A Lilliputian landscape, where
The world is white instead of green,
And trees and houses hang in air.
Where Elfins gambol and delight,
And haunt the jewelled bells of flowers;
Where upside-down we see the night
With many moons and starry showers.
And surely in his wand or hand
Is Midas magic, for, behold,
Some morn we wake and find the land,
Both field and forest, turned to gold.
A NIGHT IN JUNE
I
White as a lily moulded of Earth's milk
That eve the moon bloomed in a hyacinth sky;
Soft in the gleaming glens the wind went by,
Faint as a phantom clothed in unseen silk:
Bright as a naiad's leap, from shine to shade
The runnel twinkled through the shaken brier;
Above the hills one long cloud, pulsed with fire,
Flashed like a great enchantment-welded blade.
And when the western sky seemed some weird land,
And night a witching spell at whose command
One sloping star fell green from heav'n; and deep
The warm rose opened for the moth to sleep;
Then she, consenting, laid her hands in his,
And lifted up her lips for their first kiss.
II
There where they part, the porch's steps are strewn
With wind-blown petals of the purple vine;
Athwart the porch the shadow of a pine
Cleaves the white moonlight; and like some calm rune
Heaven says to Earth, shines the majestic moon;
And now a meteor draws a lilac line
Across the welkin, as if God would sign
The perfect poem of this night of June.
The wood-wind stirs the flowering chestnut-tree,
Whose curving blossoms strew the glimmering grass
Like crescents that wind-wrinkled waters glass;
And, like a moonstone in a frill of flame,
The dewdrop trembles on the peony,
As in a lover's heart his sweetheart's name.
THE DREAMER
Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,
And mark the loafing sunlight's lazy laugh;
Or, on each season, spell the epitaph
Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;
Or list the music of the strolling showers,
Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,
Or read the day's delivered monograph
Through all the chapters of its daedal hours.
Still with the same child-faith and child regard
He looks on Nature, hearing at her heart,
The Beautiful beat out the time and place,
Through which no lesson of this life is hard,
No struggle vain of science or of art,
That dies with failure written on its face.
WINTER
The flute, whence Summer's dreamy finger-tips
Drew music,--ripening the pinched kernels in
The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,--
Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips,
And surly songs whistle around his chin;
Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
Which unto Winter's masculine airs doth give
Thy own creative qualities of tune,
Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.
MID-WINTER
All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
Harsh as an iron landscape of wan hell
The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
My window wailing: now a little child
Crying outside my door; and now the long
Howl of some starved beast down the flue. I sat
And knew 'twas Winter with his madman song
Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.
SPRING
First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips;
A pursuivant who heralded a prince:
And dawn put on her livery of tints,
And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips:
And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came,
A knight, who bade the winter let him pass;
And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as
The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame.
And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness,
Across the hills; and heav'n bent down to bless:
Above her head the birds were as a lyre;
And at her feet, like some strong worshipper,
The shouting water paean'd praise of her
Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire.
TRANSFORMATION
It is the time when, by the forest falls,
The touch-me-nots hang fairy folly-caps;
When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps
Of rocks with colour, rich as orient shawls:
And in my heart I hear a voice that calls
Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps
Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps,
Sings the sweet Greek of Pan's old madrigals:
There is a gleam that lures me up the stream--
A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light?
Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream--
An Oread's footprints fragrant with her flight?
And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again,
Part of the myths that I pursue in vain.
RESPONSE
There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,--
And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling
To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above,
White-hearts and mandrake blooms--that look enough
Like the elves' washing--white with laundering
Of May-moon dews; and all pale-opening
Wild-flowers of the woods are born thereof.
There is no sod Spring's white foot brushes but
Must feel the music that vibrates within,
And thrill to the communicated touch
Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
The heart of Beauty for Song's concrete kin,
Emotions--that are flowers--born of such.
THE SWASHBUCKLER
Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
Aggression marches armies in his words;
And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-a-pie;
His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
And in his carriage camp all wars to be:--
With him of battles there shall be no lack
While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.
SIMULACRA
Dark in the west the sunset's sombre wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
With Conflagration glaring at each crack.--
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.
CAVERNS
WRITTEN OF COLOSSAL CAVE, KENTUCKY
Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores,
Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips
Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.--
Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits
Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,--
Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,--
An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.
THE BLUE BIRD
From morn till noon upon the window-pane
The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
And all the afternoon the blustering gales
Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
The rose, near which the lily bloom lay slain,
Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
On which the sullen slug left slimy trails--
Meseemed the sun would never shine again.
Then in the drench, long, loud and full of cheer,--
A skyey herald tabarded in blue,--
A bluebird bugled ... and at once a bow
Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
God's sapphire spaces crystallising through
The strata'd clouds in azure tremolo.
QUATRAINS
POETRY
Who hath beheld the goddess face to face,
Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go
Climbing lone mountains towards her temple's place,
Weighed with song's sweet, inexorable woe.
THE UNIMAGINATIVE
Each form of beauty's but the new disguise
Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be;
Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,
Never the Earth's wild fairy-dance shall see.
MUSIC
God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled,
With awful symphonies of flood and fire,
God's name on rocking Chaos--world by world
Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre.
THE THREE ELEMENTS
They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet
Sonorous-sandalled with majestic awe;
In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat,
Blowing the trumpets of God's wrath and law.
ROME
Above the circus of the world she sat,
Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride:
Fierce nations, upon whom she sneered and spat,
Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died.
ON READING THE LIFE OF HAROUN ER RESHID
Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth
He steals, with golden justice for the poor:
Within his palace--you shall know the truth!--
A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door.
MNEMOSYNE
In classic beauty, cold, immaculate,
A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands,
Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate,
That sorrow o'er dead roses in her hands.
BEAUTY
High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
Unknown she takes her unassuming place
At Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour
Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face.
THE STARS
These--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame,
In which he reads his blessing or his curse--
Are syllables with which God speaks his name
In the vast utterance of the universe.
ECHO
Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.
ADVENTURERS
Seemingly over the hill-tops,
Possibly under the hills,
A tireless wing that never drops,
And a song that never stills.
Epics heard on the stars' lips?
Lyrics read in the dew?--
To sing the song at our finger-tips,
And live the world anew!
Cavaliers of the Cortes kind,
Bold and stern and strong,--
And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind
To sing a new-world's song!
Sailing seas of the silver morn,
Winds of the balm and spice,
To put the old-world art to scorn
At the price of any price!
Danger, death, but the hope high!
God's, if the purpose fail!
Into the deeds of a vaster sky
Sailing a dauntless sail.
EPILOGUE
I
O Life! O Death! O God!
Have we not striven?
Have we not known Thee, God
As Thy stars know Heaven?
Have we not held Thee true,
True as thy deepest,
Sweet and immaculate blue
Heaven that feels Thy dew!
Have we not _known_ Thee true,
O God who keepest.
II
O God, our Father, God!--
Who gav'st us fire,
To soar beyond the sod,
To rise, aspire--
What though we strive and strive,
And all our soul says 'live'?
The empty scorn of men
Will sneer it down again.
And, O sun-centred high,
Who, too, art Poet,
Beneath Thy tender sky
Each day new Keatses die,
Calling all life a lie;
Can this be so--and why?--
And canst Thou know it?
III
We know Thee beautiful,
We know Thee bitter!
Help Thou!--Men's eyes are dull,
O God most beautiful!
Make thou their souls less full
Of things mere glitter.
Dost Thou not see our tears?
Dost Thou not hear the years
Treading our hearts to shards,
O Lord of all the Lords?--
Arouse Thee, God of Hosts,
There 'mid Thy glorious ghosts,
So high and holy!
Have mercy on our tears!
Have mercy on our years!
Our strivings and our fears,
O Lord of lordly peers,
On us, so lowly!
IV
On us, so fondly fain
To tell what mother-pain
Of Nature makes the rain.
On us, so glad to show
The sorrow of her snow,
And all her winds that blow.
Us, who interpret right
Her mystic rose of light,
Her moony rune of night.
Us, who have utterance for
Each warm, flame-hearted star
That stammers from afar.
Who hear the tears and sighs
Of every bud that dies
While heav'n's dew on it lies.
Who see the power that dowers
The wildwood bosks and bowers
With musk of sap and flowers.
Who see what no man sees
In water, earth, and breeze,
And in the hearts of trees.
Turn not away Thy light,
O God!--Our strength is slight!
Help us who breast the height!
Have mercy, Infinite!
Have mercy!
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press