Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

   This statue of Liberty, busy man,      Here erect in the city square,I have watched while your scrubbings, this early morning,         Strangely wistful,         And half tristful,      Have turned her from foul to fair;   With your bucket of water, and mop, and brush,      Bringing her out of the grimeThat has smeared her during the smokes of winter         With such glumness         In her dumbness,      And aged her before her time.   You have washed her down with motherly care —      Head, shoulders, arm, and foot,To the very hem of the robes that drape her —         All expertly         And alertly,      Till a long stream, black with soot,   Flows over the pavement to the road,      And her shape looms pure as snow:I read you are hired by the City guardians —         May be yearly,         Or once merely —      To treat the statues so?   “Oh, I’m not hired by the Councilmen      To cleanse the statues here.I do this one as a self-willed duty,         Not as paid to,         Or at all made to,      But because the doing is dear.”   Ah, then I hail you brother and friend!      Liberty’s knight divine.What you have done would have been my doing,         Yea, most verily,         Well, and thoroughly,      Had but your courage been mine!   “Oh I care not for Liberty’s mould,      Liberty charms not me;What’s Freedom but an idler’s vision,         Vain, pernicious,         Often vicious,      Of things that cannot be!   “Memory it is that brings me to this —      Of a daughter – my one sweet own.She grew a famous carver’s model,         One of the fairest         And of the rarest: —      She sat for the figure as shown.   “But alas, she died in this distant place      Before I was warned to betakeMyself to her side!.. And in love of my darling,         In love of the fame of her,         And the good name of her,      I do this for her sake.”   Answer I gave not.  Of that form      The carver was I at his side;His child, my model, held so saintly,         Grand in feature,         Gross in nature,      In the dens of vice had died.

THE BACKGROUND AND THE FIGURE

(Lover’s Ditty)

I think of the slope where the rabbits fed,   Of the periwinks’ rockwork lair,Of the fuchsias ringing their bells of red —   And the something else seen there.Between the blooms where the sod basked bright,   By the bobbing fuchsia trees,Was another and yet more eyesome sight —   The sight that richened these.I shall seek those beauties in the spring,   When the days are fit and fair,But only as foils to the one more thing   That also will flower there!

THE CHANGE

   Out of the past there rises a week —      Who shall read the years O! —   Out of the past there rises a week      Enringed with a purple zone.   Out of the past there rises a week   When thoughts were strung too thick to speak,And the magic of its lineaments remains with me alone.   In that week there was heard a singing —      Who shall spell the years, the years! —   In that week there was heard a singing,      And the white owl wondered why.   In that week, yea, a voice was ringing,   And forth from the casement were candles flingingRadiance that fell on the deodar and lit up the path thereby.   Could that song have a mocking note? —      Who shall unroll the years O! —   Could that song have a mocking note      To the white owl’s sense as it fell?   Could that song have a mocking note   As it trilled out warm from the singer’s throat,And who was the mocker and who the mocked when two felt all was well?   In a tedious trampling crowd yet later —      Who shall bare the years, the years! —   In a tedious trampling crowd yet later,      When silvery singings were dumb;   In a crowd uncaring what time might fate her,   Mid murks of night I stood to await her,And the twanging of iron wheels gave out the signal that she was come.   She said with a travel-tired smile —      Who shall lift the years O! —   She said with a travel-tired smile,      Half scared by scene so strange;   She said, outworn by mile on mile,   The blurred lamps wanning her face the while,“O Love, I am here; I am with you!”.. Ah, that there should have come a change!   O the doom by someone spoken —      Who shall unseal the years, the years! —   O the doom that gave no token,      When nothing of bale saw we:   O the doom by someone spoken,   O the heart by someone broken,The heart whose sweet reverberances are all time leaves to me.

Jan. – Feb. 1913.

SITTING ON THE BRIDGE

(Echo of an old song)

   Sitting on the bridge   Past the barracks, town and ridge,At once the spirit seized usTo sing a song that pleased us —As “The Fifth” were much in rumour;It was “Whilst I’m in the humour,   Take me, Paddy, will you now?”   And a lancer soon drew nigh,   And his Royal Irish eye   Said, “Willing, faith, am I,O, to take you anyhow, dears,   To take you anyhow.”   But, lo! – dad walking by,   Cried, “What, you lightheels!  Fie!   Is this the way you roam   And mock the sunset gleam?”   And he marched us straightway home,Though we said, “We are only, daddy,Singing, ‘Will you take me, Paddy?’”   – Well, we never saw from then   If we sang there anywhen,   The soldier dear again,Except at night in dream-time,   Except at night in dream.Perhaps that soldier’s fighting   In a land that’s far away,Or he may be idly plighting   Some foreign hussy gay;Or perhaps his bones are whiting   In the wind to their decay!.   Ah! – does he mind him how   The girls he saw that dayOn the bridge, were sitting singingAt the time of curfew-ringing,“Take me, Paddy; will you now, dear?   Paddy, will you now?”

Grey’s Bridge.

THE YOUNG CHURCHWARDEN

When he lit the candles there,And the light fell on his hand,And it trembled as he scannedHer and me, his vanquished airHinted that his dream was done,And I saw he had begun   To understand.When Love’s viol was unstrung,Sore I wished the hand that shookHad been mine that shared her bookWhile that evening hymn was sung,His the victor’s, as he litCandles where he had bidden us sit   With vanquished look.Now her dust lies listless there,His afar from tending hand,What avails the victory scanned?Does he smile from upper air:“Ah, my friend, your dream is done;And ’tis you who have begun   To understand!

“I TRAVEL AS A PHANTOM NOW”

I travel as a phantom now,For people do not wish to seeIn flesh and blood so bare a bough   As Nature makes of me.And thus I visit bodilessStrange gloomy households often at odds,And wonder if Man’s consciousness   Was a mistake of God’s.And next I meet you, and I pause,And think that if mistake it were,As some have said, O then it was   One that I well can bear!

1915.

LINES

TO A MOVEMENT IN MOZART’S E-FLAT SYMPHONY

      Show me again the time      When in the Junetide’s prime   We flew by meads and mountains northerly! —Yea, to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness,      Love lures life on.      Show me again the day      When from the sandy bay   We looked together upon the pestered sea! —Yea, to such surging, swaying, sighing, swelling, shrinking,      Love lures life on.      Show me again the hour      When by the pinnacled tower   We eyed each other and feared futurity! —Yea, to such bodings, broodings, beatings, blanchings, blessings,      Love lures life on.      Show me again just this:      The moment of that kiss   Away from the prancing folk, by the strawberry-tree! —Yea, to such rashness, ratheness, rareness, ripeness, richness,      Love lures life on.

Begun November 1898.

“IN THE SEVENTIES”

“Qui deridetur ab amico suo sicut ego.” – JobIn the seventies I was bearing in my breast,         Penned tight,Certain starry thoughts that threw a magic lightOn the worktimes and the soundless hours of restIn the seventies; aye, I bore them in my breast         Penned tight.In the seventies when my neighbours – even my friend —         Saw me pass,Heads were shaken, and I heard the words, “Alas,For his onward years and name unless he mend!”In the seventies, when my neighbours and my friend      Saw me pass.In the seventies those who met me did not know      Of the visionThat immuned me from the chillings of mis-prisionAnd the damps that choked my goings to and froIn the seventies; yea, those nodders did not know      Of the vision.In the seventies nought could darken or destroy it,      Locked in me,Though as delicate as lamp-worm’s lucency;Neither mist nor murk could weaken or alloy itIn the seventies! – could not darken or destroy it,      Locked in me.

THE PEDIGREE

I         I bent in the deep of night      Over a pedigree the chronicler gave      As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed,The uncurtained panes of my window-square let in the watery light         Of the moon in its old age:And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed   Like a drifting dolphin’s eye seen through a lapping wave.II         So, scanning my sire-sown tree,      And the hieroglyphs of this spouse tied to that,         With offspring mapped below in lineage,         Till the tangles troubled me,The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face   Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage      Enchanting me to gaze again thereat.III         It was a mirror now,      And in it a long perspective I could trace   Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each         All with the kindred look,      Whose names had since been inked down in their place         On the recorder’s book,Generation and generation of my mien, and build, and brow.IV         And then did I divine      That every heave and coil and move I made      Within my brain, and in my mood and speech,         Was in the glass portrayed      As long forestalled by their so making it;   The first of them, the primest fuglemen of my line,Being fogged in far antiqueness past surmise and reason’s reach.V         Said I then, sunk in tone,   “I am merest mimicker and counterfeit! —         Though thinking, I am I,   And what I do I do myself alone.”   – The cynic twist of the page thereat unknitBack to its normal figure, having wrought its purport wry,   The Mage’s mirror left the window-square,And the stained moon and drift retook their places there.

1916.

THIS HEART

A WOMAN’S DREAM

   At midnight, in the room where he lay dead   Whom in his life I had never clearly read,I thought if I could peer into that citadel   His heart, I should at last know full and well   What hereto had been known to him alone,   Despite our long sit-out of years foreflown,“And if,” I said, “I do this for his memory’s sake,   It would not wound him, even if he could wake.”   So I bent over him.  He seemed to smile   With a calm confidence the whole long whileThat I, withdrawing his heart, held it and, bit by bit,   Perused the unguessed things found written on it.   It was inscribed like a terrestrial sphere   With quaint vermiculations close and clear —His graving.  Had I known, would I have risked the stroke   Its reading brought, and my own heart nigh broke!   Yes, there at last, eyes opened, did I see   His whole sincere symmetric history;There were his truth, his simple singlemindedness,   Strained, maybe, by time’s storms, but there no less.   There were the daily deeds from sun to sun   In blindness, but good faith, that he had done;There were regrets, at instances wherein he swerved   (As he conceived) from cherishings I had deserved.   There were old hours all figured down as bliss —   Those spent with me – (how little had I thought this!)There those when, at my absence, whether he slept or waked,   (Though I knew not ’twas so!) his spirit ached.   There that when we were severed, how day dulled   Till time joined us anew, was chronicled:And arguments and battlings in defence of me   That heart recorded clearly and ruddily.   I put it back, and left him as he lay   While pierced the morning pink and then the grayInto each dreary room and corridor around,   Where I shall wait, but his step will not sound.

WHERE THEY LIVED

   Dishevelled leaves creep down   Upon that bank to-day,Some green, some yellow, and some pale brown;   The wet bents bob and sway;The once warm slippery turf is sodden   Where we laughingly sat or lay.   The summerhouse is gone,   Leaving a weedy space;The bushes that veiled it once have grown   Gaunt trees that interlace,Through whose lank limbs I see too clearly   The nakedness of the place.   And where were hills of blue,   Blind drifts of vapour blow,And the names of former dwellers few,   If any, people know,And instead of a voice that called, “Come in, Dears,”   Time calls, “Pass below!”

THE OCCULTATION

When the cloud shut down on the morning shine,   And darkened the sun,I said, “So ended that joy of mine   Years back begun.”But day continued its lustrous roll   In upper air;And did my late irradiate soul   Live on somewhere?

LIFE LAUGHS ONWARD

Rambling I looked for an old abodeWhere, years back, one had lived I knew;Its site a dwelling duly showed,   But it was new.I went where, not so long ago,The sod had riven two breasts asunder;Daisies throve gaily there, as though   No grave were under.I walked along a terrace whereLoud children gambolled in the sun;The figure that had once sat there   Was missed by none.Life laughed and moved on unsubdued,I saw that Old succumbed to Young:’Twas well.  My too regretful mood   Died on my tongue.

THE PEACE-OFFERING

It was but a little thing,Yet I knew it meant to meEase from what had given a stingTo the very birdsinging   Latterly.But I would not welcome it;And for all I then declinedO the regrettings infiniteWhen the night-processions flit   Through the mind!

“SOMETHING TAPPED”

Something tapped on the pane of my room   When there was never a traceOf wind or rain, and I saw in the gloom   My weary Belovéd’s face.“O I am tired of waiting,” she said,   “Night, morn, noon, afternoon;So cold it is in my lonely bed,   And I thought you would join me soon!”I rose and neared the window-glass,   But vanished thence had she:Only a pallid moth, alas,   Tapped at the pane for me.

August 1913.

THE WOUND

I climbed to the crest,   And, fog-festooned,The sun lay west   Like a crimson wound:Like that wound of mine   Of which none knew,For I’d given no sign   That it pierced me through.

A MERRYMAKING IN QUESTION

“I will get a new string for my fiddle,   And call to the neighbours to come,And partners shall dance down the middle   Until the old pewter-wares hum:   And we’ll sip the mead, cyder, and rum!”From the night came the oddest of answers:   A hollow wind, like a bassoon,And headstones all ranged up as dancers,   And cypresses droning a croon,   And gurgoyles that mouthed to the tune.

“I SAID AND SANG HER EXCELLENCE”

(Fickle Lover’s Song)

I said and sang her excellence:   They called it laud undue.      (Have your way, my heart, O!)Yet what was homage far aboveThe plain deserts of my olden Love   Proved verity of my new.“She moves a sylph in picture-land,   Where nothing frosts the air:”      (Have your way, my heart, O!)“To all winged pipers overheadShe is known by shape and song,” I said,   Conscious of licence there.I sang of her in a dim old hall   Dream-built too fancifully,      (Have your way, my heart, O!)But lo, the ripe months chanced to leadMy feet to such a hall indeed,   Where stood the very She.Strange, startling, was it then to learn   I had glanced down unborn time,      (Have your way, my heart, O!)And prophesied, whereby I knewThat which the years had planned to do   In warranty of my rhyme.

By Rushy-Pond.

A JANUARY NIGHT

(1879)

The rain smites more and more,The east wind snarls and sneezes;Through the joints of the quivering door   The water wheezes.The tip of each ivy-shootWrithes on its neighbour’s face;There is some hid dread afoot   That we cannot trace.Is it the spirit astrayOf the man at the house belowWhose coffin they took in to-day?   We do not know.

A KISS

By a wall the stranger now calls his,Was born of old a particular kiss,Without forethought in its genesis;Which in a trice took wing on the air.And where that spot is nothing shows:   There ivy calmly grows,   And no one knows   What a birth was there!That kiss is gone where none can tell —Not even those who felt its spell:It cannot have died; that know we well.Somewhere it pursues its flight,One of a long procession of sounds   Travelling aethereal rounds   Far from earth’s bounds   In the infinite.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT

They came, the brothers, and took two chairs   In their usual quiet way;And for a time we did not think      They had much to say.And they began and talked awhile   Of ordinary things,Till spread that silence in the room      A pent thought brings.And then they said: “The end has come.   Yes: it has come at last.”And we looked down, and knew that day      A spirit had passed.

THE OXEN

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.   “Now they are all on their knees,”An elder said as we sat in a flock   By the embers in hearthside ease.We pictured the meek mild creatures where   They dwelt in their strawy pen,Nor did it occur to one of us there   To doubt they were kneeling then.So fair a fancy few would weave   In these years!  Yet, I feel,If someone said on Christmas Eve,   “Come; see the oxen kneel“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb   Our childhood used to know,”I should go with him in the gloom,   Hoping it might be so.

1915.

THE TRESSES

   “When the air was dampIt made my curls hang slackAs they kissed my neck and backWhile I footed the salt-aired track   I loved to tramp.   “When it was dryThey would roll up crisp and tightAs I went on in the lightOf the sun, which my own sprite   Seemed to outvie.   “Now I am old;And have not one gay curlAs I had when a girlFor dampness to unfurl   Or sun uphold!”

THE PHOTOGRAPH

The flame crept up the portrait line by lineAs it lay on the coals in the silence of night’s profound,   And over the arm’s incline,And along the marge of the silkwork superfine,And gnawed at the delicate bosom’s defenceless round.Then I vented a cry of hurt, and averted my eyes;The spectacle was one that I could not bear,   To my deep and sad surprise;But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtive-wiseTill the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair.“Thank God, she is out of it now!” I said at last,In a great relief of heart when the thing was done   That had set my soul aghast,And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the pastBut the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.She was a woman long hid amid packs of years,She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight,   And the deed that had nigh drawn tearsWas done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears;But I felt as if I had put her to death that night!.* * *– Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive,And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;   Yet – yet – if on earth aliveDid she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive?If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?

ON A HEATH

I could hear a gown-skirt rustling   Before I could see her shape,Rustling through the heather   That wove the common’s drape,On that evening of dark weather   When I hearkened, lips agape.And the town-shine in the distance   Did but baffle here the sight,And then a voice flew forward:   “Dear, is’t you?  I fear the night!”And the herons flapped to norward   In the firs upon my right.There was another looming   Whose life we did not see;There was one stilly blooming   Full nigh to where walked we;There was a shade entombing   All that was bright of me.

AN ANNIVERSARY

It was at the very date to which we have come,   In the month of the matching name,When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum,   Its couch-time at night being the same.And the same path stretched here that people now follow,   And the same stile crossed their way,And beyond the same green hillock and hollow   The same horizon lay;And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness;   But the tree that neighbours the track,And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness,   Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack.And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded   With mosses of many tones,And the garth up afar was not overcrowded   With a multitude of white stones,And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones.

Kingston-Maurward Ewelease.

“BY THE RUNIC STONE”

(Two who became a story)

      By the Runic Stone   They sat, where the grass sloped down,And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown,      Pink-faced, breeze-blown.      Rapt there alone   In the transport of talking soIn such a place, there was nothing to let them know      What hours had flown.      And the die thrown   By them heedlessly there, the dentIt was to cut in their encompassment,      Were, too, unknown.      It might have strown   Their zest with qualms to see,As in a glass, Time toss their history      From zone to zone!

THE PINK FROCK

“O my pretty pink frock,I sha’n’t be able to wear it!Why is he dying just now?   I hardly can bear it!“He might have contrived to live on;But they say there’s no hope whatever:And must I shut myself up,   And go out never?“O my pretty pink frock,Puff-sleeved and accordion-pleated!He might have passed in July,   And not so cheated!”

TRANSFORMATIONS

Portion of this yewIs a man my grandsire knew,Bosomed here at its foot:This branch may be his wife,A ruddy human lifeNow turned to a green shoot.These grasses must be madeOf her who often prayed,Last century, for repose;And the fair girl long agoWhom I often tried to knowMay be entering this rose.So, they are not underground,But as nerves and veins aboundIn the growths of upper air,And they feel the sun and rain,And the energy againThat made them what they were!

IN HER PRECINCTS

Her house looked cold from the foggy lea,And the square of each window a dull black blur      Where showed no stir:Yes, her gloom within at the lack of meSeemed matching mine at the lack of her.The black squares grew to be squares of lightAs the eyeshade swathed the house and lawn,      And viols gave tone;There was glee within.  And I found that nightThe gloom of severance mine alone.

Kingston-Maurward Park.

THE LAST SIGNAL

(Oct. 11, 1886)

A MEMORY OF WILLIAM BARNES   Silently I footed by an uphill road   That led from my abode to a spot yew-boughed;Yellowly the sun sloped low down to westward,      And dark was the east with cloud.   Then, amid the shadow of that livid sad east,   Where the light was least, and a gate stood wide,Something flashed the fire of the sun that was facing it,      Like a brief blaze on that side.   Looking hard and harder I knew what it meant —   The sudden shine sent from the livid east scene;It meant the west mirrored by the coffin of my friend there,      Turning to the road from his green,   To take his last journey forth – he who in his prime   Trudged so many a time from that gate athwart the land!Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way,      As with a wave of his hand.

Winterborne-Came Path.

THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

   “That is a quiet place —That house in the trees with the shady lawn.”“ – If, child, you knew what there goes onYou would not call it a quiet place.Why, a phantom abides there, the last of its race,   And a brain spins there till dawn.”   “But I see nobody there, —Nobody moves about the green,Or wanders the heavy trees between.”“ – Ah, that’s because you do not bearThe visioning powers of souls who dare   To pierce the material screen.   “Morning, noon, and night,Mid those funereal shades that seemThe uncanny scenery of a dream,Figures dance to a mind with sight,And music and laughter like floods of light   Make all the precincts gleam.   “It is a poet’s bower,Through which there pass, in fleet arrays,Long teams of all the years and days,Of joys and sorrows, of earth and heaven,That meet mankind in its ages seven,   An aion in an hour.”

GREAT THINGS

Sweet cyder is a great thing,   A great thing to me,Spinning down to Weymouth town   By Ridgway thirstily,And maid and mistress summoning   Who tend the hostelry:O cyder is a great thing,   A great thing to me!The dance it is a great thing,   A great thing to me,With candles lit and partners fit   For night-long revelry;And going home when day-dawning   Peeps pale upon the lea:O dancing is a great thing,   A great thing to me!Love is, yea, a great thing,   A great thing to me,When, having drawn across the lawn   In darkness silently,A figure flits like one a-wing   Out from the nearest tree:O love is, yes, a great thing,   A great thing to me!Will these be always great things,   Great things to me?.Let it befall that One will call,   “Soul, I have need of thee:”What then?  Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,   Love, and its ecstasy,Will always have been great things,   Great things to me!