Here there is death. But even here, they say, —Here where the dull sun shines this afternoonAs desolate as ever the dead moonDid glimmer on dead Sardis, — men were gay;And there were little children here to play,With small soft hands that once did keep in tuneThe strings that stretch from heaven, till too soonThe change came, and the music passed away.Now there is nothing but the ghosts of things, —No life, no love, no children, and no men;And over the forgotten place there clingsThe strange and unrememberable lightThat is in dreams. The music failed, and thenGod frowned, and shut the village from His sight.
My northern pines are good enough for me,But there's a town my memory uprears —A town that always like a friend appears,And always in the sunrise by the sea.And over it, somehow, there seems to beA downward flash of something new and fierce,That ever strives to clear, but never clearsThe dimness of a charmed antiquity.
I
Just as I wonder at the twofold screenOf twisted innocence that you would plaitFor eyes that uncourageously awaitThe coming of a kingdom that has been,So do I wonder what God's love can meanTo you that all so strangely estimateThe purpose and the consequent estateOf one short shuddering step to the Unseen.No, I have not your backward faith to shrinkLone-faring from the doorway of God's homeTo find Him in the names of buried men;Nor your ingenious recreance to thinkWe cherish, in the life that is to come,The scattered features of dead friends again.
II
Never until our souls are strong enoughTo plunge into the crater of the Scheme —Triumphant in the flash there to redeemLove's handsel and forevermore to slough,Like cerements at a played-out masque, the roughAnd reptile skins of us whereon we setThe stigma of scared years — are we to getWhere atoms and the ages are one stuff.Nor ever shall we know the cursed wasteOf life in the beneficence divineOf starlight and of sunlight and soul-shineThat we have squandered in sin's frail distress,Till we have drunk, and trembled at the taste,The mead of Thought's prophetic endlessness.
I did not think that I should find them thereWhen I came back again; but there they stood,As in the days they dreamed of when young bloodWas in their cheeks and women called them fair.Be sure, they met me with an ancient air, —And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhoodAbout them; but the men were just as good,And just as human as they ever were.And you that ache so much to be sublime,And you that feed yourselves with your descent,What comes of all your visions and your fears?Poets and kings are but the clerks of Time,Tiering the same dull webs of discontent,Clipping the same sad alnage of the years.
At first I thought there was a superfinePersuasion in his face; but the free glowThat filled it when he stopped and cried, "Hollo!"Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,But be that as it may; — I only knowHe talked of this and that and So-and-So,And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,And I looked hard at him; and there we gazedWith a strained shame that made us cringe and wince:Then, with a wordless clogged apologyThat sounded half confused and half amazed,He dodged, — and I have never seen him since.
With searching feet, through dark circuitous ways,I plunged and stumbled; round me, far and near,Quaint hordes of eyeless phantoms did appear,Twisting and turning in a bootless chase, —When, like an exile given by God's graceTo feel once more a human atmosphere,I caught the world's first murmur, large and clear,Flung from a singing river's endless race.Then, through a magic twilight from below,I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:Life's wild infinity of mirth and woeIt sang me; and, with many a changing gleam,Across the music of its onward flowI saw the cottage lights of Wessex beam.
The man who cloaked his bitterness withinThis winding-sheet of puns and pleasantries,God never gave to look with common eyesUpon a world of anguish and of sin:His brother was the branded man of Lynn;And there are woven with his jollitiesThe nameless and eternal tragediesThat render hope and hopelessness akin.We laugh, and crown him; but anon we feelA still chord sorrow-swept, — a weird unrest;And thin dim shadows home to midnight steal,As if the very ghost of mirth were dead —As if the joys of time to dreams had fled,Or sailed away with Ines to the West.
"Dear brother, dearest friend, when I am dead,And you shall see no more this face of mine,Let nothing but red roses be the signOf the white life I lost for him," she said;"No, do not curse him, — pity him instead;Forgive him! — forgive me! . . God's anodyneFor human hate is pity; and the wineThat makes men wise, forgiveness. I have readLove's message in love's murder, and I die."And so they laid her just where she would lie, —Under red roses. Red they bloomed and fell;But when flushed autumn and the snows went by,And spring came, — lo, from every bud's green shellBurst a white blossom. — Can love reason why?
I pray you not, Leuconoe, to poreWith unpermitted eyes on what may beAppointed by the gods for you and me,Nor on Chaldean figures any more.'T were infinitely better to imploreThe present only: — whether Jove decreeMore winters yet to come, or whether heMake even this, whose hard, wave-eaten shoreShatters the Tuscan seas to-day, the last —Be wise withal, and rack your wine, nor fillYour bosom with large hopes; for while I sing,The envious close of time is narrowing; —So seize the day, — or ever it be past, —And let the morrow come for what it will.
Because he was a butcher and therebyDid earn an honest living (and did right),I would not have you think that Reuben BrightWas any more a brute than you or I;For when they told him that his wife must die,He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,And cried like a great baby half that night,And made the women cry to see him cry.And after she was dead, and he had paidThe singers and the sexton and the rest,He packed a lot of things that she had madeMost mournfully away in an old chestOf hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughsIn with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.
Alone, remote, nor witting where I went,I found an altar builded in a dream —A fiery place, whereof there was a gleamSo swift, so searching, and so eloquentOf upward promise, that love's murmur, blentWith sorrow's warning, gave but a supremeUnending impulse to that human streamWhose flood was all for the flame's fury bent.Alas! I said, — the world is in the wrong.But the same quenchless fever of unrestThat thrilled the foremost of that martyred throngThrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the sameBewildered insect plunging for the flameThat burns, and must burn somehow for the best.
Whenever I go by there nowadaysAnd look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,I seem to be afraid of the old place;And something stiffens up and down my face,For all the world as if I saw the ghostOf old Ham Amory, the murdered host,With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.The Tavern has a story, but no manCan tell us what it is. We only knowThat once long after midnight, years ago,A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,Who brushed, and scared, and all but overranThat skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.
Oh for a poet — for a beacon brightTo rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray;To spirit back the Muses, long astray,And flush Parnassus with a newer light;To put these little sonnet-men to flightWho fashion, in a shrewd, mechanic way,Songs without souls, that flicker for a day,To vanish in irrevocable night.What does it mean, this barren age of ours?Here are the men, the women, and the flowers,The seasons, and the sunset, as before.What does it mean? Shall not one bard ariseTo wrench one banner from the western skies,And mark it with his name forevermore?
Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, —But his hard, human pulse is throbbing stillWith the sure strength that fearless truth endows.In spite of all fine science disavows,Of his plain excellence and stubborn skillThere yet remains what fashion cannot kill,Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.Whether or not we read him, we can feelFrom time to time the vigor of his nameAgainst us like a finger for the shameAnd emptiness of what our souls revealIn books that are as altars where we kneelTo consecrate the flicker, not the flame.
I cannot find my way: there is no starIn all the shrouded heavens anywhere;And there is not a whisper in the airOf any living voice but one so farThat I can hear it only as a barOf lost, imperial music, played when fairAnd angel fingers wove, and unaware,Dead leaves to garlands where no roses are.No, there is not a glimmer, nor a call,For one that welcomes, welcomes when he fears,The black and awful chaos of the night;For through it all, — above, beyond it all, —I know the far-sent message of the years,I feel the coming glory of the Light!
If ever I am old, and all alone,I shall have killed one grief, at any rate;For then, thank God, I shall not have to waitMuch longer for the sheaves that I have sown.The devil only knows what I have done,But here I am, and here are six or eightGood friends, who most ingenuously prateAbout my songs to such and such a one.But everything is all askew to-night, —As if the time were come, or almost come,For their untenanted mirage of meTo lose itself and crumble out of sight,Like a tall ship that floats above the foamA little while, and then breaks utterly.
The master and the slave go hand in hand,Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,And there be kings do sorrowfully craveThe joyance that a scullion may command.But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understandThe mission of his bondage, or the graveMay clasp his bones, or ever he shall saveThe perfect word that is the poet's wand!The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymesAre for Thought's purest gold the jewel-stones;But shapes and echoes that are never doneWill haunt the workshop, as regret sometimesWill bring with human yearning to sad thronesThe crash of battles that are never won.
Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengersTo touch the covered corpse of him that fledThe uplands for the fens, and riotedLike a sick satyr with doom's worshippers?Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verseTo tell the story of the life he led.Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,And let the worms be its biographers.Song sloughs away the sin to find redressIn art's complete remembrance: nothing clingsFor long but laurel to the stricken browThat felt the Muse's finger; nothing lessThan hell's fulfilment of the end of thingsCan blot the star that shines on Paris now.
When we can all so excellently giveThe measure of love's wisdom with a blow, —Why can we not in turn receive it so,And end this murmur for the life we live?And when we do so frantically striveTo win strange faith, why do we shun to knowThat in love's elemental over-glowGod's wholeness gleams with light superlative?Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, —Or anything God ever made that grows, —Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,Till you can read, as on Belshazzar's wall,The glory of eternal partnership!
There is a drear and lonely tract of hellFrom all the common gloom removed afar:A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.I walked among them and I knew them well:Men I had slandered on life's little starFor churls and sluggards; and I knew the scarUpon their brows of woe ineffable.But as I went majestic on my way,Into the dark they vanished, one by one,Till, with a shaft of God's eternal day,The dream of all my glory was undone, —And, with a fool's importunate dismay,I heard the dead men singing in the sun.
Look you, Dominie; look you, and listen!Look in my face, first; search every line there;Mark every feature, — chin, lip, and forehead!Look in my eyes, and tell me the lessonYou read there; measure my nose, and tell meWhere I am wanting! A man's nose, Dominie,Is often the cast of his inward spirit;So mark mine well. But why do you smile so?Pity, or what? Is it written all over,This face of mine, with a brute's confession?Nothing but sin there? nothing but hell-scars?Or is it because there is something better —A glimmer of good, maybe — or a shadowOf something that's followed me down from childhood —Followed me all these years and kept me,Spite of my slips and sins and follies,Spite of my last red sin, my murder, —Just out of hell? Yes? something of that kind?And you smile for that? You're a good man, Dominie,The one good man in the world who knows me, —My one good friend in a world that mocks me,Here in this hard stone cage. But I leave itTo-morrow. To-morrow! My God! am I crying?Are these things tears? Tears! What! am I frightened?I, who swore I should go to the scaffoldWith big strong steps, and — No more. I thank you,But no — I am all right now! No! — listen!I am here to be hanged; to be hanged to-morrowAt six o'clock, when the sun is rising.And why am I here? Not a soul can tell youBut this poor shivering thing before you,This fluttering wreck of the man God made him,For God knows what wild reason. Hear me,And learn from my lips the truth of my story.There's nothing strange in what I shall tell you,Nothing mysterious, nothing unearthly, —But damnably human, — and you shall hear it.Not one of those little black lawyers had guessed it;The judge, with his big bald head, never knew it;And the jury (God rest their poor souls!) never dreamed it.Once there were three in the world who could tell it;Now there are two. There'll be two to-morrow, —You, my friend, and — But there's the story: —When I was a boy the world was heaven.I never knew then that the men and the womenWho petted and called me a brave big fellowWere ever less happy than I; but wisdom —Which comes with the years, you know — soon showed meThe secret of all my glittering childhood,The broken key to the fairies' castleThat held my life in the fresh, glad seasonWhen I was the king of the earth. Then slowly —And yet so swiftly! — there came the knowledgeThat the marvellous life I had lived was my life;That the glorious world I had loved was my world;And that every man, and every woman,And every child was a different being,Wrought with a different heat, and firedWith passions born of a single spirit;That the pleasure I felt was not their pleasure,Nor my sorrow — a kind of nameless pityFor something, I knew not what — their sorrow.And thus was I taught my first hard lesson, —The lesson we suffer the most in learning:That a happy man is a man forgetfulOf all the torturing ills around him.When or where I first met the womanI cherished and made my wife, no matter.Enough to say that I found her and kept herHere in my heart with as pure a devotionAs ever Christ felt for his brothers. Forgive meFor naming His name in your patient presence;But I feel my words, and the truth I utterIs God's own truth. I loved that woman, —Not for her face, but for something fairer,Something diviner, I thought, than beauty:I loved the spirit — the human somethingThat seemed to chime with my own condition,And make soul-music when we were together;And we were never apart, from the momentMy eyes flashed into her eyes the messageThat swept itself in a quivering answerBack through my strange lost being. My pulsesLeapt with an aching speed; and the measureOf this great world grew small and smaller,Till it seemed the sky and the land and the oceanClosed at last in a mist all goldenAround us two. And we stood for a seasonLike gods outflung from chaos, dreamingThat we were the king and the queen of the fireThat reddened the clouds of love that held usBlind to the new world soon to be ours —Ours to seize and sway. The passionOf that great love was a nameless passion,Bright as the blaze of the sun at noonday,Wild as the flames of hell; but, mark you,Never a whit less pure for its fervor.The baseness in me (for I was human)Burned like a worm, and perished; and nothingWas left me then but a soul that mingledItself with hers, and swayed and shudderedIn fearful triumph. When I considerThat helpless love and the cursed follyThat wrecked my life for the sake of a womanWho broke with a laugh the chains of her marriage(Whatever the word may mean), I wonderIf all the woe was her sin, or whetherThe chains themselves were enough to lead herIn love's despite to break them. . . . SinnersAnd saints — I say — are rocked in the cradle,But never are known till the will within themSpeaks in its own good time. So I fosterEven to-night for the woman who wronged me,Nothing of hate, nor of love, but a feelingOf still regret; for the man — But hear me,And judge for yourself: —For a time the seasonsChanged and passed in a sweet successionThat seemed to me like an endless music:Life was a rolling psalm, and the choirsOf God were glad for our love. I fanciedAll this, and more than I dare to tell youTo-night, — yes, more than I dare to remember;And then — well, the music stopped. There are momentsIn all men's lives when it stops, I fancy, —Or seems to stop, — till it comes to cheer themAgain with a larger sound. The curtainOf life just then is lifted a littleTo give to their sight new joys — new sorrows —Or nothing at all, sometimes. I was watchingThe slow, sweet scenes of a golden picture,Flushed and alive with a long delusionThat made the murmur of home, when I shudderedAnd felt like a knife that awful silenceThat comes when the music goes — forever.The truth came over my life like a darknessOver a forest where one man wanders,Worse than alone. For a time I staggeredAnd stumbled on with a weak persistenceAfter the phantom of hope that dartedAnd dodged like a frightened thing before me,To quit me at last, and vanish. NothingWas left me then but the curse of livingAnd bearing through all my days the feverAnd thirst of a poisoned love. Were I stronger,Or weaker, perhaps my scorn had saved me,Given me strength to crush my sorrowWith hate for her and the world that praised her —To have left her, then and there — to have conqueredThat old false life with a new and a wiser, —Such things are easy in words. You listen,And frown, I suppose, that I never mentionThat beautiful word, FORGIVE! — I forgave herFirst of all; and I praised kind HeavenThat I was a brave, clean man to do it;And then I tried to forget. Forgiveness!What does it mean when the one forgivenShivers and weeps and clings and kissesThe credulous fool that holds her, and tells himA thousand things of a good man's mercy,And then slips off with a laugh and plungesBack to the sin she has quit for a season,To tell him that hell and the world are betterFor her than a prophet's heaven? Believe me,The love that dies ere its flames are wastedIn search of an alien soul is better,Better by far than the lonely passionThat burns back into the heart that feeds it.For I loved her still, and the more she mocked me, —Fooled with her endless pleading promiseOf future faith, — the more I believed herThe penitent thing she seemed; and the strongerHer choking arms and her small hot kissesBound me and burned my brain to pity,The more she grew to the heavenly creatureThat brightened the life I had lost forever.The truth was gone somehow for the moment;The curtain fell for a time; and I fanciedWe were again like gods together,Loving again with the old glad rapture.But scenes like these, too often repeated,Failed at last, and her guile was wasted.I made an end of her shrewd caressesAnd told her a few straight words. She took themFull at their worth — and the farce was over.. . . . .At first my dreams of the past upheld me,But they were a short support: the presentPushed them away, and I fell. The missionOf life (whatever it was) was blasted;My game was lost. And I met the winnerOf that foul deal as a sick slave gathersHis painful strength at the sight of his master;And when he was past I cursed him, fearfulOf that strange chance which makes us mightyOr mean, or both. I cursed him and hatedThe stones he pressed with his heel; I followedHis easy march with a backward envy,And cursed myself for the beast within me.But pride is the master of love, and the visionOf those old days grew faint and fainter:The counterfeit wife my mercy shelteredWas nothing now but a woman, — a womanOut of my way and out of my nature.My battle with blinded love was over,My battle with aching pride beginning.If I was the loser at first, I wonderIf I am the winner now! . . . I doubt it.My life is a losing game; and to-morrow —To-morrow! — Christ! did I say to-morrow? . . .Is your brandy good for death? . . . There, — listen: —When love goes out, and a man is drivenTo shun mankind for the scars that make himA joke for all chattering tongues, he carriesA double burden. The woes I sufferedAfter that hard betrayal made mePity, at first, all breathing creaturesOn this bewildered earth. I studiedTheir faces and made for myself the storyOf all their scattered lives. Like brothersAnd sisters they seemed to me then; and I nourishedA stranger friendship wrought in my fancyBetween those people and me. But somehow,As time went on, there came queer glancesOut of their eyes, and the shame that stung meHarassed my pride with a crazed impressionThat every face in the surging cityWas turned to me; and I saw sly whispers,Now and then, as I walked and weariedMy wasted life twice over in bearingWith all my sorrow the sorrows of others, —Till I found myself their fool. Then I trembled, —A poor scared thing, — and their prying facesTold me the ghastly truth: they were laughingAt me and my fate. My God, I could feel it —That laughter! And then the children caught it;And I, like a struck dog, crept and listened.And then when I met the man who had weakenedA woman's love to his own desire,It seemed to me that all hell were laughingIn fiendish concert! I was their victim —And his, and hate's. And there was the struggle!As long as the earth we tread holds somethingA tortured heart can love, the meaningOf life is not wholly blurred; but afterThe last loved thing in the world has left us,We know the triumph of hate. The gloryOf good goes out forever; the beaconOf sin is the light that leads us downward —Down to the fiery end. The road runsRight through hell; and the souls that followThe cursed ways where its windings lead themSuffer enough, I say, to meritAll grace that a God can give. — The fashionOf our belief is to lift all beingsBorn for a life that knows no struggleIn sin's tight snares to eternal glory —All apart from the branded millionsWho carry through life their faces gravenWith sure brute scars that tell the storyOf their foul, fated passions. ScienceHas yet no salve to smooth or softenThe cradle-scars of a tyrant's visage;No drug to purge from the vital essenceOf souls the sleeping venom. VirtueMay flower in hell, when its roots are twistedAnd wound with the roots of vice; but the strongerNever is known till there comes that battleWith sin to prove the victor. PerilousThings are these demons we call our passions:Slaves are we of their roving fancies,Fools of their devilish glee. — You think me,I know, in this maundering way designingTo lighten the load of my guilt and cast itHalf on the shoulders of God. But hear me!I'm partly a man, — for all my weakness, —If weakness it were to stand and murderBefore men's eyes the man who had murderedMe, and driven my burning foreheadWith horns for the world to laugh at. Trust me!And try to believe my words but a portionOf what God's purpose made me! The cowardWithin me cries for this; and I beg youNow, as I come to the end, to rememberThat women and men are on earth to travelAll on a different road. HereafterThe roads may meet. . . . I trust in something —I know not what. . . .Well, this was the way of it: —Stung with the shame and the secret furyThat comes to the man who has thrown his pittanceOf self at a traitor's feet, I wanderedWeeks and weeks in a baffled frenzy,Till at last the devil spoke. I heard him,And laughed at the love that strove to touch me, —The dead, lost love; and I gripped the demonClose to my breast, and held him, praisingThe fates and the furies that gave me the courageTo follow his wild command. ForgetfulOf all to come when the work was over, —There came to me then no stony visionOf these three hundred days, — I cherishedAn awful joy in my brain. I ponderedAnd weighed the thing in my mind, and gloriedIn life to think that I was to conquerDeath at his own dark door, — and chuckledTo think of it done so cleanly. One eveningI knew that my time had come. I shudderedA little, but rather for doubt than terror,And followed him, — led by the nameless devilI worshipped and called my brother. The cityShone like a dream that night; the windowsFlashed with a piercing flame, and the pavementsPulsed and swayed with a warmth — or somethingThat seemed so then to my feet — and thrilled meWith a quick, dizzy joy; and the womenAnd men, like marvellous things of magic,Floated and laughed and sang by my shoulder,Sent with a wizard motion. Through itAnd over and under it all there soundedA murmur of life, like bees; and I listenedAnd laughed again to think of the flowerThat grew, blood-red, for me! . . . This fellowWas one of the popular sort who flourishUnruffled where gods would fall. For a conscienceHe carried a snug deceit that made himThe man of the time and the place, whateverThe time or the place might be. Were he sounding,With a genial craft that cloaked its purpose,Nigh to itself, the depth of a womanFooled with his brainless art, or sendingThe midnight home with songs and bottles, —The cad was there, and his ease foreverShone with the smooth and slippery polishThat tells the snake. That night he driftedInto an up-town haunt and ordered —Whatever it was — with a soft assuranceThat made me mad as I stood behind him,Gripping his death, and waited. Coward,I think, is the name the world has givenTo men like me; but I'll swear I neverThought of my own disgrace when I shot him —Yes, in the back, — I know it, I know itNow; but what if I do? . . . As I watched himLying there dead in the scattered sawdust,Wet with a day's blown froth, I notedThat things were still; that the walnut tables,Where men but a moment before were sitting,Were gone; that a screen of something around meShut them out of my sight. But the gildedSigns of a hundred beers and whiskeysFlashed from the walls above, and the mirrorsAnd glasses behind the bar were lightedIn some strange way, and into my spiritA thousand shafts of terrible fireBurned like death, and I fell. The storyOf what came then, you know.But tell me,What does the whole thing mean? What are we, —Slaves of an awful ignorance? puppetsPulled by a fiend? or gods, without knowing it?Do we shut from ourselves our own salvation, —Or what do we do! I tell you, Dominie,There are times in the lives of us poor devilsWhen heaven and hell get mixed. Though conscienceMay come like a whisper of Christ to warn usAway from our sins, it is lost or laughed at, —And then we fall. And for all who have fallen —Even for him — I hold no malice,Nor much compassion: a mightier mercyThan mine must shrive him. — And I — I am goingInto the light? — or into the darkness?Why do I sit through these sickening hours,And hope? Good God! are they hours? — hours?Yes! I am done with days. And to-morrow —We two may meet! To-morrow! — To-morrow! . . .
The master-songs are ended, and the manThat sang them is a name. And so is GodA name; and so is love, and life, and death,And everything. But we, who are too blindTo read what we have written, or what faithHas written for us, do not understand:We only blink, and wonder.Last night it was the song that was the man,But now it is the man that is the song.We do not hear him very much to-day:His piercing and eternal cadence ringsToo pure for us — too powerfully pure,Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;But there are some that hear him, and they knowThat he shall sing to-morrow for all men,And that all time shall listen.The master-songs are ended? Rather sayNo songs are ended that are ever sung,And that no names are dead names. When we writeMen's letters on proud marble or on sand,We write them there forever.
Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,Ye that have eyes for all man's agony,Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, —Look with a just regard,And with an even grace,Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,Here on a suffering world where men grow oldAnd wander like sad shadows till, at last,Out of the flare of life,Out of the whirl of years,Into the mist they go,Into the mist of death.O shades of you that loved him long beforeThe cruel threads of that black sail were spun,May loyal arms and ancient welcomingsReceive him once againWho now no longer movesHere in this flickering dance of changing days,Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,And the black master Death is over all,To chill with his approach,To level with his touch,The reigning strength of youth,The fluttered heart of age.Woe for the fateful day when Delphi's word was lost —Woe for the loveless prince of Aethra's line!Woe for a father's tears and the curse of a king's release —Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom! —And thou, the saddest windThat ever blew from Crete,Sing the fell tidings back to that thrice unhappy ship! —Sing to the western flame,Sing to the dying foam,A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore: —Whether or not there fellTo the touch of an alien handThe sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,Better his end had beenTo die as an old man dies, —But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown.
Come away! come away! there's a frost along the marshes,And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;There's a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodlandOf a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumnPut off the summer's languor with a touch that made us gladFor the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,Calling us to come to them, and roam no more.Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,There's an old song calling us to come!Come away! come away! — for the scenes we leave behind usAre barren for the lights of home and a flame that's young forever;And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits usIn the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman's eyes.Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us —Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: —Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,And a warm hearth waits for us within.Come away! come away! — or the roving-fiend will hold us,And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the betterFor the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: —The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us —Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laughThat shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,And the long fall wind on the lake.