Chapter 2
To his bed there came a woman, Stood and looked and sighed a little, And departed without speaking, As himself a few hours after.
I was told it was his sweetheart. They were on the eve of marriage. She was quiet as a statue, But her lip was grey and writhen.
XIV AVE CAESER!
FROM the winter’s grey despair, From the summer’s golden languor, Death, the lover of Life, Frees us for ever.
Inevitable, silent, unseen, Everywhere always, Shadow by night and as light in the day, Signs she at last to her chosen; And, as she waves them forth, Sorrow and Joy Lay by their looks and their voices, Set down their hopes, and are made One in the dim Forever.
Into the winter’s grey delight, Into the summer’s golden dream, Holy and high and impartial, Death, the mother of Life, Mingles all men for ever.
XV ‘THE CHIEF’
HIS brow spreads large and placid, and his eye Is deep and bright, with steady looks that still. Soft lines of tranquil thought his face fulfill— His face at once benign and proud and shy. If envy scout, if ignorance deny, His faultless patience, his unyielding will, Beautiful gentleness and splendid skill, Innumerable gratitudes reply. His wise, rare smile is sweet with certainties, And seems in all his patients to compel Such love and faith as failure cannot quell. We hold him for another Herakles, Battling with custom, prejudice, disease, As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.
XVI HOUSE-SURGEON
EXCEEDING tall, but built so well his height Half-disappears in flow of chest and limb; Moustache and whisker trooper-like in trim; Frank-faced, frank-eyed, frank-hearted; always bright And always punctual—morning, noon, and night; Bland as a Jesuit, sober as a hymn; Humorous, and yet without a touch of whim; Gentle and amiable, yet full of fight. His piety, though fresh and true in strain, Has not yet whitewashed up his common mood To the dead blank of his particular Schism. Sweet, unaggressive, tolerant, most humane, Wild artists like his kindly elderhood, And cultivate his mild Philistinism.
XVII INTERLUDE
O, THE fun, the fun and frolic That _The Wind that Shakes the Barley_ Scatters through a penny-whistle Tickled with artistic fingers!
Kate the scrubber (forty summers, Stout but sportive) treads a measure, Grinning, in herself a ballet, Fixed as fate upon her audience.
Stumps are shaking, crutch-supported; Splinted fingers tap the rhythm; And a head all helmed with plasters Wags a measured approbation.
Of their mattress-life oblivious, All the patients, brisk and cheerful, Are encouraging the dancer, And applauding the musician.
Dim the gas-lights in the output Of so many ardent smokers, Full of shadow lurch the corners, And the doctor peeps and passes.
There are, maybe, some suspicions Of an alcoholic presence . . . ‘Tak’ a sup of this, my wumman!’ . . . New Year comes but once a twelvemonth.
XVIII CHILDREN: PRIVATE WARD
HERE in this dim, dull, double-bedded room, I play the father to a brace of boys, Ailing but apt for every sort of noise, Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom. Roden, the Irishman, is ‘sieven past,’ Blue-eyed, snub-nosed, chubby, and fair of face. Willie’s but six, and seems to like the place, A cheerful little collier to the last. They eat, and laugh, and sing, and fight, all day; All night they sleep like dormice. See them play At Operations:—Roden, the Professor, Saws, lectures, takes the artery up, and ties; Willie, self-chloroformed, with half-shut eyes, Holding the limb and moaning—Case and Dresser.
XIX SCRUBBER
SHE’S tall and gaunt, and in her hard, sad face With flashes of the old fun’s animation There lowers the fixed and peevish resignation Bred of a past where troubles came apace. She tells me that her husband, ere he died, Saw seven of their children pass away, And never knew the little lass at play Out on the green, in whom he’s deified. Her kin dispersed, her friends forgot and gone, All simple faith her honest Irish mind, Scolding her spoiled young saint, she labours on: Telling her dreams, taking her patients’ part, Trailing her coat sometimes: and you shall find No rougher, quainter speech, nor kinder heart.
XX VISITOR
HER little face is like a walnut shell With wrinkling lines; her soft, white hair adorns Her withered brows in quaint, straight curls, like horns; And all about her clings an old, sweet smell. Prim is her gown and quakerlike her shawl. Well might her bonnets have been born on her. Can you conceive a Fairy Godmother The subject of a strong religious call? In snow or shine, from bed to bed she runs, All twinkling smiles and texts and pious tales, Her mittened hands, that ever give or pray, Bearing a sheaf of tracts, a bag of buns: A wee old maid that sweeps the Bridegroom’s way, Strong in a cheerful trust that never fails.
XXI ROMANCE
‘TALK of pluck!’ pursued the Sailor, Set at euchre on his elbow, ‘I was on the wharf at Charleston, Just ashore from off the runner.
‘It was grey and dirty weather, And I heard a drum go rolling, Rub-a-dubbing in the distance, Awful dour-like and defiant.
‘In and out among the cotton, Mud, and chains, and stores, and anchors, Tramped a squad of battered scarecrows— Poor old Dixie’s bottom dollar!
‘Some had shoes, but all had rifles, Them that wasn’t bald was beardless, And the drum was rolling _Dixie_, And they stepped to it like men, sir!
‘Rags and tatters, belts and bayonets, On they swung, the drum a-rolling, Mum and sour. It looked like fighting, And they meant it too, by thunder!’
XXII PASTORAL
IT’S the Spring. Earth has conceived, and her bosom, Teeming with summer, is glad.
Vistas of change and adventure, Thro’ the green land The grey roads go beckoning and winding, Peopled with wains, and melodious With harness-bells jangling: Jangling and twangling rough rhythms To the slow march of the stately, great horses Whistled and shouted along.
White fleets of cloud, Argosies heavy with fruitfulness, Sail the blue peacefully. Green flame the hedgerows. Blackbirds are bugling, and white in wet winds Sway the tall poplars. Pageants of colour and fragrance, Pass the sweet meadows, and viewless Walks the mild spirit of May, Visibly blessing the world.
O, the brilliance of blossoming orchards! O, the savour and thrill of the woods, When their leafage is stirred By the flight of the Angel of Rain! Loud lows the steer; in the fallows Rooks are alert; and the brooks Gurgle and tinkle and trill. Thro’ the gloamings, Under the rare, shy stars, Boy and girl wander, Dreaming in darkness and dew.
It’s the Spring. A sprightliness feeble and squalid Wakes in the ward, and I sicken, Impotent, winter at heart.
XXIII MUSIC
DOWN the quiet eve, Thro’ my window with the sunset Pipes to me a distant organ Foolish ditties;
And, as when you change Pictures in a magic lantern, Books, beds, bottles, floor, and ceiling Fade and vanish,
And I’m well once more . . . August flares adust and torrid, But my heart is full of April Sap and sweetness.
In the quiet eve I am loitering, longing, dreaming . . . Dreaming, and a distant organ Pipes me ditties.
I can see the shop, I can smell the sprinkled pavement, Where she serves—her chestnut chignon Thrills my senses!
O, the sight and scent, Wistful eve and perfumed pavement! In the distance pipes an organ . . . The sensation
Comes to me anew, And my spirit for a moment Thro’ the music breathes the blessèd Airs of London.
XXIV SUICIDE
STARING corpselike at the ceiling, See his harsh, unrazored features, Ghastly brown against the pillow, And his throat—so strangely bandaged!
Lack of work and lack of victuals, A debauch of smuggled whisky, And his children in the workhouse Made the world so black a riddle
That he plunged for a solution; And, although his knife was edgeless, He was sinking fast towards one, When they came, and found, and saved him.
Stupid now with shame and sorrow, In the night I hear him sobbing. But sometimes he talks a little. He has told me all his troubles.
In his broad face, tanned and bloodless, White and wild his eyeballs glisten; And his smile, occult and tragic, Yet so slavish, makes you shudder!
XXV APPARITION
THIN-LEGGED, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face— Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, The brown eyes radiant with vivacity— There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace Of passion and impudence and energy. Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist.
XXVI ANTEROTICS
LAUGHS the happy April morn Thro’ my grimy, little window, And a shaft of sunshine pushes Thro’ the shadows in the square.
Dogs are tracing thro’ the grass, Crows are cawing round the chimneys, In and out among the washing Goes the West at hide-and-seek.
Loud and cheerful clangs the bell. Here the nurses troop to breakfast. Handsome, ugly, all are women . . . O, the Spring—the Spring—the Spring!
XXVII NOCTURN
AT the barren heart of midnight, When the shadow shuts and opens As the loud flames pulse and flutter, I can hear a cistern leaking.
Dripping, dropping, in a rhythm, Rough, unequal, half-melodious, Like the measures aped from nature In the infancy of music;
Like the buzzing of an insect, Still, irrational, persistent . . . I must listen, listen, listen In a passion of attention;
Till it taps upon my heartstrings, And my very life goes dripping, Dropping, dripping, drip-drip-dropping, In the drip-drop of the cistern.
XXVIII DISCHARGED
CARRY me out Into the wind and the sunshine, Into the beautiful world.
O, the wonder, the spell of the streets! The stature and strength of the horses, The rustle and echo of footfalls, The flat roar and rattle of wheels! A swift tram floats huge on us . . . It’s a dream? The smell of the mud in my nostrils Blows brave—like a breath of the sea!
As of old, Ambulant, undulant drapery, Vaguery and strangely provocative, Fluttersd and beckons. O, yonder— Is it?—the gleam of a stocking! Sudden, a spire Wedged in the mist! O, the houses, The long lines of lofty, grey houses, Cross-hatched with shadow and light! These are the streets . . . Each is an avenue leading Whither I will!
Free . . . ! Dizzy, hysterical, faint, I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me Into the wonderful world.
THE OLD INFIRMARY, EDINBURGH, 1873–75
ENVOY _To_ CHARLES BAXTER
DO you remember That afternoon—that Sunday afternoon!— When, as the kirks were ringing in, And the grey city teemed With Sabbath feelings and aspects, LEWIS—our LEWIS then, Now the whole world’s—and you, Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came, Laden with BALZACS (Big, yellow books, quite impudently French), The first of many times To that transformed back-kitchen where I lay So long, so many centuries— Or years is it!—ago?
Dear CHARLES, since then We have been friends, LEWIS and you and I, (How good it sounds, ‘LEWIS and you and I!’): Such friends, I like to think, That in us three, LEWIS and me and you, Is something of that gallant dream Which old DUMAS—the generous, the humane, The seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven!— Dreamed for a blessing to the race, The immortal _Musketeers_.
Our ATHOS rests—the wise, the kind, The liberal and august, his fault atoned, Rests in the crowded yard There at the west of Princes Street. We three— You, I, and LEWIS!—still afoot, Are still together, and our lives, In chime so long, may keep (God bless the thought!) Unjangled till the end.
W. E. H.
CHISWICK, _March_ 1888
THE SONG OF THE SWORD
(_To_ Rudyard Kipling)
1890
_The Sword_ _Singing_— _The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword_ _Clanging imperious_ _Forth from Time’s battlements_ _His ancient and triumphing Song_.
In the beginning, Ere God inspired Himself Into the clay thing Thumbed to His image, The vacant, the naked shell Soon to be Man: Thoughtful He pondered it, Prone there and impotent, Fragile, inviting Attack and discomfiture; Then, with a smile— As He heard in the Thunder That laughed over Eden The voice of the Trumpet, The iron Beneficence, Calling his dooms To the Winds of the world— Stooping, He drew On the sand with His finger A shape for a sign Of his way to the eyes That in wonder should waken, For a proof of His will To the breaking intelligence. That was the birth of me: I am the Sword.
Bleak and lean, grey and cruel, Short-hilted, long shafted, I froze into steel; And the blood of my elder, His hand on the hafts of me, Sprang like a wave In the wind, as the sense Of his strength grew to ecstasy; Glowed like a coal In the throat of the furnace; As he knew me and named me The War-Thing, the Comrade, Father of honour And giver of kingship, The fame-smith, the song-master, Bringer of women On fire at his hands For the pride of fulfilment, _Priest_ (saith the Lord) _Of his marriage with victory_ Ho! then, the Trumpet, Handmaid of heroes, Calling the peers To the place of espousals! Ho! then, the splendour And glare of my ministry, Clothing the earth With a livery of lightnings! Ho! then, the music Of battles in onset, And ruining armours, And God’s gift returning In fury to God! Thrilling and keen As the song of the winter stars, Ho! then, the sound Of my voice, the implacable Angel of Destiny!— I am the Sword.
Heroes, my children, Follow, O, follow me! Follow, exulting In the great light that breaks From the sacred Companionship! Thrust through the fatuous, Thrust through the fungous brood, Spawned in my shadow And gross with my gift! Thrust through, and hearken O, hark, to the Trumpet, The Virgin of Battles, Calling, still calling you Into the Presence, Sons of the Judgment, Pure wafts of the Will! Edged to annihilate, Hilted with government, Follow, O, follow me, Till the waste places All the grey globe over Ooze, as the honeycomb Drips, with the sweetness Distilled of my strength, And, teeming in peace Through the wrath of my coming, They give back in beauty The dread and the anguish They had of me visitant! Follow, O follow, then, Heroes, my harvesters! Where the tall grain is ripe Thrust in your sickles! Stripped and adust In a stubble of empire, Scything and binding The full sheaves of sovranty: Thus, O, thus gloriously, Shall you fulfil yourselves! Thus, O, thus mightily, Show yourselves sons of mine— Yea, and win grace of me: I am the Sword!
I am the feast-maker: Hark, through a noise Of the screaming of eagles, Hark how the Trumpet, The mistress of mistresses, Calls, silver-throated And stern, where the tables Are spread, and the meal Of the Lord is in hand! Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master— Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable Grisliness Prone down the nethermost Chasms of the Void!— Clear singing, clean slicing; Sweet spoken, soft finishing; Making death beautiful, Life but a coin To be staked in the pastime Whose playing is more Than the transfer of being; Arch-anarch, chief builder, Prince and evangelist, I am the Will of God: I am the Sword.
_The Sword_ _Singing_— _The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword_ _Clanging majestical_, _As from the starry-staired_ _Courts of the primal Supremacy_, _His high_, _irresistible song_.
ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS
(_To_ Elizabeth Robins Pennell)
1893
‘O mes chères _Mille et Une Nuits_!’—_Fantasio_.
ONCE on a time There was a little boy: a master-mage By virtue of a Book Of magic—O, so magical it filled His life with visionary pomps Processional! And Powers Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, Thronged in the criss-cross streets, The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields, Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul Pavilioned jealously, and hid As in the dusk, profound, Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.—
I shut mine eyes . . . And lo! A flickering snatch of memory that floats Upon the face of a pool of darkness five And thirty dead years deep, Antic in girlish broideries And skirts and silly shoes with straps And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks Plain in the shadow of a church (St. Michael’s: in whose brazen call To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed), Sedate for all his haste To be at home; and, nestled in his arm, Inciting still to quiet and solitude, Boarded in sober drab, With small, square, agitating cuts Let in a-top of the double-columned, close, Quakerlike print, a Book! . . . What but that blessed brief Of what is gallantest and best In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance? The Book of rocs, Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars, And ghouls, and genies—O, so huge They might have overed the tall Minster Tower Hands down, as schoolboys take a post! In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk— Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms— Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles, The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!
Old friends I had a-many—kindly and grim Familiars, cronies quaint And goblin! Never a Wood but housed Some morrice of dainty dapperlings. No Brook But had his nunnery Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites, To cabin in his grots, and pace His lilied margents. Every lone Hillside Might open upon Elf-Land. Every Stalk That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs You climbed beyond the clouds, and found The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged And drowsy, from his great oak chair, Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, Called for his Faëry Harp. And in it flew, And, perching on the kitchen table, sang Jocund and jubilant, with a sound Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals The shy thrush at mid-May Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn; Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still, In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring, For Pan’s own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, And mocked him call for call!
I could not pass The half-door where the cobbler sat in view Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun, In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes, Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists And elbows. In the rich June fields, Where the ripe clover drew the bees, And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind Lolled his half-holiday away Beside me lolling and lounging through my own, ’Twas good to follow the Miller’s Youngest Son On his white horse along the leafy lanes; For at his stirrup linked and ran, Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped From wall to wall above the espaliers, But in the bravest tops That market-town, a town of tops, could show: Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail A banner flaunted in disdain Of human stratagems and shifts: King over All the Catlands, present and past And future, that moustached Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots! Or Bluebeard’s Closet, with its plenishing Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood, And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases— Odd-fangled, most a butcher’s, part A faëry chamber hazily seen And hazily figured—on dark afternoons And windy nights was visiting of the best. Then, too, the pelt of hoofs Out in the roaring darkness told Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit, Between his hell-born Hounds. And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear, Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall, The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins; For, listening, I could help him play His wonderful game, In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.
But what were these so near, So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought The run of Ali Baba’s Cave Just for the saying ‘Open Sesame,’ With gold to measure, peck by peck, In round, brown wooden stoups You borrowed at the chandler’s? . . . Or one time Made you Aladdin’s friend at school, Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair For all the embrowning scars in their white breasts Went labouring under some dread ordinance, Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while, Strange Curs that cried as they, Till there was never a Black Bitch of all Your consorting but might have gone Spell-driven miserably for crimes Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . . Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night, While you lay wondering and acold, Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon Queen Labé, abominable and dear, Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom, Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk), And muttered certain words you could not hear; And there! a living stream, The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags And cresses, glittered and sang Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness, Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .