Nietzsche, nor charged with finer lightning ran
Around the world. And true it is the man
Who hath no menace in him, nor hath met
A threatening Universe with counter-threat
Is caitiff still. In those who lead the van
The Headlong is the guide to each new plan,
While lances leap, spears break, the ground is wet.
One prayer I prayed: “Lord, if Thou hast discerned
Within me ought of manliness, enroll
Thy servant with the fighters, who have earned
Their manhood’s charter where the thunders roll
Over the field, that so I may have learned
To taste this Element, and know my soul.”
HESEPE, _6th June_
II
There comes to me a memorable thought
Borne on that voice, which like some wandering gleam
Brings freshness into Hegel’s well-worn theme
From Naples lately, Croce, he who taught
That Art’s true nature is not to be sought
In what is fitted only to redeem
By strict initiation souls who dream
Of beauty in some crafty pattern wrought,
But in the apt Expression, wheresoe’er
Expression apt is found, the Inward still
Externalizing till the soul declare
The thing within it, and divinely fill
With sound or sign the habitable air--
A language universal as man’s will.
HESEPE, _18th June_
III
Thus language is the type wherein revealed
Art’s universal function we behold,
In sensuous forms appropriate to unfold
Whate’er of meaning Individuals yield:
A doctrine this which doth enlarge the field
To every man who in himself doth hold
But speech enough a simple thought to mould
In words well wedded to the sense concealed.
--Doubtless a truth, though strained beyond the Norm,
If still the theme, with varying purport fraught,
Loses itself entirely in the Form,
And ugliness and beauty count for naught;
And yet a truth, although a truth in part,
All art expression, not all expression art.
HESEPE, _18th June_
IV
The Import counts. All great art greatly deals
With themes not insignificant. The less
Gives lesser art, howe’er the form express
The sense of that the artist thinks or feels.
And wonderful it is how life reveals
The great theme near at hand, did we but press
Our lives less fiercely, and our souls possess,
When stirred, until the fitting word congeals.
Art should not fail among us. All have eyes
Which bring the star-sown heavens nightly home,
And there are ever winds about the world.
And no man but hath felt the mysteries
Of birth and wedlock and death’s solemn gloam,
Or seen the petals of a rose uncurled.
HESEPE, _19th June_
V
Of Tragedy the essence and the goal
Is Vindication. Fear and pity close
The tale with mourning, but the issue shows
The moral order master of man’s soul.
And as its slow and solemn waters roll
Thunderingly through the scenes, a sense there grows
Of some high Presence working in these throes,
Whose Being is the topic and the whole.
Thus not these personal griefs alone comprise
The theme of Tragedy, that theme more vast
Than its own content, deeper than the sighs
Of the doomed Titan hounded home at last--
The Universe in action, and the cries
Of Cosmic Vengeance closing with the Past.
HESEPE, _25th May_
VI
“Gehorsam.” It is seldom that one hears
The German tongue commended. Yet I find
No spell more swift, more potent to unbind
The spirit’s shades in some fine phrase that clears
An entrance to the import of the years,
Where speech, unwinding as thought’s coils unwind,
Makes landfall, and companioning man’s mind,
Ends in the Innermost, whereto he steers.
And many a haunting solitary sound
In that strange tongue, with doubling content fraught,
Booms at the ear of conscience, whose profound
Responses in that energy are caught,
And Teuton loyalty, that holds its ground,
Sweeps Europe still, and sets a world at naught.
HESEPE, _4th July_
VII
Two other words contrasting well distil
In two clear drops of sound significant,
And flavoured to the thought, the crowning want
That mars our enterprise--the English will,
Steadfast of purpose, but unsteady still
In the particular. Strange humours haunt
The earnestness of battle, and we flaunt
The eccentric in us even as we kill.
A nobly erring pride is here, disdain
Of death--and duty, when that duty chimes
Not with our liking; and our stubbornness
Wants sternness in it to perfect the grain.
Of late to tragic heights the contrast climbs,
Which “Ernst” and “Eigensinnigkeit” express.
HESEPE, _5th July_
VIII
Compel them to be free! A true word there
Thou minted’st, Rousseau--half the human race
Still unaspiring to that crowning grace,
Still disinclined the easy yoke to wear.
Oh, that at length our people would but dare
To look their cancer fiercely in the face,
Consenting on the foul and rotting place
The short sharp anguish of the knife to bear.
For there are powers upon us that still sap
Our liberty and drain our manhood dry,
Which if we clear not speedily, mayhap
Our twilight follows and the end is nigh;
Or else there rise a Strong One who will clap
The Teuton iron on us, and we die.
HESEPE, _7th July_
IX
As when along a level land we pace,
The scene, from where our forward-moving feet
Touch ground, to where the earth and heaven greet,
Seems to revolve in some vast wheel’s embrace,
Whose spoke-wise turning slow the eye can trace
From near-by hedges, wayside trees, that fleet
With rick and steading by, till all lines meet
And motion dwindles in far distant space--
There haply some majestic mountain mass
By contrast travels with us as we go,
And doth across the spirit, as we pass,
The feeling of its omnipresence throw--
So o’er man’s fleeting and particular fate
For ever omnipresent broods the State.
HESEPE, _30th June_
X
Unto man’s spirit thou art closely bound
By natural drift and consanguinity,
But more by long companionship, the tie
That holds you twain together tightly wound
First in his infancy, where thou art found
Like some great watchdog that doth panting lie
Stretched by his infant master, his dull eye
Wakeful, his sharp ear cocked at every sound.
Nay, for the bond is closer, ’twas thy face
Bent over him at birth; thy kindly pains
Steadied his childish feet. Nor can we trace
What in his blood derives not from thy veins
By long transfusion unprecipitate,
Alive, organically intimate.
HESEPE, _19th July_
XI
Suppose a race (the vision first I saw
Among the dark stern reasonings of Kant)
Resolved its past for ever to recant,
And from its island borders to withdraw:
No man shall move--I heard that doom with awe--
Until the wretched, last, lorn miscreant
By shameful death full reparation grant
To the offended majesty of Law.
So as man’s coming race prepares to leave
The Island of its Present, where to-day
Europe in crime lies sweltering, and to cleave
A fresh path through the portals of the Day,
At History’s bar the nations duly lined
Await their judgment. Some remain behind.
HESEPE, _7th July_
XII
One thing upon the tablet of the mind
By fire should be imprinted. Nations stand
Only as to the touch of that great Hand
Their substance answers, which when it outlined
A cosmos on the waters, and designed
Earth’s granite frame, and sundered sea and land,
Laid in man’s heart a Law, more deeply planned
Than that of nations, compassing his kind.
And in that Law eternal stands revealed
How by self-abnegation man at length
Comes to himself, how to the meek is sealed
The habitable earth, how human strength
Is perfected in weakness, into dross
Earth’s glory sinks confronted with Christ’s cross.
HESEPE, _25th July_
XIII
Protector of the spirit, who by night
With hands bent round it lanthorn-like dost frame
Against the wind a shelter for its flame,
Thyself a thing of spirit and a light,
The Commonwealth! Yet in thy sovereign right
Thou may’st not unrebuked, unchallenged claim
To be the First and Last, a holier Name
Than thine intoning from a higher height.
For blood is on thy hand and on thy head,
And war’s black cloud upon thy deep dark brow;
And in thy shadow Socrates lies dead.
And though awhile it needs must be that thou
For man’s unrighteousness shalt legislate,
Man’s righteousness will yet become thy Fate.
HESEPE, _17th July_
ENGLAND AND OXFORD
I
Line after line the tale beneath the pen
Moves on, and rodent Time with tireless tooth
Works o’er our portion, till one day forsooth
We tread the cool gray shadow, ageing men.
This change I mark, and sadly pondering then
Catch the soul’s murmur, accented with ruth:
“Oh, let me hear upon the lips of youth
‘Eothen’ and ‘Eothen’ once again!”
And Oxford, oh, do thou with soulful toil,
While o’er our folk tumultuous ages throng,
Mounted at night as o’er some priceless spoil,
For us the fineness of this cult prolong,
Still nurturing in our sweet English soil
That glory from the Morningland of song.
HESEPE, _8th June_
II
Yet, Oxford, it is better thou should’st know
That eyes which love thee in thy culture see
The withering curse of long sterility.
Rooted in England, thou hast ceased to grow
Together with her growth. Thy waters flow
Not with her broadening current to the sea,
But murmuring their delicious melody
They wander forth and wist not where they go.
And thus thy fine-edged spirit, which in high
Disdain hath never paltered with the pelf
Of modern rapine, doth too often fly
To endless crochets, wayward as an elf,
Self-humouring and posturing and shy,
And broods apart and lives unto itself.[2]
HESEPE, _8th June_
[2] It is hoped that it may not be thought too much of a liberty in an
outsider to criticize anything so esoteric as the Oxford culture; but
if so I should reply that it is just this esoteric quality which I wish
to criticize. Admiration for Oxford and love of England alike compel me
to deplore the fact that so typical a _product_ of our national life
should be so little _representative_.
III
None than thyself more royally to-day
Hath given to England in her hour of need.
In every field where England’s children bleed
Thine own have there more richly bled than they.
And Oxford still incarnadines the clay
To such a sanctity as doth o’erplead
The voice of censure, silenced by the deed
Of the great heart that laid them where they lay.
’Tis their’s, that murmur fluttering from the marge
Of thither Acheron, where their cares they ply
In deathless death: “O Mother mine, enlarge
Thy life to England’s. Thou hast learned to die.
But while thy life thou dost so grandly give,
One thing thou lackest, Oxford: learn to live!”
HESEPE, _8th June_
IV
There is one source alone which can supply
New life and impulse. ’Tis a voice that rolls
Half inarticulate in English souls,
From field and mine and factory, where they ply
The single talent Fate did not deny,
Their labour. Now they hear upon the shoals
Of a sad life that there are other goals
To man’s existence than they yet descry;
And, scarcely yet discerned, they deeply feel
A presence over them, a haunting sense
Of music in the world, whose echoes steal
Unto them from the spheres, where in the immense
Circle of night and day the planets keep
Measure and watch, while mortals toil and weep.
HESEPE, _15th June_
V
Thine be it to direct their steps aright
Unto that bourne which doth not cease to haunt.
They cry for it, not knowing what they want,
Or what for man is best--the use of sight;
Some inkling of the precious power of light,
To glorify a mean existence gaunt,
And check the bitter self-inflicted taunt
That nothing worthy calls them home at night.
And thou can’st set them questing, make them feel
The nearness of true knowledge, where it lies
In common things with which they daily deal,
Yet ending in the Splendour of the skies;
Or teach them in shunned volumes to detect
The simplicity of letters unsuspect.
HESEPE, _16th June_
VI
Yet--for the kindly Mother may not quit
Her cloistered sanctuary, where from the height
Of scholarship’s remoteness day and night
She strains truth’s fabric--it is those who sit
A season at her feet, and learn to fit
Their spirits to her own, who must requite
These lofty cares, and carry out the light,
And serve it round, and tend its burning, lit.
But thine, O Kindly Mother, first to prove
Thy ministers, and having chosen, tune,
Bringing thy spirit o’er them, till they move
Like one at thy behest--as to the moon,
Passing soft influence from the quiet skies,
The oceans with their weight of waters rise.
HESEPE, _16th June_
VII
One thing must be thine instant, anxious care,
Which on thine honour thou dar’st not refuse.
Long time our people now the habit lose
Of speech consecutive (which man should wear
Upon him like a garment, fit and fair)
And through some faulting of the brain abuse
Thought’s flowing vesture of a thousand hues,
Oft shorn to shreds, all fluttering in the air.
I mark and grieve; for in this lost control
We trace the weakness of these breathless times,
When man no longer keeps his nature whole,
Nor governs his spirit; and it chimes
With the unruly in us, deadliest threat
Our English liberty hath fronted yet.
HESEPE, _17th June_
VIII
It is not for art’s sake this precious dower
Of speech must be renewed, but for the sake
Of life within. The expression doth not break
Silence in vain, but with reflexive power
To vitalize its source, and parting shower
New riches on the donor. Thus we take
Life’s counterthrust upon our souls, and shake
The vessel, lest by standing Being sour.
All life’s a language; but ’tis not enough
To launch forth with it wildly into space,
Adding one atom to the blinding drain,
A pitiable froth-bell in the trough
Of each new cause, wherein the striving race
Tries issue with stern time--perchance in vain.
HESEPE, _20th June_
HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE
I
A week of nights and days once more brings round
The Sabbath tide; and once again the heart
Sets yearningly to homewards. Do they part
At the church door to-day, as when the stound
Of disillusioned fancy last unbound
Memory’s deep wound, and in the bitter smart
The vision vanished? Ah, the shadows start
To life again across the haunted ground;
The kindly farewells said, the sauntering walk
Home through the sun-baked streets, by twos and twos,
The friendly flow of pleasant secular talk,
And personalities and trivial news.
And the long winding prospect of the day,
The feast of children yet shall wile away.
HESEPE, _26-27th May_
II
’Tis July, and a sunny stillness broods
On our magnificent England. Misty skies
Break into blue, and ripening harvests rise
Over her bosom. Her majestic woods
Ripple and sway before the varying moods
Of the west wind. The roses sacrifice
In every garden to the sun. There lies
Deep peace o’er all: no sound profane intrudes.
Far in the north the solemn mountains keep
A sanctuary amongst the shades that dwell
In the deep gloom of haunted Highland glens,
Where silence awes, and where for ever sleep
In lochs unfathomed and inscrutable
The shadows of the everlasting Bens.
HESEPE, _2nd July_
III
There is another England, that which feeds
Our sinews where the champing engines chide
Beneath the settled darkness that doth hide
Earth’s stricken face from Rotherham to Leeds.
Deep in that gloom the blinding furnace bleeds
A molten treasure: England is supplied;
A million hammers roar along the Clyde;
The transport of a million men proceeds.
And all this horror of the work of man,
Effacing God, I magnify and bless--
The way that leads out leading also through,
While God goes round to compass His great plan,
And out of ashes and of hideousness
By curse of toil Creation blooms anew.
HESEPE, _3rd July_
INTERLUDE
I
My hundredth sonnet! Here I pause to brood
A little by myself upon the theme
Ere once again with the meandering stream
Of my own thoughts I move. And it were good
To give thanks for the labour that hath stood
Between my soul and madness, like a gleam
Of sunlight in the darkness of the dream
Which passes over me, else scarce withstood.
Wonderful is it how the heart o’erwrought
Unloads in song, life’s passionate rebound
’Gainst agonies whose barb alone hath brought
This bird of sorrows fluttering to the ground,
And with these wild and wandering flowers of thought
The portion of a prisoner metely crowned.
HESEPE, _23rd June_
II
I ponder on the form, and truth to tell,
’Twere scarcely to be deemed a sonnet chain
Which did not in its forged length contain
Some turn contemplative, where for a spell
The smith might lay his hammer by, to dwell
Upon the pattern, lest the octet strain
The content, or the sextet court in vain
A bigger thought than it can compass well.
And oft when to the varying interplay
Of partnered sounds I strive thought’s flower to train
Upon this trellis, the perplexing way
By lucky chance of rime lies sudden plain,
And I cry out with Agathon: τέχνη
τύχην ἔστερξε καὶ τύχη τέχνην.
HESEPE, _23rd June_
III
Yet the sport wind that doubling oft blows home
Some welcome unforeseen felicity,
Is but, within the dreams of poesie,
Life’s average accident, which all who roam
The spacious earth, or try the beckoning foam
Of some unvisited soul-haunting sea,
May count on as their portion--even as we
Who chance a star or two in this weird gloam.
Hence as in all high toil which must be traced
In long-drawn sequence, linking part to part,
Not chance nor inspiration can fulfil
The welded whole, nor vanquish that distaste
Which ever comes with pause; but sovereign Art
Herself must bow to man’s more sovereign Will.
HESEPE, _24th June_
IV
So forward still, might but my strength avail
Out of the brooding darkness of my plight,
Each day to bring one glimmering shaft of light,
Each night to add some fragment to the tale,
That so I sleep. Else o’er my dreams prevail
These sorrows, or within me hour-long smite
The hammers of the brain, and turn the night
Into a thing to make man’s reason fail.
--A little further; for the thoughts still rise
Over me like a soughing wind, that blows
From where the surges boom along the graile
Of the world’s misery under lowering skies,
--A little further and my task I close,
Lest twilight overtake me and I stale.
HESEPE, _25th June_
ENGLAND
I
England, the strain of weakness in thee shows
Like to some fell distemper which doth threat
Thy noble life with blight, and doth beget
Many malignant sores. The evil flows
Not from one source, but gradually grows
With thine own growth of years, wherein are met
All the deep instincts that did ever fret
The soul of freedom against freedom’s foes.
But whatsoe’er the form, the effect is one;
Some great cause grandly tried and bravely lost,
Some work of beauty marred upon the loom,
And at the final reckoning, something done,
Yet at a bitter and a fearful cost--
In broken hearts and many a needless tomb.
HESEPE, _25th June_
II
I heard it in the strife of other days;
It reached me in my home across the sea,
That the great soul that made my England free,
And now must make her perfect, idly plays
With the tremendous issue; that they raise
Sedition’s banner with impunity,
And legislators, hot with laboured plea,
Pile law on law, while Law herself decays.
It is the everlasting cloud that dwells
Upon the summit, compassed in one word,
Disruption, whose deep thunder as it swells
Unnerves us, and arrests the falling sword,
Even to this hour, when but to differ spells
Lese-majesty, and loyalty means accord.
HESEPE, _25th June_
III
Man lives by love. The state subsists by Law.
And in these sacred islands east and west,
Constant of late the Beast its scaly breast
Half rears from earth, and with its unclean paw
And bloody fang a-work, and dripping jaw,
Offers at England. It is time this pest
Were exorcised, and Unrest laid to rest,
With all that dares to hold thee not in awe.
So thou deal’st faithfully with God and man;
With man, who prays thee, England, but to place
Thy heavy hand on all that doth immerse
The god-like in him, and distort his plan;
With God, who made thee regent for a space
Over a portion of His Universe.
HESEPE, _1st July_
IV
England, I trust thee. What thy soul hath planned
Will be performed; and towards that last long end
Thou hast not wavered since thou first did’st send
Ship hot on ship, by freemen freely manned,
Over the sea to France’s sacred strand.
Faithful thou art, and knowest well to blend
Patience with resolution, and to lend
To thy heart’s aim thy gauntleted right hand.
This in the main. And yet the enterprise
Articulated, mocks the purposed whole
With fitful effort; and the dread doth loom,
As each fresh crisis darkens all the skies,
That the Disruptive in thy restless soul,
Become habitual, is become thy doom.
HESEPE, _28th June_
V
Forget it, England, that this Tempest finds
Thy life at home with troubles overrun,
Issues unsettled, justice to be done,
And dark distrust corrupting all men’s minds.
Trust England, all her sons. Her millstone grinds
Slowly perchance; but while in heaven the sun
Endureth, while their rounds the planets run,
Her word is bond, and what she binds she binds.
And England, see thou that these debts are paid!
Be firmly true to thine own children. Stand
For justice. Let these arms aside be laid.
And in our dear inviolable land
None but thyself go armed--the only blade
Out of its sheath, that flashing in thy hand.
HESEPE, _28th June_
VI
Until the day that England’s sons shall learn
Not in that instant only when there burst
Thunders upon her to place England first,
But steadily, and in her face discern
The hunger-look of one who still doth yearn
Over the children whom her breast hath nursed;
The long look of a mother, and her thirst
To see her children’s eyes that look return--
Not till the day when o’er our local strife
The feeling of our nationality
Shall rise spontaneous as our English Life,
Outsoaring every animosity
By sheer force of its grandeur--shall we see
The truth come home and our free England free.
HESEPE, _29th June_
VII
Have you e’er thought, you people, have you thought
How great a thing it is in these great days
But to belong to England? The world stays
Upon the event. ’Twas English armies caught
The onfall of the Cyclone. While they fought,
The world forbore to breathe. Stern Fate delays
The issue; but that service and its praise
While England lives will never be forgot.
There was an honour that the ages kept
For English arms from immemorial time,
While yet the chivalry of nations slept
With mastodon and mammoth in the slime.
The æons rolled. Fate nodded. England woke.
The hour boomed forth. ’Twas England took the stroke.
HESEPE, _1st July_
VIII
Let every child of England every day,
While o’er the world these battle-thunders roll,
Enter into the silence of his soul,
And there communing with his conscience say:
“I am a child of England, and I pray
That with a single eye and one fixed goal,
Thou grant me, God, to give my being whole
To England in her hour of agony.
Chasten me to the greatness of my fate;
And, self-divided, make me one again,
That, as to this last rally congregate
The last stern remnants of my countrymen,
Thou may’st behold Thy England move as one,
Swift, final, justified of every son.”
HESEPE, _2nd July_
IX
There have been moments haunted by the sound
Of riot in our midst and foul rapine,
Which, with more wealth, still makes our lives more mean,
When I have asked: “If one who strove to ground
Our life afresh should cast his eyes around
Amongst the people, one great class to glean
Out of the whole, that should keep England clean,
Where should this pure, effectual class be found?”
No answer came from those who still divide
The old tradition of a worn-out past.
I asked the Church: the labouring lost replied;
For these the Publican. And at the last
I looked into the honest eyes of youth,
And knew--the exceeding bitterness of truth.
HESEPE, _5th July_
X
My countrymen, if while upon the brink
Of this Penultimate of Destiny,
The world with gathered sinews, anxiously
Craning upon the plunge, awaits the wink
Of swithering Mars, I could but make you think
A wildish thought on purpose, it would be
That England in a night beneath the sea
Should like some greater Krakatoa sink.
Then while to water and oblivion
The great ship heels majestically down,
Ask ye what world it were in which the dawn
Sparkled no more on Ocean’s jewelled crown,
But in that place where England used to be
Spouted and plashed the insufferable sea.
HESEPE, _9th July_
XI