And here again I must draw upon Dr. Gordon Hake’s fascinating book of poetry, ‘The New Day,’ which must live, if only for its reminiscences of the life poetic lived at Chelsea, Kelmscott, and Bognor:—
THE NEW DAY
I
In the unbroken silence of the mind
Thoughts creep about us, seeming not to move,
And life is back among the days behind—
The spectral days of that lamented love—
Days whose romance can never be repeated.
The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming,
We see him, life-like, at his easel seated,
His voice, his brush, with rival wonders teeming.
These vanished hours, where are they stored away?
Hear we the voice, or but its lingering tone?
Its utterances are swallowed up in day;
The gabled house, the mighty master gone.
Yet are they ours: the stranger at the hall—
What dreams he of the days we there recall?II
O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
From Nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
How often did we trace the nestling Thames
From humblest waters on his course of might,
Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the strand
Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
Triumphal labours of the day to be.
The words were his: ‘Such love can never die;’
The grief was ours when he no more was nigh.III
Like some sweet water-bell, the tinkling rill
Still calls the flowers upon its misty bank
To stoop into the stream and drink their fill.
And still the shapeless rushes, green and rank,
Seem lounging in their pride round those retreats,
Watching slim willows dip their thirsty spray.
Slowly a loosened weed another meets;
They stop, like strangers, neither giving way.
We are here surely if the world, forgot,
Glides from our sight into the charm, unbidden;
We are here surely at this witching spot,—
Though Nature in the reverie is hidden.
A spell so holds our captive eyes in thrall,
It is as if a play pervaded all.IV
Sitting with him, his tones as Petrarch’s tender,
With many a speaking vision on the wall,
The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender,
Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl—
’Twas you brought Nature to the visiting,
Till she herself seemed breathing in the room,
And Art grew fragrant in the glow of spring
With homely scents of gorse and heather bloom.
Or sunbeams shone by many an Alpine fountain,
Fed by the waters of the forest stream;
Or glacier-glories in the rock-girt mountain,
Where they so often fed the poet’s dream;
Or else was mingled the rough billow’s glee
With cries of petrels on a sullen sea.Remember how we roamed the Channel’s shore,
And read aloud our verses, each in turn,
While rhythmic waves to us their music bore,
And foam-flakes leapt from out the rocky churn.
Then oft with glowing eyes you strove to capture
The potent word that makes a thought abiding,
And wings it upward to its place of rapture,
While we discoursed to Nature, she presiding.
Then would the poet-painter gaze in wonder
That art knew not the mighty reverie
That moves earth’s spirit and her orb asunder,
While ocean’s depths, even, seem a shallow sea.
Yet with rare genius could his hand impart
His own far-searching poesy to art.
The fourth of these exquisite sonnets delights me most of all. It makes me see the recluse in his studio, sitting snugly with his feet in the fender, when suddenly the door opens and the poet of Nature brings with him a new atmosphere—the salt atmosphere which envelops ‘Mother Carey’s Chicken,’ and the attenuated mountain air of Natura Benigna. And yet perhaps the description of
‘The sun of Kelmscott through the foliage gleaming’
is equally fascinating.
Mr. Watts-Dunton himself, with a stronger hand and more vigorous brush, has in his sonnet ‘The Shadow on the Window Blind,’ made Kelmscott Manor and the poetic life lived there still more memorable:—
Within this thicket’s every leafy lair
A song-bird sleeps: the very rooks are dumb,
Though red behind their nests the moon has swum—
But still I see that shadow writing there!—
Poet, behind yon casement’s ruddy square,
Whose shadow tells me why you do not come—
Rhyming and chiming of thine insect-hum,
Flying and singing through thine inch of air—Come thither, where on grass and flower and leaf
Gleams Nature’s scripture, putting Man’s to shame:
‘Thy day,’ she says, ‘is all too rich and brief—
Thy game of life too wonderful a game—
To give to Art entirely or in chief:
Drink of these dews—sweeter than wine of Fame.’
‘Aylwin,’ too, is full of vivid pictures of Rossetti at Chelsea and Kelmscott.
The following description of the famous house and garden, 16 Cheyne Walk, has been declared by one of Rossetti’s most intimate friends to be marvellously graphic and true:—