Part 3

For in no deeps of midmost inland May More flowerbright flowers the hawthorn, or more sweet Swells the wild gold of the earth for wandering feet; For on no northland way Crowds the close whin-bloom closer, set like thee With thorns about for fangs of sea-rock shown Through blithe lips of the bitter brine to lee; Nor blithelier landward comes the sea-wind blown, Nor blithelier leaps the land-wind back to sea: Nor louder springs the living song of birds To shame our sweetest words. And in the narrowest of thine hollowest hold For joy thine aspens quiver as though for cold, And many a self-lit flower-illumined tree Outlaughs with snowbright or with rosebright glee The laughter of the fields whose laugh is gold. Yea, even from depth to height, Even thine own beauty with its own delight Fulfils thine heart in thee an hundredfold Beyond the larger hearts of islands bright With less intense contraction of desire Self-satiate, centred in its own deep fire; Of shores not self-enchanted and entranced By heavenly severance from all shadow of mirth Or mourning upon earth: As thou, by no similitude enhanced, By no fair foil made fairer, but alone Fair as could be no beauty save thine own, And wondrous as no world-beholden wonder: Throned, with the world's most perilous sea for throne, And praised from all its choral throats of thunder.

Yet one praise hast thou, holier [_Str._ 5. Than praise of theirs may be, To exalt thee, wert thou lowlier Than all that take the sea With shores whence waves ebb slowlier Than these fall off from thee;

That One, whose name gives glory, [_Ant._ 5. One man whose life makes light, One crowned and throned in story Above all empire's height, Came, where thy straits run hoary, To hold thee fast in sight;

With hallowing eyes to hold thee, [_Str._ 6. With rapturous heart to read, To encompass and enfold thee With love whence all men feed, To brighten and behold thee, Who is mightiest of man's seed:

More strong than strong disaster, [_Ant._ 6. For fate and fear too strong; Earth's friend, whose eyes look past her, Whose hands would purge of wrong; Our lord, our light, our master, Whose word sums up all song.

Be it April or September [_Str._ 7. That plays his perfect part, Burn June or blow December, Thou canst not in thine heart But rapturously remember, All heavenlike as thou art,

Whose footfall made thee fairer, [_Ant._ 7. Whose passage more divine, Whose hand, our thunder-bearer, Held fire that bade thee shine With subtler glory and rarer Than thrills the sun's own shrine.

Who knows how then his godlike banished gaze Turned haply from its goal of natural days And homeward hunger for the clear French clime, Toward English earth, whereunder now the Accursed Rots, in the hate of all men's hearts inhearsed, A carrion ranker to the sense of time For that sepulchral gift of stone and lime By royal grace laid on it, less of weight Than the load laid by fate, Fate, misbegotten child of his own crime, Son of as foul a bastard-bearing birth As even his own on earth; Less heavy than the load of cursing piled By loyal grace of all souls undefiled On one man's head, whose reeking soul made rotten The loathed live corpse on earth once misbegotten? But when our Master's homeless feet were here France yet was foul with joy more foul than fear, And slavery chosen, more vile by choice of chance Than dull damnation of inheritance From Russian year to year Alas fair mother of men, alas my France, What ailed thee so to fall, that wert so dear For all men's sake to all men, in such trance, Plague-stricken? Had the very Gods, that saw Thy glory lighten on us for a law, Thy gospel go before us for a guide, Had these waxed envious of our love and awe, Or was it less their envy than thy pride That bared thy breast for the obscene vulture-claw, High priestess, by whose mouth Love prophesied That fate should yet mean freedom? Howsoever, That hour, the helper of men's hearts, we praise, Which blots out of man's book of after days The name above all names abhorred for ever. And His name shall we praise not, whom these flowers, These rocks and ravening waters bound for girth Round this wild starry spanlong plot of earth, Beheld, the mightier for those heavier hours That bowed his heart not down Nor marred one crowning blossom of his crown? For surely, might we say, Even from the dark deep sea-gate that makes way Through channelled darkness for the darkling day Hardly to let men's faltering footfall win The sunless passage in, Where breaks a world aflower against the sun, A small sweet world of wave-encompassed wonder Kept from the wearier landward world asunder With violence of wild waters, and with thunder Of many winds as one, To where the keen sea-current grinds and frets The black bright sheer twin flameless Altarlets That lack no live blood-sacrifice they crave Of shipwreck and the shrine-subservient wave, Having for priest the storm-wind, and for choir Lightnings and clouds whose prayer and praise are fire, All the isle acclaimed him coming; she, the least Of all things loveliest that the sea's love hides From strange men's insult, walled about with tides That bid strange guests back from her flower-strewn feast, Set all her fields aflower, her flowers aflame, To applaud him that he came. Nor surely flashed not something of delight Through that steep strait of rock whose twin-cliffed height Links crag with crag reiterate, land with land, By one sheer thread of narrowing precipice Bifront, that binds and sunders Abyss from hollower imminent abyss And wilder isle with island, blind for bliss Of sea that lightens and of wind that thunders; Nor pealed not surely back from deep to steep Reverberate acclamation, steep to deep Inveterately reclaiming and replying Praise, and response applausive; nor the sea, For all the sea-wind's crying, Knew not the song her sister, even as she Thundering, or like her confluent spring-tides brightening, And like her darkness lightening; The song that moved about him silent, now Both soundless wings refolded and refurled On that Promethean brow, Then quivering as for flight that wakes the world.

From the roots of the rocks underlying the gulfs that engird it around [_Str._ 8. Was the isle not enkindled with light of him landing, or thrilled not with sound? Yea, surely the sea like a harper laid hand on the shore as a lyre, As the lyre in his own for a birthright of old that was given of his sire, And the hand of the child was put forth on the chords yet alive and aflame From the hand of the God that had wrought it in heaven; and the hand was the same. And the tongue of the child spake, singing; and never a note that he sang, But the strings made answer unstricken, as though for the God they rang. And the eyes of the child shone, lightening; and touched as by life at his nod, They shuddered with music, and quickened as though from the glance of the God. So trembled the heart of the hills and the rocks to receive him, and yearned With desirous delight of his presence and love that beholding him burned. Yea, down through the mighty twin hollows where never the sunlight shall be, Deep sunk under imminent earth, and subdued to the stress of the sea, That feel when the dim week changes by change of their tides in the dark, As the wave sinks under within them, reluctant, removed from its mark, Even there in the terror of twilight in bloom with its blossoms ablush, Did a sense of him touch not the gleam of their flowers with a fierier flush? Though the sun they behold not for ever, yet knew they not over them One Whose soul was the soul of the morning, whose song was the song of the sun? But the secrets inviolate of sunlight in hollows untrodden of day, Shall he dream what are these who beholds not? or he that hath seen, shall he say? For the path is for passage of sea-mews; and he that hath glided and leapt Over sea-grass and sea-rock, alighting as one from a citadel crept That his foemen beleaguer, descending by darkness and stealth, at the last Peers under, and all is as hollow to hellward, agape and aghast. But afloat and afar in the darkness a tremulous colour subsides [_Ant._ 8. From the crimson high crest of the purple-peaked roof to the soft-coloured sides That brighten as ever they widen till downward the level is won Of the soundless and colourless water that knows not the sense of the sun: From the crown of the culminant arch to the floor of the lakelet abloom, One infinite blossom of blossoms innumerable aflush through the gloom. All under the deeps of the darkness are glimmering; all over impends An immeasurable infinite flower of the dark that dilates and descends, That exults and expands in its breathless and blind efflorescence of heart As it broadens and bows to the wave-ward, and breathes not, and hearkens apart. As a beaker inverse at a feast on Olympus, exhausted of wine, But inlaid as with rose from the lips of Dione that left it divine: From the lips everliving of laughter and love everlasting, that leave In the cleft of his heart who shall kiss them a snake to corrode it and cleave. So glimmers the gloom into glory, the glory recoils into gloom, That the eye of the sun could not kindle, the lip not of Love could relume. So darkens reverted the cup that the kiss of her mouth set on fire: So blackens a brand in his eyeshot asmoulder awhile from the pyre. For the beam from beneath and without it refrangent again from the wave Strikes up through the portal a ghostly reverse on the dome of the cave, On the depth of the dome ever darkling and dim to the crown of its arc: That the sun-coloured tapestry, sunless for ever, may soften the dark. But within through the side-seen archway a glimmer again from the right Is the seal of the sea's tide set on the mouth of the mystery of night. And the seal on the seventh day breaks but a little, that man by its mean May behold what the sun hath not looked on, the stars of the night have not seen.

Even like that hollow-bosomed rose, inverse And infinite, the heaven of thy vast verse, Our Master, over all our souls impends, Imminent; we, with heart-enkindled eyes Upwondering, search the music-moulded skies Sphere by sweet sphere, concordant as it blends Light of bright sound, sound of clear light, in one, As all the stars found utterance through the sun. And all that heaven is like a rose in bloom, Flower-coloured, where its own sun's fires illume As from one central and imperious heart The whole sky's every part: But lightening still and darkling downward, lo The light and darkness of it, The leaping of the lamping levin afar Between the full moon and the sunset star, The war-song of the sounding skies aglow, That have the herald thunder for their prophet: From north to south the lyric lights that leap, The tragic sundawns reddening east and west As with bright blood from one Promethean breast, The peace of noon that strikes the sea to sleep, The wail over the world of all that weep, The peace of night when death brings life on rest.

Goddess who gatherest all the herded waves Into thy great sweet pastureless green fold, Even for our love of old, I pray thee by thy power that slays and saves, Take thou my song of this thy flower to keep Who hast my heart in hold; And from thine high place of thy garden-steep, Where one sheer terrace oversees thy deep From the utmost rock-reared height Down even to thy dear depths of night and light, Take my song's salutation; and on me Breathe back the benediction of thy sea.

_Between two seas the sea-bird's wing makes halt, Wind-weary; while with lifting head he waits For breath to reinspire him from the gates That open still toward sunrise on the vault High-domed of morning, and in flight's default With spreading sense of spirit anticipates What new sea now may lure beyond the straits His wings exulting that her winds exalt And fill them full as sails to seaward spread, Fulfilled with fair speed's promise. Pass, my song, Forth to the haven of thy desire and dread, The presence of our lord, long loved and long Far off above beholden, who to thee Was as light kindling all a windy sea._

BIRTHDAY ODE

FOR THE ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL OF VICTOR HUGO, FEBRUARY 26, 1880

Spring, born in heaven ere many a springtime flown, [_Strophe_ 1. Dead spring that sawest on earth A babe of deathless birth, A flower of rosier flowerage than thine own, A glory of goodlier godhead; even this day, That floods the mist of February with May, And strikes death dead with sunlight, and the breath Whereby the deadly doers are done to death, They that in day's despite Would crown the imperial night, 10 And in deep hate of insubmissive spring Rethrone the royal winter for a king, This day that casts the days of darkness down Low as a broken crown, We call thee from the gulf of deeds and days, Deathless and dead, to hear us whom we praise.

A light of many lights about thine head, [_Antistrophe_ 1. Lights manifold and one, Stars molten in a sun, A sun of divers beams incorporated, 20 Compact of confluent aureoles, each more fair Than man, save only at highest of man, may wear, So didst thou rise, when this our grey-grown age Had trod two paces of his pilgrimage, Two paces through the gloom From his fierce father's tomb, Led by cross lights of lightnings, and the flame That burned in darkness round one darkling name; So didst thou rise, nor knewest thy glory, O thou Re-risen upon us now, 30 The glory given thee for a grace to give, And take the praise of all men's hearts that live.

First in the dewy ray [_Epode_ 1. Ere dawn be slain of day The fresh crowned lilies of discrowned kings' prime Sprang splendid as of old With moonlight-coloured gold And rays refract from the oldworld heaven of time; Pale with proud light of stars decreased 39 In westward wane reluctant from the conquering east.

But even between their golden olden bloom [_Str._ 2. Strange flowers of wildwood glory, With frost and moonshine hoary, Thrust up the new growths of their green-leaved gloom, Red buds of ballad blossom, where the dew Blushed as with bloodlike passion, and its hue Was as the life and love of hearts on flame, And fire from forth of each live chalice came: Young sprays of elder song, Stem straight and petal strong, 50 Bright foliage with dark frondage overlaid, And light the lovelier for its lordlier shade; And morn and even made loud in woodland lone With cheer of clarions blown, And through the tournay's clash and clarion's cheer Laugh to laugh echoing, tear washed off by tear.

Then eastward far past northland lea and lawn Beneath a heavier light [_Ant._ 2. Of stormier day and night Began the music of the heaven of dawn; 60 Bright sound of battle along the Grecian waves, Loud light of thunder above the Median graves, New strife, new song on AEschylean seas, Canaris risen above Themistocles; Old glory of warrior ghosts Shed fresh on filial hosts, With dewfall redder than the dews of day, And earth-born lightnings out of bloodbright spray; Then through the flushed grey gloom on shadowy sheaves Low flights of falling leaves; 70 And choirs of birds transfiguring as they throng All the world's twilight and the soul's to song.

Voices more dimly deep [_Ep._ 2. Than the inmost heart of sleep, And tenderer than the rose-mouthed morning's lips; And midmost of them heard The viewless water's word, The sea's breath in the wind's wing and the ship's, That bids one swell and sound and smite 79 And rend that other in sunder as with fangs by night.

But ah! the glory of shadow and mingling ray, [_Str._ 3. The story of morn and even Whose tale was writ in heaven And had for scroll the night, for scribe the day! For scribe the prophet of the morning, far Exalted over twilight and her star; For scroll beneath his Apollonian hand The dim twin wastes of sea and glimmering land. Hark, on the hill-wind, clear For all men's hearts to hear 90 Sound like a stream at nightfall from the steep That all time's depths might answer, deep to deep, With trumpet-measures of triumphal wail From windy vale to vale, The crying of one for love that strayed and sinned Whose brain took madness of the mountain wind.

Between the birds of brighter and duskier wing, [_Ant._ 3. What mightier-moulded forms Girt with red clouds and storms Mix their strong hearts with theirs that soar and sing? 100 Before the storm-blast blown of death's dark horn The marriage moonlight withers, that the morn For two made one may find three made by death One ruin at the blasting of its breath: Clothed with heart's flame renewed And strange new maidenhood, Faith lightens on the lips that bloomed for hire Pure as the lightning of love's first-born fire: Wide-eyed and patient ever, till the curse Find where to fall and pierce, 110 Keen expiation whets with edge more dread A father's wrong to smite a father's head.

Borgia, supreme from birth [_Ep._ 3. As loveliest born on earth Since earth bore ever women that were fair; Scarce known of her own house If daughter or sister or spouse; Who holds men's hearts yet helpless with her hair; The direst of divine things made, Bows down her amorous aureole half suffused with shade. 120

As red the fire-scathed royal northland bloom, [_Str._ 4. That left our story a name Dyed through with blood and flame Ere her life shrivelled from a fierier doom Than theirs her priests bade pass from earth in fire To slake the thirst of God their Lord's desire: As keen the blast of love-enkindled fate That burst the Paduan tyrant's guarded gate: As sad the softer moan Made one with music's own 130 For one whose feet made music as they fell On ways by loveless love made hot from hell: But higher than these and all the song thereof The perfect heart of love, The heart by fraud and hate once crucified, That, dying, gave thanks, and in thanksgiving died.

Above the windy walls that rule the Rhine [_Ant._ 4. A noise of eagles' wings And wintry war-time rings, With roar of ravage trampling corn and vine 140 And storm of wrathful wassail dashed with song, And under these the watch of wreakless wrong, With fire of eyes anhungered; and above These, the light of the stricken eyes of love, The faint sweet eyes that follow The wind-outwinging swallow, And face athirst with young wan yearning mouth Turned after toward the unseen all-golden south, Hopeless to see the birds back ere life wane, Or the leaves born again; 150 And still the might and music mastering fate Of life more strong than death and love than hate.

In spectral strength biform [_Ep._ 4. Stand the twin sons of storm Transfigured by transmission of one hand That gives the new-born time Their semblance more sublime Than once it lightened over each man's land; There Freedom's winged and wide-mouthed hound, 159 And here our high Dictator, in his son discrowned.

What strong-limbed shapes of kindred throng round these [_Str._ 5. Before, between, behind, Sons born of one man's mind, Fed at his hands and fostered round his knees? Fear takes the spirit in thraldom at his nod, And pity makes it as the spirit of God, As his own soul that from her throne above Sheds on all souls of men her showers of love, On all earth's evil and pain Pours mercy forth as rain 170 And comfort as the dewfall on dry land; And feeds with pity from a faultless hand All by their own fault stricken, all cast out By all men's scorn or doubt, Or with their own hands wounded, or by fate Brought into bondage of men's fear or hate.

In violence of strange visions north and south Confronted, east and west, [_Ant._ 5. With frozen or fiery breast, Eyes fixed or fevered, pale or bloodred mouth, 180 Kept watch about his dawn-enkindled dreams; But ere high noon a light of nearer beams Made his young heaven of manhood more benign, And love made soft his lips with spiritual wine, And left them fired, and fed With sacramental bread, And sweet with honey of tenderer words than tears To feed men's hopes and fortify men's fears, And strong to silence with benignant breath The lips that doom to death, 190 And swift with speech like fire in fiery lands To melt the steel's edge in the headsman's hands.

Higher than they rose of old, [_Ep._ 5. New builded now, behold, The live great likeness of Our Lady's towers; And round them like a dove Wounded, and sick with love, One fair ghost moving, crowned with fateful flowers, Watched yet with eyes of bloodred lust 199 And eyes of love's heart broken and unbroken trust.

But sadder always under shadowier skies, [_Str._ 6. More pale and sad and clear Waxed always, drawn more near, The face of Duty lit with Love's own eyes; Till the awful hands that culled in rosier hours From fairy-footed fields of wild old flowers And sorcerous woods of Rhineland, green and hoary, Young children's chaplets of enchanted story, The great kind hands that showed Exile its homeward road, 210 And, as man's helper made his foeman God, Of pity and mercy wrought themselves a rod, And opened for Napoleon's wandering kin France, and bade enter in, And threw for all the doors of refuge wide, Took to them lightning in the thunder-tide.

For storm on earth above had risen from under, Out of the hollow of hell, [_Ant._ 6. Such storm as never fell From darkest deeps of heaven distract with thunder; A cloud of cursing, past all shape of thought, 221 More foul than foulest dreams, and overfraught With all obscene things and obscure of birth That ever made infection of man's earth; Having all hell for cloak Wrapped round it as a smoke And in its womb such offspring so defiled As earth bare never for her loathliest child, Rose, brooded, reddened, broke, and with its breath Put France to poisonous death; 230 Yea, far as heaven's red labouring eye could glance, France was not, save in men cast forth of France.