SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP
SONNETS
FROM A PRISON CAMP
BY ARCHIBALD ALLAN BOWMAN
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, W.
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXIX
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
FOREWORD
For allowing this slight volume to see the light of day I have but one
excuse to offer. The situation to which these verses are the emotional
reaction represents a very real and serious piece of experience. It
is no mere poetical exaggeration to say that in the first days of
captivity at least, the writing of the sonnets was a labour that “stood
between my soul and madness,” and I cannot help feeling that what,
under one of the heaviest blows that can befall a soldier, has meant so
much to me, may have in it something that will raise it at times above
the personal to the level of general human interest.
It ought to be a pleasure to acknowledge generosity in an enemy; and
I wish to express my indebtedness to Captain Hohnholz, Commandant of
the Prison-Camp at Hesepe, to whose kindness I owe it that I am able to
offer the sonnets as they stand for publication.
Offizier--Gefangenenlager
HESEPE, _17th August 1918_
PROEM
He who hath never from behind toothed wire
Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude,
Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood
The embers of another day expire
In glory welling westward, like the pyre
Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood
Bears dwindling into that infinitude
That great souls end in; then around the fire
Of his own musings, lodering through the bars
Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn
His lost felicity--can ne’er divine
The vastness of the common things that line
Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim
Infinity with galaxies of stars.
RASTATT, _26th April 1918_
CONTENTS
PAGE
IN THE FIELD 1
THE NADIR 19
ON THE MARCH 23
RASTATT 33
HESEPE 45
THOUGHTS OF HOME 55
INFLUENCES 63
WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS 91
ENGLAND AND OXFORD 107
HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE 117
INTERLUDE 123
ENGLAND 129
SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP
IN THE FIELD
I
Two hours before the mist of morning paled
Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,
And spectral day stole on the world with shame,
Into the night unsentinelled there sailed
The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed
Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim
Window and tile down clattering from the frame
Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,
And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept
From corridors by fitful candle; then
Gathered scared children down the winding stair,
And only whispers passed where no one slept.
And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when
The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.
RASTATT, _27th April_
II
“Stand to!” The warning word was hardly said,
And had not moved a man, when round and round
Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground,
And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread,
A soldier’s morning bite. Still overhead
Murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found
Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound.
Breakfast began, but not a man was fed
Ere the growled “Fall in” menacingly proved
The dog’s bone kinsman to a soldier’s meal.
We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew;
And it was seen the world again had moved,
As at the impulse of a groaning wheel,
Unto some issue, from that first “Stand to!”
RASTATT, _27th April_
III
Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed
What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist,
Massing to bear down on us. No one wist
What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed
Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed
Than many a day had happed, of trials the least,
Vexatious interruption of a feast,
A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed.
But still the thickening barrage combed the air;
Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke;
And momently the cobbled roadway shook
With sickening thud where freighted monsters took
The earth with double thunder. Here and there
Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.
RASTATT, _27th April_
IV
The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread
To bind or bar thy holders to their own;
But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown
Over these sullen waters, lightly shed.
Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread
Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown
Haggard. “What are you?” “Durhams.” “What is known?”
“Our billet down, our officers are dead.
We seek a new position further on.”
Position! Little recked they then how steep
The way, how sure the ending. They were gone,
And the keen harvester prepared to reap
In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn
Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.
RASTATT, _28th April_
V
The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. ’Tis there
We concentrate. There hung in the void street
A local silence, which our sudden feet
With lesser clangour startled in its lair,
While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air
Could break the boding hush of that retreat.
So in a thunder-storm the quickened beat
Of one’s own startled pulses may impair
The silence of a room which the onfall
Of shafted noise o’erhead left deadly still.
Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan
The figured sounds which figured space do fill,
Far or more near. ’Tis sure the hodding van
Broke forward into silence virginal.
RASTATT, _29th April_
VI
Waiting! A soldier’s sacrament of strain,
The eager cup of poising destiny,
That may not pass from him till it is dry,
And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain.
Full many in this demented play must drain
That cup but once. Full many a soul must try
Its sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie
Of a life’s landscape, smitten from the brain.
Then in a falling twilight of the mind
Their way into that temple oft they grope,
Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip
Life’s vesture of live colours, meaning, hope,
Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind,
While the word “Fate” drops dreaming from the lip.
RASTATT, _29th April_
VII
What of our comrades in the forward post?
The fog of war but deepened with the day.
We knew that in that troubled ocean lay
Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast.
And what of yonder never-ending host
Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay,
Pale sergeant. Do you bleed? You came that way?
What is the tidings? Is the front line lost?
“Nothing is known of posts that lie before
Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire
Has cut them off who shouldered the first load.”
Can they live through it? “They can not retire,
Nor can you reinforce. I know no more
But this. No living thing comes down that road.”
RASTATT, _30th April_
VIII
Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept
The morning out in vapour shot with fire,
That struck now here now there in random ire
Bloodily something human down, yet kept
Alone stagnation at arm’s length. Men leapt
Suddenly to their feet, smit with a dire
Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire.
No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept.
Only the stolid bearers wound about,
Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white;
Or sharply a familiar voice rang out,
Comfortingly peremptory: “All right?
Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt.
The hour will surely come when we shall fight.”
RASTATT, _29th April_
IX
Does the first softening of the season break
The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs
Of wooing spring bid curling brackens rise
On hillsides out of nothing for love’s sake?
How sweet it is to think that harebells shake
Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies
Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies;
In trance to see the catkined willows quake,
Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side;
To watch the sands of Morar gently take
The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles;
And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde
To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake
The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.
RASTATT, _29th April_
X
There is a stillness in the heart of sound,
How dire soever, if unloosed too long.
There is a time for pause in every song,
And in the whirling cyclone’s heady round
A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound
With iron girdle, and with leathern thong
To the acute wheel of the sense’s wrong
Only until the creaking spring is wound.
Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,
Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,
And visions of fair spaces left behind,
As if the genius of the place had wings,
And in the migratory hour were sent
To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XI
Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang,
As the mad moment swooped upon the dream.
Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream
Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang,
And greater guns with stunning double clang
Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem
All hell was in the air--not without gleam
Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang.
Men crouched together, shaken as they took
That presence far too massive for their fear,
A quivering sense that something tidal welled
Over their perfect helplessness, and shook
The core of being; yet that being held.
We knew a limber clattered to the rear.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XII
’Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies
A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found
Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground,
Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies
Brightened, the housing spirit to entice
Into the air; the string its length unwound,
And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound
Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise.
Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed
The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt.
Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed,
Closing upon them in the bloody hunt;
And Verey lights at hand too well explained
The long and boding silence of the front.
RASTATT, _30th April_
XIII
Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash
From hedge to house, from house again to hedge,
And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge!
One instant on the aim, and then, the crash!
He went to earth, and vanished in a flash.
And there once more was house, and there was hedge,
With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge,
And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash--
A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound
Loneliness of the battlefield. The next
Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head;
Another, and the day was sealed and fixed
On front and flank. Among the stricken dead,
One in the skull, behind, his summons found.
RASTATT, _1st May_
XIV
--Found it behind, while yet his soul was set
And his eyes eager with the death he planned
For his foe forward, where he stood and manned
His gun upon the roaring parapet.
We knew the sign, the closing of the net,
The baying of the pack on every hand,
Terror of isolation. Still it fanned
Some flame within. We were not conquered yet.
Circled with unseen fire, we only heard
The bullets whistle round us, only saw
The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred.
And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw
Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured
Treacherously to cover. We endured.
RASTATT, _1st May_
XV
A man dashed in among us and caught breath.
A sergeant, resolute and silent, one
That we who knew him trusted. He had run
As men run only in the face of death,
Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith?
“The game is all but up, the end begun.
Live men we shall not see another sun.
Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death.
’Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air,
And through the breach, five hundred yards away,
His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires.”
Column of fours? No! Then God save the day!
These breastwork trenches!--’Twas as if there snapped
Some devilish mechanism on us--trapped!
RASTATT, _30th April_
XVI
How it befel?--The overreaching arm,
Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan
Surprise completed what surprise began.
The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm,
A ditch along a road, a false alarm,
Thirty yards of the open; in the van
A desperado running--How he ran!--
And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm!
--It is the end of all, the bitter end,
The unpardonable, though ineluctable,
A breach in life no living now will mend;
The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall.
One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost
England to gain what I this day have lost!
RASTATT, _1st May_
THE NADIR
I
There is no moment in the life of man
More potent to subdue the stuff that binds
His manhood into one than that which finds
The work the founders of his race began,
And centuries enlarged, until its span
Encompasses a nation, bodies, minds
And institutions, scattered to the winds
Out of his life, of which it held the plan.
And with the sense of something sacred sold,
His heritage, and branded with the crime
Against the ages, from the lowest pit,
Gathered for judgment meet, his eyes behold,
Tier after tier upon the banks of time,
The generations of his fathers sit.
RASTATT, _1st May_
II
One moment and his reeling world has rolled
Back into ages now no longer fit
For human dwelling. Here exalted sit
The cruel strong, and, with the cunning bold,
Possess the meek’s inheritance, and hold
The good man in subjection--ages knit
With blood and iron, and with arson lit,
Crusted with murder, wanton, fierce and cold.
And England, who so mightily championeth
That freedom forced from us (our guards were met,
And we went, speechless--to a living death)
--England--a new light breaking on me, set
My brain aworking--England lives! The breath
That moment spared I hold for England yet!
RASTATT, _1st May_
ON THE MARCH
I
Never wound cortège more exceeding slow,
Nor mourners to more melancholy tones,
Than that wan wending, musicked by the moans
Of wounded men, whom pity bade us show
That much of tenderness. Nor friend nor foe
Spoke in the heavy language of these groans,
But stark mankind, whose utter anguish owns
A common nature, in a common woe.
Full many a mile of weary footing sore,
By miry side tracks, not unkindly led;
And each unwounded man his burden bore
On stretcher or in blanket, ransacked bed,
Duck-board uprooted, hand-cart, unhinged door.
We left behind the dying and the dead.
RASTATT, _2nd May_
II
Hour followed hour, and slowly on we wound,
Till wan day turned to front the gradual west;
And with day’s waning waned the dream of rest
For the worn bearers, whom the twilight found
Voyaging no-man’s gray, wide-watered ground,
Their shoulders bowed and aching backs distressed;
Isthmused between deep pools, and sorely pressed
To foot the flanks of many a slippery mound;
While floundering convoys, till the light was gone,
Across the perilous space their drivers nurse,
Limber and gun, by frighted horses drawn,
Whose plunging swerve that bogged their burdens worse,
Provoked Teutonic fury, well laid on
With sounding whipcord and sonorous curse.
RASTATT, _2nd May_
III
And darkness fell, and a great void of space,
As if to bar our further going on,
Unfeatured, huge, gloomed o’er us. No light shone.
Strength, too, scarce held sufficient now to trace
The squalid reaches of this dismal place;
And silence settled near and far upon
That vacancy at length--our last guide gone.
Night hid each from his comrade, face from face.
As is a voyage through the uncharted waste
Of seas, unpiloted by any star,
Alone, unmooned, uncomforted, unplanned;
So forward still in silent pain we paced,
Nor light of moon nor pharos gleamed from far
Across the boding gloom of that lost land.
RASTATT, _3rd May_
IV
We came to Aubers at the dead of night,
And found the semblance of that circled hell,
Which Dante once, damnation’s pains to tell,
Paced out in darkness, agony and fright.
In that blank lazarette no kindly light
On bending form of nurse or surgeon fell,
But darkness and barred doors proclaimed too well
The piteous end of long-endured plight.
No room was there in stable or in stall,
Nor roof to shelter cattle while they eat,
Where wounded men could shelter from the blight
Of the foul dew that drizzling covered all.
But in the open and the squelching street
We left them to endure the drenching night.
RASTATT, _3rd May_
V
There is a garden where the whispering breeze
Perchance has wooed the lilacs in the spring,
Where still perchance at dawn a few birds sing,
And love goes nesting in the willow-trees.
But night’s ear now caught other sounds than these,
And darkness, bending, shrouded with his wing
What from an iceberg scalding tears might wring,
The glowing core of any furnace freeze.
Thick as the crimsoned leaves of autumn fall,
And crimsoned, too, and torn, and crushed as they
(’Twas the wet hand that told it) over all,
Moaning and writhing in their pain they lay;
And none to turn their faces to the wall,
And none to close their eyes, and none to pray.
RASTATT, _4th May_
VI
So where the wide and shallow beaches bound
The ceaseless moiling of the North Sea hoar,
And on the sands the rounding billows pour
Their majesty of waters to the ground;
As one by one the rising breakers pound
The beaten salt sands of the yeasty shore,
Their bursting charges’ momentary roar
Dies in a background of prevailing sound--
Thus hour by hour the moaning did prevail
Over night’s stillness, rose, and swelled, and died
In the sad level of a murmuring wail,
Like ocean’s moan with voices multiplied
Along the reaches of the sounding graile,
The west wind wrestling with the flowing tide.
RASTATT, _5th May_
VII
The last march opened with the sudden blaze
Of howitzers upon the face of night,
Waving us onward ere the laggard light
Of morning broke down transport-crowded ways.
Next to the first was this the bitterest phase
Of our humiliation. Yet ’tis right
To chronicle some kindness, and requite
Our armed custodians with this word of praise.
By Fournes, by Haubourdin, the endless reel
Of marching men ran out its windings slow,
Till near day’s end, nigh broken on the wheel
Of hunger, and scarce longer fit to go,
Within the moated Citadel of Lille
The sharper pang gave place to deeper woe.
RASTATT, _5th May_
VIII
--The deep woe of the mind when prison walls
First darken it with shadow, throbbing hot
To meet the outrage, as the bolts are shot,
The locks ground home, and the long silence falls.
And next a settling helplessness appals
The sinking soul, as if that hour should blot
One’s name out of the Book, as if one caught
Of life’s retreat the hurrying last footfalls.
Where once a vision smiled of rankèd days
Drawn on life’s vista’d curtain rich and vast,
Only a gulf now yawns. Of all the plays
Played out in visions, we have played the last.
The future bankrupt, ’tis the present pays;
And of life’s triple span, remains--the Past.
RASTATT, _5th May_
RASTATT
I
Yet morning comes with pageantry of fire,
And evening falls with majesty of flame,
And every hour hath something to reclaim
The waste of life, slow wilting behind wire.
It were a doleful dungeon that could tire
Nature’s incessant carefulness to shame
Sheer stalemate from each thing that lives, and claim
All motion for her universal choir.
Thus day by dreary day the chargèd hours
Pass influence from the sweetness of the hills
Across these cages, and the scent of flowers
Is wafted, and the fragrant dew distils,
And unimaginable stir of powers
From the deep sense of woods divinely thrills.
RASTATT, _7th May_
II
Two silent influences mainly move
The captive’s mind, not wholly sunk in sloth,
Nor lost in carnal craving--dangers both
That to the core the sterling manhood prove.
One is the sense of shrinkage, of the groove
In which the soul enshuttled--O how loth!--
Feels stoppage of life’s pulse, arrested growth,
Heart-sickness which no medicine can remove.
The other wakens when departing night
Throws up the windows of the spacious morn
Upon a new day pulsing with new light;
And from the hill the hunter with his horn
Sends down imagined valleys strains that smite
The spirit with the sense of something born.
RASTATT, _7th May_
III
Within these cages day by day we pace
The bitter shortness of the meted span;
And this and that way variously we plan
Our poor excursions over the poor place,
Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace.
For neither bars nor tented wire can ban
Full many a roving glance that dares to scan
The roomy hill, and wanders into space.
Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed
And unimpaired the free impetuous quest
Of the mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed
To the full measure of a life possessed
Awhile, but never counted, now revealed
Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.
RASTATT, _7th May_
IV
The long day waned beneath refulgent skies,
And evening sunshine bathed the hilltops round,
Where on the sudden from the level ground
Pine-vestured, solemn, summit by summit rise
The tops of the Black Forest. Wistful eyes
Wandered from peak to peak, as if to sound
Their mystery, if perchance there might be found
Some healing essence there, some glad surprise.
Long strove the puzzled spirit, vainly yearned
Into that alien soul to force its way;
When suddenly--the mystic rune was learned!
And in an upland glen remote and gray
There moved a presence known and last discerned
In Glendaruel on a morn of May.
RASTATT, _7th May_
V
O May! O month of months divinely dear,
Which severest, amidst the toil and strife
Of Nature’s round, as with a glittering knife,
A perfect segment from the varying year!
Month of entrancing spaces, wide and clear,
Calling us to the open, thick with life,
All leaf and lamb and freshness, welling, rife
With blossom--can it be that thou art here?
O that it were in some sweet Scottish strath,
Backed by the mountains, watered, green and wide,
Where the Tay laves in shallow crystal bath
His pebbles, or the Forth’s meandering tide
Receives Dumyat’s shadow o’er his path,
And young light breaks down Ochill’s mottled side.
RASTATT, _8th May_
VI
As the lone searcher, crouching o’er his glass,
Beside the window while the light is high,
Doth moved therein the forms of things descry
Invisible else to common vision crass;
Spirilla, the amœba’s sprawling mass,
With gliding infusoria sailing by--
And marks each vestige with entranced eye,
Glimmer, emerge and clear, dissolve and pass;
So in that optic lens, where never yet
The sun prevailed, beneath my prison wall,
One-windowed to the past, but brightly lit
By the eye’s own pure light, a swarm of small
And fleeting memories, else forgotten, flit,
Trivial, yet entrancing to recall.
RASTATT, _9th May_
VII
Oft at the hour when night’s aërial spring
Waters with dew the beauty of the morn,
What time another rosy day is born,
Along these lanes the echoing footsteps ring
Of marching men, who to their marching sing,
Deep-voiced, light-hearted. Yet they do not scorn
Due pause and measure, and the theme well-worn
From the full heart of Germany they bring.
But we, whose fathers once in songs as fine
Unburdened hearts as full, and with the power
Of our dear country pulsing in each line,
Scorn to remember England, and to our
Incomparable heritage of song
Prefer the tinkle of some mean ding-dong.
RASTATT, _9th May_
VIII
All is not well with England. Her great heart
Beats faultily and to no music set.
She hath her moods, suspicions, and doth fret
The daylong hour, by night doth toss and start.
Oft she stands dreaming in the crowded mart.
’Tis true that this distemper doth not yet
The deeper functions of her life beset,
And mightily she plays her mighty part.
Yet sometimes in this tempest the heart fears
Whether, so faulted, the old anchor grips.
And shall we find, we ask, when the sky clears,
England still mightier than England’s slips?
Let our own past proclaim it. Let the years
Advance and set their trumpets to their lips.
RASTATT, _9th May_
IX
The root of our infirmity is found
In English liberty, grandly achieved,
Yet little understood and ill conceived,
And sprouting rank from the uncultured ground.
Too much the thought prevails that man unbound
Is man made free, a life oft unretrieved
From chaos by a content; undeceived
Only when licence runs the ship aground.
O England! Mother! whom thine every child
Loves, surely, to the last, forgive that some
Must fear the loss of thy benignant strength
Through the mind’s error--lest, too freely wild,
Thy liberty of indifference become
A liberty of impotence at length.
RASTATT, _9th May_
X
There is no single foot of English soil,
Howe’er defaced, that is not holy ground.
There is no spot where great souls more abound,
Or where man’s greatness is more truly royal.
Who hath o’ertopped our Shakespeare? Who by toil
Of kingly thought more lofty, more profound,
Than Newton e’er from heaven’s majestic round
Brought home at night a more stupendous spoil?
One thing I find not well. In our reserve
We oft-times cloak our excellence, ashamed
Not of our imperfections, but our Best;
And what is finest, most our own, we serve
In some mean dish, or pass it by unclaimed,
Leaving the noble in us unexpressed.
RASTATT, _9th May_
HESEPE
I
A lonely camp and small amidst the miles
Of the Westphalian plain, where islanded
In the green waste our simple lives are led
Out of the troubled world. Here morning smiles
Splendidly, and the mustering twilight wiles
To a strange sense of peace consummated
Over these low-hung woods, where setting red
And oval the sun the yearning eye beguiles.
Then as the white and sheeted vapour steals
Along the flats lagoon-like, comes a breath
Of anguish from the void, where still is hurled
Nation on nation; and the spirit feels
A tidal presence of o’erwhelming death
Stir through this weird backwater of the world.
HESEPE, _19th May_
II
How hard it is to think upon this shoal
Of Inanition that the world’s ablaze.
How hard to link these lazy summer days
With ends and issues that will not unroll
Their length in æons--mankind’s furthest goal,
Perpending in the thick and murderous haze
Of yonder battle-hurricane that lays
Legions to rest till the last tattoo roll.
On sun-beat sand the busy ants deploy;
Industrious spiders ply their little looms;
With brush and pencil or with book we toy.
The quiet evening nears; the beetle booms.
God blazes at the world. Hell gapes for joy.
And Europe whitens with those nameless tombs.
HESEPE, _30th May_
III
Scanted of life and vented on this shore,
Where but the salt and sailless ocean plies
His tide of time with soulless fall and rise,
We conn the unfeatured waste from pole to pole.
Daily the gray remorseless waters roll
Out of the blank of gray remorseless skies,
And nothing happens. Then we close sick eyes,
And sadly the soul communes with the soul--
When often o’er night’s face a sudden glow
Of Boreal splendour palpitating plays,
And the long runners, shaking tress-like, show
Our life’s plan in a vision which betrays
Our secrets to our pillows; and we know
Our selves more clearly than in happier days.
HESEPE, _4th June_
IV
When in this deep Re-entrant’s sullen shade,
What hour night’s middle watches change reliefs,
The mind compiles the roster of its griefs,
Before the inward eye there oft parade
Life’s serried loves, appointed and arrayed
For high inspection, potentates and chiefs,
And armed retainers whom some bond enfeoffs,
And all precisely marshalled grade by grade.
Then we discern at length where each doth stand,
In front or rear, and what the rank they bear;
The acquainted Mass, the Intimates, the band
Of such as do the forward stations share.
And last the One with none on either hand.
And thou art She, whose ring and seal I wear.
HESEPE, _4th June_
V
What time in empty hour awhile relaxed,
Around my cage’s circuit I have paced,
Sunk in myself, and broodingly have traced
These late appalling issues, I have taxed
My country with a weakening will: “Thou slack’st
Thy effort, England.” Then some sight hath braced
My soul, and from my mind the doubt effaced.
England, it is not energy thou lack’st!
I felt it when one morn there sudden flew
Around the camp new life and boisterous cheer,
Unlike the mood of those who hitherto
Our wants supplied, and something did endear
The noise of labour to us, and we knew
That English orderlies at length were here.
HESEPE, _20th June_
VI
My Countrymen! The years that have gone by
Since Hengist came with Horsa from the sea,
Find the same substance in you, fiercely free,
Yet of that fundamental liberty,
The soul’s state, oft unable to descry
The deeper import, your simplicity,
Your limit, only natural chivalry
Redeeming what your insight doth deny.
Unskilled to conn the inwardness of things,
There is a health about you keeps you clean,
Derisive of all high pretence that chimes
Not with your plainness, sound. Your laughter rings
Over hard toil, and all things grandly mean
Your humour shatters, punctures, or sublimes.
HESEPE, _22nd June_
VII
With little tasks we wile the hours away,
Each bringing shyly forth his piteous store
Of erudition, oft-times dubious lore,
Since memory cupboards all we dare to say.
One tells us how to mine, one how to lay
A crop of good Rhodesian maize. Nay more,
The skirts of metaphysics we explore,
And touch the dread fringe of psychology.
O to be hidden here amongst the seams
Of History’s garment, while the whole world rocks
Upon its base! When every day that gleams
Tells us that England still against all shocks
Raises her front; and starting from our dreams,
Each morning Hesepe the lonely mocks!
HESEPE, _30th May_
THOUGHTS OF HOME
I
As are the features of some well-loved face,
On which a life’s prolixity is writ
In moving characters much conned and fit
Across a single soulful ground to trace
Feeling and thought and purpose, like the grace
Which motion adds to loveliness (there flit
The spirit’s shades, and there the lamp is lit
That lights twin souls to a lifelong embrace);
So to the city-dweller hath the town,
Much conned, its moving physiognomy,
Which oft in exile, as the sun goes down,
Teams in the caverned dusk of memory
With haunting visions of dear streets, that crown
Night’s sorrow with entrancing imagery.
HESEPE, _19th May_
II
Does the slant touch of early light awake
The sirens on the Clyde, and fling the door
Wide on the city’s rousing all-day roar?
Are the streets well a-clatter? Do they break
From tram and train, that travelling host, and take
The town by storm? Does gathering traffic pour
Over the tide-line of night’s silent shore,
Into the spaces, till the cobbles quake?
While down the river, crowded to the brink
With huddled shipyards, many a loaded quay,
Ten hundred thousand volleying hammers clink;
And the slow homing liner booms to see
The ever-coiling waters still a-wink
With mirrored shipping freighted for the sea.
HESEPE, _19th May_
III
Ah me, I dream of what they do at home
This Sabbath sunrise of the early prime!
The slumbering city waking to the chime
Of opening church-bells, when the sun hath clomb
Full half-way up the hollow of heaven’s dome;
The leisured family muster, the sublime
Jollity and the uplift of the time
That sets the week-worn spirit free to roam;
The walking to the kirk, the solemn hour
With the Creator, lapsing at the close
Into the sweet expansiveness that plays
Round the church door, when from the too tense power
Of prayer and praise the natural spirit flows
Back to its level.--That was in past days.
HESEPE, _19th May_
IV
What do they do _to-day_? What form of fear
Haunts the now voided chambers of their life,
Troubling its ancient tenor, parent, wife,
Survivors of the broken circle dear
In the old home enisled, as in some drear
Interspace of existence, till the strife
Is overblown, and but the echoes rife
Volley adown the days still left them here?
How they must suffer!--Yet these later shocks
Displace not from my brain the life it knew
Before the Power that our planned journey mocks,
Over our faring war’s dark glory drew;
And when my miser mind its store unlocks,
It takes out treasures rather old than new.
HESEPE, _20th May_
V
So thus I picture it, not as life lies
Now writhing, but as when the days and nights
Followed each other in unmarked delights;
Nor noted we the measure of the prize
Till all was over. Now the spirit cries,
What time encroaching Inanition blights,
For but the phantom of its past, and fights
Extinction with its memories. Let them rise!
Let me dissemble that as in past days
The crystal fountain with delicious flow
Of bursting social joy unconscious plays
Over the garden close, where row by row
The flowers of life in such profusion blaze
That their own loveliness they do not know.
HESEPE, _20th May_
VI
Day follows night, and night returns to day
Through all the enchanting stages of the spring;
And exile lengthens out to months that fling
Their shadow further, and my life grows gray;
Grays even with the sun’s increasing ray;
While forward still the heading heats do wing
Into the year, that softly rounds his ring
To midsummer, and June is on the way:
The perfect season, when the hawthorn blows
Down cream-white Scottish hedges, and the spent
Airs of the evening gently swaying close
Tired eyes upon it, heavy with its scent;
While on the Downs the beating sunlight glows,
And sends the wildering roses over Kent.
HESEPE, _21st May_
INFLUENCES
I
When in the waking visions of the night
I travel back the miles my feet have worn
Since with a cry my spirit was reborn,
There stirs again the anguish and delight
Felt first as each new vista on the sight
Swam in the luminous duskiness of morn,
And the soul quested down the long leagues, torn
With its own thirst for vision and more light.
One realm in thought I near with awe profound,
Where hangs the Slav for ever on his tree,
Bedewed with sorrow, with contrition crowned,
And thorns of perfected humility,
The holy flowering of that cursed ground;
And at the mighty portals Titans three.
HESEPE, _21st May_
II
Russia, thy bitter sorrows partly spring
From the deep cleavage which, as with a knife,
Severs what is most native in thy life
From what thy troubled history doth bring
Out of dark days that threatened once to wring
That life itself from thee. The very strife
That heals our Europe through thy pains, is rife
With thine own Tragedy, still on the wing.
Here stand thine institutes, designed to sway
A local life within thee, Zemstvo, Mir,
And Duma, people’s parliaments; and here
The iron empire with the feet of clay,
That froward issue of the Olden day
When Ivan’s legions laid the Tartar spear.
HESEPE, _22nd May_
III
The other cause behind the ages lies,
A-swelter in the elemental yeast,
Where yet thou lay’st fermenting for the feast
Of nationality, thine opening eyes
Turned longingly to where the sun doth rise,
And thy great spirit, when the ferment ceased,
For ever oriented to the East,
Mysterious, helpless, beautiful and wise.
Thence while the bitter ages onward run,
And the fierce West doth rend a path through time,
Thou for the nations from the healing sun
Draw’st healing still, and in the teeth of crime
Provest by many a bloodless victory won,
Than this world’s pride of power Love more sublime.
HESEPE, _22nd May_
IV
Who is it loometh o’er the Steppes at e’en,
A giant from the sunrise of man’s race,
Statured of eld, that immemorial face
Hewn out of Ararat, in which we glean,
And in the froward, patriarchal mien,
An old tale told in many a furrowed trace,
Moulded before the Sphynx crouched in her place,
By passion uncontrollable and clean.
For he hath sat with Abram in the tent,
And gazed on Hebron, till the blue heaven broke
Over them into stars. Then he went on
Down all the ages ageless and unbent,
Till in this later world of lesser folk
’Mongst men he towers the eternal Mastodon.
HESEPE, _23rd May_
V
And all that man hath felt since man hath known
Life first within him, aye, and woman too,
Conceived and manifolded in him, drew
To limitless creation, widely sown
On teaming soil o’er which his breath had blown.
Magnificently carnal, through and through.
Each taste of the green earth, the brown, he knew,
And tasted deep, and joyed, and made his own:
The boundless steppe, to which the sky bends down,
The forest where the eternal shadows sleep,
The sowing and the mowing and the frost;
The village and the pleasures of the town,
And birth and death and love, and the starred deep
Of heaven by night; and here his soul was lost!
HESEPE, _23rd May_
VI
Tolstoy is great in art, in thought not great.
Yet his thought troubles, oft-times shivering through
With icy barb the best that thought can do.
And when we ponder o’er his latter state,
And note its argument, backed by the fate
That marked his greatness down, we feel here too
That Something elemental, vast and true
To which all things at length capitulate.
And ye who sadly ponder to behold
The ruin of such greatness, grieved to see
How the child in him acted, thought and spoke,
Perchance will wonder, when the tale is told,
Whether ’twas not a mightier Thing than he
On which the Titan stumbled when he broke.
HESEPE, _24th May_
VII
So Tolstoy passed, and passing left behind
Not great themes only, but himself a great
And tragic Theme. Another shares his state,
Supreme within the kingdom of the mind,
As he where soul and body meet, combined
In lovely earth-forms. Dostoievsky, late
Thou cam’st into thine own, thy bitter fate
To be an exile; for the world is blind.
But in thy mantic cavern, undismayed
Amongst thy spirits, named and known so well,
Each a familiar, and thyself a shade,
By whitest light of heaven, by reddest hell,
Unscorched, unblinded, wrapt yet unafraid,
And true to thine own Passion, thou dost dwell.
HESEPE, _26th May_
VIII
Deep-sounding, subtle, pitiful, profound,
Dredger of human nature, versed in crime,
Mated with every grief, who in the slime
Divinest well where purest pearls abound;
Where darkness mostly reigneth thou dost found
A kingdom of the light, O soul sublime,
Most pure, most Christ-like spirit of thy time;
And where thy feet have trod is holy ground--
Holy, yet haunted, and a realm of fright,
Not to be traversed but with flying feet,
And beating heart and racing brain alight
With fire from hell, and heated with hell’s heat,
Till in the cooler spaces of the night
The o’erwrought spirit finds a safe retreat.
HESEPE, _27th May_
IX
Here is thy limit, mightiest of thine age
An under- and an over-world to paint,
Peopled with epileptic and with saint,
The murderer’s, ogre’s, and the gambler’s rage:
Too much of fever in thee to assuage
Our average human restlessness, the taint
Of a charmed subtlety oft rendering faint
The sense of man’s salvation in thy page.
Perchance in thy heroic spirit, fraught
With too much tragedy, the causes lie;
That spirit unembittered, overwrought,
In which a something fitful we descry,
A fretfulness, as in thine image caught
By Sonia Kovalevsky’s soulful eye.
HESEPE, _28th May_
X
Turgenev, gentlest of the sons of pain,
Who in a line, as Homer wont, distillest
The essence of all pathos, thou who fillest
A human place ’twixt the Cyclopean twain,
’Tis not with hell-fire driven o’er the brain,
Nor stretched titanic canvas that thou thrillest,
But by the plotted garden-space thou tillest,
Making man’s middle courses thy domain.
Here once more we discern how still great art
Meets nature greatly. Elemental powers
Pulse in thy perfect pages. Souls depart
With awe upon them to the silent bowers.
The world is ever with thee, its great heart
Laid to thy beating own, as thine to ours.
HESEPE, _21st May_
XI
Wordsworth, above all poets in thee I find
What in the greatest we too seldom see,
The crowning virtue of tranquillity,
Effectual o’er the sorrows of the mind.
Others to gain such peace have left behind
This hard world for the realm of fantasie,
Or in a past remote found sanctuary,
Or in the end thought’s burden have resigned.
One above all by daily struggle rose
Into a blue empyrean of the brain,
Self-mastering might, yet such as never knows
The deeper calm that masters. There remain
Nature’s anointed dynasts. Only those
Whose peace is fundamental truly reign.
HESEPE, _30th May_
XII
Of these thou art. And, Wordsworth, it is not
That thou hast missed man’s feverish heritage.
Strange passions thou hast known, and noble rage,
Nor in Romance an anodyne hast sought.
And if to souls in trouble thou hast brought
Strength and relief, ’tis not thy sauntering page,
Nor oft-times common theme that doth assuage
The anguish of the spirit overwrought.
Rather it is that, deeply moved, thou sink’st
Deeply in nature’s homeliness, thy rime
Plain as her face; but, stooping as thou drink’st,
The eternal from beyond the hills of Time
Is on thee ere thou know’st it, and thou link’st
Thy being with it, suddenly sublime.
HESEPE, _31st May_
XIII
Herein is thy celestial wisdom shown,
That thou, divining Godhead scarce concealed
In nature’s plain immediacy, dost yield
To her the soul of poetry and thine own.
Until thou cam’st no son of time had known
The measure of the glory now revealed
In common things, the beauty of the field,
The moving grace of planet and of stone.
What bliss it was to feel as at the first,
But with that insight now supremely thine,
The trailing clouds upon a world accurst
In all their fresh and pristine splendour shine;
While into that familiar face there burst
The expression of the Countenance divine.
HESEPE, _31st May_
XIV
Sweetly at length, like faithful love abused
By cold neglect, in this domed interval
Of silent time returns with soft footfall
The echo of a music long disused.
Ah me, before such strains I stand accused,
So early known, and then my all in all,
And with the magic of the morning’s call
And ethos of my children interfused--
A nameless sense of youth that will not die,
While Homer’s volleying dactyls surging send
The music of the wind-entangled seas
Around the world, and as the billows fly,
Shouldering each other shorewards, metely blend
His harping with the thunderous centuries.
HESEPE, _8th June_
XV
Oft have I risen before the night hath flown,
To catch the hour of deepest silence sweet,
And through that hush to list in my retreat
The solemn voice of Æschylus intone,
His great Iambic, till the tale hath grown
Into a passion over me, where meet
Huge forms archaic, and on stately feet
Move to swift doom in Æginetan stone.
High over all in simple grandeur bold,
With crest on crest against the morning skies,
Yet in eternal shadow, I behold
The massif of the _Agamemnon_ rise,
And through its marble caverns shuddering hear
The haunting voice of Clytæmnestra’s fear.
HESEPE, _9th June_
XVI
--Infatuate queen, who oft as lingering day
Rounds to his close, and passion’s hour is nigh,
Through Atreus’ halls on soundless foot doth hie,
And from the tower the purpling east survey--
Lest in the still and fearful night’s thick play,
While by her beating side doth sweltering lie
Sallow Ægisthus with the hawking eye,
Swift Fate prepare a swifter stroke than they;
And while love’s maddening vintage they partake,
A sudden flame should redden all the land,
And beacon call to beacon, where they break
From the lone watchman on the Ægean strand.
“The ship! the ship! His ship comes tossing o’er
The wine-dark sea. The King is at the door.”
HESEPE, _9th June_
XVII
I paced entranced the mourne, melodious shore
Where Sophocles unwinds with matchless art
Life’s tangled error, pondering in my heart
The tragic theme that middle diction bore--
The end not hopeless, when, all wanderings o’er,
By still Colonus in that place apart
The thunder rolled, and while the earth did start,
The old man of the sorrows was no more.
And I have felt the moving of the strings
Beneath the fingers of that troubled soul,
Third in the triple dynasty of kings,
Whose tenderness, beyond his art’s control,
Over life’s mutilated torso wrings
Fierce protest, agonizing for the Whole.
HESEPE, _10th June_
XVIII
One scene, Euripides, throughout the years
Clings to the moving skirts of memory,
Among the images of things that lie
In beauty perfected, too deep for tears.
’Tis where, to still his faithful matron’s fears
Through lonely days and nights of agony,
Having fulfilled his roving chivalry,
At length the Paladin of eld appears,
Thy Herakles; and wife and children stand
’Neath that majestic manhood pure from blame;
The basket circulates from hand to hand.
When of a sudden--_He was not the same_.
There could no more, but with the dripping sword.
And all that ruth impounded in a word!
HESEPE, _10th June_
XIX
While still that music pealed an alien strain
Broke boisterous into sudden interplay,
Troubling the soul with laughter and dismay;
And chattering drolls appeared, expressly plain,
And tingling to the immemorial vein
Of the obscene in all things formed of clay.
There pausing on the turmoiled scene that lay
Before my eyes, a light broke on my brain,
And vast Aristophanic laughter shook
Each nerve within me, and a hand did part
Some far-back curtain of the soul, and took
A portion of my years; and I did start,
Divining art’s new purport, to rebuke
And humanize the stiffly pure of heart.
HESEPE, _11th June_
XX
It were not well with man did he not feel
At home with his own nature, all we are
Conspiring with our angel and our star
To keep our being whole, or, broken, heal,
Lest in some faulted mould the soul congeal.
And oft-times ’tis the Highest that doth mar
The Perfect in us, straining us too far,
And overreaching Justice. Hence the peal
Of that great cachinnation echoing woke
Appreciation of the lofty use
Of comedy, to shake the settling soul
Out of itself. The Elemental spoke,
And something broadened in me. The recluse
Unstiffened, and I felt my nature whole.
HESEPE, _11th June_
XXI
Justice! the very sound brings back the throes
Of that tremendous season when Youth sees
His world collapse, and beaten to his knees
He takes the bolt of doubt, all that he knows,
That he knows nothing. Underneath the blows
Of thought I laboured long in labouring seas,
Pledging my soul to martyred Socrates;
And o’er night’s face the star of Plato rose.
This much of truth I still divined, that here
Was internecine conflict; only doubt
Strained to the uttermost a path could clear
To that last Deep where wind and tide give out,
And freighted Time drops softly out to sea,
A moving image of Eternity.
HESEPE, _12th June_
XXII
Who to the visions of immortal Thought,
Engendered by the music of the mind--
First in that place where our poor human kind
Sit in the cave and watch the shadows wrought
By firelight on the wall, obscurely caught;
Then luring on to where the soul, half blind,
Turns from the Splendour which itself divined--
With kinglier toil a loftier art hath brought,
Than Plato? Who more haunted by the light
Hath ever yet gone coasting with the sun,
Or in the deep and constellated night,
Claimed from the spheres their voices as they run?
Or soaring where the Eternal Glories shine
Hath stretched to earth a more majestic line?
HESEPE, _13th June_
XXIII
As deeply versed in that infinitude
Where man his doom within himself doth find
By no strait pedagogy, but divined
Through some more massive sense of True and Good,
A kind of Inspiration, the soul’s food,
Derived from far, and working still behind
All conscious reason, till the labouring mind
’Neath that profounder suasion sinks subdued.
So Plato’s thought grows cosmic, by its own
Illumination led and mystified,
And haunted by a voice of purer tone
Than reason’s groping motion e’er supplied;
The beam refracted by the Forms and shown
As coloured light wherein the soul is dyed.
HESEPE, _14th June_
XXIV
Thus do the greatest ever by sheer might
Of natural penetration find their way
Into the Innermost, where Being’s ray
Burns unendurable, and in that light
Their own with nature’s majesty unite
To one high rhythm, stupendous interplay
Of Thought and Being, perioded, gray
With shadow, with serenest sunshine bright.
So that old man of Koenigsberg profound,
By night revolving two infinities,
And so Spinoza, when his spirit found
Intellect into Intuition rise,
Envisaging creation from above,
Where knowledge takes the perfect form of Love.[1]
HESEPE, _14th June_
[1] The “Amor Dei intellectualis.”
XXV
But thy peculiar greatness more than these,
By thinking pregnant with creative art,
Subduing chance and moulding part to part,
Hath Cosmic in it, Plato, harmonies
That wake the dim immortal memories
We bring from the Eternal, whence we start
The round of Being, bearing in our heart
The echoes of the everlasting seas.
Here stands no accidental word. And so,
While theme with theme grows twisted and entwined,
Is freedom perfected. We gaze, and lo,
The argument is off before the wind,
Like some great trireme tacking endlessly,
Yet ever headed for Eternity.
HESEPE, _14th June_
WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS
I