Part 5

--Look, lady, where yon river winds its line Toward sunset, and receives on breast and face The splendour of fair life: to be divine, ’Tis nature bids you be to nature true, Flowing with beauty, lending earth your grace, Reflecting heaven in clearness you.

XL.

--Sir, you speak well: your friend no word vouchsafes. To flow with beauty, breeding fools and worse, Cowards and worse: at such fair life she chafes Who is not wholly of the nursery, Nor of your schools: we share the primal curse: Together shake it off, say we!

XLI.

--Hear, then, my friend, madam! Tongue-restrained he stands Till words are thoughts, and thoughts, like swords enriched With traceries of the artificer’s hands, Are fire-proved steel to cut, fair flowers to view. Do I hear him? Oh, he is bewitched, bewitched! Heed him not! Traitress beauties you!

XLII.

--We have won a champion, sisters, and a sage! --Ladies, you win a guest to a good feast! --Sir spokesman, sneers are weakness veiling rage. --Of weakness, and wise men, you have the key. --Then are there fresher mornings mounting East Than ever yet have dawned, sing we!

XLIII.

--False ends as false began, madam, be sure! --What lure there is the pure cause purifies! --Who purifies the victim of the lure? --That soul which bids us our high light pursue. --Some heights are measured down: the wary wise Shun Reason in the masque with you!

XLIV.

--Sir, for the friend you bring us, take our thanks. Yes, Beauty was of old this barren goal; A thing with claws; and brute-like in her pranks! But could she give more loyal guarantee Than wooing wisdom, that in her a soul Has risen? Adieu: content are we!

XLV.

Those ladies led their captive to the flood’s Green edge. He floating with them seemed the most Fool-flushed old noddy ever crowned with buds. Happier than I! Then, why not wiser too? For he that lives with Beauty, he may boast His comrade over me and you.

XLVI.

Have women nursed some dream since Helen sailed Over the sea of blood the blushing star, That Beauty, whom frail man as Goddess hailed, When not possessing her (for such is he!), Might in a wondering season seen afar, Be tamed to say not ‘I,’ but ‘we’?

XLVII.

And shall they make of Beauty their estate, The fortress and the weapon of their sex? Shall she in her frost-brilliancy dictate, More queenly than of old, how we must woo, Ere she will melt? The halter’s on our necks, Kick as it likes us, I and you.

XLVIII.

Certain it is, if Beauty has disdained Her ancient conquests, with an aim thus high: If this, if that, if more, the fight is gained. But can she keep her followers without fee? Yet ah! to hear anew those ladies cry, He who’s for us, for him are we!

SONNETS

LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT.

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose. Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened, Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose. Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those. And now upon his Western wing he leaned, Now his huge bulk o’er Africa careened, Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows. Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars With memory of the old revolt from Awe, He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

THE STAR SIRIUS.

Bright Sirius! that when Orion pales To dotlings under moonlight still art keen With cheerful fervour of a warrior’s mien Who holds in his great heart the battle-scales: Unquenched of flame though swift the flood assails, Reducing many lustrous to the lean: Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen To show what source divine is, and prevails. Long watches through, at one with godly night, I mark thee planting joy in constant fire; And thy quick beams, whose jets of life inspire Life to the spirit, passion for the light, Dark Earth since first she lost her lord from sight Has viewed and felt them sweep her as a lyre.

SENSE AND SPIRIT.

The senses loving Earth or well or ill, Ravel yet more the riddle of our lot. The mind is in their trammels, and lights not By trimming fear-bred tales; nor does the will To find in nature things which less may chill An ardour that desires, unknowing what. Till we conceive her living we go distraught, At best but circle-windsails of a mill. Seeing she lives, and of her joy of life Creatively has given us blood and breath For endless war and never wound unhealed, The gloomy Wherefore of our battle-field Solves in the Spirit, wrought of her through strife To read her own and trust her down to death.

EARTH’S SECRET.

Not solitarily in fields we find Earth’s secret open, though one page is there; Her plainest, such as children spell, and share With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind. Not where the troubled passions toss the mind, In turbid cities, can the key be bare. It hangs for those who hither thither fare, Close interthreading nature with our kind. They, hearing History speak, of what men were, And have become, are wise. The gain is great In vision and solidity; it lives. Yet at a thought of life apart from her, Solidity and vision lose their state, For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives.

THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell Of human passions, but of love deflowered His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well. Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips, The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, Yet full of speech and intershifting tales, Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff From grain, bid sick Philosophy’s last leaves Whirl, if they have no response--they enforced To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced.

THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE:

CONTINUED.

How smiles he at a generation ranked In gloomy noddings over life! They pass. Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked, Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass. But he can spy that little twist of brain Which moved some weighty leader of the blind, Unwitting ’twas the goad of personal pain, To view in curst eclipse our Mother’s mind, And show us of some rigid harridan The wretched bondmen till the end of time. O lived the Master now to paint us Man, That little twist of brain would ring a chime Of whence it came and what it caused, to start Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.

INTERNAL HARMONY.

Assured of worthiness we do not dread Competitors; we rather give them hail And greeting in the lists where we may fail: Must, if we bear an aim beyond the head! My betters are my masters: purely fed By their sustainment I likewise shall scale Some rocky steps between the mount and vale; Meanwhile the mark I have and I will wed. So that I draw the breath of finer air, Station is nought, nor footways laurel-strewn, Nor rivals tightly belted for the race. Good speed to them! My place is here or there; My pride is that among them I have place: And thus I keep this instrument in tune.

GRACE AND LOVE.

Two flower-enfolding crystal vases she I love fills daily, mindful but of one: And close behind pale morn she, like the sun Priming our world with light, pours, sweet to see, Clear water in the cup, and into me The image of herself: and that being done, Choice of what blooms round her fair garden run In climbers or in creepers or the tree, She ranges with unerring fingers fine, To harmony so vivid that through sight I hear, I have her heavenliness to fold Beyond the senses, where such love as mine, Such grace as hers, should the strange Fates withhold Their starry more from her and me, unite.

APPRECIATION.

Earth was not Earth before her sons appeared, Nor Beauty Beauty ere young Love was born: And thou when I lay hidden wert as morn At city-windows, touching eyelids bleared; To none by her fresh wingedness endeared; Unwelcome unto revellers outworn. I the last echoes of Diana’s horn In woodland heard, and saw thee come, and cheered. No longer wert thou then mere light, fair soul! And more than simple duty moved thy feet. New colours rose in thee, from fear, from shame, From hope, effused: though not less pure a scroll May men read on the heart I taught to beat: That change in thee, if not thyself, I claim.

THE DISCIPLINE OF WISDOM.

Rich labour is the struggle to be wise, While we make sure the struggle cannot cease. Else better were it in some bower of peace Slothful to swing, contending with the flies. You point at Wisdom fixed on lofty skies, As mid barbarian hordes a sculptured Greece: She falls. To live and shine, she grows her fleece, Is shorn, and rubs with follies and with lies. So following her, your hewing may attain The right to speak unto the mute, and shun That sly temptation of the illumined brain, Deliveries oracular, self-spun. Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun.

THE STATE OF AGE.

Rub thou thy battered lamp: nor claim nor beg Honours from aught about thee. Light the young. Thy frame is as a dusty mantle hung, O gray one! pendant on a loosened peg. Thou art for this our life an ancient egg, Or a tough bird: thou hast a rudderless tongue, Turning dead trifles, like the cock of dung; Which runs, Time’s contrast to thy halting leg. Nature, it is most sure, not thee admires. But hast thou in thy season set her fires To burn from Self to Spirit through the lash, Honoured the sons of Earth shall hold thee high: Yea, to spread light when thy proud letter I Drops prone and void as any thoughtless dash.

PROGRESS.

In Progress you have little faith, say you: Men will maintain dear interests, wreak base hates, By force, and gentle women choose their mates Most amorously from the gilded fighting crew: The human heart Bellona’s mad halloo Will ever fire to dicing with the Fates. ‘Now at this time,’ says History, ‘those two States ‘Stood ready their past wrestling to renew. ‘They sharpened arms and showed them, like the brutes ‘Whose haunches quiver. But a yellow blight ‘Fell on their waxing harvests. They deferred ‘The bloody settlement of their disputes ‘Till God should bless them better.’ They did right. And naming Progress, both shall have the word.

THE WORLD’S ADVANCE.

Judge mildly the tasked world; and disincline To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack. You have perchance observed the inebriate’s track At night when he has quitted the inn-sign: He plays diversions on the homeward line, Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack: A hedge may take him, but he turns not back, Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine. ‘Spiral,’ the memorable Lady terms Our mind’s ascent: our world’s advance presents That figure on a flat; the way of worms. Cherish the promise of its good intents, And warn it, not one instinct to efface Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place.

A CERTAIN PEOPLE.

As Puritans they prominently wax, And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks. Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks, They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks. But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks When Peace another door in them unlocks, Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe. Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness, Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut. They need their pious exercises less Than schooling in the Pleasures: fair belief That these are devilish only to their thief, Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput.

THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS.

That Garden of sedate Philosophy Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap, A shining spot upon a shaggy map; Where mind and body, in fair junction free, Luted their joyful concord; like the tree From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap. Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature’s lap, Of gentlemen the happy nursery. That Garden would on light supremest verge, Were the long drawing of an equal breath Healthful for Wisdom’s head, her heart, her aims. Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge, And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims The crucifix that came of Nazareth.

A LATER ALEXANDRIAN.

An inspiration caught from dubious hues, Filled him, and mystic wrynesses he chased; For they lead farther than the single-faced, Wave subtler promise when desire pursues. The moon of cloud discoloured was his Muse, His pipe the reed of the old moaning waste. Love was to him with anguish fast enlaced, And Beauty where she walked blood-shot the dews. Men railed at such a singer; women thrilled Responsively: he sang not Nature’s own Divinest, but his lyric had a tone, As ’twere a forest-echo of her voice: What barrenly they yearn for seemed distilled From what they dread, who do through tears rejoice.

AN ORSON OF THE MUSE.

Her son, albeit the Muse’s livery And measured courtly paces rouse his taunts, Naked and hairy in his savage haunts, To Nature only will he bend the knee; Spouting the founts of her distillery Like rough rock-sources; and his woes and wants Being Nature’s, civil limitation daunts His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he. Him, when he blows of Earth, and Man, and Fate, The Muse will hearken to with graver ear Than many of her train can waken: him Would fain have taught what fruitful things and dear Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight, If in no vessel built for sea they swim.

THE POINT OF TASTE.

Unhappy poets of a sunken prime! You to reviewers are as ball to bat. They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat With Shakespeare: bludgeons brainingly sublime On you the excommunicates of Rhyme, Because you sing not in the living Fat. The wiry whizz of an intrusive gnat Is verse that shuns their self-producing time. Sound them their clocks, with loud alarum trump, Or watches ticking temporal at their fobs, You win their pleased attention. But, bright God O’ the lyre, what bully-drawlers they applaud! Rather for us a tavern-catch, and bump Chorus where Lumpkin with his Giles hobnobs.

CAMELUS SALTAT.

What say you, critic, now you have become An author and maternal?--in this trap (To quote you) of poor hollow folk who rap On instruments as like as drum to drum. You snarled tut-tut for welcome to tum-tum, So like the nose fly-teased in its noon’s nap. You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap With that between the fingers and the thumb. It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch, Which bade our public gobble or reject. O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked, Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch! What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere, You dealt?--the voice austere, the jeer, the sneer.

CAMELUS SALTAT: CONTINUED.

Oracle of the market! thence you drew The taste which stamped you guide of the inept.-- A north-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept, A sturdy and a briny, once men knew. He loved small beer, and for that copious brew, To roll ingurgitation till he slept, Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept: And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew. At last this dancer to the Polar star Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched, To drink the sea and pilot him to land. O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched, Know, while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.

TO J. M.

Let Fate or Insufficiency provide Mean ends for men who what they are would be: Penned in their narrow day no change they see Save one which strikes the blow to brutes and pride. Our faith is ours and comes not on a tide: And whether Earth’s great offspring, by decree, Must rot if they abjure rapacity, Not argument but effort shall decide. They number many heads in that hard flock; Trim swordsmen they push forth; yet try thy steel. Thou fighting for poor humankind wilt feel The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, And bring the army of the faithful through.

TO A FRIEND LOST.

(T. T.)

When I remember, friend, whom lost I call, Because a man beloved is taken hence, The tender humour and the fire of sense In your good eyes; how full of heart for all, And chiefly for the weaker by the wall, You bore that lamp of sane benevolence; Then see I round you Death his shadows dense Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall. For surely are you one with the white host, Spirits, whose memory in our vital air Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these, Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas, Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost, Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.

MY THEME.

Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt: The song of gladness one straight bolt can check. But I have never stood at Fortune’s beck: Were she and her light crew to run atilt At my poor holding little would be spilt; Small were the praise for singing o’er that wreck. Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck; He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt. Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell With other than those votaries she deals The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift. I say but that this love of Earth reveals A soul beside our own to quicken, quell, Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.

MY THEME: CONTINUED.

’Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts Through contemplation from a heart unbent By many tempests may be stained and rent: The summer flies it mightily attracts. Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts, Which scarce give breathing of the sty’s content For their diurnal carnal nourishment: Which treat with Nature in official pacts. The deader body Nature could proclaim. Much life have neither. Let the heavens of wrath Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth. But during calms the flies of idle aim Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.

TIME AND SENTIMENT.

I see a fair young couple in a wood, And as they go, one bends to take a flower, That so may be embalmed their happy hour And in another day, a kindred mood, Haply together, or in solitude, Recovered what the teeth of Time devour, The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power, Wherewith by their young blood they are endued To move all enviable, framed in May, And of an aspect sisterly with Truth: Yet seek they with Time’s laughing things to wed: Who will be prompted on some pallid day To lift the hueless flower and show that dead, Even such, and by this token, is their youth.

PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS.

The measure runs:

MELAMPUS.

LOVE IN THE VALLEY:

Trochaic, variable in short syllables according to stress of the accent.

A sketch of this poem appeared in a volume published many years back, now extinct.