Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,As though the leagues of woodland held them wrongedTo hear an axe and see a township climb.
The forest’s erewhile emperor at eveHad voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.At midnight a small people danced the dales,So thin that they might dwindle through a sieve
Ringed mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.The pensioned forester beside his crutch,Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.
Came then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;Devourer, and insensibly devoured;In whom the city over forest flowered,The forest wreathed the city’s drama-mart.
There found he in new form that Dragon old,From tangled solitudes expelled; and taughtHow blindly each its antidote besought;For either’s breath the needs of either told.
Now deep in woods, with song no sermon’s drone,He showed what charm the human concourse works:Amid the press of men, what virtue lurksWhere bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.
Our conquest these: if haply we retainThe reverence that ne’er will overrunDue boundaries of realms from Nature won,Nor let the poet’s awe in rapture wane.
Withsagest craft Arachne workedHer web, and at a corner lurked,Awaiting what should plump her soon,To case it in the death-cocoon.Sagaciously her home she choseFor visits that would never close;Inside my chalet-porch her feastPlucked all the winds but chill North-east.
The finished structure, bar on bar,Had snatched from light to form a star,And struck on sight, when quick with dews,Like music of the very Muse.Great artists pass our single sense;We hear in seeing, strung to tense;Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,To think such beauty means a trap.But Nature’s genius, even man’sAt best, is practical in plans;Subservient to the needy thought,However rare the weapon wrought.As long as Nature holds it goodTo urge her creatures’ quest for foodWill beauty stamp the just intentOf weapons upon service bent.For beauty is a flower of rootsEmbedded lower than our boots;Out of the primal strata springs,And shows for crown of useful things
Arachne’s dream of prey to sizeAspired; so she could nigh despiseThe puny specks the breezes roundSupplied, and let them shake unwound;Assured of her fat fly to come;Perhaps a blue, the spider’s plum;Who takes the fatal odds in fight,And gives repast an appetite,By plunging, whizzing, till his wingsAre webbed, and in the lists he swings,A shrouded lump, for her to seeHer banquet in her victory.
This matron of the unnumbered threads,One day of dandelions’ headsDistributing their gray perruquesUp every gust, I watched with looksDiscreet beside the chalet-door;And gracefully a light wind bore,Direct upon my webster’s wall,A monster in the form of ball;The mildest captive ever snared,That neither struggled nor despaired,On half the net invading hung,And plain as in her mother tongue,While low the weaver cursed her lures,Remarked, “You have me; I am yours.”
Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,Her dream of size she saw, agape.Midway the vast round-raying beardA desiccated midge appeared;Whose body pricked the name of meal,Whose hair had growth in earth’s unreal;Provocative of dread and wrath,Contempt and horror, in one froth,Inextricable, insensible,His poison presence there would dwell,Declaring him her dream fulfilled,A catch to compliment the skilled;And she reduced to beaky skin,Disgraceful among kith and kin
Against her corner, humped and aged,Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,Beyond disgust or hope in guile.Ridiculously volatileHe seemed to her last spark of mind;And that in pallid ash declinedBeneath the blow by knowledge dealt,Wherein throughout her frame she feltThat he, the light wind’s libertine,Without a scoff, without a grin,And mannered like the courtly few,Who merely danced when light winds blew,Impervious to beak and claws,Tradition’s ruinous Whitebeard was;Of whom, as actors in old scenes,Had grannam weavers warned their weans,With word, that less than feather-weight,He smote the web like bolt of Fate.
This muted drama, hour by hour,I watched amid a world in flower,Ere yet Autumnal threads had laidTheir gray-blue o’er the grass’s blade,And still along the garden-runThe blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.Arachne crouched unmoved; perchanceHer visitor performed a dance;She puckered thinner; he the sameAs when on that light wind he came.
Next day was told what deeds of nightWere done; the web had vanished quite;With it the strange opposing pair;And listless waved on vacant air,For her adieu to heart’s content,A solitary filament.
Sprungof the father blood, the mother brain,Are they who point our pathway and sustain.They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
To see Life’s formless offspring and subdueDesire of times unripe, we have these two,Whose union is right reason: join they hands,The world shall know itself and where it stands;What cowering angel and what upright beastMake man, behold, nor count the low the least,Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
As in a land of waterfalls, that flowSmooth for the leap on their great voice below,Some eddies near the brink borne swift along,Will capture hearing with the liquid song,So, while the headlong world’s imperious forceResounded under, heard I these discourse.
First words, where down my woodland walk she led,To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
—Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,When still I find you in this mire alone.
—The few steps taken at a funeral paceBy men had slain me but for those you trace.
—Look I once back, a broken pinion I:Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
—Needs must you drink of me while here you live,And make me rich in feeling I can give.
—A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:Yet must I read my sister for the How.My daisy better knows her God of beamsThan doth an eagle that to mount him seems.She hath the secret never fieriest reachOf wing shall master till men hear her teach.
—Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,My semblance when I have you not as now.The quiet creatures who escape mishapBear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:A picture of the settled peace desiredBy cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.I listen at their breasts: is there no jarOf wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,And such a picture as the piercing mindRanks beneath vegetation. Not resignedAre my true pupils while the world is brute.What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,Stronger impels the motion of my heart.I am not Resignation’s counterpart.If that I teach, ’tis little the dry word,Content, but how to savour hope deferred.We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;Soon carrion if very earth are we!The coursing veins, the constant breath, the useOf sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,And pass despised; “a-cold for lack of heat,”Like other corpses, but without death’s plea.
—My sister calls for battle; is it she?
—Rather a world of pressing men in arms,Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charmsEach drowsy malady and coiling viceWith dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!No home is here for peace while evil breeds,While error governs, none; and must the seedsYou sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,Let stout contention drive deep furrows, bloodMoisten, and make new channels of its flood!
—My sober little maid, when we meet first,Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.So can I not of her till circumstanceDrugs cravings. Here we see how men advanceA doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the wordPrompting their hungers, and they grandly march,As to band-music under Victory’s arch.Thus was it, and thus is it; save that thenThe beauty of frank animals had men.
—Observe them, and down rearward for a term,Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.Thence look this way, across the fields that showMen’s early form of speech for Yes and No.My sister a bruised infant’s utterance had;And issuing stronger, to mankind ’twas mad.I knew my home where I had choice to feelThe toad beneath a harrow or a heel.
—Speak of this Age.
—When you it shall discernBright as you are, to me the Age will turn.
—For neither of us has it any care;Its learning is through Science to despair.
—Despair lies down and grovels, grapples notWith evil, casts the burden of its lot.This Age climbs earth.
—To challenge heaven.
—Not lessThe lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!That know I, though the echoes of it wail,For one step upward on the crags you scale.Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,Which means our soul asleep or body’s lust,Until from warmth of many breasts, that beatA temperate common music, sunlike heatThe happiness not predatory sheds!
—But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads,Now rages to outdo a horny Past.Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vastAre thrown by every novel light upraised.The world’s whole round smokes ominously, amazedAnd trembling as its pregnant Ætna swells.Combustibles on hot combustiblesRun piling, for one spark to roll in fireThe mountain-torrent of infernal ireAnd leave the track of devils where men built.Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guiltConfesses in a cry for help shrill loud,If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:None save they but the souls which them contain.No extramural God, the God withinAlone gives aid to city charged with sin.A world that for the spur of fool and knave,Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?But men who ply their wits in such a school,Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.
—Much have I studied hard Necessity!To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that weMay deem the harshness of her later criesIn labour a sure goad to prick the wise,If men among the warnings which convulse,Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse.Long ere the rising of this Age of ours,The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,And are as lasting as the parent thing.Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.
Behold such army gathering: ours the spur,No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.Not fool or knave is now the enemyO’ershadowing men, ’tis Folly, Knavery!A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.Now must the brother soul alive in each,His traitorous individual devildomHold subject lest the grand destruction come.Dimly men see it menacing apaceTo overthrow, perchance uproot the race.Within, without, they are a field of tares:Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,And wherefore warrior service they must yield,Shines visible as life on either field.That is my comfort, following shock on shock,Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,The human and Satanic intellect,Determined for their uses to controlWhat forces on the earth and under roll,Their granite rock runs igneous; now they standPledged to the heavens for safety of their land.They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.
—My sister, as I read them in my glass,Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.How waken them that have not any bentSave browsing—the concrete indifferent!Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:They fear not for the race when full the trough.They have much fear of giving up the ghost;And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.
—If I could see with you, and did not faintIn beating wing, the future I would paint.Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:Now meanwhile is another mass awake,Once denser than the grunters of the sty.If I could see with you! Could I but fly!
—The length of days that you with them have housed,An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.
—O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,While still they have a cause too piteous!Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,And quicken in the virtue of their cause,To think me a poor mouther of old saws!I wait the issue of a battling Age;The toilers with your “troughsters” now engage;Instructing them through their acutest sense,How close the dangers of indifference!Already have my people shown their worth,More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.That love to love of labour leads: thence loveOf humankind—earth’s incense flung above.
—Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swellsOn Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;And if I bid it face whatIobserve,Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!
—Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:As little as Time’s earliest knew the sky.Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flameAt intervals, in proof of whom they came.To strengthen our foundations is the taskOf this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,Though, lighted by your beams, down mining cavesThe rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.My sister sees no round beyond her mood;To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,It moves: O much for me to say it moves!About his Æthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,Though not the stream of the paternal smile:And where his tide of nourishment he drives,An Abyssinian wantonness revives.Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,He is the vast Insensate who devoursHis golden promise over leagues of seed,Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.The races which on barbarous force begin,Inherit onward of their origin,And cancelled blessings will the current lengthReveal till they know need of shaping strength.’Tis not in men to recognize the needBefore they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,For tens up the safe mountains at his head.Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
—That rings of truth! More do your people thrive;Your Many are more merrily aliveThan erewhile when I gloried in the pageOf radiant singer and anointed sage.Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!All structures built upon a narrow spaceMust fall, from having not your hosts for base.O thrice must one be you, to see them shiftAlong their desert flats, here dash, there drift;With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!And thrice must one be you, to wait releaseFrom duress in the swamp of their increase.At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed,Philosophers behold; desponding view.Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,Dive down the fumy Ætna of their brains.Belated vessels on a rising sea,They seem: they pass!
—But not Philosophy!
—Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despiseNought but the coward in us! That way liesThe wisdom making passage through our slough.Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.Philosophy is Life’s one match for Fate.That photosphere of our high fountain One,Our spirit’s Lord and Reason’s fostering sun,Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!Advantage to the Many: that we nameGod’s voice; have there the surety in our aim.This thought unto my sister do I owe,And irony and satire off me throw.They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.Who never yet of scattered lamps was bornTo speed a world, a marching world to warn,But sunward from the vivid Many springs,Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.
Iliad, B. I. V. 149
“Heighme! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armèd Trojans,Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done;Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvestsRavaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksomeMountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justicePluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed!Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.Worse, it is thou whose threat ’tis to ravish my prize from me, portionWon with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when AchaiansGave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat,Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessèd thing boreOff to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed!So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems meHomeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store.”
“Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou!Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict,Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of AchaiaDared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a death-stroke.Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians,Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against thee.Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over abjects;Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise:Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf-budsNever again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the mountains,No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal clipped offLeaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement,Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent;Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of AchaiaThroughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying HectorTumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart-strings,Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of Achaians.”
Iliad, B. II V. 455
Likeas a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far,So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the splendourGleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky-vault.They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged flocks,Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild-swans,Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaïstros;Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions,Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them resoundeth;So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings poured forthOn that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath themEarth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the horse-hooves.Stopped they then on the fair-flower’d field of Scamander, their thousandsMany as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse,Clouds of them, under some herdsman’s wonning, where then are the milk-pailsAlso, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time;Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush them.Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of goats, knowEasily one from the other when all get mixed o’er the pasture,So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for onslaught,Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his thunder,He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.
Iliad, B. XI. V. 148
These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the thickest,Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved Achaians.Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion,Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust-cloud,Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse-hooves)Hewed with the sword’s sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord AgamemnonFollowed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.
Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclippèd woodland,This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the scrubwoodStretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire’s fury rageing,So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scatteredTrojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field,Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were outstretchedFlat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.
Iliad; B. XI V. 378
Sohe, with a clear shout of laughter,Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise:“Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had pierced theeInto the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life-breath!Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their direst,They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a lion.”Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:“Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins!If that thou dared’st face me here out in the open with weapons,Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows.Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole;Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant.Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that’s emasculate, noughtworth!Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the slightest,My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway.Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen slaughtered,Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood-drops,Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women.”
Iliad, B. XIV. V. 283
Theythen to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the woodland.There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on IdaLustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for concealment,That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the mountains,Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.
Iliad, B. XIV. V. 394
Notthe sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,Whipped from the sea’s deeps up by the terrible blast of the Northwind;Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire’s rush so arousing,Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-trees’Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;As rose then stupendous the Trojan’s cry and Achaians’,Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.
Iliad, B. XVII. V. 426
Sonow the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown there,Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and oft, too,Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont spacious,Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessantRan the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the yoke-bow.Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shookPitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his bosom;“Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortalMaster; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart-grief?’Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder nowhereAught over earth’s range found that is gifted with breath and has movement.”
From theMirèioof Mistral
Ahundredmares, all white! their manesLike mace-reed of the marshy plainsThick-tufted, wavy, free o’ the shears:And when the fiery squadron rearsBursting at speed, each mane appearsEven as the white scarf of a fayFloating upon their necks along the heavens away.
O race of humankind, take shame!For never yet a hand could tame,Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdueThe mares of the Camargue. I have known,By treason snared, some captives shown;Expatriate from their native Rhone,Led off, their saline pastures far from view:
And on a day, with prompt rebound,They have flung their riders to the ground,And at a single gallop, scouring free,Wide-nostril’d to the wind, twice tenOf long marsh-leagues devour’d, and then,Back to the Vacarés again,After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea
For of this savage race unbent,The ocean is the element.Of old escaped from Neptune’s car, full sure,Still with the white foam fleck’d are they,And when the sea puffs black from grey,And ships part cables, loudly neighThe stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;
And keen as a whip they lash and crackTheir tails that drag the dust, and backScratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,The God, drives deep his trident teeth,Who in one horror, above, beneath,Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.
Cant.iv.
Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.