Stranger:
For twenty silver pieces he is yours.
Captain:
That's cheap, if he has skill. Yes, there might beProfit in him at that. Has he a trade?
Stranger:
He is a carpenter.
Captain:
A carpenter!Why, for a good one I'ld give all my purse.
Stranger:
No, twenty silver pieces is the price;Though 'tis a slave a king might joy to own.I've taught him to imagine palacesSo high, and tower'd so nobly, they might seemThe marvelling of a God-delighted heartEscaping into ecstasy; he knows,Moreover, of a stuff so rare it makesSmaragdus and the dragon-stone despised;And yet the quarries whereof he is wiseWould yield enough to house the tribes of the worldIn palaces of beautiful shining work.
Captain:
Lo there! why, that is it: the carpenterI am to bring is needed for to buildThe king's new palace.
Stranger:
Yea? He is your man.
Captain:
Come on, my man. I'll put your cunning heelsWhere they'll not budge more than a shuffled inch.My lord, if you'll bide with the rascal hereI'll get the irons ready. Here's your sum. —
Stranger:
Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear;Easily may a man crouch down for fear,And yet rise up on firmer knees, and faceThe hailing storm of the world with graver courage.But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin,And one that groweth deep into a life,With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.For this refuses faith in the unknown powersWithin man's nature; shrewdly bringeth allTheir inspiration of strange eagernessTo a judgment bought by safe experience;Narrows desire into the scope of thought.But it is written in the heart of man,Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sightTo pore only within the candle-gleamOf conscious wit and reasonable brain;But search into the sacred darkness lyingOutside thy knowledge of thyself, the vastMeasureless fate, full of the power of stars,The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.Keep thy desire closed in the room of lightThe labouring fires of thy mind have made,And thou shalt find the vision of thy spiritPitifully dazzled to so shrunk a ken,There are no spacious puissances about it,But send desire often forth to scanThe immense night which is thy greater soul;Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond itInto impossible things, unlikely ends;And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desireGrow large as all the regions of thy soul,Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,And of created purpose reach the ends.
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The snow had fallen many nights and days;The sky was come upon the earth at last,Sifting thinly down as endlesslyAs though within the system of blind planetsSomething had been forgot or overdriven.The dawn now seemed neglected in the greyWhere mountains were unbuilt and shadowless treesRootlessly paused or hung upon the air.There was no wind, but now and then a sighCrossed that dry falling dust and rifted itThrough crevices of slate and door and casement.Perhaps the new moon's time was even past.Outside, the first white twilights were too voidUntil a sheep called once, as to a lamb,And tenderness crept everywhere from it;But now the flock must have strayed far away.The lights across the valley must be veiled,The smoke lost in the greyness or the dusk.For more than three days now the snow had thatchedThat cow-house roof where it had ever meltedWith yellow stains from the beasts' breath inside;But yet a dog howled there, though not quite lately.Someone passed down the valley swift and singing.Yes, with locks spreaded like a son of morning;But if he seemed too tall to be a manIt was that men had been so long unseen,Or shapes loom larger through a moving snow.And he was gone and food had not been given him.When snow slid from an overweighted leaf,Shaking the tree, it might have been a birdSlipping in sleep or shelter, whirring wings;Yet never bird fell out, save once a dead one —And in two days the snow had covered it.The dog had howled again — or thus it seemedUntil a lean fox passed and cried no more.All was so safe indoors where life went onGlad of the close enfolding snow — O gladTo be so safe and secret at its heart,Watching the strangeness of familiar things.They knew not what dim hours went on, went by,For while they slept the clock stopt newly woundAs the cold hardened. Once they watched the road,Thinking to be remembered. Once they doubtedIf they had kept the sequence of the days,Because they heard not any sound of bells.A butterfly, that hid until the SpringUnder a ceiling's shadow, dropt, was dead.The coldness seemed more nigh, the coldness deepenedAs a sound deepens into silences;It was of earth and came not by the air;The earth was cooling and drew down the sky.The air was crumbling. There was no more sky.Rails of a broken bed charred in the grate,And when he touched the bars he thought the stingCame from their heat — he could not feel such cold ...She said 'O, do not sleep,Heart, heart of mine, keep near me. No, no; sleep.I will not lift his fallen, quiet eyelids,Although I know he would awaken then —He closed them thus but now of his own will.He can stay with me while I do not lift them.'
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Lost towers impend, copeless primeval propsOf the new threatening sky, and first rude digitsOf awe remonstrance and uneasy powerThrust out by man when speech sank back in his throat:Then had the last rocks ended bubbling upAnd rhythms of change within the heart begunBy a blind need that would make Springs and Winters;Pylons and monoliths went on by ages,Mycenae and Great Zimbabwe came about;Cowed hearts in This conceived a pyramidThat leaned to hold itself upright, a thingForedoomed to limits, death and an easy apex;Then postulants for the stars' previous wisdomStanding on Carthage must get nearer still;While in Chaldea an altitude of godBeing mooted, and a saurian unearthedUpon a mountain stirring a surmiseOf floods and alterations of the sea,A round-walled tower must rise upon SenaarTemple and escape to god the ascertained.These are decayed like Time's teeth in his mouth,Black cavities and gaps, yet earth is darkenedBy their deep-sunken and unfounded shadowsAnd memories of man's earliest theme of towers.Space — the old source of time — should be undone,Eternity defined, by men who trustedAnother tier would equal them with god.A city of grimed brick-kilns, squat truncations,Hunched like spread toads yet high beneath their circlesOf low packed smoke, assemblages of thunderThat glowed upon their under sides by nightAnd lit like storm small shadowless workmen's toil.Meaningless stumps, upturned bare roots, remainedIn fields of mashy mud and trampled leaves;While, if a horse died hauling, plasterersKnelt on a flank to clip its sweaty coat.A builder leans across the last wide courses;His unadjustable unreaching eyesFail under him before his glances sinkOn the clouds' upper layers of sooty curlsWhere some long lightning goes like swallows downward,But at the wider gallery next belowRecognise master-masons with pricked parchments:That builder then, as one who condescendsUnto the sea and all that is beneath him,His hairy breast on the wet mortar, calls'How many fathoms is it yet to heaven!'On the next eminence the orgulous kingNimroud stands up conceiving he shall liveTo conquer god, now that he knows where god is:His eager hands push up the tower in thought ...Again, his shaggy inhuman height strides downAmong the carpenters because he has seenOne shape an eagle-woman on a door-post:He drives his spear-beam through him for wasted day.Little men hurrying, running here and there,Within the dark and stifling walls, dissentFrom every sound, and shoulder empty hods:'The god's great altar should stand in the cryptAmong our earth's foundations' — 'The god's great altarMust be the last far coping of our work' —It should inaugurate the broad main stair' —'Or end it' — 'It must stand toward the East!'But here a grave contemptuous youth cries out'Womanish babblers, how can we build god's altarEre we divine its foreordained true shape?'Then one 'It is a pedestal for deeds' —''Tis more and should be hewn like the king's brow' —'It has the nature of a woman's bosom' —'The tortoise, first created, signifies it' —'A blind and rudimentary navel showsThe source of worship better than horned moons.'Then a lean giant 'Is not a calyx needful?' —'Because round grapes on statues well expressedBecome the nadir of incense, nodal lamps,Yet apes have hands that cut and carved red crystal' —'Birds molten, touchly talc veins bronze buds crumbleAblid ublai ghan isz rad eighar ghaurl ...'Words said too often seemed such ancient soundsThat men forgot them or were lost in them;The guttural glottis-chasms of language reached,A rhythm, a gasp, were curves of immortal thought.Man with his bricks was building, building yet,Where dawn and midnight mingled and woke no birds,In the last courses, building past his knowledgeA wall that swung — for towers can have no tops,No chord can mete the universal segment,Earth has not basis. Yet the yielding sky,Invincible vacancy, was there discovered —Though piled-up bricks should pulp the sappy balks,Weight generate a secrecy of heat,Cankerous charring, crevices' fronds of flame.
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Café des Westens, Berlin
Just now the lilac is in bloom,All before my little room;And in my flower-beds, I think,Smile the carnation and the pink;And down the borders, well I know,The poppy and the pansy blow ...Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,Beside the river make for youA tunnel of green gloom, and sleepDeeply above; and green and deepThe stream mysterious glides beneath,Green as a dream and deep as death. —Oh, damn! I know it! and I knowHow the May fields all golden show,And when the day is young and sweet,Gild gloriously the bare feetThat run to bathe ...Du lieber Gott!Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,And there the shadowed waters freshLean up to embrace the naked flesh.TemperamentvollGerman JewsDrink beer around; andtherethe dewsAre soft beneath a morn of gold.Here tulips bloom as they are told;Unkempt about those hedges blowsAn English unofficial rose;And there the unregulated sunSlopes down to rest when day is done,And wakes a vague unpunctual star,A slippered Hesper; and there areMeads towards Haslingfield and CotonWheredas Betreten'snotverboten...Would I wereIn Grantchester, in Grantchester! —Some, it may be, can get in touchWith Nature there, or Earth, or such.And clever modern men have seenA Faun a-peeping through the green,And felt the Classics were not dead,To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,Or hear the Goat-foot piping low ...But these are things I do not know.I only know that you may lieDay long and watch the Cambridge sky,And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,Until the centuries blend and blurIn Grantchester, in Grantchester ...Still in the dawnlit waters coolHis ghostly Lordship swims his pool,And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx;Dan Chaucer hears his river stillChatter beneath a phantom mill;Tennyson notes, with studious eye,How Cambridge waters hurry by ...And in that garden, black and whiteCreep whispers through the grass all night;And spectral dance, before the dawn,A hundred Vicars down the lawn;Curates, long dust, will come and goOn lissom, clerical, printless toe;And oft between the boughs is seenThe sly shade of a Rural Dean ...Till, at a shiver in the skies,Vanishing with Satanic cries,The prim ecclesiastic routLeaves but a startled sleeper-out,Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls,The falling house that never falls.* * * * *God! I will pack, and take a train,And get me to England once again!For England's the one land, I know,Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;And Cambridgeshire, of all England,The shire for Men who Understand;And ofthatdistrict I preferThe lovely hamlet Grantchester.For Cambridge people rarely smile,Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;And Royston men in the far SouthAre black and fierce and strange of mouth;At Over they fling oaths at one,And worse than oaths at Trumpington,And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,And there's none in Harston under thirty,And folks in Shelford and those partsHave twisted lips and twisted hearts,And Barton men make cockney rhymes,And Coton's full of nameless crimes,And things are done you'd not believeAt Madingley on Christmas Eve.Strong men have run for miles and milesWhen one from Cherry Hinton smiles;Strong men have blanched and shot their wivesRather than send them to St. Ives;Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,To hear what happened at Babraham.But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!There's peace and holy quiet there,Great clouds along pacific skies,And men and women with straight eyes,Lithe children lovelier than a dream,A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,And little kindly winds that creepRound twilight corners, half asleep.In Grantchester their skins are white,They bathe by day, they bathe by night;The women there do all they ought;The men observe the Rules of Thought.They love the Good; they worship Truth;They laugh uproariously in youth;(And when they get to feeling old,They up and shoot themselves, I'm told)...Ah God! to see the branches stirAcross the moon at Grantchester!To smell the thrilling-sweet and rottenUnforgettable, unforgottenRiver smell, and hear the breezeSobbing in the little trees.Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand,Still guardians of that holy land?The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,The yet unacademic stream?Is dawn a secret shy and coldAnadyomene, silver-gold?And sunset still a golden seaFrom Haslingfield to Madingley?And after, ere the night is born,Do hares come out about the corn?Oh, is the water sweet and coolGentle and brown, above the pool?And laughs the immortal river stillUnder the mill, under the mill?Say, is there Beauty yet to find?And Certainty? and Quiet kind?Deep meadows yet, for to forgetThe lies, and truths, and pain?... oh! yetStands the Church clock at ten to three?And is there honey still for tea?
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When the white flame in us is gone,And we that lost the world's delightStiffen in darkness, left aloneTo crumble in our separate night;When your swift hair is quiet in death,And through the lips corruption thrustHas stilled the labour of my breath —When we are dust, when we are dust! —Not dead, not undesirous yet,Still sentient, still unsatisfied,We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit,Around the places where we died,And dance as dust before the sun,And light of foot, and unconfined,Hurry from road to road, and runAbout the errands of the wind.And every mote, on earth or air,Will speed and gleam, down later days.And like a secret pilgrim fareBy eager and invisible ways,Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,Till, beyond thinking, out of view,One mote of all the dust that's IShall meet one atom that was you.Then in some garden hushed from wind,Warm in a sunset's afterglow,The lovers in the flowers will findA sweet and strange unquiet growUpon the peace; and, past desiring,So high a beauty in the air,And such a light, and such a quiring,And such a radiant ecstasy there,They'll know not if it's fire, or dew,Or out of earth, or in the height,Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,Or two that pass, in light, to light,Out of the garden, higher, higher ...But in that instant they shall learnThe shattering fury of our fire,And the weak passionless hearts will burnAnd faint in that amazing glow,Until the darkness close above;And they will know — poor fools, they'll know! —One moment, what it is to love.
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In a cool curving world he liesAnd ripples with dark ecstasies.The kind luxurious lapse and stealShapes all his universe to feelAnd know and be; the clinging streamCloses his memory, glooms his dream,Who lips the roots o' the shore, and glidesSuperb on unreturning tides.Those silent waters weave for himA fluctuant mutable world and dim,Where wavering masses bulge and gapeMysterious, and shape to shapeDies momently through whorl and hollow,And form and line and solid followSolid and line and form to dreamFantastic down the eternal stream;An obscure world, a shifting world,Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,Or serpentine, or driving arrows,Or serene slidings, or March narrows.There slipping wave and shore are one,And weed and mud. No ray of sun,But glow to glow fades down the deep(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);Shaken translucency illumesThe hyaline of drifting glooms;The strange soft-handed depth subduesDrowned colour there, but black to hues,As death to living, decomposes —Red darkness of the heart of roses,Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,And gold that lies behind the eyes,The unknown unnameable sightless whiteThat is the essential flame of night,Lustreless purple, hooded green,The myriad hues that lie betweenDarkness and darkness!...And all's one,Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,The world he rests in, world he knows,Perpetual curving. Only — growsAn eddy in that ordered falling,A knowledge from the gloom, a callingWeed in the wave, gleam in the mud —The dark fire leaps along his blood;Dateless and deathless, blind and still,The intricate impulse works its will;His woven world drops back; and he,Sans providence, sans memory,Unconscious and directly driven,Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.O world of lips, O world of laughter,Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,Of lights in the clear night, of criesThat drift along the wave and riseThin to the glittering stars above,You know the hands, the eyes of love!The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,The infinite distance, and the singingBlown by the wind, a flame of sound,The gleam, the flowers, and vast aroundThe horizon, and the heights above —You know the sigh, the song of love!But there the night is close, and thereDarkness is cold and strange and bare;And the secret deeps are whisperless;And rhythm is all deliciousness;And joy is in the throbbing tide,Whose intricate fingers beat and glideIn felt bewildering harmoniesOf trembling touch; and music isThe exquisite knocking of the blood.Space is no more, under the mud;His bliss is older than the sun.Silent and straight the waters run,The lights, the cries, the willows dim,And the dark tide are one with him.
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Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and sideAre stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall.In every touch more intimate meanings hide;And flaming brains are the white heart of all.Here, million pulses to one centre beat:Closed in by men's vast friendliness, alone,Two can be drunk with solitude, and meetOn the sheer point where sense with knowing's one.Here the green-purple clanging royal night,And the straight lines and silent walls of town,And roar, and glare, and dust, and myriad whiteUndying passers, pinnacle and crownIntensest heavens between close-lying facesBy the lamp's airless fierce ecstatic fire;And we've found love in little hidden places,Under great shades, between the mist and mire.Stay! though the woods are quiet, and you've heardNight creep along the hedges. Never goWhere tangled foliage shrouds the crying bird,And the remote winds sigh, and waters flow!Lest — as our words fall dumb on windless noons,Or hearts grow hushed and solitary, beneathUnheeding stars and unfamiliar moons,Or boughs bend over, close and quiet as death, —Unconscious and unpassionate and still,Cloud-like we lean and stare as bright leaves stare,And gradually along the stranger hillOur unwalled loves thin out on vacuous air,And suddenly there's no meaning in our kiss,And your lit upward face grows, where we lie,Lonelier and dreadfuller than sunlight is,And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky.
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When you were there, and you, and you,Happiness crowned the night; I too,Laughing and looking, one of all,I watched the quivering lamplight fallOn plate and flowers and pouring teaAnd cup and cloth; and they and weFlung all the dancing moments byWith jest and glitter. Lip and eyeFlashed on the glory, shone and cried,Improvident, unmemoried;And fitfully and like a flameThe light of laughter went and came.Proud in their careless transience movedThe changing faces that I loved.Till suddenly, and otherwhence,I looked upon your innocence;For lifted clear and still and strangeFrom the dark woven flow of changeUnder a vast and starless skyI saw the immortal moment lie.One instant I, an instant, knewAs God knows all. And it and youI, above Time, oh, blind! could seeIn witless immortality.I saw the marble cup; the tea,Hung on the air, an amber stream;I saw the fire's unglittering gleam,The painted flame, the frozen smoke.No more the flooding lamplight brokeOn flying eyes and lips and hair;But lay, but slept unbroken there,On stiller flesh, and body breathless,And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,And words on which no silence grew.Light was more alive than you.For suddenly, and otherwhence,I looked on your magnificence.I saw the stillness and the light,And you, august, immortal, white,Holy and strange; and every glintPosture and jest and thought and tintFreed from the mask of transiency,Triumphant in eternity,Immote, immortal.Dazed at lengthHuman eyes grew, mortal strengthWearied; and Time began to creep.Change closed about me like a sleep.Light glinted on the eyes I loved.The cup was filled. The bodies moved.The drifting petal came to ground.The laughter chimed its perfect round.The broken syllable was ended.And I, so certain and so friended,How could I cloud, or how distress,The heaven of your unconsciousness?Or shake at Time's sufficient spell,Stammering of lights unutterable?The eternal holiness of you,The timeless end, you never knew,The peace that lay, the light that shone.You never knew that I had goneA million miles away, and stayedA million years. The laughter playedUnbroken round me; and the jestFlashed on. And we that knew the bestDown wonderful hours grew happier yet.I sang at heart, and talked, and eat,And lived from laugh to laugh, I too,When you were there, and you, and you.
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Blue-eyed was Elf the minstrel,With womanish hair and ring,Yet heavy was his hand on sword,Though light upon the string.And as he stirred the strings of the harpTo notes but four or five,The heart of each man moved in himLike a babe buried alive.And they felt the land of the folk-songsSpread southward of the Dane,And they heard the good Rhine flowingIn the heart of all Allemagne.They felt the land of the folk-songs,Where the gifts hang on the tree,Where the girls give ale at morningAnd the tears come easily,The mighty people, womanlike,That have pleasure in their pain;As he sang of Balder beautiful,Whom the heavens loved in vain.As he sang of Balder beautiful,Whom the heavens could not save,Till the world was like a sea of tearsAnd every soul a wave.'There is always a thing forgottenWhen all the world goes well;A thing forgotten, as long agoWhen the gods forgot the mistletoe,And soundless as an arrow of snowThe arrow of anguish fell.'The thing on the blind side of the heart,On the wrong side of the door;The green plant groweth, menacingAlmighty lovers in the spring;There is always a forgotten thing,And love is not secure.'
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A dear old couple my grandparents were,And kind to all dumb things; they saw in HeavenThe lamb that Jesus petted when a child;Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to themDeath was a rainbow in Eternity,That promised everlasting brightness soon.An old seafaring man was he; a roughOld man, but kind; and hairy, like the nutFull of sweet milk. All day on shore he watchedThe winds for sailors' wives, and told what shipsEnjoyed fair weather, and what ships had storms;He watched the sky, and he could tell for sureWhat afternoons would follow stormy morns,If quiet nights would end wild afternoons.He leapt away from scandal with a roar,And if a whisper still possessed his mind,He walked about and cursed it for a plague.He took offence at Heaven when beggars passed,And sternly called them back to give them help.In this old captain's house I lived, and thingsThat house contained were in ships' cabins once;Sea-shells and charts and pebbles, model ships;Green weeds, dried fishes stuffed, and coral stalks;Old wooden trunks with handles of spliced rope,With copper saucers full of monies strange,That seemed the savings of dead men, not touchedTo keep them warm since their real owners died;Strings of red beads, methought were dipped in blood,And swinging lamps, as though the house might move;An ivory lighthouse built on ivory rocks,The bones of fishes and three bottled ships.And many a thing was there which sailors makeIn idle hours, when on long voyages,Of marvellous patience, to no lovely end.And on those charts I saw the small black dotsThat were called islands, and I knew they hadTurtles and palms, and pirates' buried gold.There came a stranger to my granddad's house,The old man's nephew, a seafarer too;A big, strong able man who could have walkedTwm Barlum's hill all clad in iron mail;So strong he could have made one man his clubTo knock down others — Henry was his name,No other name was uttered by his kin.And here he was, insooth illclad, but oh,Thought I, what secrets of the sea are his!This man knows coral islands in the sea,And dusky girls heartbroken for white men;This sailor knows of wondrous lands afar,More rich than Spain, when the Phoenicians shippedSilver for common ballast, and they sawHorses at silver mangers eating grain;This man has seen the wind blow up a mermaid's hairWhich, like a golden serpent, reared and stretchedTo feel the air away beyond her head.He begged my pennies, which I gave with joy —He will most certainly return some timeA self-made king of some new land, and rich.Alas that he, the hero of my dreams,Should be his people's scorn; for they had roseTo proud command of ships, whilst he had toiledBefore the mast for years, and well content;Him they despised, and only Death could bringA likeness in his face to show like them.For he drank all his pay, nor went to seaAs long as ale was easy got on shore.Now, in his last long voyage he had sailedFrom Plymouth Sound to where sweet odours fanThe Cingalese at work, and then back home —But came not near his kin till pay was spent.He was not old, yet seemed so; for his faceLooked like the drowned man's in the morgue, when itHas struck the wooden wharves and keels of ships.And all his flesh was pricked with Indian ink,His body marked as rare and delicateAs dead men struck by lightning under trees,And pictured with fine twigs and curlèd ferns;Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms;Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist;And on his breast the Jane of AppledoreWas schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea.He could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice,No more than could a horse creep quietly;He laughed to scorn the men that muffled closeFor fear of wind, till all their neck was hid,Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves;He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green,He knew no birds but those that followed ships.Full well he knew the water-world; he heardA grander music there than we on land,When organ shakes a church; swore he would makeThe sea his home, though it was always rousedBy such wild storms as never leave Cape Horn;Happy to hear the tempest grunt and squealLike pigs heard dying in a slaughterhouse.A true-born mariner, and this his hope —His coffin would be what his cradle was,A boat to drown in and be sunk at sea;To drown at sea and lie a dainty corpseSalted and iced in Neptune's larder deep.This man despised small coasters, fishing-smacks;He scorned those sailors who at night and mornCan see the coast, when in their little boatsThey go a six days' voyage and are backHome with their wives for every Sabbath day.Much did he talk of tankards of old beer,And bottled stuff he drank in other lands,Which was a liquid fire like Hell to gulp,But Paradise to sip.And so he talked;Nor did those people listen with more aweTo Lazarus — whom they had seen stone dead —Than did we urchins to that seaman's voice.He many a tale of wonder told: of where,At Argostoli, Cephalonia's seaRan over the earth's lip in heavy floods;And then again of how the strange ChineseConversed much as our homely Blackbirds sing.He told us how he sailed in one old shipNear that volcano Martinique, whose powerShook like dry leaves the whole Carribean seas;And made the sun set in a sea of fireWhich only half was his; and dust was thickOn deck, and stones were pelted at the mast.So, as we walked along, that seaman droppedInto my greedy ears such words that sleepStood at my pillow half the night perplexed.He told how isles sprang up and sank again,Between short voyages, to his amaze;How they did come and go, and cheated charts;Told how a crew was cursed when one man killedA bird that perched upon a moving barque;And how the sea's sharp needles, firm and strong,Ripped open the bellies of big, iron ships;Of mighty icebergs in the Northern seas,That haunt the far horizon like white ghosts,He told of waves that lift a ship so highThat birds could pass from starboard unto portUnder her dripping keel.Oh, it was sweetTo hear that seaman tell such wondrous tales:How deep the sea in parts, that drownèd menMust go a long way to their graves and sinkDay after day, and wander with the tides.He spake of his own deeds; of how he sailedOne summer's night along the Bosphorus,And he — who knew no music like the washOf waves against a ship, or wind in shrouds —Heard then the music on that woody shoreOf nightingales, and feared to leave the deck,He thought 'twas sailing into Paradise.To hear these stories all we urchins placedOur pennies in that seaman's ready hand;Until one morn he signed for a long cruise,And sailed away — we never saw him more.Could such a man sink in the sea unknown?Nay, he had found a land with something rich,That kept his eyes turned inland for his life.'A damn bad sailor and a landshark too,No good in port or out' — my granddad said.
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When primroses are out in Spring,And small, blue violets come between;When merry birds sing on boughs green,And rills, as soon as born, must sing;When butterflies will make side-leaps,As though escaped from Nature's handEre perfect quite; and bees will standUpon their heads in fragrant deeps;When small clouds are so silvery whiteEach seems a broken rimmèd moon —When such things are, this world too soon,For me, doth wear the veil of Night.
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Yes, I will spend the livelong dayWith Nature in this month of May;And sit beneath the trees, and shareMy bread with birds whose homes are there;While cows lie down to eat, and sheepStand to their necks in grass so deep;While birds do sing with all their might,As though they felt the earth in flight.This is the hour I dreamed of, whenI sat surrounded by poor men;And thought of how the Arab satAlone at evening, gazing atThe stars that bubbled in clear skies;And of young dreamers, when their eyesEnjoyed methought a precious boonIn the adventures of the MoonWhose light, behind the Clouds' dark bars,Searched for her stolen flocks of stars.When I, hemmed in by wrecks of men,Thought of some lonely cottage then,Full of sweet books; and miles of sea,With passing ships, in front of me;And having, on the other hand,A flowery, green, bird-singing land.
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One night when I went downThames' side, in London Town,A heap of rags saw I,And sat me down close by.That thing could shout and bawl,But showed no face at all;When any steamer passedAnd blew a loud shrill blast,That heap of rags would sitAnd make a sound like it;When struck the clock's deep bell,It made those peals as well.When winds did moan around,It mocked them with that sound;When all was quiet, itFell into a strange fit;Would sigh, and moan and roar,It laughed, and blessed, and swore.Yet that poor thing, I know,Had neither friend nor foe;Its blessing or its curseMade no one better or worse.I left it in that place —The thing that showed no face,Was it a man that hadSuffered till he went mad?So many showers and notOne rainbow in the lot;Too many bitter fearsTo make a pearl from tears.
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It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,And left thee all her lovely hues;And, as her mother's name was Tears,So runs it in thy blood to chooseFor haunts the lonely pools, and keepIn company with trees that weep.Go you and, with such glorious hues,Live with proud Peacocks in green parks;On lawns as smooth as shining glass,Let every feather show its marks;Get thee on boughs and clap thy wingsBefore the windows of proud kings.Nay, lovely Bird, thou art not vain;Thou hast no proud, ambitious mind;I also love a quiet placeThat's green, away from all mankind;A lonely pool, and let a treeSigh with her bosom over me.
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Far are the shades of Arabia,Where the Princes ride at noon,'Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,Under the ghost of the moon;And so dark is that vaulted purpleFlowers in the forest riseAnd toss into blossom 'gainst the phantom starsPale in the noonday skies.Sweet is the music of ArabiaIn my heart, when out of dreamsI still in the thin clear mirk of dawnDescry her gliding streams;Hear her strange lutes on the green banksRing loud with the grief and delightOf the dim-silked, dark-haired MusiciansIn the brooding silence of night.They haunt me — her lutes and her forests;No beauty on earth I seeBut shadowed with that dream recallsHer loveliness to me:Still eyes look coldly upon me,Cold voices whisper and say —He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,They have stolen his wits away.'