Chapter 5

WHILE I watch the Christmas blaze Paint the room with ruddy rays, Something makes my vision glide To the frosty scene outside.

There, to reach a rotting berry, Toils a thrush,—constrained to very Dregs of food by sharp distress, Taking such with thankfulness.

Why, O starving bird, when I One day’s joy would justify, And put misery out of view, Do you make me notice you!

THE RAMBLER

I DO not see the hills around, Nor mark the tints the copses wear; I do not note the grassy ground And constellated daisies there.

I hear not the contralto note Of cuckoos hid on either hand, The whirr that shakes the nighthawk’s throat When eve’s brown awning hoods the land.

Some say each songster, tree, and mead— All eloquent of love divine— Receives their constant careful heed: Such keen appraisement is not mine.

The tones around me that I hear, The aspects, meanings, shapes I see, Are those far back ones missed when near, And now perceived too late by me!

NIGHT IN THE OLD HOME

When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast, And Life’s bare pathway looms like a desert track to me, And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest, My perished people who housed them here come back to me.

They come and seat them around in their mouldy places, Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness, A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces, And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.

“Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here, A pale late plant of your once strong stock?” I say to them; “A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere, And on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?”

“—O let be the Wherefore! We fevered our years not thus: Take of Life what it grants, without question!” they answer me seemingly. “Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us, And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!”

AFTER THE LAST BREATH (J. H. 1813–1904)

THERE’S no more to be done, or feared, or hoped; None now need watch, speak low, and list, and tire; No irksome crease outsmoothed, no pillow sloped Does she require.

Blankly we gaze. We are free to go or stay; Our morrow’s anxious plans have missed their aim; Whether we leave to-night or wait till day Counts as the same.

The lettered vessels of medicaments Seem asking wherefore we have set them here; Each palliative its silly face presents As useless gear.

And yet we feel that something savours well; We note a numb relief withheld before; Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell Of Time no more.

We see by littles now the deft achievement Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all, In view of which our momentary bereavement Outshapes but small.

1904.

IN CHILDBED

IN the middle of the night Mother’s spirit came and spoke to me, Looking weariful and white— As ’twere untimely news she broke to me.

“O my daughter, joyed are you To own the weetless child you mother there; ‘Men may search the wide world through,’ You think, ‘nor find so fair another there!’

“Dear, this midnight time unwombs Thousands just as rare and beautiful; Thousands whom High Heaven foredooms To be as bright, as good, as dutiful.

“Source of ecstatic hopes and fears And innocent maternal vanity, Your fond exploit but shapes for tears New thoroughfares in sad humanity.

“Yet as you dream, so dreamt I When Life stretched forth its morning ray to me; Other views for by and by!” . . . Such strange things did mother say to me.

THE PINE PLANTERS (MARTY SOUTH’S REVERIE)

I

WE work here together In blast and breeze; He fills the earth in, I hold the trees.

He does not notice That what I do Keeps me from moving And chills me through.

He has seen one fairer I feel by his eye, Which skims me as though I were not by.

And since she passed here He scarce has known But that the woodland Holds him alone.

I have worked here with him Since morning shine, He busy with his thoughts And I with mine.

I have helped him so many, So many days, But never win any Small word of praise!

Shall I not sigh to him That I work on Glad to be nigh to him Though hope is gone?

Nay, though he never Knew love like mine, I’ll bear it ever And make no sign!

II

From the bundle at hand here I take each tree, And set it to stand, here Always to be; When, in a second, As if from fear Of Life unreckoned Beginning here, It starts a sighing Through day and night, Though while there lying ’Twas voiceless quite.

It will sigh in the morning, Will sigh at noon, At the winter’s warning, In wafts of June; Grieving that never Kind Fate decreed It should for ever Remain a seed, And shun the welter Of things without, Unneeding shelter From storm and drought.

Thus, all unknowing For whom or what We set it growing In this bleak spot, It still will grieve here Throughout its time, Unable to leave here, Or change its clime; Or tell the story Of us to-day When, halt and hoary, We pass away.

THE DEAR

I PLODDED to Fairmile Hill-top, where A maiden one fain would guard From every hazard and every care Advanced on the roadside sward.

I wondered how succeeding suns Would shape her wayfarings, And wished some Power might take such ones Under Its warding wings.

The busy breeze came up the hill And smartened her cheek to red, And frizzled her hair to a haze. With a will “Good-morning, my Dear!” I said.

She glanced from me to the far-off gray, And, with proud severity, “Good-morning to you—though I may say I am not _your_ Dear,” quoth she:

“For I am the Dear of one not here— One far from his native land!”— And she passed me by; and I did not try To make her understand.

1901

ONE WE KNEW (M. H. 1772–1857)

SHE told how they used to form for the country dances— “The Triumph,” “The New-rigged Ship”— To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses, And in cots to the blink of a dip.

She spoke of the wild “poussetting” and “allemanding” On carpet, on oak, and on sod; And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing, And the figures the couples trod.

She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted, And where the bandsmen stood While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted To choose each other for good.

She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded Of the death of the King of France: Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte’s unbounded Ambition and arrogance.

Of how his threats woke warlike preparations Along the southern strand, And how each night brought tremors and trepidations Lest morning should see him land.

She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking As it swayed in the lightning flash, Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child’s shrieking At the cart-tail under the lash . . .

With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers— We seated around her knees— She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers, But rather as one who sees.

She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant So far that no tongue could hail: Past things retold were to her as things existent, Things present but as a tale.

_May_ 20, 1902.

SHE HEARS THE STORM

THERE was a time in former years— While my roof-tree was his— When I should have been distressed by fears At such a night as this!

I should have murmured anxiously, “The pricking rain strikes cold; His road is bare of hedge or tree, And he is getting old.”

But now the fitful chimney-roar, The drone of Thorncombe trees, The Froom in flood upon the moor, The mud of Mellstock Leaze,

The candle slanting sooty wick’d, The thuds upon the thatch, The eaves-drops on the window flicked, The clacking garden-hatch,

And what they mean to wayfarers, I scarcely heed or mind; He has won that storm-tight roof of hers Which Earth grants all her kind.

A WET NIGHT

I PACE along, the rain-shafts riddling me, Mile after mile out by the moorland way, And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray Into the lane, and round the corner tree;

Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred, And the enfeebled light dies out of day, Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say, “This is a hardship to be calendared!”

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot, When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here, And night and storm were foes indeed to fear, Times numberless have trudged across this spot In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot, And taking all such toils as trifles mere.

BEFORE LIFE AND AFTER

A TIME there was—as one may guess And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell— Before the birth of consciousness, When all went well.

None suffered sickness, love, or loss, None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings; None cared whatever crash or cross Brought wrack to things.

If something ceased, no tongue bewailed, If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung; If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed, No sense was stung.

But the disease of feeling germed, And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong; Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed How long, how long?

NEW YEAR’S EVE

“I HAVE finished another year,” said God, “In grey, green, white, and brown; I have strewn the leaf upon the sod, Sealed up the worm within the clod, And let the last sun down.”

“And what’s the good of it?” I said. “What reasons made you call From formless void this earth we tread, When nine-and-ninety can be read Why nought should be at all?

“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in This tabernacle groan’— If ever a joy be found herein, Such joy no man had wished to win If he had never known!”

Then he: “My labours—logicless— You may explain; not I: Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess That I evolved a Consciousness To ask for reasons why.

“Strange that ephemeral creatures who By my own ordering are, Should see the shortness of my view, Use ethic tests I never knew, Or made provision for!”

He sank to raptness as of yore, And opening New Year’s Day Wove it by rote as theretofore, And went on working evermore In his unweeting way.

1906.

GOD’S EDUCATION

I SAW him steal the light away That haunted in her eye: It went so gently none could say More than that it was there one day And missing by-and-by.

I watched her longer, and he stole Her lily tincts and rose; All her young sprightliness of soul Next fell beneath his cold control, And disappeared like those.

I asked: “Why do you serve her so? Do you, for some glad day, Hoard these her sweets—?” He said, “O no, They charm not me; I bid Time throw Them carelessly away.”

Said I: “We call that cruelty— We, your poor mortal kind.” He mused. “The thought is new to me. Forsooth, though I men’s master be, Theirs is the teaching mind!”

TO SINCERITY

O SWEET sincerity!— Where modern methods be What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying, Its greens for ever graying, Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it, And riper seasons shown it, But custom cries: “Disown it:

“Say ye rejoice, though grieving, Believe, while unbelieving, Behold, without perceiving!”

—Yet, would men look at true things, And unilluded view things, And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming, Facts better their foredeeming, And Life its disesteeming.

_February_ 1899.

PANTHERA

(For other forms of this legend—first met with in the second century—see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)

YEA, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent, I think of Panthera, who underwent Much from insidious aches in his decline; But his aches were not radical like mine; They were the twinges of old wounds—the feel Of the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel, Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air, Fingers and all, as if it still were there. My pains are otherwise: upclosing cramps And stiffened tendons from this country’s damps, Where Panthera was never commandant.— The Fates sent him by way of the Levant. He had been blithe in his young manhood’s time, And as centurion carried well his prime. In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell, He had seen service and had borne him well. Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave; Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow grave When pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind; And it was in the way of warning me (By much his junior) against levity That he recounted them; and one in chief Panthera loved to set in bold relief.

This was a tragedy of his Eastern days, Personal in touch—though I have sometimes thought That touch a possible delusion—wrought Of half-conviction carried to a craze— His mind at last being stressed by ails and age:— Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.

I had said it long had been a wish with me That I might leave a scion—some small tree As channel for my sap, if not my name— Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim, In whose advance I secretly could joy. Thereat he warned. “Cancel such wishes, boy! A son may be a comfort or a curse, A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse— A criminal . . . That I could testify!” “Panthera has no guilty son!” cried I All unbelieving. “Friend, you do not know,” He darkly dropt: “True, I’ve none now to show, For _the law took him_. Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!”

“This noon is not unlike,” he again began, “The noon these pricking memories print on me— Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red, And I served in Judæa . . . ’Twas a date Of rest for arms. The _Pax Romana_ ruled, To the chagrin of frontier legionaries! Palestine was annexed—though sullen yet,— I, being in age some two-score years and ten And having the garrison in Jerusalem Part in my hands as acting officer Under the Governor. A tedious time I found it, of routine, amid a folk Restless, contentless, and irascible.— Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall, Sending men forth on public meeting-days To maintain order, were my duties there.

“Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sun Whitened the city and the hills around, And every mountain-road that clambered them, Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm, And the rank cacti round the valley’s sides. The day was one whereon death-penalties Were put in force, and here and there were set The soldiery for order, as I said, Since one of the condemned had raised some heat, And crowds surged passionately to see him slain. I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse, With some half-company of auxiliaries, Had captained the procession through the streets When it came streaming from the judgment-hall After the verdicts of the Governor. It drew to the great gate of the northern way That bears towards Damascus; and to a knoll Upon the common, just beyond the walls— Whence could be swept a wide horizon round Over the housetops to the remotest heights. Here was the public execution-ground For city crimes, called then and doubtless now Golgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.

“The usual dooms were duly meted out; Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed, And no great stir occurred. A day of wont It was to me, so far, and would have slid Clean from my memory at its squalid close But for an incident that followed these.

“Among the tag-rag rabble of either sex That hung around the wretches as they writhed, Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye— A weeping woman, whose strained countenance, Sharpened against a looming livid cloud, Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon— The mother of one of those who suffered there I had heard her called when spoken roughly to By my ranged men for pressing forward so. It stole upon me hers was a face I knew; Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a while Eluded me. And then at once it came.

“Some thirty years or more before that noon I was sub-captain of a company Drawn from the legion of Calabria, That marched up from Judæa north to Tyre. We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel, The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floor Of Jew with Canaanite, and with the host Of Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, met While crossing there to strike the Assyrian pride. We left behind Gilboa; passed by Nain; Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the top With arbute, terabinth, and locust growths.

“Encumbering me were sundry sick, so fallen Through drinking from a swamp beside the way; But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge, We dipt into a world of pleasantness— A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon— Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh. In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where, Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we made To rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.

“Here a day onward, towards the eventide, Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic dance Trod by their comrades, when the young women came To fill their pitchers, as their custom was. I proffered help to one—a slim girl, coy Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent. Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins That hung down by her banded beautiful hair, Symboled in full immaculate modesty.

“Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirred To quick desire. ’Twas tedious timing out The convalescence of the soldiery; And I beguiled the long and empty days By blissful yieldance to her sweet allure, Who had no arts, but what out-arted all, The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness. We met, and met, and under the winking stars That passed which peoples earth—true union, yea, To the pure eye of her simplicity.

“Meanwhile the sick found health; and we pricked on. I made her no rash promise of return, As some do use; I was sincere in that; I said we sundered never to meet again— And yet I spoke untruth unknowingly!— For meet again we did. Now, guess you aught? The weeping mother on Calvaria Was she I had known—albeit that time and tears Had wasted rudely her once flowerlike form, And her soft eyes, now swollen with sorrowing.

“Though I betrayed some qualms, she marked me not; And I was scarce of mood to comrade her And close the silence of so wide a time To claim a malefactor as my son— (For so I guessed him). And inquiry made Brought rumour how at Nazareth long before An old man wedded her for pity’s sake On finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how, Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.

“Well; there it ended; save that then I learnt That he—the man whose ardent blood was mine— Had waked sedition long among the Jews, And hurled insulting parlance at their god, Whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill, Vowing that he would raze it, that himself Was god as great as he whom they adored, And by descent, moreover, was their king; With sundry other incitements to misrule.

“The impalements done, and done the soldiers’ game Of raffling for the clothes, a legionary, Longinus, pierced the young man with his lance At signs from me, moved by his agonies Through naysaying the drug they had offered him. It brought the end. And when he had breathed his last The woman went. I saw her never again . . . Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend?— That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy So trustingly, you blink contingencies. Fors Fortuna! He who goes fathering Gives frightful hostages to hazardry!”

Thus Panthera’s tale. ’Twas one he seldom told, But yet it got abroad. He would unfold, At other times, a story of less gloom, Though his was not a heart where jests had room. He would regret discovery of the truth Was made too late to influence to ruth The Procurator who had condemned his son— Or rather him so deemed. For there was none To prove that Panthera erred not: and indeed, When vagueness of identity I would plead, Panther himself would sometimes own as much— Yet lothly. But, assuming fact was such, That the said woman did not recognize Her lover’s face, is matter for surprise. However, there’s his tale, fantasy or otherwise.

Thereafter shone not men of Panthera’s kind: The indolent heads at home were ill-inclined To press campaigning that would hoist the star Of their lieutenants valorous afar. Jealousies kept him irked abroad, controlled And stinted by an Empire no more bold. Yet in some actions southward he had share— In Mauretania and Numidia; there With eagle eye, and sword and steed and spur, Quelling uprisings promptly. Some small stir In Parthia next engaged him, until maimed, As I have said; and cynic Time proclaimed His noble spirit broken. What a waste Of such a Roman!—one in youth-time graced With indescribable charm, so I have heard, Yea, magnetism impossible to word When faltering as I saw him. What a fame, O Son of Saturn, had adorned his name, Might the Three so have urged Thee!—Hour by hour His own disorders hampered Panthera’s power To brood upon the fate of those he had known, Even of that one he always called his own— Either in morbid dream or memory . . . He died at no great age, untroublously, An exit rare for ardent soldiers such as he.

THE UNBORN

I ROSE at night, and visited The Cave of the Unborn: And crowding shapes surrounded me For tidings of the life to be, Who long had prayed the silent Head To haste its advent morn.

Their eyes were lit with artless trust, Hope thrilled their every tone; “A scene the loveliest, is it not? A pure delight, a beauty-spot Where all is gentle, true and just, And darkness is unknown?”

My heart was anguished for their sake, I could not frame a word; And they descried my sunken face, And seemed to read therein, and trace The news that pity would not break, Nor truth leave unaverred.

And as I silently retired I turned and watched them still, And they came helter-skelter out, Driven forward like a rabble rout Into the world they had so desired By the all-immanent Will.

1905.

THE MAN HE KILLED

“HAD he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have sat us down to wet Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry, And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because— Because he was my foe, Just so: my foe of course he was; That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ’list, perhaps, Off-hand like—just as I— Was out of work—had sold his traps— No other reason why.