Part 3
And we shall sit at endless feast, Enjoying each the other’s good; What vaster dream can hit the mood Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
Upon the last and sharpest height, Before the spirits fade away, Some landing-place, to clasp and say, ‘Farewell! We lose ourselves in light.’
XLVII.
If these brief lays, of Sorrow born, Were taken to be such as closed Grave doubts and answers here proposed, Then these were such as men might scorn:
Her care is not to part and prove; She takes, when harsher moods remit, What slender shade of doubt may flit, And makes it vassal unto love:
And hence, indeed, she sports with words; But better serves a wholesome law, And holds it sin and shame to draw The deepest measure from the chords:
Nor dare she trust a larger lay, But rather loosens from the lip Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away.
XLVIII.
From art, from nature, from the schools, Let random influences glance, Like light in many a shiver’d lance That breaks about the dappled pools:
The lightest wave of thought shall lisp, The fancy’s tenderest eddy wreathe, The slightest air of song shall breathe To make the sullen surface crisp.
And look thy look, and go thy way, But blame not thou the winds that make The seeming-wanton ripple break, The tender-pencil’d shadow play.
Beneath all fancied hopes and fears Ay me! the sorrow deepens down, Whose muffled motions blindly drown The bases of my life in tears.
XLIX.
Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust, And time, a maniac, scattering dust, And life, a Fury, slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry, And men the flies of latter spring, That lay their eggs, and sting and sing, And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away, To point the term of human strife, And on the low dark verge of life The twilight of eternal day.
L.
Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side? Is there no baseness we would hide? No inner vileness that we dread?
Shall he for whose applause I strove, I had such reverence for his blame, See with clear eye some hidden shame And I be lessen’d in his love?
I wrong the grave with fears untrue: Shall love be blamed for want of faith? There must be wisdom with great Death; The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.
Be near us when we climb or fall: Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours With larger other eyes than ours, To make allowance for us all.
LI.
I cannot love thee as I ought, For love reflects the thing beloved; My words are only words, and moved Upon the topmost froth of thought.
‘Yet blame not thou thy plaintive song,’ The Spirit of true love replied; ‘Thou canst not move me from thy side, Nor human frailty do me wrong.
‘What keeps a spirit wholly true To that ideal which he bears? What record? not the sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue;
‘So fret not, like an idle girl, That life is dash’d with flecks of sin. Abide: thy wealth is gathered in, When Time hath sunder’d shell from pearl.’
LII.
How many a father have I seen, A sober man, among his boys, Whose youth was full of foolish noise, Who wears his manhood hale and green;
And dare we to this doctrine give That had the wild oat not been sown, The soil, left barren, had not grown The grain by which a man may live?
Oh! if we held the doctrine sound For life outliving heats of youth, Yet who would preach it as a truth To those that eddy round and round?
Hold thou the good: define it well: For fear divine philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell.
LIII.
Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy’d, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain; That not a moth with vain desire Is shrivel’d in a fruitless fire, Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold! we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last--far off--at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
LIV.
The wish, that of the living whole No life may fail beyond the grave; Derives it not from what we have The likest God within the soul?
Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear;
I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world’s altar-stairs That slope thro’ darkness up to God;
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
LV.
‘So careful of the type?’ but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries ‘a thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go.
Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more.’ And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law-- Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed--
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal’d within the iron hills?
No more? A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match’d with him.
O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil.
LVI.
Peace, come away: the song of woe Is after all an earthly song: Peace, come away; we do him wrong To sing so wildly; let us go.
Come, let us go, your cheeks are pale, But half my life I leave behind; Methinks my friend is richly shrined, But I shall pass; my work will fail.
Yet in these ears till hearing dies, One set slow bell will seem to toll The passing of the sweetest soul That ever looked with human eyes.
I hear it now, and o’er and o’er, Eternal greetings to the dead; And ‘Ave, Ave, Ave,’ said, ‘Adieu, adieu’ for evermore!
LVII.
In those sad words I took farewell: Like echoes in sepulchral halls, As drop by drop the water falls In vaults and catacombs, they fell;
And, falling, idly broke the peace Of hearts that beat from day to day, Half-conscious of their dying clay, And those cold crypts where they shall cease.
The high Muse answer’d: ‘Wherefore grieve Thy brethren with a fruitless tear? Abide a little longer here, And thou shalt take a nobler leave.’
LVII.
He past; a soul of nobler tone: My spirit loved and loves him yet, Like some poor girl whose heart is set On one whose rank exceeds her own.
He mixing with his proper sphere, She finds the baseness of her lot; Half jealous of she knows not what, And envying all that meet him there.
The little village looks forlorn; She sighs amid her narrow days, Moving about the household ways, In that dark house where she was born.
The foolish neighbours come and go, And tease her till the day draws by; At night she weeps, ‘How vain am I! How should he love a thing so low?’
LIX.
If, in thy second state sublime, Thy ransom’d reason change replies With all the circle of the wise, The perfect flower of human time;
And if thou cast thine eyes below, How dimly character’d and slight, How dwarf’d a growth of cold and night, How blanch’d with darkness must I grow!
Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore, Where thy first form was made a man: I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.
LX.
Tho’ if an eye that’s downward cast Could make thee somewhat blench or fail, So be my love an idle tale, And fading legend of the past;
And thou, as one that once declined, When he was little more than boy, On some unworthy heart with joy, But lives to wed an equal mind;
And breathes a novel world, the while His other passion wholly dies, Or in the light of deeper eyes Is matter for a flying smile.
LXI.
Yet pity for a horse o’er-driven, And love in which my hound has part, Can hang no weight upon my heart In its assumptions up to heaven;
And I am so much more than these, As thou, perchance, art more than I, And yet I spare them sympathy And I would set their pains at ease.
So may’st thou watch me where I weep, As, unto vaster motions bound, The circuits of thine orbit round A higher height, a deeper deep.
LXII.
Dost thou look back on what hath been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life in low estate began And on a simple village green;
Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star;
Who makes by force his merit known And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mould a mighty state’s decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne;
And moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune’s crowning slope The pillar of a people’s hope, The centre of a world’s desire;
Yet feels, as in a pensive dream, When all his active powers are still, A distant dearness in the hill, A secret sweetness in the stream,
The limit of his narrower fate, While yet beside its vocal springs He played at counsellors and kings, With one that was his earliest mate;
Who ploughs with pain his native lea And reaps the labour of his hands, Or in the furrow musing stands; ‘Does my old friend remember me?’
LXIII.
Sweet soul! do with me as thou wilt; I lull a fancy trouble-tost With ‘Love’s too precious to be lost, A little grain shall not be spilt.’
And in that solace can I sing, Till out of painful phases wrought There flutters up a happy thought, Self-balanced on a lightsome wing:
Since we deserved the name of friends, And thine effect so lives in me, A part of mine may live in thee, And move thee on to noble ends.
LXIV.
You thought my heart too far diseased; You wonder when my fancies play To find me gay among the gay, Like one with any trifle pleased.
The shade by which my life was crost, Which makes a desert in the mind, Has made me kindly with my kind, And like to him whose sight is lost;
Whose feet are guided thro’ the land, Whose jest among his friends is free, Who takes the children on his knee, And winds their curls about his hand:
He plays with threads, he beats his chair For pastime, dreaming of the sky; His inner day can never die, His night of loss is always there.
LXV.
When on my bed the moonlight falls, I know that in thy place of rest By that broad water of the west, There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears, As slowly steals a silver flame Along the letters of thy name, And o’er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away; From off my bed the moonlight dies; And closing eaves of wearied eyes I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn A lucid veil from coast to coast, And in the chancel like a ghost Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.
LXVI.
When in the down I sink my head, Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, times my breath; Sleep, Death’s twin-brother, knows not Death, Nor can I dream of thee as dead:
I walk as ere I walk’d forlorn, When all our path was fresh with dew, And all the bugle breezes blew Reveillée to the breaking morn.
But what is this? I turn about, I find a trouble in thine eye Which makes me sad I know not why, Nor can my dream resolve the doubt:
But ere the lark hath left the lea I wake, and I discern the truth; It is the trouble of my youth That foolish sleep transfers to thee.
LXVII.
I dream’d there would be Spring no more, That Nature’s ancient power was lost: The streets were black with smoke and frost, They chatter’d trifles at the door.
I wander’d from the noisy town, I found a wood with thorny boughs: I took the thorns to bind my brows, I wore them like a civic crown.
I met with scoffs, I met with scorns From youth and babe and hoary hairs: They call’d me in the public squares The fool that wears a crown of thorns.
They call’d me fool, they call’d me child: I found an angel of the night: The voice was low, the look was bright, He look’d upon my crown and smiled:
He reach’d the glory of a hand, That seem’d to touch it into leaf: The voice was not the voice of grief; The words were hard to understand.
LXVIII.
I cannot see the features right, When on the gloom I strive to paint The face I know; the hues are faint And mix with hollow masks of night:
Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought, A gulf that ever shuts and gapes, A hand that points, and palled shapes In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;
And crowds that stream from yawning doors, And shoals of pucker’d faces drive; Dark bulks that tumble half alive, And lazy lengths on boundless shores:
Till all at once beyond the will I hear a wizard music roll, And thro’ a lattice on the soul Looks thy fair face and makes it still.
LXIX.
Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance And madness, thou hast forged at last A night-long Present of the Past In which we went through summer France.
Hadst thou such credit with the soul? So bring an opiate treble-strong, Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong That thus my pleasure might be whole;
While now we talk as once we talk’d Of men and minds, the dust of change, The days that grow to something strange, In walking as of old we walk’d
Beside the river’s wooded reach, The fortress, and the mountain ridge, The cataract flashing from the bridge, The breaker breaking on the beach.
LXX.
Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again, And howlest, issuing out of night, With blasts that blow the poplar white, And lash with storm the streaming pane?
Day, when my crown’d estate begun To pine in that reverse of doom, Which sickened every living bloom, And blurr’d the splendour of the sun;
Who usherest in the dolorous hour With thy quick tears that make the rose Pull sideways, and the daisy close Her crimson fringes to the shower;
Who might’st have heaved a windless flame Up the deep East, or, whispering, play’d A chequer-work of beam and shade From hill to hill, yet look’d the same,
As wan, as chill, as wild as now; Day, mark’d as with some hideous crime, When the dark hand struck down thro’ time. And cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,
Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows Thro’ clouds that drench the morning star, And whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar, And sow the sky with flying boughs,
And up thy vault with roaring sound Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day; Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray, And hide thy shame beneath the ground.
LXXI.
So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be, How know I what had need of thee, For thou wert strong as thou wert true?
The fame is quench’d that I foresaw, The head hath miss’d an earthly wreath: I curse not nature; no, nor death, For nothing is that errs from law.
We pass: the path that each man trod Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds: What fame is left for human deeds In endless age? It rests with God.
O hollow wraith of dying fame, Fade wholly, while the soul exults, And self-infolds the large results Of force that would have forged a name.
LXXII.
As sometimes in a dead man’s face, To those that watch it more and more, A likeness hardly seen before Comes out--to some one of his race:
So, dearest, now thy brows are cold, I see thee what thou art, and know Thy likeness to the wise below, Thy kindred with the great of old.
But there is more than I can see, And what I see I leave unsaid, Nor speak it, knowing Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee.
LXXIII.
I leave thy praises unexpress’d In verse that brings myself relief, And by the measure of my grief I leave thy greatness to be guess’d;
What practice howsoe’er expert In fitting aptest words to things, Or voice the richest-toned that sings, Hath power to give thee as thou wert?
I care not in these fading days To raise a cry that lasts not long, And round thee with the breeze of song To stir a little dust of praise.
Thy leaf has perish’d in the green, And, while we breathe beneath the sun, The world which credits what is done Is cold to all that might have been.
So here shall silence guard thy fame; But somewhere, out of human view, Whate’er thy hands are set to do Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.
LXXIV.
Take wings of fancy, and ascend, And in a moment set thy face Where all the starry heavens of space Are sharpen’d to a needle’s end;
Take wings of foresight: lighten thro’ The secular abyss to come, And lo! thy deepest lays are dumb Before the mouldering of a yew;
And if the matin songs, that woke The darkness of our planet, last, Thine own shall wither in the vast, Ere half the lifetime of an oak.
Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain; And what are they when these remain The ruin’d shells of hollow towers?
LXXV.
What hope is here for modern rhyme To him, who turns a musing eye On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?
These mortal lullabies of pain May bind a book, may line a box, May serve to curl a maiden’s locks; Or when a thousand moons shall wane
A man upon a stall may find, And, passing, turn the page that tells A grief--then changed to something else, Sung by a long forgotten mind.
But what of that? My darken’d ways Shall ring with music all the same; To breathe my loss is more than fame, To utter love more sweet than praise.
LXXVI.
Again at Christmas did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth, The silent snow possess’d the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve;
The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost.
As in the winters left behind, Again our ancient games had place, The mimic pictures breathing grace, And dance and song and hoodman-blind.
Who show’d a token of distress? No single tear, no type of pain: O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less?
O last regret, Regret can die! No--mixt with all this mystic frame, Her deep relations are the same, But with long use her tears are dry.
LXXVII.
‘More than my brothers are to me’-- Let this not vex thee, noble heart! I know thee of what force thou art, To hold the costliest love in fee.
But thou and I are one in kind, As moulded like in nature’s mint; And hill and wood and field did print The same sweet forms in either mind.
For us the same cold streamlet curl’d Through all his eddying coves; the same All winds that roam the twilight came In whispers of the beauteous world.
At one dear knee we proffer’d vows, One lesson from one book we learn’d, Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turn’d To black and brown on kindred brows.
And so my wealth resembles thine, But he was rich where I was poor, And he supplied my want the more As his unlikeness fitted mine.
LXXVIII.
If any vague desire should rise, That holy Death ere Arthur died Had moved me kindly from his side, And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;
Then fancy shapes, as fancy can, The grief my loss in him had wrought, A grief as deep as life or thought, But stay’d in peace with God and man.
I make a picture in the brain; I hear the sentence that he speaks; He bears the burthen of the weeks, But turns his burthen into gain.
His credit thus shall set me free; And, influence-rich to soothe and save, Unused example from the grave, Reach out dead hands to comfort me.
LXXIX.
Could I have said while he was here ‘My love shall now no further range, There cannot come a mellower change, For now is love mature in ear.’
Love, then, had hope of richer store: What end is here to my complaint? This haunting whisper makes me faint, ‘More years had made me love thee more.’
But Death returns an answer sweet: ‘My sudden frost was sudden gain, And gave all ripeness to the grain, It might have drawn from after-heat.’
LXXX.
I wage not any feud with Death For changes wrought on form and face; No lower life that earth’s embrace May breed with him, can fright my faith.
Eternal process moving on, From state to state the spirit walks; And these are but the shatter’d stalks Or ruined chrysalis of one.
Nor blame I Death, because he bare The use of virtue out of earth; I know transplanted human worth Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.
For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart; He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.
LXXXI.