XXXII Ballades in Blue China [1885]

BALLADE OF RABBITS AND HARES

In a vision a Sportsman forlornI beheld, in an isle of the West,And his purple and linen were torn,And he wailed, as he beat on his breast, —“My people are men dispossessed,They have vanished, and nobody cares, —They have passed to the place of their rest,They have gone with the Rabbits and Hares!“Oh, why was a gentleman bornWith a title, a name, and a crest,Where the Rabbit is treated with scorn,And the Hare is accounted a pest,By the lumbering farmer repressed,With his dogs, and his guns, and his snares?But my fathers have ended their quest,They have gone with the Rabbits and Hares!“Ah, woe for the clover and cornThat the Rabbit was wont to infest!Ah, woe for my youth in its morn,When the farmer obeyed my behest!Happy days! like a wandering guestYe have fled, ye are sped unawares;But my fathers are now with the blest,They have gone with the Rabbits and Hares!”ENVOYPrince, mourn for a nation oppressed,And absorbed in her stocks and her shares,And bereaved of her bravest and best —They have gone with the Rabbits and Hares!

VALENTINE IN FORM OF BALLADE

The soft wind from the south land sped,He set his strength to blow,From forests where Adonis bled,And lily flowers a-row:He crossed the straits like streams that flow,The ocean dark as wine,To my true love to whisper low,To be your Valentine.The Spring half-raised her drowsy head,Besprent with drifted snow,“I’ll send an April day,” she said,“To lands of wintry woe.”He came, – the winter’s overthrowWith showers that sing and shine,Pied daisies round your path to strow,To be your Valentine.Where sands of Egypt, swart and red,’Neath suns Egyptian glow,In places of the princely dead,By the Nile’s overflow,The swallow preened her wings to go,And for the North did pine,And fain would brave the frost her foe,To be your Valentine.ENVOYSpring, Swallow, South Wind, even so,Their various voice combine;But that they crave on me bestow,To be your Valentine.

BALLADE OF OLD PLAYS

(Les Œuvres de Monsieur Molière. A Paris,chez Louys Billaine, à la PalmeM.D.C.LXVI.)LA COURWhen these Old Plays were new, the King,Beside the Cardinal’s chair,Applauded, ’mid the courtly ring,The verses of Molière;Point-lace was then the only wear,Old Corneille came to woo,And bright Du Parc was young and fair,When these Old Plays were new!LA COMÉDIEHow shrill the butcher’s cat-calls ring,How loud the lackeys swear!Black pipe-bowls on the stage they fling,At Brécourt, fuming there!The Porter’s stabbed! a MousquetaireBreaks in with noisy crew —’Twas all a commonplace affairWhen these Old Plays were new!LA VILLEWhen these Old Plays were new!  They bringA host of phantoms rare:Old jests that float, old jibes that sting,Old faces peaked with care:Ménage’s smirk, de Visé’s stare,The thefts of Jean Ribou, —3Ah, publishers were hard to bearWhen these Old Plays were new.ENVOYGhosts, at your Poet’s word ye dareTo break Death’s dungeons through,And frisk, as in that golden air,When these Old Plays were new!

BALLADE OF HIS BOOKS

Here stand my books, line upon lineThey reach the roof, and row by row,They speak of faded tastes of mine,And things I did, but do not, know:Old school books, useless long ago,Old Logics, where the spirit, railed in,Could scarcely answer “yes” or “no” —The many things I’ve tried and failed in!Here’s Villon, in morocco fine,(The Poet starved, in mud and snow,)Glatigny does not crave to dine,And René’s tears forget to flow.And here’s a work by Mrs. Crowe,With hosts of ghosts and bogies jailed in;Ah, all my ghosts have gone below —The many things I’ve tried and failed in!He’s touched, this mouldy Greek divine,The Princess D’Este’s hand of snow;And here the arms of D’Hoym shine,And there’s a tear-bestained Rousseau:Here’s Carlyle shrieking “woe on woe”(The first edition, this, he wailed in);I once believed in him – but oh,The many things I’ve tried and failed in!ENVOYPrince, tastes may differ; mine and thineQuite other balances are scaled in;May you succeed, though I repine —“The many things I’ve tried and failed in!”

BALLADE OF ÆSTHETIC ADJECTIVES

There be “subtle” and “sweet,” that are bad ones to beat,There are “lives unlovely,” and “souls astray;”There is much to be done yet with “moody” and “meet,”And “ghastly,” and “grimly,” and “gaunt,” and “grey;”We should ever be “blithesome,” but never be gay,And “splendid” is suited to “summer” and “sea;”“Consummate,” they say, is enjoying its day, —“Intense” is the adjective dearest to me!The Snows and the Rose they are “windy” and “fleet,”And “frantic” and “faint” are Delight and Dismay;Yea, “sanguine,” it seems, as the juice of the beet,Are “the hands of the King” in a general way:There be loves that quicken, and sicken, and slay;“Supreme” is the song of the Bard of the free;But of adjectives all that I name in my lay,“Intense” is the adjective dearest to me!The Matron intense – let us sit at her feet,And pelt her with lilies as long as we may;The Maiden intense – is not always discreet;But the Singer intense, in his “singing array,”Will win all the world with his roundelay:While “blithe” birds carol from tree to tree,And Art unto Nature doth simper, and say, —“‘Intense’ is the adjective dearest to me!”ENVOYPrince, it is surely as good as a playTo mark how the poets and painters agree;But of plumage æsthetic that feathers the jay,“Intense” is the adjective dearest to me!

BALLADE OF THE PLEASED BARD

They call me “dull,” “affected,” “tame;”My Muse “has neither voice nor wing;”My prose (though lucrative) is “lame,”My satires, “wasps without the sting.”The Critic thus – Opprobrious thing! —No more I heed or hear his chaff,Nor note the ink that he may sling —A Lady wants my autograph!All heedless of the common blame,My muse her random rhymes will string;The Boers may shoot, the Irish “schame,”The world and all its woes go swing!My heart has ceased from sorrowing,I grasp Apollo’s laurell’d staff,And cry aloud, like anything, —A Lady wants my autograph!Oh Flatt’ry, soft, delicious flame!Oh, fairer than the flowers of Spring,These blossoms of the noblest nameA lady’s good enough to fling!Ah, tie them with a silver string,Crown, crown the bowl with shandygaff,And shout, till all the welkin ring, —“A Lady wants my autograph!”ENVOYPrincess, my lips can never frameMy whole acknowledgments, or half;For this, I feel, at last, is fame —A Lady wants my autograph!

BALLADE FOR A BABY

(FROM “THE GARLAND OF RACHEL.”)’Tis distance lends, the poet says,Enchantment to the view,And this makes possible the praiseWhich I bestow on you.For babies rosy-pink of hueI do not always care,But distance paints the mountains blue,And Rachel always fair.Ah Time, speed on her flying days,Bring back my youth that flew,That she may listen to my laysWhere Merton stock-doves coo;That I may sing afresh, anew,My songs, now faint and rare,Time, make me always twenty-two,And Rachel always fair.Nay, long ago, down dusky waysFled Cupid and his crew;Life brings not back the morning haze,The dawning and the dew;And other lips must sigh and sue,And younger lovers dareTo hint that Love is always true,And Rachel always fair.ENVOYPrincess, let Age bid Youth adieu,Adieu to this despair,To me, who thus despairing woo,And Rachel always fair.

BALLADE AMOUREUSE

AFTER FROISSARTNot Jason nor Medea wise,I crave to see, nor win much lore,Nor list to Orpheus’ minstrelsies;Nor Her’cles would I see, that o’erThe wide world roamed from shore to shore;Nor, by St. James, Penelope, —Nor pure Lucrece, such wrong that bore:To see my Love suffices me!Virgil and Cato, no man viesWith them in wealth of clerkly store;I would not see them with mine eyes;Nor him that sailed, sans sail nor oar,Across the barren sea and hoar,And all for love of his ladye;Nor pearl nor sapphire takes me more:To see my Love suffices me!I heed not Pegasus, that fliesAs swift as shafts the bowmen pour;Nor famed Pygmalion’s artifice,Whereof the like was ne’er before;Nor Oléus, that drank of yoreThe salt wave of the whole great sea:Why? dost thou ask?  ’Tis as I swore —To see my Love suffices me!

BALLADE OF QUEEN ANNE

The modish Airs,The Tansey Brew,The Swains and FairsIn curtained Pew;Nymphs Kneller drew,Books Bentley read, —Who knows them, who?Queen Anne is dead!We buy her Chairs,Her China blue,Her red-brick SquaresWe build anew;But ah! we rue,When all is said,The tale o’er-true,Queen Anne is dead!Now Bulls and Bears,A ruffling Crew,With Stocks and Shares,With Turk and Jew,Go bubbling throughThe Town ill-bred:The World’s askew,Queen Anne is dead!ENVOYFriend, praise the new;The old is fled:Vivat Frou-Frou!Queen Anne is dead!

BALLADE OF BLIND LOVE

(AFTER LYONNET DE COISMES.)Who have loved and ceased to love, forgetThat ever they loved in their lives, they say;Only remember the fever and fret,And the pain of Love, that was all his pay;All the delight of him passes awayFrom hearts that hoped, and from lips that met —Too late did I love you, my love, and yetI shall never forget till my dying day.Too late were we ‘ware of the secret netThat meshes the feet in the flowers that stray;There were we taken and snared, Lisette,In the dungeon of La Fausse Amistié;Help was there none in the wide world’s fray,Joy was there none in the gift and the debt;Too late we knew it, too long regret —I shall never forget till my dying day!We must live our lives, though the sun be set,Must meet in the masque where parts we play,Must cross in the maze of Life’s minuet;Our yea is yea, and our nay is nay:But while snows of winter or flowers of MayAre the sad year’s shroud or coronet,In the season of rose or of violet,I shall never forget till my dying day!ENVOYQueen, when the clay is my coverlet,When I am dead, and when you are grey,Vow, where the grass of the grave is wet,“I shall never forget till my dying day!”

BALLADE OF HIS CHOICE OF A SEPULCHRE

Here I’d come when weariest!   Here the breastOf the Windburg’s tufted overDeep with bracken; here his crest   Takes the west,Where the wide-winged hawk doth hover.Silent here are lark and plover;   In the coverDeep below the cushat bestLoves his mate, and croons above her   O’er their nest,Where the wide-winged hawk doth hover.Bring me here, Life’s tired-out guest,   To the blestBed that waits the weary rover,Here should failure be confessed;   Ends my quest,Where the wide-winged hawk doth hover!ENVOYFriend, or stranger kind, or lover,Ah, fulfil a last behest,   Let me restWhere the wide-winged hawk doth hover!

DIZAIN

As, to the pipe, with rhythmic feetIn windings of some old-world dance,The smiling couples cross and meet,Join hands, and then in line advance,So, to these fair old tunes of France,Through all their maze of to-and-fro,The light-heeled numbers laughing go,Retreat, return, and ere they flee,One moment pause in panting row,And seem to say – Vos plaudite!A. D.

VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS

Oronte —Ce ne sont point de ces grands vers pompeux,

Mais de petits vers!

“Le Misanthrope,” Acte i., Sc. 2.

A PORTRAIT OF 1783

Your hair and chin are like the hairAnd chin Burne-Jones’s ladies wear;You were unfashionably fair         In ’83;And sad you were when girls are gay,You read a book about Le vraiMérite de l’homme, alone in May.         What can it be,Le vrai mérite de l’homme?  Not gold,Not titles that are bought and sold,Not wit that flashes and is cold,         But Virtue merely!Instructed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau(And Jean-Jacques, surely, ought to know),You bade the crowd of foplings go,         You glanced severely,Dreaming beneath the spreading shadeOf ‘that vast hat the Graces made;’ 4So Rouget sang – while yet he played         With courtly rhyme,And hymned great Doisi’s red perruque,And Nice’s eyes, and Zulmé’s look,And dead canaries, ere he shook         The sultry timeWith strains like thunder.  Loud and lowMethinks I hear the murmur grow,The tramp of men that come and go         With fire and sword.They war against the quick and dead,Their flying feet are dashed with red,As theirs the vintaging that tread         Before the Lord.O head unfashionably fair,What end was thine, for all thy care?We only see thee dreaming there:         We cannot seeThe breaking of thy vision, whenThe Rights of Man were lords of men,When virtue won her own again         In ’93.

THE MOON’S MINION

(FROM THE PROSE OF C. BAUDELAIRE.)Thine eyes are like the sea, my dear,   The wand’ring waters, green and grey;Thine eyes are wonderful and clear,   And deep, and deadly, even as they;The spirit of the changeful sea   Informs thine eyes at night and noon,She sways the tides, and the heart of thee,   The mystic, sad, capricious Moon!The Moon came down the shining stair   Of clouds that fleck the summer sky,She kissed thee, saying, “Child, be fair,   And madden men’s hearts, even as I;Thou shalt love all things strange and sweet,   That know me and are known of me;The lover thou shalt never meet,   The land where thou shalt never be!”She held thee in her chill embrace,   She kissed thee with cold lips divine,She left her pallor on thy face,   That mystic ivory face of thine;And now I sit beside thy feet,   And all my heart is far from thee,Dreaming of her I shall not meet,   And of the land I shall not see!

IN ITHACA

“And now am I greatly repenting that ever I left my life with thee, and the immortality thou didst promise me.” —Letter of Odysseus to Calypso. Luciani Vera Historia.

’Tis thought Odysseus when the strife was o’erWith all the waves and wars, a weary while,Grew restless in his disenchanted isle,And still would watch the sunset, from the shore,Go down the ways of gold, and evermoreHis sad heart followed after, mile on mile,Back to the Goddess of the magic wile,Calypso, and the love that was of yore.Thou too, thy haven gained, must turn thee yetTo look across the sad and stormy space,Years of a youth as bitter as the sea,Ah, with a heavy heart, and eyelids wet,Because, within a fair forsaken placeThe life that might have been is lost to thee.

HOMER

Homer, thy song men liken to the sea   With all the notes of music in its tone,   With tides that wash the dim dominionOf Hades, and light waves that laugh in gleeAround the isles enchanted; nay, to me   Thy verse seems as the River of source unknown   That glasses Egypt’s temples overthrownIn his sky-nurtured stream, eternally.No wiser we than men of heretofore   To find thy sacred fountains guarded fast;Enough, thy flood makes green our human shore,   As Nilus Egypt, rolling down his vastHis fertile flood, that murmurs evermore   Of gods dethroned, and empires in the past.

THE BURIAL OF MOLIÈRE

(AFTER J. TRUFFIER.)Dead – he is dead!  The rouge has left a trace   On that thin cheek where shone, perchance, a tear,   Even while the people laughed that held him dearBut yesterday.  He died, – and not in grace,And many a black-robed caitiff starts apace   To slander him whose Tartuffe made them fear,   And gold must win a passage for his bier,And bribe the crowd that guards his resting-place.Ah, Molière, for that last time of all,   Man’s hatred broke upon thee, and went by,And did but make more fair thy funeral.   Though in the dark they hid thee stealthily,Thy coffin had the cope of night for pall,   For torch, the stars along the windy sky!

BION

The wail of Moschus on the mountains crying   The Muses heard, and loved it long ago;They heard the hollows of the hills replying,   They heard the weeping water’s overflow;They winged the sacred strain – the song undying,   The song that all about the world must go, —When poets for a poet dead are sighing,   The minstrels for a minstrel friend laid low.And dirge to dirge that answers, and the weeping   For Adonais by the summer sea,The plaints for Lycidas, and Thyrsis (sleeping   Far from ‘the forest ground called Thessaly’),These hold thy memory, Bion, in their keeping,   And are but echoes of the moan for thee.

SPRING

(AFTER MELEAGER.)Now the bright crocus flames, and now   The slim narcissus takes the rain,And, straying o’er the mountain’s brow,   The daffodilies bud again.   The thousand blossoms wax and waneOn wold, and heath, and fragrant bough,But fairer than the flowers art thou,   Than any growth of hill or plain.Ye gardens, cast your leafy crown,That my Love’s feet may tread it down,   Like lilies on the lilies set;My Love, whose lips are softer farThan drowsy poppy petals are,   And sweeter than the violet!

BEFORE THE SNOW

(AFTER ALBERT GLATIGNY.)The winter is upon us, not the snow,   The hills are etched on the horizon bare,   The skies are iron grey, a bitter air,The meagre cloudlets shudder to and fro.One yellow leaf the listless wind doth blow,   Like some strange butterfly, unclassed and rare.   Your footsteps ring in frozen alleys, whereThe black trees seem to shiver as you go.Beyond lie church and steeple, with their old   And rusty vanes that rattle as they veer,A sharper gust would shake them from their hold,   Yet up that path, in summer of the year,And past that melancholy pile we strolled   To pluck wild strawberries, with merry cheer.

VILLANELLE

TO LUCIAApollo left the golden Muse   And shepherded a mortal’s sheep,Theocritus of Syracuse!To mock the giant swain that woo’s   The sea-nymph in the sunny deep,Apollo left the golden Muse.Afield he drove his lambs and ewes,   Where Milon and where Battus reap,Theocritus of Syracuse!To watch thy tunny-fishers cruise   Below the dim Sicilian steepApollo left the golden Muse.Ye twain did loiter in the dews,   Ye slept the swain’s unfever’d sleep,Theocritus of Syracuse!That Time might half with his confuse   Thy songs, – like his, that laugh and leap, —Theocritus of Syracuse,   Apollo left the golden Muse!

THE MYSTERY OF QUEEN PERSEPHONE

St. Paul and the Devil disputing about the Immortality of Man’s Soul, and St. Paul maintaining the same, (from the similitude of the corn-seed sown, which again sprouteth,) the Devil refutes him by his atheistic subtlety, but is put to shame by the evidence of three witnesses, namely, Persephone, Hela, and St. Lucy.

The Scene is Mount GerizimIntrabunt Sanctus Paulus, et Diabolus, interse de immortalitate Animae disputantesSANCTUS PAULUSYe say that when a man is deadHe never more shall lift his head,As doth the flower perishèd,Nor break ne sweet ne bitter bread.   I hold you much in scorn!Lo, if you cast in earth a seedThat seemeth to be dead indeed,   I wot ye shall have corn;And all men shall rejoice and reap:And so it fares with them that sleep,The narrow house doth them but keep   Until the judgment morn.DIABOLUSThere is an end of grief and mirth,   There is an end of all things born,And if ye sow into the earth   A seed, ye shall have corn;   But if ye sow its withered root   It shall not bear you any fruit,   It will not sprout and spring again;   And if ye look to gather grain,   Of men mote ye have scorn.Man’s body buried is the sownDead root, whose flower is over-blown.SANCTUS PAULUSBeshrew thee for thy subtletiesThat melt the hearts of men with lies,An evil task hath he that tries   To still thy subtle tongue!But look ye round and ye shall seeThe Dames that Queens of dead men be,I wot there are no mo than three,   When all is said and sung.

Hic intrabunt et cantabunt tres Reginæ.

PERSEPHONEI am the Queen Persephone.The lips of Grecians prayed to me,   Saying, I give men sleep;But I would have ye well to knowThat with me none do slumber so;   But there be some that weep,And juster souls content to dwellAmong the fields of asphodel,   By the Nine Waters deep.HELAI am the Queen of Hela’s House,Great clouds I bind upon my brows;   Night for a covering.For them I hold, I will ye wotThey sorrow, but they slumber not,   They have no lust to sing,And never comes a merry voice,Nor doth a soul of them rejoice   Until their uprising.SANCTA LUCIAI am a Queen of Paradise,And who shall look on me, I wis,   His spirit shall find grace.Whoso dwells with me walks alongIn gardens glad with small birds’ song,   A flowered and grassy place,Therein the souls of blessèd menWait each, till comes his love again,   To look upon her face!SANCTUS PAULUSThou, Sir Diabolus, art shent,I wot that well ye might repent,But till Midsummer fall in Lent,   Ye will not cease to sin.Get thee to dungeon undergroundAnd sit beside thy man, Mahound.I wot I would ye twain were bound   For evermore therein.

Fugiat Diabolus ad locum suum.

STOKER BILL

A BALLAD OF THE SCHOOL-BOARD FLEET   Which my name is Stoker Bill,   And a pleasant berth I fill,And the care the ladies take of me is clipping;   They have made me pretty snug,   With a blooming Persian rug,In the Ladies’ new Æsthetic Training Shipping.   There’s my Whistler pastels, there,   As are quite beyond compare,And a portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist skipping;   From such art we all expect   Quite a softening effect,In the Ladies’ new Æsthetic Training Shipping.   And my beer comes in a mug —   Such a rare old Rhodian jug!And here I sits æsthetically sipping;   And I drinks my grog or ale   On a chair by Chippendale —We’ve no others in our modern training shipping.   There’s our first Liftenant, too,   Is a rare old (China) Blue,And you do not very often catch him tripping   At a monogram or mark,   But no more than Noah’s ark,Does he know the way to manage this here shipping.   But the Boys? the Boys, they stands   With white lilies in their hands,And they do not know the meaning of a whipping:   For the whole delightful ship is   Like a dream of Lippo Lippi’s,More than what you mostly see in modern shipping.   Well, some coves they cuts up rough,   And they calls æsthetics stuff,And they says as we’ve no business to keep dipping   In the rates, but ladies likes it,   And our flag we never strikes it —Bless old England’s new Æsthetic Training Shipping!

NATURAL THEOLOGY

      ἐπει καὶ τοῦτον ὀῖομαι ἀθανάτοισινἔυχεσθαι·  Πάντες δὲ θεῶν χατέουσ’ ἄνθρωποι.Od. iii. 47.“Once Cagn was like a father, kind and good,   But He was spoiled by fighting many things;He wars upon the lions in the wood,   And breaks the Thunder-bird’s tremendous wings;But still we cry to Him, —We are thy brood—   O Cagn, be merciful! and us He bringsTo herds of elands, and great store of food,   And in the desert opens water-springs.”So Qing, King Nqsha’s Bushman hunter, spoke,   Beside the camp-fire, by the fountain fair,When all were weary, and soft clouds of smoke   Were fading, fragrant, in the twilit air:And suddenly in each man’s heart there woke   A pang, a sacred memory of prayer.

THE ODYSSEY

As one that for a weary space has lain   Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine   In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,Where that Ææan isle forgets the main,And only the low lutes of love complain,   And only shadows of wan lovers pine,   As such an one were glad to know the brineSalt on his lips, and the large air again, —So gladly, from the songs of modern speech   Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free      Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,      And through the music of the languid hours,They hear like ocean on a western beach   The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

IDEAL

Suggested by a female head in wax, of unknown date, but supposed to be either of the best Greek age, or a work of Raphael or Leonardo. It is now in the Lille Museum.

Ah, mystic child of Beauty, nameless maid,   Dateless and fatherless, how long ago,A Greek, with some rare sadness overweighed,   Shaped thee, perchance, and quite forgot his woe!   Or Raphael thy sweetness did bestow,While magical his fingers o’er thee strayed,   Or that great pupil of VerrocchioRedeemed thy still perfection from the shadeThat hides all fair things lost, and things unborn,   Where one has fled from me, that wore thy grace,   And that grave tenderness of thine awhile;Nay, still in dreams I see her, but her face   Is pale, is wasted with a touch of scorn,   And only on thy lips I find her smile.THE END

1

Cf. “Suggestions for Academic Reorganization.”

2

Thomas of Ercildoune.