Part 3

THE spur is red upon the briar, The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; The wind shakes out the colored fire From lamps a-row on the sycamore; The tanager, with flitting note, Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat; The mink is busy; herds again Go hillward in the honeyed rain; The midges meet. I cry to Thee Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride; Along an edge of marshy ground The shad-bush enters like a bride. Yon little clouds are washed of care That climb the blue New England air, And almost merrily withal The tree-frog plays at evenfall His oboe in a mossy tree. So too, Am I not Thine? Arise, undo This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

Happy the vernal rout that come To their due offices to-day, And strange, if in Thy mercy’s sum, Excluded man alone decay. I ask no triumph, ask no joy, Save leave to live, in law’s employ. As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap! lest aye inoperative Here in the Pit my strength shall be: And still Help me endure the Pit, until Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

VIRGO GLORIOSA, MATER AMANTISSIMA

VINES branching stilly Shade the open door, In the house of Zion’s Lily, Cleanly and poor. O brighter than wild laurel The Babe bounds in her hand, The King, who for apparel Hath but a swaddling-band, And sees her heavenlier smiling than stars in His command!

Soon, mystic changes Part Him from her breast, Yet there awhile He ranges Gardens of rest: Yea, she the first to ponder Our ransom and recall, Awhile may rock Him under Her young curls’ fall, Against that only sinless love-loyal heart of all.

What shall inure Him Unto the deadly dream, When the tetrarch shall abjure Him, The thief blaspheme, And scribe and soldier jostle About the shameful Tree, And even an Apostle Demand to touch and see?-- But she hath kissed her Flower where the Wounds are to be.

FOUR COLLOQUIES

TO H. P. K.

I. THE SEARCH

“WHY dost thou hide from these Out along the hills halloaing? Why hast forbade Thy face, O goddess! to thy votaries?”

“_Unasking and unknowing Is he whom I make glad, Like Dian grandly going To the sleeping shepherd-lad. Men that pursue learn not To follow is my lot._”

“Happiness, secret one, Heartbeat of the April weather, Where art thou found? Tell; lest I err too, yonder in the sun.”

“_Call in thine eye from ether, Thy feet from far ground; Seek Honor in this heather, With austere purples wound. Serve her: she will reveal Me, hound-like, at thy heel._”

II. FACT AND THE MYSTIC

“Good-morrow, Symbol.”--“_Call me not The name I neither love nor merit._” --“That grave eternal name inherit, Thine ever, though all men forgot.”

“_Mistake me not; secure and free, From rock to rock my falchion passes: But Symbols trail through gray morasses The tattered shows of faëry._”

“My Symbol thou, of phantom blood, With starlight from thy temples raying; Along thy floated body playing Are withering wings, and wings in bud.”

“_Alas, thine eye with clay is sealed._” --“Symbol, before the clay’s denial, While yet I had a god’s espial, I saw thee in a solar field!”

“_Nay: I am Fact._”--“Then lose thy praise; And lest to-day no song behoove thee, Lest mine impeach thee, or reprove thee, Ah, Symbol, Symbol! go thy ways.”

III. THE POET’S CHART

“Where shall I find my light?”

“_Turn from another’s track: Whether for gain or lack, Love but thy natal right. Cease to follow withal, Though on thine up-led feet Flakes of the phosphor fall. Oracles overheard Are never again for thee, Nor at a magian’s knee Under the hemlock tree, Burns the illumining word._”

“Whence shall I take my law?”

“_Neither from sires nor sons, Nor the delivered ones, Holy, invoked with awe. Rather, dredge the divine Out of thine own poor dust, Feebly to speak and shine. Schools shall be as they are: Be thou truer, and stray Alone, intent, and away, In a savage wild to obey A dim primordial star._”

IV. OF THE GOLDEN AGE

“Recall for me, recall The time more true and ample; The world whereon I trample, How tortuous and small! Behold, I tire of all.

Once, gods in jeweled mail Through greenwood ways invited; There now the moon is blighted, And mosses long and pale On lifeless cedars trail.”

“_Child, keep this good unrest: But give to thine own story Simplicity with glory; To greatness dispossessed, Dominion of thy breast._

_In abstinence, in pride, Thou, who from Folly’s boldest Thy sacred eye withholdest, Another morn shalt ride At Agamemnon’s side._”

SANCTUARY

HIGH above hate I dwell: O storms! farewell. Though at my sill your daggered thunders play, Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day, To me they sound more small Than a young fay’s footfall: Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low In Long Ago, And winnowed into silence on that wind Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

Hither Felicity Doth climb to me, And bank me in with turf and marjoram Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb; With golden barberry-wreath, And bluets thick beneath; One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest With bud-red breast, Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage Float less than April fog below our hermitage.

ORISONS

ORANGE and olive and glossed bay-tree, And air of the evening out at sea, And out at sea, on the steep warm stone, A little bare diver poising alone.

Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves, Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves, “I am!” he cries to his glorying heart, And unto he knows not what: “THOU art!”

He leaps, he shines, he sinks, he is gone: He will climb to the golden ledge anon. Perfecter rite can none employ, When the god of the isle is good to a boy.

THE INNER FATE: A CHORUS

NOT weak with eld The stars beheld Proud Persia coming to her doom; Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed, The long luxurious galleys lost Their souls at Actium.

Not outer arts Of hostile hearts Persuaded him of France to be The wreckage of his wars at last, The orphan of the kingdoms, cast Upon the mothering sea.

Man evermore doth work his will, And evermore the gods are still, Applauding him alone who stands Too just for heaven-accusing groans, And in his house of havoc owns The doing of his hands; Transgressor, yet divinely taught To suffer all, blaspheming naught, When fair-begun must foul conclude: Himself progenitor of death, Who breeds, within, the only breath Can kill beatitude.

OF JOAN’S YOUTH

I WOULD unto my fair restore A simple thing: The flushing cheek she had before! Out-velveting No more, no more By Severn shore, The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass Unmoor the rose; Or guileful ways the salmon pass To sea, disclose; For so, alas, With Love, alas, With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

BY THE TRUNDLE-BED

TO M. M. R.

LOST love, be never beyond Love’s calling! For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet As fontal water in Arden falling, As first-mown hay in the April heat:

To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden, And bring to bloom in the outer cold, Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden, Our son that is like you, and six years old;

And lest his worth be the worth unreal, To ward him not from the mortal blast, But suffer your own, through a long ordeal, Verily like you to be at the last,

And hear men murmur, if so he merit In your old place with your look to arise: “The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?-- You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes.”

THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT

SINCE first I knew it our divine employ To beat beyond the reach of soiling care, As at Philippi, well of doom aware, The Prætor called and heard the singing boy; Since first my soul so jealous was of joy, That any facile linden-bloom in air, Or fall of water on a wildwood stair, Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy; Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled Long, long, at such august amends up-piled, Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop Death’s aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup, On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child, Immortals! unto You will drink it up.

ARBORICIDE

A WORD of grief to me erewhile: _We have cut the oak down, in our isle._

And I said: “Ye have bereaven The song-thrush and the bee, And the fisher-boy at sea Of his sea-mark in the even; And gourds of cooling shade, to lie Within the sickle’s sound; And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eye Of sleep on duty’s ground; And poets of their tent And quiet tenement. Ah, impious! who so paid Such fatherhood, and made Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.”

For the hewn oak a century fair, A wound in earth, an ache in air.

And I said: “No pillared height With a summer daïs over, Where a dryad fled her lover Through the long arcade of light; Nor ’neath Arcturus rolleth more, Since the loud leaves are gone, Between the shorn cliff and the shore, Pan’s organ antiphon. Some nameless envy fed This blow at grandeur’s head: Some breathed reproach o’erdue, Degenerate men, ye drew! Then, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew.”

CHARISTA MUSING

MOVELESS, on the marge of a sunny cornfield, Rapt in sudden revery while thou standest, Like the sheaves, in beautiful Doric yellow Clad to the ankle,

Oft to thee with delicate hasty footstep So I steal, and suffer because I find thee Inly flown, and only a fallen feather Left of my darling.

Give me back thy wakening breath, thy ringlets Fragrant as the vine of the bean in blossom, And those eyes of violet dusk and daylight Under sea-water,

Eyes too far away, and too full of longing! Yes: and go not heavenward where I lose thee, Go not, go not whither I cannot follow, Being but earthly.

Willing swallow poisèd upon my finger, Little wild-wing ever from me escaping, For the care thou art to me, I thy lover Love thee, and fear thee.

THE PERFECT HOUR

BE it on my blazon shown How I fought the fiends alone, Ere I rose to this content, Open, true, magnificent.

My heart from the underworld Rides the bright sea-foam upcurled; My heart suns in air between Medlar-pear and nectarine;

Terrors run to me at dawn Tamer than the velvet fawn; Not to me hath Love denied His great star of eventide.

Fate, where is thy splintered spear Met me in the tourney year? Once thou wert in overthrow, Then I laughed, and let thee go.

Wouldst thou yet make sport of me, Find me kingly, fervent, free! Though there come the foreordained, In thy city have I not reigned?

DEO OPTIMO MAXIMO

ALL else for use, one only for desire; Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee: Up from the best, whereof no man need tire, Impel thou me.

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by, Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer. Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny These three are dear,)

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed, Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys: O close my hand upon Beatitude! Not on her toys.

IN TIME OF TROUBLE

BELIEVE the word our gentle augur spake: _Sweet are the uses of adversity_, Sweet ever; and in naught so sweet as this: That though the heavens be barred, if we but hold An equal, quiet, will-illumined mind, Such greatness in us, laborless, must win Great answers: cheer from all created things, And interchange of love by natural right With the high few, a kinship not of clay. Be these thy present comfort! Like a man Who tends a watchlight on the hills alone At Childermas, (and through a night so cold, The red clots of the rowan-berry twirl Incorporate with a small stiff cone of ice, And the wind breaks his flail, and swineherds hear Outside, the pine-boles crack with frost i’ the heart,) Thou shalt, ere long, upon a distant peak Descry a doubted smoke, a likelier spark, A shadow shot across a glare, and then Two spurts of flame that bare the under sea; And climb, by much and more of certitude, To praising God some other even as thou Beneath his natal star himself maintains, And in salute of souls coördinate, There, till he perish, guards his lineal fire.

AN ESTRAY

WELL we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream: Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,

For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd’s stave, For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.

While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering, And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,

Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,

As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay, Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?

Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,

As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light, How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!

Lest captivity be o’er, lest thou glide away, and so From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.

BORDERLANDS

THROUGH all the evening, All the virginal long evening, Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone; For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during; And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring, Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

Yet in the valley, At a turn of the orchard alley, When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air, Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee, Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee, O hidden, O perfect, O desired! the first and the final Fair.

TO THE OUTBOUND REPUBLIC: MDCCCXCVIII

AMERICA, bride of Change! Thy cloistral hour is done; Thy shy and innocent foot Is white on the stranger’s stair: Unto what end?--Beloved! I have heard thee sigh.

As the heliotrope in the dusk Close under, but unespied, Delivers one slow breath, Pained, poignant-sweet, Into the neutral air, Because she inly feels At some light shock of a bud That would issue forth, and expand, How coronals fall, and old Dear purples wither away; (While the friendly leaves o’erhead Moan, and the redwing there Aches in his delicate sleep;) Even so, Freedom’s exempted flower! In the rhythm, the interplay Of the terrors of budding life Or death, I have heard thee sigh.

As the clear mid-channel wave, That under a Lammas dawn Her orient lanthorn held Steady and beautiful, Through the trance of the sunken tide, Sudden leaps up, and spreads Her signal round the sea: _Time, time! Time to awake; to arm; To scale the difficult shore!_ Even so, Thou Heart of the dual deep, Ere the plash of the onset came, In the vortices I have heard thee sigh.

What if now Thou failest, our saint, our star! Between thy Father’s tomb, And the throne of the glittering world, The febrile world, Calling, Ah, Child! (have I lived too long?) I have heard thee sigh.

ODE FOR A MASTER MARINER ASHORE

THERE in his room, whene’er the moon looks in, And silvers now a shell, and now a fin, And o’er his chart glides like an argosy, Quiet and old sits he. Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile. Where hidest thou the while, heart’s boast, Strange face of beauty sought and lost, Star-face that lured him out from boyhood’s isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old, The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss Their phosphor-flowers across. Towards ocean’s either rim the long-exiled Wears on, till stunted cedars throw A lace-like shadow over snow, Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Awhile, play up and down the briny spar Odors of Surinam and Zanzibar, Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new, The Labradorian blue; All homeless hurricanes about him break; The purples of spent day he sees From Samos to the Hebrides, And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried, Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide, Away, and far away, his pride is borne, Riding the noisy morn, Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know The helm and tightening halyards still Follow the urging of his will, And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Mischance hath barred him from his heirdom high, And shackled him with many an inland tie, And of his only wisdom made a jibe Amid an alien tribe: No wave abroad but moans his fallen state. The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars! Why is it on a yellowing page he pores? Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim, Familiar Danger, O forget not him! Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole Unto his subject soul, Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth, Nor hath so tamely worn her chain, But she may know that voice again, And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

O give him back, before his passion fail, The singing cordage and the hollow sail, And level with those aged eyes let be The bright unsteady sea; And move like any film from off his brain The pasture wall, the boughs that run Their evening arches to the sun, The hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the trivial hour, Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower, With rapt arrest and solemn loitering, Him whom thou lovedst, bring: That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip, Not having, at the last, less grace Of thee than had his roving race, Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.

THE RECRUIT

SO much to me is imminent: To leave Revolt that is my tent, And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be gone, Ere yet Creation marches on, Obedient, jocund, glorified;

And last of things afoot, to know How to be free is still to go With glad concession, grave accord,

Nor longer, bond and imbecile, Stand out against the gradual Will, The guessed _Fall in!_ of God the Lord.

_The Martyrs’ Idyl first came out in the Christmas number, 1898, of Harper’s Magazine. With the exception of that, of three poems taken from “England and Yesterday” (Grant Richards, London), and of one other, the contents of this volume appeared prior to 1896 in Harper’s, The Century, The Cosmopolitan, The Independent, The Chap-Book, etc., to all of which thanks are due for the courteous permission to reprint._

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Martyrs' Idyl, by Louise Imogen Guiney