Late Lyrics and Earlier, With Many Other Verses

IWhen moiling seems at cease   In the vague void of night-time,   And heaven’s wide roomage stormless   Between the dusk and light-time,   And fear at last is formless,We call the allurement Peace.IIPeace, this hid riot, Change,   This revel of quick-cued mumming,   This never truly being,   This evermore becoming,   This spinner’s wheel onfleeingOutside perception’s range.1917.

“I WAS NOT HE”

(SONG)

   I was not he – the manWho used to pilgrim to your gate,At whose smart step you grew elate,   And rosed, as maidens can,      For a brief span.   It was not I who sangBeside the keys you touched so trueWith note-bent eyes, as if with you   It counted not whence sprang      The voice that rang.   Yet though my destinyIt was to miss your early sweet,You still, when turned to you my feet,   Had sweet enough to be      A prize for me!

THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL

A very West-of-Wessex girl,   As blithe as blithe could be,   Was once well-known to me,And she would laud her native town,   And hope and hope that weMight sometime study up and down   Its charms in company.But never I squired my Wessex girl   In jaunts to Hoe or street   When hearts were high in beat,Nor saw her in the marbled ways   Where market-people meetThat in her bounding early days   Were friendly with her feet.Yet now my West-of-Wessex girl,   When midnight hammers slow   From Andrew’s, blow by blow,As phantom draws me by the hand   To the place – Plymouth Hoe —Where side by side in life, as planned,   We never were to go!Begun in Plymouth, March 1913.

WELCOME HOME

   To my native place   Bent upon returning,   Bosom all day burning   To be where my raceWell were known, ’twas much with meThere to dwell in amity.   Folk had sought their beds,   But I hailed: to view me   Under the moon, out to me   Several pushed their heads,And to each I told my name,Plans, and that therefrom I came.   “Did you?..  Ah, ’tis true   I once heard, back a long time,   Here had spent his young time,   Some such man as you.Good-night.”  The casement closed again,And I was left in the frosty lane.

GOING AND STAYING

IThe moving sun-shapes on the spray,The sparkles where the brook was flowing,Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,These were the things we wished would stay;   But they were going.IISeasons of blankness as of snow,The silent bleed of a world decaying,The moan of multitudes in woe,These were the things we wished would go;   But they were staying.IIIThen we looked closelier at Time,And saw his ghostly arms revolvingTo sweep off woeful things with prime,Things sinister with things sublime   Alike dissolving.

READ BY MOONLIGHT

I paused to read a letter of hers   By the moon’s cold shine,Eyeing it in the tenderest way,And edging it up to catch each ray   Upon her light-penned line.I did not know what years would flow   Of her life’s span and mineEre I read another letter of hers   By the moon’s cold shine!I chance now on the last of hers,   By the moon’s cold shine;It is the one remaining pageOut of the many shallow and sage   Whereto she set her sign.Who could foresee there were to be   Such letters of pain and pineEre I should read this last of hers   By the moon’s cold shine!

AT A HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD

SOMETIME THE DWELLING OF JOHN KEATS

O poet, come you haunting hereWhere streets have stolen up all around,And never a nightingale pours one   Full-throated sound?Drawn from your drowse by the Seven famed Hills,Thought you to find all just the sameHere shining, as in hours of old,   If you but came?What will you do in your surpriseAt seeing that changes wrought in RomeAre wrought yet more on the misty slope   One time your home?Will you wake wind-wafts on these stairs?Swing the doors open noisily?Show as an umbraged ghost beside   Your ancient tree?Or will you, softening, the whileYou further and yet further look,Learn that a laggard few would fain   Preserve your nook?.– Where the Piazza steps incline,And catch late light at eventide,I once stood, in that Rome, and thought,   “’Twas here he died.”I drew to a violet-sprinkled spot,Where day and night a pyramid keepsUplifted its white hand, and said,   “’Tis there he sleeps.”Pleasanter now it is to holdThat here, where sang he, more of himRemains than where he, tuneless, cold,   Passed to the dim. July 1920.

A WOMAN’S FANCY

“Ah Madam; you’ve indeed come back here?   ’Twas sad – your husband’s so swift death,And you away!  You shouldn’t have left him:      It hastened his last breath.”“Dame, I am not the lady you think me;   I know not her, nor know her name;I’ve come to lodge here – a friendless woman;      My health my only aim.”She came; she lodged.  Wherever she rambled   They held her as no other thanThe lady named; and told how her husband      Had died a forsaken man.So often did they call her thuswise   Mistakenly, by that man’s name,So much did they declare about him,      That his past form and fameGrew on her, till she pitied his sorrow   As if she truly had been the cause —Yea, his deserter; and came to wonder      What mould of man he was.“Tell me my history!” would exclaim she;   “Our history,” she said mournfully.“But you know, surely, Ma’am?” they would answer,Much in perplexity.Curious, she crept to his grave one evening,   And a second time in the dusk of the morrow;Then a third time, with crescent emotion      Like a bereaved wife’s sorrow.No gravestone rose by the rounded hillock;   – “I marvel why this is?” she said.– “He had no kindred, Ma’am, but you near.”      – She set a stone at his head.She learnt to dream of him, and told them:   “In slumber often uprises he,And says: ‘I am joyed that, after all, Dear,      You’ve not deserted me!”At length died too this kinless woman,   As he had died she had grown to crave;And at her dying she besought them      To bury her in his grave.Such said, she had paused; until she added:   “Call me by his name on the stone,As I were, first to last, his dearest,      Not she who left him lone!”And this they did.  And so it became there   That, by the strength of a tender whim,The stranger was she who bore his name there,      Not she who wedded him.

HER SONG

I sang that song on Sunday,   To witch an idle while,I sang that song on Monday,   As fittest to beguile;I sang it as the year outwore,      And the new slid in;I thought not what might shape before   Another would begin.I sang that song in summer,   All unforeknowingly,To him as a new-comer   From regions strange to me:I sang it when in afteryears      The shades stretched out,And paths were faint; and flocking fears   Brought cup-eyed care and doubt.Sings he that song on Sundays   In some dim land afar,On Saturdays, or Mondays,   As when the evening starGlimpsed in upon his bending face      And my hanging hair,And time untouched me with a trace   Of soul-smart or despair?

A WET AUGUST

Nine drops of water bead the jessamine,And nine-and-ninety smear the stones and tiles:– ’Twas not so in that August – full-rayed, fine —When we lived out-of-doors, sang songs, strode miles.Or was there then no noted radiancyOf summer?  Were dun clouds, a dribbling bough,Gilt over by the light I bore in me,And was the waste world just the same as now?It can have been so: yea, that threateningsOf coming down-drip on the sunless gray,By the then possibilities in thingsWere wrought more bright than brightest skies to-day.1920.

THE DISSEMBLERS

“It was not you I came to please,   Only myself,” flipped she;“I like this spot of phantasies,   And thought you far from me.”But O, he was the secret spell   That led her to the lea!“It was not she who shaped my ways,   Or works, or thoughts,” he said.“I scarcely marked her living days,   Or missed her much when dead.”But O, his joyance knew its knell   When daisies hid her head!

TO A LADY PLAYING AND SINGING IN THE MORNING

   Joyful lady, sing!And I will lurk here listening,Though nought be done, and nought begun,And work-hours swift are scurrying.   Sing, O lady, still!Aye, I will wait each note you trill,Though duties due that press to doThis whole day long I unfulfil.   “ – It is an evening tune;One not designed to waste the noon,”You say.  I know: time bids me go —For daytide passes too, too soon!   But let indulgence be,This once, to my rash ecstasy:When sounds nowhere that carolled airMy idled morn may comfort me!

“A MAN WAS DRAWING NEAR TO ME”

On that gray night of mournful drone,A part from aught to hear, to see,I dreamt not that from shires unknown   In gloom, alone,   By Halworthy,A man was drawing near to me.I’d no concern at anything,No sense of coming pull-heart play;Yet, under the silent outspreading   Of even’s wing   Where Otterham lay,A man was riding up my way.I thought of nobody – not of one,But only of trifles – legends, ghosts —Though, on the moorland dim and dun   That travellers shun   About these coasts,The man had passed Tresparret Posts.There was no light at all inland,Only the seaward pharos-fire,Nothing to let me understand   That hard at hand   By Hennett ByreThe man was getting nigh and nigher.There was a rumble at the door,A draught disturbed the drapery,And but a minute passed before,   With gaze that bore   My destiny,The man revealed himself to me.

THE STRANGE HOUSE

(MAX GATE, A.D. 2000)

“I hear the piano playing —   Just as a ghost might play.”“ – O, but what are you saying?   There’s no piano to-day;Their old one was sold and broken;   Years past it went amiss.”“ – I heard it, or shouldn’t have spoken:      A strange house, this!“I catch some undertone here,   From some one out of sight.”“ – Impossible; we are alone here,   And shall be through the night.”“ – The parlour-door – what stirred it?”   “ – No one: no soul’s in range.”“ – But, anyhow, I heard it,      And it seems strange!“Seek my own room I cannot —   A figure is on the stair!”“ – What figure?  Nay, I scan not   Any one lingering there.A bough outside is waving,   And that’s its shade by the moon.”“ – Well, all is strange!  I am craving      Strength to leave soon.”“ – Ah, maybe you’ve some vision   Of showings beyond our sphere;Some sight, sense, intuition   Of what once happened here?The house is old; they’ve hinted   It once held two love-thralls,And they may have imprinted      Their dreams on its walls?“They were – I think ’twas told me —   Queer in their works and ways;The teller would often hold me   With weird tales of those days.Some folk can not abide here,   But we – we do not careWho loved, laughed, wept, or died here,      Knew joy, or despair.”

“AS ’TWERE TO-NIGHT”

(SONG)

As ’twere to-night, in the brief space   Of a far eventime,   My spirit rang achimeAt vision of a girl of grace;As ’twere to-night, in the brief space   Of a far eventime.As ’twere at noontide of to-morrow   I airily walked and talked,   And wondered as I walkedWhat it could mean, this soar from sorrow;As ’twere at noontide of to-morrow   I airily walked and talked.As ’twere at waning of this week   Broke a new life on me;   Trancings of bliss to beIn some dim dear land soon to seek;As ’twere at waning of this week   Broke a new life on me!

THE CONTRETEMPS

   A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,      And we clasped, and almost kissed;   But she was not the woman whom   I had promised to meet in the thawing brumeOn that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst.   So loosening from me swift she said:      “O why, why feign to be   The one I had meant! – to whom I have sped   To fly with, being so sorrily wed!”– ’Twas thus and thus that she upbraided me.   My assignation had struck upon      Some others’ like it, I found.   And her lover rose on the night anon;   And then her husband entered onThe lamplit, snowflaked, sloppiness around.   “Take her and welcome, man!” he cried:      “I wash my hands of her.   I’ll find me twice as good a bride!”   – All this to me, whom he had eyed,Plainly, as his wife’s planned deliverer.   And next the lover: “Little I knew,      Madam, you had a third!   Kissing here in my very view!”   – Husband and lover then withdrew.I let them; and I told them not they erred.   Why not?  Well, there faced she and I —      Two strangers who’d kissed, or near,   Chancewise.  To see stand weeping by   A woman once embraced, will tryThe tension of a man the most austere.   So it began; and I was young,      She pretty, by the lamp,   As flakes came waltzing down among   The waves of her clinging hair, that hungHeavily on her temples, dark and damp.   And there alone still stood we two;      She one cast off for me,   Or so it seemed: while night ondrew,   Forcing a parley what should doWe twain hearts caught in one catastrophe.   In stranded souls a common strait      Wakes latencies unknown,   Whose impulse may precipitate   A life-long leap.  The hour was late,And there was the Jersey boat with its funnel agroan.   “Is wary walking worth much pother?”      It grunted, as still it stayed.   “One pairing is as good as another   Where all is venture!  Take each other,And scrap the oaths that you have aforetime made.”.   – Of the four involved there walks but one      On earth at this late day.   And what of the chapter so begun?   In that odd complex what was done?   Well; happiness comes in full to none:Let peace lie on lulled lips: I will not say.Weymouth.

A GENTLEMAN’S EPITAPH ON HIMSELF AND A LADY, WHO WERE BURIED TOGETHER

I dwelt in the shade of a city,   She far by the sea,With folk perhaps good, gracious, witty;   But never with me.Her form on the ballroom’s smooth flooring   I never once met,To guide her with accents adoring   Through Weippert’s “First Set.” 1I spent my life’s seasons with pale ones   In Vanity Fair,And she enjoyed hers among hale ones   In salt-smelling air.Maybe she had eyes of deep colour,   Maybe they were blue,Maybe as she aged they got duller;   That never I knew.She may have had lips like the coral,   But I never kissed them,Saw pouting, nor curling in quarrel,   Nor sought for, nor missed them.Not a word passed of love all our lifetime,   Between us, nor thrill;We’d never a husband-and-wife time,   For good or for ill.Yet as one dust, through bleak days and vernal,   Lie I and lies she,This never-known lady, eternal   Companion to me!

THE OLD GOWN

(SONG)

I have seen her in gowns the brightest,   Of azure, green, and red,And in the simplest, whitest,   Muslined from heel to head;I have watched her walking, riding,   Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,Or in fixed thought abiding   By the foam-fingered sea.In woodlands I have known her,   When boughs were mourning loud,In the rain-reek she has shown her   Wild-haired and watery-browed.And once or twice she has cast me   As she pomped along the streetCourt-clad, ere quite she had passed me,   A glance from her chariot-seat.But in my memoried passion   For evermore stands sheIn the gown of fading fashion   She wore that night when we,Doomed long to part, assembled   In the snug small room; yea, whenShe sang with lips that trembled,   “Shall I see his face again?”

A NIGHT IN NOVEMBER

I marked when the weather changed,And the panes began to quake,And the winds rose up and ranged,That night, lying half-awake.Dead leaves blew into my room,And alighted upon my bed,And a tree declared to the gloomIts sorrow that they were shed.One leaf of them touched my hand,And I thought that it was youThere stood as you used to stand,And saying at last you knew!(?) 1913.

A DUETTIST TO HER PIANOFORTE

SONG OF SILENCE

(E. L. H. – H. C. H.)

Since every sound moves memories,   How can I play youJust as I might if you raised no scene,By your ivory rows, of a form betweenMy vision and your time-worn sheen,      As when each day youAnswered our fingers with ecstasy?So it’s hushed, hushed, hushed, you are for me!And as I am doomed to counterchord   Her notes no moreIn those old things I used to know,In a fashion, when we practised so,“Good-night! – Good-bye!” to your pleated show      Of silk, now hoar,Each nodding hammer, and pedal and key,For dead, dead, dead, you are to me!I fain would second her, strike to her stroke,   As when she was by,Aye, even from the ancient clamorous “FallOf Paris,” or “Battle of Prague” withal,To the “Roving Minstrels,” or “Elfin Call”      Sung soft as a sigh:But upping ghosts press achefully,And mute, mute, mute, you are for me!Should I fling your polyphones, plaints, and quavers   Afresh on the air,Too quick would the small white shapes be hereOf the fellow twain of hands so dear;And a black-tressed profile, and pale smooth ear;      – Then how shall I bearSuch heavily-haunted harmony?Nay: hushed, hushed, hushed you are for me!

“WHERE THREE ROADS JOINED”

Where three roads joined it was green and fair,And over a gate was the sun-glazed sea,And life laughed sweet when I halted there;Yet there I never again would be.I am sure those branchways are brooding now,With a wistful blankness upon their face,While the few mute passengers notice howSpectre-beridden is the place;Which nightly sighs like a laden soul,And grieves that a pair, in bliss for a spellNot far from thence, should have let it rollAway from them down a plumbless wellWhile the phasm of him who fared starts up,And of her who was waiting him sobs from near,As they haunt there and drink the wormwood cupThey filled for themselves when their sky was clear.Yes, I see those roads – now rutted and bare,While over the gate is no sun-glazed sea;And though life laughed when I halted there,It is where I never again would be.

“AND THERE WAS A GREAT CALM”

(ON THE SIGNING OF THE ARMISTICE, Nov. 11, 1918)

IThere had been years of Passion – scorching, cold,And much Despair, and Anger heaving high,Care whitely watching, Sorrows manifold,Among the young, among the weak and old,And the pensive Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”IIMen had not paused to answer.  Foes distraughtPierced the thinned peoples in a brute-like blindness,Philosophies that sages long had taught,And Selflessness, were as an unknown thought,And “Hell!” and “Shell!” were yapped at Lovingkindness.IIIThe feeble folk at home had grown full-usedTo “dug-outs,” “snipers,” “Huns,” from the war-adeptIn the mornings heard, and at evetides perused;To day – dreamt men in millions, when they mused —To nightmare-men in millions when they slept.IVWaking to wish existence timeless, null,Sirius they watched above where armies fell;He seemed to check his flapping when, in the lullOf night a boom came thencewise, like the dullPlunge of a stone dropped into some deep well.VSo, when old hopes that earth was bettering slowlyWere dead and damned, there sounded “War is done!”One morrow.  Said the bereft, and meek, and lowly,“Will men some day be given to grace? yea, wholly,And in good sooth, as our dreams used to run?”VIBreathless they paused.  Out there men raised their glanceTo where had stood those poplars lank and lopped,As they had raised it through the four years’ danceOf Death in the now familiar flats of France;And murmured, “Strange, this!  How?  All firing stopped?”VIIAye; all was hushed.  The about-to-fire fired not,The aimed-at moved away in trance-lipped song.One checkless regiment slung a clinching shotAnd turned.  The Spirit of Irony smirked out, “What?Spoil peradventures woven of Rage and Wrong?”VIIIThenceforth no flying fires inflamed the gray,No hurtlings shook the dewdrop from the thorn,No moan perplexed the mute bird on the spray;Worn horses mused: “We are not whipped to-day”;No weft-winged engines blurred the moon’s thin horn.IXCalm fell.  From Heaven distilled a clemency;There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;Some could, some could not, shake off misery:The Sinister Spirit sneered: “It had to be!”And again the Spirit of Pity whispered, “Why?”

HAUNTING FINGERS

A PHANTASY IN A MUSEUM OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

         “Are you awake,      Comrades, this silent night?   Well ’twere if all of our glossy gluey makeLay in the damp without, and fell to fragments quite!”         “O viol, my friend,      I watch, though Phosphor nears,   And I fain would drowse away to its utter endThis dumb dark stowage after our loud melodious years!”And they felt past handlers clutch them,   Though none was in the room,Old players’ dead fingers touch them,      Shrunk in the tomb.         “’Cello, good mate,      You speak my mind as yours:   Doomed to this voiceless, crippled, corpselike state,Who, dear to famed Amphion, trapped here, long endures?”         “Once I could thrill      The populace through and through,   Wake them to passioned pulsings past their will.”.(A contra-basso spake so, and the rest sighed anew.)And they felt old muscles travel   Over their tense contours,And with long skill unravel      Cunningest scores.         “The tender pat      Of her aery finger-tips   Upon me daily – I rejoiced thereat!”(Thuswise a harpsicord, as from dampered lips.)         “My keys’ white shine,      Now sallow, met a hand   Even whiter…  Tones of hers fell forth with mineIn sowings of sound so sweet no lover could withstand!”And its clavier was filmed with fingers   Like tapering flames – wan, cold —Or the nebulous light that lingers      In charnel mould.         “Gayer than most      Was I,” reverbed a drum;   “The regiments, marchings, throngs, hurrahs!  What a hostI stirred – even when crape mufflings gagged me well-nigh dumb!”         Trilled an aged viol:      “Much tune have I set free   To spur the dance, since my first timid trialWhere I had birth – far hence, in sun-swept Italy!”And he feels apt touches on him   From those that pressed him then;Who seem with their glance to con him,      Saying, “Not again!”         “A holy calm,”      Mourned a shawm’s voice subdued,   “Steeped my Cecilian rhythms when hymn and psalmPoured from devout souls met in Sabbath sanctitude.”         “I faced the sock      Nightly,” twanged a sick lyre,   “Over ranked lights!  O charm of life in mock,O scenes that fed love, hope, wit, rapture, mirth, desire!”Thus they, till each past player   Stroked thinner and more thin,And the morning sky grew grayer      And day crawled in.

THE WOMAN I MET

A stranger, I threaded sunken-hearted      A lamp-lit crowd;And anon there passed me a soul departed,      Who mutely bowed.In my far-off youthful years I had met her,Full-pulsed; but now, no more life’s debtor,      Onward she slid   In a shroud that furs half-hid.“Why do you trouble me, dead woman,      Trouble me;You whom I knew when warm and human?      – How it beThat you quitted earth and are yet upon itIs, to any who ponder on it,      Past being read!”   “Still, it is so,” she said.“These were my haunts in my olden sprightly      Hours of breath;Here I went tempting frail youth nightly      To their death;But you deemed me chaste – me, a tinselled sinner!How thought you one with pureness in her      Could pace this street   Eyeing some man to greet?“Well; your very simplicity made me love you      Mid such town dross,Till I set not Heaven itself above you,      Who grew my Cross;For you’d only nod, despite how I sighed for you;So you tortured me, who fain would have died for you!      – What I suffered then   Would have paid for the sins of ten!“Thus went the days.  I feared you despised me      To fling me a nodEach time, no more: till love chastised me      As with a rodThat a fresh bland boy of no assuranceShould fire me with passion beyond endurance,      While others all   I hated, and loathed their call.“I said: ‘It is his mother’s spirit      Hovering aroundTo shield him, maybe!’  I used to fear it,      As still I foundMy beauty left no least impression,And remnants of pride withheld confession      Of my true trade   By speaking; so I delayed.“I said: ‘Perhaps with a costly flower      He’ll be beguiled.’I held it, in passing you one late hour,      To your face: you smiled,Keeping step with the throng; though you did not see thereA single one that rivalled me there!.      Well: it’s all past.   I died in the Lock at last.”So walked the dead and I together      The quick among,Elbowing our kind of every feather      Slowly and long;Yea, long and slowly.  That a phantom should stalk thereWith me seemed nothing strange, and talk there      That winter night   By flaming jets of light.She showed me Juans who feared their call-time,      Guessing their lot;She showed me her sort that cursed their fall-time,      And that did not.Till suddenly murmured she: “Now, tell me,Why asked you never, ere death befell me,      To have my love,   Much as I dreamt thereof?”I could not answer.  And she, well weeting      All in my heart,Said: “God your guardian kept our fleeting      Forms apart!”Sighing and drawing her furs around herOver the shroud that tightly bound her,      With wafts as from clay   She turned and thinned away.London, 1918.