Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses

THE VAMPIRINE FAIR

Gilbert had sailed to India’s shore,   And I was all alone:My lord came in at my open door   And said, “O fairest one!”He leant upon the slant bureau,   And sighed, “I am sick for thee!”“My lord,” said I, “pray speak not so,   Since wedded wife I be.”Leaning upon the slant bureau,   Bitter his next words came:“So much I know; and likewise know   My love burns on the same!“But since you thrust my love away,   And since it knows no cure,I must live out as best I may   The ache that I endure.”When Michaelmas browned the nether Coomb,   And Wingreen Hill above,And made the hollyhocks rags of bloom,   My lord grew ill of love.My lord grew ill with love for me;   Gilbert was far from port;And – so it was – that time did see   Me housed at Manor Court.About the bowers of Manor Court   The primrose pushed its headWhen, on a day at last, report   Arrived of him I had wed.“Gilbert, my lord, is homeward bound,   His sloop is drawing near,What shall I do when I am found   Not in his house but here?”“O I will heal the injuries   I’ve done to him and thee.I’ll give him means to live at ease   Afar from Shastonb’ry.”When Gilbert came we both took thought:   “Since comfort and good cheer,”Said he, “So readily are bought,   He’s welcome to thee, Dear.”So when my lord flung liberally   His gold in Gilbert’s hands,I coaxed and got my brothers three   Made stewards of his lands.And then I coaxed him to install   My other kith and kin,With aim to benefit them all   Before his love ran thin.And next I craved to be possessed   Of plate and jewels rare.He groaned: “You give me, Love, no rest,   Take all the law will spare!”And so in course of years my wealth   Became a goodly hoard,My steward brethren, too, by stealth   Had each a fortune stored.Thereafter in the gloom he’d walk,   And by and by beganTo say aloud in absent talk,   “I am a ruined man! —“I hardly could have thought,” he said,   “When first I looked on thee,That one so soft, so rosy red,   Could thus have beggared me!”Seeing his fair estates in pawn,   And him in such decline,I knew that his domain had gone   To lift up me and mine.Next month upon a Sunday morn   A gunshot sounded nigh:By his own hand my lordly born   Had doomed himself to die.“Live, my dear lord, and much of thine   Shall be restored to thee!”He smiled, and said ’twixt word and sign,   “Alas – that cannot be!”And while I searched his cabinet   For letters, keys, or will,’Twas touching that his gaze was set   With love upon me still.And when I burnt each document   Before his dying eyes,’Twas sweet that he did not resent   My fear of compromise.The steeple-cock gleamed golden when   I watched his spirit go:And I became repentant then   That I had wrecked him so.Three weeks at least had come and gone,   With many a saddened word,Before I wrote to Gilbert on   The stroke that so had stirred.And having worn a mournful gown,   I joined, in decent while,My husband at a dashing town   To live in dashing style.Yet though I now enjoy my fling,   And dine and dance and drive,I’d give my prettiest emerald ring   To see my lord alive.And when the meet on hunting-days   Is near his churchyard home,I leave my bantering beaux to place   A flower upon his tomb;And sometimes say: “Perhaps too late   The saints in Heaven deploreThat tender time when, moved by Fate,   He darked my cottage door.”

THE REMINDER

While I watch the Christmas blazePaint the room with ruddy rays,Something makes my vision glideTo the frosty scene outside.There, to reach a rotting berry,Toils a thrush, – constrained to veryDregs of food by sharp distress,Taking such with thankfulness.Why, O starving bird, when IOne day’s joy would justify,And put misery out of view,Do you make me notice you!

THE RAMBLER

I do not see the hills around,Nor mark the tints the copses wear;I do not note the grassy groundAnd constellated daisies there.I hear not the contralto noteOf cuckoos hid on either hand,The whirr that shakes the nighthawk’s throatWhen eve’s brown awning hoods the land.Some say each songster, tree, and mead —All eloquent of love divine —Receives their constant careful heed:Such keen appraisement is not mine.The tones around me that I hear,The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,Are those far back ones missed when near,And now perceived too late by me!

NIGHT IN THE OLD HOME

When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,And Life’s bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,My perished people who housed them here come back to me.They come and seat them around in their mouldy places,Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness,A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces,And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.“Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here,A pale late plant of your once strong stock?” I say to them;“A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere,And on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?”“ – O let be the Wherefore!  We fevered our years not thus:Take of Life what it grants, without question!” they answer me seemingly.“Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us,And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!”

AFTER THE LAST BREATH

(J. H. 1813–1904)

There’s no more to be done, or feared, or hoped;None now need watch, speak low, and list, and tire;No irksome crease outsmoothed, no pillow sloped   Does she require.Blankly we gaze.  We are free to go or stay;Our morrow’s anxious plans have missed their aim;Whether we leave to-night or wait till day   Counts as the same.The lettered vessels of medicamentsSeem asking wherefore we have set them here;Each palliative its silly face presents   As useless gear.And yet we feel that something savours well;We note a numb relief withheld before;Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell   Of Time no more.We see by littles now the deft achievementWhereby she has escaped the Wrongers all,In view of which our momentary bereavement   Outshapes but small.1904.

IN CHILDBED

   In the middle of the nightMother’s spirit came and spoke to me,   Looking weariful and white —As ’twere untimely news she broke to me.   “O my daughter, joyed are youTo own the weetless child you mother there;   ‘Men may search the wide world through,’You think, ‘nor find so fair another there!’   “Dear, this midnight time unwombsThousands just as rare and beautiful;   Thousands whom High Heaven foredoomsTo be as bright, as good, as dutiful.   “Source of ecstatic hopes and fearsAnd innocent maternal vanity,   Your fond exploit but shapes for tearsNew thoroughfares in sad humanity.   “Yet as you dream, so dreamt IWhen Life stretched forth its morning ray to me;   Other views for by and by!”.Such strange things did mother say to me.

THE PINE PLANTERS

(Marty South’s Reverie)

IWe work here together   In blast and breeze;He fills the earth in,   I hold the trees.He does not notice   That what I doKeeps me from moving   And chills me through.He has seen one fairer   I feel by his eye,Which skims me as though   I were not by.And since she passed here   He scarce has knownBut that the woodland   Holds him alone.I have worked here with him   Since morning shine,He busy with his thoughts   And I with mine.I have helped him so many,   So many days,But never win any   Small word of praise!Shall I not sigh to him   That I work onGlad to be nigh to him   Though hope is gone?Nay, though he never   Knew love like mine,I’ll bear it ever   And make no sign!IIFrom the bundle at hand here   I take each tree,And set it to stand, here   Always to be;When, in a second,   As if from fearOf Life unreckoned   Beginning here,It starts a sighing   Through day and night,Though while there lying   ’Twas voiceless quite.It will sigh in the morning,   Will sigh at noon,At the winter’s warning,   In wafts of June;Grieving that never   Kind Fate decreedIt should for ever   Remain a seed,And shun the welter   Of things without,Unneeding shelter   From storm and drought.Thus, all unknowing   For whom or whatWe set it growing   In this bleak spot,It still will grieve here   Throughout its time,Unable to leave here,   Or change its clime;Or tell the story   Of us to-dayWhen, halt and hoary,   We pass away.

THE DEAR

I plodded to Fairmile Hill-top, where   A maiden one fain would guardFrom every hazard and every care   Advanced on the roadside sward.I wondered how succeeding suns   Would shape her wayfarings,And wished some Power might take such ones   Under Its warding wings.The busy breeze came up the hill   And smartened her cheek to red,And frizzled her hair to a haze.  With a will   “Good-morning, my Dear!” I said.She glanced from me to the far-off gray,   And, with proud severity,“Good-morning to you – though I may say   I am not your Dear,” quoth she:“For I am the Dear of one not here —   One far from his native land!” —And she passed me by; and I did not try   To make her understand.1901

ONE WE KNEW

(M. H. 1772–1857)

She told how they used to form for the country dances —   “The Triumph,” “The New-rigged Ship” —To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,   And in cots to the blink of a dip.She spoke of the wild “poussetting” and “allemanding”   On carpet, on oak, and on sod;And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing,   And the figures the couples trod.She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted,   And where the bandsmen stoodWhile breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted   To choose each other for good.She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded   Of the death of the King of France:Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte’s unbounded   Ambition and arrogance.Of how his threats woke warlike preparations   Along the southern strand,And how each night brought tremors and trepidations   Lest morning should see him land.She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking   As it swayed in the lightning flash,Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child’s shrieking   At the cart-tail under the lash.With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers —   We seated around her knees —She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers,   But rather as one who sees.She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant   So far that no tongue could hail:Past things retold were to her as things existent,   Things present but as a tale. May 20, 1902.

SHE HEARS THE STORM

There was a time in former years —   While my roof-tree was his —When I should have been distressed by fears   At such a night as this!I should have murmured anxiously,   “The pricking rain strikes cold;His road is bare of hedge or tree,   And he is getting old.”But now the fitful chimney-roar,   The drone of Thorncombe trees,The Froom in flood upon the moor,   The mud of Mellstock Leaze,The candle slanting sooty wick’d,   The thuds upon the thatch,The eaves-drops on the window flicked,   The clacking garden-hatch,And what they mean to wayfarers,   I scarcely heed or mind;He has won that storm-tight roof of hers   Which Earth grants all her kind.

A WET NIGHT

I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,Mile after mile out by the moorland way,And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze grayInto the lane, and round the corner tree;Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,And the enfeebled light dies out of day,Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,“This is a hardship to be calendared!”Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,Times numberless have trudged across this spotIn sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,And taking all such toils as trifles mere.

BEFORE LIFE AND AFTER

   A time there was – as one may guessAnd as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell —   Before the birth of consciousness,      When all went well.   None suffered sickness, love, or loss,None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;   None cared whatever crash or cross      Brought wrack to things.   If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;   If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,      No sense was stung.   But the disease of feeling germed,And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;   Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed      How long, how long?

NEW YEAR’S EVE

“I have finished another year,” said God,   “In grey, green, white, and brown;I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,Sealed up the worm within the clod,   And let the last sun down.”“And what’s the good of it?” I said.   “What reasons made you callFrom formless void this earth we tread,When nine-and-ninety can be read   Why nought should be at all?“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in   This tabernacle groan’ —If ever a joy be found herein,Such joy no man had wished to win   If he had never known!”Then he: “My labours – logicless —   You may explain; not I:Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guessThat I evolved a Consciousness   To ask for reasons why.“Strange that ephemeral creatures who   By my own ordering are,Should see the shortness of my view,Use ethic tests I never knew,   Or made provision for!”He sank to raptness as of yore,   And opening New Year’s DayWove it by rote as theretofore,And went on working evermore   In his unweeting way.1906.

GOD’S EDUCATION

I saw him steal the light away   That haunted in her eye:It went so gently none could sayMore than that it was there one day   And missing by-and-by.I watched her longer, and he stole   Her lily tincts and rose;All her young sprightliness of soulNext fell beneath his cold control,   And disappeared like those.I asked: “Why do you serve her so?   Do you, for some glad day,Hoard these her sweets – ?”  He said, “O no,They charm not me; I bid Time throw   Them carelessly away.”Said I: “We call that cruelty —   We, your poor mortal kind.”He mused.  “The thought is new to me.Forsooth, though I men’s master be,   Theirs is the teaching mind!”

TO SINCERITY

O sweet sincerity! —Where modern methods beWhat scope for thine and thee?Life may be sad past saying,Its greens for ever graying,Its faiths to dust decaying;And youth may have foreknown it,And riper seasons shown it,But custom cries: “Disown it:“Say ye rejoice, though grieving,Believe, while unbelieving,Behold, without perceiving!”– Yet, would men look at true things,And unilluded view things,And count to bear undue things,The real might mend the seeming,Facts better their foredeeming,And Life its disesteeming. February 1899.

PANTHERA

(For other forms of this legend – first met with in the second century – see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)

Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent,I think of Panthera, who underwentMuch from insidious aches in his decline;But his aches were not radical like mine;They were the twinges of old wounds – the feelOf the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel,Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air,Fingers and all, as if it still were there.My pains are otherwise: upclosing crampsAnd stiffened tendons from this country’s damps,Where Panthera was never commandant. —The Fates sent him by way of the Levant.   He had been blithe in his young manhood’s time,And as centurion carried well his prime.In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell,He had seen service and had borne him well.Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave;Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow graveWhen pondering them; shocks less of corporal kindThan phantom-like, that disarranged his mind;And it was in the way of warning me(By much his junior) against levityThat he recounted them; and one in chiefPanthera loved to set in bold relief.   This was a tragedy of his Eastern days,Personal in touch – though I have sometimes thoughtThat touch a possible delusion – wroughtOf half-conviction carried to a craze —His mind at last being stressed by ails and age: —Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.   I had said it long had been a wish with meThat I might leave a scion – some small treeAs channel for my sap, if not my name —Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim,In whose advance I secretly could joy.Thereat he warned.      “Cancel such wishes, boy!A son may be a comfort or a curse,A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse —A criminal.. That I could testify!”“Panthera has no guilty son!” cried IAll unbelieving.  “Friend, you do not know,”He darkly dropt: “True, I’ve none now to show,For the law took him.  Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!”   “This noon is not unlike,” he again began,“The noon these pricking memories print on me —Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red,And I served in Judæa.. ’Twas a dateOf rest for arms.  The Pax Romana ruled,To the chagrin of frontier legionaries!Palestine was annexed – though sullen yet, —I, being in age some two-score years and tenAnd having the garrison in JerusalemPart in my hands as acting officerUnder the Governor.  A tedious timeI found it, of routine, amid a folkRestless, contentless, and irascible. —Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall,Sending men forth on public meeting-daysTo maintain order, were my duties there.   “Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sunWhitened the city and the hills around,And every mountain-road that clambered them,Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm,And the rank cacti round the valley’s sides.The day was one whereon death-penaltiesWere put in force, and here and there were setThe soldiery for order, as I said,Since one of the condemned had raised some heat,And crowds surged passionately to see him slain.I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse,With some half-company of auxiliaries,Had captained the procession through the streetsWhen it came streaming from the judgment-hallAfter the verdicts of the Governor.It drew to the great gate of the northern wayThat bears towards Damascus; and to a knollUpon the common, just beyond the walls —Whence could be swept a wide horizon roundOver the housetops to the remotest heights.Here was the public execution-groundFor city crimes, called then and doubtless nowGolgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.   “The usual dooms were duly meted out;Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed,And no great stir occurred.  A day of wontIt was to me, so far, and would have slidClean from my memory at its squalid closeBut for an incident that followed these.   “Among the tag-rag rabble of either sexThat hung around the wretches as they writhed,Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye —A weeping woman, whose strained countenance,Sharpened against a looming livid cloud,Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon —The mother of one of those who suffered thereI had heard her called when spoken roughly toBy my ranged men for pressing forward so.It stole upon me hers was a face I knew;Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a whileEluded me.  And then at once it came.   “Some thirty years or more before that noonI was sub-captain of a companyDrawn from the legion of Calabria,That marched up from Judæa north to Tyre.We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel,The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floorOf Jew with Canaanite, and with the hostOf Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, metWhile crossing there to strike the Assyrian pride.We left behind Gilboa; passed by Nain;Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the topWith arbute, terabinth, and locust growths.   “Encumbering me were sundry sick, so fallenThrough drinking from a swamp beside the way;But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge,We dipt into a world of pleasantness —A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon —Which lapped a village on its furthest slopesCalled Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh.In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where,Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we madeTo rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.   “Here a day onward, towards the eventide,Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic danceTrod by their comrades, when the young women cameTo fill their pitchers, as their custom was.I proffered help to one – a slim girl, coyEven as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.Her long blue gown, the string of silver coinsThat hung down by her banded beautiful hair,Symboled in full immaculate modesty.   “Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirredTo quick desire.  ’Twas tedious timing outThe convalescence of the soldiery;And I beguiled the long and empty daysBy blissful yieldance to her sweet allure,Who had no arts, but what out-arted all,The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.We met, and met, and under the winking starsThat passed which peoples earth – true union, yea,To the pure eye of her simplicity.   “Meanwhile the sick found health; and we pricked on.I made her no rash promise of return,As some do use; I was sincere in that;I said we sundered never to meet again —And yet I spoke untruth unknowingly! —For meet again we did.  Now, guess you aught?The weeping mother on CalvariaWas she I had known – albeit that time and tearsHad wasted rudely her once flowerlike form,And her soft eyes, now swollen with sorrowing.   “Though I betrayed some qualms, she marked me not;And I was scarce of mood to comrade herAnd close the silence of so wide a timeTo claim a malefactor as my son —(For so I guessed him).  And inquiry madeBrought rumour how at Nazareth long beforeAn old man wedded her for pity’s sakeOn finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how,Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.   “Well; there it ended; save that then I learntThat he – the man whose ardent blood was mine —Had waked sedition long among the Jews,And hurled insulting parlance at their god,Whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill,Vowing that he would raze it, that himselfWas god as great as he whom they adored,And by descent, moreover, was their king;With sundry other incitements to misrule.   “The impalements done, and done the soldiers’ gameOf raffling for the clothes, a legionary,Longinus, pierced the young man with his lanceAt signs from me, moved by his agoniesThrough naysaying the drug they had offered him.It brought the end.  And when he had breathed his lastThe woman went.  I saw her never again.Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend? —That when you talk of offspring as sheer joySo trustingly, you blink contingencies.Fors Fortuna!  He who goes fatheringGives frightful hostages to hazardry!”   Thus Panthera’s tale.  ’Twas one he seldom told,But yet it got abroad.  He would unfold,At other times, a story of less gloom,Though his was not a heart where jests had room.He would regret discovery of the truthWas made too late to influence to ruthThe Procurator who had condemned his son —Or rather him so deemed.  For there was noneTo prove that Panthera erred not: and indeed,When vagueness of identity I would plead,Panther himself would sometimes own as much —Yet lothly.  But, assuming fact was such,That the said woman did not recognizeHer lover’s face, is matter for surprise.However, there’s his tale, fantasy or otherwise.   Thereafter shone not men of Panthera’s kind:The indolent heads at home were ill-inclinedTo press campaigning that would hoist the starOf their lieutenants valorous afar.Jealousies kept him irked abroad, controlledAnd stinted by an Empire no more bold.Yet in some actions southward he had share —In Mauretania and Numidia; thereWith eagle eye, and sword and steed and spur,Quelling uprisings promptly.  Some small stirIn Parthia next engaged him, until maimed,As I have said; and cynic Time proclaimedHis noble spirit broken.  What a wasteOf such a Roman! – one in youth-time gracedWith indescribable charm, so I have heard,Yea, magnetism impossible to wordWhen faltering as I saw him.  What a fame,O Son of Saturn, had adorned his name,Might the Three so have urged Thee! – Hour by hourHis own disorders hampered Panthera’s powerTo brood upon the fate of those he had known,Even of that one he always called his own —Either in morbid dream or memory.He died at no great age, untroublously,An exit rare for ardent soldiers such as he.

THE UNBORN

I rose at night, and visited   The Cave of the Unborn:And crowding shapes surrounded meFor tidings of the life to be,Who long had prayed the silent Head   To haste its advent morn.Their eyes were lit with artless trust,   Hope thrilled their every tone;“A scene the loveliest, is it not?A pure delight, a beauty-spotWhere all is gentle, true and just,   And darkness is unknown?”My heart was anguished for their sake,   I could not frame a word;And they descried my sunken face,And seemed to read therein, and traceThe news that pity would not break,   Nor truth leave unaverred.And as I silently retired   I turned and watched them still,And they came helter-skelter out,Driven forward like a rabble routInto the world they had so desired   By the all-immanent Will.1905.