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.