Contemporary Belgian Poetry / Selected and Translated by Jethro Bithell

by Unknown

ÉMILE VERHAEREN.

1855—.

THE OLD MASTERS.
In smoky inns whose loft is reached by ladders,
And with a grimy ceiling splashed by shocks
Of hanging hams, black-puddings, onions, bladders,
Rosaries of stuffed game, capons, geese, and cocks
Around a groaning table sit the gluttons
Before the bleeding viands stuck with forks,
Already loosening their waistcoat buttons,
With wet mouths when from flagons leap the cork
Teniers, and Brackenburgh, and Brauwer, shaken
With listening to Jan Steen's uproarious wit,
Holding their bellies dithering with bacon,
Wiping their chins, watching the hissing spit.
Their heavy-bodied Hebes, with their curving
Bosoms in linen white without a stain,
Are going round, and in long jets are serving
Wine that a sunbeam filters through the pane,
Before it sets on fire the kettles' paunches
The Queens of Tippling are these women, whom
Their swearing lovers, greedy of their haunches,
Belabour as befits their youth in bloom,
With sweating temples, blazing eyes, and lolling
Tongue that keeps singing songs obscenely gay,
With brandished fists, bodies together rolling,
Blows fit to bruise their carcases, while they,
With mouth for songs aye ready, throat for bumpers,
And blood for ever level with their skins,
Dance fit to split the floor, they are such jumpers,
And butt their dancer as around he spins,
And lick his face in kisses endless seeming,
Then fall with ransacked corsage, wet with heat.
A smell of bacon fat is richly steaming
From the huge platters charged with juicy meat;
The roasts are passed around, in gravy swimming,
Under the noses of the guests, and passed
Around again, with fresh relays of trimming.
And in the kitchen drudges wash up fast
The platters to be sent back to the table;
The dressers bulge, crowded with crockery;
The cellars hold as much as they are able;
And round the estrade where this agape
In glowing red, from pegs hang baskets, ladles,
Strainers, and saucepans, candlesticks, and flasks.
Two monkeys in a corner show their navels,
Throning, with glass in hand, on two twin casks;
A mellow light on every angle glimmers,
Shines on the door-knob, through the great keyhole,
Clings to a pestle, filters through the skimmers,
Is jewelled on the monster gala bowl,
And slanting on the heated hearthstone sickens,
Where, o'er the embers, turns to brown the flesh
Of rosy sucking-pigs and fat cock-chickens,
That whet the edge of appetite afresh.
From dawn to eve, from eve to dawn, and after,
The masters with their women revel hold—
Women who play a farce of opulent laughter:
Farce cynical, obscene, with sleeves uprolled,
In corsage ript a flowering gorge not hiding,
Belly that shakes with jollity, bright eyes.
Noises of orgy and of rut are gliding,
Rumbling, and hissing, till they end in cries;
A noise of jammed iron and of vessels banging;
Brauwer and Steen tilt baskets on their crowns;
Brackenburgh is two lids together clanging;
Others with pokers fiddle gridirons, clowns
Are all of them, eager to show their mettle;
They dance round those who lie with feet in air;
They scrape the frying-pan, they scrape the kettle;
And the eldest are the steadiest gluttons there,
Keenest in kisses, and the last to tumble;
With greasy nose they lick the casseroles;
One of them makes a rusty fiddle grumble,
Whose bow exhausts itself in cabrioles;
Some are in corners vomiting, and others
Are snoring with their arms hung round their seats
Babies are bawling for their sweating mothers
To stuff their little mouths with monster teats.
Men, women, children, all stuffed full to bursting;
Appetites ravening, and instincts rife,
Furies of stomach, and of throats athirsting,
Debauchery, explosion of rich life,
In which these master gluttons, never sated,
Too genuine for insipidities,
Pitching their easels lustily, created
Between two drinking-bouts a masterpiece.

THE COWHERD.
In neckerchief and slackened apron goes
The girl to graze the cows at dawn's first peep;
Under the willow shade herself she throws
To finish out her sleep.
Soon as she sinks she snores; around her brow
And naked toes the seeded grasses rise;
Her bulging arms are folded anyhow,
And round them buzz the flies.
The insects that all heated places love
Come flitting o'er the grass to bask in swarms
Upon the mossy patch she lies above,
And by her sprawling warms.
Sometimes her arm, with awkward empty sweep,
Startles around her limbs the gratified
Murmur of bees; but, greedy still of sleep,
She turns to the other side.
The heavy, fleshy flowers the cattle browse
Frame in the sleeping woman as she dreams;
She has the heavy slowness of her cows,
Her eye with their peace gleams.
Strength, that the trunk of oaks with knots embosses,
Shines, as the sap does, in her; and her hair
Is browner than barley in the fields that tosses,
Or the sand in the pathways there.
Her hands are raw, and red, and chapped; the blood
That through her tanned limbs rolls its waves of heat,
Lashes her throat, and lifts her breasts, as would
The wind lift bending wheat.
Noon with a kiss of gold her rest surprises,
Low willow branches o'er her shoulders lean,
And blend, while heavier slumber in her eyes is,
With her brown hair their green.
THE ART OF THE FLEMINGS.
I.
Art of the Flemings, thou didst know them, thou,
Who well didst love them, wenches big of bone,
With ruddy teats, and bodies like flowers blown;
Thy proudest masterpieces tell us how.
Whether a goddess glimmers from thy painting,
Or nymphs with dripping hair a shepherd sees
Rising among the lonely irides,
Or sailors to the sirens' kisses fainting,
Or females with full contours symbolizing
The seasons beautiful, O glorious Art,
These are the Masteries love-born in thy heart,
The wenches of thy colours' gormandizing.
And to create their bodies' carnal splendour,
Naked, and fat, and unashamed, thy brush
Under their clear and glossy skin made blush
A fire of unimagined colours tender.
They were a focussed light that flashed and glinted;
Their eyes were kindled at the stars, and on
Thy canvases their bosoms rose and shone,
Like great bouquets of flesh all rosy-tinted.
Sweating with love they rolled about a clearing
'Mid in the wood, or bathed their feet in springs,
While in the thickets full of noise of wings,
Satyrs were prowling and through branches leering,
And hid their legs, salacious, shagged, distorted;
Their eyes, like sparks holing the darkness, lit
Some leafy corner, their long mouths were slit
With greasy smiles, their lustful nostrils snorted,
Till, dogs in rut, they leapt to their bitches; these
Feign flight, and shiver coldly, blushing roses,
Pushing the satyr off the part that closes,
Squeezing their thighs together under his knees.
And some, by madness more than his ignited,
Rounding their naked haunches, and rich flesh
Of glorious croups beneath a showering mesh
Of golden hair, to wild assaults invited.
II.
You with the life with which yourselves abounded
Conceived them, masters dear to fame, with red
Brutalities of blood upon them shed,
The bodies of your beauties richly rounded.
No pallid women sunk in listless poses
Morosely on your canvases are seen,
As the moon's face shimmers in waters green,
Mirroring their phthisis and chlorosis,
With foreheads sad as is the day's declining,
Sad as a dolorous music faints and dies,
With heavy-lidded, sick and glassy eyes,
In which consumption and despair are pining,
And false, affected grace of bodies faded
Upon the sofas where their time they pass,
In scented dressing-gowns of taffetas,
And in chemises with a dear lace braided.
Nothing your brushes knew of painted faces,
Nor of indecency, nor of the nice
Hints of a cunning and perverted vice
Which with its winking eye our art debases,
Nor of the pedlar Venuses whose draping
Of curtains of the cushioned chamber hints,
Nor corners of a venal flesh that glints
In nests out of the low-necked dress escaping,
Pricking, suggestive themes you knew not, faintings
Of shepherdesses in false pastorals,
No, nor voluptuous beds in hollow walls—
The pulsing women, masters, of your paintings,
In landscapes bright, or waited on by pages
Crimsonly clad in panelled halls with gold,
Or in the purple sumptuousness unrolled
Of the god-guarded, mellow classic ages,
Your women sweated health; they were serenely
Crimson with blood, and white with corpulence;
Ruts they did hold in leashed obedience,
And led them at their heels with gesture queenly.

PEASANTS.
Not Greuze's ploughmen made insipid in
The melting colours of his pastorals,
So neatly dressed, so rosy, that one laughs
To see the sugared idyll chastening
The pastels of a Louis Quinze salon,
But dirty, gross, and bestial—as they are.
Penned round some market town in villages,
They know not them who traffic in the next,
But hold them enemies to cheat and rogue.
Their fatherland? Not one believes in it,
Except that it makes soldiers of their sons,
To steal their labour for a span of years.
What is the fatherland to yokels? They
See only, in a corner of their brains,
Vaguely, the king, magnificent man of gold,
In the braided velvet of his purple robes,
A sceptre, and gemmed crowns escutcheoning
The panelled walls of gilded palaces,
Guarded by sentinels with tasselled swords.
This do they know of power. It is enough.
And for the rest their heavy feet would march
In clogs through duty, liberty, and law.
In everything by instinct ankylosed,
A dirty almanac is all they read;
And though they hear the distant cities roaring,
So terrified are they by revolutions,
That they are riveted to serfdom's chains,
Fearing, if they should rear, the iron heel.
Along the black roads hollowed out with ruts,
Dung-heaps in front and cinder-heaps behind,
Stretch with low roofs and naked walls their huts
Under the buffeting wind and lashing rain.
These are their farms. And yonder soars the church,
Stained, to the north, with ooze of verdigris,
And farther, squared with ditches, lie their fields,
Fertile in patches, thanks to fat manure,
And to the harrow's unrelenting teeth.
There they keep tilling with their obstinate hands
The black glebe mined by moles, and rotten with
Detritus, pregnant with the autumn's sperm.
With dripping brow they drive the spade in deep,
Doubled above the furrows they must sow,
Under the hail of March that whips their back.
And in the summer, when the ripe rye rocks
With golden glints under the pouring sun,
Here, in the fire of long and torrid days,
Their restless sickle shaves the vast wheat-field,
While from their wrinkled foreheads runs the sweat,
Opening their skin from shoulders down to hips;
Noon darts its brazier rays upon their heads;
So raw the heat is that in meslin fields
The too dry ears burst open, and the beasts,
Their necks with gadflies riddled, pant in the sun.
And let November slow to die arrive,
Rolling his hectic rattle through deaf woods,
Howling his sobs and ending not his moans,
Until his death-knell sounds—still runs their sweat.
Always anew preparing future crops,
Under a sky spouting from swollen clouds,
While the north wind tears big holes in the woods,
And sweeps the broken stubble from the fields,
So that their bodies soon in ruin fall:
Let them be young and comely, broadly built,
Winter that chills, summer that calcines them,
Makes their limbs loathsome and their lungs short-breathed;
Or old, and bearing the down-weighing years,
With blear eyes, broken backs, and useless arms,
And horror stamped upon their hedgehog face,
They stagger under the ruin-loving wind.
And when Death opens unto them its doors;
Their coffin sliding into the soft earth
Seems only to contain a thing twice dead.
II.
On evenings when through eddying skies the wind
Is whirling the swarming snow across the fields,
Grey-headed farmers sit in reckonings lost,
Near lamps from which a thread of smoke ascends.
The kitchen is unkempt and slatternly:
A string of dirty children by the stove
Gorge the spilt remnants of the evening meal;
Mangy and bony cats lick dishes clean;
Cocks make their beaks ring upon pewter plates;
Damp soaks the leprous walls; and on the hearth
Four flickering logs are twisting meagre shanks
Dying with listless tongues of pale red ray;
The old men's heads are full of bitter thoughts.
"For all the seasons unremitting toil,
With all hands at the plough a hundred years,
The farm has passed from father on to son,
And, with good years and bad, remains the same,
Jogging along upon the brink of ruin."
This is what gnaws and bites them with slow tooth.
So like an ulcer hate is in their hearts,
Patient and cunning hate with smiling face.
Their frank and loud good nature hatches rage;
Wickedness glimmers in their icy looks;
They stink of the rancorous gall that, age by age,
Their sufferings have collected in their souls.
Keen are they on the slightest gain, and mean;
Since they can not enrich themselves by work,
Stinginess makes their hearts hard, their hearts fetid;
And black their mind is, set on petty things,
And stupid and confounded before great;
As they had never raised their eyes unto
The sun, and seen magnificent sunsets
Spread on the evening, like a crimson lake.
III.
But kermesse is for them a festival,
Even for the dirtiest, the stingiest,
There go the lads to keep the wenches warm.
A huge meal, greased with bacon and hot sauces,
Makes their throats salty and enflames their thirst.
They roll in the inns, with rounded guts, and hearts
Aflame, and break the jaws and necks of those
Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by God!
To lick the village girls too greedily,
And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs.
Savings are squandered—for the girls must dance,
And every chap must treat his mate, until
The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps.
The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs,
Their faces fire-plated, darting fright,
Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth,
In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns.
The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams
In a white froth along the causey chinks.
Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored.
Some are with short steps steadying their gait;
While others solo bawl a song's refrain,
Hindered by hiccoughing and vomiting.
In brawling groups they ramble through the town,
Calling the wenches, catching hold of them,
Hugging them, shoving at them,
Letting them go, and pulling them back in rut,
Throwing them down with flying skirts and legs.
In the taverns—where the smoke curls like grey fog
And climbs to the ceiling, where the gluing sweat
Of heated, unwashed bodies, and their smells
Dull window-panes and pewter-pots with steam—
To see battalions of couples crowd
In growing numbers round the painted tables,
It looks as if their crush would smash the walls.
More furiously still they go on swilling,
Stamping and blustering and raging through
The cries of the heavy piston and shrill flute.
Yokels in blue smocks, old hags in white bonnets,
And livid urchins smoking pipes picked up,
All of them jostle, jump, and grunt like pigs.
And sometimes sudden wedges of new-comers
Crush in a corner the quadrille that looks,
So unrestrained it is, like a mixed fight.
Then try they who can bawl the loudest, who
Can push the tidal wave back to the wall,
Though with a knife's thrust he should stab his man.
But the band now redoubles its loud din,
Covers the quarrelling voices of the lads,
And mingles all in leaping lunacy.
They calm down, joke, touch glasses, drunk as lords.
The women in their turn get hot and drunk,
Lust's carnal acid in their blood corrodes,
And in these billowing bodies, surging backs,
Freed instinct grows to such a heat of rut,
That to see lads and lasses wriggling and writhing,
With jostling bodies, screams, and blows of fists,
Crushing embraces, biting kisses, to see them
Rolling dead drunk into the corners, wallowing
Upon the floor, knocking themselves against
The panels, sweating, and frothing at the lips,
Their two hands, their ten fingers ransacking
And emptying torn corsages, it seems—
Lust is being lit at the black fire of rape.
Before the sun burns with red flames, before
The white mists fall in swaths, the reeking inns
Turn the unsteady revellers out of doors.
The kermesse in exhaustion ends, the crowd
Wend their way homewards to their sleeping farms,
Screaming their oaths of parting as they go.
The aged farmers too, with hanging arms,
Their faces daubed with dregs of wine and beer,
Stagger with zigzag feet towards their farms
Islanded in the billowing seas of wheat.
FOGS.
You melancholy fogs of winter roll
Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul,
And swathe my heart with your long winding-sheet,
And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet,
While far away upon the heaven's bounds,
Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds
A tired, lamenting angelus that dies
With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies,
So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook,
Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook,
Hearing it sob, awakens and replies,
Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries,
Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread
That in the belfry tower the bell is dead.

ON THE COAST.
A blustering wind the scattered vapour crowds
And shakes the horizon, where the dawn bursts, by
A charge that fills the ashen azure sky
With rearing, galloping, mad, milky clouds.
The whole, clear day, day without mist or rain,
With leaping manes, gilt flanks, and fiery croups,
In a flight of pallid silver and foam, their troops
Career across the ether's azure plain.
And still their ardour grows, until the eve's
Black gesture cuts the vast of space, and heaves
Their masses towards the squall that landward blares,
While the ample sun of June, fallen from Heaven's vault,
Writhes, bleeding, in their vehement assault,
Like a red stallion in a rut of mares.
HOMAGE.
I.
To heap in them your heavinesses fair,
By double, frugal, savoury breasts embossed,
The rosy skin by which your arms are glossed,
Your belly's curly fleece of reddish hair,
My verses I will weave as, at their doors
Seated, old basket-makers curb and twine
White and brown osiers in a clear design,
Copying enamelled tesselated floors,
Until your body's gold within them teems;
And like a garland I will wear them, spun
In massive blonde heaps on my head, in the sun,
Haughtily proud, as a strong man beseems.
II.
Your rich flesh minds me of the centauresses,
Whose arms Paul Rubens rounded in his dyes
Of fire beneath a weight of sun-washed tresses,
Pointing their breasts to lion-cubs' green eyes.
Your blood was theirs, when in the mazy gloaming,
Under some star that bit the brazen sky,
They heard a stranger in the sea-fog roaming,
And hailed some Hercules astray and shy;
And when with quivering senses hot for kisses,
And belly for the unknown gaping, their
Arms they were twisting, calling to mad blisses
Huge, swarthy eaters of rut on a body bare.
CANTICLES.
I.
Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires
Of gold, with great wide eyes and bronze-nailed feet,
Crawl towards your body my long, green desires.
In the full torrid noon of summer heat
I have bedded you in a nook at a field's edge,
Where the tanned meslin shoots a shivering wedge.
Heat is suspended o'er us like a daïs;
The sky prolongs the vast expanse, gold-plated;
Afar the Scheldt a dwindling, silver way is;
Lascivious, huge, you lie there yet unsated;
Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires
Of gold, crawl back to you my spent desires.
II.
My love shall be the gorgeous sun that robes
With torrid summer and with idlenesses
Your body's naked slopes and hilly globes,
Showering its light upon you in caresses,
And this new brazier's contact shall be in
Tongues of an ambient gold that lick your skin.
The tragic, rolling red of dawn and eve,
And the day's beauty you shall be; with hues
Of splendour you a billowy robe shall weave;
Your flesh shall be like fabulous statues,
Which in the desert sang, and shone like roses,
When morning burned their blocks with apotheoses.
III.
I would not choose the sunflowers that unclose
In daylight; nor the lily long of stem;
Nor roses loving winds to fondle them;
No, nor great nenuphars whose pulp morose,
And wide, cold eyes, charged with eternity,
Upon their imaging pond yawn idle-lipped
Their stirless dreams; nor flowers despotic, whipped
By wrath and wind along a hostile sea,
To symbolize you. No, but shivering wet
Under the dawn, with great red calyx leaves
Mingling as jets of blood are fused in sheaves,
A group of garden dahlias closely set,
Which, in voluptuous days of autumn, bright
With matter's hot maturity and heats,
Like monstrous and vermilion women's teats,
Grow stiff beneath the golden hands of light.
DYING MEN.
Sharp with their ills, and lonely in their dying,
The sceptic sick watch by their chamber fire,
With haggard eyes, the evening magnifying
The house-fronts, and the blackening church-spire.
The hour is dead where in some never-crowded
City by time extinguished, desolate,
They live immured in walls by mourning shrouded,
And hear the monumental hinges grate.
Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten,
Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick;
Life and its days identic they have eaten,
Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.
But shaken in their cynical assurance,
And in their haughtiness and pale disgust,
They ask: "Is happiness not in endurance
Of wilful suffering, suffering loved with lust?"
Of old they felt their hearts go out to others;
Benevolent, they pitied alien griefs;
And, like apostles, loved their suffering brothers,
And feared their pride, cabined in dead beliefs.
But now they think that love is more cemented
By cruelty than kindness, which is vain.
What of the few, chance tears they have prevented?
How many more have flowed? Decreed is pain.
Empty the golden islands are, where lingers
In golden mist Dream in a mantle spun
Of purple, skimming foam with idle fingers
From silent gold rained by a teeming sun.
Broken the proud masts, and the waves are churning!
Steer to extinguished ports the vessel's prow:
No lighthouse stretches its immensely burning
Arm to the great stars—dead the fires are now.
Haggard and lone, they gaze at Death unbeaten,
Like grim old wolves, the hieratic sick;
Life and its days identic they have eaten,
Their hate, their fate, diseases clustering thick.
With nails of wood they beat hot foreheads. Cages
Of bones for fevers are their bodies. Blind
Their eyes, their lips like withered parchment pages.
A bitter sand beneath their teeth they grind.
Now in their extinct souls a longing blazes
To sail, and in a new world live again,
Whose sunset like a smoking tripod raises
The God of shade and ebony in its brain;
In a far land of tempests raging madly,
In lands of fury hoarse and livid dreams,
Where man can drown, ferociously and gladly,
His soul and all his heart in fiery streams.
They are the tragic sick sharp with diseases;
Haggard and lone they watch the town fires fade;
And pale façades are waiting till it pleases
Their crumbling bodies have their coffins made.
THE ARMS OF EVENING.
While the cold night stories its terrace, gored
And dying evening throws upon the heath,
And forest fringed with marshes underneath,
The gold of his armour and the flash of his sword,
Which wave to wave go floating on, too soon
Yet to have lost day's flaunting ardent glow,
But kissed already by the shadowed, slow
Lips of the pious, silver-handed moon,
The lonely moon remembering the day,
Whose brandished weapons made a golden glare,
A pale wraith in the paleness of the air,
The moon for ever pale and far away!

THE MILL.
Deep in the evening slowly turns the mill
Against a sky with melancholy pale;
It turns and turns, its muddy-coloured sail
Is infinitely heavy, tired, and ill.
Its arms, complaining arms, in the dawn's pink
Rose, rose and fell; and in this o'ercast eve,
And deadened nature's silence, still they heave
Themselves aloft, and weary till they sink.
Winter's sick day lies on the fields to sleep;
The clouds are tired of sombre journeyings;
And past the wood that gathered shadow flings
The ruts towards a dead horizon creep.
Around a pale pond huts of beechwood built
Despondently squat near the rusty reeds;
A lamp of brass hung from the ceiling bleeds
Upon the wall and windows blots of gilt.
And in the vast plain, with their ragged eyes
Of windows patched, the suffering hovels watch
The worn-out mill the bleak horizon notch,—
The tired mill turning, turning till it dies.
IN PIOUS MOOD.[1]
The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.
And I uplift my heart, my night-worn heart in turn,
O Lord, my heart! to thy pale, infinite Inane,
And yet I know that nought the implenishable urn
May plenish, that nought is, whereof this heart dies fain;
And I know thee a lie, and with my lips make prayer
And with my knees; I know thy great, shut hands averse,
Thy great eyes closed, to all the clamours of despair;
It is I, who dream myself into the universe;
Have pity on my wandering wits' entire discord;
Needs must I weep my woe towards thy silence, Lord!
The winter lifts its chalice of pure night to heaven.
—OSMAN EDWARDS.

[ [1] The Savoy, No. 4, August 1896.

THE FERRYMAN.
With hands on oars the ferryman
Strove where the stubborn current ran,
With a green reed between his teeth.
But she who hailed him from the bank,
Beyond the waves, among the rushes rank
That rim the rolling heath,
Into the mists receded more and more.
The windows, with their eyes,
And the dials of the towers upon the shore,
Watched him, with doubled back,
Straining and toiling at the oar,
And heard his muscles crack.
Of a sudden broke an oar,
Which the current bore
On heavy waves down to the sea.
And she who hailed him from the mist,
In the blustering wind, appeared
More madly still her arms to twist,
Towards him who never neared.
The ferryman took to the oar remaining
With such a might,
That all his body cracked with straining,
And his heart shook with feverish fright.
A sudden shock, the rudder tore,
And the current bore
This remnant to the sea.
The windows on the shore,
Like eyes with fever great,
And the dials of the towers, those widows straight
That in their thousands throng
A river bank, were obstinately staring
At this mad fellow obstinately daring
His crazy voyage to prolong.
And she who hailed him there with chattering teeth,
Howled and howled in the mists of night,
With head stretched out in frantic fright
To the unknown, the vast, and rolling heath.
The ferryman, as a statue stands,
Bronze in the storm that paled his blood,
With the one oar firm in his hands,
Beat the waves, and bit the flood.
His old hallucinated eyes
See the lit distances rejoice,
Whence reaches him the lamentable voice,
Under the freezing skies.
His last oar breaks,
His last oar the current takes,
Like a straw, down to the sea.
The ferryman exhausted sank
Upon his bench, with sweat that poured,
His loins with vain exertion sore,
A high wave struck on the lee-board,
He looked, behind him lay the bank:
He had not left the shore.
The windows and the dials gazed,
With eyes they opened wide, amazed,
Where all his strength to ruin ran;
But the old, stubborn ferryman
Kept all the same, for God knows when,
The green reed in his teeth, even then.
THE RAIN.
As reeled from an exhaustless bobbin, the long rain,
Interminably through the long gray day,
Lines the green window pane
With its long threads of gray,
The reeled, exhaustless rain,
The long rain,
The rain.
It has been ravelling out, since last sunset,
Rags hanging soft and low
From sulky skies of jet.
Unravelling, patient, slow,
Upon the roads, since last sunset,
On roads and streets,
Continual sheets.
Along the leagues that wind
Through quiet suburbs to the fields behind,
Along the roads interminably bending,
In funeral procession, drenched, resigned,
Toiling, bathed in sweat and steam,
Vehicles with tilted coverings are wending;
In ruts so regular,
And parallel so far
By night to join the firmament they seem,
The water drips hour after hour,
The spouts gush, and the trees shower,
With long rain wet,
With rain tenacious yet.
Rivers o'er rotten dikes are brimming
Upon the meadows where drowned hay is swimming;
The wind is whipping walnut trees and alders,
And big black oxen wading stand
Deep in the water of the polders,
And bellow at the writhen sky;
And evening is at hand,
Bringing its shadows to enfold the plain, and lie
Clustered at the washed tree's root;
And ever falls the rain,
The long rain,
As fine and dense as soot.
The long rain,
The long rain falls afresh;
And its identic thread
Weaves mesh by mesh
A raiment making naked shred by shred
The cottages and farmyards gray
Of hamlets crumbling fast away;
A bunch of linen rags that hang down sick
Upon a loosely planted stick;
Here a blue dovecote to the roof that cleaves;
Sinister window panes
Plastered with paper rank with mildew stains;
Dwellings whose regular eves
Form crosses on their gable ends of stone;
Uniform, melancholy mills,
Standing like horns upon their hills;
Chapels, and spires with ivy overgrown;
The rain
The long rain
Winter-long beneath them burrows.
The rain, in lines,
The long, gray rain untwines
Its watery tresses o'er its furrows,
The long rain
Of countries old,
Torpid, eternally unrolled.
THE FISHERMEN.
Up from the sea a flaky, dank,
Thickening fog rolls up, and chokes
Windows and closed doors, and smokes
Upon the slippery river bank.
Drowned gleams of gas-lamps shake and fall
Where rolls the river's carrion;
The moon looks like a corpse, and on
The heaven's rim its burial.
But flickering lanterns now and then
Light up and magnify the backs,
Bent obstinately in their smacks,
Of the old river fishermen,
Who all the time, from last sunset,
For what night's fishing none can know,
Have cast their black and greedy net,
Where silent, evil waters flow.
Deep down beyond the reach of eye
Fates of Evil gathering throng,
Which lure the fishers where they lie
To fish for them with patience strong,
True to their task of simple toiling
In contradictory fogs embroiling.
And o'er them peal the minutes stark,
With heavy hammers peal their knells,
The minutes sound from belfry bells,
The minutes hard of autumn dark,
The minutes list.
And the black fishers in their ships,
In their cold ships, are clad in shreds;
Down their cold nape their old hat drips
And drop by drop in water sheds
All the mist.
Their villages are numb and freeze;
Their huts are all in ruin sunk,
And the willows and the walnut-trees
The winds of the west have whipped and shrunk;
And not a bark comes through the dark,
And never a cry through the void midnight,
That floated, humid ashes blight.
And never helping one another,
Never brother hailing brother,
Never doing what they ought,
For himself each fisher's thought:
And the first draws his net, and seizes
All the fry of his poverty;
And the next drags up, as keen as he,
The empty bottoms of diseases;
Another opens out his net
To griefs that on the surface swim;
And another to his vessel's rim
Pulls up the flotsam of regret.
The river churns, league after league,
Along the dikes, and runs away,
As it has done so many a day,
To the far horizon of fatigue;
Upon its banks skins of black clay
By night perspire a poison draught;
The fogs are fleeces far to waft,
And to men's houses journey they.
Never a lantern streaks the dark,
And nothing stirs in the fisher's bark,
Save, nimbusing with halos of blood,
The thick white felt of the clustering fogs,
Silent Death, who with madness clogs
The brains of the fishermen on the flood.
Lonely at the fog's cold heart,
Each sees not each, though side by side;
Their arms are tired, their vessels ride
By sandbanks marked on ruin's chart.
Why in the dark do they not hail each other?
Why does a brother's voice console not brother?
No, numb and haggard they remain,
With vaulted back and heavy brain,
With, by their side, their little light
Rigid in the river's night.
Like blocks of shadow there they arc,
And never pierce their eyes afar
Beyond the acrid, spongy wet;
And they suspect not that above,
Luring them with a magnet's love,
Stars immense are shining yet.
These fishers in black torment tossed,
They are the men immensely lost
Among the knells and far aways
And far beyonds where none can gaze;
And in their souls' monotonous deeps
The humid autumn midnight weeps.
SILENCE.
Since last the summer broke above her
A flash of lightning from his thunder-sheath,
Silence has never left her cover
In the heather on the heath.
Across her refuge peers the steeple,
And with its fingers shakes its bells;
Around her prowl the vehicles,
Laden with uproarious people;
Around her, where the fir-trees end,
In its rut the cart-wheel grates;
But never a noise has strength to rend
The tense, dead space where silence waits.
Since the last loud thunder weather,
Silence has stirred not in the heather;
And the heath, wherein the evenings sink,
Beyond the endless thickets, and
The purple mounds of hidden sand,
Lengthens her haunts to heaven's brink.
And even winds stir not the slim
Larches at the marsh's rim,
Where she will glass her abstract eyes
In pools where wondering lilies rise;
And only brushes her the clouds'
Shadow when they rush in crowds,
Or else the shadow of a flight
Of hovering hawks at heavens' height.
Since the last flash of lightning streaked the plain,
Nothing has bitten, in her vast domain.
And those who in her realm did roam,
Whether it were in dawn or gloam,
They all have felt their hearts held fast
In spells of mystery she has cast.
She, like an ample, final force,
Keeps on the same unbroken course;
Black walls of pinewoods gloom and bar
The paths of hope that gleam afar;
Clusters of dreamy junipers
Frighten the feet of wanderers;
Malignant mazes intertwine
With paths of cunning curve and line,
And the sun every moment shifts
The goal to which confusion drifts.
Since the lightning that the storm forged bit,
The bitter silence at the corners four
Of the heath, has changed no whit.
The shepherds with their hundred years worn out,
And the spent dogs that follow them about,
See her, on golden dunes where shadows flit,
Or in the noiseless moorland, sometimes sit,
Immense, beneath the outspread wing of Night;
Then waters on the wrinkled pond take fright;
And the heather veils itself and palely glistens,
And every leaf in every thicket listens,
And the incendiary sunset stills
The last cry of his light that o'er her thrills.
And the hamlets neighbouring her, beneath
Their thatch of hovels on the heath,
Shiver with terror, feeling her
Dominant, though she do not stir;
Mournful, and tired, and helpless they
Stand in her presence as at bay,
And watch benumbed, and nigh to swoon,
Fearing, when mists shall lift, to see,
Suddenly opening under the moon,
The silver eyes of her mystery.

THE ROPE-MAKER.
At the dike's foot that wearily
Curves along the sinuous sea,
The visionary, silver-haired
Rope-maker with arms bared,
Pulling backwards as he stands,
Rolls together, with prudent hands,
The twisting play of endless twine,
Coming from the far sky-line.
Down yonder in the sunset sheen,
In the twilight tired and chill,
A busy wheel is whizzing still,
Moved by one who is not seen;
But, parallel on stakes that space
The road from equal place to place,
The yellow hemp that the roper draws
Runs in a chain that never flaws.
With skilful fingers thin and old,
Fearing to break the glint of gold
That with his work the gliding light
Blends by the houses growing dim,
The visionary roper weaves
Out of the heart of the eddying eves,
And draws the horizons unto him.
Horizons? Those of red sunsets:
Furies, hatred, fights, regrets,
Sobs of beings broken-hearted,
Horizons of the days departed,
Writhen, golden, overcast;
Horizons of the living past.
Of old—the life of strayed somnambulists,
When the right hand of God to Canaans blue
The road of gold through gloaming deserts drew,
Through morns and evenings swayed with shifting mists.
Of old—exasperated life careering
Hanging from stallions' manes, lighting the dense
Darkness with heels that flashed out gleams immense,
Towards immensity immensely rearing.
Of old—it was a life of burning leaven;
When the Red Cross of Hell and Heaven's White
Through miles of marshalled mail that shed the light
Marched each through blood towards its victory's heaven.
Of old—it was a foaming, livid life,
Living and dead, with tocsin bells and crime,
Edicts and massacres reddening the time,
With mad and splendid death above the strife.
Between the flax and osiers,
On the road where nothing stirs,
Along the houses growing dim,
The visionary roper weaves
Out of the heart of the eddying eves,
And draws the horizon unto him.
Horizons? There they linger yet:
Toil, and science, struggle, fret.
Horizons? There at even-chime,
They in their mirrors show the mourning
Image of the present time.
Now, a mass of fires that belch defiance,
Where wise men, leagued in mighty storm and stress,
Hurl the gods down to change the nothingness
Whereunto strives the force of human science.
Now, lo! a room that ruthless thought has swept,
Weighed and exactly measured, and men swear
The firmament is arched by empty air;
And Death is in glass bottles corked and kept.
Now, lo! a glowing furnace, and resistance
Of matter molten in fire's dragon dens;
New strengths are forged, far mightier than men's,
To swallow up the night, and time, and distance.
Here, lo! a palace tiredly built, and lying
Beneath a century's weight, bowed down and yellow,
And whence, in terror, mighty voices bellow,
Invoking thunder towards adventure flying.
Upon the regular road, with eyes
Fixed where the silent sunset dies,
And leaves the houses drear and dim,
The visionary roper weaves
Out of the heart of the eddying eves,
And draws the horizons unto him.
Horizons? Where yon sunset beams:
Combats, hopes, awakenings, gleams;
The horizons he can see defined
In the future of his mind,
Far beyond the shores that swim
Sketched in the sky of sunsets dim.
Up yonder—in the calm skies hangs a red
Staircase of double gold with steps of blue,
With Dream and Science mounting it, the two
Who separately climb to one stair-head.
The lightning clash of contraries expires;
Doubt's mournful fist its fingers opes, while wed
Essential laws that had been wont to shed
In horal doctrines their fragmentary fires.
Up yonder—mind more strong and subtle darts
Its violence past death and what is seen.
And universal love sheds a serene
And mighty silence over tranquil hearts.
The God in every human heart, above,
Unfolds, expands, and his own being sees
In those who sometimes fell upon their knees
To worship sacred grief and humble love.
Up yonder—living peace is burning bright,
And shedding on these lands, down evening's slope
A bliss that kindles, like the brands of hope,
In the air's ash the great stars of the night.
At the dike's foot that wearily
Curves along the sinuous sea
Towards the distant eddying spaces,
The visionary roper paces
Along the houses growing dim,
And drinks the horizons into him.

SAINT GEORGE.
By a broad flash the fog was split,
And Saint George, with gold and jewels lit,
Came down the slope of it,
With feathers foaming from his crest,
Riding a charger with a milky breast,
And in its mouth no bit.
With diamonds decked the two
Made of their fall a path of pity to
This earth of ours from Heaven's blue.
Heroes with helpful virtues dowered,
Sonorous with courage, heroes crystalline,
O through my heart now let the radiance shine
That from his aureolar sword is showered!
O let me hear the silver prattle
Of the wind around his coat of mail,
And around his spurs in battle;
Saint George, who shall prevail,
He who has heard the cries of my distress,
And comes to save from scaith
My poor arms stretched unto his great prowess!
Like a loud cry of faith,
He holds his lance at rest,
Saint George;
He passes, I behold
A victory as of a haggard gold,
I see his forehead with the Chrism blessed:
Saint George of duty,
Bright with his heart's and his own beauty.
Sound, all ye voices of my hope!
Sound in myself, and on the sun-swept slope,
And high roads, and the shaded avenue!
And, gleams of silver between stones, be you
Joy, and you pebbles white with waters ope
Your eyes, and look
Up through the brook
Whose ripples o'er you roll,
And, landscape with thy crimson lakes, be thou
The mirror of the flights of flame that now
Saint George takes to my soul!
Against the black dragon's teeth,
Against the pustules of a leprous skin
He is the glaive and the miraculous sheath.
Charity on his cuirass burns, and in
His courage is the bounding overthrow
Of instinct swart with sin.
Fire golden-sifted, fire that wheels,
And eddying stars in which his glory lies,
Flashed from his charger's galloping heels,
Dazzle my memory's eyes.
The beautiful ambassador is he
From the white country that with marble glows,
Where in the parks, on the sea's strand, and on the tree
Of goodness, kindness gently grows.
The port, he knows it, where the vessels ride,
With angels filled, upon a rippling tide;
And the long evenings lighting islands fair
But motionless upon their waters, where,
And in eyes also, firmaments are seen.
This kingdom hath the Virgin for its Queen,
And St. George is the humble joy of her palace,
In the air his falchion glimmers like a chalice;
Saint George with his devouring light,
Who like a fire of gold dispels my spirit's night.
He knows how far my feet have wandered,
He knows the strength that I have squandered,
And with what fogs my brain has fought,
He knows what keen assassin knives
Have cut black crosses in my thought,
He knows my scorn of rich men's lives,
He knows the mask of wrath and folly
Upon the dregs of my melancholy.
I was a coward in my flight
Out of the world in my sick, vain defiance;
I have lifted, under the roofs of night,
The golden marbles of a hostile science
To the barred summits of black oracles;
But the King of the Night is Death;
And man but in the dawning's breath
His enigmatic effort spells;
When flowers unclose, prayer too uncloses,
With the scent of prayer their lips are sweet,
And the white sun on a nacreous water-sheet
Is a kiss that on man's lips reposes;
Dawn is a counsel to be bold,
And he who hearkens is tenfold
Saved from the marsh that never yet cleansed sin.
Saint George in cuirass glittering
With leaps of fire sprung
Unto my soul through the fresh morning;
He was beautiful with faith and young;
And more to me he bent
As he beheld me penitent;
As from an intimate golden phial
He filled me with his soaring;
Though he was proud unto my sight,
I laid the sweet flowers of my trial
In his pale hand of blest restoring;
Then signed he, ere he did depart,
My brow with his lance's cross of gold,
Bade me be of good cheer and bold,
And soared, and bore to God my heart.
IN THE NORTH.
Two ancient mariners from the Northern Main
One autumn eve came sailing home again,
From Sicily and its deceitful islands,
Carrying a shoal of sirens
On board.
Sharpened with pride they sail into their bay;
Among the mists that mark the homeward way
They cut their passage like a sword;
Under a mournful and monotonous gale,
One autumn evening of a sadness pale,
Into their northern fjord they sail.
From the safe shore the burghers of the haven
Gaze listless, cold, and craven:
And on the masts, and in the ropes, behold
The sirens covered with gold
Biting, like vines,
Their bodies' sinuous lines.
The burghers gaze with closed and sullen mouth,
Nor see the ocean booty of the south,
Brought in the fog's despite;
The vessel seems a basket silver-white,
Laden with flesh and fruit and gold for home,
Advancing borne on wings of foam.
The sirens sing, and in the cordage they
With arms stretched out in lyres,
And lifted breasts like fires,
Sing and sing a lay
Before the rolling eve,
Which reaps upon the sea the lights of day;
The sirens sing, and cleave
Around the masts as curves the handle of the urn
And still the citizens, uncouth and taciturn,
Hear not the song.
They do not know their friends away so long—
The ancient mariners twain—nor understand
The vessel is of their own land,
Neither the foc-jibs of their own
Making, nor the sails themselves have sewn;
Of this deep dream they fathom naught,
Which makes the sea glad with its journeyings,
Since it was not the lie of all the things
That in their village to their youth were taught.
And the ship passes by the harbour mole,
Luring them to the wonder of its soul,
But none will gather them the fruits
Of flesh and gold that load the trellised shoots.

THE TOWN.
Every road goes to the town.
Under the mist that the sun illumes,
She, where her terraces arise
And taper to the terraced skies,
Herself as from a dream exhumes.
Yonder glimmer looking down,
Bridges trimmed with iron lace,
Leaps in air and caught in space;
Blocks and columns like the head
Of a Gorgon gashed and red;
O'er the suburbs chimneys tower;
Gables open like a flower,
Under stagnant roofs that frown.
This is the many-tentacled town,
This is the flaming octopus,
The ossuary of all of us.
At the country's end she waits,
Feeling towards the old estates.
Meteoric gas-lamps line
Docks where tufted masts entwine;
Still they burn in noontides cold,
Monster eggs of viscous gold;
Never seems the sun to shine:
Mouth as it is of radiance, shut
By reeking smoke and driving smut.
A river of pitch and naphtha rolls
By wooden bridges, mortared moles;
And the raw whistles of the ships
Howl with fright in the fog that grips:
With a red signal light they peer
Towards the sea to which they steer.
Quays with clashing buffers groan;
Carts grate o'er the cobble-stone;
Cranes are cubes of shadow raising,
And slipping them in cellars blazing;
Bridges opening lift a vast
Gibbet till the ships have passed;
Letters of brass inscribe the world,
On roofs, and walls, and shop-fronts curled,
Face to face in battle massed.
Wheels file and file, the drosky plies,
Trains are rolling, effort flies;
And like a prow becalmed, the glare
Of gilded stations here and there;
And, from their platforms, ramified
Rails beneath the city glide,
In tunnels and in craters, whence
They storm in network flashing thin
Out into hubbub, dust, and din.
This is the many-tentacled town.
The street, with eddies tied like ropes
Around its squares, runs out and gropes
Along the city up and down,
And runs back far enlaced, and lined
With crowds inextricably twined,
Whose mad feet beat the flags beneath,
Whose eyes are filled with hate, whose teeth
Snatch at the time they cannot catch.
Dawn, eve, and night, lost in the press,
They welter in their weariness,
And cast to chance the bitter seed
Of labour that no gain can breed.
And dens black with inanity
Where poisoned sits the clerk and fasts;
And banks wide open to the blasts
Of the winds of their insanity.
Outside, in wadding of the damp,
Red lights in streaks, like burning rags,
Straggle from reeking lamp to lamp.
And alcohol goads life that lags.
The bar upon the causey masses
Its tabernacle of looking-glasses,
Reflecting drunken louts and hags.
To and fro a young girl passes,
And sells lights to the lolling men;
Debauch buys famine in her den;
And carnal lust ignited sallies
To dance to death in rotten alleys.
Lust roars and leaps from breast to breast,
Whipped to a rage uproarious,
To a blind crush of limbs in quest
Of the pleasure of gold and phosphorus;
And in and out wan women fare,
With sexual symbols in their hair.
The atmosphere of reeking dun
At times recedes towards the sun,
As though a loud cry called to Peace
To bid the deafening noises cease;
But all the city puffs and blows
With such a violent snort and flush,
That the dying seek in vain the hush
Of silence that eyes need to close.
Such is the day—and when the eves
With ebony hammers carve the skies,
Over the plain the city heaves
Its shimmer of colossal lies;
Her haunting, gilt desires arise;
Her radiance to the stars is cast;
She gathers her gas in golden sheaves;
Her rails are highways flying fast
To the mirage of happiness
That strength and fortune seem to bless;
Like a great army swell her walls;
And all the smoke she still sends down
Reaches the fields in radiant calls.
This is the many-tentacled town,
This is the burning octopus,
The ossuary of all of us,
The carcase with solemn candles lit.
And all the long ubiquitous
Roads and pathways reach to it.
THE MUSIC-HALL.
Under the enormous fog
Whose wings the city arteries clog,
'Mid ringing plaudits, at the back
Of a radiant hall their Orients they unpack.
The acrobat on airy trestles poises;
Great suns of strass shine o'er the scene;
Clashing their fists stand cymbal-players, lean
Breakers of cries and noises;
And when the ballet-corps with painted faces
In a thicket of perplexing steps appear,
Tangling and disentangling labyrinthine paces,
The hall, hung with its gorgeous chandelier,
That o'er a surging sea of faces glares,
The hall with heavy velvet clad,
With balconies like pad on pad,
Is like a belly that a woman bares.
Swarming battalions of flesh and thighs
March under arches flowered with thousand dyes;
Lace, petticoats, throats, legs, and hips:
Teams of rut whose breasts, though bridled, yet
Are bounding, yoke by yoke the coiled dance trips,
Blue with paint and raw with sweat.
Hands, vainly opening, seem to seize
Only invisible desire that flees;
A dancer, darting legs her tights leave bare,
Stiffens obscenity in the air;
Another with swimming eyes and flanks that writhe
Shrinks like a trampled beast above the loud
Flare of the footlights swaying with the lithe
Lust of the gloating crowd.
O blasphemy vociferously hurled
In crying gold on the Beauty of the world!
Atrocious feint of Art, while Art sublime
Is lying massacred and sunk in slime!
O noisy pleasure singing as it treads
On tortured ugliness that twists and cries;
Pleasure against Joy's grain that nurtures heads
With alcohol, with alcohol men's eyes;
O pleasure whose rank mouth calls out for flowers,
And vomits the vile ferment it devours!
Pleasure of old, heroic, calm, and bare,
Walked with calm hands and forehead clear as air;
The wind and the sun danced in his heart, he pressed
Divine, harmonious life, to his warm breast;
His breast that breathed it in was Beauty's source;
He knew no law that dared call Beauty coarse;
Sunrise and sunset, springs with mosses grassed,
And the green bough that brushed him as he passed,
Thrilled to his deep soul through his flesh, and were
The kiss of things that love makes lovelier.
Now senile and debauched, he licks and eats
Sin that beguiles him with her poisoned teats;
Now in his garden of anomalies
Bibles, codes, texts, and rules he multiplies,
And ravishes the faith he then denies.
His loves are gold. His hatreds? Flights unto
Beauty that grows still lovelier, still more true,
Opening in starry flowers in heavens blue.
Look where he haunts these halls of monstrous art,
Whose burning windows to the heavens dart
A restlessness by gazing still renewed:
Here is the beast transformed to a multitude.
Filled with contagion thousand eyes deflect
To find a million more they may infect;
One mind to thousands casts its brazier fire,
To be consumed the more in sick desire,
To breed new vices, unimagined Hell.
The conscience changes, and the brain as well;
Another race is bred from putrid spawn,
A writhen black totality, a sum
Of ciphers spreading in a weltering scum,
That outrages the healthfulness of Dawn.
O shames and crimes of crowds that reek and stain
The city like a bellowing hurricane;
Gulfed in the plaster boxes tier on tier
Of theatres and halls obscene and blear!
The stage is like a fan unfurled.
Enamelled minarets grotesquely curled.
Houses and terraces and avenues.
Under the limelight's changing hues,
First in slow rhythms, then with violent sweep,
Gathering swift kisses, touching breasts that leap,
Meet the Bayadères with swaying hips;
Negro boys, whose heads with plumes are tipped,
With their foam-coloured teeth in lips
Like a red vulva open ripped,
Move all as pushed along in sluggish poses.
A drum beats, an obstinate horn cries long,
A raw fife tickles a stupid song,
And at the last, for the final apotheosis,
A mad assault over the boards is sweeping,
Gold and throats and thighs in stages heaping
In curled entanglements; and then all closes
With garments splitting offering rounded shapes
And vice half hid in flowers like tempting grapes.
And the orchestra dies, or suddenly halts,
And climbs, and swells, and rolls in whipped assaults;
Out of the violins wriggle spasms dark;
Lascivious dogs in the tempest seem to bark
Of heavy brasses and of strong bassoons;
A manifold desire swells, sickens, swoons,
Revives, and with such heavy violence heaves,
The sense cries out, and helpless reels,
And prostitutes itself to a spasm that relieves.
And midnight peals.
The dense crowd pours and at the doors unfurls.
The hall is closed—and on the black causeways,
Gaudy beneath the gaslamps' leering gaze,
Red in the fog like flesh, await the girls.
THE BUTCHER'S STALL.
Hard by the docks, soon as the shadows fold
The dizzy mansion-fronts that soar aloft,
When eyes of lamps are burning soft,
The shy, dark quarter lights again its old
Allurement of red vice and gold.
Women, blocks of heaped, blown meat,
Stand on low thresholds down the narrow street,
Calling to every man that passes;
Behind them, at the end of corridors,
Shine fires, a curtain stirs
And gives a glimpse of masses
Of mad and naked flesh in looking-glasses.
Hard by the docks.
The street upon the left is ended by
A tangle of high masts and shrouds that blocks
A sheet of sky;
Upon the right a net of grovelling alleys
Falls from the town—and here the black crowd rallies
To reel to rotten revelry.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Far-sailing melancholy mariners
Who, wet with spray, through grey mists peer,
Cradled among the rigging cabin-boys, and they who steer
Hallucinated by the blue eyes of the vast sea-spaces,
All dream of it, evoke it when the evening falls;
Their raw desire to madness galls;
The wind's soft kisses hover on their faces;
The wave awakens rolling images of soft embraces;
And their two arms implore,
Stretched in a frantic cry towards the shore.
And they of offices and shops, the city tribes,
Merchants precise, keen reckoners, haggard scribes,
Who sell their brains for hire, and tame their brows,
When the keys of desks are hanging on the wall,
Feel the same galling rut at even-fall,
And run like hunted dogs to the carouse.
Out of the depths of dusk come their dark flocks,
And in their hearts debauch so rudely shocks
Their ingrained greed and old accustomed care,
That they are racked and ruined by despair.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
Come from what far sea-isles or pestilent parts?
Come from what feverish or methodic marts?
Their eyes are filled with bitter, cunning hate,
They fight their instincts that they cannot sate;
Around red females who befool them, they
Herd frenzied till the dawn of sober day.
The panelling is fiery with lewd art;
Out of the wall nitescent knick-knacks dart;
Fat Bacchuses and leaping satyrs in
Wan mirrors freeze an unremitting grin;
Flowers sicken on the gaming-tables where
The warming bowls twist fire of light blue hair;
A pot of paint curds on an étagère;
A cat is catching flies on cushioned seats;
A drunkard lolls asleep on yielding plush,
And women come, and o'er him bending, brush
His closed, red lids with their enormous teats.
And women with spent loins and sleeping croups
Are piled on sofas and arm-chairs in groups,
With sodden flesh grown vague, and black and blue
With the first trampling of the evening's crew.
One of them slides a gold coin in her stocking;
Another yawns, and some their knees are rocking;
Others by bacchanalia worn out,
Feeling old age, and, sniffing them, Death's snout,
Stare with wide-open eyes, torches extinct,
And smooth their legs with hands together linked.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers
Of the city and the sea.
According to the jingle of the purses
The women mingle promises with curses;
A tranquil cynicism, a tired pleasure
Is meted duly to the money's measure.
The kiss grows weary, and the game grows tame.
Often when fist with fist together clashes,
In the wind of oaths and insults still the same,
Some gaiety out of the blasphemy flashes,
But soon sinks, and you hear,
In the silence dank and drear,
A halting steeple near
Sounding, sick with pity,
In the darkness over the city.
Yet in those months by festivals sanctified,
St. Peter in summer, in winter Christmastide,
The ancient quarter of dirt and light
Soars up to sin and pounces on its joys,
Fermenting with wild songs and boisterous noise
Window by window, flight by flight,
With vice the house-fronts glow
Down from the garret to the grids below.
Everywhere rage roars, and couples heats.
In the great hall to which the sailors throng,
Pushing some jester of the streets,
Convulsed in obscene mimicry, along,
The wines of foam and gold leap from their sheath;
Women fall underneath
Mad, brawling drunkards; loosened ruts
Flame, arms unite, and body body butts;
Nothing is seen but instincts slaked and lit afresh,
Breasts offered, bellies taken, and the fire
Of haggard eyes in sheaves of brandished flesh.
The frenzy climbs, and sinks to rise still higher,
Rolls like exasperated tides,
And backwards glides,
Until the moment when dawn fills the port,
And Death, tired of the sport,
Back to ships and homesteads sweeps and harries
The limp debauch and human weed
That on the pavement tarries.
It is the flabby, fulsome butcher's stall of luxury,
Wherein Crime plants his knives that bleed,
Where lightning madness stains
Foreheads with rotting pains,
Time out of mind erected on the frontiers that feed
The city and the sea.
A CORNER OF THE QUAY.
When the wind sulks, and the dune dries,
The old salts with uneasy eyes
Hour after hour peer at the skies.
All are silent; their hands turning,
A brown juice from their lips they wipe;
Never a sound save, in their pipe,
The dry tobacco burning.
That storm the almanac announces,
Where is it? They are puzzled.
The sea has smoothed her flounces.
Winter is muzzled.
The cute ones shake their pate,
And cross their arms, and puff.
But mate by mate they wait,
And think the squall is late,
But coming sure enough.
With fingers slow, sedate
Their finished pipe they fill;
Pursuing, every salt,
Without a minute's halt,
The same idea still.
A boat sails up the bay,
As tranquil as the day;
Its keel a long net trails,
Covered with glittering scales.
Out come the men: What ho?
When will the tempest come?
With pipe in mouth, still dumb,
With bare foot on sabot,
The salts wait in a row.
Here they lounge about,
Where all year long the stout
Fishers' dames
Sell, from their wooden frames,
Herrings and anchovies,
And by each stall a stove is,
To warm them with its flames.
Here they spit together,
Spying out the weather.
Here they yawn and doze;
Backs bent with many a squall,
Rubbing it in rows,
Grease the wall.
And though the almanac
Is wrong about the squall,
The old salts lean their back
Against the wall,
And wait in rows together,
Watching the sea and the weather.

MY HEART IS AS IT CLIMBED A STEEP.
My heart is as it climbed a steep,
To reach your kindness fathomlessly deep,
And there I pray to you with swimming eyes.
I came so late to where you arc,
You with your pity more than prodigal's surmise;
I came from very far
Unto the two hands you were holding out,
Calmly, to me who stumbled on in doubt!
I had in me so much tenacious rust,
That gnawed with its rapacious teeth
My confidence in myself;
I was so tired, I was so spent,
I was so old with my mistrust,
I was so tired, I was so spent
With all the roads of my discontent.
So little I deserved the joy how deep
Of seeing your feet light up my wilderness,
That I am trembling still with it, and nigh to weep,
And lowly for ever is the heart you bless.
WHEN I WAS AS A MAN THAT HOPELESS PINES.
When I was as a man that hopeless pines,
And pitfalls all my hours were,
You were the light that welcomed home the wanderer,
The light that from the frosted window shines
On snow at dead of night.
Your spirit's hospitable light
Touched my heart, and hurt it not,
Like a cool hand on one with fever hot!
A element word of green, reviving hope
Ran down the piled wrack of my heart's waste slope;
Then came stout confidence and right good will,
Frankness, and tenderness, and at the last,
With hand in hand held fast,
An evening of clear understanding and of storms grown still.
Since, though the summer followed winter's chill,
Both in ourselves and under skies whose deathless fires
With gold all pathways of our thoughts adorn,
Though love has grown immense, a great flower born
Of proud desires,
A flower that, without cease, to grow still more,
In our hearts begins as e'er before,
I still look at the little light
Which first shone out on me in my soul's night.
LEST ANYTHING ESCAPE FROM OUR EMBRACE.
Lest anything escape from our embrace,
Which is as sacred as a Temple's holy place,
And so that the bright love pierce with light the body's mesh,
Together we descend into the garden of your flesh.
Your breasts are there like offerings made,
You hold your hands out, mine to greet,
And nothing can be worth the simple meat
Of whisperings in the shade.
The shadow of white boughs caresses
Your throat and face, and to the ground
The blossoms of your tresses
Fall unbound.
All of blue silver is the sky,
The night is a silent bed of ease,
The gentle night of the moon, whose breeze
Kisses the lilies tall and shy.
I BRING TO YOU AS OFFERING TO-NIGHT.
I bring to you as offering to-night
My body boisterous with the wind's delight;
In floods of sunlight I have bathed my skin;
My feet are clean as the grass they waded in;
Soft are my fingers as the flowers they held;
My eyes are brightened by the tears that welled
Within them, when they looked upon the earth
Strong without end and rich with festive mirth;
Space in its living arms has snatched me up,
And whirled me drunk as from the mad wine-cup;
And I have walked I know not where, with pent
Cries that would free my heart's wild wonderment;
I bring to you the life of meadow-lands;
Sweet marjoram and thyme have kissed my hands;
Breathe them upon my body, all the fresh
Air and its light and scents are in my flesh.

IN THE COTTAGE WHERE OUR PEACEFUL LOVE REPOSES.
In the cottage where our peaceful love reposes,
With its dear old furniture in shady nooks,
Where never a prying witness on us looks,
Save through the casement panes the climbing roses,
So sweet the days are, after olden trial,
So sweet with silence is the summer time,
I often stay the hour upon the chime
In the clock of oak-wood with the golden dial.
And then the day, the night is so much ours,
That the hush of happiness around us starts
To hear the beating of our clinging hearts,
When on your face my kisses fall in showers.
THIS IS THE GOOD HOUR WHEN THE LAMP IS LIT.
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
All is calm, and consoling, and dear,
And the silence is such that you could hear
A feather falling in it.
This is the good hour when to my chair my love will flit,
As breezes blow,
As smoke will rise,
Gentle, slow.
She says nothing at first—and I am listening;
I hear all her soul, I surprise
Its gushing and glistening,
And I kiss her eyes.
This is the good hour when the lamp is lit.
When hearts will say
How they have loved each other through the day.
And one says such simple things:
The fruit one from the garden brings;
The flower that one has seen
Opening in mosses green;
And the heart will of a sudden thrill and glow,
Remembering some faded word of love
Found in a drawer beneath a cast-off glove
In a letter of a year ago.
THE SOVRAN RHYTHM.
Yet, after years and years, to Eve there came
Impatience in her soul, and as a blight
Of being the sapless, loveless flower of white
And torrid happiness that cleaved the same;
And once, when in the skies the tempest moved
Fain had she risen and its lightning proved.
Then did a sweet, broad shudder glide on her;
And, in her deepest flesh to feel it, Eve
Pressed her frail hands against her bosom's heave.
The angel, when he felt the sleeper stir
With violent abrupt awakening,
And scattered air and arms, and body rocked,
Questioned the night, but Eve remained unlocked,
And silent. He in vain bespoke each thing
That lived beside her by the naked sources,
Birds, flowers, and mirrors of cold water-courses
With which, perchance, her unknown thought arose
Up from the ground; and one night when he bowed,
And with his reverent fingers sought to close
Her eyes, she leapt out of his great wing's shroud.
O fertile folly in its sudden flare
Beyond the too pure angel's baffled care!
For while he stretched his arms out she was drifting
Already far, and passionately lifting
To braziers of the stars her body bare.
And all the heart of Adam, seeing her so,
Trembled.
She willed to love, he willed to know.
Awkward and shy he neared her, daring not
To startle eyes that lost in reveries swam;
From terebinths were fluttered scents, and from
The soil's fermenting mounted odours hot.
He tarried, as if waiting for her hests;
But she snatched up his hands, and o'er them hung,
And kissed them slowly, long, with kiss that clung,
And guided them to cool erected breasts.
But through her flesh they burned and burned. His mouth
Had found the fires to set on flame his drouth,
And his lithe fingers spread her streaming tresses
O'er the long ardour of their first caresses.
Stretched by the cool of fountains both were lying,
Seen of their passion-gleaming eyes alone.
And Adam felt a sudden thought unknown
Well in his heart to her fast heart replying.
Eve's body hid profound retreats as sweet
As moss that by the noon's cool breeze is brushed;
Gladly came sheaves undone to be their seat,
Gladly the grass was by their loving crushed.
And when the spasm leapt from them at last,
And held them bruised in arms strained stiff and tight,
All the great amorous and feline night
Tempered its breeze as over them it passed.
But on their vision burst
A cloud far off at first,
And whirling its dizziness with such a blast
That it was all a miracle and a fright,
Leapt from the dim horizon through the night.
Adam raised Eve, and pressed unto him fast
Her shivering body exquisitely wan.
Livid and sulphurous the cloud came on,
With thundering threats o'erflowing, and red lit.
Suddenly on the spot
Where the wild grass was hot
With their two bodies that had loved on it,
All the loud
Rage of the dark, tremendous cloud
Bit.
And the voice of the Lord God in its shadow sounded,
Fires from the flowers and nightly bushes bounded;
And where the dark the turning paths submerged,
With sword in hand flamboyant angels surged;
Lions were roaring at the fateful skies,
Eagles hailed death with hoarsely boding cries;
And by the waters all the palm-trees bent
Under the same hard wind of discontent
That beat on Eve and Adam on that sward,
And in the vasty darkness drove them toward
New human worlds more fervent than the old.
* * * * * * * * *
Now felt the man a magnet manifold
Draw out his strength and mingle it with all;
Ends he divined, and knew what gave them birth;
His lover's lips with words grew magical;
And his unwritten simple heart loved earth,
And serviceable water, trees that hold
Authority, and stones that broken shine.
Fruits tempted him to take their placid gold,
And the bruised grapes of the translucent vine
Kindled his thirst which they were ripe to still.
The howling beasts he chased awoke the skill
That in his hands had slept; and pride dowered him
With vehement strengths that foam and over-brim,
That he himself his destiny might build.
And the woman, still more fair since by the man
The marvellous shiver through her body ran,
Lived in the woods of gold by perfumes filled
And dawn, with all the future in her tears.
In her awoke the first soul, made of pride
And sweet strength blended with an unknown shame,
At the hour when all her heart was shed in flame
On the child sheltered in her naked side.
And when the day burns glorious and is done,
And feet of tall trees in the forests gleam,
She laid her body full of her young dream
On sloping rocks gilt by the setting sun;
Her lifted breasts two rounded shadows showed
Upon her skin as rosy as a shell,
And the sun that on her pregnant body glowed
Seemed to be ripening all the world as well.
Valiant and grave she pondered, burning, slow,
How by her love the lot of men should grow,
And of the beautiful and violent will
Fated to tame the earth. Ye sacred cares
And griefs, she saw you, you she saw, despairs!
And all the darkest deeps of human ill.
And with transfigured face and statelier bearing
She took your hands in hers and kissed your brow;
But you as well, men's grandeur madly daring,
You lifted up her soul, and she saw how
The limitless sands of time should by your tide
Be buried under billows singing pride;
In you she hoped, ideas keen in quest,
Fervour to love and to desire the best
In valiant pain and anguished joy; and so,
One evening roving in the after-glow,
When she beheld, come to a mossy plot,
The gates of Paradise thrown open wide,
And the angel beckoning, she turned aside
Without desire of it, and entered not.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The translations in this Anthology have been taken from the following collections of poems:—

Bonmariage (Sylvain), Poèmes, Société française d'Editions modernes, Paris, 1909.

Braun (Thomas), Le Livre des Bénédictions, Brussels, 1900.

Collin (Isi-), La Vallée Heureuse, Liège and Paris, 1903.

Dominique (Jean), L'Anémone des Mers, Mercure de France, 1906.

Elskamp (Max), La Louange de la Vie, Mercure de France, 1898.

——Enluminures, Lacomblez, Brussels, 1898.

Fontainas (André), Crépuscules, Mercure de France, 1897.

——La Nef Désemparée, Mercure de France, 1908.

Gérardy (Paul), Roseaux, Mercure de France, 1898.

Gilkin (Iwan), La Nuit (reprint of La Damnation de l'Artiste, 1890, and Ténèbres,1892), Fischbacher, Paris, 1897. (New edition Mercure de France, 1910.)

Gille (Valère), La Cithare, Fischbacher, Paris, 1897.

Giraud (Albert), Hors du Siècle, Vanier, Paris, 1888.

——La Guirlande des Dieux, Lamertin, Brussels, 1910.

Kinon (Victor), L'Âme des Saisons, Larcier, Brussels, 1909.

Lerberghe (Charles van), Entrevisions, Mercure de France, 1898

——La Chanson d'Eve, Mercure de France, 1904.

Le Roy (Grégoire), La Chanson du Pauvre, Mercure de France, 1907.

——La Couronne des Soirs, Lamertin, Brussels, 1911.

Maeterlinck (Maurice), Serres Chaudes suivies de Quinze Chansons, Lacomblez, Brussels, 1906.

Marlow (Georges), L'Âme en Exil, Deman, Brussels, 1895.

Mockel (Albert), Chantefable un peu naïve, Liège, 1891.

——Clartés, Mercure de France, 1902.

——Vers et Prose, 1910.

——La Flamme Immortelle (in preparation).

Ramaekers (Georges), Le Chant des Trois Règnes, Brussels, 1906.

Rency (Georges), Vie, Lacomblez, Brussels, 1897.

——Les Heures Harmonieuses, Brussels, 1897.

Séverin (Fernand), Poèmes, Mercure de France, 1907.

——Le Centaure, published in La Vie intellectuelle, Nov. 19th, 1909.

Verhaeren (Émile), Poèmes, Mercure de France, 1900 (reprint of Les Flamandes, 1883; Les Moines, 1886; Les Bords de la Route, 1891).

——Poèmes, nouvelle série, Mercure de France, 5th edit., 1906 (reprint of Les Soirs, 1887; Les Débâcles,1888; Les Flambeaux Noirs, 1890).

——Poèmes, iii^e série, Mercure de France, 5th edit., 1907 (reprint of Les Villages illusoires, 1895; Les Apparus dans mes Chemins, 1891; Les Vignes de ma Muraille, 1899).

——Les Villes tentaculaires, précédées des Campagnes hallucinées, Mercure de France, 1904.

——Toute La Flandre, La Guirlande des Dunes, Deman, Brussels, 1907.

——Les Heures Claires, suivie des Heures d'après-midi, Mercure de France, 1909.

——Les Rythmes souverains, Mercure de France, 2nd edit., 1910.

ANTHOLOGIES.

Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, Vanier, Paris, 1887.

Poètes belges d'expression française (par Pol de Mont), W. Hilarius, Almelo, 1899.

Anthologie des Poètes français contemporains, ed. G. Walch, 3 vols., Ch. Delagrave, Paris, 1906-07.

Poètes d'Aujourd'hui, ed. Ad. van Bever and Paul Léautaud, 2 vols., 18th edit., Mercure de France, 1908.

LITERATURE (SELECTED).

Bazalgette (Léon), Émile Verhaeren, Sansot, Paris, 1907.

Beaunier (André), La Poésie Nouvelle, Mercure de France, 1902.

Edwards (Osman), Émile Verhaeren, The Savoy, Nov. 1897.

Gilbert (Eugène), Iwan Gilkin, Vanderpoorten, Ghent, 1908.

Gilkin (Iwan), Quinze Années de Littérature, la jeune Belgique, Dec. 1895.

——Les Origines Estudiantines de la "jeune Belgique" à l'Université de Louvain, Editions de la Belgique artistique et littéraire, Brussels, 1909.

Gosse (Edmund), French Profiles, London, 1905.

——The Romance of Fairyland, with a note on a Belgian Ariosto, The Standard, 27th March 1908.

Harry (Gérard), Maurice Maeterlinck, translated by Alfred Allinson, London, 1910.

Hauser (Otto), Die belgische Lyrik von 1880-1900, Groszenhain, 1902.

Horrent (Désiré), Ecrivains belges d'aujourd'hui, Lacomblez, Brussels, 1904.

Kinon (Victor), Portraits d'auteurs, Dechenne et Cie., Brussels, 1910.

Maeterlinck (Georgette Leblanc), Maeterlinck's Methods of Life and Work, Contemporary Review, Nov. 1910.

Mockel (Albert), Émile Verhaeren, Mercure de Franco, 1895.

——Charles van Lerberghe, Mercure de France, 1904.

Ramaekers (George), Émile Verhaeren, Edition de "La Lutte," Brussels, 1900.

Rency (Georges), Physionomies littéraires, Dechenne et Cie., Brussels, 1907.

Schlaf (Johannes), Émile Verhaeren, vol. xxxviii. of "Die Dichtung," Berlin, 1905.

Symons (Arthur), The Dawn by Émile Verhaeren, London, 1898.

——The Symbolist Movement in Literature, London, 1908.

Thompson (Vance), French Portraits, Boston, 1900.

Verhaeren (Émile), Les Lettres françaises en Belgique, Lamertin, Brussels, 1907.

Visan (Tancrède de), Sur l'œuvre d'Alfred Mockel, Vers et Prose, April-June 1909.

Zweig (Stefan), Émile Verhaeren, Mercure de France, 1910.

——Émile Verhaeren, Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1910.

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NOTES.

Page [3].—"Red Cheshire." The Dutch cheese so-called is "roux." Braun suggests that the adjective should be translated "red-haired."

Page [6].—"Those that we address with 'Sir.'" The cheese sold under the name of "Monsieur Fromage."

Page [13], seq.—Max Elskamp's poetry is considered somewhat obscure, and students may find the following equations of help: la Vierge = la femme pure; Jésus = l'enfance délicieuse; un dimanche solaire = une joie éclatante; un dimanche de cœur de bois = une joie égoïste; un soldat = brutalité; un juif = un marchand; un oiseau = la vie sous la forme du verbe; une fleur = la vie sous la forme de la senteur.

Page [13].—"Of Evening." Sunday is life, the week-days are death; the poet is the Sunday, therefore, since the week is about to begin again, he must die. The third stanza means that the Truelove will never again weep for the fair days of betrothal or marriage which the old family ring she wears remind her of.

Page [18].—"Full of cripples." By night, because then the regulations forbidding begging are more easily set at defiance.

Page [19], line 6.—An allusion to the painting by Seghers, which represents the Virgin Mary with lilies, dahlias, and even snowdrops.

Page [23].—"Here the azure cherubs blow." An allusion to the painting by Fouquet in the Museum at Antwerp.

Page [47].—In Huysmans' novel, À Rebours, liqueurs are compared with musical instruments: curaçao corresponds to the clarinet; kümmel to the nasal oboe; kirsch to the fierce blast of a trumpet, etc.

Page [100].—Song vii. "Et c'est l'esclavage, n'est-ce pas? auquel s'astreint tout être qui se dévoue." Beaunier.

Page [107].—"The running water" is the image of the human soul, constantly changing, "en devenir dans le devenir." And yet there is in it a continued, though mobile unity, a permanent rhythm. It objectifies itself in space, but only exists in time, and Mockel sees its vital sign in those aspirations which guide it towards itself, which bear it on to its fate. The unity of the mobile river, whose waves to-morrow will no longer be those they are to-day, is the continuous current that bears it, as though it aspired to the infinity of oceans.

Page [110].—The Goblet is woman, who, whether she inspires genius or sells her body, exists, for us, less by herself than by us; she is what we make her, like this goblet whose colours vary according to what one pours into it.

Page [111].—The Chandelier symbolizes the permanent drama enacted by Art, placed as it is between the frivolous world,—which tramples the rose of love under foot,—an the immortal splendour of Nature, which makes it feel its own feebleness.

Page [113].—The Angel is the legend of genius.

Page [116].—The Man with the lyre is the poet, who is less and less understood as he strikes the graver chords of his lyre.

Page [122].—The Eternal Bride is the Aspiration towards which we strive.

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