Who whipped his wild steeds east and west,
Whose whirlwind wheels rolled down and dinned
Along the booming forest’s crest,
Lies dead upon his mountains, where
His sister Breezes beat the breast
Sighing through their unshaken hair.
LXV
The griefs of Nature, like her joys,
Are placid and yet passionate;
These, in her heart which knows no hate,
She for the beautiful employs....
Behold how thoughts of happiness
Rainbow the tears on sorrow’s face!
Upon, the brow of joy no less
Aureates the light of seriousness!
Each to the other lending grace.
Oh, tenderness of grief that knows
Some happiness still lies before!
That for the rose that blooms no more
Will bloom a no less perfect rose!
Oh, pensiveness of joy that takes
Sweet dignity from grief that died!
Remembering that though morning shakes
Her bright locks from blue eyes and wakes,
Night sleeps on the same mountain side.
LXVI
What alchemy does Earth conceal
Desired by the desperate days?
With feet of fog and hands of haze
They search the crumbling woods and steal
With mutterings,--gaunt as hags who deal
In witchcraft,--where each dark tree sways,
And, venerable, with staff aslant,
Death sits like some old mendicant.
Around me all’s despondency,
And grief that holds the unwilling world:
The last gold leaf is wildly hurled
Through sobbing silence over me:
The brook has hushed its wildwood glee,
Sick of itself; and far unfurled,
And melancholy as my soul,
The struggling lights of sunset roll.
LXVII
The song-birds, are they flown away,
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
Thridding with vocal gold the hush.
All day the crows fly cawing past:
The acorns drop: the forests scowl:
At night I hear the bitter blast
Hoot with the hooting of the owl.
The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn
With leaves that clog: beneath the tree
The bird, that set its toil to tune,
And made a home for melody,
Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.
THE MOATED GRANGE
“_There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected
Mariana._"--Shakespeare.
The sunset-crimson poppies are departed,
Mariana!
The purple-centered, sultry-smelling poppies,
The drowsy-hearted,
That burnt like flames along the low yew coppice;
All heavy headed,
The ruby-cupped and opium-brimming poppies,
That slumber wedded,
Mariana!
The sunset-crimson poppies are departed.
Oh, heavy, heavy are the hours that fall,
The lonesome hours of the lonely days!
No poppy strews oblivion by the wall,
Where lone the last pod sways,--
Oblivion that was hers of old that happier made her days.
Oh, weary, weary is the sky o’er all,
The days that creep, the hours that crawl,
And weary all the ways--
She leans her face against the lichened wall,
The mildewed wall, the crumbling wall,
And dreams, the long, long days,
Of one who will not come again whatever may befall.
* * * * *
All night it blew. The rain streamed down
And drowned the world in misty wet.
At morning, round the sunflower’s crown
A row of silvery drops was set;
The candytuft, heat shrivelled brown,
And beds of drought-dried mignonette,
Were beat to earth: but wearier, oh,
The rain was than the sun’s fierce glow,
That in the garth had wrought such woe.
That killed the moss-rose ere it bloomed,
And scorched the double-hollyhocks;
And bred great, poisonous weeds that doomed
The snap-dragon and standing-phlox;
’Mid which gaunt spiders wove and loomed
Their dusty webs ’twixt rows of box;
And rotted into sleepy ooze
The lilied moat, that, lined with yews,
Lay scummed with many sickly hues.
How oft she longed and prayed for rain,
To blot the hateful landscape out!
To heal her heart, so parched with pain,
With cooling sounds of broken drought;
And cure with change her stagnant brain,
And soothe to sleep all care and doubt:
At last--when many days had passed--
And she had ceased to care--at last
The longed-for rain came, falling fast.
At night, as late she lay awake,
And thought of him who had not come,
She heard the gray wind, moaning, shake
Her lattice; then the steady drum
Of rain upon the leads.... The ache
Within her heart, so burdensome,
Grew heavier with the moan of rain.
The house was still, save, at her pane,
The wind cried: hushed: then cried again.
All night she lay awake and wept:
There was no other thing to do.
At dawn she rose and, sighing, crept
Adown the stairs that led into
The dripping garth, the storm had swept
With ruin; where, of every hue,
The flowers lay rotting, stained with mould;
Where all was old, unkempt and old,
And ragged as a marigold.
She sat her down, where oft she sat,
Upon a bench of marble, where,
In lines, she oft would marvel at,
A love was carved.--She did not dare
Look on it then, remembering that
Here in past time _he_ kissed her hair,
And murmured vows while, soft above,
The full moon lit the form thereof,
The slowly crumbling form of Love.
She could but weep, remembering hours
Like these. Then in the drizzling rain,
That weighed the dead and dying flowers,
She sought the old stone dial again;
The dial, among the moss-rose bowers,
Where often she had read, in vain,
Of time and change, and love and loss,
Rude-lettered and o’ergrown with moss,
That slow the gnomon moved across.
Remembering this, she turned away,
The rain and tears upon her face.
There was no thing to do or say.--
She stood a while, a little space,
And watched the rain bead, round and gray,
Upon the cobweb’s tattered lace,
And tag the toadstool’s spongy brim
With points of mist; and, orbing, dim
With fog the sunflower’s ruined rim.--
With fog, through which the moon at night
Would glimmer like a spectre sail;
Or, sullenly, a blur of light,
Like some great glow-worm, dimly trail;
’Neath which she’d hear, wrapped deep in white,
The far sea moaning on its shale:
While in the garden, pacing slow,
And listening to its surge and flow,
She’d seem to hear her own heart’s woe.--
Now as the fog crept in from sea,
A great white darkness, like a pall,
The yews and huddled shrubbery,
That dripped along the weedy wall,
Turned phantoms; and as shadowy
She too seemed, wandering ’mid it all--
A phantom, pale and sad and strange,
And hopeless, doomed for aye to range
About the melancholy grange.
* * * * *
The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied,
Mariana!
The raven-dyed and fire-fretted pansies,
To memory married;
That from the grass, like forms in old romances,
Raised fairy faces:
All dead they lie, the violet-velvet pansies,
In many places,
Mariana!
The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied.
Oh, hateful, hateful are the hours that pass,
The lonely hours of the lonesome nights!
No pansy scatters heart’s-ease through the grass,
That autumn sorrow blights,
The heart’s-ease that was hers of old that happier made her nights.
Oh, barren, barren is her life, alas!
Its youth and beauty, all life has,
And barren all delights--
She lays her face against the withered grass,
The rain-wet grass, the autumn grass,
And thinks, the long, long nights,
Of one who will not come again whatever comes to pass.
CIRCE
The pillared portals of her home once rose from out the sea;
Its casements burnt with green sea-fire of ocean mystery;
And all its halls of love were full of mermaid melody.
Its battlements of beauty were a pharos from afar,
To lure the wandering seamen like a constellated star:--
Life may question: death is silent: will it answer where they are?
It is enough to know that once between the golden goals
Of dreams and deeds their vessel steered to music of citoles,
And reached the Siren island where they pledged and lost their souls.
It is enough to know that once love led them with a lute--
To taste the honey of her soul and of her flesh the fruit;
Between the soul and flesh she changed each man into a brute.
It is enough to know that love once sate them at a feast--
Her word was bread and oil to them, her kiss was wine at least;
Between the word and kiss she changed each man into a beast.
The marble now is vanished where the columned wonder rose;
The billow beats complaining there, a heart of many woes;
The sea-wind sings uncertain things of what the Siren knows.
Ah me! you know not how it is with him who once has been
A portion of such passion and the slave of such a queen;
What such possession of her love to his whole life may mean!
The world of languid attitudes that lured him to despair;
Abandonments of beauty that his heart would not beware--
A red rose suffering death to live one hour in her hair.
Yea, just to be again to her as music to the lute,
As fragrance to the senses, and to lips the blood-red fruit,
Between the soul and flesh again, unto her beauty, brute.
Her alabaster stairways and her casements filled with light,
Her corridors of melody and colonnades of night
Shall haunt his heart forever with the magic of her might!
POPPY AND MANDRAGORA
Let us go far from here!
Here there is sadness in the early year:
Here sorrow is where joy went laughing late:
The sicklied face of heaven hangs like hate
Above the woodland and the meadowland;
And Spring hath taken fire in her hand
Of frost and made a dead bloom of her face,
Which was a flower of beauty once and grace,
And musk and color and serenest glow.
Delay not; let us go.
Let us go far away
Into the sunrise of a fairer day:
Where all the nights resign them to the moon,
And drug their souls with odor and soft tune,
And tell their dreams in starlight: where the hours
Teach immortality with fadeless flowers;
And all the day the bee weighs down the bloom,
And all the night the moth shakes strange perfume
From bell and bugle of the lily intense.
Let us go far from hence.
Why should we sit and weep,
And yearn with weary eyelids still to sleep?
Forever hiding from our hearts the hate,
Death within death, life doth accumulate,
Like winter snows, along the barren leas
And sterile hills, whereon no lover sees
The crocus limn the beautiful in flame;
Or hyacinth and jonquil write the name
Of love in fire, beautiful to the eye.
Why should we sit and sigh?
We will not stay and long,
Here where our souls are wasting for a song;
Where no bird sings; and, dim beneath the stars,
No silvery water strikes melodious bars;
And in the rocks and forest-covered hills
No quick-tongued echo from her grotto fills
With eery syllables the solitude--
The vocal image of the voice that wooed--
Echo, of sound the airy looking-glass.
Our souls are sick, alas!
What should we say to her,
To Hope, who in our hearts makes no sweet stir?
Who looks not on us nor gives thought unto:
Too busy with the birth of bud and dew,
And vague gold wings within the chrysalis;
Or Love, who will not miss us; had no kiss
To give your soul or the sad soul of me,
Who gave our hearts to her in poesy,
Long since, and wear her badge of service still.
Yea, we have served our fill.
We will go far away.
Song will not care, who slays our souls each day
With the dark daggers of indignant eyes,
And lips’ sharp silence!... Had she sighed us lies,
Not passionate, yet falsely tremulous;
And lent her mouth to ours, in mockery; thus
Smiled from calm eyes a loveless negative;
Then, then our hearts had taught themselves to live
Feeding their love on her indifference.
But no!--so let us hence.
So be the Bible shut
Of Love and Beauty, and their wisdom but
A clasp of memory!--We will not seek
The light that came not when our souls were weak
With longing, and the darkness gave no sign
Of star-born comfort. Nay! why should we whine
Dull psalms of patience, or hosannas of
Old hope and dreary canticles of love?--
Leave us alone. My soul hath long supposed
For us God’s book was closed.
ROSEMARY
I
If she but breathe her wild breath in my face,
If she but shake her wild hair past mine eyes,
When life sits tearless in grief’s sunless chamber,
Then through the vasts of separating space,
Robed on with fire of hope my soul shall rise
And claim her.
II
When shall this be?--Not till within my soul
Joy’s lips are dumb, and dumb his instrument,
And love lies dead beside one withered flower,
And dark the gray walls of the home of dole,--
Whence the last flicker of hope’s taper went,--
Shall tower.
III
If she but bend her loving eyes on mine,
If she but give one loving thought to me,
When life sits sleepless in sleep’s caverned hollow,
Then in the night a sudden star shall shine,
And I shall rise, robed on with ecstasy,
And follow.
IV
When shall this be?--Not till within my heart
Hope’s voice is still, and song that suffereth,
And love lies dead beside his silent numbers,
And in the halls of silence, all apart,
Oblivion sits, crowned with the crown of death,
And slumbers.
NIGHTSHADE
I
Though she hath lifted up my face to hers,
And kissed the lips of worship she denied,
There is no mouth of verse,
Here in the shadow of the crucified,
Or voice of love; only my soul that died,
My dead soul and my curse!--
She asks me now for flowers that are ashes,
Here where the red flow’r of my life lies slain:
For love, that lashed me once and now that lashes
Her soul again.
II
Though she hath gazed into mine eyes and said,
“Belovéd, look thou in my soul and see,”
And I have looked and read
The burthen of a kindred agony,
I am grown glad that this hath come to be
Betwixt the quick and dead.--
She asks me now for songs from love’s sweet psalter,
Here where the music of my life lies hushed:
For love, that died upon the iron altar
Where hers lies crushed.
III
Though she hath touched hot lips to mine and wept,
From out the hell of her wild soul, fierce tears,
Each little look love kept
Of her disdain, unknowingly, these years,
And word of scorn, is crier at mine ears
To wake the hate that slept.--
She asks me now for water that shall cherish,
When hot sands choke my life’s dry fountainhead:
For love, that stirs not though her love should perish
Where mine lies dead.
LOTUS
Where is the vale and mountain,
And where the rock and stream,
One with its life of music,
The other with its gleam,
Where she and I were shadows
And all our world, a dream?
Between the world of waking,
And the sad world of sleep,
I met her, crowned with sorrow
Of love no heart would keep;
Within her eyes the terror
Of darkness, starry deep.
And was it in the valley,
Where something whispereth,
“Who is it walks so dimly?”
That I heard her murmur, “Death”?
As if upon my eyelids
The Beautiful breathed its breath.
There was no tomb before us,
Nor any stone to tell
Of love, or hate, or horror
In heaven or in hell--
But in her look the legend,
And in her eyes the spell.
And was it on the mountain,
The stealthy stars had crossed
To stand austere with silence,
That I heard her whisper, “Lost”?
As if dark eyes one moment
The Terrible did accost.
There was no memoried presence
Of flower or star or bird
To tell of tears and parting
That heartbreak once had heard--
But in her face the vision,
And in her heart the word.
Where is the vale and mountain,
And where the rock and stream
One with its life of music,
The other with its gleam,
Where she and I were shadows
And all our world, a dream?
MOLY
When by the wall the tiger-flower swings
A head of sultry slumber and aroma;
And by the path, whereon the blown rose flings
Its obsolete beauty, the long lilies foam a
White place of perfume, like a beautiful breast;
Between the pansy fire of the west,
And poppy mist of moonrise in the east,
This heartache will have ceased.
The witchcraft of soft music and sweet sleep--
Let it beguile the burthen from my spirit,
And white dreams reap me, as strong reapers reap
The golden grain and gorgeous blossom near it;
Let me behold how gladness gives the whole
The transformed countenance of my own soul;
Between the sunset and the risen moon,
Let sorrow vanish soon.
And these things then shall keep me company:
The spirit of the dew; the heart of laughter
That haunts the wind; the soul of melody
That sings within the stream, that reaches after
The flow’rs, that rock themselves to its caress:
These of themselves shall shape my happiness,
A visible presence I shall lean upon,
Feeling that care is gone.
Forgetting how the cankered flower must die;
The worm-pierced fruit fall, sicklied to its syrup;
How joy, begotten ’twixt a sigh and sigh,
Waits with one foot forever in the stirrup:--
Remembering how within the hollow lute
Sweet music sleeps when music’s voice is mute;
And in the heart, when all seems dark despair,
Hope with his golden hair.
CHRYSELEPHANTINE
I
Among the hills and morning-colored ways
Let us go forth, oh, let us go with singing!
Within the hearts of better bosoms bringing
A gift of gifts, one day of all our days,
Unto the golden temple of God’s praise,
And ivory altar of the beautiful.
The woods are deep, the woods are dark and cool;
Let us go forth with timbrels of rejoicing,
And lutes of love, and lips forever voicing
The beautiful!
II
The milkworth’s pink and barley’s gold and green,
Twined with the purple of the wilding pansies,
Shall be our wreath;--sweet as an old romance is
With pale blue eyes of some fair fairy-queen,--
Let the frail bluet in our wreath be seen;
And of mauve leaves and leafy loveliness,
And cool, green moss and ferns shall be our dress.
Let us go forth, arrayed as is the morning,
With psalteries of praise, to the adorning
Of loveliness!
III
No spotted serpent hisses near her shrine,
That God ordained, within the heaven-lit distance,
Which love hath built, with life to give assistance,
Of fragrance and of song; whereover shine
All of God’s stars,--so many thoughts divine:--
And at its entrance moonéd purity,
Naked, keeps guard,--no eye impure shall see!--
But worshippers of beauty in the spirit,
And offerers of soul, whose thoughts inherit
Love’s purity.
SIBYLLINE
I
There is a glory in the apple-boughs
Of glimmering moonlight,--like a torch of myrrh,
Burning upon an altar of sweet vows,
Dropped from the hand of some pale worshiper:--
And there is life among the apple-blooms
Of mystic winds,--as if a god addressed
The flamen from the sanctuary glooms,
Revealing secrets which no man has guessed,
Saying: “Behold! a darkness which illumes:
A waking which is rest.”
II
There is a blackness in the apple-trees
Of tempest,--like the ashes of an urn
Hurt hands have gathered upon blistered knees,
With salt of tears, out of the flames that burn:--
And there is death among the blooms, that fill
The night with breathless scent,--as when, above
The priest, the vision of his faith doth will
Forth from his soul the beautiful form thereof,
Saying: “Behold! a silence never still:
And love that’s more than love.”
ELEUSINIAN
Praxitelean marbles, fairer forms
Than Phryne’s and than hers,--who loved and knew
The Attic cynic’s soul,--the rosy charms
Of lovely Laïs, gradually grew
Before his eyelids, like a floating mist,
Out of the music of the citharist.
And there were Dryads, laughing sidewise eyes,
Among Cithæron’s ash-trees; and uncouth
Brown Satyrs, dancing ’neath Bœotian skies;
And by a fountain sat a beautiful youth,
Like some white flow’r, with dim, dejected grace,
In love with the reflection of his face.
And then a chord of soft bewitchment swept
Along his soul; and, oh! within a vale,
Like some young god, a godlike mortal slept;
And there was splendor on the heights, and pale
The presence of supernal purity,
Whose face was as a marble melody.
And now two chords, that were two hands that strewed
Innumerable memories upon
His eyelids--and his spirit understood
How, ages past, he was Endymion,--
And, lo! again the old, wild rapture of
Immortal sorrow and immortal love.
ARGONAUT
His argosy spreads dawn-kissed sails,
His trireme oars the dusk,
On mythic seas whereover gales
Of summer breathe their musk.
He hears the hail of Siren bands
From headlands sunset-kissed;
The Lotus-eaters wave him hands
Pale in a land of mist.
For many a league he hears the roar
Of the Symplegades;
And through the far foam of its shore
The Isle of Circe sees.
All day he looks with hazy lids
At sea-gods cleave the deep;
All night he hears the Nereïds
Sing their wild hearts to sleep.
When heaven thunders overhead,
And hell upheaves the Vast,
Dim faces of the ocean’s dead
Gaze at him from his mast.
He but repeats the oracle
That bade him first set sail;
And cheers his soul with, “All is well!
Sail on! I will not fail!”
Behold! he sails no earthly barque,
And on no earthly sea--
Adown the years he sails the dark
Deeps of futurity.
Ideals are the ships of Greece
His purpose steers afar:
His seas, the skies, the Golden Fleece
He seeks, the farthest star.
SIC VOS NON VOBIS
If on the thorns thy feet be pierced to-morrow,
And far the fierce sands glare,
Unbind thy temples! thank life for its sorrow,
Its longing and despair.
With love within, what heart shall halt and wither,
Athirst for rivered hills?
Moaning, “Mine! mine! what hate hath led me hither
Unto a sky that kills?”
Unworthy thou! if faith should sink and falter;
Blind hand and blinder eye
Bind the blind hope upon thy doubt’s old altar
And stab it till it die.
Thou canst not say thy toil and tears have never
Communed with lovely sleep!
Had night before thine eyeballs--night forever
To lead thee to the deep!
Ay! wouldst thou have thy self-love for a burden,
A fardel bound with tears,
To sweat beneath and gain at last, for guerdon,
From hands of wasted years?
To find thy stars are glow-worms, feebler, thinner
Than glimmers of the moon:
Dead stars, and all the darkness of the inner
Self’s deader plenilune.
To see at last,--beneath Death’s sterner learning,
--Through sockets sealed with frost,
The awful sunsets of Doom’s heavens burning
God’s baffling pentecost.
WITH THE TIDE
Once when the morning flashed athwart the breakers,
And on the foaming sand,
In exultation, by the ocean’s acres,
Love took command.
And so we sailed, æolian music melting
Around our silken sails;
The bubbled foam our prow of sandal pelting
With rainbow gales.
We watched the beach, with prickly cactus hateful,
And gnarled palmetto, pass
Beyond our vision; coasts where Life walked fateful
With Time’s slow glass.
Though hateful now, who could forget the beauty
Of dim and fragile shells,
That strewed the shores of Patience and of Duty
Like asphodels?
The rocks of Care, where Faith’s meek flow’r suffices
To lead Love up and on,
To levels, that the Bible’s lily spices,
Divine with dawn?
On, on we sailed, Love laughing at to-morrow,
Past sunny isle and cape:
Three were we now:--My Soul and Love and--Sorrow,
A tall, dim shape.
On, on we sailed, Love at the golden rudder,
On till the day waxed late,
When, lo! beside him, like an icy shudder,
Rose pallid Hate.
On, on we sailed, Love seeing me, no other:
None crowned with bleeding thorn,
None armed with violence, and now another--
Unyielding Scorn.
And then Love saw; Love, who had naught demanded,
Love saw, and summoned Pride:
The darker three, against the bright two banded,
Stood side by side.
On through the night our barque went drifting, drifting;
My stricken Soul alone;
A white face cold as moonlit marble lifting,
And still as stone.
APPORTIONMENT
If grief must fill my heart with tears, and Time
Abate no hour
Of agony with any happy rhyme,--
Be grief my dower.
If days must sing to my attentive soul
Joy’s cradle-song,
Nor lift one grave note in the gladsome whole,
Let joy be long.
Bring me pale flowers of the handselled hills,
To braid and lay
On coffined brows, sad separation fills
With death’s dismay.
Or dreams to drug my soul’s life-cup with pure
Ideal love;
Glad dreams of life whose beauties aye allure
The soul above.
A harp, to hold against my heart and smite
With smiles and tears,
To sing bereavement or my soul’s delight
Through all the years.
Make of my heart a lute, for Love to wake
With tripping tune;
Or Loss to crush against her breast and break
With wilder croon.
Upon the mountains of the morning lands,
Where all may look,
Let Hope arise and lift with astral hands
His starry book.
Up bars of stars, the golden notes of skies,
On night’s black scroll
Let the moon’s music lift, and with it rise
Despair’s dark soul.
Apportion, O my God, the hope or fear,
The grief or glee!
Thine be the purpose of each smile, each tear
Eternally.
ESOTERIC BEAUTY
I
Within the old, old forest
The wind hath whispered me
Thou dwellest--thou, who warrest
With birds in melody,
And all the wood-ways starrest
With wild-flow’rs fragrantly,
Thou presence none may see!
II