Behind the Arras: A Book of the Unseen

by Bliss Carman

The Crimson House

Love built a crimson house, I know it well, That he might have a home Wherein to dwell. Poor Love that roved so far And fared so ill, Between the morning star And the Hollow Hill, Before he found the vale Where he could bide, With memory and oblivion Side by side. He took the silver dew And the dun red clay, And behold when he was through How fair were they! The braces of the sky Were in its girth, That it should feel no jar Of the swinging earth; That sun and wind might bleach But not destroy The house that he had builded For his joy. “Here will I stay,” he said, “And roam no more, And dust when I am dead Shall keep the door.” There trooping dreams by night Go by, go by. The walls are rosy white In the sun’s eye. The windows are more clear Than sky or sea; He made them after God’s Transparency. It is a dearer place Than kirk or inn; Such joy on joy as there Has never been. There may my longed-for rest And welcome be, When Love himself unbars The door for me!

The Lodger

I cannot quite recall When first he came, So reticent and tall, With his eyes of flame. The neighbors used to say (They know so much!) He looked to them half way Spanish or Dutch. Outlandish certainly He is—and queer! He has been lodged with me This thirty year; All the while (it seems absurd!) We hardly have Exchanged a single word. Mum as the grave! Minds only his own affairs, Goes out and in, And keeps himself upstairs With his violin. Mum did I say? And yet That talking smile You never can forget, Is all the while Full of such sweet reproofs The darkest day, Like morning on the roofs In flush of May. Like autumn on the hills; At four o’clock The sun like a herdsman spills For drove and flock Peace with their provender, And they are fed. The day without a stir Lies warm and red. Ah, sir, the summer land For me! That is Like living in God’s hand, Compared to this. His smile so quiet and deep Reminds me of it. I see it in my sleep, And so I love it. An anarchist, say some; But tush, say I, When a man’s heart is plumb, Can his life be awry? Better than charity And bigger too, That heart. You’ve seen the sea? Of course. To you ’T is common enough, no doubt. But here in town, With God’s world all shut out, Save the leaden frown Of the sky, a slant of rain, And a straggling star, Such memories remain The wonders they are. Once at the Isles of Shoals, And it was June . . . Now hear me dote! He strolls Across my noon, Like the sun that day, where sleeps My soul; his gaze Goes glimmering down my deeps Of yesterdays, Searching and searching, till Its light consumes The reluctant shapes that fill Those purple glooms. Let others applaud, defame, And the noise die down; His voice saying your name, Is enough renown. Too patient pitiful, Too fierce at wrong, To patronize the dull, Or praise the strong. And yet he has a soul Of wrath, though pent Even when that white ghoul Comes for his rent. The landlord? Hush! My God! I think the walls Take notes to help him prod Us up. He galls My very soul to strife, With his death’s-head face. He is foul too in his life, Some hid disgrace, Some secret thing he does, I warrant you, For all his cheek to us Is shaved so blue. He takes good care (by the shade Of seven wives!) That the undertaker’s trade He lives by thrives. Nor chick nor child has he. So servile smug, With that cringe in his knee,— God curse his lug! But him, you should have seen Him yesterday; The landlord’s smirk turned green At his smile. The way He served that bloodless fish, Were like to freeze him. But meeting elsewhere, pish! He never sees him. Yet such a gentleman, So sure and slow. The vilest harridan Is not too low, If there is pity’s need; And no man born, For cruelty or greed Escapes that scorn. Most of all things, it seems, He loves the town. Watching the bright-faced streams Go up and down, I have surprised him often On Tremont street, And marked the grave face soften, The mouth grow sweet, In a brown study over The men and women. An unsuspected rover That, for our Common. When the first jonquils come, And spring is sold On the street corners, some Of the pretty gold Is sure to find its way Home in his hand. And many a winter day At some cab-stand, He’ll watch the cabmen feed The pigeon flocks, Or bid some liner speed From the icy docks. His rooms? I much regret You cannot see His rooms, but they were let With guarantee Of his seclusion there— Except myself. Each morning, table, chair, Lamp, hearth, and shelf, I rearrange, refreshen, Put all to rights, Then leave him in possession. Ah, but the nights, The nights! Sir, if I dared But once set eye To keyhole, nor be scared, From playing Paul Pry, I doubt not I should learn A wondrous thing Or two; and in return Go blind till spring. The light under his door Is glory enough, It outshines any star That I know of. Wirrah, my lad, my lad, ’T is fearsome strange, The hints we all have had Passing the range Of science, knowledge, law, Or what you will, Whose intangible touch of awe Makes reason nil. Many a night I start, Sudden awake, Feeling my smothered heart Flutter and quake; Like an aspen at dead of noon, When not a breath Is stirring to trouble the boon Valley. A wraith Or a fetch, it must be, shivers The soul of the tree Till every leaf of it quivers. And so with me. Was it the shuffle of feet I heard go by, With muffled drums in the street? Was it the cry Of a rider riding the night Into ashes and dawn, With news in his nostrils and fright Where his hoof-beats had gone? Did the pipes, at “Bonny Dundee,” Bid regiments form? Did a renegade’s soul get free On a wail of the storm? Did a flock of wild geese honk As they cleared the hill? Or only a bittern cronk, Then all was still? Was it a night stampede Of a thousand head? I know I shook like a reed There on my bed. Nameless and void and wild Was the fear before me, Ere I bethought me and smiled As the truth flashed o’er me. Of course, it was only his hand Freeing the bass Of his old Amati, grand In the silence’ face. Rummaging up and down, From string to string, Bidding the discords drown, The harmonies spring, Where tides and tide-winds rove Far out from land, On the ocean of music a-move At the will of his hand. Sobbing and grieving now, Now glad as a bird, Thou, thou, thou Of the joys unheard, Luminous radiant sea Of the sounds and time, Surely, surely by thee Is eternal prime. Holy and beautiful deep, Spread down before The imperial coming of sleep, Endure, endure! And sleep, be thou the ranger Over it wan. And dream, be thou no stranger There with the dawn. Then wings of the sun, go abroad As a scarlet desire, Unwearied, unwaning, unawed, To quest and aspire, Till the drench of the dusk you drink In the poppy-field west; Then veer and settle and sink As a gull to her nest. Wind, Away, away! And hurry your phantom kind Through the gates of day, Or ever the king’s dark cup With its studs and spars Be inverted, and earth look up To the shuddering stars. Blaring and triumphing now, Now quailing and lone, Thou, thou, thou Of the joys unknown! Unknown and wild, wild, Where the merrymen be, Sink to sleep, soul of a child, Slumber, thou sea! All this his fiddle plays, And many a thing As strange, when his mood so lays The bow to the string. Sleepless! He never sleeps That I can find. I marvel how he keeps A bit of his mind. There is neither sight nor sound In the world of sense, But he has fathomed and found In the silvery tense Keen cords on the amber wood. As he wrings them thence, Death smiles at his hardihood For recompense. Oh fair they are, so fair! No tongue can tell How he sets them chiming there Clear as a bell. An orchard of birds in June, The winds that stream, The cold sea-brooks that croon, The storms that scream, The planets that float and swing Like buoys on the tide, The north-going legions in spring, The hills that abide, The frigate-bird clouds that range, The vagabond moon— That wilful lover of change— And the workaday sun, Dying summer and fall, Seasons and men And herds, he has them all In his shadowy ken. He calls and they come, leaving strife, Leaving discord and death, Out of oblivion to life, Though its span be a breath. There they are, all the beautiful things I loved and lost sight of Long since in the far-away springs, Come back for a night of New being as good as their old, Aye, better in fact, For somehow he gilds their fine gold,— Gives the one thing they lacked, The breath, aspiration, desire, Core, kindle, control, Memory and rapture and fire,— The touch of man’s soul. How know the true master? I know By my joys and my fears, For my heart crumbles down like the snow With spring rain into tears. Now I am a precious one! With nothing to do But idle here in the sun And gossip with you Of a stranger you have not seen, As like never will. I would every soul had a screen, When the wind sets ill In the world’s bleak house, like this Strange lodger of mine. His presence is worse to miss Than sun’s best shine. I put no thought at all Upon the end, If only I may call Such a man friend. And a friend he is, heart light With love for heft, Proud as silence, whose right Hand ignores his left. Yes, odd! he gives his name As Spiritus. But that is vague as a flame In the wind to us. And then (but not a breath Of this!) you see, All his effects, my faith! Are marked D.V. His cape-coat has a rip, But for all that, (Folk smile, suggest a dip In the dyer’s vat,— Those purple aldermen Who roll about In coaches, drive till ten, And die of gout), I think he finely shows How learning’s crumbs At least can rival those Of— ’st, here he comes!

Beyond the Gamut

Softly, softly, Niccolo Amati! What can put such fancies in your head? There, go dream of your blue-skied Cremona, While I ponder something you have said. Something in that last low lovely cadence Piercing the green dusk alone and far, Named a new room in the house of knowledge, Waiting unfrequented, door ajar. While you dream then, let me unmolested Pass in childish wonder through that door,— Breathless, touch and marvel at the beauties Soon my wiser elders must explore. Ah, my Niccolo, it’s no great science We shall ever conquer, you and I. Yet, when you are nestled at my shoulder, Others guess not half that we descry. As all sight is but a finer hearing, And all color but a finer sound, Beauty, but the reach of lyric freedom, Caught and quivering past all music’s bound; Life, that faint sigh whispered from oblivion, Harks and wonders if we may not be Five small wits to carry one great rhythmus, The vast theme of God’s new symphony. As fine sand spread on a disc of silver, At some chord which bids the motes combine, Heeding the hidden and reverberant impulse, Shifts and dances into curve and line, The round earth, too, haply, like a dust-mote, Was set whirling her assigned sure way, Round this little orb of her ecliptic To some harmony she must obey. Did the Master try the taut string merely, Give a touch, and she must throb to time? Think you how his bow must rouse the echoes, Quailing triumphing on, secure, sublime! Ah, thought cannot far without the symbol! Help me, little brother, hold the trend. Dear good flesh, that keeps the spirit steady, Lest it faint, grown dizzy at thought’s end! Waves of sound (Is this your thought, Amati?), Climbing into treble thin and clear, Past the silence, change to waves of color, We must say, when eye takes place of ear? Not a bird-song, but it has for fellow Some-wood-flower, its speechless counterpart, Form and color moulded to one cadence, To voice something of the wild mute heart. Thrushes, we’ll suppose, have for their tune-mates The gold languorous lilies of the glade; And the whippoorwill, that plaintive dreamer, Some dark purple flower that loves the shade. The song-sparrow tells me what the clover Nods about beneath the gorgeous blue; While the snowballs tell me old love-stories Thistle-birds half hinted as they flew. April’s faith, in robin at his vespers, Breathes a prayer too in my lilac blooms. What the cloudy asters told the hillside, My lone rainbird in the dusk resumes. Bobolink is voice for apple blossom, Breezy, abundant, good for human joys; Oriole has touched the burning secret Poppies hide with their deliberate poise. Tiny twin-flowers, what are they but fancies, Subtler than a field-lark can express? Swallows make the low contented twitter Lying just beyond the pansies’ guess. Yellowbird, the hot noon’s warbler, pierces Sense where tiger-lilies may not pass. Are not crickets and all field-wise creatures Brahmins of the universal grass? Saffron butterflies and mute ephemera, Doubt not, have their songs too, could we hear. Every raindrop is a sea sonorous As the great worlds thundering sphere to sphere. There’s no silence and no dark forever, Clangoring suns to us are placid stars; Swift-foot lightning with his henchman thunder Lags behind these gnomes in Leyden jars. Peal and flash and thrill and scent and savour Pulse through rhythm to rapture, and control,— Who shall say how far along or finely?— The infinite tectonics of the soul. Low-bred peoples, Hottentots, Basutos, Have a taste for scarlet and brass bands. Our friend Monet, feeling red repulsive, Sees blue shadows in pale purple lands. Sees not only, but instructs our seeing; Taught by him a twelvemonth, we confess Earth once robed in crude barbaric splendor, Has put on a softer lovelier dress. Feast my eyes on some old Indian fabric, Centuries of culture went to weave, And I grow the fine fastidious artist, No mere shop-made textile can deceive. Red the bass and violet the treble, Soul may pass out where all color ends. Ends? So we say, meaning where the eyesight With some yet unborn perception blends. You, Amati, never saw a sunset,— Hear tornadoes in a spider’s loom; I, at my wits’ end, may still develop Unknown senses in life’s larger room. Superhuman is not supernatural. How shall half-way judge of journey done? Shall this germ and protoplast of being Rest mid-life and say his race is run? Softly there, my Niccolo, a moment! Shall I then discard my simpler joys? No, for look you, every sense’s impulse Is a means the master soul employs. Test and use of all things, lowest, highest, Are alone of import to the soul; Joys of earth are journey-aids to heaven, Garb of the new sainthood sane and whole. Earth one habitat of spirit merely, I must use as richly as I may,— Touch environment with every sense-tip, Drink the well and pass my wander way. Ah, drink deep and let the parching morrow Quench what thirst its newer need may bring! Slake the senses now, that soul hereafter Go not forth a starved defrauded thing. Not for sense sake only, but for soul sake; That when soul must shed the leaves of sense, Sun and sap may solace and support her, Stored in those green hours for her defence. Shall the grub deny himself the rose-leaf That he may be moth before his time? Shall the grasshopper repress his drumbeats For small envy of the kingbird’s chime? Certain half-men, never touched by worship, Soil the goodly feast they cannot use; Others, maimed too, holding flesh a hindrance, Vilify the bounty they refuse. He’s most man who loves the purple shadows, Yet must love the flaring autumn too,— Follow when the skrieling pipes bid forward, Lie and gaze for hours into the blue. He would have gone down with Alexander, Quelling unknown lands beneath the sun; Watched where Buddha in the Bo tree shadows Saw this life’s web woven and undone; Freed his stifled heart in Shakespeare’s people, Sweet and elemental and serene; Dared the unknown with Blake and Galileo; Fronted death with Daulac’s seventeen. So shall mighty peace possess his spirit Whom the noonday leads alone apart, Through the wind-clear early Indian summer, Where no yearning more shall move his heart. Wise and foot-free, of the tranquil tenor, He shall wayfare with the homeless tides; Time enough, when life allures no longer, To frequent the tavern death provides. Life be neither hermitage nor revel; Lent or carnival alone were vain; Sin and sainthood—Help me, little brother, With your largo finder-thought again! Lift, uplift me, higher still and higher! Climb and pause and tremble and plunge on, Till I, toiling after you, come breathless Where the mountain tops are touched with dawn! Dark this valley world; and drenched with slumber We have kept the centuries of night. Cry, Amati, pierce the waiting stillness Tremulous with forecast of the light! Cry, Amati! Melt the twilight dirges In “Te Deums” fit for marching men! “Good,” the days are chorusing, “shall triumph;” Though the far-off morrows whisper, “When?” What is good? I hear your soft string answer, “I am that whereon the round world leans, I am every man’s poor guess at wisdom; Evil is the soul’s misuse of means. “Up through me, with melody and meaning, Well the floods of being or subside, The first dim desire of self for selfhood, The last smile that puts all self aside. “Hate is discord lessening through the ages; Anger a false note, fear a slackened string. Key thy soul up to the wiser manhood, Gentler lovelier joy from spring to spring!” Here in turn I help you, little brother, Half surmise what you have half explained. Store it by to ripen, and repeat it Long hereafter as a glimpse you gained, When the nineteenth century was dying, From a strolling hand that held you dear,—. Appanage of time put in your keeping For my far-off heritor to hear. I imagine how his eye will kindle When he fondles you as I do now,— Bends above you wooing like a lover, While you yield him all your heart knows how. I shall have been dust a thousand summers, But my dear unprofitable dreams Shall be part of all the good that thrills you In the oversoul’s orchestral themes. What is good? While God’s unfinished opus Multitudinous harmony obeys, Evil is a dissonance not a discord, Soon to be resolved to happier phrase,— From time immemorial permitted, Lest the too sweet melody grow tame, And, untouched of pathos or of daring, Hearts should never know what hearts proclaim: The unstained unconquerable valor, The unflinching loyalties of love. Or if evil be at worst a blunder No musician ever could approve, The mere bungling of a hand that faltered,— Mine or his who bade the planets poise,— What a thing unthinkable for smallness Is your frayed E string one touch destroys. How that sea-gull out across the bay there Rows himself at leisure up the blue! Evil the mere eddy from his wing-sweep, Good the morning path he must pursue. Good, you think, and evil live together, Both persisting on from change to change Through interminable conservation,— Primal powers no ruin can derange? Deed and accident alike unending By eternal consequence of cause? No. For good is impetus to Godward; Evil, but our ignorance of laws. Say I let you, spite of all endeavor, Mar some nocturne by a single note; Is there immortality of discord In your failure to preserve the rote? When the sound shall pass my sense’s confines, Melt away to color or thin flame, Does it still malinger in the prism, Falsify the crucible with shame? Hardly. For the melody and marring, When they put the dear oblivion on, Are become as fresh clay for the potter, Neither good nor bad, for use anon. Blighted rose and perfect shall commingle In one excellence of garden mould. Soul transfusing comeliness or blemish Can alone lend beauty to the old. While the streams go down among the mountains, Gathering rills and leaving sand behind, Till at last the ocean sea receives them, And they lose themselves among their kind, Man, the joy-born and the sorrow-nurtured, (One with nothingness though all things be,— Great lord Sirius and the moving planets Fleet as fire-germs in the torn-up sea,—) Linked to all his half-accomplished fellows, Through unfrontiered provinces to range, Man is but the morning dream of nature Roused by some wild cadence weird and strange. Slowly therefore, Niccolo, and softly, With more memories than tongue can tell, Lower me down the slope of life, and leave me Knowing the hereafter will be well. Close with, “Love is but the perfect knowledge, The one thing no failure can befall; Lovingkindness betters loving credence; Love and only love is best of all.” Beauty, beauty, beauty, sense and seeming, With the soul of truth she calls her lord! Stars and men the dust upon her garment; Hope and fear the echoes of her word. How escape we then, the rainbow’s brothers, Endless being with each blade and sod? Dust and shadow between whence and whither, Part of the tranquillity of God.