Chapter 3

That all things goodly and glad remain with her, All things that make glad life and goodly death; That as a bee sucks from a sunflower Honey, when summer draws delighted breath, Her soul may drink of thy soul in like way, And love make life a fruitful marriage-bed Where day may bring forth fruits of joy to day And night to night till days and nights be dead. And as she gives light of her love to thee, Give thou to her the old glory of days long done; And either give some heat of light to me, To warm me where I sleep without the sun.

O sunflower made drunken with the sun, O knight whose lady's heart draws thine to her, Great king, glad lover, I have a word to thee. There is a weed lives out of the sun's way, Hid from the heat deep in the meadow's bed, That swoons and whitens at the wind's least breath, A flower star-shaped, that all a summer day Will gaze her soul out on the sunflower For very love till twilight finds her dead. But the great sunflower heeds not her poor death, Knows not when all her loving life is done; And so much knows my lord the king of me.

Aye, all day long he has no eye for me; With golden eye following the golden sun From rose-coloured to purple-pillowed bed, From birthplace to the flame-lit place of death, From eastern end to western of his way. So mine eye follows thee, my sunflower, So the white star-flower turns and yearns to thee, The sick weak weed, not well alive or dead, Trod underfoot if any pass by her, Pale, without colour of summer or summer breath In the shrunk shuddering petals, that have done No work but love, and die before the day.

But thou, to-day, to-morrow, and every day, Be glad and great, O love whose love slays me. Thy fervent flower made fruitful from the sun Shall drop its golden seed in the world's way, That all men thereof nourished shall praise thee For grain and flower and fruit of works well done; Till thy shed seed, O shining sunflower, Bring forth such growth of the world's garden-bed As like the sun shall outlive age and death. And yet I would thine heart had heed of her Who loves thee alive; but not till she be dead. Come, Love, then, quickly, and take her utmost breath.

Song, speak for me who am dumb as are the dead; From my sad bed of tears I send forth thee, To fly all day from sun's birth to sun's death Down the sun's way after the flying sun, For love of her that gave thee wings and breath, Ere day be done, to seek the sunflower.

FOR THE FEAST OF GIORDANO BRUNO,

PHILOSOPHER AND MARTYR

I

Son of the lightning and the light that glows Beyond the lightning's or the morning's light, Soul splendid with all-righteous love of right, In whose keen fire all hopes and fears and woes Were clean consumed, and from their ashes rose Transfigured, and intolerable to sight Save of purged eyes whose lids had cast off night, In love's and wisdom's likeness when they close, Embracing, and between them truth stands fast, Embraced of either; thou whose feet were set On English earth while this was England yet, Our friend that art, our Sidney's friend that wast, Heart hardier found and higher than all men's past, Shall we not praise thee though thine own forget?

II

Lift up thy light on us and on thine own, O soul whose spirit on earth was as a rod To scourge off priests, a sword to pierce their God, A staff for man's free thought to walk alone, A lamp to lead him far from shrine and throne On ways untrodden where his fathers trod Ere earth's heart withered at a high priest's nod And all men's mouths that made not prayer made moan. From bonds and torments and the ravening flame Surely thy spirit of sense rose up to greet Lucretius, where such only spirits meet, And walk with him apart till Shelley came To make the heaven of heavens more heavenly sweet And mix with yours a third incorporate name.

AVE ATQUE VALE

IN MEMORY OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Nous devrions pourtant lui porter quelques fleurs; Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs, Et quand Octobre souffle, emondeur des vieux arbres, Son vent melancolique a l'entour de leurs marbres, Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats.

_Les Fleurs du Mal._

I

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, Brother, on this that was the veil of thee? Or quiet sea-flower moulded by the sea, Or simplest growth of meadow-sweet or sorrel, Such as the summer-sleepy Dryads weave, Waked up by snow-soft sudden rains at eve? Or wilt thou rather, as on earth before, Half-faded fiery blossoms, pale with heat And full of bitter summer, but more sweet To thee than gleanings of a northern shore Trod by no tropic feet?

II

For always thee the fervid languid glories Allured of heavier suns in mightier skies; Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories, The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave That knows not where is that Leucadian grave Which hides too deep the supreme head of song. Ah, salt and sterile as her kisses were, The wild sea winds her and the green gulfs bear Hither and thither, and vex and work her wrong, Blind gods that cannot spare.

III

Thou sawest, in thine old singing season, brother, Secrets and sorrows unbeheld of us: Fierce loves, and lovely leaf-buds poisonous, Bare to thy subtler eye, but for none other Blowing by night in some unbreathed-in clime; The hidden harvest of luxurious time, Sin without shape, and pleasure without speech; And where strange dreams in a tumultuous sleep Make the shut eyes of stricken spirits weep; And with each face thou sawest the shadow on each, Seeing as men sow men reap.

IV

O sleepless heart and sombre soul unsleeping, That were athirst for sleep and no more life And no more love, for peace and no more strife! Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping Spirit and body and all the springs of song, Is it well now where love can do no wrong, Where stingless pleasure has no foam or fang Behind the unopening closure of her lips? Is it not well where soul from body slips And flesh from bone divides without a pang As dew from flower-bell drips?

V

It is enough; the end and the beginning Are one thing to thee, who art past the end. O hand unclasped of unbeholden friend, For thee no fruits to pluck, no palms for winning, No triumph and no labour and no lust, Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust. O quiet eyes wherein the light saith nought, Whereto the day is dumb, nor any night With obscure finger silences your sight, Nor in your speech the sudden soul speaks thought, Sleep, and have sleep for light.

VI

Now all strange hours and all strange loves are over, Dreams and desires and sombre songs and sweet, Hast thou found place at the great knees and feet Of some pale Titan-woman like a lover, Such as thy vision here solicited, Under the shadow of her fair vast head, The deep division of prodigious breasts, The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep, The weight of awful tresses that still keep The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests Where the wet hill-winds weep?

VII

Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision? O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom, Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom? What of despair, of rapture, of derision, What of life is there, what of ill or good? Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood? Does the dim ground grow any seed of ours, The faint fields quicken any terrene root, In low lands where the sun and moon are mute And all the stars keep silence? Are there flowers At all, or any fruit?

VIII

Alas, but though my flying song flies after, O sweet strange elder singer, thy more fleet Singing, and footprints of thy fleeter feet, Some dim derision of mysterious laughter From the blind tongueless warders of the dead, Some gainless glimpse of Proserpine's veiled head, Some little sound of unregarded tears Wept by effaced unprofitable eyes, And from pale mouths some cadence of dead sighs-- These only, these the hearkening spirit hears, Sees only such things rise.

IX

Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow, Far too far off for thought or any prayer. What ails us with thee, who art wind and air? What ails us gazing where all seen is hollow? Yet with some fancy, yet with some desire, Dreams pursue death as winds a flying fire, Our dreams pursue our dead and do not find. Still, and more swift than they, the thin flame flies, The low light fails us in elusive skies, Still the foiled earnest ear is deaf, and blind Are still the eluded eyes.

X

Not thee, O never thee, in all time's changes, Not thee, but this the sound of thy sad soul, The shadow of thy swift spirit, this shut scroll I lay my hand on, and not death estranges My spirit from communion of thy song-- These memories and these melodies that throng Veiled porches of a Muse funereal-- These I salute, these touch, these clasp and fold As though a hand were in my hand to hold, Or through mine ears a mourning musical Of many mourners rolled.

XI

I among these, I also, in such station As when the pyre was charred, and piled the sods, And offering to the dead made, and their gods, The old mourners had, standing to make libation, I stand, and to the gods and to the dead Do reverence without prayer or praise, and shed Offering to these unknown, the gods of gloom, And what of honey and spice my seedlands bear, And what I may of fruits in this chilled air, And lay, Orestes-like, across the tomb A curl of severed hair.

XII

But by no hand nor any treason stricken, Not like the low-lying head of Him, the King, The flame that made of Troy a ruinous thing, Thou liest, and on this dust no tears could quicken There fall no tears like theirs that all men hear Fall tear by sweet imperishable tear Down the opening leaves of holy poets' pages. Thee not Orestes, not Electra mourns; But bending us-ward with memorial urns The most high Muses that fulfil all ages Weep, and our God's heart yearns.

XIII

For, sparing of his sacred strength, not often Among us darkling here the lord of light Makes manifest his music and his might In hearts that open and in lips that soften With the soft flame and heat of songs that shine. Thy lips indeed he touched with bitter wine, And nourished them indeed with bitter bread; Yet surely from his hand thy soul's food came, The fire that scarred thy spirit at his flame Was lighted, and thine hungering heart he fed Who feeds our hearts with fame.

XIV

Therefore he too now at thy soul's sunsetting, God of all suns and songs, he too bends down To mix his laurel with thy cypress crown, And save thy dust from blame and from forgetting. Therefore he too, seeing all thou wert and art, Compassionate, with sad and sacred heart, Mourns thee of many his children the last dead, And hallows with strange tears and alien sighs Thine unmelodious mouth and sunless eyes, And over thine irrevocable head Sheds light from the under skies.

XV

And one weeps with him in the ways Lethean, And stains with tears her changing bosom chill: That obscure Venus of the hollow hill, That thing transformed which was the Cytherean, With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine Long since, and face no more called Erycine; A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god. Thee also with fair flesh and singing spell Did she, a sad and second prey, compel Into the footless places once more trod, And shadows hot from hell.

XVI

And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom, No choral salutation lure to light A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night And love's tired eyes and hands and barren bosom. There is no help for these things; none to mend And none to mar; not all our songs, O friend, Will make death clear or make life durable. Howbeit with rose and ivy and wild vine And with wild notes about this dust of thine At least I fill the place where white dreams dwell And wreathe an unseen shrine.

XVII

Sleep; and if life was bitter to thee, pardon, If sweet, give thanks; thou hast no more to live; And to give thanks is good, and to forgive. Out of the mystic and the mournful garden Where all day through thine hands in barren braid Wove the sick flowers of secrecy and shade, Green buds of sorrow and sin, and remnants grey, Sweet-smelling, pale with poison, sanguine-hearted, Passions that sprang from sleep and thoughts that started, Shall death not bring us all as thee one day Among the days departed?

XVIII

For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, Take at my hands this garland, and farewell. Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell, And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, With sadder than the Niobean womb, And in the hollow of her breasts a tomb. Content thee, howsoe'er, whose days are done; There lies not any troublous thing before, Nor sight nor sound to war against thee more, For whom all winds are quiet as the sun, All waters as the shore.

MEMORIAL VERSES

ON THE DEATH OF THEOPHILE GAUTIER

Death, what hast thou to do with me? So saith Love, with eyes set against the face of Death; What have I done, O thou strong Death, to thee, That mine own lips should wither from thy breath?

Though thou be blind as fire or as the sea, Why should thy waves and storms make war on me? Is it for hate thou hast to find me fair, Or for desire to kiss, if it might be,

My very mouth of song, and kill me there? So with keen rains vexing his crownless hair. With bright feet bruised from no delightful way, Through darkness and the disenchanted air,

Lost Love went weeping half a winter's day. And the armed wind that smote him seemed to say, How shall the dew live when the dawn is fled, Or wherefore should the Mayflower outlast May?

Then Death took Love by the right hand and said, Smiling: Come now and look upon thy dead. But Love cast down the glories of his eyes, And bowed down like a flower his flowerless head.

And Death spake, saying: What ails thee in such wise, Being god, to shut thy sight up from the skies? If thou canst see not, hast thou ears to hear? Or is thy soul too as a leaf that dies?

Even as he spake with fleshless lips of fear, But soft as sleep sings in a tired man's ear, Behold, the winter was not, and its might Fell, and fruits broke forth of the barren year.

And upon earth was largess of great light, And moving music winged for worldwide flight, And shapes and sounds of gods beheld and heard, And day's foot set upon the neck of night.

And with such song the hollow ways were stirred As of a god's heart hidden in a bird, Or as the whole soul of the sun in spring Should find full utterance in one flower-soft word,

And all the season should break forth and sing From one flower's lips, in one rose triumphing; Such breath and light of song as of a flame Made ears and spirits of them that heard it ring.

And Love beholding knew not for the same The shape that led him, nor in face nor name, For he was bright and great of thews and fair, And in Love's eyes he was not Death, but Fame.

Not that grey ghost whose life is empty and bare And his limbs moulded out of mortal air, A cloud of change that shifts into a shower And dies and leaves no light for time to wear:

But a god clothed with his own joy and power, A god re-risen out of his mortal hour Immortal, king and lord of time and space, With eyes that look on them as from a tower.

And where he stood the pale sepulchral place Bloomed, as new life might in a bloodless face, And where men sorrowing came to seek a tomb With funeral flowers and tears for grief and grace,

They saw with light as of a world in bloom The portal of the House of Fame illume The ways of life wherein we toiling tread, And watched the darkness as a brand consume.

And through the gates where rule the deathless dead The sound of a new singer's soul was shed That sang among his kinsfolk, and a beam Shot from the star on a new ruler's head.

A new star lighting the Lethean stream, A new song mixed into the song supreme Made of all souls of singers and their might, That makes of life and time and death a dream.

Thy star, thy song, O soul that in our sight Wast as a sun that made for man's delight Flowers and all fruits in season, being so near The sun-god's face, our god that gives us light.

To him of all gods that we love or fear Thou amongst all men by thy name wast dear, Dear to the god that gives us spirit of song To bind and burn all hearts of men that hear.

The god that makes men's words too sweet and strong For life or time or death to do them wrong, Who sealed with his thy spirit for a sign And filled it with his breath thy whole life long.

Who made thy moist lips fiery with new wine Pressed from the grapes of song, the sovereign vine, And with all love of all things loveliest Gave thy soul power to make them more divine.

That thou might'st breathe upon the breathless rest Of marble, till the brows and lips and breast Felt fall from off them as a cancelled curse That speechless sleep wherewith they lived opprest.

Who gave thee strength and heat of spirit to pierce All clouds of form and colour that disperse, And leave the spirit of beauty to remould In types of clean chryselephantine verse.

Who gave thee words more golden than fine gold To carve in shapes more glorious than of old, And build thy songs up in the sight of time As statues set in godhead manifold:

In sight and scorn of temporal change and clime That meet the sun re-risen with refluent rhyme --As god to god might answer face to face-- From lips whereon the morning strikes sublime.

Dear to the god, our god who gave thee place Among the chosen of days, the royal race, The lords of light, whose eyes of old and ears Saw even on earth and heard him for a space.

There are the souls of those once mortal years That wrought with fire of joy and light of tears In words divine as deeds that grew thereof Such music as he swoons with love who hears.

There are the lives that lighten from above Our under lives, the spheral souls that move Through the ancient heaven of song-illumined air Whence we that hear them singing die with love.

There all the crowned Hellenic heads, and there The old gods who made men godlike as they were, The lyric lips wherefrom all songs take fire, Live eyes, and light of Apollonian hair.

There, round the sovereign passion of that lyre Which the stars hear and tremble with desire, The ninefold light Pierian is made one That here we see divided, and aspire,

Seeing, after this or that crown to be won; But where they hear the singing of the sun, All form, all sound, all colour, and all thought Are as one body and soul in unison.

There the song sung shines as a picture wrought, The painted mouths sing that on earth say nought, The carven limbs have sense of blood and growth And large-eyed life that seeks nor lacks not aught.

There all the music of thy living mouth Lives, and all loves wrought of thine hand in youth And bound about the breasts and brows with gold And coloured pale or dusk from north or south.

Fair living things made to thy will of old, Born of thy lips, no births of mortal mould, That in the world of song about thee wait Where thought and truth are one and manifold.

Within the graven lintels of the gate That here divides our vision and our fate, The dreams we walk in and the truths of sleep, All sense and spirit have life inseparate.

There what one thinks, is his to grasp and keep; There are no dreams, but very joys to reap, No foiled desires that die before delight, No fears to see across our joys and weep.

There hast thou all thy will of thought and sight, All hope for harvest, and all heaven for flight; The sunrise of whose golden-mouthed glad head To paler songless ghosts was heat and light.

Here where the sunset of our year is red Men think of thee as of the summer dead, Gone forth before the snows, before thy day, With unshod feet, with brows unchapleted.

Couldst thou not wait till age had wound, they say, Round those wreathed brows his soft white blossoms? Nay, Why shouldst thou vex thy soul with this harsh air, Thy bright-winged soul, once free to take its way?

Nor for men's reverence hadst thou need to wear The holy flower of grey time-hallowed hair; Nor were it fit that aught of thee grew old, Fair lover all thy days of all things fair.

And hear we not thy words of molten gold Singing? or is their light and heat acold Whereat men warmed their spirits? Nay, for all These yet are with us, ours to hear and hold.

The lovely laughter, the clear tears, the call Of love to love on ways where shadows fall, Through doors of dim division and disguise, And music made of doubts unmusical;

The love that caught strange light from death's own eyes,[1] And filled death's lips with fiery words and sighs, And half asleep let feed from veins of his Her close red warm snake's mouth, Egyptian-wise:

And that great night of love more strange than this,[2] When she that made the whole world's bale and bliss Made king of all the world's desire a slave, And killed him in mid kingdom with a kiss;

Veiled loves that shifted shapes and shafts, and gave,[3] Laughing, strange gifts to hands that durst not crave, Flowers double-blossomed, fruits of scent and hue Sweet as the bride-bed, stranger than the grave;

All joys and wonders of old lives and new That ever in love's shine or shadow grew, And all the grief whereof he dreams and grieves, And all sweet roots fed on his light and dew;

All these through thee our spirit of sense perceives, As threads in the unseen woof thy music weaves, Birds caught and snared that fill our ears with thee, Bay-blossoms in thy wreath of brow-bound leaves.

Mixed with the masque of death's old comedy Though thou too pass, have here our flowers, that we For all the flowers thou gav'st upon thee shed, And pass not crownless to Persephone.

Blue lotus-blooms and white and rosy-red We wind with poppies for thy silent head, And on this margin of the sundering sea Leave thy sweet light to rise upon the dead.

[Footnote 1: _La Morte Amoureuse._]

[Footnote 2: _Une Nuit de Cleopatre._]

[Footnote 3: _Mademoiselle de Maupin._]

SONNET

(WITH A COPY OF _Mademoiselle de Maupin_)

This is the golden book of spirit and sense, The holy writ of beauty; he that wrought Made it with dreams and faultless words and thought That seeks and finds and loses in the dense Dim air of life that beauty's excellence Wherewith love makes one hour of life distraught And all hours after follow and find not aught. Here is that height of all love's eminence Where man may breathe but for a breathing-space And feel his soul burn as an altar-fire To the unknown God of unachieved desire, And from the middle mystery of the place Watch lights that break, hear sounds as of a quire, But see not twice unveiled the veiled God's face.

AGE AND SONG

(TO BARRY CORNWALL)

I

In vain men tell us time can alter Old loves or make old memories falter, That with the old year the old year's life closes. The old dew still falls on the old sweet flowers, The old sun revives the new-fledged hours, The old summer rears the new-born roses.

II

Much more a Muse that bears upon her Raiment and wreath and flower of honour, Gathered long since and long since woven, Fades not or falls as fall the vernal Blossoms that bear no fruit eternal, By summer or winter charred or cloven.

III