To double on it, as in glee,
With clap of hands, and little lacks
Of meaning in her repartee.
For all shall fall,
As one has done,
The tree of me,
Of thee the tree;
And unto all
The fate we wait
Reveals the wheels
Whereon we run:
We tower to flower,
We spread the shade,
We drop for crop,
At length are laid;
Are rolled in mould,
From chop and lop:
And are we thick in woodland tracks,
Or tempting of our stature we,
The end is one, we do but wax
For service over land and sea.
So, strike! the like
Shall thus of us,
My brawny woodman, claim the tax.
Nor foe thy blow,
Though wood be good,
And shriekingly the timber cracks:
The ground we crowned
Shall speed the seed
Of younger into swelling sacks.
For use he hews,
To make awake
The spirit of what stuff we be:
Our earth of mirth
And tears he clears
For braver, let our minds agree;
And then will men
Within them win
An Echo clapping harmony.
THE WISDOM OF ELD
WE spend our lives in learning pilotage,
And grow good steersmen when the vessel’s crank!
Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank
Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.
It is the sentence which completes that stage;
A testament of wisdom reading blank.
The seniors of the race, on their last plank,
Pass mumbling it as nature’s final page.
These, bent by such experience, are the band
Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain
What things we view, and Earth’s decree withstand,
Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay,
Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,
And ancients musical at close of day.
EARTH’S PREFERENCE
EARTH loves her young: a preference manifest:
She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds;
Their beauty with her choicest interthreads,
And makes her revel of their merry zest;
As in our East much were it in our West,
If men had risen to do the work of heads.
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.
How wrought they in their zenith? ’Tis not writ;
Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read:
Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
SOCIETY
HISTORIC be the survey of our kind,
And how their brave Society took shape.
Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape,
The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find,
Who, with some jars in harmony, combined,
Their primal instincts taming, to escape
The brawl indecent, and hot passions drape.
Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind.
Thus entered they the field of milder beasts,
Which in some sort of civil order graze,
And do half-homage to the God of Laws.
But are they still for their old ravenous feasts,
Earth gives the edifice they build no base:
They spring another flood of fangs and claws.
WINTER HEAVENS
SHARP is the night, but stars with frost alive
Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
It is a night to make the heavens our home
More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
The living throb in me, the dead revive.
Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
Life glistens on the river of the death.
It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.
NOTES
PHAETHON
_The Galliambic Measure_
Hermann (_Elementa Doctrinae Metricae_), after citing lines from the
Tragic poet Phrynichus and from the Comic, observes:
Dixi supra, Phrynichorum versus videri puros Ionicos esse. Id si verum
est, Galliambi non alia re ab his differunt, quam quod anaclasin,
contractionesque et solutiones recipiunt. Itaque versus Galliambicus ex
duobus versibus Anacreonteis constat, quorum secundus catalecticus est,
hac forma:
[Picture: Graphic depiction of scheme]
The wonderful _Attis_ of Catullus is the one classic example. A few
lines have been gathered elsewhere. Lord Tennyson’s _Boadicea_ rides
over many difficulties and is a noble poem. Catullus makes general use
of the variant second of the above metrical forms:
_Mihi januae frequentes_, _mihi limina tepida_:
With stress on the emotion;
_Jam_, _jam dolet quod egi_, _jam jamque poenitet_.
A perfect conquest of the measure is not possible in our tongue. For the
sake of an occasional success in the velocity, sweep, volume of the line,
it seems worth an effort; and, if to some degree serviceable for
narrative verse, it is one of the exercises of a writer which readers may
be invited to share.
THEODOLINDA
The legend of the Iron Crown of Lombardy, formed of a nail of the true
Cross by order of the devout Queen Theodolinda, is well known. In this
dramatic song she is seen passing through one of the higher temptations
of the believing Christian.
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Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press