Part 14

Myrrh and music everywhere Haunt its cascades--like the hair That a Naiad tosses cool, Swimming strangely beautiful, With white fragrance for her bosom, And her mouth a breath of song:-- Under leaf and branch and blossom Flows the woodland spring along, Sparkling, singing flows along.

III

Still the wet wan mornings touch Its gray rocks, perhaps; and such Slender stars as dusk may have Pierce the rose that roofs its wave; Still the thrush may call at noontide And the whippoorwill at night; Nevermore, by sun or moontide, Shall I see it gliding white, Falling, flowing, wild and white.

THE FOREST SPRING

Push back the brambles, berry-blue; The hollowed spring is full in view: Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern Ripples its rock-embedded urn.

Not for the loneliness that keeps The coigne wherein its crystal sleeps; Not for wild butterflies that sway Their pansy pinions all the day Above its mirror; nor the bee, Nor dragon-fly, that, passing, see Themselves reflected in its spar; Not for the one white liquid star That twinkles in its firmament; Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent Athwart it when the kindly night Beads its long grasses with the light Small jewels of the dimpled dew: Not for the day’s inverted blue, Nor the quaint, dimly colored stones That dance within it where it moans; Not for all these I love to sit In silence and to gaze in it. But, lo! a nymph with merry eyes Greets mine within its laughing skies; A glimmering, shimmering nymph who plays All the long fragrant summer days With instant sights of bees and birds, And talks with them in water-words; And for whose nakedness the air Weaves moony mists; and on whose hair, Unfilleted, the night will set That lone star as a coronet.

THE HILLS

There is no joy of earth that thrills My bosom like the far-off hills! Th’ unchanging hills, that, shadowy, Beckon our mutability To follow and to gaze upon Foundations of the dusk and dawn. Meseems the very heavens are massed Upon their shoulders, vague and vast With all the skyey burden of The winds and clouds and stars above. Lo, how they sit before us, seeing The laws that give all Beauty being! Behold! to them, when dawn draws near, The nomads of the air appear, Unfolding crimson camps of day In brilliant bands; then march away; And under burning battlements Of evening plant their tinted tents. The truth of olden myths, that brood By haunted stream and haunted wood, They see; and feel the happiness Of old at which we only guess: The dreams, the ancients loved and knew, Still as their rocks and trees are true: Not otherwise than presences The tempest and the calm to these: One, shouting on them all the night, Black-limbed and veined with lambent light: The other, with the ministry Of all soft things that company With music--whose embodied form Fills all the solitude with charm Of leaves and waters and the peace Of bird-begotten melodies-- And who at night doth still confer With the mild moon, that telleth her Pale tale of lonely love, until Wan shadows of her passion fill The heights with shapes that glimmer by Clad on with sleep and memory.

THE SONG OF THE THRUSH

Overhead, overhead a wood thrush flutes, And it seems to me All the sweet words in the world, Married to melody, could not express What its few, wild notes, Inspired, and simple, and free, express, Say to me Of expectation and woodland mystery, Dreams, and wonder-visions never appearing, Remote and unattainably beautiful-- O indescribable song! Song of the wild brown thrush! O June! O love! O youth! Of you, of you it speaks to me! Of the lost, the irremediable, The indescribably fair and far and yet to be found; The mysteriously hidden, too: The lure of the undiscoverable calling, calling, Bidding me on and on, In the voice of all my longings, Down the dim, the deep, the cadenced aisles of the forest.

TRANSMUTATION

To me all beauty that I see Is melody made visible: An earth-translated state, may be, Of music heard in Heaven or Hell.

Out of some love-impassioned strain Of saints, the rose evolved its bloom; And, dreaming of it here again, Perhaps relives it as perfume.

Out of some chant, that demons sing Of hate and pain, the sunset grew; And, haply, still remembering, Relives it here as some wild hue.

FROST

Magician he, who, autumn nights, Down from the starry darkness whirls; Heav’n’s harlequin, whose spangled tights And wand are powdered thick with pearls.

Through him each pane presents a scene, A Lilliputian landscape, where The world is white instead of green, And trees and houses hang in air.

Where Elfins gambol and delight, And bow the jewelled bells of flowers; Where upside-down we see the night With many moons and meteor showers.

And surely in his wand and hand Lies Midas magic, for, behold, Some morn we wake and find the land, Both field and forest, turned to gold.

ADVENTURERS

Seemingly over the hilltops, Possibly under the hills, A tireless wing that never drops, And a song that never stills.

Epics heard on the stars’ lips? Lyrics read in the dew?-- To sing the song at our finger-tips, And live the world anew!

Cavaliers of the Cortés kind, Bold and free and strong,-- And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind To sing a New-World’s song!

Sailing seas of the silver morn, Blown of its balm and spice, To put the Old-World art to scorn At the price of any price!

Danger, death, but the hope high! God’s, though the purpose fail!-- Into the deeds of a vaster sky Sailing a dauntless sail.

INVOCATION

I

O Life! O Death; O God! Have we not striven? Have we not known Thee, God, As Thy stars know Heaven? Have we not held Thee true, True as Thy deepest, Sweet and immaculate blue Heaven whence rains Thy dew! Have we not _known_ Thee true, O God who keepest!

II

O God, our Father, God!-- Who gav’st us fire, To rise above the sod, To soar, aspire-- What though we strive and strive, And all our soul says “live”? Will not the scorn of men, Like some wild bird, again Falcon it down with sneers, As often in past years? And, O sun-centered high, Thou, too, who ’rt Poet, Beneath Thy seeing sky Each day new Keatses die, Crying, “Why should we try! That which we seek ’s a lie!”-- Why is this so?--O why?-- Thou who dost know it!

III

We know Thee beautiful, We know Thee bitter! Help Thou!--Men’s eyes are dull, O God most beautiful! Make Thou their souls less full Of things mere glitter. Dost Thou not see our tears? Dost Thou not hear the years Treading our hearts to shards, O Lord of all the Lords?-- Give heed, O God of Hosts, There ’mid Thy glorious ghosts, Most high and holy! Have mercy on our tears! Have mercy on our years! Our strivings and our fears, O Lord of lordly peers, On us, so lowly!

IV

On us, so fondly fain To tell what mother-pain Of Nature haunts the rain.

On us, so glad to show What sorrow wings the snow, And her wild winds that blow.

Us, who interpret right Her mystic rose of light, Her moony rune of night.

Us, who have utterance for Each warm, flame-hearted star That stammers from afar.

Who hear the tears and sighs Of every bud that dies While heav’n’s dew on it lies.

Who see the power that dowers The wildwood bosks and bowers With musk and sap of flowers.

Who see what no man sees In water, earth and breeze, And in the hearts of trees.

Turn not away Thy light, O God!--Our strength is slight! Help us who breast the height! Have mercy, Infinite! Have mercy!

THE DEATH OF LOVE

So Love is dead, the Love we knew of old! And in the sorrow of our heart’s hushed halls A lute lies broken and a rose-flower falls; Love’s house stands empty and his hearth lies cold. Lone in dim places, where sweet vows were told, In walks grown desolate, by ruined walls Beauty decays; and on their pedestals Dreams crumble, and th’ immortal gods are mold. Music is slain or sleeps; one voice alone, One voice awakes, and like a wandering ghost Haunts all the echoing chambers of the Past-- The voice of Memory, that stills to stone The soul that hears; the mind, that, utterly lost, Before its beautiful presence stands aghast.

UNANSWERED

How long ago it is since we went Maying! Since she and I went Maying long ago! The years have left my forehead lined, I know, Have thinned my hair around the temples graying. Ah, time will change us: yea, I hear it saying-- “She, too, grows old: the face of rose and snow Has lost its freshness: in the hair’s brown glow Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying. The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled, Has lost the litheness of its loveliness: And all the gladness that her blue eyes held Tears and the world have hardened with distress.”-- “True! true!” I answer, “O ye years that part! These things are changed--but is her heart, her heart?”

LOVE, THE INTERPRETER

Thou art the music that I hear in sleep, The poetry that lures me on in dreams; The magic, thou, that holds my thought with themes Of young romance in revery’s mystic keep.-- The lily’s aura, and the damask deep That clothes the rose; the whispering soul that seems To haunt the wind; the rainbow light that streams, Like some wild spirit, ’thwart the cataract’s leap-- Are glimmerings of thee and thy loveliness, Pervading all my world; interpreting The marvel and the wonder these disclose: For, lacking thee, to me were meaningless Life, love, and hope, the joy of everything, And all the beauty that the wide world knows.

LOVE DESPISED

Why not resolve and hunt it from one’s heart? This love, this god and fiend, that makes a hell Of all one’s life, in ways no tongue can tell, No mind divine, nor any word impart. Would not one think the slights that make hearts smart, The ice of love’s disdain, the wintry well Of love’s disfavor, otherwise would quell? Or school one’s nature, too, to its own art? Why will men cringe and cry forever here For that which, once obtained, may prove a curse? Why not remember that, however fair, Decay is wed to Beauty? that each year Robs somewhat from the riches of her purse, Until at last her house of pride stands bare?

PEARLS

Baroque, but beautiful, between the lunes, The valves of nacre of a mussel-shell, Behold, a pearl! shaped like the burnished bell Of some strange blossom that long afternoons Of summer coax to open: all the moon’s Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell With purity.... It takes me, like a spell, Back to a day when, whistling truant tunes, A barefoot boy I waded ’mid the rocks, Searching for shells strewn in the creek’s slow swirl, Unconscious of the pearls that round me lay: While, ’mid wild-roses,--all her tomboy locks Blond-blowing,--stood, unnoticed then, a girl, My sweetheart once, the pearl I flung away.

THE WOMAN SPEAKS

Why have you come?--To see me in my shame? A thing to spit upon, despise and scorn?-- You, you who ask me! You, by whom was torn, Then cast aside, like some vile rag, my name! What shelter could you give me, now, that blame And loathing would not share? that wolves of vice Would not besiege with eyes of glaring ice? Wherein Sin sat not with her face of flame? “You love me”?--God!--If yours be love, for lust Hell must invent another synonym! If yours be love, then whoredom is the way To Heaven and God! and not with soul but dust Must burn the faces of the Cherubim,-- O beast of beasts, if yours be love, I say!

OF THE SLUMS

Red-faced as old carousal, and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy bosomed, from her window-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town. The flaring lights of alley-way saloons, The reek of hideous gutters and black oaths Of drunkenness from vice-infested dens, Are to her senses what the silvery moon’s Chaste splendor is, and what the blossoming growths Of Earth and bird-song are to Innocence.

LIGHT AND WIND

Where, through the myriad leaves of many trees, The daylight falls, beryl and chrysoprase, The glamour and the glimmer of its rays Seem visible music, tangible melodies: Light that is music; music that one sees-- Wagnerian music--where forever sways The spirit of romance, and gods and fays Take form, clad on with dreams and mysteries. And now the wind’s transmuting necromance Touches the light and makes it fall and rise, Vocal, a harp of multitudinous waves That speaks as ocean speaks--an utterance Of far-off whispers, mermaid-murmuring sighs-- Pelagian, vast, deep down in coral caves.

THE WINDS

Those hewers of the clouds, the Winds,--that lair At the four compass-points,--are out to-night; I hear their sandals trample on the height, I hear their voices trumpet through the air: Builders of Storm, God’s workmen, now they bear, Up the steep stair of sky, on backs of might, Huge tempest bulks, while,--sweat that blinds their sight,-- The rain is shaken from tumultuous hair: Now, sweepers of the firmament, they broom, Like gathered dust, the rolling mists along Heaven’s floors of sapphire; all the beautiful blue Of skyey corridor and aëry room Preparing, with large laughter and loud song, For the white moon and stars to wander through.

TOUCHES

In heavens of rivered blue, that sunset dyes With glaucous flame, deep in the west the day Stands Midas-like; or, wading on his way, Touches with splendor all the twilight skies. Each cloud that, like a stepping-stone, he tries With rosy foot, transforms its sober gray To blazing gold; while, ray on crystal ray, Within his wake the stars like bubbles rise. So should the artist in his work accord All things with beauty, and communicate His soul’s high magic and divinity To all he does; and, hoping no reward, Toil onward, making darkness aureate With light of worlds that be and are to be.

EARTH AND MOON

I saw the day like some great monarch die, Gold-couched, behind the clouds’ rich tapestries. Then, purple-sandaled, clothed in silences Of sleep, through halls of skyey lazuli, The twilight, like a mourning queen, trailed by, Dim-paged of dreams and shadowy mysteries; And now the night, the star-robed child of these, In meditative loveliness draws nigh. Earth,--like to Romeo,--deep in dew and scent, Beneath Heaven’s window, watching till a light, Like some white blossom, in its square be set,-- Lifts a faint face unto the firmament, That, with the moon, grows gradually bright, Bidding him climb and clasp his Juliet.

DUSK

Corn-colored clouds upon a sky of gold, And ’mid their sheaves,--where, like a daisy-bloom Left by the reapers to the gathering gloom, The star of twilight flames,--as Ruth, ’tis told, Dreamed homesick ’mid the harvest fields of old, The Dusk goes gleaning color and perfume From Bible slopes of heaven, that illume Her pensive beauty deep in shadows stoled. Hushed is the forest; and blue vale and hill Are still, save for the brooklet, sleepily Stumbling the stone with one foam-fluttering foot: Save for the note of one far whippoorwill, And in my heart _her_ name,--like some sweet bee Within a rose,--blowing a fairy flute.

SEPTEMBER

The bubbled blue of morning-glory spires, Balloon-blown foam of moonflowers, and sweet snows Of clematis, through which September goes, Song-hearted, rich in realized desires, Are flanked with hotter hues: with tawny fires Of acrid marigolds,--that light long rows Of lamps,--and salvias, red as day’s red close,-- That torches seem,--by which the Month attires Barbaric beauty; like some Asian queen, Towering imperial in her two-fold crown Of harvest and of vintage; all her form Gold and majestic purple: in her mien The might of motherhood; her baby brown, Abundance, high on one exultant arm.

THE END OF SUMMER

Pods are the poppies, and slim spires of pods The hollyhocks; the balsam’s pearly bredes Of rose-stained snow are little sacs of seeds Collapsing at a touch; the lote, that sods The pond with green, has changed its flowers to rods And discs of vesicles; and all the weeds, Around the sleepy water and its reeds, Are one white smoke of seeded silk that nods. Summer is dead, ay me! sweet Summer’s dead! The sunset clouds have built her funeral pyre, Through which, e’en now, runs subterranean fire: While from the East, as from a garden-bed, Mist-vined, the Dusk lifts her broad moon--like some Great golden melon--saying, “Fall has come.”

THE PASSING GLORY

Slow sinks the sun,--a great carbuncle ball Red in the cavern of a sombre cloud,-- And in her garden, where the dense weeds crowd, Among her dying asters stands the Fall, Like some lone woman in a ruined hall, Dreaming of desolation and the shroud; Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed, Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl. The gaunt wind rises, like an angry hand, And sweeps the sprawling spider from its web, Smites frantic music in the twilight’s ear; And all around, like melancholy sand, Rains dead leaves down--wild leaves, that mark the ebb, In Earth’s dark hour-glass, of another year.

PROTOTYPES

Whether it be that we in letters trace The pure exactness of a woodbird’s strain, And name it song; or with the brush attain The high perfection of a wildflower’s face; Or mold in difficult marble all the grace We know as man; or from the wind and rain Catch elemental rapture of refrain And mark in music to due time and place: The aim of art is Nature; to unfold Her truth and beauty to the souls of men In close suggestions; in whose forms is cast Nothing so new but ’tis long eons old; Nothing so old but ’tis as young as when The mind conceived it in the ages past.

SUPERSTITION

In the waste places, in the sinister night, When the wood whispers like a wandering mind, And silence sits and listens to the wind, Or, ’mid the rocks, to some wild torrent’s flight; Bat-browed thou wadest with thy wisp of light Among black pools the moon can never find; Or, owlet-eyed, thou hootest to the blind Deep darkness from some cave or haunted height. He who beholds but once thy fearsome face, Never again shall walk alone! but wan And terrible attendants shall be his-- Unutterable things that have no place In God or Beauty--that compel him on, Against all hope, where endless horror is.

A. D. NINETEEN HUNDRED

War and Disaster, Famine and Pestilence, Vaunt-couriers of the Century that comes, Behold them shaking their tremendous plumes Above the world! Lo, all the air grows dense With rumors of destruction and a sense, Cadaverous, of corpses and of tombs Predestined; while,--like monsters in the glooms,-- Bristling with battle, shadowy and immense, The Nations rise in dread apocalypse.-- Where now the boast Earth makes of civilization? Its brag of Christianity?--In vain We seek to see them in the wild eclipse Of hell and horror and the devastation Of Death triumphant on his hills of slain.

UNCALLED

As one, who, journeying westward with the sun, Beholds at length from the up-towering hills, Far-off, a land unspeakable beauty fills, Circeän peaks and vales of Avalon: And, sinking weary, watches, one by one, The big seas beat between; and knows it skills No more to try; that now, as Heaven wills, This is the helpless end, that all is done: So ’tis with him, whom long a vision led In quest of Beauty--and who finds at last, She lies beyond his effort; all the waves Of all the world between them: while the dead, The myriad dead, who populate the Past With failure, hail him from forgotten graves.

QUATRAINS

I

_Moths and Fireflies_

Since Fancy taught me in her school of spells I know her tricks: These are not moths at all, Nor fireflies; but masking Elfland belles Whose link-boys torch them to Titania’s ball.

II

_Autumn Wildflowers_

Like colored lanterns swung in Elfin towers, Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways, And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays, Burns the sloped crimson of the cardinal-flowers.

III

_The Wind in the Pines_

When winds go organing through the pines On hill and headland, darkly gleaming, Meseems I hear sonorous lines Of Iliads that the woods are dreaming.

IV

_Opportunity_

Behold a hag whom Life denies a kiss As he rides questward in knighterrant-wise; Only when he hath passed her is it his To know, too late, the Fairy in disguise.

V

_Dreams_

They mock the present and they haunt the past, And in the future there is naught agleam With hope, the soul desires, that at last The heart, pursuing, does not find a dream.

AFTERWORD

_What vague traditions do the golden eves, What legends do the dawns Inscribe in fire on Heaven’s azure leaves, The red sun colophons?_

_What ancient stories do the waters verse? What tales of war and love Do winds within the Earth’s vast house rehearse, God’s stars stand guard above?_

_Would I could know them as they are expressed In hue and melody! And say, in words, the beauties they suggest, Language their mystery!_

_And in one song magnificently rise, The music of the spheres, That more than marble should immortalize My name in after years._