I shall not see the hour of thy queening!
But my Song shall see, and wake like a flower that dawn-winds shake,
And sigh with joy the odours of its meaning.
O Lily of the King, remember then the thing
That this dead mouth sang; and thy daughters,
As they dance before His way; sing there on the Day
What I sang when night was on the waters!
TO THE ENGLISH MARTYRS
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
Rain, rain on Tyburn tree,
Red rain a-falling;
Dew, dew on Tyburn tree,
Red dew on Tyburn tree,
And the swart bird a-calling.
The shadow lies on England now
Of the deathly-fruited bough:
Cold and black with malison
Lies between the land and sun;
Putting out the sun, the bough
Shades England now!
The troubled heavens so wan with care,
And burdened with the earth’s despair
Shiver a-cold; the starved heaven
Has want, with wanting men bereaven.
Blest fruit of the unblest bough,
Aid the land that smote you, now!
That feels the sentence and the curse
Ye died if so ye might reverse.
When God was stolen from out man’s mouth,
Stolen was the bread; then hunger and drouth
Went to and fro; began the wail,
Struck root the poor-house and the jail,
Ere cut the dykes, let through that flood,
Ye writ the protest with your blood;
Against this night--wherein our breath
Withers, and the toiled heart perisheth,--
Entered the _caveat_ of your death.
Christ in the form of His true Bride,
Again hung pierced and crucified,
And groaned, “I thirst!” Not still ye stood,--
Ye had your hearts, ye had your blood;
And pouring out the eager cup,--
“The wine is weak, yet, Lord Christ, sup.”
Ah, blest! who bathed the parched Vine
With richer than His Cana-wine,
And heard, your most sharp supper past:
“Ye kept the best wine to the last!”
Ah, happy who
That sequestered secret knew,
How sweeter than bee-haunted dells
The blosmy blood of martyrs smells!
Who did upon the scaffold’s bed,
The ceremonial steel between you, wed
With God’s grave proxy, high and reverend Death;
Or felt about your neck, sweetly,
(While the dull horde
Saw but the unrelenting cord)
The Bridegroom’s arm, and that long kiss
That kissed away your breath, and claimed you His.
You did, with thrift of holy gain,
Unvenoming the sting of pain,
Hive its sharp heather-honey. Ye
Had sentience of the mystery
To make Abaddon’s hooked wings
Buoy you up to starry things;
Pain of heart, and pain of sense,
Pain the scourge, ye taught to cleanse;
Pain the loss became possessing;
Pain the curse was pain the blessing.
Chains, rack, hunger, solitude,--these,
Which did your soul from earth release,
Left it free to rush upon
And merge in its compulsive Sun.
Desolated, bruised, forsaken,
Nothing taking, all things taken,
Lacerated and tormented,
The stifled soul, in naught contented,
On all hands straitened, cribbed, denied,
Can but fetch breath o’ the Godward side.
Oh, to me, give but to me
That flower of felicity,
Which on your topmost spirit ware
The difficult and snowy air
Of high refusal! and the heat
Of central love which fed with sweet
And holy fire i’ the frozen sod
Roots that ta’en hold on God.
Unwithering youth in you renewed
Those rosy waters of your blood,--
The true _Fons Juventutis_; ye
Pass with conquest that Red Sea,
And stretch out your victorious hand
Over the Fair and Holy Land.
O by the Church’s pondering art
Late set and named upon the chart
Of her divine astronomy,
Through your influence from on high
Long shed unnoted! Bright
New cluster in our Northern night,
Cleanse from its pain and undelight
An impotent and tarnished hymn,
Whose marish exhalations dim
Splendours they would transfuse! And thou
Kindle the words which blot thee now,
Over whose sacred corse unhearsed
Europe veiled her face, and cursed
The regal mantle grained in gore
Of genius, freedom, faith, and More!
Ah, happy Fool of Christ, unawed
By familiar sanctities,
You served your Lord at holy ease!
Dear Jester in the Courts of God----
In whose spirit, enchanting yet,
Wisdom and love together met,
Laughed on each other for content!
That an inward merriment,
An inviolate soul of pleasure,
To your motions taught a measure
All your days; which tyrant king,
Nor bonds, nor any bitter thing,
Could embitter or perturb;
No daughter’s tears, nor, more acerb,
A daughter’s frail declension from
Thy serene example, come
Between thee and thy much content.
Nor could the last sharp argument
Turn thee from thy sweetest folly;
To the keen _accolade_ and holy
Thou didst bend low a sprightly knee,
And jest Death out of gravity
As a too sad-visaged friend;
So, jocund passing to the end
Of thy laughing martyrdom;
And now from travel art gone home
Where, since gain of thee was given,
Surely there is more mirth in heaven!
Thus, in Fisher and in thee,
Arose the purple dynasty,
The anointed Kings of Tyburn tree;
High in act and word each one:
He that spake--and to the sun
Pointed--“I shall shortly be
Above yon fellow,” He too, he
No less high of speech and brave,
Whose word was: “Though I shall have
Sharp dinner, yet I trust in Christ
To have a most sweet supper.” Priced
Much by men that utterance was
Of the doomed Leonidas,--
Not more exalt than these, which note
Men who thought as Shakespeare wrote.
But more lofty eloquence
Than is writ by poet’s pens
Lives in your great deaths: O these
Have more fire than poesies!
And more ardent than all ode,
The pomps and raptures of your blood!
By that blood ye hold in fee
This earth of England; Kings are ye:
And ye have armies--Want, and Cold,
And heavy Judgments manifold
Hung in the unhappy air, and Sins
That the sick gorge to heave begins,
Agonies and Martyrdoms,
Love, Hope, Desire, and all that comes
From the unwatered soul of man
Gaping on God. These are the van
Of conquest, these obey you; these,
And all the strengths of weaknesses,
That brazen walls disbed. Your hand,
Princes, put forth to the command,
And levy upon the guilty land
Your saving wars; on it go down,
Black beneath God’s and heaven’s frown;
Your prevalent approaches make
With unsustainable grace, and take
Captive the land that captived you;
To Christ enslave ye and subdue
Her so bragged freedom: for the crime
She wrought on you in antique time,
Parcel the land among you; reign,
Viceroys to your sweet Suzerain!
Till she shall know
This lesson in her overthrow:
Hardest servitude has he
That’s jailed in arrogant liberty;
And freedom, spacious and unflawed,
Who is walled about with God.
THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat--and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet--
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followed,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside);
But, if one little casement parted wide.
The gust of His approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateway of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.
I said to dawn, Be sudden; to eve, Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From his tremendous Lover!
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot ’thwart a heaven
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet:--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat--
“Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”
I sought no more that after which I strayed
In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children’s eyes
Seems something, something that replies;
_They_ at least are for me, surely for me!
I turned me to them very wistfully;
But, just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
“Come then, ye other children, Nature’s--share
With me” (said I) “your delicate fellowship;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother’s vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured dais,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the day spring.”
So it was done:
_I_ in their delicate fellowship was one--
Drew the bolt of Nature’s secrecies.
_I_ knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumed of the wild sea-snortings;
All that’s born or dies
Rose and drooped with--made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine--
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day’s dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning’s eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven’s grey cheek.
For ah, we know not what each other says
These things and I; in sound _I_ speak--
_Their_ sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drought;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts of her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;
And past those noised fleet--
A Voice comes yet more fleet--
“Lo! naught contents thee who content’st not Me.”
Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years--
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must--
Designer infinite!--
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is; what is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
“And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo! all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing,
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught” (He said)
“And human love needs human meriting:
How hast thou merited--
Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”
THE DREAD OF HEIGHT
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
“_If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say;
We see: your sin remaineth._”--John ix. 41
Not the Circean wine
Most perilous is for pain:
Grapes of the heaven’s star-loaden vine,
Whereto the lofty-placed
Thoughts of fair souls attain,
Tempt with a more retributive delight,
And do disrelish all life’s sober taste.
’Tis to have drunk too well
The drink that is divine,
Maketh the kind earth waste,
And breath intolerable.
Ah, me!
How shall my mouth content it with mortality?
Lo, secret music, sweetest music,
From distances of distance drifting its lone flight,
Down the arcane where Night would perish in night,
Like a god’s loosened locks slips undulously:
Music that is too grievous of the height
For safe and low delight,
Too infinite
For bounded hearts which yet would girth the sea!
So let it be,
Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small:
So let it be,
O music, music, though you wake in me
No joy, no joy at all;
Although you only wake
Uttermost sadness, measure of delight,
Which else I could not credit to the height,
Did I not know,
Did I not know,
That ill is statured to its opposite;
And even of sadness so,
Of utter sadness, make
Of extreme sad a rod to mete
The incredible excess of unsensed sweet,
And mystic wall of strange felicity.
So let it be,
Though sweet be great, and though my heart be small,
And bitter meat
The food of Gods for men to eat;
Yea, John ate daintier, and did tread
Less ways of heat,
Than whom to their wind-carpeted
High banquet hall,
And golden love-feasts, the fair stars entreat.
But ah! withal,
Some hold, some stay,
O difficult joy, I pray,
Some arms of thine,
Not only, only arms of mine!
Lest like a weary girl I fall
From clasping love so high,
And lacking thus thine arms, then may
Most hapless I
Turn utterly to love of basest rate;
For low they fall whose fall is from the sky.
Yea, who me shall secure
But I, of height grown desperate,
Surcease my wing, and my lost fate
Be dashed from pure
To broken writhings in the shameful slime:
Lower than man, for I dreamed higher,
Thrust down, by how much I aspire,
And damned with drink of immortality?
For such things be,
Yea, and the lowest reach of reeky Hell
Is but made possible
By foreta’en breath of Heaven’s austerest clime.
These tidings from the vast to bring
Needeth not doctor nor divine,
Too well, too well
My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing;
That dread theology alone
Is mine,
Most native and my own;
And ever with victorious toil
When I have made
Of the delfic peaks dim escalade,
My soul with anguish and recoil
Doth like a city in an earthquake rock,
As at my feet the abyss is cloven then,
With deeper menace than for other men,
Of my potential cousinship with mire;
That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock,
My fearful powers retire,
No longer strong,
Reversing the shook banners of their song.
Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven,
A hooded eye, for jesses and restraint,
Or for a will accipitrine to pursue!--
The veil of tutelar flesh to simple livers given,
Or those brave-fledging fervours of the Saint,
Whose heavenly falcon-craft doth never taint,
Nor they in sickest time their ample virtue mew.
TO MY GODCHILD--FRANCIS M. W. M.
BY FRANCIS THOMPSON
This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon,
Riding at anchor off the orient sun,
Had broken its cable, and stood out to space
Down some froze Arctic of the aerial ways:
And now, back warping from the inclement main,
Its vapourous shroudage drenched with icy rain,
It swung into its azure roads again;
When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you
Lit, a white halcyon auspice, ’mid our frozen crew.
To the Sun, stranger, surely you belong,
Giver of golden days and golden song;
Nor is it by an all-unhappy plan
You bear the name of me, his constant Magian.
Yet, ah! from any other that it came,
Lest fated to my fate you be, as to my name.
When at the first those tidings did they bring,
My heart turned troubled at the ominous thing:
Though well may such a title him endower,
For when a poet’s prayer implores a poet’s power.
The Assisian, who kept plighted faith to three,
To Song, to Sanctitude, and Poverty,
(In two alone of whom most singers prove
A fatal faithfulness of during love!);
He the sweet Sales, of whom we scarcely ken
How God he could love more, he so loved men;
The crown and crowned of Laura and Italy;
And Fletcher’s fellow--from these, and not from me,
Take you your name, and take your legacy!
Or, if a right successive you declare
When worms, for ivies, intertwine my hair,
Take but this Poesy that now followeth
My clayey best with sullen servile breath,
Made then your happy freedman by testating death.
My song I do but hold for you in trust,
I ask you but to blossom from my dust.
When you have compassed all weak I began,
Diviner poet, and ah! diviner man--
The man at feud with the perduring child
In you before song’s altar nobly reconciled--
From the wise heavens I half shall smile to see
How little a world, which owned you, needed me.
If, while you keep the vigils of the night,
For your wild tears make darkness all too bright,
Some lone orb through your lonely window peeps,
As it played lover over your sweet sleeps,
Think it a golden crevice in the sky,
Which I have pierced but to behold you by!
And when, immortal mortal, droops your head,
And you, the child of deathless song, are dead;
Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance
The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod
Among the bearded counsellors of God;
For, if in Eden as on earth are we,
I sure shall keep a younger company:
Pass where beneath their ranged gonfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridged spears:
Pass where majestical the eternal peers,
The stately choice of the great Saintdom, meet--
A silvern segregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet;
Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer,
Your cousined clusters, emulous to share
With you the roseal lightnings burning ’mid their hair;
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:--
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL
BY KATHERINE TYNAN
Not woman-faced and sweet, as look
The angels in the picture-book;
But terrible in majesty,
More than an army passing by.
His hair floats not upon the wind
Like theirs, but curled and closely twined;
Wrought with his aureole, so that none
Shall know the gold curls from the crown.
His wings he hath put away in steel,
He goes mail-clad from head to heel;
Never moon-silver hath outshone
His breastplate and his morion.
His brows are like a battlement,
Beautiful, brave and innocent;
His eyes with fires of battle burn--
On his strong mouth the smile is stern.
His horse, the horse of Heaven, goes forth,
Bearing him off to South and North,
Neighing far off, as one that sees
The battle over distances.
His fiery sword is never at rest,
His foot is in the stirrup prest;
Through all the world where wrong is done
Michael the Soldier rideth on.
Michael, Commander! Angels are
That sound the trumpet and that bear
The banners by the Throne, where is
The King one nameth on his knees.
Angels there are of peace and prayers,
And they that go with wayfarers,
And they that watch the house of birth,
And they that bring the dead from earth.
And mine own Angel. Yet I see,
Heading God’s army gloriously,
Michael Archangel, like a sun,
Splendid beyond comparison!
PLANTING BULBS
BY KATHERINE TYNAN
Setting my bulbs a-row
In cold earth under the grasses,
Till the frost and the snow
Are gone and the Winter passes--
Sudden a footfall light,
Sudden a bird-call ringing;
And these in gold and in white
Shall rise with a sound of winging.
Airy and delicate all,
All go trooping and dancing
At Spring’s call and footfall,
Airily dancing, advancing.
In the dark of the year,
Turning the earth so chilly,
I look to the day of cheer,
Primrose and daffodilly.
Turning the sods and the clay
I think on the poor sad people
Hiding their dead away
In the churchyard, under the steeple.
All poor women and men,
Broken-hearted and weeping,
Their dead they call on in vain,
Quietly smiling and sleeping.
Friends, now listen and hear,
Give over crying and grieving,
There shall come a day and a year
When the dead shall be as the living.
There shall come a call, a footfall,
And the golden trumpeters blowing
Shall stir the dead with their call,
Bid them be rising and going.
Then in the daffodil weather
Lover shall run to lover;
Friends all trooping together;
Death and Winter be over.
Laying my bulbs in the dark,
Visions have I of hereafter.
Lip to lip, breast to breast, hark!
No more weeping, but laughter!
SHEEP AND LAMBS
BY KATHERINE TYNAN
All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road.
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed me by on the road;
All in the April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God.
The lambs were weary, and crying
With a weak, human cry.
I thought on the Lamb of God
Going meekly to die.
Up in the blue, blue mountains
Dewy pastures are sweet;
Rest for the little bodies,
Rest for the little feet.
But for the Lamb of God
Up on a hilltop green
Only a cross of shame
Two stark crosses between.
All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad;
I saw the sheep with their lambs,
And thought on the Lamb of God.
THE MAKING OF BIRDS
BY KATHERINE TYNAN
God made Him birds in a pleasant humour;
Tired of planets and suns was He.
He said: “I will add a glory to summer,
Gifts for my creatures banished from Me!”
He had a thought and it set Him smiling
Of the shape of a bird and its glancing head,
Its dainty air and its grace beguiling:
“I will make feathers,” the Lord God said.
He made the robin; He made the swallow;
His deft hands moulding the shape to His mood,
The thrush and the lark and the finch to follow,
And laughed to see that His work was good.
He Who has given men gift of laughter,
Made in His image; He fashioned fit
The blink of the owl and the stork thereafter,
The little wren and the long-tailed tit.
He spent in the making His wit and fancies;
The wing-feathers He fashioned them strong;
Deft and dear as daisies and pansies,
He crowned His work with the gift of song.
“Dearlings,” He said, “make songs for my praises!”
He tossed them loose to the sun and the wind,
Airily sweet as pansies and daisies;
He taught them to build a nest to their mind.
The dear Lord God of His glories weary--
Christ our Lord had the heart of a boy--
Made Him birds in a moment merry,
Bade them soar and sing for His joy.
THE MAN OF THE HOUSE
BY KATHERINE TYNAN
Joseph, honoured from sea to sea,
This is your name that pleases me,
“Man of the House.”
I see you rise at the dawn and light
The fire and blow till the flame is bright.
I see you take the pitcher and carry
The deep well-water for Jesus and Mary.
You knead the corn for the bread so fine,
Gather them grapes from the hanging vine.
There are little feet that are soft and slow,
Follow you whithersoever you go.
There’s a little face at your workshop door,
A little one sits down on your floor:
Holds His hands for the shavings curled,
The soft little hands that have made the world.
Mary calls you: the meal is ready:
You swing the Child to your shoulder steady.
I see your quiet smile as you sit
And watch the little Son thrive and eat.
The vine curls by the window space,
The wings of angels cover the face.
Up in the rafters, polished and olden,
There’s a Dove that broods and his wings are golden.
You who kept Them through shine and storm,
A staff, a shelter kindly and warm,