Part 5

In a little strength, in a little strength, We affront thy unveiled face intolerable, Which yet we do sustain. Though I the Orient never more shall feel Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart Clang through my shaken body like a gong; Nor ever more with spurted feet shall tread I’ the winepresses of song; nought’s truly lost That moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on me The high Phœbean priesthood, and that craves An unrash utterance; not with flaunted hem May the Muse enter in behind the veil, Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good, Shall the holy Virgins mænadize: ruled lips Befit a votaress Muse. Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love, I keep, O Earth, thy worship, Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more Athwart its roseal glow Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou put’st on Strange sanctities of pathos; like this knoll Made derelict of day, Couchant and shadowèd Under dim Vesper’s overloosened hair: This, where embossèd with the half-blown seed The solemn purple thistle stands in grass Grey as an exhalation, when the bank Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall. Not to the boy, although his eyes be pure As the prime snowdrop is, Ere the rash Phœbus break her cloister Of sanctimonious snow; Or Winter fasting sole on Himalay Since those dove-nuncioed days When Asia rose from bathing; Not to such eyes, Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchical Vision lies unoccult, rank under rank Through all create down-wheeling, from the Throne Even to the bases of the pregnant ooze. This is the enchantment, this the exaltation, The all-compensating wonder, Giving to common things wild kindred With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove; Linking such heights and such humilities Hand in hand in ordinal dances, That I do think my tread, Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-grass, Flickers the unwithering stars. This to the shunless fardel of the world Nerves my uncurbèd back; that I endure, The monstrous Temple’s moveless caryatid, With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things, In a little strength.

In a little sight, in a little sight, We learn from what in thee is credible The incredible, with bloody clutch and feet Clinging the painful juts of jaggèd faith. Science, old noser in its prideful straw, That with anatomising scalpel tents Its three-inch of thy skin, and brags—‘All’s bare,’ The eyeless worm, that boring works the soil, Making it capable for the crops of God; Against its own dull will Ministers poppies to our troublous thought, A Balaam come to prophecy,—parables, Nor of its parable itself is ware, Grossly unwotting; all things has expounded Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre The seminary of being, and extinction The Ceres of existence: it discovers Life in putridity, vigour in decay; Dissolution even, and disintegration, Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder, Finds in God’s thoughts irrefragable order, And admirable the manner of our corruption As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress The tree of Life—Death dies on his own dart Promising to our ashes perpetuity, And to our perishable elements Their proper imperishability; extracting Medicaments from out mortality Against too mortal cogitation; till Even of the caput mortuum we do thus Make a memento vivere. To such uses I put the blinding knowledge of the fool, Who in no order seeth ordinance; Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high, And cry—‘There’s nought beyond!’ How should I so, That cannot with these arms of mine engirdle All which I am; that am a foreigner In mine own region? Who the chart shall draw Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths, The spacious tenements and wide pleasances, Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn, Where I wander darkling, of myself? Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore The long arcane of those dim catacombs, Where the rat memory does its burrows make, Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen tread Starts populace, a _gens lucifuga_; That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold, And I myself incontinent of me. Then go I, my foul-venting ignorance With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth! Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o’ the world, And vow—_A goodly house_, _but something ancient_, _And I can find no Master_? Rather, nay, By baffled seeing, something I divine Which baffles, and a seeing set beyond; And so with strenuous gazes sounding down, Like to the day-long porer on a stream, Whose last look is his deepest, I beside This slow perpetual Time stand patiently, In a little sight.

In a little dust, in a little dust, Earth, thou reclaim’st us, who do all our lives Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage. Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended passions sway it; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries. Thou giv’st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem’st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, The lion maned with curlèd puissance, The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin, Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin; And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat’st. Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, And many a floating bank of fangs, The scaly scourges of thy primal brine, And the tower-crested plesiosaure. Thou fill’st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow On purple æons of kings; man’s hulking towers Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun Disglutt’st their splintered bones. Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidæ Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi, And perished cities whose great phantasmata O’erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:— Hast not thy fill? Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink, Even till thy dull throat sicken, The draught thou grow’st most fat on; hear’st thou not The world’s knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience! Much offal of a foul world comes thy way, And man’s superfluous cloud shall soon be laid In a little blood.

In a little peace, in a little peace, Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes Of imposed being, and relenting, mend’st Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus’ horse Paws i’ the lucent dust as when he shocked The East with rising; O how may I trace In this decline that morning when we did Sport ’twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence, Which had not yet learned rending? we did then Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us Sentence had passed of life, nor commutation Petitioning into death. What’s he that of The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop, Even where the low _hic jacet_ answers him; Thus low, O Man! there’s freedom’s seignory, Tellus’ most reverend sole free commonweal, And model deeply-policied: there none Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss With liberal largesse all; there each is free To be e’en what he must, which here did strive So much to be he could not; there all do Their uses just, with no flown questioning. To be took by the hand of equal earth They doff her livery, slip to the worm, Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance, And that soiled workaday apparel cast, Put on condition: Death’s ungentle buffet Alone makes ceremonial manumission; So are the heavenly statutes set, and those Uranian tables of the primal Law. In a little peace, in a little peace, Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers, We draw together to one hid dark lake; In a little peace, in a little peace, We drain with all our burthens of dishonour Into the cleansing sands o’ the thirsty grave. The fiery pomps, brave exhalations, And all the glistering shows o’ the seeming world, Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see Through the smoked glass of Death; Death, wherewith’s fined The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush The cumbered gutters of humanity; Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned, Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o’ the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws Of the high-tided man; skull-housèd asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being’s drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth That broker is of immortality. Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike, To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter’st Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, Here I pluck loose the body’s cerementing, And break the tomb of life; here I shake off The bur o’ the world, man’s congregation shun, And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended In a little peace.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

‘EX ORE INFANTIUM’

LITTLE Jesus, wast Thou shy Once, and just so small as I? And what did it feel like to be Out of Heaven, and just like me? Didst Thou sometimes think of _there_, And ask where all the angels were? I should think that I would cry For my house all made of sky; I would look about the air, And wonder where my angels were; And at waking ’twould distress me— Not an angel there to dress me! Hadst Thou ever any toys, Like us little girls and boys? And didst Thou play in Heaven with all The angels that were not too tall, With stars for marbles? Did the things Play _Can you see me_? through their wings? And did Thy Mother let Thee spoil Thy robes, with playing on _our_ soil? How nice to have them always new In Heaven, because ’twas quite clean blue!

Didst Thou kneel at night to pray, And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way? And did they tire sometimes, being young, And make the prayer seem very long? And dost Thou like it best, that we Should join our hands to pray to Thee? I used to think, before I knew, The prayer not said unless we do. And did Thy Mother at the night Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right? And didst Thou feel quite good in bed, Kissed, and sweet, and thy prayers said?

Thou canst not have forgotten all That it feels like to be small: And Thou know’st I cannot pray To Thee in my father’s way— When Thou wast so little, say, Couldst Thou talk Thy Father’s way?— So, a little Child, come down And hear a child’s tongue like Thy own; Take me by the hand and walk, And listen to my baby-talk. To Thy Father show my prayer (He will look, Thou art so fair), And say: ‘O Father, I, Thy Son, Bring the prayer of a little one.’

And He will smile, that children’s tongue Has not changed since Thou wast young!

A QUESTION

O BIRD with heart of wassail, That toss the Bacchic branch, And slip your shaken music, An elfin avalanche;

Come tell me, O tell me, My poet of the blue! What’s _your_ thought of me, Sweet?— Here’s _my_ thought of you.

A small thing, a wee thing, A brown fleck of nought; With winging and singing That who could have thought?

A small thing, a wee thing, A brown amaze withal, That fly a pitch more azure Because you’re so small.

Bird, I’m a small thing— My angel descries; With winging and singing That who could surmise?

Ah, small things, ah, wee things, Are the poets all, Whose tour’s the more azure Because they’re so small.

The angels hang watching The tiny men-things:— ‘The dear speck of flesh, see, With such daring wings!

‘Come, tell us, O tell us, Thou strange mortality! What’s _thy_ thought of us, Dear?— Here’s _our_ thought of thee.’

‘Alack! you tall angels, I can’t think so high! I can’t think what it feels like Not to be I.’

Come tell me, O tell me, My poet of the blue! What’s _your_ thought of me, Sweet?— Here’s _my_ thought of you.

FIELD-FLOWER

A PHANTASY

GOD took a fit of Paradise-wind, A slip of coerule weather, A thought as simple as Himself, And ravelled them together. Unto His eyes He held it there, To teach it gazing debonair With memory of what, perdie, A God’s young innocences were. His fingers pushed it through the sod— It came up redolent of God, Garrulous of the eyes of God To all the breezes near it; Musical of the mouth of God To all had eyes to hear it; Mystical with the mirth of God, That glow-like did ensphere it. _And_—‘_Babble_! _babble_! _babble_!’ _said_; ‘_I’ll tell the whole world one day_!’ _There was no blossom half so glad_, _Since sun of Christ’s first Sunday_.

A poet took a flaw of pain, A hap of skiey pleasure, A thought had in his cradle lain, And mingled them in measure. That chrism he laid upon his eyes, And lips, and heart, for euphrasies, That he might see, feel, sing, perdie, The simple things that are the wise. Beside the flower he held his ways, And leaned him to it gaze for gaze— He took its meaning, gaze for gaze, As baby looks on baby; Its meaning passed into his gaze, Native as meaning may be; He rose with all his shining gaze As children’s eyes at play be. _And_—‘_Babble_! _babble_! _babble_!’ _said_; ‘_I’ll tell the whole world one day_!’ _There was no poet half so glad_, _Since man grew God that Sunday_.

THE CLOUD’S SWAN-SONG

THERE is a parable in the pathless cloud, There’s prophecy in heaven,—they did not lie, The Chaldee shepherds; sealèd from the proud, To cheer the weighted heart that mates the seeing eye.

A lonely man, oppressed with lonely ills, And all the glory fallen from my song, Here do I walk among the windy hills, The wind and I keep both one monotoning tongue.

Like grey clouds one by one my songs upsoar Over my soul’s cold peaks; and one by one They loose their little rain, and are no more; And whether well or ill, to tell me there is none.

For ’tis an alien tongue, of alien things, From all men’s care, how miserably apart! Even my friends say: ‘Of what is this he sings?’ And barren is my song, and barren is my heart.

For who can work, unwitting his work’s worth? Better, meseems, to know the work for naught, Turn my sick course back to the kindly earth, And leave to ampler plumes the jetting tops of thought.

And visitations, that do often use, Remote, unhappy, inauspicious sense Of doom, and poets widowed of their muse, And what dark ’gan, dark ended, in me did commence.

I thought of spirit wronged by mortal ills, And my flesh rotting on my fate’s dull stake; And how self-scornèd they the bounty fills Of others, and the bread, even of their dearest, take.

I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, In predecease of his just-sickening song; Of him that set, wrapt in his radiant rhyme, Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.

But I, exanimate of quick Poesy,— O then, no more but even a soulless corse! Nay, my Delight dies not; ’tis I should be Her dead, a stringless harp on which she had no force.

Of my wild lot I thought; from place to place, Apollo’s song-bowed Scythian, I go on; Making in all my home, with pliant ways, But, provident of change, putting forth root in none.

Now, with starved brain, sick body, patience galled With fardels even to wincing; from fair sky Fell sudden little rain, scarce to be called A shower, which of the instant was gone wholly by.

What cloud thus died I saw not; heaven was fair. Methinks my angel plucked my locks: I bowed My spirit, shamed; and looking in the air:— ‘Even so,’ I said, ‘even so, my brother the good Cloud?’

It was a pilgrim of the fields of air, Its home was allwheres the wind left it rest, And in a little forth again did fare, And in all places was a stranger and a guest.

It harked all breaths of heaven, and did obey With sweet peace their uncomprehended wills; It knew the eyes of stars which made no stay, And with the thunder walked upon the lonely hills.

And from the subject earth it seemed to scorn, It drew the sustenance whereby it grew Perfect in bosom for the married Morn, And of his life and light full as a maid kissed new.

Its also darkness of the face withdrawn, And the long waiting for the little light, So long in life so little. Like a fawn It fled with tempest breathing hard at heel of flight;

And having known full East, did not disdain To sit in shadow and oblivious cold, Save what all loss doth of its loss retain, And who hath held hath somewhat that he still must hold.

Right poet! who thy rightness to approve, Having all liberty, didst keep all measure, And with a firmament for ranging, move But at the heavens’ uncomprehended pleasure.

With amplitude unchecked, how sweetly thou Didst wear the ancient custom of the skies, And yoke of used prescription; and thence how Find gay variety no license could devise!

As we the quested beauties better wit Of the one grove our own than forests great, Restraint, by the delighted search of it, Turns to right scope. For lovely moving intricate

Is put to fair devising in the curb Of ordered limit; and all-changeful Hermes Is Terminus as well. Yet we perturb Our souls for latitude, whose strength in bound and term is.

How far am I from heavenly liberty, That play at policy with change and fate, Who should my soul from foreign broils keep free, In the fast-guarded frontiers of its single state!

Could I face firm the Is, and with To-be Trust Heaven; to Heaven commit the deed, and do; In power contained, calm in infirmity, And fit myself to change with virtue ever new;

Thou hadst not shamed me, cousin of the sky, Thou wandering kinsman, that didst sweetly live Unnoted, and unnoted sweetly die, Weeping more gracious song than any I can weave;

Which these gross-tissued words do sorely wrong. Thou hast taught me on powerlessness a power; To make song wait on life, not life on song; To hold sweet not too sweet, and bread for bread though sour;

By law to wander, to be strictly free. With tears ascended from the heart’s sad sea, Ah, such a silver song to Death could I Sing, Pain would list, forgetting Pain to be, And Death would tarry marvelling, and forget to die!

TO THE SINKING SUN

HOW graciously thou wear’st the yoke Of use that does not fail! The grasses, like an anchored smoke, Ride in the bending gale; This knoll is snowed with blosmy manna, And fire-dropt as a seraph’s mail.

Here every eve thou stretchest out Untarnishable wing, And marvellously bring’st about Newly an olden thing; Nor ever through like-ordered heaven Moves largely thy grave progressing.

Here every eve thou goest down Behind the self-same hill, Nor ever twice alike go’st down Behind the self-same hill; Nor like-ways is one flame-sopped flower Possessed with glory past its will.

Not twice alike! I am not blind, My sight is live to see; And yet I do complain of thy Weary variety. O Sun! I ask thee less or more, Change not at all, or utterly!

O give me unprevisioned new, Or give to change reprieve! For new in me is olden too, That I for sameness grieve. O flowers! O grasses! be but once The grass and flower of yester-eve!

Wonder and sadness are the lot Of change: thou yield’st mine eyes Grief of vicissitude, but not Its penetrant surprise. Immutability mutable Burthens my spirit and the skies.

O altered joy, all joyed of yore, Plodding in unconned ways! O grief grieved out, and yet once more A dull, new, staled amaze! I dream, and all was dreamed before, Or dream I so? the dreamer says.

GRIEF’S HARMONICS

AT evening, when the lank and rigid trees, To the mere forms of their sweet day-selves drying, On heaven’s blank leaf seem pressed and flattenèd; Or rather, to my sombre thoughts replying, Of plumes funereal the thin effigies; That hour when all old dead things seem most dead, And their death instant most and most undying, That the flesh aches at them; there stirred in me The babe of an unborn calamity, Ere its due time to be deliverèd. Dead sorrow and sorrow unborn so blent their pain, That which more present was were hardly said, But both more _now_ than any Now can be. My soul like sackcloth did her body rend, And thus with Heaven contend:— ‘Let pass the chalice of this coming dread, Or that fore-drained O bid me not re-drain!’ So have I asked, who know my asking vain, Woe against woe in antiphon set over, That grief’s soul transmigrates, and lives again, And in new pang old pang’s incarnated.

MEMORAT MEMORIA

COME you living or dead to me, out of the silt of the Past, With the sweet of the piteous first, and the shame of the shameful last? Come with your dear and dreadful face through the passes of Sleep, The terrible mask, and the face it masked—the face you did not keep? You are neither two nor one—I would you were one or two, For your awful self is embalmed in the fragrant self I knew: And Above may ken, and Beneath may ken, what I mean by these words of whirl, But by my sleep that sleepeth not,—O Shadow of a Girl!— Nought here but I and my dreams shall know the secret of this thing:— For ever the songs I sing are sad with the songs I never sing, Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs we dare not sing!

Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the hateful horror of love! It has sent more souls to the unslaked Pit than it ever will draw above. I damned you, girl, with my pity, who had better by far been thwart, And drave you hard on the track to hell, because I was gentle of heart. I shall have no comfort now in scent, no ease in dew, for this; I shall be afraid of daffodils, and rose-buds are amiss; You have made a thing of innocence as shameful as a sin, I shall never feel a girl’s soft arms without horror of the skin. My child! what was it that I sowed, that I so ill should reap? You have done this to me. And I, what I to you?—It lies with Sleep.

JULY FUGITIVE

CAN you tell me where has hid her Pretty Maid July? I would swear one day ago She passed by, I would swear that I do know The blue bliss of her eye: ‘Tarry, maid, maid,’ I bid her; But she hastened by. Do you know where she has hid her, Maid July?