BOOK II.
I. TO THE UNKNOWN EROS.
What rumour’d heavens are these
Which not a poet sings,
O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze
Of sudden wings
Speeding at far returns of time from interstellar space
To fan my very face,
And gone as fleet,
Through delicatest ether feathering soft their solitary beat,
With ne’er a light plume dropp’d, nor any trace
To speak of whence they came, or whither they depart?
And why this palpitating heart,
This blind and unrelated joy,
This meaningless desire,
That moves me like the Child
Who in the flushing darkness troubled lies,
Inventing lonely prophecies,
Which even to his Mother mild
He dares not tell;
To which himself is infidel;
His heart not less on fire
With dreams impossible as wildest Arab Tale,
(So thinks the boy,)
With dreams that turn him red and pale,
Yet less impossible and wild
Than those which bashful Love, in his own way and hour,
Shall duly bring to flower?
O, Unknown Eros, sire of awful bliss,
What portent and what Delphic word,
Such as in form of snake forebodes the bird,
Is this?
In me life’s even flood
What eddies thus?
What in its ruddy orbit lifts the blood,
Like a perturbed moon of Uranus,
Reaching to some great world in ungauged darkness hid;
And whence
This rapture of the sense
Which, by thy whisper bid,
Reveres with obscure rite and sacramental sign
A bond I know not of nor dimly can divine;
This subject loyalty which longs
For chains and thongs
Woven of gossamer and adamant,
To bind me to my unguess’d want,
And so to lie,
Between those quivering plumes that thro’ fine ether pant,
For hopeless, sweet eternity?
What God unhonour’d hitherto in songs,
Or which, that now
Forgettest the disguise
That Gods must wear who visit human eyes,
Art Thou?
Thou art not Amor; or, if so, yon pyre,
That waits the willing victim, flames with vestal fire;
Nor mooned Queen of maids; or, if thou’rt she,
Ah, then, from Thee
Let Bride and Bridegroom learn what kisses be!
In what veil’d hymn
Or mystic dance
Would he that were thy Priest advance
Thine earthly praise, thy glory limn?
Say, should the feet that feel thy thought
In double-center’d circuit run,
In that compulsive focus, Nought,
In this a furnace like the sun;
And might some note of thy renown
And high behest
Thus in enigma be expressed:
‘There lies the crown
Which all thy longing cures.
Refuse it, Mortal, that it may be yours!
It is a Spirit, though it seems red gold;
And such may no man, but by shunning, hold.
Refuse it, till refusing be despair;
And thou shalt feel the phantom in thy hair.’
II. THE CONTRACT.
Twice thirty centuries and more ago,
All in a heavenly Abyssinian vale,
Man first met woman; and the ruddy snow
On many-ridgëd Abora turn’d pale,
And the song choked within the nightingale.
A mild white furnace in the thorough blast
Of purest spirit seem’d She as she pass’d;
And of the Man enough that this be said,
He look’d her Head.
Towards their bower
Together as they went,
With hearts conceiving torrents of content,
And linger’d prologue fit for Paradise,
He, gathering power
From dear persuasion of the dim-lit hour,
And doubted sanction of her sparkling eyes,
Thus supplicates her conjugal assent,
And thus she makes replies:
‘Lo, Eve, the Day burns on the snowy height,
But here is mellow night!’
‘Here let us rest. The languor of the light
Is in my feet.
It is thy strength, my Love, that makes me weak;
Thy strength it is that makes my weakness sweet.
What would thy kiss’d lips speak?’
‘See, what a world of roses I have spread
To make the bridal bed.
Come, Beauty’s self and Love’s, thus to thy throne be led!’
‘My Lord, my Wisdom, nay!
Does not yon love-delighted Planet run,
(Haply against her heart,)
A space apart
For ever from her strong-persuading Sun!
O say,
Shall we no voluntary bars
Set to our drift? I, Sister of the Stars,
And Thou, my glorious, course-compelling Day!’
‘Yea, yea!
Was it an echo of her coming word
Which, ere she spake, I heard?
Or through what strange distrust was I, her Head,
Not first this thing to have said?
Alway
Speaks not within my breast
The uncompulsive, great and sweet behest
Of something bright,
Not named, not known, and yet more manifest
Than is the morn,
The sun being just at point then to be born?
O Eve, take back thy “Nay.”
Trust me, Beloved, ever in all to mean
Thy blissful service, sacrificial, keen;
But bondless be that service, and let speak—’
‘This other world of roses in my cheek,
Which hide them in thy breast, and deepening seek
That thou decree if they mean Yea or Nay.’
‘Did e’er so sweet a word such sweet gainsay!’
‘And when I lean, Love, on you, thus, and smile
So that my Nay seems Yea,
You must the while
Thence be confirm’d that I deny you still.’
‘I will, I will!’
‘And when my arms are round your neck, like this,
And I, as now,
Melt like a golden ingot in your kiss,
Then, more than ever, shall your splendid word
Be as Archangel Michael’s severing sword!
Speak, speak!
Your might, Love, makes me weak,
Your might it is that makes my weakness sweet.’
‘I vow, I vow!’
‘And are you happy, O, my Hero and Lord;
And is your joy complete?’
‘Yea, with my joyful heart my body rocks,
And joy comes down from Heaven in floods and shocks,
As from Mount Abora comes the avalanche.’
‘My Law, my Light!
Then am I yours as your high mind may list.
No wile shall lure you, none can I resist!’
Thus the first Eve
With much enamour’d Adam did enact
Their mutual free contract
Of virgin spousals, blissful beyond flight
Of modern thought, with great intention staunch,
Though unobliged until that binding pact.
Whether She kept her word, or He the mind
To hold her, wavering, to his own restraint,
Answer, ye pleasures faint,
Ye fiery throes, and upturn’d eyeballs blind
Of sick-at-heart Mankind,
Whom nothing succour can,
Until a heaven-caress’d and happier Eve
Be join’d with some glad Saint
In like espousals, blessed upon Earth,
And she her Fruit forth bring;
No numb, chill-hearted, shaken-witted thing,
‘Plaining his little span,
But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,
The Son of God and Man.
III. ARBOR VITAE.
With honeysuckle, over-sweet, festoon’d;
With bitter ivy bound;
Terraced with funguses unsound;
Deform’d with many a boss
And closed scar, o’ercushion’d deep with moss;
Bunch’d all about with pagan mistletoe;
And thick with nests of the hoarse bird
That talks, but understands not his own word;
Stands, and so stood a thousand years ago,
A single tree.
Thunder has done its worst among its twigs,
Where the great crest yet blackens, never pruned,
But in its heart, alway
Ready to push new verdurous boughs, whene’er
The rotting saplings near it fall and leave it air,
Is all antiquity and no decay.
Rich, though rejected by the forest-pigs,
Its fruit, beneath whose rough, concealing rind
They that will break it find
Heart-succouring savour of each several meat,
And kernell’d drink of brain-renewing power,
With bitter condiment and sour,
And sweet economy of sweet,
And odours that remind
Of haunts of childhood and a different day.
Beside this tree,
Praising no Gods nor blaming, sans a wish,
Sits, Tartar-like, the Time’s civility,
And eats its dead-dog off a golden dish.
IV. THE STANDARDS.
That last,
Blown from our Sion of the Seven Hills,
Was no uncertain blast!
Listen: the warning all the champaign fills,
And minatory murmurs, answering, mar
The Night, both near and far,
Perplexing many a drowsy citadel
Beneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell,
With armed jar
And angry threat, surcease
Their long-kept compact of contemptuous peace!
Lo, yonder, where our little English band,
With peace in heart and wrath in hand,
Have dimly ta’en their stand,
Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,
Whence, o’er the dawning Land,
Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate
’Gainst the black flag of Hate. [{62}]
Envy not, little band,
Your brothers under the Hohenzollern hoof
Put to the splendid proof.
Your hour is near!
The spectre-haunted time of idle Night,
Your only fear,
Thank God, is done,
And Day and War, Man’s work-time and delight,
Begun.
Ho, ye of the van there, veterans great of cheer,
Look to your footing, when, from yonder verge,
The wish’d Sun shall emerge;
Lest once again the Flower of Sharon bloom
After a way the Stalk call heresy.
Strange splendour and strange gloom
Alike confuse the path
Of customary faith;
And when the dim-seen mountains turn to flame
And every roadside atom is a spark,
The dazzled sense, that used was to the dark,
May well doubt, ‘Is’t the safe way and the same
By which we came
From Egypt, and to Canaan mean to go?’
But know,
The clearness then so marvellously increas’d,
The light’ning shining Westward from the East,
Is the great promised sign
Of His victorious and divine
Approach, whose coming in the clouds shall be,
As erst was His humility,
A stumbling unto some, the first bid to the Feast.
Cry, Ho!
Good speed to them that come and them that go
From either gathering host,
And, after feeble, false allegiance, now first know
Their post.
Ho, ye
Who loved our Flag
Only because there flapp’d none other rag
Which gentlemen might doff to, and such be,
‘Save your gentility!
For leagued, alas, are we
With many a faithful rogue
Discrediting bright Truth with dirt and brogue;
And flatterers, too,
That still would sniff the grass
After the ’broider’d shoe,
And swear it smelt like musk where He did pass,
Though he were Borgia or Caiaphas.
Ho, ye
Who dread the bondage of the boundless fields
Which Heaven’s allegiance yields,
And, like to house-hatch’d finches, hop not free
Unless ’tween walls of wire,
Look, there be many cages: choose to your desire!
Ho, ye,
Of God the least beloved, of Man the most,
That like not leaguing with the lesser host,
Behold the invested Mount,
And that assaulting Sea with ne’er a coast.
You need not stop to count!
But come up, ye
Who adore, in any way,
Our God by His wide-honour’d Name of YEA.
Come up; for where ye stand ye cannot stay.
Come all
That either mood of heavenly joyance know,
And, on the ladder hierarchical,
Have seen the order’d Angels to and fro
Descending with the pride of service sweet,
Ascending, with the rapture of receipt!
Come who have felt, in soul and heart and sense,
The entire obedience
Which opes the bosom, like a blissful wife,
To the Husband of all life!
Come ye that find contentment’s very core
In the light store
And daisied path
Of Poverty,
And know how more
A small thing that the righteous hath
Availeth than the ungodly’s riches great.
Come likewise ye
Which do not yet disown as out of date
That brightest third of the dead Virtues three,
Of Love the crown elate
And daintiest glee!
Come up, come up, and join our little band.
Our time is near at hand.
The sanction of the world’s undying hate
Means more than flaunted flags in windy air.
Be ye of gathering fate
Now gladly ware.
Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought,
The brilliant shall be brought;
The white stone mystic set between the eyes
Of them that get the prize;
Yea, part and parcel of that mighty Stone
Which shall be thrown
Into the Sea, and Sea shall be no more.