APOLOGY
While blue and khaki share the heroes mud,
And women tend in white or weep in grey,
Though all expressiveness seems over-dressed,
Yet some must wear the colours of their hearts
Upon their sleeves, like troubadours, of old;
And sing, and sometimes write their singing down.
... To "chase them from republics" were as vain
As to disturb the hurdy-gurdy man.
Let him go grinding music as he likes;
You see him turn his wheel, but need not hear
The tune he's playing in the noisy street?...
(Some have an organ, some an axe to grind,
While others seek how best to bury hatchets.)
We all are poets in our different ways
And may your dreams be harmless as my own.
AH! NIGHT!
Ah! night!
To feel the stab of beauty at the heart!
To drink, with lifted throat,
The silent throb and music of the stars,
The first kiss of the spring on spell-bound trees,
To stretch out arms to hold and soothe the world,
—A love too vast in aught to be contained,
Helpless and great: a poets youthfulness,...
Alone, might all this emptiness be you!
May first 1915
THE LOVE OF JUDAS
Love, take me back to you, and make me whole,
Who am divided and in unbelief:
An infidel in thought and word and grief,
A double heart and a promiscuous soul!
And what if Judas offered Christ that bowl
Of greatest bitterness without relief.
Revenge, not silver, tempted such a thief:
Betrayed betrayer of the kiss he stole.
He loved the most; those others loved but well,
They drowsed: in dreadful paths his anguish trod,
Nor thrice denied the love that sold his God.
No pity for his throbbing jealous side,
No pity for his false obscure farewell;
Yet he alone for his lost master died!
THE WEEPING VENUS
by Romaine
Laid out as dead in moonlight shroud
Beneath a derelict of cloud:
A double wreckage safe from flight,
High-caged as grief, in prisoned night.—
Unseeing eyes whose clustering tears
Tell the pure crystal of her years.—
No crown of thorns, no wounded side,
Yet as the God-man crucified,
Her body expiates the sin
That love and life with her begin!
MORE NIGHT!
Moon-love, star-love, the love of silver water.
The weeping face of love touched in the dark,
And murdered joy, lost souls of joy that caught her
A glow-worm's warmth and spark.
Birds of prey, invisible, now hover
About her midnights hammocked in unrest—
A moving shadow, faithless as a lover,
Is all her arms have pressed—
Too luminous the dreaming of the sleeper
Whose tears are prophecies and second-sight.
Has death no under-sea, no darkness deeper,
In which to satiate our need of night?
THE PHANTOM GUEST
We lay in shade diaphanous
And spoke the light that burns in us
As in the glooming's net I caught her,
She shimmered like reflected water!
Romantic and emphatic moods
Are not for her whom life eludes...
Its vulgar tinsel round her fold?
She'd rather shudder with the cold,
Attend just this elusive hour,
A shadow in a shadow bower,
A moving imagery so fine,
It must have been her soul near mine
And so we blended and possessed
Each in each the phantom guest,
Inseparate, we scarcely met;
Yet other love-nights we forget!
DOUBLE BEING
A northern mind, a face from Italy,
A double fate lived all too fatally,
A look fresh as a childs, both soft and sharp,
A clarion-voice, then liquid as a harp!
A natural being, yet from nature freed,
Like a Shakespearean boy of fairy breed—
A sex perplexed into attractive seeming—
Both sex at best, the strangeness so redeeming!—
Hands hard to loosen if for once they cling,
Yet frail as Leicester's wearing a queen's ring.
A page-clothed Rosalind to play a part,
A brow of genius and a lonely heart.
SINGING
Ethereal vibrations
And soulful pulsations
Of song,
Afloat on the air
—More aspiring than prayer—
How strong
The wings that uplift!
As soaring adrift,
A throng
Of angels there are,
And an echoing star,
As along
You rise ever higher,
Sole voice of a choir
How long
Shall we follow your flight,
Through crystaline night,
And belong
—Through the high vaults of space—
To your archangel's face,
And long,
—With the heavens still ringing—
To be one with your singing?
ON A PICTURE TO MUSIC
Music, language of the mortal soul.
The face of twilight,
The mouth of bitterness made lyrical,
Eyes closed on poignant joys that might have been!
A profile turned to life, and yet beyond ...
Reborn, transfigured; penetrating sense
To gather an acute expressiveness
Vibrant within itself: all our lost lives!
—We must play gently to the living dead—
Fingers outstretched, by that responsive lid
Where Angel harps lie buried at full length,
Yet still in touch and resonant—Arise
To laying on of hands—
Invisible, a phantom of pure sound
Voices the spirit sitting there, awakes
The sighing, and the soaring and the beat
(O dispossessed and silenced King: my heart!)
Until we too are echos of that tide,
Where winds and waves become articulate,
Our being tossed so high, beyond itself,
Winged by the elements!
Our human weight of woe no longer felt
Until we meet
—By some familiar fall of minor chords—
The inner God of Sorrow face to face.
LOVE'S COMRADES
You say I've lived too long in France
And wearied of the senses' dance?
Like fresh air in an opium den
You'll lead me out—to where? and when?
.... I fear no country's ready yet
For our complexities: forget
The best of flesh and food to go
A'roaming o'er the world, and know
Discomfort's great surprises few—?
No, let me travel just to you!