When we have thrown off this old suit,So much in need of mending,To sink among the naked mute,Is that, think you, our ending?We follow many, more we lead,And you who sadly turf us,Believe not that all living seedMust flower above the surface.
Sensation is a gracious gift,But were it cramped to station,The prayer to have it cast adriftWould spout from all sensation.Enough if we have winked to sun,Have sped the plough a season;There is a soul for labour done,Endureth fixed as reason.
Then let our trust be firm in Good,Though we be of the fasting;Our questions are a mortal brood,Our work is everlasting.We children of BeneficenceAre in its being sharers;And Whither vainer sounds than Whence,For word with such wayfarers.
From twig to twig the spider weavesAt noon his webbing fine.So near to mute the zephyrs fluteThat only leaflets dance.The sun draws out of hazel leavesA smell of woodland wine.I wake a swarm to sudden stormAt any step's advance.
Along my path is bugloss blue,The star with fruit in moss;The foxgloves drop from throat to topA daily lesser bell.The blackest shadow, nurse of dew,Has orange skeins across;And keenly red is one thin threadThat flashing seems to swell.
My world I note ere fancy comes,Minutest hushed observe:What busy bits of motioned witsThrough antlered mosswork strive.But now so low the stillness hums,My springs of seeing swerve,For half a wink to thrill and thinkThe woods with nymphs alive.
I neighbour the invisibleSo close that my consentIs only asked for spirits maskedTo leap from trees and flowers.And this because with them I dwellIn thought, while calmly bentTo read the lines dear Earth designsShall speak her life on ours.
Accept, she says; it is not hardIn woods; but she in townsRepeats, accept; and have we wept,And have we quailed with fears,Or shrunk with horrors, sure rewardWe have whom knowledge crowns;Who see in mould the rose unfold,The soul through blood and tears.
Leave the uproar: at a leapThou shalt strike a woodland path,Enter silence, not of sleep,Under shadows, not of wrath;Breath which is the spirit's bathIn the old Beginnings find,And endow them with a mind,Seed for seedling, swathe for swathe.That gives Nature to us, thisGive we her, and so we kiss.
Fruitful is it so: but hearHow within the shell thou art,Music sounds; nor other nearCan to such a tremor start.Of the waves our life is part;They our running harvests bear:Back to them for manful air,Laden with the woodland's heart!That gives Battle to us, thisGive we it, and good the kiss.
A wind sways the pines,And belowNot a breath of wild air;Still as the mosses that glowOn the flooring and over the linesOf the roots here and there.The pine-tree drops its dead;They are quiet, as under the sea.Overhead, overheadRushes life in a race,As the clouds the clouds chase;And we go,And we drop like the fruits of the tree,Even we,Even so.
On the morning of May,Ere the children had entered my gateWith their wreaths and mechanical lay,A metal ding-dong of the date!I mounted our hill, bearing heartThat had little of life save its weight:The crowned Shadow poising dartHung over her: she, my own,My good companion, mate,Pulse of me: she who had shownFortitude quiet as Earth'sAt the shedding of leaves. And aroundThe sky was in garlands of cloud,Winning scents from unnumbered new births,Pointed buds, where the woods were brownedBy a mouldered beechen shroud;Or over our meads of the vale,Such an answer to sun as he,Brave in his gold; to a sound,None sweeter, of woods flapping sail,With the first full flood of our year,For their voyage on lustreful sea:Unto what curtained haven in chief,Will be writ in the book of the sere.But surely the crew are we,Eager or stamped or bowed;Counted thinner at fall of the leaf.Grief heard them, and passed like a bier.Due Summerward, lo, they were set,In volumes of foliage proud,On the heave of their favouring tides,And their song broadened out to the cheerWhen a neck of the ramping surfRattles thunder a boat overrides.All smiles ran the highways wet;The worm drew its links from the turf;The bird of felicity loudSpun high, and a South wind blew.Weak out of sheath downy leavesOf the beech quivered lucid as dew,Their radiance asking, who grieves;For nought of a sorrow they knew:No space to the dread wrestle vowed,No chamber in shadow of night.At times as the steadier breezeFlutter-huddled their twigs to a crowd,The beam of them wafted my sightTo league-long sun upon seas:The golden path we had crossedMany years, till her birthland swungRecovered to vision from lost,A light in her filial glance.And sweet was her voice with the tongue,The speechful tongue of her France,Soon at ripple about us, like rillsEver busy with little: awayThrough her Normandy, down where the millsDot at lengths a rivercourse, greyAs its bordering poplars bentTo gusts off the plains above.Old stone chateau and farms,Home of her birth and her love!On the thread of the pasture you trace,By the river, their milk, for miles,Spotted once with the English tent,In days of the tocsin's alarms,To tower of the tallest of piles,The country's surveyor breast-high.Home of her birth and her love!Home of a diligent race;Thrifty, deft-handed to plyShuttle or needle, and wooSun to the roots of the pearFrogging each mud-walled cot.The elders had known her in arms.There plucked we the bluet, her hueOf the deeper forget-me-not;Well wedding her ripe-wheat hair.
I saw, unsighting: her heartI saw, and the home of her loveThere printed, mournfully rent:Her ebbing adieu, her adieu,And the stride of the Shadow athwart.For one of our Autumns there! . . .Straight as the flight of a doveWe went, swift winging we went.We trod solid ground, we breathed air,The heavens were unbroken. Break they,The word of the world is adieu:Her word: and the torrents are round,The jawed wolf-waters of prey.We stand upon isles, who stand:A Shadow before us, and back,A phantom the habited land.We may cry to the Sunderer, spareThat dearest! he loosens his pack.Arrows we breathe, not air.The memories tenderly boundTo us are a drifting crew,Amid grey-gapped waters for ground.Alone do we stand, each one,Till rootless as they we strewThose deeps of the corse-like stareAt a foreign and stony sun.
Eyes had I but for the sceneOf my circle, what neighbourly grew.If haply no finger lay outTo the figures of days that had been,I gathered my herb, and endured;My old cloak wrapped me about.Unfooted was ground-ivy blue,Whose rustic shrewd odour alluredIn Spring's fresh of morning: unseenHer favourite wood-sorrel bellAs yet, though the leaves' green floorAwaited their flower, that would tellOf a red-veined moist yestreen,With its droop and the hues it wore,When we two stood overnightOne, in the dark van-glowOn our hill-top, seeing beneathOur household's twinkle of lightThrough spruce-boughs, gem of a wreath.
Budding, the service-tree, whiteAlmost as whitebeam, threw,From the under of leaf upright,Flecks like a showering snowOn the flame-shaped junipers green,On the sombre mounds of the yew.Like silvery tapers brightBy a solemn cathedral screen,They glistened to closer view.Turf for a rooks' revel stripedPleased those devourers astute.Chorister blackbird and thrushTogether or alternate piped;A free-hearted harmony large,With meaning for man, for brute,When the primitive forces are brimmed.Like featherings hither and yonOf aery tree-twigs over marge,To the comb of the winds, untrimmed,Their measure is found in the vast.Grief heard them, and stepped her way on.She has but a narrow embrace.Distrustful of hearing she passed.They piped her young Earth's Bacchic rout;The race, and the prize of the race;Earth's lustihead pressing to sprout.
But sight holds a soberer space.Colourless dogwood lowCurled up a twisted root,Nigh yellow-green mosses, to flushRedder than sun upon rocks,When the creeper clematis-shootShall climb, cap his branches, and show,Beside veteran green of the box,At close of the year's maple blush,A bleeding greybeard is he,Now hale in the leafage lush.Our parasites paint us. Hard by,A wet yew-trunk flashed the peelOf our naked forefathers in fight;With stains of the fray sweating free;And him came no parasite nigh:Firm on the hard knotted knee,He stood in the crown of his dun;Earth's toughest to stay her wheel:Under whom the full day is night;Whom the century-tempests call son,Having striven to rend him in vain.
I walked to observe, not to feel,Not to fancy, if simple of eyeOne may be among images reapedFor a shift of the glance, as grain:Profitless froth you espyAshore after billows have leaped.I fled nothing, nothing pursued:The changeful visible faceOf our Mother I sought for my food;Crumbs by the way to sustain.Her sentence I knew past grace.Myself I had lost of us twain,Once bound in mirroring thought.She had flung me to dust in her wake;And I, as your convict dragsHis chain, by the scourge untaught,Bore life for a goad, without aim.I champed the sensations that makeOf a ruffled philosophy rags.For them was no meaning too blunt,Nor aspect too cutting of steel.This Earth of the beautiful breasts,Shining up in all colours aflame,To them had visage of hags:A Mother of aches and jests:Soulless, heading a huntAimless except for the meal.Hope, with the star on her front;Fear, with an eye in the heel;Our links to a Mother of grace;They were dead on the nerve, and deadFor the nature divided in three;Gone out of heart, out of brain,Out of soul: I had in their placeThe calm of an empty room.We were joined but by that thin thread,My disciplined habit to see.And those conjure images, those,The puppets of loss or gain;Not he who is bare to his doom;For whom never semblance playsTo bewitch, overcloud, illume.The dusty mote-images rose;Sheer film of the surface awag:They sank as they rose; their painDeclaring them mine of old days.
Now gazed I where, sole upon gloom,As flower-bush in sun-specked crag,Up the spine of the double combeWith yew-boughs heavily cloaked,A young apparition shone:Known, yet wonderful, whiteSurpassingly; doubtfully known,For it struck as the birth of Light:Even Day from the dark unyoked.It waved like a pilgrim flagO'er processional penitents flownWhen of old they broke rounding yon spine:O the pure wild-cherry in bloom!
For their Eastward march to the shrineOf the footsore far-eyed Faith,Was banner so brave, so fair,So quick with celestial signOf victorious rays over death?For a conquest of coward despair; -Division of soul from wits,And these made rulers;—full sure,More starlike never did shineTo illumine the sinister fieldWhere our life's old night-bird flits.I knew it: with her, my own,Had hailed it pure of the pure;Our beacon yearly: but strangeWhen it strikes to within is the known;Richer than newness revealed.There was needed darkness like mine.Its beauty to vividness blownDrew the life in me forward, chased,From aloft on a pinnacle's range,That hindward spidery line,The length of the ways I had paced,A footfarer out of the dawn,To Youth's wild forest, where sprang,For the morning of May long gone,The forest's white virgin; sheSeen yonder; and sheltered me, sang;She in me, I in her; what songsThe fawn-eared wood-hollows reviveTo pour forth their tune-footed throngs;Inspire to the dreaming of goodIllimitable to come:She, the white wild cherry, a tree,Earth-rooted, tangibly wood,Yet a presence throbbing alive;Nor she in our language dumb:A spirit born of a tree;Because earth-rooted alive:Huntress of things worth pursuitOf souls; in our naming, dreams.And each unto other was lute,By fits quick as breezy gleams.My quiver of aims and desiresHad colour that she would have owned;And if by humaner firesHued later, these held her enthroned:My crescent of Earth; my bloodAt the silvery early stir;Hour of the thrill of the budAbout to burst, and by herDirected, attuned, englobed:My Goddess, the chaste, not chill;Choir over choir white-robed;White-bosomed fold within fold:For so could I dream, breast-bare,In my time of blooming; dream stillThrough the maze, the mesh, and the wreck,Despite, since manhood was bold,The yoke of the flesh on my neck.She beckoned, I gazed, unawareHow a shaft of the blossoming treeWas shot from the yew-wood's core.I stood to the touch of a keyTurned in a fast-shut door.
They rounded my garden, content,The small fry, clutching their fee,Their fruit of the wreath and the pole;And, chatter, hop, skip, they were sent,In a buzz of young company glee,Their natural music, swift shoalTo the next easy shedders of pence.Why not? for they had me in tuneWith the hungers of my kind.Do readings of earth draw thence,Then a concord deeper than criesOf the Whither whose echo is Whence,To jar unanswered, shall riseAs a fountain-jet in the mindBowed dark o'er the falling and strewn.
* * *
Unwitting where it might lead,How it came, for the anguish to cease,And the Questions that sow not nor spin,This wisdom, rough-written, and black,As of veins that from venom bleed,I had with the peace within;Or patience, mortal of peace,Compressing the surgent strifeIn a heart laid open, not mailed,To the last blank hour of the rack,When struck the dividing knife:When the hand that never had failedIn its pressure to mine hung slack.
But this in myself did I know,Not needing a studious brow,Or trust in a governing star,While my ears held the jangled shoutThe children were lifting afar:That natures at interflowWith all of their past and the now,Are chords to the Nature without,Orbs to the greater whole:First then, nor utterly thenTill our lord of sensations at war,The rebel, the heart, yields placeTo brain, each prompting the soul.Thus our dear Earth we embraceFor the milk, her strength to men.
And crave we her medical herb,We have but to see and hear,Though pierced by the cruel acerb,The troops of the memories armedHostile to strike at the nestThat nourished and flew them warmed.Not she gives the tear for the tear.Weep, bleed, rave, writhe, be distraught,She is moveless. Not of her breastAre the symbols we conjure when FearTakes leaven of Hope. I caught,With Death in me shrinking from Death,As cold from cold, for a signOf the life beyond ashes: I cast,Believing the vision divine,Wings of that dream of my YouthTo the spirit beloved: 'twas unglassedOn her breast, in her depths austere:A flash through the mist, mere breath,Breath on a buckler of steel.For the flesh in revolt at her laws,Neither song nor smile in ruth,Nor promise of things to reveal,Has she, nor a word she saith:We are asking her wheels to pause.Well knows she the cry of unfaith.If we strain to the farther shore,We are catching at comfort near.Assurances, symbols, saws,Revelations in legends, lightTo eyes rolling darkness, theseDesired of the flesh in affright,For the which it will swear to adore,She yields not for prayers at her knees;The woolly beast bleating will shear.These are our sensual dreams;Of the yearning to touch, to feelThe dark Impalpable sure,And have the Unveiled appear;Whereon ever black she beams,Doth of her terrible deal,She who dotes over ripeness at play,Rosiness fondles and feeds,Guides it with shepherding crook,To her sports and her pastures alway.Not she gives the tear for the tear:Harsh wisdom gives Earth, no more;In one the spur and the curb:An answer to thoughts or deeds;To the Legends an alien look;To the Questions a figure of clay.Yet we have but to see and hear,Crave we her medical herb.For the road to her soul is the Real:The root of the growth of man:And the senses must traverse it freshWith a love that no scourge shall abate,To reach the lone heights where we scanIn the mind's rarer vision this flesh;In the charge of the Mother our fate;Her law as the one common weal.
We, whom the view benumbs,We, quivering upward, each hourKnow battle in air and in groundFor the breath that goes as it comes,For the choice between sweet and sour,For the smallest grain of our worth:And he who the reckoning sumsFinds nought in his hand save Earth.Of Earth are we stripped or crowned.The fleeting Present we crave,Barter our best to wed,In hope of a cushioned bower,What is it but Future and PastLike wind and tide at a wave!Idea of the senses, bredFor the senses to snap and devour:Thin as the shell of a soundIn delivery, withered in light.Cry we for permanence fast,Permanence hangs by the grave;Sits on the grave green-grassed,On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.By Death, as by Life, are we fed:The two are one spring; our bondWith the numbers; with whom to uniteHere feathers wings for beyond:Only they can waft us in flight.For they are Reality's flower.Of them, and the contact with them,Issues Earth's dearest daughter, the firmIn footing, the stately of stem;Unshaken though elements lour;A warrior heart unquelled;Mirror of Earth, and guideTo the Holies from sense withheld:Reason, man's germinant fruit.She wrestles with our old wormSelf in the narrow and wide:Relentless quencher of lies,With laughter she pierces the brute;And hear we her laughter peal,'Tis Light in us dancing to scourThe loathed recess of his dens;Scatter his monstrous bed,And hound him to harrow and plough.She is the world's one prize;Our champion, rightfully head;The vessel whose piloted prow,Though Folly froth round, hiss and hoot,Leaves legible print at the keel.Nor least is the service she does,That service to her may cleanseThe well of the Sorrows in us;For a common delight will drainThe rank individual fensOf a wound refusing to healWhile the old worm slavers its root.
I bowed as a leaf in rain;As a tree when the leaf is shedTo winds in the season at wane:And when from my soul I said,May the worm be trampled: smite,Sacred Reality! powerFilled me to front it aright.I had come of my faith's ordeal.
It is not to stand on a towerAnd see the flat universe reel;Our mortal sublimities dropLike raiment by glisterlings worn,At a sweep of the scythe for the crop.Wisdom is won of its fight,The combat incessant; and driesTo mummywrap perching a height.It chews the contemplative cudIn peril of isolate scorn,Unfed of the onward flood.Nor view we a different mornIf we gaze with the deeper sight,With the deeper thought forewise:The world is the same, seen through;The features of men are the same.But let their historian newIn the language of nakedness write,Rejoice we to know not shame,Not a dread, not a doubt: to have doneWith the tortures of thought in the throes,Our animal tangle, and graspVery sap of the vital in this:That from flesh unto spirit man growsEven here on the sod under sun:That she of the wanton's kiss,Broken through with the bite of an asp,Is Mother of simple truth,Relentless quencher of lies;Eternal in thought; discernedIn thought mid-ferry betweenThe Life and the Death, which are one,As our breath in and out, joy or teen.She gives the rich vision to youth,If we will, of her prompting wise;Or men by the lash made lean,Who in harness the mind subserve,Their title to read her have earned;Having mastered sensation—insaneAt a stroke of the terrified nerve;And out of the sensual hiveGrown to the flower of brain;To know her a thing alive,Whose aspects mutably swerve,Whose laws immutably reign.Our sentencer, clother in mist,Her morn bends breast to her noon,Noon to the hour dark-dyed,If we will, of her promptings wise:Her light is our own if we list.The legends that sweep her aside,Crying loud for an opiate boon,To comfort the human want,From the bosom of magical skies,She smiles on, marking their source:They read her with infant eyes.Good ships of morality they,For our crude developing force;Granite the thought to stay,That she is a thing aliveTo the living, the falling and strewn.But the Questions, the broods that hauntSensation insurgent, may drive,The way of the channelling mole,Head in a ground-vault gauntAs your telescope's skeleton moon.Barren comfort to these will she dole;Dead is her face to their cries.Intelligence pushing to tasteA lesson from beasts might heed.They scatter a voice in the waste,Where any dry swish of a reedBy grey-glassy water replies.
'They see not above or below;Farthest are they from my soul,'Earth whispers: 'they scarce have the thirst,Except to unriddle a rune;And I spin none; only show,Would humanity soar from its worst,Winged above darkness and dole,How flesh unto spirit must grow.Spirit raves not for a goal.Shapes in man's likeness hewnDesires not; neither desiresThe sleep or the glory: it trusts;Uses my gifts, yet aspires;Dreams of a higher than it.The dream is an atmosphere;A scale still ascending to knitThe clear to the loftier Clear.'Tis Reason herself, tiptoeAt the ultimate bound of her wit,On the verges of Night and Day.But is it a dream of the lusts,To my dustiest 'tis decreed;And them that so shuffle astrayI touch with no key of goldFor the wealth of the secret nook;Though I dote over ripeness at play,Rosiness fondle and feed,Guide it with shepherding crookTo my sports and my pastures alway.The key will shriek in the lock,The door will rustily hinge,Will open on features of mould,To vanish corrupt at a glimpse,And mock as the wild echoes mock,Soulless in mimic, doth GreedOr the passion for fruitage tingeThat dream, for your parricide impsTo wing through the body of Time,Yourselves in slaying him slay.Much are you shots of your prime,You men of the act and the dream:And please you to fatten a weedThat perishes, pledged to decay,'Tis dearth in your season of need,Down the slopes of the shoreward way; -Nigh on the misty stream,Where Ferryman under his hood,With a call to be ready to payThe small coin, whitens red blood.But the young ethereal seedShall bring you the bread no buyerCan have for his craving supreme;To my quenchless quick shall speedThe soul at her wrestle rudeWith devil, with angel more dire;With the flesh, with the Fates, enringed.The dream of the blossom of GoodIs your banner of battle unrolledIn its waver and current and curve(Choir over choir white-winged,White-bosomed fold within fold):Hopeful of victory mostWhen hard is the task to sustainAssaults of the fearful senseAt a mind in desolate moodWith the Whither, whose echo is Whence;And humanity's clamour, lost, lost;And its clasp of the staves that snap;And evil abroad, as a mainUproarious, bursting its dyke.For back do you look, and lo,Forward the harvest of grain! -Numbers in council, awakeTo love more than things of my lap,Love me; and to let the types break,Men be grass, rocks rivers, all flow;All save the dream sink alikeTo the source of my vital in sap:Their battle, their loss, their ache,For my pledge of vitality know.The dream is the thought in the ghost;The thought sent flying for food;Eyeless, but sprung of an aimSupernal of Reason, to findThe great Over-Reason we nameBeneficence: mind seeking Mind.Dream of the blossom of Good,In its waver and current and curve,With the hopes of my offspring enscrolled!Soon to be seen of a hostThe flag of the Master I serve!And life in them doubled on Life,As flame upon flame, to behold,High over Time-tumbled sea,The bliss of his headship of strife,Him through handmaiden me.'
I stood at the gate of the cotWhere my darling, with side-glance demure,Would spy, on her trim garden-plot,The busy wild things chase and lure.For these with their ways were her feast;They had surety no enemy lurked.Their deftest of tricks to their leastShe gathered in watch as she worked.
When berries were red on her ash,The blackbird would rifle them rough,Till the ground underneath looked a gash,And her rogue grew the round of a chough.The squirrel cocked ear o'er his hoop,Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush.She knew any tit of the troopAll as well as the snail-tapping thrush.
I gazed: 'twas the scene of the frame,With the face, the dear life for me, fled.No window a lute to my name,No watcher there plying the thread.But the blackbird hung peeking at will;The squirrel from cone hopped to cone;The thrush had a snail in his bill,And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.
With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,And made them on each side a shadow seem.Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dreamTo fall on daylight; and night puts awayHer darker veil for grey.
In that grey veil green grassblades brushed we by;We came where woods breathed sharp, and overheadRocks raised clear horns on a transforming sky:Around, save for those shapes, with him who ledAnd linked them, desert varied by no signOf other life than mine.
By this the dark-winged planet, raying wide,From the mild pearl-glow to the rose upborne,Drew in his fires, less faint than far descried,Pure-fronted on a stronger wave of morn:And those two shapes the splendour interweaved,Hung web-like, sank and heaved.
Love took my hand when hidden stood the sunTo fling his robe on shoulder-heights of snow.Then said: There lie they, Life and Death in one.Whichever is, the other is: but know,It is thy craving self that thou dost see,Not in them seeing me.
Shall man into the mystery of breath,From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy?Or learn the secret of the shrouded death,By lifting up the lid of a white eye?Cleave thou thy way with fathering desireOf fire to reach to fire.
Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makesThe house of heaven splendid for the bride.To him as leaps a fountain she awakes,In knotting arms, yet boundless: him beside,She holds the flower to heaven, and by his powerBrings heaven to the flower.
He gives her homeliness in desert air,And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leadsThrough widening chambers of surprise to whereThrobs rapture near an end that aye recedes,Because his touch is infinite and lendsA yonder to all ends.
Death begs of Life his blush; Life Death persuadesTo keep long day with his caresses graced.He is the heart of light, the wing of shades,The crown of beauty: never soul embracedOf him can harbour unfaith; soul of himPossessed walks never dim.
Love eyed his rosy memories: he sang:O bloom of dawn, breathed up from the gold sheafHeld springing beneath Orient! that dost hangThe space of dewdrops running over leaf;Thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghostThan Time with all his host!
Of thee to say behold, has said adieu:But love remembers how the sky was green,And how the grasses glimmered lightest blue;How saint-like grey took fervour: how the screenOf cloud grew violet; how thy moment cameBetween a blush and flame.
Love saw the emissary eglantineBreak wave round thy white feet above the gloom;Lay finger on thy star; thy raiment lineWith cherub wing and limb; wed thy soft bloom,Gold-quivering like sunrays in thistle-down,Earth under rolling brown.
They do not look through love to look on thee,Grave heavenliness! nor know they joy of sight,Who deem the wave of rapt desire must beIts wrecking and last issue of delight.Dead seasons quicken in one petal-spotOf colour unforgot.
This way have men come out of brutishnessTo spell the letters of the sky and readA reflex upon earth else meaningless.With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unagedShall on through brave wars waged.
More gardens will they win than any lost;The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain.Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed,To stature of the Gods will they attain.They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord,Themselves the attuning chord!
The song had ceased; my vision with the song.Then of those Shadows, which one made descentBeside me I knew not: but Life ere longCame on me in the public ways and bentEyes deeper than of old: Death met I too,And saw the dawn glow through.
What links are ours with orbs that areSo resolutely far:The solitary asks, and theyGive radiance as from a shield:Still at the death of day,The seen, the unrevealed.Implacable they shineTo us who would of Life obtainAn answer for the life we strainTo nourish with one sign.Nor can imagination throwThe penetrative shaft: we passThe breath of thought, who would divineIf haply they may growAs Earth; have our desire to know;If life comes there to grain from grass,And flowers like ours of toil and pain;Has passion to beat bar,Win space from cleaving brain;The mystic link attain,Whereby star holds on star.
Those visible immortals beamAllurement to the dream:Ireful at human hungers brookNo question in the look.For ever virgin to our sense,Remote they wane to gaze intense:Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smiteThe beating heart behind the ball of sight:Till we conceive their heavens hoar,Those lights they raise but sparkles frore,And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering preyTo that frigidity of brainless ray.
Yet space is given for breath of thoughtBeyond our bounds when musing: moreWhen to that musing love is brought,And love is asked of love's wherefore.'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought:Her gift, her secret, here our tie.And not with her and yonder sky?Bethink you: were it Earth aloneBreeds love, would not her region beThe sole delight and throneOf generous Deity?
To deeper than this ball of sightAppeal the lustrous people of the night.Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails,It is our ravenous that quails,Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.The spirit leaps alight,Doubts not in them is he,The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right:Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought,To feel it large of the great life they hold:In them to come, or vaster intervolved,The issues known in us, our unsolved solved:That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree,Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.So may we read and little find them cold:Let it but be the lord of Mind to guideOur eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped;Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortifiedBy day to penetrate black midnight; see,Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we,The specks of dust upon a mound of mould,We who reflect those rays, though low our place,To them are lastingly allied.
So may we read, and little find them cold:Not frosty lamps illumining dead space,Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.The fire is in them whereof we are born;The music of their motion may be ours.Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voicedSisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.Of love, the grand impulsion, we beholdThe love that lends her graceAmong the starry fold.Then at new flood of customary morn,Look at her through her showers,Her mists, her streaming gold,A wonder edges the familiar face:She wears no more that robe of printed hours;Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.
Close Echo hears the woodman's axe,To double on it, as in glee,With clap of hands, and little lacksOf meaning in her repartee.For all shall fall,As one has done,The tree of me,Of thee the tree;And unto allThe fate we waitReveals the wheelsWhereon we run:We tower to flower,We spread the shade,We drop for crop,At length are laid;Are rolled in mould,From chop and lop:And are we thick in woodland tracks,Or tempting of our stature we,The end is one, we do but waxFor service over land and sea.So, strike! the likeShall thus of us,My brawny woodman, claim the tax.Nor foe thy blow,Though wood be good,And shriekingly the timber cracks:The ground we crownedShall speed the seedOf younger into swelling sacks.
For use he hews,To make awakeThe spirit of what stuff we be:Our earth of mirthAnd tears he clearsFor braver, let our minds agree;And then will menWithin them winAn Echo clapping harmony.
We spend our lives in learning pilotage,And grow good steersmen when the vessel's crank!Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shankSidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.It is the sentence which completes that stage;A testament of wisdom reading blank.The seniors of the race, on their last plank,Pass mumbling it as nature's final page.These, bent by such experience, are the bandWho captain young enthusiasts to maintainWhat things we view, and Earth's decree withstand,Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay,Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,And ancients musical at close of day.
Earth loves her young: a preference manifest:She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds;Their beauty with her choicest interthreads,And makes her revel of their merry zest;As in our East much were it in our West,If men had risen to do the work of heads.Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treadsThe ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.How wrought they in their zenith? 'Tis not writ;Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read:Have they but held her laws and nature dear,They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.More prizes she her beasts than this high breedWry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.
Historic be the survey of our kind,And how their brave Society took shape.Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape,The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find,Who, with some jars in harmony, combined,Their primal instincts taming, to escapeThe brawl indecent, and hot passions drape.Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind.Thus entered they the field of milder beasts,Which in some sort of civil order graze,And do half-homage to the God of Laws.But are they still for their old ravenous feasts,Earth gives the edifice they build no base:They spring another flood of fangs and claws.
Sharp is the night, but stars with frost aliveLeap off the rim of earth across the dome.It is a night to make the heavens our homeMore than the nest whereto apace we strive.Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:The living throb in me, the dead revive.Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,Life glistens on the river of the death.It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springsOf radiance, the radiance enrings:And this is the soul's haven to have felt.
Poems by George Meredith—Volume 3
[This etext was prepared from the 1912 Times Book Club "Surrey" editionby David Price]
The wind is East, the wind is West,Blows in and out of haven;The wind that blows is the wind that's best,And croak, my jolly raven!If here awhile we jigged and laughed,The like we will do yonder;For he's the man who masters a craft,And light as a lord can wander.So, foot the measure, Roving Tim,And croak, my jolly raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
You live in rows of snug abodes,With gold, maybe, for counting;And mine's the beck of the rainy roadsAgainst the sun a-mounting.I take the day as it behaves,Nor shiver when 'tis airy;But comes a breeze, all you are on waves,Sick chickens o' Mother Carey!So, now for next, cries Roving Tim,And croak, my jolly raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
Sweet lass, you screw a lovely leer,To make a man consider.If you were up with the auctioneer,I'd be a handsome bidder.But wedlock clips the rover's wing;She tricks him fly to spider;And when we get to fights in the Ring,It's trumps when you play outsider.So, wrench and split, cries Roving Tim,And croak, my jolly raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
Along my winding way I knowA shady dell that's winking;The very corner for Self and CoTo do a world of thinking.And shall I this? and shall I that?Till Nature answers, ne'ther!Strike match and light your pipe in your hat,Rejoicing in sound shoe-leather!So lead along, cries Roving Tim,And croak, my jolly raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
A cunning hand 'll hand you bread,With freedom for your capers.I'm not so sure of a cunning head;It steers to pits or vapours.But as for Life, we'll bear in sightThe lesson Nature teaches;Regard it in a sailoring light,And treat it like thirsty leeches.So, fly your jib, cries Roving Tim,And top your boom, old raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
She'll take, to please her dame and dad,The shopman nicely shaven.She'll learn to think o' the marching ladWhen perchers show they're craven.You say the shopman piles a heap,While I perhaps am fasting;And bless your wits, it haunts him in sleep,His tin-kettle chance of lasting!So hail the road, cries Roving Tim,And hail the rain, old raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
He's half a wife, yon pecker bill;A book and likewise preacher.With any soul, in a game of skill,He'll prove your over-reacher.The reason is, his brains are bentOn doing things right single.You'd wish for them when pitching your tentAt night in a whirly dingle!So, off we go, cries Roving Tim,And on we go, old raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
Lord, no, man's lot is not for bliss;To call it woe is blindness:It'll here a kick, and it's there a kiss,And here and there a kindness.He starts a hare and calls her joy;He runs her down to sorrow:The dogs within him bother the boy,But 'tis a new day to-morrow.So, I at helm, cries Roving Tim,And you at bow, old raven!The wind according to its whimIs in and out of haven.
A revelation came on Jane,The widow of a labouring swain:And first her body trembled sharp,Then all the woman was a harpWith winds along the strings; she heard,Though there was neither tone nor word.
For past our hearing was the air,Beyond our speaking what it bare,And she within herself had sightOf heaven at work to cleanse outright,To make of her a mansion fitFor angel hosts inside to sit.
They entered, and forthwith entranced,Her body braced, her members danced;Surprisingly the woman leapt;And countenance composed she kept:As gossip neighbours in the laneDeclared, who saw and pitied Jane.
These knew she had been reading books,The which was witnessed by her looksOf late: she had a maniaFor mad folk in America,And said for sure they led the way,But meat and beer were meant to stay.
That she had visited a fair,Had seen a gauzy lady there,Alive with tricks on legs alone,As good as wings, was also known:And longwhiles in a sullen mood,Before her jumping, Jane would brood.
A good knee's height, they say, she sprang;Her arms and feet like those who hang:As if afire the body sped,And neither pair contributed.She jumped in silence: she was thoughtA corpse to resurrection caught.
The villagers were mostly dazed;They jeered, they wondered, and they praised.'Twas guessed by some she was inspired,And some would have it she had hiredAn engine in her petticoats,To turn their wits and win their votes.
Her first was Winny Earnes, a kindOf woman not to dance inclined;But she went up, entirely won,Ere Jump-to-glory Jane had done;And once a vixen wild for speech,She found the better way to preach.
No long time after, Jane was seenDirecting jumps at Daddy Green;And that old man, to watch her fly,Had eyebrows made of arches high;Till homeward he likewise did hop,Oft calling on himself to stop!
It was a scene when man and maid,Abandoning all other trade,And careless of the call to meals,Went jumping at the woman's heels.By dozens they were counted soon,Without a sound to tell their tune.
Along the roads they came, and crossedThe fields, and o'er the hills were lost,And in the evening reappeared;Then short like hobbled horses reared,And down upon the grass they plumped:Alone their Jane to glory jumped.
At morn they rose, to see her springAll going as an engine thing;And lighter than the gossamerShe led the bobbers following her,Past old acquaintances, and whereThey made the stranger stupid stare.
When turnips were a filling crop,In scorn they jumped a butcher's shop:Or, spite of threats to flog and souse,They jumped for shame a public-house:And much their legs were seized with rageIf passing by the vicarage.
The tightness of a hempen ropeTheir bodies got; but laundry soapNot handsomer can rub the skinFor token of the washed within.Occasionally coughers castA leg aloft and coughed their last.
The weaker maids and some old men,Requiring rafters for the penOn rainy nights, were those who fell.The rest were quite a miracle,Refreshed as you may search all roundOn Club-feast days and cry, Not found!
For these poor innocents, that sleptAgainst the sky, soft women wept:For never did they any theft;'Twas known when they their camping left,And jumped the cold out of their rags;In spirit rich as money-bags.
They jumped the question, jumped reply;And whether to insist, deny,Reprove, persuade, they jumped in ranksOr singly, straight the arms to flanks,And straight the legs, with just a kneeFor bending in a mild degree.
The villagers might call them mad;An endless holiday they had,Of pleasure in a serious work:They taught by leaps where perils lurk,And with the lambkins practised sportsFor 'scaping Satan's pounds and quarts.
It really seemed on certain days,When they bobbed up their Lord to praise,And bobbing up they caught the glanceOf light, our secret is to dance,And hold the tongue from hindering peace;To dance out preacher and police.
Those flies of boys disturbed them soreOn Sundays and when daylight wore:With withies cut from hedge or copse,They treated them as whipping-tops,And flung big stones with cruel aim;Yet all the flock jumped on the same.
For what could persecution doTo worry such a blessed crew,On whom it was as wind to fire,Which set them always jumping higher?The parson and the lawyer tried,By meek persistency defied.
But if they bore, they could pursueAs well, and this the Bishop too;When inner warnings proved him plainThe chase for Jump-to-glory Jane.She knew it by his being sentTo bless the feasting in the tent.
Not less than fifty years on end,The Squire had been the Bishop's friend:And his poor tenants, harmless ones,With souls to save! fed not on buns,But angry meats: she took her placeOutside to show the way to grace.
In apron suit the Bishop stood;The crowding people kindly viewed.A gaunt grey woman he saw riseOn air, with most beseeching eyes:And evident as light in darkIt was, she set to him for mark.
Her highest leap had come: with easeShe jumped to reach the Bishop's knees:Compressing tight her arms and lips,She sought to jump the Bishop's hips:Her aim flew at his apron-band,That he might see and understand.
The mild inquiry of his gazeWas altered to a peaked amaze,At sight of thirty in ascent,To gain his notice clearly bent:And greatly Jane at heart was vexedBy his ploughed look of mind perplexed.
In jumps that said, Beware the pit!More eloquent than speaking it -That said, Avoid the boiled, the roast;The heated nose on face of ghost,Which comes of drinking: up and o'erThe flesh with me! did Jane implore.
She jumped him high as huntsmen goAcross the gate; she jumped him low,To coax him to begin and feelHis infant steps returning, peelHis mortal pride, exposing fruit,And off with hat and apron suit.
We need much patience, well she knew,And out and out, and through and through,When we would gentlefolk address,However we may seek to bless:At times they hide them like the beastsFrom sacred beams; and mostly priests.
He gave no sign of making bare,Nor she of faintness or despair.Inflamed with hope that she might win,If she but coaxed him to begin,She used all arts for making fain;The mother with her babe was Jane.
Now stamped the Squire, and knowing notHer business, waved her from the spot.Encircled by the men of might,The head of Jane, like flickering light,As in a charger, they beheldEre she was from the park expelled.
Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight,Did Jane around communicate:For that the moment when beganThe holy but mistaken man,In view of light, to take his lift,They cut him from her charm adrift!
And he was lost: a banished faceFor ever from the ways of grace,Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.They saw the Bishop's wavering spriteWithin her look, at come and go,Long after he had caused her woe.
Her greying eyes (until she sankAt Fredsham on the wayside bank,Like cinder heaps that whitened lieFrom coals that shot the flame to sky)Had glassy vacancies, which yearnedFor one in memory discerned.
May those who ply the tongue that cheats,And those who rush to beer and meats,And those whose mean ambition aimsAt palaces and titled names,Depart in such a cheerful strainAs did our Jump-to-glory Jane!
Her end was beautiful: one sigh.She jumped a foot when it was nigh.A lily in a linen cloutShe looked when they had laid her out.It is a lily-light she bearsFor England up the ladder-stairs.