Grass of Parnassus

CIRCE’S ISLE REVISITED

Ah, Circe, Circe! in the wood we cried;Ah, Circe, Circe! but no voice replied;   No voice from bowers o’ergrown and ruinousAs fallen rocks upon the mountain side.There was no sound of singing in the air;Faded or fled the maidens that were fair,   No more for sorrow or joy were seen of us,No light of laughing eyes, or floating hair.The perfume, and the music, and the flameHad passed away; the memory of shame   Alone abode, and stings of faint desire,And pulses of vague quiet went and came.Ah, Circe! in thy sad changed fairy place,Our dead youth came and looked on us a space,   With drooping wings, and eyes of faded fire.And wasted hair about a weary face.Why had we ever sought the magic isleThat seemed so happy in the days erewhile?   Why did we ever leave it, where we metA world of happy wonders in one smile?Back to the westward and the waning lightWe turned, we fled; the solitude of night   Was better than the infinite regret,In fallen places of our dead delight.

THE LIMIT OF LANDS

Between the circling ocean sea   And the poplars of Persephone   There lies a strip of barren sand,Flecked with the sea’s last spray, and strownWith waste leaves of the poplars, blown   From gardens of the shadow land.With altars of old sacrificeThe shore is set, in mournful wise   The mists upon the ocean brood;Between the water and the air   The clouds are born that float and fareBetween the water and the wood.Upon the grey sea never sailOf mortals passed within our hail,   Where the last weak waves faint and flow;We heard within the poplar paleThe murmur of a doubtful wail   Of voices loved so long ago.We scarce had care to die or live,We had no honey cake to give,   No wine of sacrifice to shed;There lies no new path over sea,And now we know how faint they be,   The feasts and voices of the dead.Ah, flowers and dance! ah, sun and snow!Glad life, sad life we did forego   To dream of quietness and rest;Ah, would the fleet sweet roses herePoured light and perfume through the drear   Pale year, and wan land of the west.Sad youth, that let the spring go byBecause the spring is swift to fly,   Sad youth, that feared to mourn or love,Behold how sadder far is this,To know that rest is nowise bliss,   And darkness is the end thereof.

VERSES

MARTIAL IN TOWN

Last night, within the stifling train,   Lit by the foggy lamp o’erhead,   Sick of the sad Last News, I readVerse of that joyous child of Spain,Who dwelt when Rome was waxing cold,   Within the Roman din and smoke.   And like my heart to me they spoke,These accents of his heart of old: —“Brother, had we but time to live,   And fleet the careless hours together,With all that leisure has to give   Of perfect life and peaceful weather,“The Rich Man’s halls, the anxious faces,The weary Forum, courts, and cases   Should know us not; but quiet nooks,But summer shade by field and well,   But county rides, and talk of books,At home, with these, we fain would dwell!“Now neither lives, but day by day   Sees the suns wasting in the west,And feels their flight, and doth delay   To lead the life he loveth best.”So from thy city prison broke,   Martial, thy wail for life misspent,And so, through London’s noise and smoke   My heart replies to the lament.For dear as Tagus with his gold,   And swifter Salo, were to thee,So dear to me the woods that fold   The streams that circle Fernielea!

APRIL ON TWEED

As birds are fain to build their nest   The first soft sunny day,So longing wakens in my breast   A month before the May,When now the wind is from the West,   And Winter melts away.The snow lies yet on Eildon Hill,   But soft the breezes blow.If melting snows the waters fill,   We nothing heed the snow,But we must up and take our will, —   A fishing will we go!Below the branches brown and bare,   Beneath the primrose lea,The trout lies waiting for his fare,   A hungry trout is he;He’s hooked, and springs and splashes there   Like salmon from the sea!Oh, April tide’s a pleasant tide,   However times may fall,And sweet to welcome Spring, the Bride,   You hear the mavis call;But all adown the water-side   The Spring’s most fair of all.

TIRED OF TOWNS

‘When we spoke to her of the New Jerusalem, she said she would rather go to a country place in Heaven.’

Letters from the Black Country.I’m weary of towns, it seems a’most a pity   We didn’t stop down i’ the country and clem,And you say that I’m bound for another city,   For the streets o’ the New Jerusalem.And the streets are never like Sheffield, here,   Nor the smoke don’t cling like a smut to them;But the water o’ life flows cool and clear   Through the streets o’ the New Jerusalem.And the houses, you say, are of jasper cut,   And the gates are gaudy wi’ gold and gem;But there’s times I could wish as the gates was shut —   The gates o’ the New Jerusalem.For I come from a country that’s over-built   Wi’ streets that stifle, and walls that hem,And the gorse on a common’s worth all the gilt   And the gold of your New Jerusalem.And I hope that they’ll bring me, in Paradise,   To green lanes leafy wi’ bough and stem —To a country place in the land o’ the skies,   And not to the New Jerusalem.

SCYTHE SONG

Mowers, weary and brown, and blithe,   What is the word methinks ye know,Endless over-word that the Scythe   Sings to the blades of the grass below?Scythes that swing in the grass and clover,   Something, still, they say as they pass;What is the word that, over and over,   Sings the Scythe to the flowers and grass?Hush, ah hush, the Scythes are saying,   Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;Hush, they say to the grasses swaying,   Hush, they sing to the clover deep!Hush– ’tis the lullaby Time is singing —   Hush, and heed not, for all things pass,Hush, ah hush! and the Scythes are swinging   Over the clover, over the grass!

PEN AND INK

Ye wanderers that were my sires,   Who read men’s fortunes in the hand,Who voyaged with your smithy fires   From waste to waste across the land,Why did you leave for garth and town   Your life by heath and river’s brink,Why lay your gipsy freedom down   And doom your child to Pen and Ink?You wearied of the wild-wood meal   That crowned, or failed to crown, the day;Too honest or too tame to steal   You broke into the beaten way;Plied loom or awl like other men,   And learned to love the guineas’ chink —Oh, recreant sires, who doomed me then   To earn so few – with Pen and Ink!Where it hath fallen the tree must lie.   ’Tis over late for me to roam,Yet the caged bird who hears the cry   Of his wild fellows fleeting home,May feel no sharper pang than mine,   Who seem to hear, whene’er I think,Spate in the stream, and wind in pine,   Call me to quit dull Pen and Ink.For then the spirit wandering,   That slept within the blood, awakes;For then the summer and the spring   I fain would meet by streams and lakes;But ah, my Birthright long is sold,   But custom chains me, link on link,And I must get me, as of old,   Back to my tools, to Pen and Ink.

A DREAM

Why will you haunt my sleep?   You know it may not be,The grave is wide and deep,   That sunders you and me;In bitter dreams we reap   The sorrow we have sown,And I would I were asleep,   Forgotten and alone!We knew and did not know,   We saw and did not see,The nets that long ago   Fate wove for you and me;The cruel nets that keep   The birds that sob and moan,And I would we were asleep,   Forgotten and alone!

THE SINGING ROSE

‘La Rose qui chante et l’herbe qui égare.’White Rose on the grey garden wall,   Where now no night-wind whispereth,Call to the far-off flowers, and call   With murmured breath and musicalTill all the Roses hear, and all   Sing to my Love what the White Rose saith.White Rose on the grey garden wall   That long ago we sung!Again you come at Summer’s call, —Again beneath my windows all   With trellised flowers is hung,With clusters of the roses whiteLike fragrant stars in a green night.Once more I hear the sister towers   Each unto each reply,The bloom is on those limes of ours,The weak wind shakes the bloom in showers,   Snow from a cloudless sky;There is no change this happy dayWithin the College Gardens grey!St. Mary’s, Merton, Magdalen – still   Their sweet bells chime and swing,The old years answer them, and thrillA wintry heart against its will   With memories of the Spring —That Spring we sought the gardens throughFor flowers which ne’er in gardens grew!For we, beside our nurse’s knee,   In fairy tales had heardOf that strange Rose which blossoms freeOn boughs of an enchanted tree,   And sings like any bird!And of the weed beside the wayThat leadeth lovers’ steps astray!In vain we sought the Singing Rose   Whereof old legends tell,Alas, we found it not mid thoseWithin the grey old College close,   That budded, flowered, and fell, —We found that herb called ‘Wandering’And meet no more, no more in Spring!Yes, unawares the unhappy grass   That leadeth steps astray,We trod, and so it came to passThat never more we twain, alas,   Shall walk the self-same way.And each must deem, though neither knows,That neither found the Singing Rose!

A REVIEW IN RHYME

A little of Horace, a little of Prior,A sketch of a Milkmaid, a lay of the Squire —These, these are ‘on draught’ ‘At the Sign of the Lyre!’A child in Blue Ribbons that sings to herself,A talk of the Books on the Sheraton shelf,A sword of the Stuarts, a wig of the Guelph,A lai, a pantoum, a ballade, a rondeau,A pastel by Greuze, and a sketch by Moreau,And the chimes of the rhymes that sing sweet as they go,A fan, and a folio, a ringlet, a glove,’Neath a dance by Laguerre on the ceiling above,And a dream of the days when the bard was in love,A scent of dead roses, a glance at a pun,A toss of old powder, a glint of the sun,They meet in the volume that Dobson has done!If there’s more that the heart of a man can desire,He may search, in his Swinburne, for fury and fire;If he’s wise – he’ll alight ‘At the Sign of the Lyre!’

COLINETTE

FOR A SKETCH BY MR. G. LESLIE, R.AFrance your country, as we know;   Room enough for guessing yet,What lips now or long ago,   Kissed and named you – Colinette.In what fields from sea to sea,   By what stream your home was set,Loire or Seine was glad of thee,   Marne or Rhone, O Colinette?Did you stand with maidens ten,   Fairer maids were never seen,When the young king and his men   Passed among the orchards green?Nay, old ballads have a note   Mournful, we would fain forget;No such sad old air should float   Round your young brows, Colinette.Say, did Ronsard sing to you,   Shepherdess, to lull his pain,When the court went wandering through   Rose pleasances of Touraine?Ronsard and his famous Rose   Long are dust the breezes fret;You, within the garden close,   You are blooming, Colinette.Have I seen you proud and gay,   With a patched and perfumed beau,Dancing through the summer day,   Misty summer of Watteau?Nay, so sweet a maid as you   Never walked a minuetWith the splendid courtly crew;   Nay, forgive me, Colinette.Not from Greuze’s canvases   Do you cast a glance, a smile;You are not as one of these,   Yours is beauty without guile.Round your maiden brows and hair   Maidenhood and Childhood metCrown and kiss you, sweet and fair,   New art’s blossom, Colinette.

A SUNSET OF WATTEAU

LUIThe silk sail fills, the soft winds wake,   Arise and tempt the seas;Our ocean is the Palace lake,Our waves the ripples that we make   Among the mirrored trees.ELLENay, sweet the shore, and sweet the song,   And dear the languid dream;The music mingled all day longWith paces of the dancing throng,   And murmur of the stream.An hour ago, an hour ago,   We rested in the shade;And now, why should we seek to knowWhat way the wilful waters flow?   There is no fairer glade.LUINay, pleasure flits, and we must sail,   And seek him everywhere;Perchance in sunset’s golden paleHe listens to the nightingale,      Amid the perfumed air.Come, he has fled; you are not you,   And I no more am I;Delight is changeful as the hueOf heaven, that is no longer blue   In yonder sunset sky.ELLENay, if we seek we shall not find,   If we knock none openeth;Nay, see, the sunset fades behindThe mountains, and the cold night wind   Blows from the house of Death.

NIGHTINGALE WEATHER

‘Serai-je nonnette, oui ou non?Semi-je nonnette? je crois que non.Derrière chez mon pèreIl est un bois taillis,Le rossignol y chanteEt le jour et la nuit.Il chante pour les fillesQui n’ont pas d’ami;Il ne chant pas pour moi,J’en ai un, Dieu merci.’ —Old French.I’ll never be a nun, I trow,While apple bloom is white as snow,   But far more fair to see;I’ll never wear nun’s black and whiteWhile nightingales make sweet the night   Within the apple tree.Ah, listen! ’tis the nightingale,And in the wood he makes his wail,   Within the apple tree;He singeth of the sore distressOf many ladies loverless;   Thank God, no song for me.For when the broad May moon is low,A gold fruit seen where blossoms blow   In the boughs of the apple tree,A step I know is at the gate;Ah love, but it is long to wait   Until night’s noon bring thee!Between lark’s song and nightingale’sA silent space, while dawning pales,   The birds leave still and freeFor words and kisses musical,For silence and for sighs that fall   In the dawn, ’twixt him and me.

LOVE AND WISDOM

‘When last we gathered roses in the gardenI found my wits, but truly you lost yours.’The Broken Heart.July and June brought flowers and loveTo you, but I would none thereof,Whose heart kept all through summer timeA flower of frost and winter rime.Yours was true wisdom – was it not?Even love; but I had clean forgot,Till seasons of the falling leaf,All loves, but one that turned to grief.At length at touch of autumn tideWhen roses fell, and summer died,All in a dawning deep with dew,Love flew to me, Love fled from you.The roses drooped their weary heads,I spoke among the garden beds;You would not hear, you could not know,Summer and love seemed long ago,As far, as faint, as dim a dream,As to the dead this world may seem.Ah sweet, in winter’s miseries,Perchance you may remember this,How Wisdom was not justifiedIn summer time or autumn tide,Though for this once below the sun,Wisdom and Love were made at one;But Love was bitter-bought enough,And Wisdom light of wing as Love.

GOOD-BYE

Kiss me, and say good-bye;   Good-bye, there is no word to say but this,   Nor any lips left for my lips to kiss,Nor any tears to shed, when these tears dry;Kiss me, and say, good-bye.Farewell, be glad, forget;   There is no need to say ‘forget,’ I know,   For youth is youth, and time will have it so,And though your lips are pale, and your eyes wet,   Farewell, you must forget.You shall bring home your sheaves,   Many, and heavy, and with blossoms twined   Of memories that go not out of mind;Let this one sheaf be twined with poppy leavesWhen you bring home your sheaves.In garnered loves of thine,   The ripe good fruit of many hearts and years,   Somewhere let this lie, grey and salt with tears;It grew too near the sea wind, and the brineOf life, this love of mine.This sheaf was spoiled in spring,   And over-long was green, and early sere,   And never gathered gold in the late yearFrom autumn suns, and moons of harvesting,But failed in frosts of spring.Yet was it thine, my sweet,   This love, though weak as young corn withered,   Whereof no man may gather and make bread;Thine, though it never knew the summer heat;Forget not quite, my sweet.

AN OLD PRAYER

Χαιρέ μοι, ω βασίλεια, διαμπερες, εις ο κε γηραςΕλθη και θάνατος, τά τ’ επ’ ανθρώποισι πέλονται. Odyssey, XIII.My prayer an old prayer borroweth,Of ancient love and memory —‘Do thou farewell, till Eld and Death,That come to all men, come to thee.’Gently as winter’s early breath,Scarce felt, what time the swallows flee,To lands whereof no man knowethOf summer, over land and sea;So with thy soul may summer be,Even as the ancient singer saith,‘Do thou farewell, till Eld and Death,That come to all men, come to thee.’

À LA BELLE HÉLÈNE

AFTER RONSARDMore closely than the clinging vine   About the wedded tree,Clasp thou thine arms, ah, mistress mine!   About the heart of me.Or seem to sleep, and stoop your face   Soft on my sleeping eyes,Breathe in your life, your heart, your grace,   Through me, in kissing wise.Bow down, bow down your face, I pray,   To me, that swoon to death,Breathe back the life you kissed away,   Breathe back your kissing breath.So by your eyes I swear and say,   My mighty oath and sure,From your kind arms no maiden may   My loving heart allure.I’ll bear your yoke, that’s light enough,   And to the Elysian plain,When we are dead of love, my love,   One boat shall bear us twain.They’ll flock around you, fleet and fair,   All true loves that have been,And you of all the shadows there,   Shall be the shadow queen.Ah, shadow-loves and shadow-lips!   Ah, while ’tis called to-day,Love me, my love, for summer slips,   And August ebbs away.

SYLVIE ET AURÉLIE

IN MEMORY OF GÉRARD DE NERVALTwo loves there were, and one was born   Between the sunset and the rain;Her singing voice went through the corn,Her dance was woven ’neath the thorn,   On grass the fallen blossoms stain;And suns may set, and moons may wane,But this love comes no more again.There were two loves and one made white,   Thy singing lips, and golden hair;Born of the city’s mire and light,The shame and splendour of the night,   She trapped and fled thee unaware;Not through the lamplight and the rainShalt thou behold this love again.Go forth and seek, by wood and hill,   Thine ancient love of dawn and dew;There comes no voice from mere or rill,Her dance is over, fallen still   The ballad burdens that she knew:And thou must wait for her in vain,Till years bring back thy youth again.That other love, afield, afar   Fled the light love, with lighter feet.Nay, though thou seek where gravesteads are,And flit in dreams from star to star,   That dead love shalt thou never meet,Till through bleak dawn and blowing rainThy soul shall find her soul again.

A LOST PATH

Plotinus, the Greek philosopher, had a certain proper mode of ecstasy, whereby, as Porphyry saith, his soul, becoming free from the deathly flesh, was made one with the Spirit that is in the world.

Alas, the path is lost, we cannot leave   Our bright, our clouded life, and pass awayAs through strewn clouds, that stain the quiet eve,   To heights remoter of the purer day.The soul may not, returning whence she came,   Bathe herself deep in Being, and forgetThe joys that fever, and the cares that fret,   Made once more one with the eternal flameThat breathes in all things ever more the same.   She would be young again, thus drinking deepOf her old life; and this has been, men say,   But this we know not, who have only sleepTo soothe us, sleep more terrible than day,   Where dead delights, and fair lost faces stray,To make us weary at our wakening;   And of that long lost path to the DivineWe dream, as some Greek shepherd erst might sing,   Half credulous, of easy Proserpine,And of the lands that lie ‘beneath the day’s decline.’

THE SHADE OF HELEN

Some say that Helen went never to Troy, but abode in Egypt; for the gods, having made in her semblance a woman out of clouds and shadows, sent the same to be wife to Paris. For this shadow then the Greeks and Trojans slew each other.

Why from the quiet hollows of the hills,And extreme meeting place of light and shade,Wherein soft rains fell slowly, and becameClouds among sister clouds, where fair spent beamsAnd dying glories of the sun would dwell,Why have they whom I know not, nor may know,Strange hands, unseen and ruthless, fashioned me,And borne me from the silent shadowy hills,Hither, to noise and glow of alien life,To harsh and clamorous swords, and sound of war?One speaks unto me words that would be sweet,Made harsh, made keen with love that knows me not,And some strange force, within me or around,Makes answer, kiss for kiss, and sigh for sigh,And somewhere there is fever in the hallsThat troubles me, for no such trouble cameTo vex the cool far hollows of the hills.The foolish folk crowd round me, and they cry,That house, and wife, and lands, and all Troy town,Are little to lose, if they may keep me here,And see me flit, a pale and silent shade,Among the streets bereft, and helpless shrines.At other hours another life seems mine,Where one great river runs unswollen of rain,By pyramids of unremembered kings,And homes of men obedient to the Dead.There dark and quiet faces come and goAround me, then again the shriek of arms,And all the turmoil of the Ilian men.What are they? even shadows such as I.What make they?  Even this – the sport of gods —The sport of gods, however free they seem.Ah, would the game were ended, and the light,The blinding light, and all too mighty suns,Withdrawn, and I once more with sister shades,Unloved, forgotten, mingled with the mist,Dwelt in the hollows of the shadowy hills.

SONNETS

SHE

To H. R. HNot in the waste beyond the swamps and sand,   The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand,   Thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon,   Not there doth Ayesha linger, rune by runeSpelling strange scriptures of a people banned.   The world is disenchanted; over soonShall Europe send her spies through all the land.Nay, not in Kôr, but in whatever spot,   In town or field, or by the insatiate sea,Men brood on buried loves, and unforgot,   Or break themselves on some divine decree,Or would o’erleap the limits of their lot,   There, in the tombs and deathless, dwelleth SHE!

HERODOTUS IN EGYPT

He left the land of youth, he left the young,   The smiling gods of Greece; he passed the isleWhere Jason loitered, and where Sappho sung,   He sought the secret-founted wave of Nile,   And of their old world, dead a weary while,Heard the priests murmur in their mystic tongue,   And through the fanes went voyaging, amongDark tribes that worshipped Cat and Crocodile.He learned the tales of death Divine and birth,Strange loves of Hawk and Serpent, Sky and Earth,   The marriage, and the slaying of the Sun.The shrines of gods and beasts he wandered through,And mocked not at their godhead, for he knew   Behind all creeds the Spirit that is One.

GÉRARD DE NERVAL

Of all that were thy prisons – ah, untamed,Ah, light and sacred soul! – none holds thee now;   No wall, no bar, no body of flesh, but thouArt free and happy in the lands unnamed,Within whose gates, on weary wings and maimed,   Thou still would’st bear that mystic golden bough   The Sibyl doth to singing men allow,Yet thy report folk heeded not, but blamed.   And they would smile and wonder, seeing whereThou stood’st, to watch light leaves, or clouds, or wind,   Dreamily murmuring a ballad air,Caught from the Valois peasants; dost thou find   A new life gladder than the old times were,A love more fair than Sylvie, and as kind?

RONSARD

Master, I see thee with the locks of grey,   Crowned by the Muses with the laurel-wreath;   I see the roses hiding underneath,Cassandra’s gift; she was less dear than they.Thou, Master, first hast roused the lyric lay,   The sleeping song that the dead years bequeath,   Hast sung thine answer to the lays that breatheThrough ages, and through ages far away.And thou hast heard the pulse of Pindar beat,   Known Horace by the fount Bandusian!Their deathless line thy living strains repeat,   But ah, thy voice is sad, thy roses wan,But ah, thy honey is not honey-sweet,   Thy bees have fed on yews Sardinian!

LOVE’S MIRACLE

With other helpless folk about the gate,The gate called Beautiful, with weary eyes   That take no pleasure in the summer skies,Nor all things that are fairest, does she wait;So bleak a time, so sad a changeless fate   Makes her with dull experience early wise,   And in the dawning and the sunset, sighsThat all hath been, and shall be, desolate.Ah, if Love come not soon, and bid her live,   And know herself the fairest of fair things,Ah, if he have no healing gift to give,   Warm from his breast, and holy from his wings,Or if at least Love’s shadow in passing byTouch not and heal her, surely she must die.