Part 3

Pure thought-creations of the mind, Within the circle of the soul,-- The emanations that control Life to its God-predestined goal,-- Are spirit shapes no flesh can bind: Within the soul desire ordains Achievements which the will constrains; And far above us, on before, Our thoughts--a beautiful people--soar, To wait us on celestial plains.

So Nature pours her thoughts in forms-- Realities we move among-- Of fragrance, color, and of song; Sense emanations which belong, Invisible, to spiritual charms; The sensuous substance of her thought From immaterial matter wrought-- Matter, which death can not annul, That constitutes the Beautiful, And, dead, repeats itself from naught.

XLII

Give me the streams, that counterfeit The twilight of autumnal skies; The silent, shadowy waters, lit With fire like a woman’s eyes! Slow waters that, in autumn, glass The scarlet-strewn and golden grass, And drink the sunset’s tawny dyes.

Give me the pools, that lie among The centuried forests! give me those, Deep, dim, and sad as shadows hung Dark ’neath the sunset’s sombre rose: Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look-- Like ragged gipsies round a book Of magic--trees in wild repose.

No quiet thing, or innocent, Of water, earth, or air shall please My soul now: but the violent Between the sunset and the trees: The fierce, the splendid, and intense, Like love matures in innocence, Like mighty music, give me these!

XLIII

As Nature in herself resolves All parts of beauty to one whole, And from the perfect whole evolves The high ideas that control Advancement, till the time be ripe To doff disguise and, type by type, Reveal the emanated soul:

So should the Beautiful in man Evolve the best in him; to be The lofty purpose life began For ends which only Heaven can see-- The absolute, that sees how thought Its high ideal’s shape hath wrought To be its far affinity.

XLIV

I hold them here; they are no less; I see them still--the changeful grays Of threatening skies above the haze-- My hills! that roll long, murmuring miles Of savage-painted wilderness, On which the saddened sunlight smiles; Or, like a fallen angel’s frown-- Severe beneath a burning crown-- Through sombre silvers, that oppress With clouds its glory, rushes down.

I hear the coming storm again; Again behold the streaming clouds; The autumn wind drives down and crowds Wild sibylline voices through the leaves, To whispering octaves of the rain: A wilder wind, vibrating, heaves Vast music through the rolling woods-- Upon my soul the grandeur broods, Like some archangel’s trumpet strain, Or organ-pomp that sweeps all moods.

XLV

Such circumstance of passionate praise Hath no religion; and the creeds No pomp of worship or of grace Like Nature’s, standing face to face With God, whose inmost thought she reads: No multitude of words she needs, Since all her worship is one word Of love, like that creation heard.

God leaves progression in her care: Through her it must materialize-- Our Mother! with strong lips of prayer, Majestic-browed, with hands that bare Immortal fire from the skies: Who looks, with no evasive eyes, Through life, and, smiling, sees beneath The beautiful, dark eyes of death.

XLVI

Between the sunset and the stars Long clouds lie--as fierce sachems loom, In war-paint and the eagle-plume, Among their wampumed warriors, When council fires burn red and set On stoic cheeks the battle-bloom, That puff the smoking calumet.

Beneath the stars and hunter’s-moon The frost spreads ghostly pearls, that glance Like dewy jewels in the dance That whirls on fairied hills of June: The night is calm; no luminous veil Conceals the spirit utterance Of her dark beauty, pure and pale.

XLVII

I sat alone with song and sleep, And in the singing silence heard The darkness draw from forth the deep With star on star, like word on word: A sound of twilight and swift shades Materializing into night, Who hears the breaking waves of light, And towards the shores of morning wades.

I sat alone with dawn and death, And in my waking vision saw The form of silence, like a breath Of bodiless beauty and of awe, Whose sibyl eyes said unto me The things the sealed lips would not word, That eons of the stars record In volumes of eternity.

XLVIII

The dead gold of the marybud, The dusky, tarnished orange-red Of zinnias, flush the flower-bed, Like frosty autumn gleams that scud Tempestuous dusks and stormy dawns Above the wind-dishevelled lawns.

With tired eyes and heart grown grave, And thoughts more weary than the night, I watch the dwindling of the light, And hear the rising night-winds rave, As one might hear, when half asleep, Another self make moan and weep.

XLIX

Behold, the winds have speech and speak! The stars of heaven are eloquent! A voice within us bids us seek The word the flowers say in scent: The paraclete encouragement Of beauty that the burning scrolls Of eve and morning give our souls.

There is one language of the mart; Another of the rocks and trees: Unrest and greed is this one’s heart; The other’s heart is rest and peace: Within our souls we know of these; They lead us by the myths we love, Yet never see and know not of.

L

When thorn-tree copses still were bare And black along the turbid brook; When catkined willows blurred and shook Great tawny tangles in the air; In bottomlands, the first thaw makes An oozy bog, beneath the trees, Prophetic of the spring that wakes, Sang the sonorous hylodes.

Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn, And clogged with leaves the forest-creek; Now that the woods look brown and bleak, And webs are frosty white at morn; At night beneath the spectral sky, A far foreboding cry I hear-- The wild-fowl calling as they fly? Or vague voice of the dying Year?

LI

Night,--who within heaven’s uttermost Dark walls uncloses shadowy gates,-- Beyond the Spirit of Light she hates, Speeds like a ghost before a ghost Upon the twilight-haunted coast Of death between the seas of sleep: Her lips are dumb with awe that hears; And in her eyes, that never weep, Is anguish of eternal tears.

Out of the terrible gulfs of God Into God’s awful deeps she goes, Revealing in heaven’s gold and rose The ways her footsteps tread and trod From period to period: Her lips are still--for she hath heard God’s voice that moves the universe: Her eyes are sad beyond the word-- The eyes of Vastness gazed in hers.

LII

And still my soul holds phantom tryst, When chestnuts hiss among the coals, Upon the Evening of All Souls, When all the night is moon and mist, And all the world is mystery; I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed, And look in eyes no man may see, Filled with a love long lost to me.

I hear the night-wind’s ghostly glove Flutter the window: then the knob Of some dark door turn, with a sob As when love comes to gaze on love Who lies pale-coffined in a room: And then the iron gallop of The storm, who rides outside, his plume Sweeping the night with dread and gloom.

So fancy takes my mind, and paints The darkness with eidolon light, And writes the deads’ romance in white On the dim Evening of All Saints: Unheard the hissing nuts; the clink Of falling coals, whose shadow faints Around me where I sit and think, Borne far beyond the actual’s brink.

LIII

No thing occult of Heaven or Earth, Or influence of such, I feel But hath a meaning and a worth God, in His wisdom, doth conceal: Reflections of another birth, Existent with and kin to ours, Announcing through supernal powers Facts of a world it would reveal.

In Nature I perceive it, too, This other life I can not see: A spirit sparkles in the dew, The trees have tongues that speak to me: That Earth is green and Heaven, blue, The sight alone may satisfy; The soul sees with a different eye The meaning ’neath the mystery.

LIV

The shadow of uncertain things And all unearthly whisperings,-- That premonitions death and blight,-- Leans from the sepulchre of night; And on the Earth fall shadowings; And prophecies of near decay; But, lovelier than a dead delight, The starlit skies of glittering gray. Still shall the Season claim and keep Her wild-girl beauty; doubly deep The purport of her dreams shall rise Out of her heart into her eyes, Till very dreaming makes her weep; And death, with pale, pure lips and arms, Shall touch her from the frosty skies, Making a memory of her charms.

LV

Sometime shall Beauty hide no more The fair conceptions she conceives Beneath the abstract veil she weaves Before her face the few adore; The self-denying few, who long Live lofty lives of art and song, And, dying, leave the world less poor.

No more are these alone when she, From the subjective world she rules, Confronts the falsehood of the schools With her high front of purity: And on the dark and general way Lets fall her individual ray That low as well as high may see.

LVI

The ghost of what was loveliness Sits in the waning woods, with bare And bleeding feet, and wintry hair, And brows the thorns of care distress; She makes a passion of despair And, Rachel-like, with eyes wept red, Refuses to be comforted.

To funeral torches for the Year, Tree by tall tree, the forests turned; Then, fiery coals in ashes, burned A few last leaves among the sear; Where, robed in purple pomp, she yearned To die, like some sad queen, and died Crowned with magnificence and pride.

LVII

She meets us with impressive hands And eyes of earnest emphasis Between the known and unknown lands, And fills our souls with untold bliss, This spirit of the solitude Named Meditation; thought-imbued, On whom all beauty ministers; Whose silent, dreaming worshipers Lay unresisting hands in hers, Knowing their hearts are understood.

The holy harp she holds and smites Was tuned among concordant spheres; The heavenly pen with which she writes Was dipped in angel smiles and tears: Between her eyebrows and her eyes The starry stamp of silence lies; Between her symboled lips and tongue, The song the stars of morning sung: To this her heavenly harp is strung, In that her holy pen is wise.

LVIII

Again the night is wild with rain; Again distracted with the gale: Upon the hills I hear a wail Of lamentation and of pain, As when, on some high burial-place, Moaning among the windy graves, The Indian squaws lament the braves, Who fell in battle for their race.

Another day of storm shall dawn Within the east; and, darkly lit, Like one, with brows abstraction-knit, Absorbed in moody thought, pass on.-- Bear not too hard, is all I ask, Upon the hearts that toil and yearn, O day of clouds! but swiftly turn To sunshine all your frowning mask.

LIX

No wind is this which cries forlorn Around the hilltops and the woods!-- Earth, weary of her multitudes Of dead, despairing of the morn, Calls through illimitable night The wailing words no thing may know; Deep in her memory-haunted sight Sleeps no remembrance of delight, But death and everlasting woe.

No wind! a voice whose sense is form; A form whose sense is but a sound; That smites the constant skies around, And shakes the steadfast hills with storm: Adown life’s desolate deep it cries The words death’s sterile lips must learn From Law, the Law that never dies-- Such utterless, wild speech as sighs In stone and cinerary urn.

LX

I heard the wind, before the morn Stretched gaunt, gray fingers ’thwart my pane, Drive clouds down, a dark dragon train; Its iron visor closed, a horn Of steel from out the north it wound.-- No morn like yesterday’s! whose mouth, A cool carnation, from the south Breathed through a golden reed the sound Of days that drop clear gold upon Cerulean silver floors of dawn.

And all of yesterday is lost And swallowed in to-day’s wild light-- The birth deformed of day and night, The illegitimate, who cost Its mother secret tears and sighs; Unlovely since unloved; and chilled With sorrows and the shame that filled Its parents’ love; which was not wise In passion as the night and day That yestermorn made heaven all ray.

LXI

We know not of one mood that’s hers, Or glad or grave, which has not drawn Its source from God’s deep universe, As th’ hours draw the day from dawn-- Nature’s! who holds us quietly But earnestly, as by a spell, Whose contact with us seems to be Actual and yet intangible.

In us she thus asserts her claims Of kinship and divine control; God-teacher of exalted aims, The high consents of heart and soul: Imperfectly man sees and feels, Through earthly mediums of his fate, The premonitions she reveals For issues that shall elevate.

LXII

Down through the dark, indignant trees, On indistinguishable wings Of storm, the wind of evening swings; Before its insane anger flees Distracted leaf and the shattered bough: There is a rushing, as when seas Of thunder beat an iron prow On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck: ’Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck Of flickering blackness, driven by, A mad bat whirls along the sky.

Like some sad shadow, in the eve’s Deep melancholy--visible As by some strange and twilight spell-- A gaunt girl stands among the leaves, The night-wind in her dolorous dress: Symbolic of the life that grieves, Of toil that patience makes not less, Her load of faggots fallen there.-- A wilder shadow sweeps the air, And she is gone: Was it the dumb Eidolon of the month to come?

LXIII

No songs but what are sorrowful And sweet in pensive notes and words, Shall fill my heart,--as singing birds Might build a nest within a skull.... The nun-like days, in stoles of white, Chant requiems for the dying Year: The monk-like nights about her bier, In cowls of black, with lights that blear, The service for the dead recite. Into my soul the litanies Of life and death strike golden bars: I hear the far, responding stars,-- Uttering themselves within the skies,-- Reverberate from cause to cause Results that terminate in man; From world to world, the rounding plan Of change,--God’s mighty artisan,-- Of which both life and death are laws.

LXIV

No sunlight strews with gold the plain; No moonlight stains the hill with white; Clouds, sullen with the undropped rain, And motionless with unspent spite, Dome deep with uninvaded gray The dull, ignoble term of day, The duller period of night.

Yea, ev’n the mad, marauding Wind, Who whipped his wild steeds east and west, Whose whirlwind wheels rolled down and dinned Along the booming forest’s crest, Lies dead upon his mountains, where His sister Breezes beat the breast Sighing through their unshaken hair.

LXV

The griefs of Nature, like her joys, Are placid and yet passionate; These, in her heart which knows no hate, She for the beautiful employs.... Behold how thoughts of happiness Rainbow the tears on sorrow’s face! Upon, the brow of joy no less Aureates the light of seriousness! Each to the other lending grace.

Oh, tenderness of grief that knows Some happiness still lies before! That for the rose that blooms no more Will bloom a no less perfect rose! Oh, pensiveness of joy that takes Sweet dignity from grief that died! Remembering that though morning shakes Her bright locks from blue eyes and wakes, Night sleeps on the same mountain side.

LXVI

What alchemy does Earth conceal Desired by the desperate days? With feet of fog and hands of haze They search the crumbling woods and steal With mutterings,--gaunt as hags who deal In witchcraft,--where each dark tree sways, And, venerable, with staff aslant, Death sits like some old mendicant.

Around me all’s despondency, And grief that holds the unwilling world: The last gold leaf is wildly hurled Through sobbing silence over me: The brook has hushed its wildwood glee, Sick of itself; and far unfurled, And melancholy as my soul, The struggling lights of sunset roll.

LXVII

The song-birds, are they flown away, The song-birds of the summer-time, That sang their souls into the day, And set the laughing hours to rhyme? No catbird scatters through the hush The sparkling crystals of its song; Within the woods no hermit-thrush Trails an enchanted flute along, Thridding with vocal gold the hush.

All day the crows fly cawing past: The acorns drop: the forests scowl: At night I hear the bitter blast Hoot with the hooting of the owl. The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn With leaves that clog: beneath the tree The bird, that set its toil to tune, And made a home for melody, Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.

THE MOATED GRANGE

“_There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana._"--Shakespeare.

The sunset-crimson poppies are departed, Mariana! The purple-centered, sultry-smelling poppies, The drowsy-hearted, That burnt like flames along the low yew coppice; All heavy headed, The ruby-cupped and opium-brimming poppies, That slumber wedded, Mariana! The sunset-crimson poppies are departed.

Oh, heavy, heavy are the hours that fall, The lonesome hours of the lonely days! No poppy strews oblivion by the wall, Where lone the last pod sways,-- Oblivion that was hers of old that happier made her days. Oh, weary, weary is the sky o’er all, The days that creep, the hours that crawl, And weary all the ways-- She leans her face against the lichened wall, The mildewed wall, the crumbling wall, And dreams, the long, long days, Of one who will not come again whatever may befall.

* * * * *

All night it blew. The rain streamed down And drowned the world in misty wet. At morning, round the sunflower’s crown A row of silvery drops was set; The candytuft, heat shrivelled brown, And beds of drought-dried mignonette, Were beat to earth: but wearier, oh, The rain was than the sun’s fierce glow, That in the garth had wrought such woe.

That killed the moss-rose ere it bloomed, And scorched the double-hollyhocks; And bred great, poisonous weeds that doomed The snap-dragon and standing-phlox; ’Mid which gaunt spiders wove and loomed Their dusty webs ’twixt rows of box; And rotted into sleepy ooze The lilied moat, that, lined with yews, Lay scummed with many sickly hues.

How oft she longed and prayed for rain, To blot the hateful landscape out! To heal her heart, so parched with pain, With cooling sounds of broken drought; And cure with change her stagnant brain, And soothe to sleep all care and doubt: At last--when many days had passed-- And she had ceased to care--at last The longed-for rain came, falling fast.

At night, as late she lay awake, And thought of him who had not come, She heard the gray wind, moaning, shake Her lattice; then the steady drum Of rain upon the leads.... The ache Within her heart, so burdensome, Grew heavier with the moan of rain. The house was still, save, at her pane, The wind cried: hushed: then cried again.

All night she lay awake and wept: There was no other thing to do. At dawn she rose and, sighing, crept Adown the stairs that led into The dripping garth, the storm had swept With ruin; where, of every hue, The flowers lay rotting, stained with mould; Where all was old, unkempt and old, And ragged as a marigold.

She sat her down, where oft she sat, Upon a bench of marble, where, In lines, she oft would marvel at, A love was carved.--She did not dare Look on it then, remembering that Here in past time _he_ kissed her hair, And murmured vows while, soft above, The full moon lit the form thereof, The slowly crumbling form of Love.

She could but weep, remembering hours Like these. Then in the drizzling rain, That weighed the dead and dying flowers, She sought the old stone dial again; The dial, among the moss-rose bowers, Where often she had read, in vain, Of time and change, and love and loss, Rude-lettered and o’ergrown with moss, That slow the gnomon moved across.

Remembering this, she turned away, The rain and tears upon her face. There was no thing to do or say.-- She stood a while, a little space, And watched the rain bead, round and gray, Upon the cobweb’s tattered lace, And tag the toadstool’s spongy brim With points of mist; and, orbing, dim With fog the sunflower’s ruined rim.--

With fog, through which the moon at night Would glimmer like a spectre sail; Or, sullenly, a blur of light, Like some great glow-worm, dimly trail; ’Neath which she’d hear, wrapped deep in white, The far sea moaning on its shale: While in the garden, pacing slow, And listening to its surge and flow, She’d seem to hear her own heart’s woe.--

Now as the fog crept in from sea, A great white darkness, like a pall, The yews and huddled shrubbery, That dripped along the weedy wall, Turned phantoms; and as shadowy She too seemed, wandering ’mid it all-- A phantom, pale and sad and strange, And hopeless, doomed for aye to range About the melancholy grange.

* * * * *

The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied, Mariana! The raven-dyed and fire-fretted pansies, To memory married; That from the grass, like forms in old romances, Raised fairy faces: All dead they lie, the violet-velvet pansies, In many places, Mariana! The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied.

Oh, hateful, hateful are the hours that pass, The lonely hours of the lonesome nights! No pansy scatters heart’s-ease through the grass, That autumn sorrow blights, The heart’s-ease that was hers of old that happier made her nights. Oh, barren, barren is her life, alas! Its youth and beauty, all life has, And barren all delights-- She lays her face against the withered grass, The rain-wet grass, the autumn grass, And thinks, the long, long nights, Of one who will not come again whatever comes to pass.

CIRCE

The pillared portals of her home once rose from out the sea; Its casements burnt with green sea-fire of ocean mystery; And all its halls of love were full of mermaid melody.