Part 3

But those who slay Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs-- The death of innocences and despairs; The dying of the golden and the grey. The sentence, when these speak it, has no Nay. And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.

THE MODERN MOTHER

Oh, what a kiss With filial passion overcharged is this! To this misgiving breast This child runs, as a child ne'er ran to rest Upon the light heart and the unoppressed.

Unhoped, unsought! A little tenderness, this mother thought The utmost of her meed. She looked for gratitude; content indeed With thus much that her nine years' love had bought.

Nay, even with less. This mother, giver of life, death, peace, distress, Desired ah! not so much Thanks as forgiveness; and the passing touch Expected, and the slight, the brief caress.

O filial light Strong in these childish eyes, these new, these bright Intelligible stars! Their rays Are near the constant earth, guides in the maze, Natural, true, keen in this dusk of days.

UNTO US A SON IS GIVEN

Given, not lent, And not withdrawn--once sent, This Infant of mankind, this One, Is still the little welcome Son.

New every year, New born and newly dear, He comes with tidings and a song, The ages long, the ages long;

Even as the cold Keen winter grows not old, As childhood is so fresh, foreseen, And spring in the familiar green--

Sudden as sweet Come the expected feet. All joy is young, and new all art, And He, too, Whom we have by heart.

VENI CREATOR

So humble things Thou hast born for us, O God, Left'st Thou a path of lowliness untrod? Yes, one, till now; another Olive-Garden. For we endure the tender pain of pardon,-- One with another we forbear. Give heed, Look at the mournful world thou hast decreed. The time has come. At last we hapless men Know all our haplessness all through. Come, then, Endure undreamed humility: Lord of Heaven, Come to our ignorant hearts and be forgiven.

TWO BOYHOODS

Luminous passions reign High in the soul of man; and they are twain. Of these he hath made the poetry of earth-- Hath made his nobler tears, his magic mirth.

Fair love is one of these, The visiting vision of seven centuries; And one is love of Nature--love to tears-- The modern passion of this hundred years.

O never to such height, O never to such spiritual light-- The light of lonely visions, and the gleam Of secret splendid sombre suns in dream--

O never to such long Glory in life, supremacy in song, Had either of these loves attained in joy, But for the ministration of a boy.

Dante was one who bare Love in his deep heart, apprehended there When he was yet a child; and from that day The radiant love has never passed away.

And one was Wordsworth; he Conceived the love of Nature childishly As no adult heart might; old poets sing That exaltation by remembering.

For no divine Intelligence, or art, or fire, or wine, Is high-delirious as that rising lark-- The child's soul and its daybreak in the dark.

And Letters keep these two Heavenly treasures safe the ages through, Safe from ignoble benison or ban-- These two high childhoods in the heart of man.

TO SYLVIA

TWO YEARS OLD

Long life to thee, long virtue, long delight, A flowering early and late! Long beauty, grave to thought and gay to sight, A distant date!

Yet, as so many poets love to sing (When young the child will die), "No autumn will destroy this lovely spring," So, Sylvia, I.

I'll write thee dapper verse and touching rhyme; "Our eyes shall not behold--" The commonplace shall serve for thee this time: "Never grow old."

For there's another way to stop thy clock Within my cherishing heart, To carry thee unalterable, and lock Thy youth apart:

Thy flower, for me, shall evermore be hid In this close bud of thine, Not, Sylvia, by thy death--O God forbid! Merely by mine.

SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA

_Written for Strephon, who said that a woman must lean, or she should not have his chivalry._

The light young man who was to die, Stopped in his frolic by the State, Aghast, beheld the world go by; But Catherine crossed his dungeon gate.

She found his lyric courage dumb, His stripling beauties strewn in wrecks, His modish bravery overcome; Small profit had he of his sex.

On any old wife's level he, For once--for all. But he alone-- Man--must not fear the mystery, The pang, the passage, the unknown:

Death. He did fear it, in his cell, Darkling amid the Tuscan sun; And, weeping, at her feet he fell, The sacred, young, provincial nun.

She prayed, she preached him innocent; She gave him to the Sacrificed; On her courageous breast he leant, The breast where beat the heart of Christ.

He left it for the block, with cries Of victory on his severed breath. That crimson head she clasped, her eyes Blind with the splendour of his death.

And will the man of modern years --Stern on the Vote--withhold from thee, Thou prop, thou cross, erect, in tears, Catherine, the service of his knee?

CHIMES

Brief, on a flying night, From the shaken tower, A flock of bells take flight. And go with the hour.

Like birds from the cote to the gales, Abrupt--O hark! A fleet of bells set sails, And go to the dark.

Sudden the cold airs swing. Alone, aloud, A verse of bells takes wing And flies with the cloud.

A POET'S WIFE

I saw a tract of ocean locked inland, Within a field's embrace-- The very sea! Afar it fled the strand, And gave the seasons chase, And met the night alone, the tempest spanned, Saw sunrise face to face.

O Poet, more than ocean, lonelier! In inaccessible rest And storm remote, thou, sea of thoughts, dost err Scattered through east to west,-- Now, while thou closest with the kiss of her Who locks thee to her breast.

MESSINA, 1908

Lord, Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, o'erthrown Thy strong, Thy fair; Thy man thou hast unmanned, Thy elaborate works unwrought, Thy deeds undone, Thy lovely sentiment human plan unplanned; Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own Immediate, unintelligible hand.

Lord, thou hast hastened to retrieve, to heal, To feed, to bind, to clothe, to quench the brand, To prop the ruin, to bless, and to anneal; Hast sped Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land, Shed pity and tears:--our shattered fingers feel Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

THE UNKNOWN GOD

One of the crowd went up, And knelt before the Paten and the Cup, Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed Close to my side. Then in my heart I said:

"O Christ, in this man's life!-- This stranger who is Thine--in all his strife, All his felicity, his good and ill, In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

"I do confess Thee here, Alive within this life; I know Thee near Within this lonely conscience, closed away Within this brother's solitary day.

"Christ in his unknown heart, His intellect unknown--this love, this art, This battle and this peace, this destiny That I shall never know, look upon me!

"Christ in his numbered breath, Christ in his beating heart and in his death, Christ in his mystery! From that secret place And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!"

A GENERAL COMMUNION

I saw the throng, so deeply separate, Fed at one only board-- The devout people, moved, intent, elate, And the devoted Lord.

O struck apart! not side from human side, But soul from human soul, As each asunder absorbed the multiplied, The ever unparted, whole.

I saw this people as a field of flowers, Each grown at such a price The sum of unimaginable powers Did no more than suffice.

A thousand single central daisies they, A thousand of the one; For each, the entire monopoly of day; For each, the whole of the devoted sun.

THE FUGITIVE

"_Nous avons chassé ce Jésus Christ._"--FRENCH PUBLICIST.

Yes, from the ingrate heart, the street Of garrulous tongue, the warm retreat Within the village and the town; Not from the lands where ripen brown A thousand thousand hills of wheat;

Not from the long Burgundian line, The Southward, sunward range of vine. Hunted, He never will escape The flesh, the blood, the sheaf, the grape, That feed His man--the bread, the wine.

IN PORTUGAL, 1912

And will they cast the altars down, Scatter the chalice, crush the bread? In field, in village, and in town He hides an unregarded head;

Waits in the corn-lands far and near, Bright in His sun, dark in His frost, Sweet in the vine, ripe in the ear-- Lonely unconsecrated Host.

In ambush at the merry board The Victim lurks unsacrificed; The mill conceals the harvest's Lord, The wine-press holds the unbidden Christ.

THE CRUCIFIXION

"_A Paltry Sacrifice._"--PREFACE TO A PLAY

Oh, man's capacity For spiritual sorrow, corporal pain! Who has explored the deepmost of that sea, With heavy links of a far-fathoming chain?

That melancholy lead, Let down in guilty and in innocent hold, Yea into childish hands delivered, Leaves the sequestered floor unreached, untold.

One only has explored The deepmost; but He did not die of it. Not yet, not yet He died. Man's human Lord Touched the extreme; it is not infinite.

But over the abyss Of God's capacity for woe He stayed One hesitating hour; what gulf was this? Forsaken He went down, and was afraid.

THE NEWER VAINGLORY

Two men went up to pray; and one gave thanks, Not with himself--aloud, With proclamation, calling on the ranks Of an attentive crowd.

"Thank God, I clap not my own humble breast, But other ruffians' backs, Imputing crime--such is my tolerant haste-- To any man that lacks.

"For I am tolerant, generous, keep no rules, And the age honours me. Thank God, I am not as these rigid fools, Even as this Pharisee."

IN MANCHESTER SQUARE

(_In Memoriam_ T.H.)

The paralytic man has dropped in death The crossing-sweeper's brush to which he clung, One-handed, twisted, dwarfed, scanted of breath, Although his hair was young.

I saw this year the winter vines of France, Dwarfed, twisted, goblins in the frosty drouth-- Gnarled, crippled, blackened little stems askance On long hills to the South.

Great green and golden hands of leaves ere long Shall proffer clusters in that vineyard wide. And O his might, his sweet, his wine, his song, His stature, since he died!

MATERNITY

One wept whose only child was dead, New-born, ten years ago. "Weep not; he is in bliss," they said. She answered, "Even so,

"Ten years ago was born in pain A child, not now forlorn. But oh, ten years ago, in vain, A mother, a mother was born."

THE FIRST SNOW

Not yet was winter come to earth's soft floor, The tideless wave, the warm white road, the shore, The serried town whose small street tortuously Led darkling to the dazzling sea.

Not yet to breathing man, not to his song, Not to his comforted heart; nor to the long Close-cultivated lands beneath the hill. Summer was gently with them still.

But on the Apennine mustered the cloud; The grappling storm shut down. Aloft, aloud, Ruled secret tempest one long day and night, Until another morning's light.

O tender mountain-tops and delicate, Where summer-long the westering sunlight sate! Within that fastness darkened from the sun, What solitary things were done?

The clouds let go, they rose, they winged away; Snow-white the altered mountains faced the day, As saints who keep their counsel sealed and fast, Their anguish over-past.

THE COURTS

A FIGURE OF THE EPIPHANY

The poet's imageries are noble ways, Approaches to a plot, an open shrine. Their splendours, colours, avenues, arrays, Their courts that run with wine;

Beautiful similes, "fair and flagrant things," Enriched, enamouring,--raptures, metaphors Enhancing life, are paths for pilgrim kings Made free of golden doors.

And yet the open heavenward plot, with dew, Ultimate poetry, enclosed, enskied (Albeit such ceremonies lead thereto) Stands on the yonder side.

Plain, behind oracles, it is; and past All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild, The song some loaded poets reach at last-- The kings that found a Child.

THE LAUNCH

Forth, to the alien gravity, Forth, to the laws of ocean, we Builders on earth by laws of land Entrust this creature of our hand Upon the calculated sea.

Fast bound to shore we cling, we creep, And make our ship ready to leap Light to the flood, equipped to ride The strange conditions of the tide-- New weight, new force, new world: the Deep.

Ah thus--not thus--the Dying, kissed, Cherished, exhorted, shriven, dismissed; By all the eager means we hold We, warm, prepare him for the cold, To keep the incalculable tryst.

TO THE BODY

Thou inmost, ultimate Council of judgment, palace of decrees, Where the high senses hold their spiritual state, Sued by earth's embassies, And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create;

Create--thy senses close With the world's pleas. The random odours reach Their sweetness in the place of thy repose, Upon thy tongue the peach, And in thy nostrils breathes the breathing rose.

To thee, secluded one, The dark vibrations of the sightless skies, The lovely inexplicit colours run; The light gropes for those eyes O thou august! thou dost command the sun.

Music, all dumb, hath trod Into thine ear her one effectual way; And fire and cold approach to gain thy nod, Where thou call'st up the day, Where thou awaitest the appeal of God.

THE UNEXPECTED PERIL

Unlike the youth that all men say They prize--youth of abounding blood, In love with the sufficient day, And gay in growth, and strong in bud;

Unlike was mine! Then my first slumber Nightly rehearsed my last; each breath Knew itself one of the unknown number. But Life was urgent with me as Death.

My shroud was in the flocks; the hill Within its quarry locked my stone; My bier grew in the woods; and still Life spurred me where I paused alone.

"Begin!" Life called. Again her shout, "Make haste while it is called to-day!" Her exhortations plucked me out, Hunted me, turned me, held me at bay.

But if my youth is thus hard pressed (I thought) what of a later year? If the end so threats this tender breast, What of the days when it draws near?

Draws near, and little done? yet lo, Dread has forborne, and haste lies by. I was beleaguered; now the foe Has raised the siege, I know not why.

I see them troop away; I ask Were they in sooth mine enemies-- Terror, the doubt, the lash, the task? What heart has my new housemate, Ease?

How am I left, at last, alive, To make a stranger of a tear? What did I do one day to drive From me the vigilant angel, Fear?

The diligent angel, Labour? Ay, The inexorable angel, Pain? Menace me, lest indeed I die, Sloth! Turn; crush, teach me fear again!

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all The innumerable host of stars has heard How He administered this terrestrial ball. Our race have kept their Lord's entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet None knows the secret, cherished, perilous, The terrible, shame fast, frightened, whispered, sweet, Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave, Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss, Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day, May His devices with the heavens be guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way, Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But, in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul! To read the inconceivable, to scan The million forms of God those stars unroll When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

BEYOND KNOWLEDGE

"_Your sins ... shall be white as snow._"

Into the rescued world newcomer, The newly-dead stepped up, and cried, "O what is that, sweeter than summer Was to my heart before I died? Sir (to an angel), what is yonder More bright than the remembered skies, A lovelier sight, a softer splendour Than when the moon was wont to rise? Surely no sinner wears such seeming Even the Rescued World within?"

"O the success of His redeeming! O child, it is a rescued sin!"

EASTER NIGHT

All night had shout of men and cry Of woeful women filled His way; Until that noon of sombre sky On Friday, clamour and display Smote Him; no solitude had He, No silence, since Gethsemane.

Public was Death; but Power, but Might, But Life again, but Victory, Were hushed within the dead of night, The shutter'd dark, the secrecy. And all alone, alone, alone He rose again behind the stone.

A FATHER OF WOMEN

AD SOROREM E. B.

"_Thy father was transfused into thy blood._" _Dryden: Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew._

Our father works in us, The daughters of his manhood. Not undone Is he, not wasted, though transmuted thus, And though he left no son.

Therefore on him I cry To arm me: "For my delicate mind a casque, A breastplate for my heart, courage to die, Of thee, captain, I ask.

"Nor strengthen only; press A finger on this violent blood and pale, Over this rash will let thy tenderness A while pause, and prevail.

"And shepherd-father, thou Whose staff folded my thoughts before my birth, Control them now I am of earth, and now Thou art no more of earth.

"O liberal, constant, dear! Crush in my nature the ungenerous art Of the inferior; set me high, and here, Here garner up thy heart."

Like to him now are they, The million living fathers of the War-- Mourning the crippled world, the bitter day-- Whose striplings are no more.

The crippled world! Come then, Fathers of women with your honour in trust; Approve, accept, know them daughters of men, Now that your sons are dust.

LENGTH OF DAYS

TO THE EARLY DEAD IN BATTLE

There is no length of days But yours, boys who were children once. Of old The Past beset you in your childish ways, With sense of Time untold.

What have you then forgone? A history? This you had. Or memories? These, too, you had of your far-distant dawn. No further dawn seems his,

The old man who shares with you, But has no more, no more. Time's mystery Did once for him the most that it can do; He has had infancy.

And all his dreams, and all His loves for mighty Nature, sweet and few, Are but the dwindling past he can recall Of what his childhood knew.

He counts not any more His brief, his present years. But O he knows How far apart the summers were of yore, How far apart the snows.

Therefore be satisfied; Long life is in your treasury ere you fall; Yes, and first love, like Dante's. O a bride For ever mystical!

Irrevocable good,-- You dead, and now about, so young, to die,-- Your childhood was; there Space, there Multitude, There dwelt Antiquity.

NURSE EDITH CAVELL

_Two o'clock, the morning of October_ 12_th_, 1915

To her accustomed eyes The midnight-morning brought not such a dread As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies In trivial sleep on the habitual bed.

'Twas yet some hours ere light; And many, many, many a break of day Had she outwatched the dying; but this night Shortened her vigil was, briefer the way.

By dial of the clock 'Twas day in the dark above her lonely head. "This day thou shalt be with Me." Ere the cock Announced that day she met the Immortal Dead.

SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1914

On London fell a clearer light; Caressing pencils of the sun Defined the distances, the white Houses transfigured one by one, The "long, unlovely street" impearled. O what a sky has walked the world!

Most happy year! And out of town The hay was prosperous, and the wheat; The silken harvest climbed the down: Moon after moon was heavenly-sweet Stroking the bread within the sheaves, Looking 'twixt apples and their leaves.

And while this rose made round her cup, The armies died convulsed. And when This chaste young silver sun went up Softly, a thousand shattered men, One wet corruption, heaped the plain, After a league-long throb of pain.

Flower following tender flower; and birds, And berries; and benignant skies Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.-- Yonder are men shot through the eyes. Love, hide thy face From man's unpardonable race.

* * *

Who said "No man hath greater love than this, To die to serve his friend"? So these have loved us all unto the end. Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed! The soldier dying dies upon a kiss, The very kiss of Christ.

TO TINTORETTO IN VENICE

_The Art of Painting had in the Primitive years looked with the light, not towards it. Before Tintoretto's date, however, many painters practised shadows and lights, and turned more or less sunwards; but he set the figure between himself and a full sun. His work is to be known in Venice by the splendid trick of an occluded sun and a shadow thrown straight at the spectator._

Master, thy enterprise, Magnificent, magnanimous, was well done, Which seized the head of Art, and turned her eyes-- The simpleton--and made her front the sun.

Long had she sat content, Her young unlessoned back to a morning gay, To a solemn noon, to a cloudy firmament, And looked upon a world in gentle day.

But thy imperial call Bade her to stand with thee and breast the light, And therefore face the shadows, mystical, Sombre, translucent, vestiges of night,

Yet glories of the day. Eagle! we know thee by thy undaunted eyes Sky-ward, and by thy glooms; we know thy way Ambiguous, and those halo-misted dyes.

Thou Cloud, the bridegroom's friend (The bridegroom sun)! Master, we know thy sign: A mystery of hues world-without-end; And hide-and-seek of gamesome and divine;

Shade of the noble head Cast hitherward upon the noble breast; Human solemnities thrice hallowed; The haste to Calvary, the Cross at rest.

Look sunward, Angel, then! Carry the fortress-heavens by that hand; Still be the interpreter of suns to men; And shadow us, O thou Tower! for thou shalt stand.

A THRUSH BEFORE DAWN

A voice peals in this end of night A phrase of notes resembling stars, Single and spiritual notes of light. What call they at my window-bars? The South, the past, the day to be, An ancient infelicity.

Darkling, deliberate, what sings This wonderful one, alone, at peace? What wilder things than song, what things Sweeter than youth, clearer than Greece, Dearer than Italy, untold Delight, and freshness centuries old?

And first first-loves, a multitude, The exaltation of their pain; Ancestral childhood long renewed; And midnights of invisible rain; And gardens, gardens, night and day, Gardens and childhood all the way.