Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.Not wiser of our mark than at the start,It surges like the wrath-faced father SeaTo countering winds; a force blind-eyed,On endless rounds of aimless reach;Emotion for the source of pride,The grounds of faith in fixityAbove our flesh; its cravings urging speech,Inspiring prayer; by turns a lumpSwung on a time-piece, and by turnsA quivering energy to jumpFor seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns,Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloudCapping a sullen crater: and mankindWe see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,Because of thy straight leadership declined;At heels of this or that delusive spark:Now when the multitudinous races pressElbow to elbow hourly more,A thickened host; when now we hear aloudLife for the very life imploreA signal of a visioned mark;Light of the mind, the mind's discourse,The rational in graciousness,Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,To tame and lead that blind-eyed forceIn harmony of harness with the crowd,For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowedTo holy work, deems it the heart's intent;Or where a silken circle views it cowled,The seeming figure of concordance, bentOn satiating tyrant lustOr barren fits of sentiment.
Thou wilt not have our paths befouledBy simulation; are we vile to view,The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:They make their mirror upon faces true;And where they win reflection, lucid heaveThe under tides of this hot heart seen through.Beneficently wilt thou clipAll oversteppings of the plumed,The puffed, and bid the masker strip,And into the crowned windbag thrust,Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,A lightning o'er the half-illumed,Who to base brute-dominion cleave,Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,To spy a wound without a gash,The magic in a turn of wrist,And how are wedded heart and head regaledWhen Wit o'er Folly blows the mort,And their high note of union spreadsWide from the timely word with conquest charged;Victorious laughter, of no loud report,If heard; derision as divinely veiledAs terrible Immortals in rose-mist,Given to the vision of arrested men:Whereat they feel within them weaveCommunity its closer threads,And are to our fraternal state enlarged;Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken:They learn that thou art not of alien sort,Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed,Or of the frosty heights unsealed,Or of the vain who simple speech distort,Or of the vapours pointing on to noughtAlong cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch;As when sole homeward the belated treads,And hears aloft a clamour wailed,That once had seemed the broomstick witchHorridly violating cloud for drought:He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears,Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train;Homeliest order in black sky appears,Not less than in the lighted village steads.So do those half-illumed wax clear to shareA cry that is our common voice; the noteOf fellowship upon a loftier plane,Above embattled castle-wall and moat;And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.So thou for washing a phantasmal air,For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise,Laughter—the joy of Reason seeing fadeObstruction into Earth's renewing beds,Beneath the stroke of her good servant's blade -Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed;Gain of the years, conjunction's prize.The greater heart in thy appeal to headsThey see, thou Captain of our civil Fort!By more elusive savages assailedOn each ascending stage; untiredBoth inner foe and outer to cut short,And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist:Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile'sYard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight,Like forms in running water, oft when smiles,When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight:But never with the slayer's malice fired:As little as informs an infant's fistClenched at the sneeze! Thou wouldst but have us beGood sons of mother soil, whereby to growBranching on fairer skies, one stately tree;Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court:Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress;Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.Ambrosial heights of possible acquist,Where souls of men with soul of man consort,And all look higher to new lovelinessBegotten of the look: thy mark is there;While on our temporal ground alive,Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest swordOf finer temper now a numbered learnThat they resisting thee themselves resist;And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive,Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snareWitching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts.More now, and hourly more, and of the LordThou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern,When pinched ascetic and red sensualistAlternately recurrent freeze or burn,And of its old religions it has doubts.It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare;Less hates, part understands, nor much resents,When the prized objects it has raised for prayer,For fitful prayer;—repentance dreading fire,Impelled by aches; the blindness which repentsLike the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire; -Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probeOld institutions and establishments,Once fortresses against the floods of sin,For what their worth; and questioningly prodFor why they stand upon a racing globe,Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod;Their angel out of them, a demon in.
This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to fret,To hurl at vanities, to drift in shameOf gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod,Shall of predestination wed thee yet.Something it gathers of what things should dropAt entrance on new times; of how thrice broadThe world of minds communicative; howA straggling Nature classed in school, and scoredWith stripes admonishing, may yield to ploughFruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tameBe feeble on an Earth whose gentler cropIs its most living, in the mind that steers,By Reason led, her way of tree and flame,Beyond the genuflexions and the tears;Upon an Earth that cannot stop,Where upward is the visible aim,And ever we espy the greater God,For simple pointing at a good adored:Proof of the closer neighbourhood. Head on,Sword of the many, light of the few! untwistOr cut our tangles till fair space is wonBeyond a briared wood of austere brow,Believed of discord by thy timely wordAt intervals refreshing life: for thouArt verify Keeper of the Muse's Key;Thyself no vacant melodist;On lower land elective even as she;Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred;Advising to her measured steps in flow;And teaching how for being subjected freePast thought of freedom we may come to knowThe music of the meaning of Accord.
Days, when the ball of our visionHad eagles that flew unabashed to sun;When the grasp on the bow was decision,And arrow and hand and eye were one;When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,Came heaving for rapture ahead! -Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmerAs lights over mounds of the dead.
Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead,With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed,Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear,To bear the golden nectar-cup.So flies desire at view of its delight,When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.We meanwhile who in hues of the sick yearThe Spring-time paint to prick us for our lost,Mount but the fatal half way up -Whereon shut eyes! This is decreed,For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend,By passion for the arms' possession tossed,It falls the way of sighs and hath their end;A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.Good if the arrowy eagle of the heightBe then the little bird that hops to feed.
Lame falls the cry to kindle daysOf radiant orb and daring gaze.It does but clank our mortal chain.For Earth reads through her felon oldThe many-numbered of her fold,Who forward tottering backward strain,And would be thieves of treasure spent,With their grey season soured.She could write out their history in their thirstTo have again the much devoured,And be the bud at burst;In honey fancy join the flow,Where Youth swims on as once they went,All choiric for spontaneous gleeOf active eager lungs and thews;They now bared roots beside the river bent;Whose privilege themselves to see;Their place in yonder tideway know;The current glass peruse;The depths intently sound;And sapped by each returning floodAccept for monitory nourishmentThose worn roped features under crust of mud,Reflected in the silvery smooth around:Not less the branching and high singing tree,A home of nests, a landmark and a tent,Until their hour for losing hold on ground.Even such good harvest of the things that fleeEarth offers her subjected, and they chooseRather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink,And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.
Who cheerfully the little bird becomes,Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs,May have her dolings to the lightest touch;As where some cripple muses by his crutch,Unwitting that the spirit in him sings:'When I had legs, then had I wings,As good as any born of eggs,To feed on all aerial things,When I had legs!'And if not to embrace he sighs,She gives him breath of Youth awhile,Perspective of a breezy mile,Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies;Scenes where his nested dreams upon their hoardBrooded, or up to empyrean soared:Enough to link him with a dotted line.But cravings for an eagle's flight,To top white peaks and serve wild wineAmong the rosy undecayed,Bring only flash of shadeFrom her full throbbing breast of day in night.By what they crave are they betrayed:And cavernous is that young dragon's jaw,Crimson for all the fiery reptile sawIn time now coveted, for teeth to flay,Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.They to their moment of drawn breath,Which is the life that makes the death,The death that makes ethereal life would bind:The death that breeds the spectre do they find.Darkness is wedded and the waste regretsBeating as dead leaves on a fitful gust,By souls no longer dowered to climbBeneath their pack of dust,Whom envy of a lustrous prime,Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets,And dooms to sink and water sable flowers,That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.Strain we the arms for Memory's hours,We are the seized Persephone.Responsive never to the soft desireFor one prized tune is this our chord of life.'Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife,In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.Yet have we glad companionship of Youth,Elysian meadows for the mind,Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tombFilled with the parti-coloured bloomOf loved and hated, grasp all human truthSowed by us down the mazy paths behind.To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through:Whence comes a line of continuity,That brings our middle station into view,Between those poles; a novel Earth we see,In likeness of us, made of banned and blest;The sower's bed, but not the reaper's rest:An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meetBuried, and breathing, and to be.Then of the junction of the three,Even as a heart in brain, full sweetMay sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.
Only the soul can walk the dusty trackWhere hangs our flowering under vapours black,And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,Quench recollection of a spacious pure.They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,Hard at each other point and gape,Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,To reappear with one they drapeFor criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,Who such distorted issue did beget.Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweatOff brow on breast, whose furnace flameHas eaten, and old Self consumes.Out of the purification will they leap,Thee renovating while new light illumesThe dusky web of evil, known as pain,That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain:Midway the tameless oceanic bruteBelow, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,And the fair heaven reflecting inner peaceOn righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.
Forth of such passage through black fire we winClear hearing of the simple lute,Whereon, and not on other, Memory playsFor them who can in quietness receiveHer restorative airs: a ditty thinAs note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching raysOn a transparent sheet, where curves a glassTo truer heavens than when the breaker neighsLoud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.Solidity and bulk and martial brass,Once tyrants of the senses, faintly scoreA mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,While present in the spirit, vital there,Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as airImperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawledHistoric of the soul, and heats anewIts coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.True of the man, and of mankind 'tis true,Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warredAgainst the primal beast in us, and flung;Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starredAbove self-pity slain: or it was PrayerFirst taken for Life's cleanser; or the tongueSpake for the world against this heart; or ringsOld laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throbFrom breast of Earth, and did no creature rob:These quickening live. But deepest at her springs,Most filial, is an eye to love her young.And had we it, to see with it, aliveIs our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are thenThe green-robed and grey-crested sons of men:She tributary to her aged restoresThe living in the dead; she will inspireFaith homelier than on the Yonder shores,Abhorring these as mire,Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes,With mortal tremours pricking hopes,And, by the final Bacchic of the lustsPropelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts:A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants;Not utterly misled, though blindly led,Led round fermenting eddies. Faith she plantsIn her own firmness as our midway road:Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read;Her essence reading in her toothsome goad;Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.But love we well the young, her road midwayThe darknesses runs consecrated clay.Despite our feeble hold on this green home,And the vast outer strangeness void of dome,Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel,Up to the moment of our prostrate fall,The life they deem voluptuously realIs more than empty echo of a call,Or shadow of a shade, or swing of tides;As brooding upon age, when veins congeal,Grey palsy nods to think. With us for guides,Another step above the animal,To views in Alpine thought are they helped on.Good if so far we live in them when gone!
And there the arrowy eagle of the heightBecomes the little bird that hops to feed,Glad of a crumb, for tempered appetiteTo make it wholesome blood and fruitful seed.Then Memory strikes on no slack string,Nor sectional will varied Life appear:Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hearEarth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring.And ours the mellow note, while sharing joysNo more subjecting mortals who have learntTo build for happiness on equipoise,The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt;Know in our seasons an integral wheel,That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed.This, the truistic rubbish under heelOf all the world, we peck at and are filled.
Sleek as a lizard at round of a stone,The look of her heart slipped out and in.Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone,As innocents clear of a shade of sin.
He laid a finger under her chin,His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown:Now, what will happen and who will win,With me in the fight and my lady lone?
He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone;Was fire on her eyes till they let him in.Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone,And never a corner for serpent sin.
Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin;Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown:At home to the death my lord shall win,When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone!
With splendour of a silver day,A frosted night had opened May:And on that plumed and armoured night,As one close temple hove our wood,Its border leafage virgin white.Remote down air an owl hallooed.The black twig dropped without a twirl;The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;A crystal off the green leaf slipped.Across the tracks of rimy tan,Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;A limping minnow-rillet ran,To hang upon an icy foot.
In this shrill hush of quietude,The ear conceived a severing cry.Almost it let the sound elude,When chuckles three, a warble shy,From hazels of the garden came,Near by the crimson-windowed farm.They laid the trance on breath and frame,A prelude of the passion-charm.
Then soon was heard, not sooner heardThan answered, doubled, trebled, more,Voice of an Eden in the birdRenewing with his pipe of fourThe sob: a troubled Eden, richIn throb of heart: unnumbered throatsFlung upward at a fountain's pitch,The fervour of the four long notes,That on the fountain's pool subside,Exult and ruffle and upspring:Endless the crossing multipliedOf silver and of golden string.There chimed a bubbled underbrewWith witch-wild spray of vocal dew.
It seemed a single harper sweptOur wild wood's inner chords and wakedA spirit that for yearning achedEre men desired and joyed or wept.Or now a legion ravishingMusician rivals did uniteIn love of sweetness high to singThe subtle song that rivals light;From breast of earth to breast of sky:And they were secret, they were nigh:A hand the magic might disperse;The magic swung my universe.
Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream,Where all was visionary gleam;Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed;And feelings, passing joy and woe,Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed,Nor either was the one we know:Nor pregnant of the heart containedIn us were they, that griefless plained,That plaining soared; and through the heartStruck to one note the wide apart:-A passion surgent from despair;A paining bliss in fervid cold;Off the last vital edge of air,Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled,For rapture of a wine of tears;As had a star among the spheresCaught up our earth to some mid-heightOf double life to ear and sight,She giving voice to thought that shinesKeen-brilliant of her deepest mines;While steely drips the rillet clinked,And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled.
Then was the lyre of earth beheld,Then heard by me: it holds me linked;Across the years to dead-ebb shoresI stand on, my blood-thrill restores.But would I conjure into meThose issue notes, I must reviewWhat serious breath the woodland drew;The low throb of expectancy;How the white mother-muteness pressedOn leaf and meadow-herb; how shook,Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crestSeen spinning on the bracken-crook.
A satyr spied a Goddess in her bath,Unseen of her attendant nymphs; none knew.Forthwith the creature to his fellows drew,And looking backward on the curtained path,He strove to tell; he could but heave a breastToo full, and point to mouth, with failing leers:Vainly he danced for speech, he giggled tears,Made as if torn in two, as if tight pressed,As if cast prone; then fetching whimpered tunesFor words, flung heel and set his hairy flightThrough forest-hollows, over rocky height.The green leaves buried him three rounds of moons.A senatorial Satyr named what herbHad hurried him outrunning reason's curb.
'Tis told how when that hieaway uncheckedTo dell returned, he seemed of tempered mood:Even as the valley of the torrent rude,The torrent now a brook, the valley wrecked.In him, to hale him high or hurl aheap,Goddess and Goatfoot hourly wrestled sore;Hourly the immortal prevailing more:Till one hot noon saw Meliboeus peepFrom thicket-sprays to where his full-blown dame,In circle by the lusty friskers gripped,Laughed the showered rose-leaves while her limbs were stripped.She beckoned to our Satyr, and he came.Then twirled she mounds of ripeness, wreath of arms.His hoof kicked up the clothing for such charms.
O briar-scents, on yon wet wingOf warm South-west wind brushing by,You mind me of the sweetest thingThat ever mingled frank and shy:When she and I, by love enticed,Beneath the orchard-apples met,In equal halves a ripe one sliced,And smelt the juices ere we ate.
That apple of the briar-scent,Among our lost in Britain now,Was green of rind, and redolentOf sweetness as a milking cow.The briar gives it back, well nighThe damsel with her teeth on it;Her twinkle between frank and shy,My thirst to bite where she had bit.
He leaped. With none to hinder,Of Aetna's fiery scoriaeIn the next vomit-shower, made heA more peculiar cinder.And this great Doctor, can it be,He left no saner recipeFor men at issue with despair?Admiring, even his poet owns,While noting his fine lyric tones,The last of him was heels in air!
Comes Reverence, her featuresAmazed to see high Wisdom hear,With glimmer of a faunish leer,One mock her pride of creatures.Shall such sad incident degradeA stature casting sunniest shade?O Reverence! let Reason swim;Each life its critic deed reveals;And him reads Reason at his heels,If heels in air the last of him!
The day that is the night of days,With cannon-fire for sun ablazeWe spy from any billow's lift;And England still this tidal drift!Would she to sainted forethought vowA space before the thunders flood,That martyr of its hour might nowSpare her the tears of blood.
Asleep upon her ancient deeds,She hugs the vision plethora breeds,And counts her manifold increaseOf treasure in the fruits of peace.What curse on earth's improvident,When the dread trumpet shatters rest,Is wreaked, she knows, yet smiles contentAs cradle rocked from breast.
She, impious to the Lord of Hosts,The valour of her offspring boasts,Mindless that now on land and mainHis heeded prayer is active brain.No more great heart may guard the home,Save eyed and armed and skilled to cleaveYon swallower wave with shroud of foam,We see not distant heave.
They stand to be her sacrifice,The sons this mother flings like dice,To face the odds and brave the Fates;As in those days of starry dates,When cannon cannon's counterblastAwakened, muzzle muzzle bowled,And high in swathe of smoke the mastIts fighting rag outrolled.
1891.
Now the North wind ceases,The warm South-west awakes;Swift fly the fleeces,Thick the blossom-flakes.
Now hill to hill has made the stride,And distance waves the without end:Now in the breast a door flings wide;Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.And song of England's rush of flowersIs this full breeze with mellow stops,That spins the lark for shine, for showers;He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.The stir in memory seem these things,Which out of moistened turf and clayAstrain for light push patient rings,Or leap to find the waterway.'Tis equal to a wonder done,Whatever simple lives renewTheir tricks beneath the father sun,As though they caught a broken clue;So hard was earth an eyewink back:But now the common life has come,The blotting cloud a dappled pack,The grasses one vast underhum.A City clothed in snow and soot,With lamps for day in ghostly rows,Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,The river that reflective flows:And there did fog down crypts of streetPlay spectre upon eye and mouth:-Their faces are a glass to greetThis magic of the whirl for South.A burly joy each creature swellsWith sound of its own hungry quest;Earth has to fill her empty wells,And speed the service of the nest;The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,That haunts the farmer's look abroad,Who sees what tomb a white night built,Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.For iron Winter held her firm;Across her sky he laid his hand;And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;A sightless heaven, a shaven land.Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,The bitten buds dared not unfold:We raced on roads and ice to keepThought of the girl we love from cold.
But now the North wind ceases,The warm South-west awakes,The heavens are out in fleeces,And earth's green banner shakes.
For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory thatfollowsWhen ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he hasdone.But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer'scrown is Apollo's,While stands he yet in his grime and sweat—to wrestle for fruits ofthe Sun.
Can an enemy wither his cheer? Not you, ye fair yellow-floweringladies,Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, andclog.'Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soulto their Hades,And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay ofthe Dog.
Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving newfashions:The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs luredto run in a stream:He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason toswallow the passions,Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!
Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer's resolute hope: thatby him shall be written,To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the strongmade just:That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thricevitalised Britain,Ashine with the light of the doing of right: at the gates of theFuture in trust.
Sprung of 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 alongWill 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 headsNow 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 Aetna 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 knaveSweats in its laboratory what shall save?But men who ply their wits in such a schoolMust 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 convulseCan 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 eachHis 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 what I observe,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 AEthiop 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 beginInherit 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 dressedPhilosophers behold; desponding viewYour Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,Dive down the fumy AEtna 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.
We have seen mighty men ballooning high,And in another moment bump the ground.He falls; and in his measurement is foundTo count some inches o'er the common fry.'Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,Yet 'twas enough above his fellows crowned,Had he less panted. Let his faithful houndBark at detractors. He may walk or lie.Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas -This little Isle's insatiable greedFor Continents—filled to inflation burst.So do ripe nations into squalor pass,When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,They scorn the brain's wild search for virtuous light.
To sit on History in an easy chair,Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom 'twas writ!Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air.If more than hands' and armsful be our share,Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit.Have we not heard derision infiniteWhen old men play the youth to chase the snare?Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes,Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent,The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex,Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent;Armed to support her sword;—lest we composeThat Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.
He leads: we hear our Seaman's callIn the roll of battles won;For he is Britain's AdmiralTill setting of her sun.
When Britain's life was in her ships,He kept the sea as his own right;And saved us from more fell eclipseThan drops on day from blackest night.Again his battle spat the flame!Again his victory flag men saw!At sound of Nelson's chieftain name,A deeper breath did Freedom draw.
Each trusty captain knew his part:They served as men, not marshalled kine:The pulses they of his great heart,With heads to work his main design.Their Nelson's word, to beat the foe,And spare the fall'n, before them shone.Good was the hour of blow for blow,And clear their course while they fought on.
Behold the Envied vanward sweep! -A day in mourning weeds adored!Then Victory was wrought to weep;Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.
A breezeless flag above a shroudAll Britain was when wind and wave,To make her, passing human, proud,Brought his last gift from o'er the grave!
Uprose the soul of him a starOn that brave day of Ocean days:It rolled the smoke from TrafalgerTo darken Austerlitz ablaze.Are we the men of old, its lightWill point us under every skyThe path he took; and must we fight,Our Nelson be our battle-cry!
He leads: we hear our Seaman's callIn the roll of battles won;For he is Britain's AdmiralTill setting of her sun.
Not yet had History's Aetna smoked the skies,And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained,While overhead in ordered set and riseHer kingly crowns immutably defiled;Effulgent on funereal piledAcross the vacant heavens, and distrainedHer body, mutely, even as earth, to bear;Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.
Through marching scores of winters racked she lay,Beneath a hoar-frost's brilliant crust,Whereon the jewelled flies that drainedHer breasts disported in a glistering spray;She, the land's fount of fruits, enclosed with dust;By good and evil angels fed, sustainedIn part to curse, in part to pray,Sucking the dubious rumours, till men sawThe throbs of her charged heart before the Just,So worn the harrowed surface had become:And still they deemed the dance above was Law,Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.
Then, on the unanticipated day,Earth heaved, and rose a veinous moundTo roar of the underfloods; and off it sprang,Ravishing as red wine in woman's form,A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh,Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned;She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray,Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sangIntoxication to her swarm,Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole,As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff,Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay(O ripeness of the time! O Retribution sure,If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!)And, like a glad releasing of her soul,Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue,Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined,In the face of men they joined: attest it true,The million witnesses, that she,For ages lying beside the mole,Was on the unanticipated miracle dayUpraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal,Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knewWhat Lucifer of the Mint had coinedHis bride's adulterate currencyOf burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate;She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate:His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed.Read backward on the hoar-frost's brilliant crust;Beneath it read.Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood,A radiance fringed with grim affright;For them that hungered, she was nourishing food,For those who sparkled, Night.Read in her heart, and how before the JustHer doings, her misdoings, plead.
Down on her leap for him the young Angelical brokeTo husband a resurgent France:From whom, with her dethroning stroke,Dishonour passed; the dalliance,That is occasion's yea or nay,In issues for the soul to pay,Discarded; and the cleft 'twixt deed and word,The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird,Wherein we see old Darkness peer,Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence;And hence the talons and the beak of prey;Hence all the lures to silken swineThronging the troughs of indolence;With every sleek convolvement serpentine;The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer,And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay.He clasped in this revived, uprisen France,A valorous dame, of countenanceThe lightning's upon cloud: unlit as yetOn brows and lips the lurid shineOf seas in the night-wind's whirl; unstirredHer pouch of the centuries' injuries compressed;The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard:Earth's animate full flower she looked, intenseFor worship, wholly given him, fairAdoring or desiring; in her bright jet,Earth's crystal spring to sky: Earth's warrior BestTo win Heaven's Pure up that midwayWe vision for new ground, where senseAnd spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare,Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarrayIn scorn of the seductive insincere,But martially nude for hot Bellona's play,And amorous of the loftiest in her view.
She sprang from dust to drink of earth's cool dew,The breath of swaying grasses share,Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear,At wrestle with the tyrannic strong;Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew,As immortals may be in the mortal sphere.Read through her launching heart, who had lain longWith Earth and heard till it became her ownOur good Great Mother's eve and matin song:The humming burden of Earth's toil to feedHer creatures all, her task to speed their growth,Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shownBetween the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both,Of either aided on their hard ascent.Now when she looked, with love's benign delightAfter great ecstasy, along the plains,What foulest impregnation of her sightTransformed the scene to multitudinous troopsOf human sketches, quaver-figures, bent,As were they winter sedges, broken hoops,Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts,With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains?Recked she that some perverting devil had limnedEarth's proudest to spout scorn of the Maker's hand,Who could a day behold these deathly hosts,And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed,A ribanded and gemmed elected few,Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:-Like melody in flesh, its pleasant gameOlympianwise perform, cloak but the shame:Beautiful statures; hideous,By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains,And flexile where is manhood straight;Mortuaries where warm should beatThe brotherhood that keeps blood sweet:Who dared in cantique impiousProclaim the Just, to whom was dueCathedral gratitude in the pomp of state,For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains,On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew.Surely a devil's land when that meant death for each!Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus,With all the body's life to plump the leech,Is Nature's way, she knew. The abominable sceneSpat at the skies; and through her veins,To cloud celestially sown,Ran venom of what nourishmentHer dark sustainer subterreneSupplied her, stretched supine on the rack,Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains,Under derisive revels, proneAs one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.
Now was her face white waves in the tempest's sharp flame-blink;Her skies shot black.Now was it visioned infamy to drinkOf earth's cool dew, and through the vinesFrolic in pearly laughter with her young,Watching the healthful, natural, happy signsWhere hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung,After their sly shy ventures from the leaf,And promised bunches. Now it seemedThe world was one malarious mire,Crying for purification: chiefThis land of France. It seemedA duteous desireTo drink of life's hot flood, and the crimson streamed.
She drank what makes man demon at the draught.Her skies lowered black,Her lover flew,There swept a shudder over men.Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed,For laughter was her spirit's weapon then.The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.
As mighty thews burst manacles, she went mad:Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits.Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had!To tread her down in her live grave beneathTheir dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath,They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits.Without they girdled her, made nest within.There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake.They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood;Believing it, in the mother's mind at strain,In the mother's fears, and in young Liberty's wailAlarmed, for her encompassed children's sake,The sole sure way to save her priceless bud.Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail,Vengeance appeared as logically akin.Insanely rational they; she rationally insane;And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.
Amid the plash of scarlet mudStained at the mouth, drunk with our common air,Not lack of love was her defect;The Fury mourned and raged and bled for FranceBreathing from exultation to despairAt every wild-winged hope struck by mischanceSoaring at each faint gleam o'er her abyss.Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect,The frontier march she piped her sons, for whereHer crouching outer enemy camped,Attendant on the deadlier inner's hiss.She piped her sons the frontier march, the wineOf martial music, History's cherished tune;And they, the saintliest labourers that ayeDropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped;High-breasted to match men or elements,Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled:War's ragged pupils; many a wavering line,Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,To jest at famine, plyThe novel scythe, and stand to it on the field;Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents;Fronting the red artillery straighten spine;Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn;Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;Die, if the multiple hazards around said die;Downward measure a foeman mightily sized;Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised;Lyrical on into death's red roaring jaw-gape, steeledGaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply.Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!
Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind rattle their thunderLoud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great South-west,Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the race:Lo, in the day's young beams the colossal invading pursuersBurst upon rocks and were foam;Ridged up a torrent crest;Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder;Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace.Yesterday's clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid comb;They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under;They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home;They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers;Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the pursuers.Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace;Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army dispieced;Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb.Fly! was the sportsman's word; and the note of the quarry rang,Chase!
Banners from South, from East,Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred;The captive brides of valour, Sabine WivesPlucked from the foeman's blushful bed,For glorious muted battle-tonguesOf deeds along the horizon's red,At cost of unreluctant lives;Her toilful heroes homeward poured,To give their fevered mother air of the lungs.She breathed, and in the breathing craved.Environed as she was, at bay,Safety she kissed on her drawn sword,And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved:She craved for victory as her daily bread;For victory as her daily banquet raved.
Now had her glut of vengeance left her greyOf blood, who in her entrails fiercely toreTo clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the moreDevitalizing: red washer Auroral ray;Desired if but to paint her pallid hue.The passion for that young horizon red,Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,Like dotage of the past-meridian dameFor some bright Sungod adolescent, swelledInsatiate, to the voracious grew,The glutton's inward raveners bred;Till she, mankind's most dreaded, most abhorred,Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,As by the weaving Fates impelled,To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.
Banners from East, from South,She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne.So may you see the village innocent,With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone:See furthermore the Just in his measures weighHer sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed.False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,She fell: from his ethereal home observedThrough love, grown alien love, not moved to pleadAgainst the season's fruit for deadly Seed,But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought.Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous holdThe doer of the monstrous; she aroused,She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,More strongly the divine in him than whenJoy of her as she sprang from mouldDrew him the midway heavens adownTo clasp her in his arms espousedBefore the sight of wondering men,And put upon the day a deathless crown.The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,His alien love laid open, to divideThe martyred creature from her crimes; he knewWhat cowardice in her valour could reside;What strength her weakness covered; what abasedSublimity so illumining, and what raisedThis wallower in old slime to noblest heights,Up to the union on the midway blue:-Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangsAmong dark History's nocturnal lights,With vivid beams indicative to the quickOf all who have felt the vaulted body's pangsBeneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick.She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearnedTo the one helping hand above;Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical loveThat day: and he, the bright day's husband, still with love,Though alien, though to an upper seat retired,Behold a wrangling heart, as 'twere her soulOn eddies of wild waters cast;In wilderness division; firedFor domination, freedom, lust,The Pleasures; lo, a witch's snaky bowlSet at her lips; the blood-drinker's madness fastUpon her; and therewith mistrust,Most of herself: a mouth of guile.Compassionately could he smile,To hear the mouth disclaiming God,And clamouring for the Just!Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursedCity and field; and pushed abroadO'er hungry waves to thirsty sands,Flaring at further; she had grown to beThe headless with the fearful hands;To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced.But he, remembering how his love began,And of what creature, pitied when was plainAnother measure of captivity:The need for strap and rod;The penitential prayers again;Again the bitter bowing down to dust;The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God,The answer when is call upon the Just.Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strodeHer master, saying, 'I only; I who can!'And echoed round her army, now her chain.So learns the nation, closing Anarch's reign,That she had been in travail of a Man.