'TIS the time o' the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
The green like a breaker rolls steady up the branch,
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
In jets of angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.
'Tis the time o' the year the marsh is full of sound,
And good and glorious it is to smell the living ground.
The crimson-headed catkin shakes above the pasture-bars,
The daisy takes the middle field and spangles it with stars,
And down the hedgerow to the lane the primroses do crowd,
All coloured like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!
'Tis the time o' the year, in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The rocks are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling's golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.
'Tis the time o' the year I turn upon the height
To watch from my harrow the dance of going light;
And if before the sun be hid, come slowly up the vale
Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,
Hey, but there's many a March for me, and many and many a lass!--
I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.
_The Japanese Anemone_
ALL summer the breath of the roses around
Exhales with a delicate passionate sound;
And when from a trellis, in holiday places,
They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,
A lad in the lane must slacken his paces.
Fragrance of these is a voice from a bower:
But low by the wall is my odourless flower,
So pure, so controlled, not a fume is above her,
That poet or bee should delay there and hover;
For she is a silence, and therefore I love her.
And never a mortal by morn or midnight
Is called to her hid little house of delight;
And she keeps from the wind, on his pillages olden,
Upon a true stalk in rough weather upholden,
Her winter-white gourd with the hollow moon-golden.
While ardours of roses contend and increase,
Methinks she has found how noble is peace,
Like a spirit besought from the world to dissever,
Not absent to men, though resumed by the Giver,
And dead long ago, being lovely for ever.
_Orisons_
ORANGE and olive and glossed bay-tree,
And air of the evening out at sea,
And out at sea on the steep warm stone,
A little bare diver poising alone.
Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves,
Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves,
"I am!" he cries to his glorying heart,
And unto he knows not what: "THOU art!"
He leaps, he shines, he sinks and is gone:
He will climb to the golden ledge anon.
Perfecter rite can none employ,
When the god of the isle is good to a boy.
_The Inner Fate: a Chorus_
NOT weak with eld
The stars beheld
Proud Persia coming to her doom;
Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed,
The long luxurious galleys lost
Their souls at Actium.
Not outer arts
Of hostile hearts
Seduced the arm of France to be
The wreckage of his wars at last,
The orphan of the kingdoms, cast
Upon the mothering sea.
Man evermore doth work his will,
And evermore the gods are still,
Applauding him alone who stands
Too just for Heaven-accusing groans,
But in his house of havoc owns
The doing of his hands:
Transgressor, yet divinely taught
To suffer all, blaspheming naught,
When fair-begun must foul conclude:
Himself progenitor of death
Who breeds, within, the only breath
Can kill beatitude.
_The Acknowledgment_
SINCE first I knew it our divine employ
To beat beyond the reach of soiling care,
As at Philippi, well of doom aware,
The Prætor called and heard the singing-boy;
Since first my soul so jealous was of joy,
That any facile linden-bloom in air,
Or fall of water on a wildwood stair,
Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy;
Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled
Long, long, at such august amends up-piled,
Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop
Death's aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup,
On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child,
Immortals! unto You will drink it up.
_By the Trundle-bed_
LOST love, be never beyond Love's calling!
For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet
As fontal water in Arden falling,
As first-mown hay in the April heat:
To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden,
And bring to bloom in the outer cold,
Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden,
Our son that is like you, and six years old;
And lest his worth be the worth unreal,
To ward him not from the mortal blast,
But suffer your own, through a long ordeal,
Verily like you to be at the last,
And hear men murmur, if so he merit
In your old place with your look to arise:
"The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?--
You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes."
_Arboricide_
A WORD of grief to me erewhile:
_We have cut the oak down, in our isle._
And I said: "Ye have bereaven
The song-thrush and the bee,
And the fisher-boy at sea
Of his sea-mark in the even;
And gourds of cooling shade, to lie
Within the sickle's sound;
And the old sheep-dog's loyal eye
Of sleep on duty's ground;
And poets of their tent
And quiet tenement.
Ah, impious! who so paid
Such fatherhood, and made
Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade."
For the hewn oak a century fair,
A wound in earth, an ache in air.
And I said: "No pillared height
With a summer daïs over,
Where a dryad fled her lover
Through the long arcade of light;
Nor 'neath Arcturus rolleth more,
Since the loud leaves are gone,
Between the shorn cliff and the shore,
Pan's organ antiphon.
Some nameless envy fed
This blow at grandeur's head:
Some breathed reproach, o'erdue,
Degenerate men, ye drew!
Hence, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew."
_The Cherry Bough_
IN a new poet's and a new friend's honour,
Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting,
Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome
Here in my garden,
Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses,
And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting,
One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries.
Oh, naught is absent,
Oh, naught but you, kind head that far in prison
Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god's pity
Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels
Were once so plenty;
Nor dreams, from revel and strange faces turning,
How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you
I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden
With your rich verses!
Since, long ago, in other gentler weather,
Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it
(Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother
Glad with your gladness),
What has befallen in the world of wonder,
That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet colour,
And you, and you that fed our eyes with beauty,
Are sapped and rotten?
Alas! When my young guests have done with singing,
I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden's glory,
And hold it high among them, and say after:
"O my poor Ovid,
"Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember
For the clear time when we were boys together,
These tears at home are shed; and with you also
Your bough is dying."
_The Wild Ride_
I HEAR in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.
Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle
Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.
The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.
Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb,
And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam:
Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.
A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle,
A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty:
We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.
(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses,
All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.)
We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil.
Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers that follow.
_Bedesfolk_
WHO is good enough to be
Near the never-stainèd sea?
Ah, not I,
Who thereby
Only sigh:
_Pray for me._
Standing underneath some free
Innocent magnanimous tree,
To be true,
There anew
Must I sue:
_Pray for me._
Ere I pass on hilly lea
Fellow-lives of glad degree,
Without shame,
Name by name
These I claim:
_Pray for me._
Fail not, then, thou kingly sea!
Aid the needy, sister tree!
March herds,
Ye have words!
April birds,
_Pray for me_!
_In a City Street_
THOUGH sea and mount have beauty and this but what it can,
Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,
The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,
The dread endearing stain of time,
The sullied heart of man.
Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,
That where it dare not enter steals in shrouded passion by;
And mine the saffron river-sails,
And every plane-tree that avails
To rest an urban eye;
The bells, the dripping gable, the tavern's corner glare;
The cab in firefly darting; the barrel-organ air,
While one by one, or two by two
The hatless babes are waltzing through
The gutters of the Square.
Not on Thessalian headlands of song and old desire
My spirit chose her pleasure-house, but in the London mire:
Long, long alone she loves to pace,
And find a music in this place
As in a minster choir.
O names of awe and rapture! O deeds of legendry!
Still is it most of joy within your altered pale to be,
Whose very ills I fain would slake
Mine angels are, and help to make
In Hell a Heaven for me.
_Florentin_
_A.D. MDCCCXC_
HEART all full of heavenward haste, too like the bubble bright
On wild little waters floating half of an April night,
Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light,
Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be
Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea:
Whither, through troubled valleys, we also follow thee.
_A Song of the Lilac_
ABOVE the wall that's broken,
And from the coppice thinned,
So sacred and so sweet
The lilac in the wind!
For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.
In tears it long was buried,
And trances wrapt it round;
Oh, how they wake it now,
The fragrance and the sound!
For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.
_Monochrome_
SHUT fast again in Beauty's sheath
Where ancient forms renew,
The round world seems above, beneath,
One wash of faintest blue,
And air and tide so stilly sweet
In nameless union lie,
The little far-off fishing fleet
Goes drifting up the sky.
Secure of neither misted coast
Nor ocean undefined,
Our flagging sail is like the ghost
Of one that served mankind,
Who in the void, as we upon
This melancholy sea,
Finds labour and allegiance done,
And Self begin to be.
_Saint Francis Endeth his Sermon_
"AND now, my clerks who go in fur or feather
Or brighter scales, I bless you all. Be true
To your true Lover and Avenger, whether
By land or sea ye die the death undue.
Then proffer man your pardon; and together
Track him to Heaven, and see his heart made new.
"From long ago one hope hath in me thriven,
Your hope, mysterious as the scented May:
Not to Himself your titles God hath given
In vain, nor only for our mortal day.
O doves! how from The Dove shall ye be driven?
O darling lambs! ye with The Lamb shall play."
_An Estray_
WELL we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream:
Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,
For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd's stave,
For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.
While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering,
And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,
Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast
Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,
As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay,
Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?
Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain
Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,
As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light,
How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!
Lest captivity be o'er, lest thou glide away, and so
From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.
_Friendship Broken_
I
WE chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,
Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,
Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke
Strange things and deep as any poet penned,
Such truth as never truth again can mend,
Whatever art we use, what gods invoke;
It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke:
Be what it may, it had a solemn end.
Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne
Are foeman vassals; pale astrologers,
Each a wise skeptic of the other's star.
Silently, as we went our ways alone,
The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters,
Drew high between us his majestic bar.