ASPIRATION The roots of a dead universe are shrunken in my brain; And the tinsel leafèd branches of the charred trees are strewn; And the chaff we deem'd for harvest shall be turned to golden grain, While May no more will mimic March, but June be only June. Lo! a ghost enleaguer'd city where no ghostly footfall came! And a rose within the mirror with the fragrance of it hid; And mine ear prest to the mouth of the shadow of a name; But no ghost or speech or fragrance breathing on my faint eyelid. I would crash the city's ramparts, touch the ghostly hands without. Break the mirror, feel the scented warm lit petals of the rose. Would mine ears be stretched for shadows in the fading of the doubt? Other ears shall wait my shadow,---can you see behind the brows? For I would see with mine own eyes the glory and the gold. With a strange and fervid vision see the glamour and the dream. And chant an incantation in a measure new and bold, And enaureole a glory round an unawakened theme. TO J. H. AMSCHEWITZ In the wide darkness of the shade of days Twixt days that were and days that yet will be, Making the days that are gloom'd mystery, What starshine glimmers through the nighted ways Uplifting? and through all vain hope's delays What is it brings far joy's foretaste to me? A savour of a ship unsullied sea, A glimpse of golden lands too high for praise. Life holds the glass but gives us tears for wine. But if at times he changes in his hand The bitter goblet for the drink divine, I stand upon the shore of a strange land. And when mine eyes unblinded of the brine See clear, lo! where he stood before, you stand. HEART'S FIRST WORD To sweeten a swift minute so With such rare fragrance of sweet speech, And make the after hours go In a blank yearning each on each; To drain the springs till they be dry, And then in anguish thirst for drink, So but to glimpse her robe thirst I, And my soul hungers and I sink. There is no word that we have said Whereby the lips and heart are fire; No look the linkèd glances read That held the springs of deep desire. And yet the sounds her glad lips gave Are on my soul vibrating still. Her eyes that swept me as a wave Shine my soul's worship to fulfil. Her hair, her eyes, her throat and chin; Sweet hair, sweet eyes, sweet throat, so sweet, So fair because the ways of sin Have never known her perfect feet. By what far ways and marvellous May I such lovely heaven reach? What dread dark seas and perilous Lie 'twixt love's silence and love's speech? 'WHEN I WENT FORTH' When I went forth as is my daily wont Into the streets, into the eddying throng, Lady---the thought of your sweet face was strong, The grace of your sweet shape my ways did haunt. About this spell clangoured the busy chaunt Of traffic, like some hundred-throated song Of storm set round some moon-flashed isle in wrong. But soon usurped your robes' undulant flaunt--- Your last words said---your ruby gaolers' loss--- The instant and unanchored gleams across My soul's mirror that holds you there for aye; The sounds that beat the guard down of sound's gates, But memory mastereth not, behind who waits, Your speech---your face---his text by night and day. IN NOVEMBER Your face was like a day in June Glad with the raiment of the noon, And your eyes seemed like thoughts that stir To dream of warm June nights that were. The dead leaves dropped off one by one, All hopeless in the withered sun. Around, the listless atmosphere Hung grey and quiet and austere. As we stood talking in the porch My pulse shook like a wind kissed torch, Too sweet you seemed for anything Save dreams whereof the poets sing. Your voice was like the buds that burst With latter spring to slake their thirst, While all your ardent mouth was lit With summer memories exquisite. 'LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD' Lady, you are my God--- Lady, you are my heaven. If I am your God Labour for your heaven. Lady, you are my God, And shall not love win heaven? If Love made me God Deeds must win my heaven. If my love made you God What more can I for heaven? SPIRITUAL ISOLATION My Maker shunneth me. Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy So hold I pestilent supremacy. Yea! He hath fled as far as the uttermost star, Beyond the unperturbèd fastnesses of night, And dreams that bastioned are By fretted towers of sleep that scare His light. Of wisdom writ, whereto My burdened feet may best withouten rue, I may not spell---and I am sore to do. Yea! all seeing my Maker hath such dread, Even mine own self-love wists not but to fly To Him, and sore besped Leaves me, its captain, in such mutiny. Will, deemed incorporate, With me, hath flown ere love, to expiate Its sinful stay where he did habitate. Ah me! if they had left a sepulchre; But no---the light hath changed not and in it Of its same colour stir Spirits I see not but phantasm'd feel to flit. Air legioned such stirreth, So that I seem to draw them with my breath. Ghouls that devour each joy they do to death. Strange glimmering griefs and sorrowing silences, Bearing dead flowers unseen whose charnel smell Great awe to my sense is Even in the rose time when all else is well. In my great loneliness, This haunted desolation's dire distress, I strove with April buds my thoughts to dress, Therewith to reach to joy through gay attire; But as I plucked came one of those pale griefs With mouth of parched desire And breathed upon the buds and charred the leaves. TESS The free fair life that has never been mine, the glory that might have been, If I were what you seem to be and what I may not be! I know I walk upon the earth but a dreadful wall between My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my misery. The angels that lie watching us, the little human play--- What deem they of the laughter and the tears that flow apart? When a word of man is a woman's doom do they turn and wonder and say, 'Ah, why has God made love so great that love must burst her heart?' 'O! IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN' O! in a world of men and women Where all things seemed so strange to me, And speech the common world called human For me was a vain mimicry, I thought---O! am I one in sorrow? Or is the world more quick to hide Their pain with raiment that they borrow From pleasure in the house of pride? O! joy of mine, O! longed for stranger, How I would greet you if you came! In the world's joys I've been a ranger, In my world sorrow is their name. NONE HAVE SEEN THE LORD OF THE HOUSE Stealth-hushed, the coiled night nesteth In woods where light has strayed; She is the shadow of the soul--- A virgin and afraid, That in the absent Sultan's chamber resteth, Sleepless for fear he call. Lord of this moon-dim mansion, None know thy naked light. O! were the day, of Thee dim shade, As of the soul is night, O! who would fear when in the bourne's expansion, With Thy first kiss we fade. But the sad night shivers, And palely wastes and dies; A wraith under day's burning hair, And his humid golden eyes. He has browsed by immortal meadowed rivers; O! were she nesting there! A GIRL'S THOUGHTS Dim apprehension of a trust Comes over me this quiet hour, As though the silence were a flower, And this, its perfume, dark like dust. My individual self would cling Through fear, through pride, unto its fears. It strives to shut out what it hears, The founts of being, murmuring. O! need, whose hauntings terrorize; Whether my maiden ways would hide, Or lose, and to that need subside, Life shrinks, and instinct dreads surprise. WEDDED They leave their love-lorn haunts, Their sigh-warm floating Eden; And they are mute at once; Mortals by God unheeden; By their past kisses chidden. But they have kist and known Clear things we dim by guesses--- Spirit to spirit grown--- Heaven, born in hand caresses--- Love, fall from sheltering tresses. And they are dumb and strange: Bared trees bowed from each other. Their last green interchange What lost dreams shall discover? Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover. MIDSUMMER FROST A July ghost, aghast at the strange winter, Wonders, at burning noon (all summer seeming), How, like a sad thought buried in light words, Winter, an alien presence, is ambushed here. See, from the fire-fountained noon, there creep Lazy yellow ardours towards pale evening, To thread dark and vain fire Over my unsens'd heart, Dead heart, no urgent summer can reach. Hidden as a root from air or a star from day; A frozen pool whereon mirth dances; Where the shining boys would fish. My blinded brain pierced is, And searched by a thought, and pangful With bitter ooze of a joyous knowledge Of some starred time outworn. Like blind eyes that have slinked past God, And light, their untasked inheritance, (Sealed eyes that trouble never the Sun) Yet has feel of a Maytime pierced. He heareth the Maytime dances; Frees from their airy prison, bright voices, To loosen them in his dark imagination, Powered with girl revels rare And silks and merry colours, And all the unpeopled ghosts that walk in words. Till wave white hands that ripple lakes of sadness, Until the sadness vanishes and the stagnant pool remains. Underneath this summer air can July dream How, in night hanging forest of eating maladies, A frozen forest of moon unquiet mad- ness, The moon-drunk haunted pierced soul dies; Starved by its Babel folly, lying stark, Unvexed by July's warm eyes. LOVE AND LUST No dream of mortal joy; Yet all the dreamers die. We wither with our world To make room for her sky. O lust! when you lie ravished, Broken in the dust, We will call for love in vain, Finding love was lust. IN PICCADILLY Lamp-lit faces! to you What is your starry dew? Gold flowers of the night blue! Deep in wet pavement's slime, Mud rooted, is your fierce prime, To bloom in lust's coloured clime. The sheen of eyes that lust, Dew, Time made your trust, Lights your passionless dust. A MOOD You are so light and gay, So slight, sweet maid; Your limbs like leaves in play, Or beams that grasses braid; O! joys whose jewels pray My breast to be inlaid. Frail fairy of the streets; Strong, dainty lure; For all men's eyes the sweets Whose lack makes hearts so poor; While your heart loveless beats, Light, laughing, and impure. O! fragrant waft of flesh Float through me so--- My limbs are in your mesh, My blood forgets to flow. Ah! lilied meadows fresh, It knows where it would go. APRIL DAWN Pale light hid in light Stirs the still day-spring; Wavers the dull sight With a spirit's wing. Dreams, in frail rose mist, Lurking to waylay, Subtle-wise have kist Winter into May. Nothing to the sight ... Pool of pulseless air. Spirits are in flight And my soul their lair. IF YOU ARE FIRE If you are fire and I am fire, Who blows the flame apart So that desire eludes desire Around one central heart? A single root and separate bough, And what blind hands between That make our longing's mutual glow As if it had not been? BREAK IN BY SUBTLER WAYS Break in by subtler nearer ways; Dulled closeness is too far. And separate we are Through joinèd days. The shine and strange romance of time In absence hides and change. Shut eyes and hear the strange Perfect new chime. THE ONE LOST I mingle with your bones. You steal in subtle noose This lighted dust Jehovah loans And now I lose. What will the Lender say When I shall not be found, Safe sheltered at the Judgment Day, Being in you bound? He'll hunt throng'd wards of Heaven, Call to uncoffined earth, 'Where is this soul unjudged, not given Dole for good's dearth?' And I, lying so safe Within you, hearing all, To have cheated God shall laugh, Freed by your thrall. 'MY SOUL IS ROBBED' My soul is robbed by your most treacherous eyes Treading its intricate infinities. Stay there, rich robbers! what I lose is dross; Since my life is your dungeon, where is loss? Ah! as the sun is prisoned in the heaven, Whose walls dissolve, of their own nature bereaven, So do your looks, as idly, without strife, Cover all steeps of sense, which no more pasture life. Which no more feel, but only know you there, In this blind trance of some white anywhere. Come---come---that glance engendered ecstasy--- That subtle unspaced mutual intimacy Whereby two spirits of one thought commune Like separate instruments that play one tune, And the whole miracle and amazement of The unexpected flowering of love Concentres to an instant that expands And takes unto itself the strangest of strange lands. GOD MADE BLIND It were a proud God-guiling, to allure And flatter, by some cheat of ill, our Fate To hold back the perfect crookedness its hate Devised, and keep it poor, And ignorant of our joy--- Masked in a giant wrong of cruel annoy, That stands as some bleak hut to frost and night, While hidden in bed is warmth and mad delight. For all Love's heady valour and loved pain Towers in our sinews that may not suppress (Shut to God's eye) Love's springing eager- ness, And mind to advance his gain Of gleeful secrecy Through dolorous clay, which his eternity Has pierced, in light that pushes out to meet Eternity without us, heaven's heat. And then, when Love's power hath in- creased so That we must burst or grow to give it room, And we can no more cheat our God with gloom, We'll cheat Him with our joy. For say! what can God do To us, to Love, whom we have grown into? Love! the poured rays of God's Eternity! We are grown God---and shall His self-hate be? THE DEAD HEROES Flame out, you glorious skies, Welcome our brave, Kiss their exultant eyes; Give what they gave. Flash, mailèd seraphim, Your burning spears; New days to outflame their dim Heroic years. Thrills their baptismal tread The bright proud air; The embattled plumes out- spread Burn upwards there. Flame out, flame out, O Song! Star ring to star, Strong as our hurt is strong Our children are. Their blood is England's heart; By their dead hands It is their noble part That England stands. England---Time gave them thee; They gave back this To win Eternity And claim God's kiss. THE CLOISTER Our eyes no longer sail the tidal streets, Nor harbour where the hours like petals float By sensual treasures glittering through thin walls Of woman's eyes and colour's mystery. The roots of our eternal souls were fed On the world's dung and now their blossoms gleam. God gives to glisten in an angel's hair These He has gardened, for they please His eyes. EXPRESSION Call---call---and bruise the air: Shatter dumb space! Yea! We will fling this passion everywhere; Leaving no place For the superb and grave Magnificent throng, The pregnant queens of quietness that brave And edge our song Of wonder at the light (Our life-leased home), Of greeting to our housemates. And in might Our song shall roam Life's heart, a blossoming fire Blown bright by thought, While gleams and fades the infinite desire, Phantasmed naught. Can this be caught and caged? Wings can be clipt Of eagles, the sun's gaudy measure gauged, But no sense dipt In the mystery of sense. The troubled throng Of words break out like smothered fire through dense And smouldering wrong. SPRING 1916 Slow, rigid, is this masquerade That passes as through granite air; Heavily---heavily passes. What has she fed on? Who her table laid Through the three seasons? What forbidden fare Ruined her as a mortal lass is? I played with her two years ago, Who might be now her own sister in stone, So altered from her May mien, When round pink neck a necklace of warm snow Laughed to her throat where my mouth's touch had gone. How is this, ruined Queen? Who lured her vivid beauty so To be that strained chilled thing that moves So ghastly midst her young brood Of pregnant shoots that she for men did grow? Where are the strong men who made these their loves? Spring! God pity your mood! GOD In his malodorous brain what slugs and mirc, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard. Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking. And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy, although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep; And when the cats come out the rats are sly. Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn. But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful. Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us, but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it. And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through, Where blind farewells are taken easily. ... Ah! this miasma of a rotting God! FIRST FRUIT I did not pluck at all, And I am sorry now, The garden is not barred, But the boughs are heavy with snow, The flake-blossoms thickly fall, And the hid roots sigh, 'How long will our flowers be marred?' Strange as a bird were dumb, Strange as a hueless leaf. As one deaf hungers to hear, Or gazes without belief, The fruit yearned 'Fingers, come'. O, shut hands, be empty another year. CHAGRIN Caught still as Absalom, Surely the air hangs From the swayless cloud-boughs, Like hair of Absalom Caught and hanging still. From the imagined weight Of spaces in a sky Of mute chagrin, my thoughts Hang like branch-clung hair To trunks of silence swung, With the choked soul weighing down Into thick emptiness. Christ! end this hanging death, For endlessness hangs therefrom. Invisibly---branches break From invisible trees--- The cloud-woods where we rush, Our eyes holding so much, Which we must ride dim ages round Ere the hands (we dream) can touch, We ride, we ride, before the morning The secret roots of the sun to tread, And suddenly We are lifted of all we know And hang from implacable boughs. MARCHING (AS SEEN FROM THE LEFT FILE) My eyes catch ruddy necks Sturdily pressed back--- All a red brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums, hands Swing across the khaki--- Mustard-coloured khaki--- To the automatic feet. We husband the ancient glory In these bared necks and hands. Not broke is the forge of Mars; But a subtler brain beats iron To shoe the hoofs of death (Who paws dynamic air now). Blind fingers loose an iron cloud To rain immortal darkness On strong eyes. SLEEP Godhead's lip hangs When our pulses have no golden tremors, And his whips are flicked by mice And all star-amorous things. Drops, drops of shivering quiet Filter under my lids. Now only am I powerful. What though the cunning gods outwit us here In daytime and in playtime, Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them In our sleep. O, subtle gods lying hidden! O, gods with your oblique eyes! Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists Bright with the afternoon, Do you not shake when a mortal slides Into your own unvexed peace? When a moving stillness breaks over your knees (An emanation of piled æons' pressure) From our bodies flat and straight, And your limbs are locked, Futilely gods', And shut your sinister essences? HEART'S FIRST WORD And all her soft dark hair, Breathed for him like a prayer. And her white lost face, Was prisoned to some far place. Love was not denied--- Love's ends would hide. And flower and fruit and tree Were under its sea. Yea! its abundance knelt Where the nerves felt The springs of feeling flow And made pain grow. There seemed no root or sky But a pent infinity Where apparitions dim Sculptured each whim In flame and wandering mist Of kisses to be kist. THE TROOP SHIP Grotesque and queerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, We lie all sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Winds' fumble or men's feet Are on your face. AUGUST 1914 What in our lives is burnt In the fire of this? The heart's dear granary? The much we shall miss? Three lives hath one life--- Iron, honey, gold. The gold, the honey gone--- Left is the hard and cold. Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields A fair mouth's broken tooth. THE JEW Moses, from whose loins I sprung, Lit by a lamp in his blood Ten immutable rules, a moon For mutable lampless men. The blonde, the bronze, the ruddy, With the same heaving blood, Keep tide to the moon of Moses. Then why do they sneer at me? LUSITANIA Chaos! that coincides with this militant purpose. Chaos! the heart of this earnest malignancy. Chaos! that helps, chaos that gives to shatter Mind-wrought, mind-unimagining energies For topless ill, of dynamite and iron. Soulless logic, inventive enginery. Now you have got the peace-faring Lusitania, Germany's gift---all earth they would give thee, Chaos. FROM FRANCE The spirit drank the café lights; All the hot life that glittered there, And heard men say to women gay, 'Life is just so in France'. The spirit dreams of café lights, And golden faces and soft tones, And hears men groan to broken men, 'This is not Life in France'. Heaped stones and a charred signboard show With grass between and dead folk under, And some birds sing, while the spirit takes wing. And this is Life in France. BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES The darkness crumbles away--- It is the same old druid Time as ever. Only a live thing leaps my hand--- A queer sardonic rat--- As I pull the parapet's poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand You will do the same to a German--- Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver---what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man's veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust. 'A WORM FED ON THE HEART OF CORINTH' A worm fed on the heart of Corinth, Babylon and Rome: Not Paris raped tall Helen, But this incestuous worm, Who lured her vivid beauty To his amorphous sleep. England! famous as Helen Is thy betrothal sung To him the shadowless, More amorous than Solomon. HOME---THOUGHTS FROM FRANCE Wan, fragile faces of joy! Pitiful mouths that strive To light with smiles the place We dream we walk alive. To you I stretch my hands, Hands shut in pitiless trance In a land of ruin and woe, The desolate land of France. Dear faces startled and shaken, Out of wild dust and sounds You yearn to me, lure and sadden My heart with futile bounds. THE DYING SOLDIER 'Here are houses', he moaned, 'I could reach but my brain swims.' Then they thundered and flashed And shook the earth to its rims. 'They are gunpits', he gasped, 'Our men are at the guns. Water---water---O water For one of England's dying sons.' 'We cannot give you water Were all England in your breath.' 'Water---water---O water' He moaned and swooned to death. IN WAR Fret the nonchalant noon With your spleen Or your gay brow, For the motion of your spirit Ever moves with these. When day shall be too quiet, Deaf to you And your dumb smile, Untuned air shall lap the stillness In the old space for your voice--- The voice that once could mirror Remote depths Of moving being, Stirred by responsive voices near, Suddenly stilled for ever. No ghost darkens the places Dark to One; But my eyes dream, And my heart is heavy to think How it was heavy once. In the old days when death Stalked the world For the flower of men, And the rose of beauty faded And pined in the great gloom, One day we dug a grave: We were vexed With the sun's heat. We scanned the hooded dead: At noon we sat and talked. How death had kissed their eyes Three dread noons since, How human art won The dark soul to flicker Till it was lost again: And we whom chance kept whole--- But haggard, Spent---were charged To make a place for them who knew No pain in any place. The good priest came to pray; Our ears half heard, And half we thought Of alien things, irrelevant; And the heat and thirst were great. The good priest read: 'I heard ... Dimly my brain Held words and lost. ... Sudden my blood ran cold. ... God! God! it could not be. He read my brother's name; I sank--- I clutched the priest. They did not tell me it was he Was killed three days ago. What are the great sceptred dooms To us, caught In the wild wave? We break ourselves on them, My brother, our hearts and years. THE IMMORTALS I killed them, but they would not die. Yea! all the day and all the night For them I could not rest nor sleep, Nor guard from them nor hide in flight Then in my agony I turned And made my hands red in their gore. In vain---for faster than I slew They rose more cruel than before. I killed and killed with slaughter mad; I killed till all my strength was gone. And still they rose to torture me, For Devils only die for fun. I used to think the Devil hid In women's smiles and wine's carouse. I called him Satan, Balzebub. But now I call him dirty louse. LOUSE HUNTING Nudes---stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire. For a shirt verminously busy Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice. And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he'd lit while we lay. Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons' pantomime The place was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music Blown from Sleep's trumpet. RETURNING, WE HEAR THE LARKS Sombre the night is. And though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there. Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know This poison-blasted track opens on our camp--- On a little safe sleep. But hark! joy---joy---strange joy. Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. Music showering on our upturned list'ning faces. Death could drop from the dark As easily as song--- But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand By dangerous tides, Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides. DEAD MAN'S DUMP The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan. They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now. Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended---stopped and held. What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you! Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul's sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled? None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth. What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop. The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called 'An end!' But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love, The impetuous storm of savage love. Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke, What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul With lightning and thunder from your mined heart, Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed? A man's brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer's face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads. Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face. DAUGHTERS OF WAR Space beats the ruddy freedom of their limbs--- Their naked dances with man's spirit naked By the root side of the tree of life (The under side of things And shut from earth's profoundest eyes). I saw in prophetic gleams These mighty daughters in their dances Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse To mix in their glittering dances. I heard the mighty daughters' giant sighs In sleepless passion for the sons of valour, And envy of the days of flesh Barring their love with mortal boughs across--- The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life. The old bark burnt with iron wars They blow to a live flame To char the young green days And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure--- No softer lure than the savage ways of death. We were satisfied of our lords the moon and the sun To take our wage of sleep and bread and warmth--- These maidens came---these strong everliving Amazons, And in an easy might their wrists Of night's sway and noon's sway the sceptres brake, Clouding the wild---the soft lustres of our eyes. Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender lights; Driving the darkness into the flame of day With the Amazonian wind of them Over our corroding faces That must be broken---broken for evermore So the soul can leap out Into their huge embraces. Though there are human faces Best sculptures of Deity, And sinews lusted after By the Archangels tall, Even these must leap to the love-heat of these maidens From the flame of terrene days, Leaving grey ashes to the wind---to the wind. One (whose great lifted face, Where wisdom's strength and beauty's strength And the thewed strength of large beasts Moved and merged, gloomed and lit) Was speaking, surely, as the earth-men's earth fell away; Whose new hearing drank the sound Where pictures lutes and mountains mixed With the loosed spirit of a thought. Essenced to language, thus--- 'My sisters force their males From the doomed earth, from the doomed glee And hankering of hearts. Frail hands gleam up through the human quag- mire and lips of ash Seem to wail, as in sad faded paintings Far sunken and strange. My sisters have their males Clean of the dust of old days That clings about those white hands And yearns in those voices sad. But these shall not see them, Or think of them in any days or years; They are my sisters' lovers in other days and years.' SOLDIER: TWENTIETH CENTURY I love you, great new Titan! Am I not you? Napoleon and Caesar Out of you grew. Out of unthinkable torture, Eyes kissed by death, Won back to the world again, Lost and won in a breath, Cruel men are made immortal, Out of your pain born. They have stolen the sun's power With their feet on your shoulders worn. Let them shrink from your girth, That has outgrown the pallid days, When you slept like Circe's swine, Or a word in the brain's ways. GIRL TO SOLDIER ON LEAVE I love you---Titan lover, My own storm-days' Titan. Greater than the son of Zeus, I know whom I would choose. Titan---my splendid rebel--- The old Prometheus Wanes like a ghost before your power--- His pangs were joys to yours. Pallid days arid and wan Tied your soul fast. Babel-cities' smoky tops Pressed upon your growth Weary gyves. What were you But a word in the brain's ways, Or the sleep of Circe's swine? One gyve holds you yet. It held you hiddenly on the Somme Tied from my heart at home. O must it loosen now? I wish You were bound with the old old gyves. Love! you love me---your eyes Have looked through death at mine. You have tempted a grave too much. I let you---I repine. THE BURNING OF THE TEMPLE Fierce wrath of Solomon Where sleepest thou? O see The fabric which thou won Earth and ocean to give thee--- O look at the red skies. Or hath the sun plunged down? What is this molten gold--- These thundering fires blown Through heaven---where the smoke rolled? Again the great king dies. His dreams go out in smoke, His days he let not pass And sculptured here are broke, Are charred as the burnt grass, Gone as his mouth's last sighs. THE DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM BY THE BABYLONIAN HORDES They left their Babylon bare Of all its tall men, Of all its proud horses; They made for Lebanon. And shadowy sowers went Before their spears to sow The fruit whose taste is ash For Judah's soul to know. They who bowed to the Bull god Whose wings roofed Babylon, In endless hosts darkened The bright-heavened Lebanon. They washed their grime in pools Where laughing girls forgot The wiles they used for Solomon. Sweet laughter! remembered not. Sweet laughter charred in the flame That clutched the cloud and earth While Solomon's towers crashed between, The gird of Babylon's mirth. 'THROUGH THESE PALE COLD DAYS' Through these pale cold days What dark faces burn Out of three thousand years, And their wild eyes yearn, While underneath their brows Like waifs their spirits grope For the pools of Hebron again--- For Lebanon's summer slope. They leave these blond still days In dust behind their tread They see with living eyes How long they have been dead. THE TOWER OF SKULLS Mourners These layers of piled-up skulls, These layers of gleaming horror---stark horror! Ah me! Through my thin hands they touch my eyes. Everywhere, everywhere is a pregnant birth, And here in death's land is a pregnant birth. Your own crying is less mortal Than the amazing soul in your body. Your own crying yon parrot takes up And from your empty skull cries it afterwards. Thou whose dark activities unenchanted Days from gyrating days, suspending them To thrust them far from sight, from the gyrating days Which have gone widening on and left us here, Cast derelicts lost for ever. When aged flesh looks down on tender brood; For he knows between his thin ribs' walls The giant universe, the interminable Panorama---synods, myths and creeds, He knows his dust is fire and seed. [The following fragment was evidently an early attempt to deal with the theme of the emotion of Tel, prince of the decaying race, when he first sees a woman.]
Scene I.   Tel on his Unicorn. He sees a girl and boy in the field.   He leaves the Unicorn. TEL'S SONG Small dazzling face! I shut you in my soul; How can I perish now? But thence a strange decay--- Your fragile gleaming wrists Waver my days and shake my life To golden tremors. I have no life at all, Only thin golden tremors That shudder over the abyss of days Which hedged my spirit, my spirit your prison walls That shrunk like phantasms with your vivid beauty Towering and widening till The sad moonless place Throngs with a million torches And spears and flaming wings. SIGNIFICANCE The cunning moment curves its claws Round the body of our curious wish, But push a shoulder through its straitened laws--- Then are you hooked to wriggle like a fish. Lean in high middle 'twixt two tapering points, Yet rocks and undulations control The agile brain, the limber joints The sinews of the soul. Chaos that coincides, form that refutes all sway, Shapes to the eye quite other to the touch, All twisted things continue to our clay Like added limbs and hair dispreaded over- much. And after it draws in its claws The rocks and unquiet sink to a flat ground. Then follow desert hours, the vacuous pause Till some mad indignation unleashes the hound. And those flat hours and dead unseeing things Cower and crowd and burrow for us to use, Where sundry gapings spurn and preparing wings--- And O! our hands would use all ere we lose. WEDDED The knotted moment that untwists Into the narrow laws of love, Its ends are rolled round our four wrists That once could stretch and rove. See our confinèd fingers stray O'er delicate fibres that recoil, And blushing hints as cold as clay; Love is tired after toil. But hush! two twin moods meet in air; Two spirits of one gendered thought. Our chained hands loosened everywhere Kindness like death's have caught. THE MIRROR It glimmers like a wakeful lake in the dark narrowing room. Like drowning vague branches in its depth floats the gloom, The night shall shudder at its face by gleams of pallid light Whose hands build the broader day to break the husk of night. No shade shall waver there when your shadowless soul shall pass, The green shakes not the air when your spirit drinks the grass, So in its plashless water falls, so dumbly lies therein A fervid rose whose fragrance sweet lies hidden and shut within. Only in these bruised words the glass dim-showing my spirit's face, Only a little colour from a fire I could not trace, To glimmer through eternal days like an enchanted rose, The potent dreamings of whose scent are wizard-locked beneath its glows. DUSK AND THE MIRROR Where the room seems ponder- ing, Shadowy hovering, Pictured walls and dove-dim ceiling, Edgeless, lost and spectral, In a quaint half farewell Away the things familiar fall In some limbo to a spell. Mutation of slipped moment When nothing and solid is blent. O! dusk palpitant! Prank fantastical! You hide and steal from morning What you give back from hiding, You prank before the dawning And run from her frail chiding, And all my household Gods When he who worships nods You tweak and pinch and hide And dabble under your side To drop upon the shores Of an old tomorrow Shut with the same old doors Of sleep and shame and sorrow. But naked you have left One jewel, dripping still From plundering plashless fingers. Lying in a cleft Of your own surging-bosomed hill, It dreams of dreams bereft And warm dishevelled singers, Safe from your placeless will. Or you are like a tree now, And that is like a lake, Sinister to thee now Its glimmer is awake. Like vague undrowning boughs Above the pool You float your gloom in its low light Where Narcissian augurs browse, Dreaming from its cool Apparition a fear; Behind the wall of hours you hear The tread of the arch light. 'WHO LOSES THE HOUR OF THE WIND?' Who loses the hour of the wind Where the outer silence swings? But frail---but pale are the things We seek and the seekers blind. They seek us on broken wings. No cold kiss blown from the surge Of the dark tides of the night. We sleep and blind is their flight The dreams of whose kisses urge The soul to endure its plight. Blown words, whose root is the brain, Live over your ruined root. For other mouths is the fruit And the songs so rich with pain Of a splendour whose lips were mute. 'PAST DAYS ARE HIEROGLYPHS' Past days are hieroglyphs Scrawled behind the brows Scarred deep with iron blows, Upon the thundered tree Of memory. Marvellous mad beliefs (To believe that you believed!), Plain and time-unthieved, Scratched and scrawled on the tree Of memory. Time, good graver of griefs, Those words sapped with my soul, That I read as of old and whole, What eye in the world shall see On this covered tree? BEAUTY Far and near, and now, from never, My calm beauty burns for ever, Through the forests deep and old Which loose their miser secrets hold, Unto the fountains of the sky, Whose showers of radiant melody Delight the laughter-burdened ways, And dress the hours to light the days, While hand in hand they reel their round; For the burning bush is found. Joy has blossomed, joy has burst; And earth's parched lips and dewy thirst Have found a shroud of summer mirth, And Eden covers all the earth Whose lips love's kisses did anoint, And straight our ashes fell away. Our lives are now a burning point, And faded are their walls of clay, Purged of the flames that loved the wind Is the pure glow that has not sinned. ON RECEIVING NEWS OF THE WAR Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Has asked of bud or bird For Winter's cost. Yet ice and frost and snow From earth to sky This Summer land doth know. No man knows why. In all men's hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives to mould. Red fangs have torn His face. God's blood is shed. He mourns from His lone place His children dead. O! ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom. AUGURIES Fading fire that does not fade, Only changing its nest, Sky-blown words of cloudlike breath Live in another sky. Days that are scrawled hieroglyphs On thunder-stricken barks, First our souls have plucked the fruit. Here are Time's granaries. Were we not fed of summer, but warmth and summer sang to us. Has my soul plucked all the fruit? Not all the fruit that hung thereon--- The trees whose barks were pictured days. One waits somewhere for me Holding fresh the fruit I left, And I hold fruit for one. What screen hid us gathering And lied unto our thirst, While two faces looked singly to the moon? But the moon was secret and chill. Will my eyes know the fruit I left? Will her eyes know her own? This broken stem will surely know And leap unto its leaf. No blossom bursts before its time No angel passes by the door, But from old Chaos shoots the bough While we grow ripe for heaven. BEAUTY An angel's chastity Unfretted by an earthly angel's lures. The occult lamp of beauty Which holds? Is truth? Whose spreaded wing endures? Say---beauty springs and grows From the flushed night of the nun solitude And the deep spirit's throes. Unconscious as in Eden---chaste and nude. His self-appointed aim, Whose bloodless brows bloom with austere delight, O'er his entombèd fame, Whose ghost, an unseen glory, walks in hidden light. Her sire and her lover. He burns the world to gloat on the bright flame, Her absence doth him cover. Her silence is a voice that calls his name. From the womb's antechambers He, list'ning, moves through life's wide presence-hall, Blindly its turret clambers, Then searches his own soul for the flying bacchanal. Is she an earthly care Moulding our needs unto her gracious ends, Making the rough world fair, With softer meanings than its rude speech lends? 'I AM THE BLOOD' I am the blood Streaming the veins of sweet- ness; sharp and sweet, Beauty has pricked the live veins of my soul And sucked all being in. I am the air Prowling the room of beauty, climbing her soft Walls of surmise, her ceilings that close in. She breathes me as her breath. I am the death Whose monument is beauty, and forever, Although I lie unshrouded in life's tomb, She is my cenotaph. 'SUMMER'S LIPS ARE AGLOW' Summer's lips are aglow, afresh For our old lips to kiss, The tingling of the flesh Makes life aware of this. Whose eyes are wild with love? Whose hair a blowing flame I feel around and above Laughing my dreams to shame? My dreams like stars gone out Were blossoms for your day; Red flower of mine I will shout, I have put my dreams away. 'I HAVE LIVED IN THE UNDERWORLD TOO LONG' I have lived in the underworld too long For you, O creature of light, To hear without terror the dark spirit's song And unmoved hear what moves in night. I am a spirit that yours has found Strange, undelightful, obscure, Created by some other God, and bound In terrible darkness impure. Creature of light and happiness, Deeper the darkness when you With your bright terror eddying the distress Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew. 'HER FABLED MOUTH' Her fabled mouth, love hath from fables made. She tells the same old marvels and sweet stories. Chaos within her eyes his jewels laid. Our lips and eyes dig up the antique glories. The wonder of her heavy coloured hair Still richly wears the hues of faded Eden; There, where primeval dream hath made its lair, Joy subtly smiles, in his arms sorrow hidden. O! as her eyes grow wide and starlight wanes, Wanes from our hearts that grow into her splendour, We melt with wronging of love's fabled pains, Her eyes so kind, her bosom white and tender. 'A BIRD TRILLING ITS GAY HEART OUT' A bird trilling its gay heart out Made my idle heart a cage for it Just as the sunlight makes a cage Of the lampless world its song has lit. I was half happy and half vexed Because the song flew in unasked Just as the dark might angry be If sudden light her face unmasked. I could not shut my spirit's doors I was so naked and alone, I could not hide and it saw that I would not to myself have shown. THE FEMALE GOD We curl into your eyes--- They drink our fires and have never drained. In the fierce forest of your hair Our desires beat blindly for their treasure. In your eyes' subtle pit, Far down, glimmer our souls. And your hair like massive forest trees Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb. Like a candle lost in an electric glare Our spirits tread your eyes' infinities. In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses? Queen! Goddess! Animal! In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls? When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow Do not our jealous pulses wake between? You have dethroned the ancient God, You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days, Yea! every moment is delivered to you, Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God. Our souls have passed into your eyes, Our days into your hair, And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world, Your world. DAWN O tender first cold flush of rose, O budded dawn, wake dreamily; Your dim lips as your lids unclose Murmur your own sad threnody. O as the soft and frail lights break Upon your eyelids, and your eyes Wider and wider grow and wake, The old pale glory dies. And then as sleep lies down to sleep And all her dreams lie somewhere dead, (While naked day digs goldly deep For light to lie uncoverèd), Your own ghost fades with dream- ghosts there, Our lorn eyes see, mid glimmering lips, Pass through the haunted dream moved air, Slowly, their laden ships. 'WHAT IF I WEAR YOUR BEAUTY' What if I wear your beauty as this present Wears infinite aeons yet is only now? The spirit opens but to receive, Close hid, nought yet departing--- But the world's gaze lessens love. O softer pearl whose iridescent fountain Hath been my sky, my sun, my stream of light From the first dazzling daystream, the enfolden Sweet thirst, a mother prattle To a new babbled birth. I like an insect beautiful wings have gotten, Shed from you. Let me hide, O like a vessel That you have marvel-laden, burdened With new rich fears of pirates I droop dark pendulous sails. NIGHT With sleek lascivious velvety caresses The nestling hair of night strays on my cheeks. My heart is full of brimless fervid fancies Ardent to hear the imperious word she speaks. O purple-hued---O glimmering mouth that trembles, O monstrous dusky shoulders lost above, Wrapt in bleak robes of smoke from eye, star embers, You smouldering pyres of flaming aeons of love. The straining lusts of strenuous amorists, Smoking from crimson altars of their hearts, In burning mists are shed upon my dreaming. Relax---relax. I have not strength to withstand thee. My soul will not recoil, so full of thee. Thy loathsomeness and beauty fill my hunger O! splendid, thy lithe fingers gripping me. Naked and glorious like a shining temple I fill with adorations, fervent psalm, Anoint with honey of kisses, while thy bosom Throbs music to my unprofaning palm. See how thy breasts, those two white grapes of passion, Look mixed in mine, like globed fruit mixed with leaves. Lo! where I press, what crimson stains come leaping, Bright juice of inexhaustible dreams lust weaves. 'MY SOUL IS ROBBED' My soul is robbed by your most treacherous eyes Treading its intricate infinities. Some pale light hidden in light and felt to stir In listening pulse, an audible wonder Delighting me with my immortal loss; While you stay in its place, rich robbers, that is dross. Wine of the Almighty who got drunk with thee. (The reason sin---God slumbering then---flew free.) Alas! if God thus, what will hap to me? Ah! even now drunken while your sweet light beams, You, far as Heaven, I am drunk on my dreams. Not yet, that glance engendered ecstasy, That subtle, unspaced, mutual intimacy, Whereby two spirits of one thought commune, Like separate instruments that play one tune. The music of my playing is lost in thine. Does the sun see when noonday torches shine? Mine is not yours though you have stolen mine. Beautiful thieves, I cannot captive ye, Being so bound even as ye rifle me. My limbs that moved in trembling innocence You harden to knowledge of experience Till honour rings upon the ear as crime. THE EXILE A northern spray in an all human speech To this same torrid heart may somewhat reach, Although its root, its mother tree Is in the North. But O! to its cold heart, and fervid eyes, It sojourns in another's paradise, A loveliness its alien eyes might see Could its own roots go forth. O! dried-up waters of deep hungering love! Far, far, the springs that fed you from above, And brimmed the wells of happiness With new delight. Blinding ourselves to rob another's sun Only its scorching glory have we won, And left our own homes in bleak wintriness Moaning our sunward flight. Here, where the craggy mountains edge the skies, Whose profound spaces stare to our vain eyes; Where our thoughts hang, and theirs, who yearn To know our speech. O! what winged airs soothe the sharp mountains' brow? From peak to peak with messages they go, Withering our peering thoughts that crowd to learn Words from that distant beach. 'SACRED, VOLUPTUOUS HOLLOWS DEEP' Sacred, voluptuous hollows deep Where the unlifted shadows sleep Beneath inviolate mouth and chin. What virginal woven mystery Guarding some pleadful spiritual sin, So hard to traffic with or flee, Lies in your chaste impurity? Warm, fleshly chambers of delights, Whose lamps are we, our days and nights. Where our thoughts nestle, our lithe limbs Frenzied exult till vision swims In fierce delicious agonies; And the crushed life, bruised through and through, Ebbs out, trophy no spirit slew, While molten sweetest pains enmesh The life sucked by entwining flesh. O rosy radiance incarnate, O glowing glory of heaven-dreamt flesh, O seraph-barred resplendent gate Of paradisal meadows fresh. O read---read what my pale mouth tells. God! could that mouth be but the air To kiss your chasteness everywhere Bound with lust's shrivelling manacles! As weary water dreams of land While waves roll back and leave wet sand, Their white tongues fawning on its breast, But turns it to the thing that prest, Though my thoughts drown you sweet, and cover, Your shape in me is my mad lover. 'I KNOW YOU GOLDEN' I know you golden As summer and pale As the clinging sweetness Of marvels frail. A touch of fire, A loitering thrill, My dancing spirit Has passed the will. And love and living And Time and space--- My naked spirit Hath seen its face. GIRL'S SONG The pigmy skies cover No mood in my eyes, The flat earth foams over My pallor's moonrise. Thin branches like whips Whiten the skies To gibbous lips Calling for my mad lover. What is his knowledge Knowing not this? I'll send him a message, My life in a kiss. Why is he mad? I hold fires for him, bliss He has not had And dare not aspire. FAR AWAY By what pale light or moon-pale shore Drifts my soul in lonely flight? Regions God had floated o'er Ere He touched the world with light? Not in Heaven and not in earth Is this water, is this moon; For there is no starry birth, And no dawning and no noon. Far away---O far away, Mist-born---dewy vapours rise From the dim gates of the day Far below in earthly skies. 'HAVE WE SAILED AND HAVE WE WANDERED' Have we sailed and have we wandered, Still beyond, the hills are blue. Have we spent and have we squandered, What's before us still is new. See the foam of unheard waters And the gleam of hidden skies, Footsteps of Eve's whiter daughters Flash between our dreaming eyes. Soundless waning to the spirit, Still---O still the hills are blue, Ever and yet never near it, There where our far childhood grew. 'WISTFULLY IN PALLID SPLENDOUR' Wistfully in pallid splendour Drifts the lonely infinite, A wan perfume vague and tender, Dim with feet of fragile light. Drifts so lightly through the spirit, Breathes the torch of dreams astir Till what promised lands lie near it Wavering are betrayed to her. Ghostly foam of unheard waters, And the gleam of hidden skies, Footsteps of Eve's whiter daughters Tremble to our dreaming eyes. O! sad wraith of joy lips parted, Hearing not a word they say--- Even my dreams make broken-hearted And their beauty falls away. THE POET At my eyes' anchoring levels The pigmy skies foam over The flat earth our senses see; A vapour my lips might stir--- The heat of my breath might wither. Strong unfed eyes, so baffled! Yon bright and moving vapour In a moment fades. The beamy air, the roofless silence; The smoke-throated, man- thundered street, Die to an essence, a love spirit, Which my life feels to stir; Some subtle compound wrought By no wonder-list'ning sleep. All things that, brooding, are still, Speak to me, untwist and twine The shifting links of conscious- ness, Speak to the all-eyed soul And tread its intricate infinities, Pass through the ward of our immured immensity Into the secret God, behind the mask of man. AT NIGHT Crazed shadow, from no golden body That I can see, embraces me warm; All is purple and closed Round by night's arm. A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices, Wild lost voices of shadows white. See the long houses lean To the weird flight. Star-amorous things that wake at sleep- time (Because the sun spreads wide like a tree With no good fruit for them) Thrill secrecy. Pale horses ride before the morning The secret roots of the sun to tread, With hoofs shod with venom And ageless dread, To breathe on burning emerald grasses, And opalescent dews of the day, And poison at the core What smiles may stray. 'INVISIBLE ANCIENT ENEMY OF MINE' Invisible ancient enemy of mine, My house's foe, To rich my pride with wrongful suffering, Your vengeful gain--- Coward and striker in the pit lined dark--- Lie to my friends, Feed the world's jealousy and pamper woe. When I had bowed I felt your smile, when my large spirit groaned And hid its fire Because another spirit leaned on it, I knew you near. O that the tortured spirit could amass All the world's pains, How I would cheat you, leaving none for life, You would recount All you have piled on me, self-tortured count Through all eternity. OF ANY OLD MAN Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness With alien uproar and rude jolly cries, Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden's pride) Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil. Give them their withered peace, their trial grave, Their past youth's three-scored shadowy effigy. Mock them not with your ripened turbulence, Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath, When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers one word (Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth, The feignèd rampart of bleak ignorance) 'Experience'---crown of naked majesties, That tells us naught we know not, but con- firms. O think, you reverend shadowy austere, Your Christ's youth was not ended when he died. 'O HEART, HOME OF HIGH PURPOSES' O heart, home of high purposes, O hand with craft and skill, Say, why this meagre dalliance To do such greatness ill? Marshal the flame-winged legions, yours,--- The thunder and the beauty; Sweeten these sunsoiled days of ours, We need your wizard duty. Our parched lips yearn for music yet. Find us some gate in air To leave our world-stained lives behind, And live a life more fair. The vagrant clouds are alive with light When the sun shines and sings, When the wind blows they race in flight So happy in their wings. Help us, the helpless, breathe thy breath, Show us new flowers, new ways to live, Thy glory thaw our lips of death, To you your feel of power we'll give. AT SEA-POINT Let the earth crumble away, The heavens fade like a breath, The sea go up in a cloud, And its hills be given to death. For the roots of the earth are old, And the pillars of heaven are tired. The hands that the sea enfold Have seen a new desired. All things upon my sense Are wasted spaces dull, Since one shape passed like a song Let God all things annul. A lie with its heart hidden Is that cruel wall of air That held her there unbidden, Who comes not at my prayer. Gone, who yet never came. There is the breathing sea, And the shining skies are the same, But they lie---they lie to me. For she stood with the sea below, Between the sky and the sea, She flew ere my soul was aware, But left this thirst in me. ON A LADY SINGING She bade us listen to the singing lark In tones far sweeter than its own. For fear that she should cease and leave us dark We built the bird a feignèd throne, Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways From sceptred hands of starred humility--- Praising herself the more in giving praise To music less than she. 'AS A SWORD IN THE SUN---' As a sword in the sun--- A glory calling a glory--- Our eyes seeing it run Capture its gleam for our story. Singer, marvellous gleam Dancing in splendid light, Here you have brought us our dream--- Ah, but its stay is its flight! SONG A silver rose to show Is your sweet face, And like the heavens' white brow, Sometime God's battle-place, Your blood is quiet now. Your body is a star Unto my thought. But stars are not too far And can be caught--- Small pools their prisons are. SPRING I walk and I wonder To hear the birds sing--- Without you my lady How can there be Spring? I see the pink blossoms That slept for a year, But who could have woke them While you were not near? Birds sing to the blossoms, Blind, dreaming your pink; These blush to the songsters, Your music they think. So well had you taught them To look and to sing, Your bloom and your music, The ways of the Spring. 'A WARM THOUGHT FLICKERS' A warm thought flickers An idle ray--- Being is one blush at root. For the hours' ungentle doom Where one forsaking face Hides ever---hides for our sighing Is a hard bright leaf over clover And bee-bitten shade. What moons have hidden Their month-long shine, What buds uncover And plead in vain, While one opaque thought wearies The weary lids of grief? One thought too heavy For words to bear, For lips too tired To curl to them. 'O, BE THESE MEN AND WOMEN?' O, be these men and women That pass and cry like blowing flakes, Seeking the parent cloud, Seeking the parent sea? Or like famished flames that fly On a separate root of fire Far from the nurturing furnace. Or like scent from the flower That hovers in doubt afar, Or the colour of grasses That flies to the spirit and spreads. Are these things your dreams That I too can watch? When I dream my dreams Do you see them too? When the ghosts depart Can you follow them, Though I see them not? TWILIGHT A sumptuous splendour of leaves Murmurously fanning the evening heaven; And I hear In the soft living grey shadows, In the brooding evanescent atmo- sphere, The voice of impatient night. The splendour shall vanish in a vaster splendour; Its own identity shall lose itself, And the golden glory of day Give birth to the lambent face of the twilight, And she shall grow into a vast enormous pearl maiden Whose velvet tresses shall envelop the world--- Night. THE BLIND GOD Streaked with immortal blasphemies, Betwixt twin eternities Shaper of mortal destinies Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep, Some nothing that hath shadows deep. The world is only a small pool In the meadows of Eternity, And the wise man and the fool In its depths like fishes lie. When an angel drops a rod And he draws you to the sky Will you bear to meet your God You have streaked with blasphemy? 'WALK YOU IN MUSIC, LIGHT OR NIGHT' Walk you in music, light or night, Spelled on your brows, plain to men's sight Is death and darkness written clear. God only can neither read nor hear. Ah men, ye are so skilled to write This doom so dark in letters bright. But how can God read human fear Who cannot dry a human tear? A CARELESS HEART A little breath can make a prayer, A little wind can take it And turn it back again to air: Then say, why should you make it? An ardent thought can make a word, A little ear can hear it, A careless heart forget it heard: Then why keep ever near it? THE POET He takes the glory from the gold For consecration of the mould, He strains his ears to the clouds' lips, He sings the song they sang to him And his brow dips In amber that the seraphim Have held for him and hold. So shut in are our lives, so still, That we see not of good or ill--- A dead world since ourselves are dead. Till he, the master, speaks and lo! The dead world's shed, Strange winds, new skies and rivers flow Illumined from the hill. A QUESTION What if you shut your eyes and look, Yea, look with all the spirit's eyes, While mystic unrevealèd skies Unfold like pages of a book Wherein new scenes of wonder rare Are imaged, till the sense deceives Itself, and what it sees believes--- Even what the soul has pictured there? APPARITION From her hair's unfelt gold My days are twined, As the moon weaves pale daughters Her hands may never fold. Her eyes are hidden pools Where my soul lies Glimmering in their waters Like faint and troubled skies. Dream pure, her body's grace, A streaming light, Scatters delicious fire Upon my limbs and face. 'GLORY OF HUELESS SKIES' Glory of hueless skies, What pallid splendour flies Like visible music touched From the lute of our eyes. The stars are sick and white, Old in the morning light; Like genius in a rabble The obscure mars their might. The forest of the world, Lights scattering hands have uphurled, The branches of thought are driven The vapours of act are uncurled. Deed against strenuous deed, Dark seed choking the seed, The impulses blind that blacken The ways of life's rough need. Mountain and man and beast, Live flower and leaf diseased Riot or revel in quiet At the broad day's feast. CREATION As the pregnant womb of night Thrills with imprisoned light, Misty, nebulous-born, Growing deeper into her morn, So man, with no sudden stride, Bloomed into pride. In the womb of the All-spirit The universe lay; the will Blind, an atom, lay still. The pulse of matter Obeyed in awe And strove to flatter The rhythmic law. But the will grew; nature feared, And cast off the child she reared, Now her rival, instinct-led, With her own powers impregnated. Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers, Creation is each act of yours. Your roots are God, the pauseless cause, But your boughs sway to self-windy laws. Perception is no dreamy birth And magnifies transfigured earth. With each new light, our eyes receive A larger power to perceive. If we could unveil our eyes, Become as wise as the All-wise, No love would be, no mystery: Love and joy dwell in infinity. Love begets love; reaching highest We find a higher still, unseen From where we stood to reach the first; Moses must die to live in Christ, The seed be buried to live to green. Perfection must begin from worst. Christ perceives a larger reachless love, More full, and grows to reach thereof. The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit. Perfection always is a root, And joy a motion that doth feed Itself on light of its own speed, And round its radiant circle runs, Creating and devouring suns. Thus human hunger nourisheth The plan terrific---true design--- Makes music with the bones of death, And soul knows soul to shine. What foolish lips first framed 'I sin'? The virgin spirit grows within To stature its eyes know to fail. And all its edges weaken and pale Where the flesh merges and is one; A chalice of light for stagnation To drink, but where no dust can come Till the glass shatters and light is dumb. Soul grows in freedom natural. When in wild growths eventual Its light casts shadow on other light, All cry 'That spirit is not white'. As when God strides through the wrack of skies, The plunging seas welcome paradise, They say not 'This dark period Sheweth our bitter wrong to God', But revel in a dark delight, And day is sweet and night is bright. The jewelled green laughs myriadly. The yearning pits swing and draw down The rainbow-splintered mountains thrown By wrestling giants beneath the sea. An emanation like a voice Spreads up, the spirits of our joys. The sky receives it like an ear Bent o'er the throbbing atmosphere. Our thoughts like endless waterfalls Are fed---to fill life's palace halls Until the golden gates do close On endless gardens of repose. A sun, long set, again shall rise, Bloom in annihilation's skies Strong---strong---past ruin to endure, More lost than bliss---than life more sure. This universe shall be to me Millions of years beneath the sea Cast from my rock of changelessness, The centre of eternity. And uncreated nothingness Found, what creation laboured for The ultimate silence---Ah, no more A happy fool in paradise, But finite---wise as the All-wise. AS A BESIEGED CITY In the hushed pregnancy And gleaming of hope, When a joy's infancy Fills our stars' horoscope, Flowering like a mist Heaven-mixed but light-unkist, The soul is mixed in anguish, For joy has not yet burst. Expectant is the fear--- O! why the doubt? Surely our friends are near, And the strong foe cast out. Ah! but if we are dead In their loving fears, and shed The tears for us in anguish, And they turn from gates not burst. TWILIGHT Mist-like its dusky panic creeps in the end to your proud heart: O you will feel its kisses cold while it rends your limbs apart. Have you not seen the withering rose and watched the lovely moon's decay, And more than mortal loveliness fade like the fainting stars away? I have seen lovely thoughts forgot in wind, effacing dreams; And dreams like roses wither leaving perfume not nor scent; And I have tried to hold in net like silver fish the sweet starbeams, But all these things are shadowed gleams of things beyond the firmament. RAPHAEL Dear, I have done; it shall be done. I know I can paint on and on, and still paint on. Another touch, and yet another touch. Yet wherefore? 'Tis Art's triumph to know this, Long ere the soul and brain begin to flag, And dim the first fresh flashes of the soul, Before achievement, by our own desire And loathing to desist in what we love, Is wrought to ruin by much overtoil, To know the very moment of our gain, And fix the triumph with reluctant pause. Come from the throne, sweet, kiss me on the cheek; You have borne bravely, sweet, come, look with me. Is it not well---think love---the recompense, This binds the unborn ages at our feet. Thus you shall look, my love, and never change Throughout all changes. Time's own conqueror, While worshippers of climes and times unknown Lingeringly look in wonder---here---at us. What have we done---in these long hours, my love? Long---long to you---whose patient labour was To sit, and sit, a statue, movelessly. Love we have woven a chain more glorious Than crowns or Popes---to bind the centuries. You are tired. I should have thought a little. But you said nothing, sweet, and I forgot, In rapture of my soul's imaginings. You---yes, 'twas thus you looked, ah, look again That hint of smile---it was like wings for heaven, And gave my spirit play to revel more In dazzling visions. But ah! it mocked my hand. There---there---before my eyes and in my brain Limned perfect---but my fingers traitors were. Could not translate, and heartsick was the strife. But it is done---I know not how---perchance Even as I, maddened, drew on hopelessly, An angel taking pity---mayhap for thee--- Guided my hand and drew it easily. And they will throng---admire with gaping mouth, The students, 'Look, what ease, what grace divine. What balance and what harmony serene'. And some, 'Like noonday lakes to torrents wild, After titanic Mighty Angelo'. Ah, Angelo, he has no sweetness---true. But, ah, I would I had his breadth of wing. Jove's Thunders, and the giant craggy heights Whose points cleave the high heavens, and at whose feet The topmost clouds have end, afraid to soar. And I too, shake my brow amongst the stars. And this I know and feel, what I have done Is but the seed plot of a mightier world. Yea, world on world is forming in my brain. I have no space to hold it. Time will show I could draw down the Heavens, I could bend Yon hoar age-scorning column with my hand I feel such power. But where there's sun there's shade! And these thoughts bring their shadow in their train. Who lives?---see this, it is my hand---my name. But who looks from the canvas, no---not me. Some doubt of God---but the world lives who doubts? Even thus our own creations mock at us. Our own creations outlive our decay. What do I labour for if all is thus? I triumph, but my triumph is my scorn. 'Tis true I love my labour, and the days Pass pleasantly, But what is it I love in it---desire Accomplished? Never have I reached The halfway of the purpose I have planned. A hardship conquered?---a poor juggler's feat And his elatement mayhap betters mine. The adoration of the gaping crowd, Who praise, with jest, not knowing why they praise, Then turn, and sing a lewd and smutty song. Or kneel---bate breath---to my Lord Cardinal. Or is it the approval of the wise? I take it---sadly knowing what I know, And feeling that this marvel of their world Is little triumph to me, it being my world. Their deeds being circumscribed---proportionate, Within their limits; and mine loftier, But (God how bounded yet) to do as thus Is but my nature---therefore little pride Their praises give me. Ah, but this gives pride To know that there is one that does feel pride When they praise me, and cannot hide the glow Upon her cheeks to hear me spoken of. Love---this is better---here---to be with you, My head upon your bosom while your hair A loosened fire falls all about my face, And through its tangles---like a prison bar To shut my soul in---watch the shadows creep, The long grey shadows creeping furtively. I would I were a poet---love---this once. I cannot tell my feelings. ... How effable in this half-light you look, Love, I would dream---the shadows thickly press, You fade into my fancy---and become A thought---a smile---a rapture of the brain, A presence that embraces all things felt--- A twilight glamour---faery fantasy. Your two eyes in the shadow, stars that dream In quiet waters of the evening, draw My spirit to them and enfold me there. Love, I would sleep, dear love I would forget. Love I would sleep, you watching, covering me, Charmed by your love and sheltered 'neath love's wing, Sweet, let the world pass as this day has passed, What do you murmur---sleeping? Then will I. KNOWLEDGE Within this glass he looks at he is fair, Godlike his reach and shining in his eyes The light that is the sun of Paradise. Yet midst his golden triumph a despair Lurks like a serpent hidden in his hair And says 'Proud wisdom I am yet more wise'. But swift before his look the serpent dies, Before his glory's grandeur mirrored there. This to himself, but what to us looks he? A lank unresting spectre whose grey gaze, A moth by night---a ferret through the days--- A hunger that devours all it can see And then feeds on himself but never slays, Insatiate with his own misery. PSYCHE'S LAMENT O! love, my love! once, and not long, Yet seems it dreams of ancient days, When nights were passion's lips of song, And thou his speech of honied praise, 'O love, my love', in murmurs low Burnt in my ears. Then I was thine. O! love, my love! 'twixt weepings now The empty words are only mine. O! sweetest love! O! cruel wings, The darkening shadow of thy flight Is all that dreary daylight brings Of all that was so sweet at night. O! sweetest love! once you called sweet, Through kisses, her forlorn who weeps That wings, too swift to hear their beat, Of Time, flew with you. ... How he creeps. O life, my life! I have no life Whilst thou who hast my soul art far. When night is not, while day has strife, What life has the unwakened star? O! life, my life, upon my brow My tears like flowers are gathered up. The fruit that sorrow did not sow She turns to poison in her cup. 'EVEN NOW YOUR EYES ARE MIXED IN MINE' Even now your eyes are mixed in mine. I see you not, but surely, he--- This stricken gaze, has looked on thee. From him your glances shine. Even now I felt your hand in mine, This breeze that warms my open palm Has surely kist yours; such thrilled calm No lull can disentwine. The words you spoke just now, how sweet! These grasses heard and bend to tell. The green grows pale your speech to spell, How its green heart must beat! I breathe you. Here the air enfolds Your absent presence, as fire cleaves, Leaving the places warm it leaves. Such warmth a warm word holds. Bruised are our words and our full thought Breaks like dull rain from some rich cloud. Our pulses leap alive and proud. Colour, not heat, is caught. AS WE LOOK As they have sung to me, So shall they sing to you? One song have they. Nay, when the old be new, Nay, when the blind shall see, Then, when the night is day, Shall this thing be. For this is truth, and still Ever throughout be truth While the world sings. Gladly it sings to youth; Sadly to age and ill. To love sweet whisperings Its songs fulfil. One song the roses sing; One song the chirping birds. But whoso hears, He makes within the words To his soul murmuring. High hopes or lowly fears One song shall bring. One song, one voice, the sky: The star, the moon, the cloud: One song the trees. But some will see a shroud, And some will dim descry Immortal harmonies That never die. Each looks with eyes that are But the soul's curtain hung Till thought draws clear. One hears sweet songs, un- sung To some, and dumb the star, To these while songs are near, Fair things are far. TWILIGHT A murmur of many waters, a moving maze of streams; A doubtful voice of the silence from the ghosts of the shadows of dreams, The far adieu of the day as it touches the fingers of night, Wakes all to the eye and ear but seem wings spread for the soul for flight. Can we look behind or before us, can we look on the dreams that are done? The lights gleam dim in the distance, the distance is dimmer when won. Soon that shall fade dimmer behind us, and when the night before us is here, Ah! who of us shall wait for the dawn, while the shadows of night disappear? 'LIKE SOME FAIR SUBTLE POISON' Like some fair subtle poison is the cold white beauty you shed; Pale flower of the garden I walk in, your scent is an amorous net To lure my thoughts and pulses, by your useless phantom led By misty hours and ruins with insatiate longing wet. To lure my soul with the beauty of some enthralling sin, To starve my body to hunger for the mystic rapture there--- O cruel; flesh and spirit your robe's soft stir sucks in, And your cold unseeing glances, and the fantasies of your hair. And in the shining hollow of your dream-enhaunted throat My mournful thoughts now wander and build desire a nest, But no tender thoughts to crown the fiery dreams that float Around those sinuous rhythms and dim languors of your breast. LOVE TO BE When at that happy pause that holds sweet rest As a hard burden, that it doth belate And make him seem a laggard at the gate Of long-wished night, while day rides down the west; I, weighted from my toil, and sore distrest In body and soul, the scourge of partial fate, At such sweet pause, to silence consecrate, Came thoughts swift changing fancy had bedrest In colours of desire. I thought on her I never yet have seen, my love to be. I conjured up all glorious shapes that were; And wondered what far clime, by what sad sea She roaming? And what spirits minister? What thoughts, and what vague shadowing of me? By what far ways shall my heart reach to thine? We, who have never parted---never met, Nor done to death the joys that shall be yet, Nor drained the cup of love's delirious wine. How shall my craving spirit know for mine Thine, self-same seeking? Will a wild regret For the lost days---the lonely suns that set, Be for our love a token and a sign? Will all the weary nights, the widowed days That sundered long, all point their hands at thee? Yea! all the stars that have not heard thy praise Low murmur in thy charmèd ear of me? All pointing to the ending of the ways, All singing of the love that is to be? YOU AND I You and I have met but for an instant; And no word the gate-lips let from out them. But the eyes, voice audible---the soul's lips, Stirr'd the depths of thought and feeling in me. I have seen you somewhere, some sweet sometime, Somewhere in a dim-remembered sometime. Was it in the sleep-spun realm of dreamland? In sweet woods, a faery flower of fancy? If our hands touched would it bring us nearer? As our souls touched, eyes' flame meeting eyes' flame. If the lips spake would it lift the curtain More than our mute bearing unaffected Told the spirit's secrets eloquently? Strange! this vast and universal riddle! How perplexing! Manifold the wonder. You and I, we meet but for an instant, Pause or pass, reflections in a mirror. And I see myself and wonder at it. See myself in you, a double wonder. With my thought held in a richer casket, Clothed and girt in shape of regal beauty. Strange! we pause! New waves of life rush blindly, Madly on the soul's dumb silent breakers. And a music strange is new awakened. Fate the minstrel smites or holds the chord back. Smites---new worlds undreamt of burst upon us. All our life before was but embryo Shaping for this birth---this living moment. DON JUAN'S SONG The moon is in an ecstasy, It wanes not nor can grow. The heavens are in a mist of love, And deepest knowledge know. What things in nature seem to move Bear love as I bear love? And bear my pleasures so? The moon will fade when morn- ing comes, The heavens will dream no more In our missed meetings are eyes hard? What shadows fleck the door Averted, when we part? What guard Scents death in each vain word? What haggard haunts the shore? I bear my love as streams that bear The sky still flow or shake--- Though deep within too far on high. Light blossoms kiss and wake The waters sooner than the sky. And if they kiss and die! God made them frail to break. MY SONGS Deep into the great heart of things My mood passed, as my life became One with the vasty whisperings That breathe the pure ineffable name. A pulse of all the life that stirs Through still deep shade and waver- ing light, The flowing of the wash of years From out the starry infinite. And flowing through my soul the skies And all the winds and all the trees Mixed with its stream of light, to rise And flow out in these melodies. TO NATURE Beneath the eternal wandering skies O wilt thou rest awhile by me, Immortal mother of mystery, And breathe on my blind eyes! Or is it that thou standest nigh, And while I know that I am blind I live, until thou passest by, To leave me dead behind. 1912 THE POET The trouble of the universe is on his wonder-travelled eyes. Ah, vain for him the starry quest, the spirit's wistful sacrifice. For though the glory of the heavens celestially in glimpses seen Illumines his rapt gazing, still the senses shut him in. No fellowship of suffering to meet his tear-bewildered ways, Alone he bears the burden of alienated days. He is a part of paradise that all the earth has pressed between, And when he calls unto the stars of paradise with heaven- sweet songs To his divided self he calls and sings the story of earth's wrongs. Himself he has himself betrayed, and deemed the earth a path of heaven, And wandered down its sunless days, and too late knew himself bereaven. For swiftly sin and suffering and earth-born laughter meshed his ways, And caught him in a cage of earth, but heaven can hear his dewy lays. 'O'ER THE CELESTIAL PATHWAYS' O'er the celestial pathways the mortal and immortal strays; For earth is a swift dream of God, and man one shape within His brain. And there man meeteth sun and moon, immortal shapes of nights and days, And in God's glad mood he is glad and in God's petu- lance has pain. And there he dreams his dreamer's face; forgets, nor knows himself a dream, Until some shadow wavers by and leaves him but a trembling shade To murmur in his impotence that nothing is, but all things seem, And what they seem like man shall know when man beneath the dust is laid. FLEET STREET From north and south, from east and west, Here in one shrieking vortex meet These streams of life, made manifest Along the shaking quivering street. Its pulse and heart that throbs and glows As if its strife were its repose. I shut my ear to such rude sounds As reach a harsh discordant note, Till, melting into what surrounds, My soul doth with the current float, And from the turmoil and the strife Wakes all the melody of life. The stony buildings blindly stare Unconscious of the crime within, While man returns his fellow's glare The secrets of his soul to win. And each man passes from his place, None heed. A shadow leaves such trace. 'WE ARE SAD WITH A VAGUE SWEET SORROW' We are sad with a vague sweet sorrow Whose touch is a scent of sighs; A flower that weeps to a flower The old tale that beauty dies. Our smiles are full of a longing, For we saw the gold flash of the years. They passed, and we know where they came from, The deep---deep well of tears. PEACE Where the dreamy mountains brood Ever in their ancient mood Would I go and dream with them Till I graft me on their stem. With fierce energy I aspire To be that the Gods desire As the dreamy mountains are And no God can break or mar. Soon the world shall fade and be One with still eternity As the dreamy hills that lie Silent to the passing sky. 'SO INNOCENT YOU SPREAD YOUR NET' So innocent you spread your net, I knew not I was caught in it, Till when I vainly tried to rise I read the reason in your eyes. Your silken smiles had bound me fast; Your nestling speech had tangled more; But when I started up at last I shook the fetters to the floor. THE NUN So thy soul's meekness shrinks, Too loth to show her face--- Why should she shun the world? It is a holy place. Concealèd to itself If the flower kept its scent, Of itself amorous, Less rich its ornament. Use---utmost in each kind--- Is beauty, truth in one, While soul rays light to soul In one God-linkèd sun. 'NOW THE SPIRIT'S SONG HAS WITHERED' Now the spirit's song has withered As a song of last year's June That has made the air its tomb. Shall we ever find it after Sighing in some summer tune That is sealèd now in gloom, Safe for light and laughter? Now the sky blooms full of colour, Houses glow and windows shine Glittering with impatient wings. Where they go to may I follow Since mine eyes have made them mine? Shall I ever find these things Hid in hill or hollow? BACCHANAL If life would come to me As she has never come, The music of the spring, The fullness of its prime; With roses in her hair, With laughter on her lips, Ah! life!---we'd dance a tune. Ah! life! we'd live---we'd live. If life would come to me With roses in her lap, With wine between her hands, And a fire upon her lips; We would burn Time in that fire, We would drown care in that wine, And with music and with laughter We would scare black death away. If life would only come As I would have her come, With sweet breasts for my bed, And my food her fiery wine; If life would only come, For we live not till it comes, And it comes not till we feel Its fire through all our veins. THE CAGE Air knows as you know that I sing in my cage of earth, And my mouth dry with longing for your winsome mouth of mirth, That passes ever my prison bars which will not fall apart, Wearied unweariedly so long with the fretful music of my heart. If you were a rose, and I, the wandering invisible air To feed your scent and live, glad though you knew me not there, Or the green of your stem that your proud petals could never meet, I yet would feel the caresses of your shadow's ruby feet. O splendour of radiant flesh, O your heavy hair uncurled, Binding all that my hopes have fashioned to crown me King of the world, I sing to life to befriend me; she sends me your mouth of mirth, And you only laugh as you pass me, and I weep in my cage of earth. THE KEY OF THE GATES OF HEAVEN A word leapt sharp from my tongue, Could a golden key do more Than open the golden door For the rush of the golden song? She spoke, and the spell of her speech--- The chain of the heart linked song--- Was on me swift and strong, And Heaven was in my reach. A word was the key thereof; And my thought was the hand that turned. And words that throbbed and burned, Sweet birds from the shine of love, Flew clear 'tween the rosebud gate That was parted beneath and above, And a chain of music wove More strong than the hand of fate. NOCTURNE Day, like a flower of gold fades on its crimson bed; For the many chambered night unbars to shut its sweet- ness up; From earth and heaven fast drawn together a heavy still- ness is shed, And our hearts drink the shadowy splendour from a brimming cup. For the indrawn breath of beauty thrills the holy caves of night; Shimmering winds of heaven fall gently and mysterious hands caress Our wan brows with cooling rapture of the delicate star- light Dropping from the night's blue walls in endless veils of loveliness. THE PRESENT Time, leveller, chaining fate itself to thee--- Hope frets her eager pettings on thy sand, Wild waves that strive to overreach command Of nature, much in sight. Eternity Is but thyself made shoreless. Toward thy sea The streams-to-be flow from the shadowland Of rootless flowers no earthly breeze has fanned, Weave with the past thy restless apathy. Thou art the link 'twixt after and before, The one sole truth; the final ultimate Endeavour of the ages. The loud roar Of life around me is thy voice to fate And Time---who looking on thee has grown hoar While thou art yet---and freedom is so late. BIRTHDAY SONG To thy cradle at thy birth Did not all the fairies come, Genie of heaven and earth While ogres stood afar and dumb, And thy cradle to embower Spun a roof of sun and flowers, Gave thee for thy lifelong dower Beauteous gifts and beauteous hours? Time stood by, a gardener mild, Watched the bud unfold to rose, June's delight December's child, Red rose of December snows. Twenty years and one year more Time here layeth at thy feet; But thy friends bring twenty score Wishes that the rest be sweet. 'GOD LOOKED CLEAR AT ME THROUGH HER EYES' God looked clear at me through her eyes, And when her fresh and sweet lips spake, Through dawn-flushed gates of Paradise Such silvern birds did wing and shake God's fervent music on my soul, And with their jewelled quivering feet Did rend apart the quiet stole That shades from girl-fanned pulsing heat. Upon a gold branch in my breast They made their nest, while sweet and warm Hung wav'ring thoughts like rose- leaves drest; My soul the sky to keep from harm. In the heart's woods mysterious Where feelings lie remote and far, They fly with touch imperious, And loose emotion's hidden bar. And to dark pools of brooding care, And blinding wastes of loneliness, They gleam a Paradisal air, And warm with a divine caress. LINES WRITTEN IN AN ALBUM The birds that sang in summer Were silent till the spring; For hidden were the flowers, The flowers to whom they sing. December's jewelled bosom--- Closed mouth---hill-hidden vale--- Held seed full soon to blossom: Held song that would not fail. I, silent all the winter, No flower for me to praise, For this rich wealth of roses My song shall I not raise? The lilies and the roses, White hands and damask cheeks; The eyes where love reposes And laughs before he speaks. Could this make music to thee, The music of sweet thought; Thy laughing eyes might hearken To sounds sweet visions wrought, Till the deep roses tingle The cheeks they nestle in, While music still would mingle, And pleasure still begin. Thus, hidden in these pages, My thoughts shall silent lie Till gentle fingers find them When idly bent to pry. I see them fondly linger, And quicken with their breath The music of the singer, Whose silence was its death. TO MR. AND MRS. LOWY, ON THEIR SILVER WEDDING 'Ye hearken as ye list', saith Time to all. 'Ye hear me as I pass or do not hear. I gather all the fruits of all the year, I hoard them when the barren seasons call. Then, though I flew with Spring, with them I crawl. To soothe their vacant eyes and feet of fear I bid the Spring's sweet ghost rise from her bier, And tender Memory come with light foot- fall. 'Then, when the seasons hang their heads in shame And grief, I bring my store of hoarded fruit; To warm the hands of age, youth's rosy flame; And to old love the young love at the root, Hallowed by me to silver sweet acclaim--- Hush---lo! the bride and bridegroom--- hush!---be mute.' 'THE WORLD RUMBLES BY ME' The world rumbles by me---can I heed? The rose it is crimson---and I bleed. The rose of my heart glows deep afar; And I grope in the darkness 'twixt star and star. Only in night grows the flower of peace, Spreading its odours of rest and ease. It dies in the day like light in the night. It revives like tears in the eyes of delight. For the youth at my heart beats wild and loud; And raves in my ear of a girl and a shroud. Of a golden girl with the soul in her eyes, To teach me love and to make me wise. With the fire on her lips and the wine in her hands, To bind me strong in her silken bands. For time and fate are striding to meet One unseen with soundless feet. The world rustles by me---let me heed. Clutched in its madness till I bleed. For the rose of my heart glows deep afar. If I stretch my hand, I may clasp a star. MY DAYS My days are but the tombs of buried hours; Which tombs are hidden in the piled years; But from the mounds there springeth up such flowers Whose beauty well repays its cost of tears. Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould, Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high; But from the dust there falleth grains of gold, And the dead corpse leaves what will never die. It may be but a thought, the nursling seed Of many thoughts, of many a high desire; Some little act that stirs a noble deed, Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire. They only live who have not lived in vain, For in their works their life returns again. 'IN THE HEART OF THE FOREST' In the heart of the forest, The shuddering forest, The moaning and sobbing Sad shuddering forest--- The dark and the dismal Persistent sad sobbing Through out the weird forest. Ah! God! they are voices--- Dim ghosts of the forest Unrestfully sobbing Through wistful pale voices, Whose breath is the wind and whose lips the sad trees; Whose yearning great eyes Death haunted for ever Look from the dark waters, And pale spirit faces Wrought from the white lilies. This was meant for an album. [Author's note in MS.] THE DEAD PAST Ah! will I meet you ever---you who have gone from me, You, the I that was then and a moment hath changed into you. So many moments have passed and changed the I into we, So many many times but alas I remember so few. I know you are dead, long perished, the boy that babbled and played With the toys like the wind with the flowers and the clouds play with the moon, I know you are dead long ago and hid in the grave I made Of regrets that were soon forgotten, as snow is forgotten by June. You too are dead, the shining face that laughed and wept without thought Uttered the words of he heart, wept or leapt as was right. O, were you taken to heaven, by God in a whirlwind caught, I do not know yours was best, you not conscious of your delight. O my life's dead Springtime---why will you haunt me like ghosts, You little buds that have died---and blossom in memory, Will I meet you in some dead land and see your faces in hosts, Saying 'The past is the future and you and the future are we'? DEATH Death waits for me---ah! who shall kiss me first? No lips of love glow red from out the gloom That life spreads darkly like a living tomb Around my path. Death's gift is best, not worst. For even the honey on life's lips is curst. And the worm cankers in the ripest bloom. Yea, from Birth's gates to Death's, Life's travailed womb Is big with Rest, for Death, her life, athirst. Death waits, and when she has kissed Life's warm lips With her pale mouth, and made him one with her; Held to him Lethe's wine whereof he sips; And stilled Time's wings, earth-shadowing sleepless whir; Outside of strife, beyond the world's blood-drips, Shadowed by peace, Rest dwells and makes no stir. 1910 A BALLAD OF TIME, LIFE AND MEMORY Hold wide the door and watch who passes here From dawn through day to dawn, Bravely as though their journey but begun, Through change unchangèd still. She, wild-eyed, runs and laughs, or walks and weeps; But him, swift-footed, never can outrun, Nor creep and he before. And all she has and all she knows is his; But not all his for her. He gives her of the spices and the myrrh And wonderful strange fruits, He gives her more of tears, and girds her round With yearning bitterness, With fears that kill the hopes they feed upon, With hopes that smile at fears and smile on her, Till fears again prevail. And as she goes the roses fall and die; And as she goes she weeps. But lo! behind, what dim processional? What maiden sings and sighs? And holds an urn, and as the roses fall, And the wine pours and spills, She gathers in her lap and breathes on them; And in the urn the spilled wine glows again, Lit by her eyes divine. And all the roses at her touch revive, And blush and bloom again. And by her side, whose name is Memory, The ghosts of all the hours, Some smiling as they smiled within the sun, Some, stained and wan with tears. To those she gives the roses as they fall, And bids them tune the praises of their prime To these their tears and dust. And those are happy loves and wreathèd joys. And these are sorrows pale. Even as she sings so Time himself makes pause, Even Time, Death's conqueror, And Life's reverted face grows tenderer, While the soul dreams and yearns, Watching the risen faces of the hours, And shrivelled autumn change her face to June's, And dead wine live again, And dust discrowned know Life it knew before Touched with a softened light. There is no leaf upon the naked woods, No bird upon the boughs, And Time leads Life through many waste places, And dreams and shapes of death. Yet is the voice of Summer not quite dumb, Although her lips be stilled and silenter. For Memory bids her rise To sing within the palace of the soul, And Life and Time are still. A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL God's mercy shines, And our full hearts must make record of this, For grief that burst from out its dark confines Into strange sunlit bliss. I stood where glowed The merry glare of golden whirring lights Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed Through one of London's nights. I watched the gleams Of jaggèd warm lights on shrunk faces pale. I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams, Or Hell's harsh lurid tale. The traffic rolled, A gliding chaos populous of din. A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled For perilous loads of sin. And my soul thought, 'What fearful land have my steps wandered to? God's love is everywhere, but here is naught Save love His anger slew.' And as I stood Lost in promiscuous bewilderment, Which to my mazèd soul was wonder-food, A girl in garments rent Peered 'neath lids shamed, And spoke to me and murmured to my blood. My soul stopped dead, and all my horror flamed At her forgot of God. Her hungered eyes, Craving and yet so sadly spiritual, Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel Where else foul blemish lies. I walked with her Because my heart thought, 'Here the soul is clean, The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh Is lost in odours mean.' She told me how The shadow of black death had newly come And touched her father, mother, even now Grim-hovering in her home, Where fevered lay Her wasting brother in a cold bleak room, Which theirs would be no longer than a day--- And then---the streets and doom. Lord! Lord! dear Lord! I knew that life was bitter, but my soul Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword, Grieving such body's dole. Then grief gave place To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke, For I could catch the glimpses of God's grace, And a desire awoke To take this trust, And warm and gladden it with love's new fires, Burning the past to ashes and to dust Through purified desires. We walked our way, One way hewn for us from the birth of Time. For we had wandered into Love's strange clime Through ways sin waits to slay. Love's euphony, In Love's own temple that is our glad hearts, Makes now long music wild deliciously, Now Grief hath used his darts. Love infinite, Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure flame--- Not all the surging world can compass it. Love---love---O! tremulous name. God's mercy shines. And my full heart hath made record of this, Of grief that burst from out its dark confines Into strange sunlit bliss. DAWN BEHIND NIGHT Lips! bold, frenzied utterance, shape to the thoughts that are prompted by hate Of the red streaming burden of wrong we have borne and still bear; That wealth with its soul-crushing scourges placed into its hands by fate, Hath made the cement of its towers, grim-girdled by our despair. Should it die in the death that they make, in the silence that follows the sob; In the voiceless depth of the waters that closes upon our grief; Who shall know of the bleakness assigned us for the fruits that we reap and they rob?--- To pour out the strong wine of pity, outstretch the kind hand in relief. In the golden glare of the morning, in the solemn serene of the night, We look on each other's faces, and we turn to our prison bar; In pitiless travail of toil and outside the precious light, What wonder we know not our manhood in the curse of the things that are? In the life or the death they dole us from the rags and the bones of their store, In the blood they feed but to drink of, in the pity they feign in their pride, Lies the glimpse of a heaven behind it, for the ship hath left the shore, That will find us and free us and take us where its portals are opened wide. ZION She stood---a hill-ensceptred Queen, The glory streaming from her; While Heaven flashed her rays between, And shed eternal summer. The gates of morning opened wide On sunny dome and steeple. Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side Throng'd with a happy people. And twilight's drowsy, half closed eyes Beheld that virgin splendour Whose orbs were as her darkening skies, And as her spirit, tender. Girt with that strength, first-born of right, Held fast by deeds of honour, Her robe she wove with rays more bright Than Heaven could rain upon her. Where is that light---that citadel? That robe with woof of glory? She lost her virtue and she fell, And only left her story. ODE TO DAVID'S HARP Awake, ye joyful strains! awake, In silence sleep no more; Disperse the gloom that ever lies O'er Judah's barren shore. Where are the hands that strung thee With tender touch and true? Those hands are silenced, too. The harp that faster caused to beat The heart that throbbed for war, The harp that melancholy calmed, Lies mute on Judah's shore. One chord awake---one strain prolong To wake the zeal in Israel's breast; Oh sacred lyre, once more, how long? 'Tis vain, alas! in silence rest. Many a minstrel fame's elated Envies thee thy harp of fame, Harp of David---monarch minstrel, Bravely---bravely, keep thy name. Ay! ev'ry ear that listen'd, Was charmed---was thrilled---was bound. Every eye with moisture glisten'd Thrilling to the harp's sweet sound. Hark! the harp is pouring Notes of burning fire, And each soul o'erpowering, Melts the rousing ire. Fiercer---shriller---wilder far Than the iron notes of war, Accents sweet and echoes sweeter, Minstrel---minstrel, steeds fly fleeter Spurred on by thy magic strains. Tell me not the harp lies sleeping, Set not thus my heart aweeping, In the muse's fairy dwelling There thy magic notes are swelling. But for list'ning mortals' ear Vainly wait, ye will not hear. So clearly sweet---so plaintive sad More tender tone no harper had. O! when again shall Israel see A harp so toned with melody? ADAM [The following is a fragment of a play called 'Adam', or 'Adam and Lilith', which Rosenberg abandoned in favour of 'The Unicorn'. Chronologically it came just before the latter play, and it includes a theme that reappears in parts of that; it is, however, too distinct in conception to be placed among the other fragments of 'The Unicorn'.] Spirit of Dissolution. Lilith Spirit. Crazed shadow from your golden body Lilith, Lilith, I am. I am a tremor in space Caught in your beauty's grasp. My tentacles that bore so secretly Into the health of the world, go suddenly lax. When my pulses pale to your beauty's music At night in your bed chamber Cruel your glimmering mirror shakes, As my thoughts, my pulses, pass Hungry to you, to roam your vivid beauty. Do you not hear their moan Beside those four lips darkened in glee, Shapeless in voluntary glee, Two where mine should be Of his your master Adam, Whose common bread you are Now he is hungry no more? Lilith---be kind. Lilith. If you are stronger than Adam. Spirit. For your sake only, girl, I have been cruel to my instinct And the venom in my hand. For your sake, and the mutable winds of love. Lilith. I am beautiful. Spirit. Ask Adam. Lilith. He is a widower since I died to him. Spirit. I am a ghost and you are, we will wed then. Lilith I was a lover without a lover. Spirit. Let him be king without a kingdom, Let me destroy a city, his people. BRITISH WOMEN! IN YOUR WOMBS YOU PLOTTED British women! in your wombs you plotted This monstrous girth of glory, this marvel- lous glory. Not for mere love-delights God meant the profound hour When an Englishman was planned. Responsible hour! wherein God wrote anew His guarantee of the world's surety Of honour, light and sweetness, all forgot Since men first marred the writ of Mary's Son. [Learn not such music here.] Learn not such music here. The grave's door Shall hear that music Of the Eternal taciturn. TO WILHELM II It is cruel Emperor The stars are too high. For your reach Emperor Far out they lie. It is cruel for you Emperor The sea has a stone, England---they call it Eng- land, That cannot shine in your crown. Cruel the seas are deep, Cruel for you Emperor That all men are not in blind sleep, And free hearts burn, Emperor. It is cruel when a wronged world turns And draws the claws of the beast Cruel, cruel for you Emperor Who would be most is least. [Power that impels,] Power that impels, Pulsé of the void working to my vain grap- pling fingers, Like a grave star drawing our gazes forlorn Will kiss the sister star that is my soul, So I a visible star, would penetrate the vast, The unimaginable chasms and abysses To reach the fountain star that hides the soul of thee. The poet's dead soul whose flung word lights the world, The struck music that panic whirls the world--- The hills decay and pass to blossoms of fire; In their slow dust God kneads his changing forms. Sculptor of infinite dreams, we thank our dreamer. EVENING My roses loiter, lips to press Of emerald winds Fall'n from sky chasms of sunset stress. ... Amongst their petals grope Displacing hands, and vapoured heliotrope. The vague viols of evening Call all the flower clans To some abysmal swinging And tumult of deep trance. ART O amber anger thrust Out of a madman's lust For a balked perfection, Sad lithe towering--- Eternal dereliction. Barbaric tenderness Burns swart for sorrowless Roses in storm adance, Abysmal as thy swing Through a tumult of deep trance. [This maenad anger thrust]
[Another version] This maenad anger thrust Out of a madman's lust For a balked perfection, This lithe towering Of life to dereliction. Barbaric tenderness Swart and blithe as the stress Of storm on rose adance, Abysmal to swing In your tumult of trance. The riding pomp of the years, Vigorous our eyes and ears When from your arm Silence is flung, from a sling To sound song's alarm. The streaming vigours of our blood Where silence is a derelict; Life's derelict, poesy, Saith Life's no derelict of hers. The riding pomp of all the years Her sinews are and bone, saith she. [Ah, if your lips might stir,] Ah, if your lips might stir, With one mood's breath behind, To the touch of a certain mood As easily as it alters To all swift moods but this! But you are afraid to smile And bewitch yourself to a place Where though your moods might alter One mood would come in vain. [There are sweet chains that bind] There are sweet chains that bind And gains that are strange loss. Your ruddy freedom falters And pales at hint of these. You change, bewilder and gleam In a labyrinth of light, But one change calls dark and dumbly To you and calls in vain. [You gave me leave to love] You gave me leave to love you--- In my own way I will. Your leave you gave in your way. In shy delight of loving, The ways we two had met Those ways we still must wander--- There is one thing to forget. We must forget ourselves, sweet, Too much we feel the kiss, Forget the bliss of loving, And strive for God love's bliss. [In half delight of shy delight,] In half delight of shy delight, In a sweetness thrilled with fears, Her eyes on the rich storied night, Reads love and strangely hears Love guests with wintered years. We know the summer-plaited hours, O maiden still plaiting Your men-unruffled curls For fierce loving and hating--- [Frail hours that love to dance] Frail hours that love to dance To hear yon princely sun, His golden countenance Scatters you pale and wan, Scatters your ghostly love That was the breath of a dream, Scatters light from above Till day flows like a stream. The stars fade in the sky Taking our dreams away, Day's banners flame on high In gaudy disarray. [But I am thrown with beauty's] But I am thrown with beauty's breath Climbing my soul, driven in Like a music wherein is pressed All the power that withers the mountain And maketh trees to grow. From the neck of a God your hands are odorous. Now I am made a God and he without you is none. Your eyes still wear the looks of Paradise. I look upon its shining fields and mourn for the outcast angels Who have no Eden now since it shines in your eyes. My soul is a molten cup with brimming music of your mouth; Somewhere is a weeping silence and I feel a happy thief. [A woman's beauty is a strong] A woman's beauty is a strong tree's roots. The tree is space, its branches hidden lutes, Wherefrom such music spreads into the air That all it breathes on doth its spirit share, And all men's souls are drawn beneath and lie Mixed into her as words mix with the sky. And as some words before they mix are stayed And old thoughts live new spirits by their aid, So souls of some men meet the spirit of love That sentinels. A woman's beauty is like kisses shed, A colour heard, or thoughts that have been said. It covers, with infinity between. The memory sees, but 'twixt you and that seen A million ages lie. It is a wave That in old time swept Gods, and did enslave As the broad sea imprisons, savage lands. It is a wind that blows from careful hands The grains of gathered wheat, and golden grains To others bears. It is a diver into seas more strange Than fishes know. No poison makes such change As her swift subtle alchemy. [Amber eyes with ever such little] Amber eyes with ever such little red fires, Face as vague and white as a swan in shadow. [My desires are as the sea] My desires are as the sea Whose white tongues fawn on the breast Of sand and turn it again to sea, Back to itself that prest. My desires feed on me. [Where the rock's heart is hidden] Where the rock's heart is hidden from the sea The unwearied sea whose white tongues fawn upon its breast The rock's heart hidden from the unwearying sea wet cheeks Whose white tongues fawn upon its dumb cold breasts cold cheeks It knows the hunger O as the rock's heart is her heart And my thoughts fawn and my eyes cover her O wonderful sea---it is little rock Her eyes, that are the heavens whose depths reach deep heavensnot to me. [He was mad,] He was mad, Brain drenched by luxury of pulsing blood, While to his heart's throat his cold spirit pressed. And ever rippled waves of golden curls, Rose hue made of his thoughts a coloured fire. [The trees suffer the wind,] The trees suffer the wind, And the sunbeams leap on their mail. The shadows slide from leaf to leaf, And, sudden and brief, Resounds like an avalanche The throats of these things frail. [Heart, is there hope---or is] Heart, is there hope---or is there ordeal still in thy stars' horoscope? Come, the keen years, the fierce years, laughing and cruel, Heap on your trouble. [The brooding stones and the dissolving] The brooding stones and the dissolving hills, The summer's leafy luxury, The winter shrewd, And all thy changing robes, thy myriad forms. [The monster wind prowls ...] The monster wind prowls in the writhen trees, The wind dives in the writhen trees, They strain in angered leash their green, They are only strong in ease. Soft, forward, inarticulate, Warm, wayward, drooping, or aburst, Rushing, it tires, slacks to abate. The wind wakes in the writhen trees [In a concentrated thought ...] In a concentrated thought a sudden noise startles. Sensual motions of nerves Vibrate from hushed sky curves, Helpless, obscene and cruel. My fires must drain that jewel Of all its virgin rays. Crunched in one black amaze My life inert goes out, Dissolves voluptuously. [O spear-girt face too far] O spear-girt face too far Save for the sorcery that makes soft Those points or turns them inward on herself. I cannot cleave through that inviolate tract That virginal [Love, hide thy face--- ...] Love, hide thy face---why in thy land This garden blooms we understand A little---not at all---but men Live not who are not drunk sometime With power of its scents that climb Their towers of soul and melt and sting, The thoughted throng unburnishing, The spiritual shining Rapid the flames and swords, the chains Flash and are flung, we burn, we writhe, The blood is emptied from our veins And wine streams through, fiercely and blithe, The royal flesh whose panting legions [Poets have snared you ...] Poets have snared you in sweet word; Such cage, immortal singing bird, Each soul finds you while tread your eyes Its intricate infinities, Bounding infinity in a mood Whose habit is your roseate hood, To ecstasy---to ecstasy More sweet than Paradise can be, Where every thought and pulse and vein Melts into joy---till sense is fain To cease lest [Her grape green eyes have stained ...] Her grape green eyes have stained in weird Lustrous fantasies the urn Of one mood and ever they burn, And the heart stands there to learn. They are old carvings so long heard In oldest struggle of man's brain One of restlessness to gain, Death dim---fair hair in vain. [Pale mother night, suckling thy brood] Pale mother night, suckling thy brood of stars, My fire, too, yearns for thy giant love, But they are calm, and mine is frenzy fire. [In all Love's heady valour ...] In all Love's heady valour and bold pains Is the wide storehouse for your female gains [A flea whose body shone like] A flea whose body shone like bead Gave me delight as I gave heed. A spider whose legs like stiff thread Made me think quaintly as I read. A rat whose droll shape would dart and flit Was like a torch to light my wit. A fool whose narrow forehead hung A wooden target for my tongue. A meagre wretch in whose generous scum Himself was lost-his dirty tomb. living But the flea crawled too near--- His blood the smattered wall doth smear And the spider being too brave No doctor now can him save. And when the rat would rape my cheese He signed the end of his life's lease. O cockney who maketh negatives, You negative of negatives. SENSUAL Or where absence, silence is, Of fleshly strings whose strains are Paradise And pavin ecstasies For the untravelled ardours leashed in eyes. Youth's fearless wings are spread. O Cynic life! fine mirrors are your walls. O voice and lip unwed, Hands beckon but my own wild shadow calls. Is not love loveliness, Truth beauty and all natural harmony Unstriving happiness, The mystic centre of all unity? Life mirrors love and truth Even as our love and truth within be deep. His own self dazzles youth [Beautiful is the day,] Beautiful is the day, Sighs the beloved night. Why do you fly away When I come with my stars bright? Your gaudy disarray [Wood and forest ...] Wood and forest, drink Of the blue delight, Only of its brink. But to my mind and sight Drink from brink to brink. [I know all men are withered ...] I know all men are withered with yearning--- O forest flame, guarded with swords that are burning, O eyes that sea-like our madness entombs, Gold hair whose rich metal enlocks us in terror [Green thoughts are ...] Green thoughts are Ice block on a barrow Gleaming in July. A little boy with bare feet And jewels at his nose stands by. [I have heard the Gods] I have heard the Gods In their high conference As I lay outside the world Quiet in sleep [In the large manner and luxury] In the large manner and luxury Of a giant who guests In a little world of mortals, He condescends a space His ears to incline, But as though list'ning were a trouble. Who knows! but it were a hazard To break speech on this matter, To bid conference with a doctor! Mayhap cod-liver-oil, Thrice in the day taken, Medicinal might be [Even as a letter burns ...] Even as a letter burns and curis And the mind and heart in the writing blackens, Words that wane as the wind unfurls--- Obliteration never slackens. Fate who wrote it and addressed it here, Life who read it, loved it, called it dear, Peace who slumbered, Love who tore it through. [The thronging glories ringing round ...] The thronging glories ringing round our birth, The angels worshipping, th' adoring kings, The inspired presence, Surely the songs, the worship, and the burden Of light washes beneath the lidded slumber Of the shut soul. [Nature, indeed, the plot you spin's] Nature, indeed, the plot you spin's so stale, And each man's story is so like another, I should advise---it's such a boring tale, Suppress all copies and begin some other. [From your sunny clime] From your sunny clime Dream of earthly time And the chill mist, Wonder at earth's wreck And the sorrow-strewn deck, By friend death unkist. Sailing as for joy, Happy girl and boy, In these waters grim Watch their faces pale, The broken sail, For an idle whim. God's dream, God's whim. [Now think how high a mountain] Now think how high a mountain is, Joy, could this tall oak's branches kiss Its shoulder, less its brow, how blest? If I lie low the skies are drest With its broidered branches stretched across Into the sky-scorned mountain's loss, The sky, it gibbers to forever. Naught is too low to make so high As hope, if we stand right, and sever Waste, the essential to descry. [Violet is the maddest colour] Violet is the maddest colour I know And opal is the colour of dreams, But a girl is the colour of snow, The violet like noon haze she seems And of opal the lights on her brow. [Drowsed in beauty] Drowsed in beauty Of her face Waking fancies Strive to chase. [In the moon's dark fantasy] In the moon's dark fantasy Here is a woman weeping, Having the night for a palace. And here in a house of stone Harlots feast and revel. [Under these skies, that take the hues] Under these skies, that take the hues Of metals locked beneath earth, According as the spirit woos What changing mood to birth. Delicate silver gleaming In threads of tender thought; Gold in a proud dreaming Our dream ships have brought; But the skies of lead When our hearts are dead, And the skies relentless Of an iron petal scentless, That brooding like a shadow Weighs down the sunless meadow. [All pleasures die,] All pleasures die, O clinging lights And wavering glory, Adieu you sigh, Half-told your story, To you we die. [And like the artist who creates] And like the artist who creates From dying things what never dies ... [For one thrilled instant am I] For one thrilled instant am I you, O skies. It passes, I am hunted, and the air Lives with revengeful momentary fires. O wilderness of heaven, Whose profound spaces like some God's blank eyes Roll in a milky terror, move and move, While our fears make vague shuddering imprints there And character such chained-up forms of sorrow That a breath can unloose; in its white depths Dream unnamed gulfs of sudden traps for men. For all men's thoughts go up and form one soul With unimagined might of evil scheming, Wrought by the texture of selfish desires, Of puny plotting, and inspired dreaming. Or if a thought like spray by sudden moon Is lit, that holy amorous instant knows Transplanted time to make twin time in space, My new-born thought touch aeon-dusted thoughts. From softly lidded lights, from breaking gleams, Into a rainbow radiance, some pale light springs, And the dim Sun stands midwife to this child. THE SEARCH Dawn like a flushed rose petal fleck'd with gold Quickened youth's glow. Upon my barb I leap'd While the blank desert's stretchèd leaguers slept, And loosed his bridle of flame from idling cold. [Be the hope or the fear,] Be the hope or the fear, Be the smile or the tear, In the strife of a life On Time's rolling river That rolls on forever. WILD UNDERTONES I wash my soul in colours, in a million undertones, And then my soul shines out---and you read---a poem. [I have pressed my teeth ...] I have pressed my teeth in the heart of May, I have dabbled my lips in the honey of June, And the sun shot keen and the grass laughed gay And the earth was buoyed on the tide of noon. [What songs do fill the pauses] What songs do fill the pauses of our day When action tires and motion begs to stay And life can give to life a little heed? Then when life only seems to pause A life divine from heaven she draws, From labour's earthly trammels freed. [In dimpled depths of smiling innocence,] In dimpled depths of smiling innocence, In dimpled labyrinths of innocence, My sunless sorrow made its rosy grave In laughing liquid eyes that Time had wardened. Fifteen skyey years---my sad soul looked, My sad soul looked and all its sadness vanished. 'WHAT MAY BE, WHAT HATH BEEN, AND WHAT IS NOW?' I said, I have been having some fits of despondency lately; this is what they generally end in, some Byronic sublimity of plaintive caterwauling: What may be, what hath been, and what is now? God! God! if thou art pity, look on me; God! if thou art forgiveness, turn and see The dark within, the anguish on my brow! O! wherefore am I stricken in grief thus low? For no wrong done, or right undone to thee? For, if that thou has made me, what must be Thou hast made too. How canst thou be thy foe To retribute what thou thyself hast done? A little pity, or if that be vain, If tears are dumb since there to hear are none, If that the years mean lingering hours of pain, If rest alone through death's gate is but won, [The grasses tremble and quiver] The grasses tremble and quiver Now at the set of day The host of colours come In gorgeous disarray SUMMER IN WINTER
SIX THOUGHTS Before the winter's over I know a way The summer to recover, The August and the May. Before the month of blossoms And sunny days, I know that which unbosoms Whate'er the summer says. Ah! would you net the season? And chain the sun? For you will flowers do treason? And how is treason done? While still the land lies gleaming And bare and dumb, And love asleep is dreaming Of the warm nights to come, Catch these sweet thoughts in shadow, Bring them to light, At once the fragrant meadow Will flash on sense and sight. Six names of six sweet maidens, Six honey flowers, Name, and each name unladens Its load of summer hours. Ruth, joyous as a July Song-throbbing noon, And rosy as a newly Flushed eager rose in June. The August's dreamy languor Is Maisy sweet. Drowsed summer when she's sang her Rich songs and rests her feet. The stately smile and gracious Of an April wood Is tall and fair Gertrude. And like a clear May morning When birds call clear And quickly to each other, Is little Lily dear. And ripe as buxom Autumn When she holds hands With August, fruit enwroughten, Fair sumptuous Ethel stands. Sweet gleams of dawn and twilight, Sunshine in shade, Is Lena calm as starlight. Now the six thoughts are said. L------AND M------ Once on a time in a land so fair That the air you breathed was as wine, And everything that you looked on there Made you at once divine, There lived two maidens, little and sweet, Whose dear names I may not tell Because they would call me blab and cheat, Which would be terrible. The eldest whom I will just call L, Was most ladylike and smart, And of M the youngest, she had ways that--- well, One had to guard one's heart. And in this land, as of course you'd guess, They did not live all alone, And all the blessings that God could bless These two could call their own. A mother, so wise and good and kind, A father as young as they In heart, who while he formed their mind, He did not mind their play. They were taught music, and painting, and all Of culture's thousand pothers, To dance and to play the bat and ball, And also feel for others. But sad to say, most sad it should be, They were not always good; Although they looked so fairily, They oft did what no fairy would. When they were set to drawing flowers Then Lily in pique would say, 'I hate drawing, especially flowers, Let's throw the flowers away'. And Maisy, that buxom rosy Miss, Would set the teacher riddles, And his brain with 'Can you solve this and this?' Buzzed as if with a hundred fiddles.