Poems of the Past and the Present

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS

THE MOTHER MOURNS

When mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time,   And sedges were horny,And summer’s green wonderwork faltered   On leaze and in lane,I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly   Came wheeling around meThose phantoms obscure and insistent   That shadows unchain.Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me   A low lamentation,As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened,   Perplexed, or in pain.And, heeding, it awed me to gather   That Nature herself thereWas breathing in aërie accents,   With dirgeful refrain,Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days,   Had grieved her by holdingHer ancient high fame of perfection   In doubt and disdain.– “I had not proposed me a Creature   (She soughed) so excellingAll else of my kingdom in compass   And brightness of brain“As to read my defects with a god-glance,   Uncover each vestigeOf old inadvertence, annunciate   Each flaw and each stain!“My purpose went not to develop   Such insight in Earthland;Such potent appraisements affront me,   And sadden my reign!“Why loosened I olden control here   To mechanize skywards,Undeeming great scope could outshape in   A globe of such grain?“Man’s mountings of mind-sight I checked not,   Till range of his visionHas topped my intent, and found blemish   Throughout my domain.“He holds as inept his own soul-shell —   My deftest achievement —Contemns me for fitful inventions   Ill-timed and inane:“No more sees my sun as a Sanct-shape,   My moon as the Night-queen,My stars as august and sublime ones   That influences rain:“Reckons gross and ignoble my teaching,   Immoral my story,My love-lights a lure, that my species   May gather and gain.“‘Give me,’ he has said, ‘but the matter   And means the gods lot her,My brain could evolve a creation   More seemly, more sane.’– “If ever a naughtiness seized me   To woo adulationFrom creatures more keen than those crude ones   That first formed my train —“If inly a moment I murmured,   ‘The simple praise sweetly,But sweetlier the sage’ – and did rashly   Man’s vision unrein,“I rue it!.. His guileless forerunners,   Whose brains I could blandish,To measure the deeps of my mysteries   Applied them in vain.“From them my waste aimings and futile   I subtly could cover;‘Every best thing,’ said they, ‘to best purpose   Her powers preordain.’ —“No more such!.. My species are dwindling,   My forests grow barren,My popinjays fail from their tappings,   My larks from their strain.“My leopardine beauties are rarer,   My tusky ones vanish,My children have aped mine own slaughters   To quicken my wane.“Let me grow, then, but mildews and mandrakes,   And slimy distortions,Let nevermore things good and lovely   To me appertain;“For Reason is rank in my temples,   And Vision unruly,And chivalrous laud of my cunning   Is heard not again!”

“I SAID TO LOVE”

      I said to Love,“It is not now as in old daysWhen men adored thee and thy ways      All else above;Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the OneWho spread a heaven beneath the sun,”      I said to Love.      I said to him,“We now know more of thee than then;We were but weak in judgment when,      With hearts abrim,We clamoured thee that thou would’st pleaseInflict on us thine agonies,”      I said to him.      I said to Love,“Thou art not young, thou art not fair,No faery darts, no cherub air,      Nor swan, nor doveAre thine; but features pitiless,And iron daggers of distress,”      I said to Love.      “Depart then, Love!.– Man’s race shall end, dost threaten thou?The age to come the man of now      Know nothing of? —We fear not such a threat from thee;We are too old in apathy!Mankind shall cease. – So let it be,”      I said to Love.

A COMMONPLACE DAY

   The day is turning ghost,And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively,   To join the anonymous hostOf those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe,   To one of like degree.   I part the fire-gnawed logs,Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends   Upon the shining dogs;Further and further from the nooks the twilight’s stride extends,   And beamless black impends.   Nothing of tiniest worthHave I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise,   Since the pale corpse-like birthOf this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays —   Dullest of dull-hued Days!   Wanly upon the panesThe rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet   Here, while Day’s presence wanes,And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set,   He wakens my regret.   Regret – though nothing dearThat I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime,   Or bloomed elsewhere than here,To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime,   Or mark him out in Time.   – Yet, maybe, in some soul,In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose,   Or some intent upstoleOf that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows   The world’s amendment flows;   But which, benumbed at birthBy momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be   Embodied on the earth;And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity   May wake regret in me.

AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,Now steals along upon the Moon’s meek shineIn even monochrome and curving lineOf imperturbable serenity.How shall I link such sun-cast symmetryWith the torn troubled form I know as thine,That profile, placid as a brow divine,With continents of moil and misery?And can immense Mortality but throwSo small a shade, and Heaven’s high human schemeBe hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show,Nation at war with nation, brains that teem,Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

THE LACKING SENSE

Scene. —A sad-coloured landscape, Waddon ValeI“O Time, whence comes the Mother’s moody look amid her labours,   As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves?   Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors,With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face,      As of angel fallen from grace?”II– “Her look is but her story: construe not its symbols keenly:   In her wonderworks yea surely has she wounded where she loves.   The sense of ills misdealt for blisses blanks the mien most queenly,Self-smitings kill self-joys; and everywhere beneath the sun      Such deeds her hands have done.”III– “And how explains thy Ancient Mind her crimes upon her creatures,   These fallings from her fair beginnings, woundings where she loves,   Into her would-be perfect motions, modes, effects, and featuresAdmitting cramps, black humours, wan decay, and baleful blights,      Distress into delights?”IV– “Ah! know’st thou not her secret yet, her vainly veiled deficience,   Whence it comes that all unwittingly she wounds the lives she loves?   That sightless are those orbs of hers? – which bar to her omniscienceBrings those fearful unfulfilments, that red ravage through her zones      Whereat all creation groans.V“She whispers it in each pathetic strenuous slow endeavour,   When in mothering she unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves;   Yet her primal doom pursues her, faultful, fatal is she ever;Though so deft and nigh to vision is her facile finger-touch      That the seers marvel much.VI“Deal, then, her groping skill no scorn, no note of malediction;   Not long on thee will press the hand that hurts the lives it loves;   And while she dares dead-reckoning on, in darkness of affliction,Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may,      For thou art of her clay.”

TO LIFE

   O life with the sad seared face,      I weary of seeing thee,And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace,      And thy too-forced pleasantry!   I know what thou would’st tell      Of Death, Time, Destiny —I have known it long, and know, too, well      What it all means for me.   But canst thou not array      Thyself in rare disguise,And feign like truth, for one mad day,      That Earth is Paradise?   I’ll tune me to the mood,      And mumm with thee till eve;And maybe what as interlude      I feign, I shall believe!

DOOM AND SHE

I   There dwells a mighty pair —   Slow, statuesque, intense —   Amid the vague Immense:None can their chronicle declare,   Nor why they be, nor whence.II   Mother of all things made,   Matchless in artistry,   Unlit with sight is she. —And though her ever well-obeyed   Vacant of feeling he.III   The Matron mildly asks —   A throb in every word —   “Our clay-made creatures, lord,How fare they in their mortal tasks   Upon Earth’s bounded bord?IV   “The fate of those I bear,   Dear lord, pray turn and view,   And notify me true;Shapings that eyelessly I dare   Maybe I would undo.V   “Sometimes from lairs of life   Methinks I catch a groan,   Or multitudinous moan,As though I had schemed a world of strife,   Working by touch alone.”VI   “World-weaver!” he replies,   “I scan all thy domain;   But since nor joy nor painDoth my clear substance recognize,   I read thy realms in vain.VII   “World-weaver! what is Grief?   And what are Right, and Wrong,   And Feeling, that belongTo creatures all who owe thee fief?   What worse is Weak than Strong?”.VIII   – Unlightened, curious, meek,   She broods in sad surmise.   – Some say they have heard her sighsOn Alpine height or Polar peak   When the night tempests rise.

THE PROBLEM

   Shall we conceal the Case, or tell it —      We who believe the evidence?   Here and there the watch-towers knell it      With a sullen significance,Heard of the few who hearken intently and carry an eagerly upstrained sense.   Hearts that are happiest hold not by it;      Better we let, then, the old view reign;   Since there is peace in it, why decry it?      Since there is comfort, why disdain?Note not the pigment the while that the painting determines humanity’s joy and pain!

THE SUBALTERNS

I“Poor wanderer,” said the leaden sky,   “I fain would lighten thee,But there be laws in force on high   Which say it must not be.”II– “I would not freeze thee, shorn one,” cried   The North, “knew I but howTo warm my breath, to slack my stride;   But I am ruled as thou.”III– “To-morrow I attack thee, wight,”   Said Sickness.  “Yet I swearI bear thy little ark no spite,   But am bid enter there.”IV– “Come hither, Son,” I heard Death say;   “I did not will a graveShould end thy pilgrimage to-day,   But I, too, am a slave!”VWe smiled upon each other then,   And life to me wore lessThat fell contour it wore ere when   They owned their passiveness.

THE SLEEP-WORKER

When wilt thou wake, O Mother, wake and see —As one who, held in trance, has laboured longBy vacant rote and prepossession strong —The coils that thou hast wrought unwittingly;Wherein have place, unrealized by thee,Fair growths, foul cankers, right enmeshed with wrong,Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and song,And curious blends of ache and ecstasy? —Should that morn come, and show thy opened eyesAll that Life’s palpitating tissues feel,How wilt thou bear thyself in thy surprise? —Wilt thou destroy, in one wild shock of shame,Thy whole high heaving firmamental frame,Or patiently adjust, amend, and heal?

THE BULLFINCHES

   Brother Bulleys, let us sing   From the dawn till evening! —For we know not that we go not   When the day’s pale pinions fold   Unto those who sang of old.   When I flew to Blackmoor Vale,   Whence the green-gowned faeries hail,Roosting near them I could hear them   Speak of queenly Nature’s ways,   Means, and moods, – well known to fays.   All we creatures, nigh and far   (Said they there), the Mother’s are:Yet she never shows endeavour   To protect from warrings wild   Bird or beast she calls her child.   Busy in her handsome house   Known as Space, she falls a-drowse;Yet, in seeming, works on dreaming,   While beneath her groping hands   Fiends make havoc in her bands.   How her hussif’ry succeeds   She unknows or she unheeds,All things making for Death’s taking!   – So the green-gowned faeries say   Living over Blackmoor way.   Come then, brethren, let us sing,   From the dawn till evening! —For we know not that we go not   When the day’s pale pinions fold   Unto those who sang of old.

GOD-FORGOTTEN

   I towered far, and lo!  I stood within   The presence of the Lord Most High,Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win      Some answer to their cry.   – “The Earth, say’st thou?  The Human race?   By Me created?  Sad its lot?Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:      Such world I fashioned not.” —   – “O Lord, forgive me when I say   Thou spak’st the word, and mad’st it all.” —“The Earth of men – let me bethink me.. Yea!      I dimly do recall   “Some tiny sphere I built long back   (Mid millions of such shapes of mine)So named.. It perished, surely – not a wrack      Remaining, or a sign?   “It lost my interest from the first,   My aims therefor succeeding ill;Haply it died of doing as it durst?” —      “Lord, it existeth still.” —   “Dark, then, its life!  For not a cry   Of aught it bears do I now hear;Of its own act the threads were snapt whereby      Its plaints had reached mine ear.   “It used to ask for gifts of good,   Till came its severance self-entailed,When sudden silence on that side ensued,      And has till now prevailed.   “All other orbs have kept in touch;   Their voicings reach me speedily:Thy people took upon them overmuch      In sundering them from me!   “And it is strange – though sad enough —   Earth’s race should think that one whose callFrames, daily, shining spheres of flawless stuff      Must heed their tainted ball!.   “But say’st thou ’tis by pangs distraught,   And strife, and silent suffering? —Deep grieved am I that injury should be wrought      Even on so poor a thing!   “Thou should’st have learnt that Not to Mend   For Me could mean but Not to Know:Hence, Messengers! and straightway put an end      To what men undergo.”.   Homing at dawn, I thought to see   One of the Messengers standing by.– Oh, childish thought!.. Yet oft it comes to me      When trouble hovers nigh.

THE BEDRIDDEN PEASANT

TO AN UNKNOWING GOD

Much wonder I – here long low-laid —   That this dead wall should beBetwixt the Maker and the made,   Between Thyself and me!For, say one puts a child to nurse,   He eyes it now and thenTo know if better ’tis, or worse,   And if it mourn, and when.But Thou, Lord, giv’st us men our clay   In helpless bondage thusTo Time and Chance, and seem’st straightway   To think no more of us!That some disaster cleft Thy scheme   And tore us wide apart,So that no cry can cross, I deem;   For Thou art mild of heart,And would’st not shape and shut us in   Where voice can not he heard:’Tis plain Thou meant’st that we should win   Thy succour by a word.Might but Thy sense flash down the skies   Like man’s from clime to clime,Thou would’st not let me agonize   Through my remaining time;But, seeing how much Thy creatures bear —   Lame, starved, or maimed, or blind —Thou’dst heal the ills with quickest care   Of me and all my kind.Then, since Thou mak’st not these things be,   But these things dost not know,I’ll praise Thee as were shown to me   The mercies Thou would’st show!

BY THE EARTH’S CORPSE

I   “O Lord, why grievest Thou? —   Since Life has ceased to be   Upon this globe, now cold   As lunar land and sea,And humankind, and fowl, and fur   Are gone eternally,All is the same to Thee as ere   They knew mortality.”II“O Time,” replied the Lord,   “Thou read’st me ill, I ween;Were all the same, I should not grieve   At that late earthly scene,Now blestly past – though planned by me   With interest close and keen! —Nay, nay: things now are not the same   As they have earlier been.III   “Written indelibly   On my eternal mind   Are all the wrongs endured   By Earth’s poor patient kind,Which my too oft unconscious hand   Let enter undesigned.No god can cancel deeds foredone,   Or thy old coils unwind!IV   “As when, in Noë’s days,   I whelmed the plains with sea,   So at this last, when flesh   And herb but fossils be,And, all extinct, their piteous dust   Revolves obliviously,That I made Earth, and life, and man,   It still repenteth me!”

MUTE OPINION

II traversed a dominionWhose spokesmen spake out strongTheir purpose and opinionThrough pulpit, press, and song.I scarce had means to note thereA large-eyed few, and dumb,Who thought not as those thought thereThat stirred the heat and hum.IIWhen, grown a Shade, beholdingThat land in lifetime trode,To learn if its unfoldingFulfilled its clamoured code,I saw, in web unbroken,Its history outwroughtNot as the loud had spoken,But as the mute had thought.

TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD

I   Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently,   And though thy birth-hour beckons thee,      Sleep the long sleep:      The Doomsters heap   Travails and teens around us here,And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.II   Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh,   And laughters fail, and greetings die:      Hopes dwindle; yea,      Faiths waste away,   Affections and enthusiasms numb;Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.III   Had I the ear of wombèd souls   Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls,      And thou wert free      To cease, or be,   Then would I tell thee all I know,And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?IV   Vain vow!  No hint of mine may hence   To theeward fly: to thy locked sense      Explain none can      Life’s pending plan:   Thou wilt thy ignorant entry makeThough skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.V   Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot   Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not      One tear, one qualm,      Should break the calm.   But I am weak as thou and bare;No man can change the common lot to rare.VI   Must come and bide.  And such are we —   Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary —      That I can hope      Health, love, friends, scope   In full for thee; can dream thou’lt findJoys seldom yet attained by humankind!

TO FLOWERS FROM ITALY IN WINTER

Sunned in the South, and here to-day;   – If all organic thingsBe sentient, Flowers, as some men say,   What are your ponderings?How can you stay, nor vanish quite   From this bleak spot of thorn,And birch, and fir, and frozen white   Expanse of the forlorn?Frail luckless exiles hither brought!   Your dust will not regainOld sunny haunts of Classic thought   When you shall waste and wane;But mix with alien earth, be lit   With frigid Boreal flame,And not a sign remain in it   To tell men whence you came.

ON A FINE MORNING

Whence comes Solace? – Not from seeingWhat is doing, suffering, being,Not from noting Life’s conditions,Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;   But in cleaving to the Dream,   And in gazing at the gleam   Whereby gray things golden seem.IIThus do I this heyday, holdingShadows but as lights unfolding,As no specious show this momentWith its irisèd embowment;   But as nothing other than   Part of a benignant plan;   Proof that earth was made for man. February 1899.

TO LIZBIE BROWNE

IDear Lizbie Browne,Where are you now?In sun, in rain? —Or is your browPast joy, past pain,Dear Lizbie Browne?IISweet Lizbie BrowneHow you could smile,How you could sing! —How archly wileIn glance-giving,Sweet Lizbie Browne!IIIAnd, Lizbie Browne,Who else had hairBay-red as yours,Or flesh so fairBred out of doors,Sweet Lizbie Browne?IVWhen, Lizbie Browne,You had just begunTo be endearedBy stealth to one,You disappearedMy Lizbie Browne!VAy, Lizbie Browne,So swift your life,And mine so slow,You were a wifeEre I could showLove, Lizbie Browne.VIStill, Lizbie Browne,You won, they said,The best of menWhen you were wed.Where went you then,O Lizbie Browne?VIIDear Lizbie Browne,I should have thought,“Girls ripen fast,”And coaxed and caughtYou ere you passed,Dear Lizbie Browne!VIIIBut, Lizbie Browne,I let you slip;Shaped not a sign;Touched never your lipWith lip of mine,Lost Lizbie Browne!IXSo, Lizbie Browne,When on a dayMen speak of meAs not, you’ll say,“And who was he?” —Yes, Lizbie Browne!

SONG OF HOPE

O sweet To-morrow! —   After to-day   There will awayThis sense of sorrow.Then let us borrowHope, for a gleamingSoon will be streaming,   Dimmed by no gray —      No gray!While the winds wing us   Sighs from The Gone,   Nearer to dawnMinute-beats bring us;When there will sing usLarks of a gloryWaiting our story   Further anon —      Anon!Doff the black token,   Don the red shoon,   Right and retuneViol-strings broken;Null the words spokenIn speeches of rueing,The night cloud is hueing,   To-morrow shines soon —      Shines soon!

THE WELL-BELOVED

I wayed by star and planet shine   Towards the dear one’s homeAt Kingsbere, there to make her mine   When the next sun upclomb.I edged the ancient hill and wood   Beside the Ikling Way,Nigh where the Pagan temple stood   In the world’s earlier day.And as I quick and quicker walked   On gravel and on green,I sang to sky, and tree, or talked   Of her I called my queen.– “O faultless is her dainty form,   And luminous her mind;She is the God-created norm   Of perfect womankind!”A shape whereon one star-blink gleamed   Glode softly by my side,A woman’s; and her motion seemed   The motion of my bride.And yet methought she’d drawn erstwhile   Adown the ancient leaze,Where once were pile and peristyle   For men’s idolatries.– “O maiden lithe and lone, what may   Thy name and lineage be,Who so resemblest by this ray   My darling? – Art thou she?”The Shape: “Thy bride remains within   Her father’s grange and grove.”– “Thou speakest rightly,” I broke in,   “Thou art not she I love.”– “Nay: though thy bride remains inside   Her father’s walls,” said she,“The one most dear is with thee here,   For thou dost love but me.”Then I: “But she, my only choice,   Is now at Kingsbere Grove?”Again her soft mysterious voice:   “I am thy only Love.”Thus still she vouched, and still I said,   “O sprite, that cannot be!”.It was as if my bosom bled,   So much she troubled me.The sprite resumed: “Thou hast transferred   To her dull form awhileMy beauty, fame, and deed, and word,   My gestures and my smile.“O fatuous man, this truth infer,   Brides are not what they seem;Thou lovest what thou dreamest her;   I am thy very dream!”– “O then,” I answered miserably,   Speaking as scarce I knew,“My loved one, I must wed with thee   If what thou say’st be true!”She, proudly, thinning in the gloom:   “Though, since troth-plight began,I’ve ever stood as bride to groom,   I wed no mortal man!”Thereat she vanished by the Cross   That, entering Kingsbere town,The two long lanes form, near the fosse   Below the faneless Down.– When I arrived and met my bride,   Her look was pinched and thin,As if her soul had shrunk and died,   And left a waste within.

HER REPROACH

Con the dead page as ’twere live love: press on!Cold wisdom’s words will ease thy track for thee;Aye, go; cast off sweet ways, and leave me wanTo biting blasts that are intent on me.But if thy object Fame’s far summits be,Whose inclines many a skeleton o’erliesThat missed both dream and substance, stop and seeHow absence wears these cheeks and dims these eyes!It surely is far sweeter and more wiseTo water love, than toil to leave anonA name whose glory-gleam will but adviseInvidious minds to quench it with their own,And over which the kindliest will but stayA moment, musing, “He, too, had his day!”Westbourne Park Villas,1867.

THE INCONSISTENT

I say, “She was as good as fair,”   When standing by her mound;“Such passing sweetness,” I declare,   “No longer treads the ground.”I say, “What living Love can catch   Her bloom and bonhomie,And what in newer maidens match   Her olden warmth to me!”– There stands within yon vestry-nook   Where bonded lovers sign,Her name upon a faded book   With one that is not mine.To him she breathed the tender vow   She once had breathed to me,But yet I say, “O love, even now   Would I had died for thee!”

A BROKEN APPOINTMENT

      You did not come,And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb. —Yet less for loss of your dear presence thereThan that I thus found lacking in your makeThat high compassion which can overbearReluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sakeGrieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum,      You did not come.      You love not me,And love alone can lend you loyalty;– I know and knew it.  But, unto the storeOf human deeds divine in all but name,Was it not worth a little hour or moreTo add yet this: Once, you, a woman, cameTo soothe a time-torn man; even though it be      You love not me?