Part 4

What Middle Ages passionate, O passionless voice! What distant bells Lodged in the hills, what palace state Illyrian! For it speaks, it tells, Without desire, without dismay, Some morrow and some yesterday.

All-natural things! But more--Whence came This yet remoter mystery? How do these starry notes proclaim A graver still divinity? This hope, this sanctity of fear? _O innocent throat! O human ear!_

THE TWO SHAKESPEARE TERCENTENARIES

OF BIRTH, 1864; OF DEATH, 1916

TO SHAKESPEARE

Longer than thine, than thine, Is now my time of life; and thus thy years Seem to be clasped and harboured within mine. O how ignoble this my clasp appears!

Thy unprophetic birth, Thy darkling death; living I might have seen That cradle, marked those labours, closed that earth. O first, O last, O infinite between!

Now that my life has shared Thy dedicated date, O mortal, twice, To what all-vain embrace shall be compared My lean enclosure of thy paradise:

To ignorant arms that fold A poet to a foolish breast? The Line, That is not, with the world within its hold? So, days with days, my days encompass thine.

Child, Stripling, Man--the sod. Might I talk little language to thee, pore On thy last silence? O thou city of God, My waste lies after thee, and lies before.

To O----, OF HER DARK EYES

Across what calm of tropic seas, 'Neath alien clusters of the nights, Looked, in the past, such eyes as these! Long-quenched, relumed, ancestral lights!

The generations fostered them; And steadfast Nature, secretwise-- Thou seedling child of that old stem-- Kindled anew thy dark-bright eyes.

Was it a century or two This lovely darkness rose and set, Occluded by grey eyes and blue, And Nature feigning to forget?

Some grandam gave a hint of it-- So cherished was it in thy race, So fine a treasure to transmit In its perfection to thy face.

Some father to some mother's breast Entrusted it, unknowing. Time Implied, or made it manifest, Bequest of a forgotten clime.

Hereditary eyes! But this Is single, singular, apart:-- New-made thy love, new-made thy kiss, New-made thy errand to my heart.

THE TREASURE

Three times have I beheld Fear leap in a babe's face, and take his breath, Fear, like the fear of eld That knows the price of life, the name of death.

What is it justifies This thing, this dread, this fright that has no tongue, The terror in those eyes When only eyes can speak--they are so young?

Not yet those eyes had wept. What does fear cherish that it locks so well? What fortress is thus kept? Of what is ignorant terror sentinel?

And pain in the poor child, Monstrously disproportionate, and dumb In the poor beast, and wild In the old decorous man, caught, overcome?

Of what the outposts these? Of what the fighting guardians? What demands That sense of menaces, And then such flying feet, imploring hands?

Life: There's nought else to seek; Life only, little prized; but by design Of nature prized. How weak, How sad, how brief! O how divine, divine!

A WIND OF CLEAR WEATHER IN ENGLAND

O what a miracle wind is this Has crossed the English land to-day With an unprecedented kiss, And wonderfully found a way!

Unsmirched incredibly and clean, Between the towns and factories, Avoiding, has his long flight been, Bringing a sky like Sicily's.

O fine escape, horizon pure As Rome's! Black chimneys left and right, But not for him, the straight, the sure, His luminous day, his spacious night.

How keen his choice, how swift his feet! Narrow the way and hard to find! This delicate stepper and discreet Walked not like any worldly wind.

Most like a man in man's own day, One of the few, a perfect one: His open earth--the single way; His narrow road--the open sun.

IN SLEEP

I dreamt (no "dream" awake--a dream indeed) A wrathful man was talking in the park: "Where are the Higher Powers, who know our need And leave us in the dark?

"There are no Higher Powers; there is no heart In God, no love"--his oratory here, Taking the paupers' and the cripples' part, Was broken by a tear.

And then it seemed that One who did create Compassion, who alone invented pity, Walked, as though called, in at that north-east gate, Out from the muttering city;

Threaded the little crowd, trod the brown grass, Bent o'er the speaker close, saw the tear rise, And saw Himself, as one looks in a glass, In those impassioned eyes.

THE DIVINE PRIVILEGE

Lord, where are Thy prerogatives? Why, men have more than Thou hast kept; The king rewards, remits, forgives, The poet to a throne has stept.

And Thou, despoiled, hast given away Worship to men, success to strife, Thy glory to the heavenly day, And made Thy sun the lord of life.

Is one too precious to impart, One property reserved to Christ, One, cherished, grappled to that heart? --To be alone the Sacrificed?

O Thou who lovest to redeem!-- One whom I know lies sore oppressed, Thou wilt not suffer me to dream That I can bargain for her rest.

Seven hours I swiftly sleep, while she Measures the leagues of dark, awake. O that my dewy eyes might be Parched by a vigil for her sake!

But O rejected! O in vain! I cannot give who would not keep. I cannot buy, I cannot gain, I cannot give her half my sleep.

FREE WILL

Dear are some hidden things My soul has sealed in silence; past delights; Hope unconfessed; desires with hampered wings, Remembered in the nights.

But my best treasures are Ignoble, undelightful, abject, cold; Yet O! profounder hoards oracular No reliquaries hold.

There lie my trespasses, Abjured but not disowned. I'll not accuse Determinism, nor, as the Master* says, Charge even "the poor Deuce."

Under my hand they lie, My very own, my proved iniquities; And though the glory of my life go by I hold and garner these.

How else, how otherwhere, How otherwise, shall I discern and grope For lowliness? How hate, how love, how dare, How weep, how hope?

*George Meredith

THE TWO QUESTIONS

"A riddling world!" one cried. "If pangs must be, would God that they were sent To the impure, the cruel, and passed aside The holy innocent!"

But I, "Ah no, no, no! Not the clean heart transpierced; not tears that fall For a child's agony; nor a martyr's woe; Not these, not these appal.

"Not docile motherhood, Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress; Not shedding of the unoffending blood; Not little joy grown less;

"Not all-benign old age With dotage mocked; not gallantry that faints And still pursues; not the vile heritage Of sin's disease in saints;

"Not these defeat the mind. For great is that abjection, and august That irony. Submissive we shall find A splendour in that dust.

"Not these puzzle the will; Not these the yet unanswered question urge. But the unjust stricken; but the hands that kill Lopped; but the merited scourge;

"The sensualist at fast; The merciless felled; the liar in his snares. The cowardice of my judgment sees, aghast, The flail, the chaff, the tares."

THE LORD'S PRAYER

"_Audemus dicere 'Pater Noster.'_"--CANON OF THE MASS.

There is a bolder way, There is a wilder enterprise than this All-human iteration day by day. Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His.

Out of His mouth were given These phrases. O replace them whence they came. He, only, knows our inconceivable "Heaven," Our hidden "Father," and the unspoken "Name";

Our "trespasses," our "bread," The "will" inexorable yet implored; The miracle-words that are and are not said, Charged with the unknown purpose of their Lord.

"Forgive," "give," "lead us not"-- Speak them by Him, O man the unaware, Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what, Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.

Last Poems

THE POET AND HIS BOOK

Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold, My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold Their different eyes.

O distant pastures in their blood! O streams From watersheds that fed them for this prison! Lights from aloft, midsummer suns in dreams, Set and arisen.

They wander out, but all return anew, The small ones, to this heart to which they clung; "And those that are with young," the fruitful few That are with young.

INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY

FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

A simple child ... That lightly draws its breath And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death? WORDSWORTH.

It knows but will not tell. Awake, alone, it counts its father's years-- How few are left--its mother's. Ah, how well It knows of death, in tears.

If any of the three-- Parents and child--believe they have prevailed To keep the secret of mortality, I know that two have failed.

The third, the lonely, keeps One secret--a child's knowledge. When they come At night to ask wherefore the sweet one weeps, Those hidden lips are dumb.

THE WIND IS BLIND

"EYELESS, IN GAZA, AT THE MILL, WITH SLAVES" _Milton's "Samson."_

The wind is blind. The earth sees sun and moon; the height Is watch-tower to the dawn; the plain Shines to the summer; visible light Is scattered in the drops of rain.

The wind is blind. The flashing billows are aware; With open eyes the cities see; Light leaves the ether, everywhere Known to the homing bird and bee.

The wind is blind, Is blind alone. How has he hurled His ignorant lash, his aimless dart, His eyeless rush upon the world, Unseeing, to break his unknown heart!

The wind is blind, And the sail traps him, and the mill Captures him; and he cannot save His swiftness and his desperate will From those blind uses of the slave.

TIME'S REVERSALS

A DAUGHTER'S PARADOX

To his devoted heart* Who, young, had loved his ageing mate for life, In late lone years Time gave the elder's part, Time gave the bridegroom's boast, Time gave a younger wife.

A wilder prank and plot Time soon will promise, threaten, offering me Impossible things that Nature suffers not-- A daughter's riper mind, a child's seniority.

Oh, by my filial tears Mourned all too young, Father! On this my head Time yet will force at last the longer years, Claiming some strange respect for me from you, the dead.

Nay, nay! Too new to know Time's conjuring is, too great to understand. Memory has not died; it leaves me so-- Leaning a fading brow on your unfaded hand.

*Dr. Johnson outlived by thirty years his wife, who was twenty years his senior.

THE THRESHING MACHINE

No "fan is in his hand" for these Young villagers beneath the trees, Watching the wheels. But I recall The rhythm of rods that rise and fall, Purging the harvest, over-seas.

No fan, no flail, no threshing-floor! And all their symbols evermore Forgone in England now--the sign, The visible pledge, the threat divine, The chaff dispersed, the wheat in store.

The unbreathing engine marks no tune, Steady at sunrise, steady at noon, Inhuman, perfect, saving time, And saving measure, and saving rhyme-- And did our Ruskin speak too soon?

"No noble strength on earth" he sees "Save Hercules' arm"; his grave decrees Curse wheel and steam. As the wheels ran I saw the other strength of man, I knew the brain of Hercules.

WINTER TREES ON THE HORIZON

O delicate! Even in wooded lands They show the margin of my world, My own horizon; little bands Of twigs unveil that edge impearled.

And what is more mine own than this, My limit, level with mine eyes? For me precisely do they kiss-- The rounded earth, the rounding skies.

It has my stature, that keen line (Let mathematics vouch for it). The lark's horizon is not mine, No, nor his nestlings' where they sit;

No, nor the child's. And, when I gain The hills, I lift it as I rise Erect; anon, back to the plain I soothe it with mine equal eyes.

TO SLEEP

Dear fool, be true to me! I know the poets speak thee fair, and I Hail thee uncivilly. O but I call with a more urgent cry!

I do not prize thee less, I need thee more, that thou dost love to teach-- Father of foolishness-- The imbecile dreams clear out of wisdom's reach.

Come and release me; bring My irresponsible mind; come in thy hours. Draw from my soul the sting Of wit that trembles, consciousness that cowers.

For if night comes without thee She is more cruel than day. But thou, fulfil Thy work, thy gifts about thee-- Liberty, liberty, from this weight of will.

My day-mind can endure Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. But O afraid, unsure, My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

Dear fool, be true to me! The night is thine, man yields it, it beseems Thy ironic dignity. Make me all night the innocent fool that dreams.

"THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS"

(IN THE BACH-GOUNOD "AVE MARIA")

That seeking Prelude found its unforetold Unguessed intention, trend; Though needing no fulfilment, did enfold This exquisite end.

Bach led his notes up through their delicate slope Aspiring, so they sound, And so they were--in some strange ignorant hope Thus to be crowned.

What deep soft seas beneath this buoyant barque! What winds to speed this bird! What impulses to toss this heavenward lark! Thought--then the word.

Lovely the tune, lovely the unconsciousness Of him who promised it. Lovely the years that joined in blessedness The two, the fit.

Bach was Precursor. But no Baptist's cry Was his; he, who began For one who was to end, did prophesy, By Nature's generous act, the lesser man.

IN HONOUR OF AMERICA, 1917

IN ANTITHESIS TO ROSSETTI'S "ON THE REFUSAL OF AID BETWEEN NATIONS"

Not that the earth is changing, O my God! Not that her brave democracies take heart To share, to rule her treasure, to impart The wine to those who long the wine-press trod; Not therefore trust we that beneath Thy nod, Thy silent benediction, even now In gratitude so many nations bow, So many poor: not therefore, O my God!

But because living men for dying man Go to a million deaths, to deal one blow; And justice speaks one great compassionate tongue; And nation unto nation calls "One clan We succourers are, one tribe!" By this we know Our earth holds confident, steadfast, being young.

"LORD, I OWE THEE A DEATH" _Richard Hooker_

(IN TIME OF WAR)

Man pays that debt with new munificence, Not piecemeal now, not slowly, by the old: Not grudgingly, by the effaced thin pence, But greatly and in gold.

REFLECTIONS

(I) IN IRELAND

A mirror faced a mirror: ire and hate Opposite ire and hate: the multiplied, The complex charge rejected, intricate, From side to sullen side;

One plot, one crime, one treachery, nay, one name, Assumed, denounced, in echoes of replies. The doubt, exchanged, lit thousands of one flame Within those mutual eyes.

(II) IN "OTHELLO"

A mirror faced a mirror: in sweet pain His dangers with her pity did she track, Received her pity with his love again, And these she wafted back.

That masculine passion in her little breast She bandied with him; her compassion he Bandied with her. What tender sport! No rest Had love's infinity.

(III) IN TWO POETS

A mirror faced a mirror: O thy word, Thou lord of images, did lodge in me, Locked to my heart, homing from home, a bird, A carrier, bound for thee.

Thy migratory greatness, greater far For that return, returns; now grow divine By endlessness my visiting thoughts, that are Those visiting thoughts of thine.

TO CONSCRIPTS

"_Compel them to come in._"--ST. LUKE'S GOSPEL

You "made a virtue of necessity" By divine sanction; you, the loth, the grey, The random, gentle, unconvinced; O be The crowned!--you may, you may.

You, the compelled, be feasted! You, the caught, Be freemen of the gates that word unlocks! Accept your victory from that unsought, That heavenly paradox.

THE VOICE OF A BIRD

"_He shall rise up at the voice of a bird._"--ECCLESIASTES

Who then is "he"? Dante, Keats, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley; all Rose in their greatness at the shrill decree, The little rousing inarticulate call.

For they stood up At the bird-voice, of lark, of nightingale, Drank poems from that throat as from a cup. Over the great world's notes did these prevail.

And not alone The signal poets woke. In listening man, Woman, and child a poet stirs unknown, Throughout the Mays of birds since Mays began.

He rose, he heard-- Our father, our St. Peter, in his tears-- The crowing, twice, of the prophetic bird, The saddest cock-crow of our human years.

THE QUESTION

IL POETA MI DISSE, "CHE PENSI?"

Virgil stayed Dante with a wayside word; But long, and how, and loud and urgently The poets of my passion have I heard Summoning me.

It is their closest whisper and their call. Their greatness to this lowliness hath spoken, Their voices rest upon that interval, Their sign, their token.

Man at his little prayer tells Heaven his thought, To man entrusts his thought--"Friend, this is mine." The immortal poets within my breast have sought, Saying, "What is thine?"

THE LAWS OF VERSE

Dear laws, come to my breast! Take all my frame, and make your close arms meet Around me; and so ruled, so warmed, so pressed, I breathe, aware; I feel my wild heart beat.

Dear laws, be wings to me! The feather merely floats. O be it heard Through weight of life--the skylark's gravity-- That I am not a feather, but a bird.

"THE RETURN TO NATURE"

_Histories of Modern Poetry_

(I) PROMETHEUS

It was the south: mid-everything, Mid-land, mid-summer, noon; And deep within a limpid spring The mirrored sun of June.

Splendour in freshness! Ah, who stole This sun, this fire, from heaven? He holds it shining in his soul, Prometheus the forgiven.

(II) THETIS

In her bright title poets dare What the wild eye of fancy sees-- Similitude--the clear, the fair Light mystery of images.

Round the blue sea I love the best The argent foam played, slender, fleet; I saw--past Wordsworth and the rest-- Her natural, Greek, and silver feet.

TO SILENCE

"SPACE, THE BOUND OF A SOLID": SILENCE, THEN, THE FORM OF A MELODY

Silence, for thine idleness I raise My silence-bounded singing in thy praise, But for thy moulding of my Mozart's tune, Thy hold upon the bird that sings the moon, Thy magisterial ways.

Man's lovely definite melody-shapes are thine, Outlined, controlled, compressed, complete, divine. Also thy fine intrusions do I trace, Thy afterthoughts, thy wandering, thy grace, Within the poet's line.

Thy secret is the song that is to be. Music had never stature but for thee, Sculptor! strong as the sculptor Space whose hand Urged the Discobolus and bade him stand. * * * * * Man, on his way to Silence, stops to hear and see.

THE ENGLISH METRES

The rooted liberty of flowers in breeze Is theirs, by national luck impulsive, terse, Tethered, uncaptured, rules obeyed "at ease," Time-strengthened laws of verse.

Or they are like our seasons that admit Inflexion, not infraction: Autumn hoar, Winter more tender than our thoughts of it, But a year's steadfast four;

Redundant syllables of Summer rain, And displaced accents of authentic Spring; Spondaic clouds above a gusty plain With dactyls on the wing.

Not Common Law, but Equity, is theirs-- Our metres; play and agile foot askance, And distant, beckoning, blithely rhyming pairs, Unknown to classic France;

Unknown to Italy. Ay, count, collate, Latins! with eye foreseeing on the time, And numbered fingers, and approaching fate On the appropriate rhyme.

Nay, nobly our grave measures are decreed: Heroic, Alexandrine with the stay, Deliberate; or else like him whose speed Did outrun Peter, urgent in the break of day.

"RIVERS UNKNOWN TO SONG" _James Thomson_

Wide waters in the waste; or, out of reach, Rough Alpine falls where late a glacier hung; Or rivers groping for the alien beach, Through continents, unsung.

Nay, not these nameless, these remote, alone; But all the streams from all the watersheds-- Peneus, Danube, Nile--are the unknown. Young in their ancient beds.

Man has no tale for them. O travellers swift From secrets to oblivion! Waters wild That pass in act to bend a flower, or lift The bright limbs of a child!

For they are new, they are fresh; there's no surprise Like theirs on earth. O strange for evermore! This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes Never saw Rome before.

Man has no word for their eternity-- Rhine, Avon, Arno, younglings, youth uncrowned: Ignorant, innocent, instantaneous, free, Unwelcomed, unrenowned.

TO THE MOTHER OF CHRIST THE SON OF MAN

We too (one cried), we too, We the unready, the perplexed, the cold, Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew, Cherish, possess, enfold.

Thou sweetly, we in strife. It is our passion to conceive Him thus In mind, in sense, within our house of life; That seed is locked in us.

We must affirm our Son From the ambiguous Nature's difficult speech, Gather in darkness that resplendent One, Close as our grasp can reach.

Nor shall we ever rest From this our task. An hour sufficed for thee, Thou innocent! He lingers in the breast Of our humanity.

A COMPARISON IN A SEASIDE FIELD

'Tis royal and authentic June Over this poor soil blossoming; Here lies, beneath an upright noon, Thin nation for so wild a king.

Far off, the noble Summer rules, Violent in the ardent rose, His sun alight in mirroring pools, Braggart on Alps of vanquished snows;

Away, aloft, true to his hour, Announced, his colour, his fire, his jest. But here, in negligible flower, Summer is not proclaimed:--confessed.

A woman I marked; for her no state, Small joy, no song. She had her boon, Her only youth, true to its date, Faintly perceptible, her June.

SURMISE

THE TRACK OF A HUMAN MOOD

Not wish, nor fear, nor quite expectancy Is that vague spirit Surmise, That wanderer, that wonderer, whom we see Within each other's eyes;

And yet not often. For she flits away, Fitful as infant thought, Visitant at a venture, hope at play, Unversed in facts, untaught.

In "the wide fields of possibility" Surmise, conjecturing, Makes little trials, incredulous, that flee Abroad on random wing.

One day this inarticulate shall find speech, This hoverer seize our breath. Surmise shall close with man--with all, with each-- In her own sovereign hour, the moments of our death.

TO ANTIQUITY

"... REVERENCE FOR OUR FATHERS, WITH THEIR STORES OF EXPERIENCES" _An author whose name I did not note_

O our young ancestor, Our boy in Letters, how we trudge oppressed With our "experiences," and you of yore Flew light, and blessed!

Youngling, in your new town, Tight, like a box of toys--the town that is Our shattered, open ruin, with its crown Of histories;