dust of days,
We are pale from the dust of dreamless nights
Shaken before we were rested—
At dawn we are found by the sun
Adrift, labouring, thinking of nothing—
Our wine is bitter, it has made us drunk,
Our bread is coarse,
We are always athirst and hungry....
O God, we have been patient,
We have grown old in weariness,
Our lives are as the labouring of the wind—
We are huddled together in the dawn,
The sleeping houses pass us,
The dawn is a field of nettles
Stinging us from rest....
O God,
We have nothing to give Thee but patience,
We have suffered evil and believed Thee good,
Thy face is the gentleness of the distance,
The river is placid with the thought of Thee—
Our tears have washed us harder than the rocks,
And like the rocks we wait,
Grow old with waiting....
Weariness, the river
Flowing through banks of sleep....
O God, we have nothing to give Thee,
Take our great weariness,
We that have never lived and never slept,
Take our long weariness, O God!...
1919
[Transcribers' Notes:]
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were not changed.
Ellipses are reproduced as printed in the original book.
Most of the poems' titles appear only in the Table of Contents, not with the poems themselves.
When the Transcriber could not to determine whether a verse at the top of a page was a new stanza or part of the stanza on the previous page, the latter was assumed.
Page [42]: "sombring" was printed that way.
Page [89]: "Because I can not" was printed with "can" and "not" as separate words.