And never leaves me through the desolate years.
Go, take your hell to men who never lived,
Save as the slow world wendeth, sluggish, dull.
Even they must suffer also, poor bleak ones,
Then is your feeble comfort nothing worth.
You tell me to have hope, God will forgive.
O Priest, can God forgive a sin like mine?
You say He is all-loving, did He lie
With me that night amid the eyeless dark,
And writhe with me, and whisper, "Save thyself,
That way to north lies cold and age and death,
And awful failure on men's awèd tongues,
To linger years hereafter; Southward lies
Home heat and love, and sweet, blood-pulsing life,--
Life, with its morns and eves and glad to-morrows,
And joy and hope for many days to be?"
Did He, I say, lie with me there that night,
And know that awful tragedy beyond,
And my poor tragedy enacted there?
Then must He feel Him since as I have felt,
And live that hideous misery in His heart.
And, knowing this, I say unto thee, priest,
He could not be a God and say, forgive.
You plead my soul's salvation the one end
And aim of all my thought; then hearken, priest,
For this my sin hath made me more than wise:--
That seems to me the one great sin I sinned
In selling all to save mine evil self.
Stay, hearken, priest, and haunt me not with hopes
As futile as those icy-fingered winds
That stirred the canvas there that arctic night.
I bid thee hark and mumble not thy prayers
Like August bees heard in a summer room,
That drone afar, but keep them for the dead,
The dull-eared dead who sleep and heed them not.
Then hearken, priest, and learn thee of my woe,
For I have lain afar on northern nights,
By star-filled wastes, and conned it o'er and o'er,
And thought on God, and life, and many things,
And all the baffling mystery of the dark.
And I have held that awful rendezvous
Of naked self with self alone and bare,
And knew myself as men have never known;--
Have fought the duel, flashing hilt to hilt,
And blade to blade, of flesh and spirit there,
Until I lay a weak and wounded thing,
Like some poor, mangled bird the sportsman leaves,
Writhing and twisting there amid the dark.
You talk of ladders leading up to light,
Of windows bursting on the perfect day,
Of dawns grown ruddy on the blackest night.
Yea, I have groped about the muffled walls,
And beat my spirit's prison all in vain,
Only to find them shrouded fold on fold;
And still the cruel, icy stars look down,
And my dread memory stayeth with me still.
It was a strange, mad quest we went upon,
To seek the living in the lifeless north.
For days and days and long, lone, loveless nights
We set our faces toward the arctic sky,
And threaded wastes of that lone wilderness,
Beyond the lands of summer and glad spring,
Beyond the regions kind of flower and bird,
Past glint horizons of auroral gleams,
A haunted world of winter's wizened sleep,
Where death, a giant, aged, and stark and wan,
Kept fast the entrance of those sunless caves
Where hides the day beyond the icy seas.
Long day by day a desolation went
Where our wan faces fared, o'er all that waste;
And I was young and filled with love of life,
And fear of ugly death as some weird black,
The enemy of love and youth and joy;
A lonely, ruined bridge at edge of night,
Fading in blackness at the outer end.
And those were cold, stern men I went with there,
Who held their lives as men do hold a gift
Not worth the keeping; men who told dread tales,
That made a madness in me of that waste
And all its hellish, lonely solitude,
And set my heart abeating for the south,
Until that awful desolation ringed
My reason round, and shrunk my fearful heart.
Yea, Father, I had saved them but for this;--
Why did they send me on alone, ahead,
Poor me, the only weak one of that band,
Who was too much of coward to show my fear?
Why did life give me that mad fear of death,
To make me selfish at the very last?
Why did God give those men into my hand,
And leave them victim to a craven fear
That walked those lonely wastes in form of man?
No, Father, take your cross, mine is a pain
That only distant ages can out-burn.
Forgiveness! No, you know not what you say;
You churchmen mumble words as charmers do,
And talk of God and love so glib and pat,
And think you reach men's souls and give them light,
When all the time my spirit is to you
A land unfound, a region far-removed,
Where walk dim ghosts of thoughts and fears and pains
You never dreamed of. What know you of souls
Like this of mine that hath girt misery's sum,
And found the black with which God veils His face?
You say the church absolves, you speak of peace;
You talk of what not even God can do,
Be He but what you make Him. In my light,--
And mine is light of one who knows the case,
The facts, the reasons, and hath weighed them too,--
There is but one absolver, the absolved.
For I, since that far, fatal, arctic night,
Have been alone in some dread, shadowy court,
Where I was judge and guilty prisoner too.
Words, words are empty; were life built on words,
How rich the poor would grow, the weak be strong,
The hateful loving, and the scornful weak!--
The king would be a peasant, and the poor
A king in his own right; the murderer, red
From his foul guilt, would pass to God's own breast,
And all damned things, long damned of earth's consent,
And some dread law much older far than we,
Would blossom righteous under heaven's face.
Still fared we north across that frozen waste
Of icy horror ringed with awful night,
To seek the living in a world of death;
And as we fared a terror grew and grew
About my heart like madness, till I dreamed
A vague desire to flee by night and creep,
By steel-blue windless plain and haunted wood,
And wizened shore and headland, once more south.
There, as we went, the days grew wan and shrunk,
And nights grew vast and weird and beautiful,
Walled with flame-glories of auroral light,
Ringing the frozen world with myriad spears
Of awful splendor there across the night.
And ever anon a shadowy, spectral pack
Of gleaming eyes and panting, lurid tongues
Haunted the lone horizon toward the south.
Then life ebbed lower in the bravest heart,
And spake the leader, "If in ten more days
We chance on nothing, then will we return,
And set our faces once more to the south."
For that dread land began to close us in,
With cold and hunger, bit at our poor limbs,
Till life grew there a feeble, flickering flame,
Amid the snows and ice-floes of that land.
Then ten days crept out shrunk and gray and wan,
With nothing but the lonely, haunted waste.
Then spake the leader, "If in five more days!"
Then parcelled out those five gray, haggard days,
While life to me grew like an ebbing tide,
That surged far out from some dread death-like strand.
And horror came upon me like the night,
That seemed to gird the world in desolate walls.
Then spake the leader, "If in three more days!"
But when the third day waned we came, at last,
Unto the shores of some dread, lonely sea,
That gloomed to north and night, and far beyond,
Where ruined straits and headlands loomed and sank,
There seemed the awful endings of the world.
Then spake the leader, "Let us go not yet,
But stay a little ere we turn us south,
Perchance, poor souls, they might be somewhere here."
And then to me, "You go, for you are young
And strong, and life throbs quickest in your veins,
And you have eyes more strong to see, for ours
Are dimmed by the dread frost-mists of this land;
And creep out there beyond yon gleaming ledge,
And bring me word of what you there may see.
And if you meet no sign of mast or sail,
Or hull or wreck, or mark of living soul,
Then we will turn our faces to the south;
For this great ocean's vastness hems us in,
And death here nightly creeps from strand to strand,
And binds with girth of black the gleaming world."
Then, whispering "Madness, madness," to the dark,
I crept me fearful o'er that gleaming ledge,
And saw but night and awful gulfs of dark,
And weird ice-mountains looming desolate there,
And far beyond the vastness of that sea.
And then--O God, why died I not that hour?--
Amid the gleaming floes far up that shore,
So far it seemed that man's foot scarce could go,
The certain, tapering outline of a mast,
And one small patch of rag; and then I felt
No man could ever live to reach that place,
And horror seized me of that haunted world,
That I should die there and be froze for aye,
Amid the ice-core of its awful heart.
Then crept I back, the weak ghost of a life,
A miserable, shaking, coffined fear,
And spake, "I saw but ice and winds and dark,
And the dread vastness of that desolate sea."
Again he spake, "Creep out once more and look;
Perchance your sight was misled by the gleam."
And then once more I crept out on that ledge,
And saw again the night and awful dark,
And that poor beckoning mast that haunts me yet;
And as I lay those moments seemed to grow,
As men have felt in looking down long years,
And there I chose 'twixt evil and the good,
And took the evil; then began my hell,
And back I crept with that black lie on lips,
And spake again, "I only saw the night,
And those weird mountains and the awful deep."
At that he moaned and spake, "Poor souls! poor souls!
Then they are doomed if ever men were doomed."
Whereat a sudden, great auroral flame
Filled all the heaven, lighting wastes and sea,
And came a wondrous shock across the world,
Like sounds of far-off battle where hosts die,
As if God thundered back mine awful lie,
And I fell in a heap where all was black.
When next I lived, we were full three days south,
And two had died upon that dreadful march;
The memory came, and I went laughing mad,
But kept mine awful secret to this hour.
No, priest, you can do nothing; pain like mine
Must smoulder out in its own agony,
Till there be nought but ashes at the last.
But something 'mid the pauses of the dark
Doth teach me that I am not all alone,
For I have dreamed in my dread, maddest hour,
An awful shadow, blacker than my black,
Went ever with me. Hearken to me now:
I never felt a hand or saw a face,
I never knew a comfort more than sleep,
The winters they are only barren snows,
And age is hard, and death waits at the last.
But I have felt in some dim, shapeless way,
As memories long remembered after youth,
That back of all there is some mighty will,
Beyond the little dreams that we are here,
Beyond the misery of our days and years,
Beyond the outmost system's outmost rim,
Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim,
A wondrous mercy that is working still.
Her Look
Time may set his fingers there,
Fix the smiles that curve about
Her winsome mouth, and touch her hair,
Put the curves of youth to rout;
But the "something" God put there,
That which drew me to her first,
Not the imps of pain and care,
Not all sorrow's fiends accurst,
Can kill the look that God put there.
Something beautiful and rare,
Nothing common can destroy;
Not all the leaden load of care,
Not all the dross of earth's alloy;
Better than all fame or gold,
True as only God's own truth,
It is something all hearts hold
Who have loved once in their youth.
That sweet look her face doth hold
Thus will ever be to me;
Joy may all her pinions fold,
Care may come and misery;
Through the days of murk and shine,
Though the roads be foul or fair,
I will see through love's glad eyne
That sweet look that God put there.
The Wayfarer
He woke with the dawning
Met eyes with the sun,
And drank the wild rapture
Of living begun.
But he went with the moment
To follow the clue,
Ere the first red of dawning
Had drunk the blue dew.
Follow him, follow him,
Where the world will,
Under the sunlight
By meadow and hill.
Down the blue distance,
Round the world's rim,
Where the hosts of the future
Are horning for him.
Follow him, call to him,
Pray to him, Sweet,
Tell him the morning
Is fresh for his feet;
Sing him the rapture,
The glamour, the gleam
Of pearly dew-azure
That curtains the stream;
Sing the glad thrushnote
That never knew pain,
But sing him and call him
And pray him in vain.
For ere the red dewdrop
In sunlight was pearled,
He heard that mad ocean
That whelms the world.
Yea, heard that voice calling
Past sunlight and dew,
That rarest, alluringest,
Ever heart knew.
That siren of sunrise,
That weaver of songs,
Till the heart of man hearkens
And gladdens and longs,
Till o'er the blue distance,
As opens the rose,
The yearning impulsion
Of all his life goes;
And many a dragon
Chimera so grim,
Down the dream of the morning
Is vanquished by him.
Yea, sing to him, call him through
Heartache in vain.
But the gladdest day wakened
To glory, must wane;
And the noonday he longed for
To fierce light will burn,
And the battles he wages
Grow bitter and stern;
And the surge of life sink
To the moan of a bar;
And the hopes of the morning
Grow hollow and far;
And the road that he follows
Less luring and true,
Till he longs for a whiff
Of the morning he knew.
For he hears thy far singing,
That lures not in vain,
Till he comes to thy beauty
Of dawning again.
But the roads of returning
Are never the same
As the sweet dewy meadows
Of morning we came.
But the song of alluring
Is ever as true,
To lead the heart back
To the beauty it knew;
And vain the mad magic
Where life's glories burn,
For the heart of the yearner
Who longs to return:
For he hears that voice calling,
Voiced never in vain,
To world-heart aweary
For all dreamings fain;
And he hears the low grasses,
The green tents of sod,
From roof-trees of slumber,
As voices of God;
And the spinning and turning,
Of madness amain
Fade out from his dreaming
As night from the pane,
When the rosy-red splendor
In dewdreams impearled,
From ashes of slumber,
Lifts over the world.
Yea, back from those echoes
Of bugles that blew,
Heart-weary, life-broken,
He wanders to you;
Yea, back to his truest,
Those far broken gleams
Of that rosy-red, morning-lit
House of his dreams.
Where all hours were splendid,
And all hearts held true,
In those glory-lit visions
Of beauty and you.
Yea, call to him, cry to him,
Mother of all;
You lit his youth's torches,
You saw their flames fall.
You loved him, upheld him,
This child of thy breast,
And now give him surcease
In dreamings and rest.
Thy note was the one note
He heard in the fray,
That bore him far out
In the heat of the day;
Thy call is the one call
That beckons him home,
When day-fires darken
By forest and foam.
When o'er all the heartache,
The visions untrue,
Love draws her dim curtains
Of duskfire and dew.
While the bells ring for slumber
As out of the deep,
Come pleading those velvet-winged
Spirits of sleep.
And there at thy doorways
Of slumber he stands,
Like him of old Horeb,
And sees his heart's lands;
And under the white awe
Of planets that swim,
Knows dawning and even
As one world to him.
To the Ottawa
Out of the northern wastes, lands of winter and death,
Regions of ruin and age, spaces of solitude lost;
You wash and thunder and sweep,
And dream and sparkle and creep,
Turbulent, luminous, large,
Scion of thunder and frost.
Down past woodland and waste, lone as the haunting of even,
Of shrivelled and wind-moaning night when
Winter hath wizened the world;
Down past hamlet and town
By marshes, by forests that frown,
Brimming their desolate banks,
Your tides to the ocean are hurled.
Departure
Old house now ruined, wrecked and gray,
Home once enshrined of love's delight
And all glad promise of the May,
Now hushed in shades of wintry night,--
Once garment of a thousand loves,
Now but a shroud of glooming stone,--
While sad October moans and roves,
Old house, old house, we are alone!
We are alone; yea, you and I,
Who dreamed old summers in their prime;
Now sad and late, to see them die
Along this ruined verge of time.
Old rooms now empty, once so bright,--
Staircases climbed of gladdening feet,
Dark windows erstwhile filled with light
Where now but rains of autumn beat:--
Where now but lorn months call and call
And sea and gust and night complain,--
With ghost-boughs shadowing on the wall,
Or dead vines knocking at the pane.
Old place, whose ceilings, walls and floors
Still redolent of love and May;
Once more, once more I leave your doors,
Into the night I take my way.
Huge yawning hearths, once flaming bright
On many a well-loved face and form
Long gathered out unto the night
To meet the vastness and the storm,--
Into the night; where I, too, go,
Beyond your sheltering walls and doors;
Where death's October drives his woe
Over a thousand midnight moors,
Beyond your sheltering, where I beat
To sleep with stars of dark o'ergleamed,
Or breast the night of moan and sleet
To meet that morn a world hath dreamed.
Hath dreamed? Hope-hungering heart hath read,
And carolled morning-lifted lark!
Yea, back of all this muffled dread
Perchance some splendor rifts the dark.
Yea, though no magic reach its gleams,
Nor heart of doubting prove it true,
Old house, beloved, of my dead dreams,
While I go forth from love and you.
Phaethon
I Phaethon: dwelling in that golden house,
Which Hephaistos did build for my great sire,
Old Helios, king of glowing heaven and day;
Knowing this life but mortal in its span,
Hedged in by puling youth and palsied age,
Where poor men crawl like insects, knowing pain
And mighty sorrow to the gates of death;
Besought the god my father by his love,
To grant me that which I did long for most
Of all things great in earth and heaven and sea,
The which he granting in his mighty love,--
Of all things splendid under the splendid sky
Built of old by toil of ancient gods,
To me the dearest; for one round golden day,
To stand in his great chariot built of fire,
And chase the rosy hours from dawn to dusk,
Guiding his fleeting steeds o'er heaven's floors.
He gave to me.--No god yet brake his word.--
Speaking to me in sorrow: "O my son,
Know what thy foolish pride hath made for thee.
That mortal life which is to men a span,
From childhood unto youth, and manhood's prime,
Reaching on out to happy olden age,
For thee must shrink into one woeful day.
For, O my son, impetuous in thy pride,
Who would be as the gods and ape their ways,
And sacrilegious leave thy mortal bounds,--
Know thou must die upon that baleful day,
That terrible day of days thou mountest up
To ride that chariot never mortal rode,
And drive those steeds that never man hath driven.
Then I: "My father, know me, thine own son,
Better to me to live one day a god,
Going out in some great flame of death,
Than live this weary life of common men,
Misunderstood, misunderstanding still,
Half wakeful, moving dimly in a dream,
Confused, phantasmic, men call history;
Chasing the circles of the perishing suns,
The summers and dim winters, hating all,
Heart-eaten for a longing ne'er attained,
Despising all things named of earth or heaven,
Or mortal birth that they should ever be;
Knowing within this mystery of my being,
This curbed heredity, lies a latent dream
Of some old vanished, banished, lease of being,
When life was life and man's soul lived its hour,
Uncurbed, uncabined, like the mighty gods,
Vast, splendid, capable, and heraclean,
To drain the golden beaker of his days."
Thus I: "My father, I am over weary,
Chained in this summer-plot of circumstance,
Beaten by fearful custom, childish, chidden,
Hounded of cruel wolves of superstition,
And rounded by a petty wall of time,
Plodding the dreary years that wend their round,
Aping the sleeping sensual life of beasts,
Fearful of all things, dreading mostly death,
Past pain and age and all their miseried end,
Where all must rot, who smile and weep and sleep,
And be a part of all this grim corruption.
Nay, better to me than the long-measured draught,
Trickling out through many anxious years,
Iron-eaten, haggard, to the place of death--
To drain my flagon of life in one glad draught,--
To live, to love, aspire, and dare all things;
Be all I am and others ought to be,
Real man or demi-god, to blossom my rose,
To scale my heights, to live my vastest dream,
To climb, to be, and then, if chance my fate,
To greatly fall."
Then my great father, laden
With woe divine: "My son, take thou thy way;
As thou hast chosen, thus 't will be to thee;"
And passing, darkened down his godlike face,
And shadowed splendor thence forevermore.
'Twas night ambrosial down the orient meads,
With stars like winking pearls far-studding heaven,
And dews all glorious on the bending stem,
Odorous, passionate as the rose of sleep
Half-budded on the throbbing heart of night,
And in the east a glowing sapphire gloomed;
When I awoke and lifted up mine eyes,
And saw through rose and gold and vermeil dyes,
And splendid mists of azure hung with pearl,
Half-hid, half-seen, as life would apprehend,
As in a sleep, the presence of dim death
And fate and terrible gods, the car of day.
Like morn within the morning, glad, it hung,
Light hid in light, swift blinding all who saw,
Dazzled, its presence; motionless though vibrate,
Where it did swing athwart the deep-welled night,
The heart of morning in the folds of dark,
Pulsating sleep, and conquering death with life;
So glowed its glory, folded, cloud in cloud,
Gold within azure, purple shut in gold,
The bud of morning pulsing ere it break,
And spill its splendors many vermeil-dyed,
Reddening Ocean to his outmost rim.
Here charmèd dreams and drowsèd magic hung,
And wingèd hopes and rosy joys afloat
Filled all the air, and I was quick aware
That this was life, and this mine hour supreme,
To seize and act and be one with the gods.
So dreamed I reckless when to think, to act,
And moved, elate, with swift life-flaming step
Athwart the meadow's budding asphodels,
Song on my lip, and life at heart and eye,
Exultant, breathing flame of pride and power.
Joy rose and sang, a bird, across the fields,
Hope's rosy wings shot trembling to the blue,
And Courage with dauntless steps before me went,
Brushing the veils of fierce cobwebby fires.
And there, before me, sprawled grim ancient Power,
A hideous ethiope, huge in sodden sleep,
The golden reins clutched in his titan hands.
I snatched, leaped, shouted; morning rose in flame,
And ashweed paled to lily, lily blushed
To ruddy crocus, crocus flamed to rose,
And out of all, borne on the floors of light,
I floated, gloried, up the orient walls,
And all things woke, and sang of conquering day.
Higher, yet higher, out of fiery mists,
Filling those meadows of the dew-built dawn,
Gloried and glorying, power clutched in my hand,
Wreathed about in terrible splendors, I drave,
Glowing, the dawn's gold coursers, champing steam
Of snow and pearly foam from golden bridles,
Forged in blue eidolon forges of the night,
Beaten on steely anvils of the stars.
These, champing, reared their fetlocks; breathing flame,
In red, dew-draining lances, thundered on,
'Whelming night, as golden stair by stair
They climbed the glimmering bridgeway of the day.
Far under, wreathed in mists, old ocean swayed;
And, cyclops-like, the bearded mountains hung.
Vast shining rivers with their brimming floors
And broad curved courses gleamed and glanced and shone,
And loneliness and gloom and gray despair
With sombre hauntings fled to shuddering night
Hidden in caves and coral glooms of seas.
Low down the east the morn's ambrosial meads
Sank in soft splendors. Sphering out below,
Gilded in morning, anchored the patient earth,
Mountain and valley, ocean and wide plain,
Opening to dawn's young footsteps where we wheeled,
And blossomed wide the rosebud of the day.
Glory was mine, but greater, sense of power,
Nor marred by fear, as loftier we climbed,
With glinting hoofs, that clanged the azure bridge
That arched from dawning up to flaming noon.
Dauntless my soul, and fiery-glad my heart,
And "vastness," "vastness," sang through all my being,
As gloved with adamant I guided on
The day's red coursers up their flaming hill,
To reach the mighty keystone of the day.
All things conspired to build my upward road:
The fitful winds of morning, the soft clouds,
That fleece-like swept my cheek, the azure glint
Of ocean swaying, restless, on his rim,
Where slept the continents like a serpent curled
In sleep, leviathan, huge, about the world.
Then sudden all my waking turned to dream,
A madness wherein, hideous, all things hung.
Thought fled confused, and awful apprehension
Shadowed my spirit, power and reason fled;
And, maddening, day's red coursers thundered on,
Uncurbed, unguided by my palsied hand.
Then with loud ruin, blundering from the bridge,
Through space went swaying, now high up, now down,
Scattering conflagration and fierce death
O'er earth's shrunk verges where their scorchings scarred.