Poems

Edward Dowden

Poems

PREFACE

Goethe says in a little poem1 that “Poems are stained glass windows”—“Gedichte sind gemalte Fensterscheiben”—to be seen aright not from the “market-place” but only from the interior of the church, “die heilige Kapelle”: and that “der Herr Philister” (equivalent for “indolent Reviewer”) glances at them from without and gets out of temper because he finds them unintelligible from his “market-place” standpoint. This comparison is a pretty conceit, and holds good as a half truth—but not more than a half: for while the artist who paints his “church windows” needs only to make them beautiful from within, the maker of poems must so shape and colour his work that its outer side—the technical, towards the “market-place” of the public—shall have no lack of beauty, though differing from the beauty visible from the spiritual interior.

The old volume of Edward Dowden’s Poems of 1876, which is now reprinted with additions, has been, to a limited extent, long before the public—seen from the “market-place” by general critics, who, for the most part, approved the outer side of the “painted windows,” and seen perhaps from within by some few like-minded readers, who, though no definite door was opened into “die heilige Kapelle,” somehow entered in.

But a great many people, to whom the author’s prose works are well known, have never even heard that he had written poetry. This is due in a measure to the fact that the published book of poems only got into circulation by its first small edition. Its second edition found a silent apotheosis in flame at a great fire at the publisher’s in London, in which nearly the whole of it perished.

Edward Dowden’s chief work has been as a prose writer. That fact remains—yet it is accidental rather than essential. In the early seventies he felt the urge very strongly towards making verse his vocation in life, and he probably would have yielded to it, but for the necessity to be bread-winner for a much-loved household. Poetry is a ware of small commercial value, as most poets—at least for a long space of their lives—have known, and prose, for even a young writer of promise, held out prospects of bread for immediate eating. Hence to prose he turned, and on that road went his way, and whether the accidental circumstances that determined his course at the parting of the ways wrought loss or gain for our literature, who can say?

But he never wholly abandoned verse, and all through his life, even to the very end, he would fitfully, from time to time, utter in it a part of himself which never found complete issue in prose and which was his most real self.

Perhaps the nearest approaches to his utterance in poetry occurred sometimes in his College lecturing, when in the midst of a written discourse he would interrupt it and stop and liberate his heart in a little rush of words—out of the depths, accompanied by that familiar gesture of his hands which always came to him when emotionally stirred in speaking. Some of his students have told me that they usually found those little extempore bits in a lecture by far the most illuminated and inspiring parts of it, especially as it was then that his voice, always musical in no common degree, vibrated, and acquired a richer tone.

In his prose writings in general he seemed to curb and restrain himself. That he did so was by no means an evil, for the habitual retinence in his style gave to the little rare outbreaks of emotion the quality of charm that we find in a tender flower growing out of a solid stone wall unexpectedly.

Not infrequently a sort of hard irony was employed by him, as restraint on enthusiasm, with occasional loosening of the curb.

In Edward Dowden’s soul there seemed to be capacities which might, under other circumstances, have made him more than a minor poet. His was a more than usually rich, sensuous nature. This, combined with absolute purity—the purity not of ice and snow, but of fire. And, superadded, was an unlimited capacity for sternness—that quality which, as salt, acts as preservative of all human ardours. He came from his Maker, fashioned out of the stuff whereof are made saints, patriots, martyrs, and the great lovers in the world. His work as a scholar never obliterated anything of this in him. By this, his erudition gained richness—the richness of vital blood. It was as no anæmic recluse that he dwelt amongst his book-shelves, and hence no Faust-like weariness of intellectual satiety ever came to him, no sense of being “beschränkt mit diesem Bücherhauf” in his surroundings of his library (which latterly had grown to some twenty-four thousand volumes). He lived in company with these in a twofold way, keenly and accurately grasping all their textual details, and at the same time valuing them for the sake, chiefly, of spiritual converse with the writers.

Besides the spiritual converse he gained thus, he found, as a book-lover, a fertile source of recreation in the collecting of literary rarities, old books, MSS. and curiosities. In this he felt the keen zest of a sportsman. This was his shooting on the moors, his fishing in the rivers. No living creature ever lost its life for his amusement, but in this innocuous play he found unfailing pleasure, and many a piece of luck he had with his gun or rod in hitting some rare bird, or landing some big prize of a fish out of old booksellers’ catalogues or the “carts” in the back streets.

His physical nature was fully and strongly developed, and it is out of strong physical instincts that strong spiritual instincts often grow—the boundary line between them being undefined.

His one athletic exercise—swimming—was to him a joy of no common sort. He gave himself to the sea with an eagerness of body, soul and spirit, breasting the bright waters exultingly on many a summer’s day on some West of Ireland or Cornish shore, revelling in the sea’s life and in his own.

And akin to that, in the sensuous, spiritual region of the soul, was his feeling for all External Nature, his deep delight in the coming of each new Spring—its blackthorn blossoms, its hazel and willow catkins, its daffodils—and his response, as the year went on in its procession, to the glory of the furze and heather glow and to all Earth’s sounds and silences.

And of a like sort was his enjoyment of music which had the depth of a passion.

Very possibly, if his lot had been cast in early Christian or mediæval times, all these impulses towards the joy and beauty of the earth might have been sternly crushed out by the moral forces of his character.

Looking at a picture of St. Jerome one day—not unlike E. D. in feature—I said to him, “There’s what you would have been if you had lived in those times.” (The saint is depicted there as lean, emaciated and woefully dirty!).

It was well for Edward Dowden that he was laid hold of in his early life by that great non-ascetic soul, William Wordsworth. He was initiated into the inner secret of Wordsworth. He had experience of the Wordsworthian ecstasy—that ecstasy which comes, if at all, straight as a gift from God, and is not to be taught by the teaching of the scribes.

Through kinship a man who is born potentially a poet comes first into relation with poets, and with E. Dowden’s sensuousness of capacities it was natural that he should be in his early years attracted to Keats, to the long, deep, rich dwelling of his verse on the vision and the sounds of Nature. It was not until he had advanced some way towards middle life that he came into vital contact with Shelley. He had felt aloof from him; but the attraction, when once owned, became very powerful, and he yielded to the delight of the swift motion of the Shelleyan utterances.

He always recognized Robert Browning’s greatness profoundly, and responded to all his best truths, especially as regards the relation, in love, of Man and Woman, but he never became pledged to an all-round Browning worship; his admiration had no discipleship in it.

For Walt Whitman, with whom a personal friendship, strong on both sides, was formed, he felt the cordial reverence due to the giver of what he reckoned as a gift of immense value. While condemning whatever was unreticent in Leaves of Grass, he at the same time saw there the great flood of spirituality available as a force for emancipation of our hearts from pressure of sordidnesses in the world.

It is somewhat remarkable that with all his trend towards the great spiritual and mystical forces in literature he was all along never without a keen appreciation of the writers who brought mundane shrewdness and wisdom. The first book he bought for himself in childhood with the hoarded savings of his pocket-money was Bacon’s Essays, with which as a small boy he became very familiar. And all through his life he sought with unfailing pleasure the companionship of Jane Austen again and again. And amongst the books which he himself made, it was perhaps his Montaigne that gave him, in the process of making, the delicatest satisfaction—the satisfaction of witnessing and analysing the dexterous play of human intellect and character on low levels.

His attraction to Goethe—very dominant with him in middle life—came, I imagine, from the fact that he saw in that mightiest of the Teutons two diverse qualities in operation—the measureless intellectual spirituality and the vast common-sense of mundane wisdom.

In this attraction there was also the element of the magnetism which draws together opposites—not less forcible than the attraction between affinities.

As regards the moral nature, his own was as far as the North Pole is from the South from that of the great sage of Weimar, whose serenely-wise beneficence contained no potentialities of sainthood, martyrdom or absolute human love. He sought gain from Goethe just because of that unlikeness to what was in himself.

At one period of his literary work he was intending to make as his “opus magnus” a full study of Goethe’s life and works, and with that intent he carried on a course of reading, and laid in a great equipment of workman’s tools—Goethe books in German, French and English. From this project he was turned aside by a call to write the life of Shelley—a long and difficult task. But he never lost sight of Goethe. In one of the later years of his life, as recreation in a summer’s holiday in Cornwall, he translated the whole of the “West-Eastern Divan” into English verse, and previously, from time to time, isolated essays on Goethe themes appeared amongst his prose writings. And yet it is not unlikely that even if the task of Shelley’s biography had not intervened, no complete study, such as he had at first planned, might have been ever accomplished by him on Goethe, for with experience there came to him a growing conviction that his best work in criticism could only be done in dealing with what was written in his mother-tongue.

Some of Edward Dowden’s friends, Nationalist and Unionist both, have felt regret that he, the gentle scholar, gave such large share of his energies to the strife of politics, as if force were subtracted thereby from his work in Literature. They are mistaken. The output of energy thus given came back to the giver, reinforcing his prose writing with a mundane vigour and virility, exceeding what it might have had if he had kept himself aloof from the affairs of the nation.

Yet, strangely enough, between his politics and his poetry there was a water-tight wall of separation. Other men, to take scattered instances, Kipling, Wordsworth, Milton, fused in various ways their political feeling and their poetical. This Edward Dowden never attempted. I cannot analyse the “why.”

Confining myself to some points which seem left out of sight in most of the admirably appreciative obituary notices in last April’s newspapers, I have tried to say here, in a fragmentary way, a few things about a man of whom many things—infinitely many—might be said without exhausting the total. He was himself at the same time many and one. He had multiform aspects—interests very diverse—and yet life was for him in no wise “patchy and scrappy,” but had unity throughout.

In Shakespeare, whose faithful scholar he was, there are diversities: and yet, do we not image Shakespeare to our minds as one and a whole?

In the volumes now issued by Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons is contained all the verse that the author left available for publication, with the exception of a sequence of a hundred and one lyrics (which by desire is separately published under the somewhat transparent disguise of editorship). That little sequence, named A Woman’s Reliquary, is his latest work in verse. Much in it re-echoes sounds that can be heard in his old poems of the early seventies.

E. D. D.

September 1913.

THE WANDERER

I cast my anchor nowhere (the waves whirledMy anchor from me); East and West are oneTo me; against no winds are my sails furled;—Merely my planet anchors to the Sun.

THE FOUNTAIN

(An Introduction To the Sonnets)

Hush, let the fountain murmur dimMelodious secrets; stir no limb,But lie along the marge and wait,Till deep and pregnant as with fate,Fine as a star-beam, crystal-clear,Each ripple grows upon the ear.This is that fountain seldom seenBy mortal wanderer,—Hippocrene,—Where the virgins three times three,Thy singing brood, Mnemosyne,Loosen’d the girdle, and with gravePure joy their faultless bodies gaveTo sacred pleasure of the wave.Listen! the lapsing waters tellThe urgence uncontrollableWhich makes the trouble of their breast,And bears them onward with no restTo ampler skies and some grey plainSad with the tumbling of the main.But see, a sidelong eddy slipsBack into the soft eclipseOf day, while careless fate allows,Darkling beneath still olive boughs;Then with chuckle liquid sweetCoils within its shy retreat;This is mine, no wave of might,But pure and live with glimmering light;I dare not follow that broad floodOf Poesy, whose lustihoodNourishes mighty lands, and makesResounding music for their sakes;I lie beside the well-head clearWith musing joy, with tender fear,And choose for half a day to leanThus on my elbow where the greenMargin-grass and silver-whiteStarry buds, the wind’s delight,Thirsting steer, nor goat-hoof rudeOf the branch-sundering Satyr broodHas ever pashed; now, now, I stoop,And in hand-hollow dare to scoopThis scantling from the delicate stream;It lies as quiet as a dream,And lustrous in my curvèd hand.Were it a crime if this were drain’dBy lips which met the noonday blueFiery and emptied of its dew?Crown me with small white marish-flowers!To the good Dæmon, and the PowersOf this fair haunt I offer upIn unprofanèd lily-cupLibations; still remains for meA bird’s drink of clear Poesy;Yet not as light bird comes and dipsA pert bill, but with reverent lipsI drain this slender trembling tide;O sweet the coolness at my side,And, lying back, to slowly pryFor spaces of the upper skyRadiant ’twixt woven olive leaves;And, last, while some fair show deceivesThe closing eyes, to find a sleepAs full of healing and as deepAs on toil-worn Odysseus laySurge-swept to his Ionian bay.

IN THE GALLERIES

I. THE APOLLO BELVEDERE

Radiance invincible! Is that the browWhich gleamed on Python while thy arrow sped?Are those the lips for Hyacinthus deadThat grieved? Wherefore a God indeed art thou:For all we toil with ill, and the hours bowAnd break us, and at best when we have bled,And are much marred, perchance propitiatedA little doubtful victory they allow:We sorrow, and thenceforth the lip retainsA shade, and the eyes shine and wonder less.O joyous Slayer of evil things! O greatAnd splendid Victor! God, whom no soil stainsOf passion or doubt, of grief or languidness,—Even to worship thee I come too late.

II. THE VENUS OF MELOS

Goddess, or woman nobler than the God,No eyes a-gaze upon Ægean seasShifting and circling past their CycladesSaw thee. The Earth, the gracious Earth, wastrodFirst by thy feet, while round thee lay her broadCalm harvests, and great kine, and shadowing trees,And flowers like queens, and a full year’s increase,Clusters, ripe berry, and the bursting pod.So thy victorious fairness, unalliedTo bitter things or barren, doth bestowAnd not exact; so thou art calm and wise;Thy large allurement saves; a man may growLike Plutarch’s men by standing at thy side,And walk thenceforward with clear-visioned eyes!

III. ANTINOUS CROWNED AS BACCHUS

(In the British Museum)Who crowned thy forehead with the ivy wreathAnd clustered berries burdening the hair?Who gave thee godhood, and dim rites? BewareO beautiful, who breathest mortal breath,Thou delicate flame great gloom environeth!The gods are free, and drink a stainless air,And lightly on calm shoulders they upbearA weight of joy eternal, nor can DeathCast o’er their sleep the shadow of her shrine.O thou confessed too mortal by the o’er-fraughtCrowned forehead, must thy drooped eyes ever seeThe glut of pleasure, those pale lips of thineStill suck a bitter-sweet satiety,Thy soul descend through cloudy realms of thought?

IV. LEONARDO’S “MONNA LISA”

Make thyself known, Sibyl, or let despairOf knowing thee be absolute; I waitHour-long and waste a soul. What word of fateHides ’twixt the lips which smile and still forbear?Secret perfection! Mystery too fair!Tangle the sense no more lest I should hateThy delicate tyranny, the inviolatePoise of thy folded hands, thy fallen hair.Nay, nay,—I wrong thee with rough words; still beSerene, victorious, inaccessible;Still smile but speak not; lightest ironyLurk ever ’neath thine eyelids’ shadow; stillO’ertop our knowledge; Sphinx of ItalyAllure us and reject us at thy will!

V. ST LUKE PAINTING THE VIRGIN

(By Van der Weyden)It was Luke’s will; and she, the mother-maid,Would not gainsay; to please him pleased her best;See, here she sits with dovelike heart at restBrooding, and smoothest brow; the babe is laidOn lap and arm, glad for the unarrayedAnd swatheless limbs he stretches; lightly pressedBy soft maternal fingers the full breastSeeks him, while half a sidelong glance is stayedBy her own bosom and half passes downTo reach the boy. Through doors and window-frameBright airs flow in; a river tranquillyWashes the small, glad Netherlandish town.Innocent calm! no token here of shame,A pierced heart, sunless heaven, and Calvary.

ON THE HEIGHTS

Here are the needs of manhood satisfied!Sane breath, an amplitude for soul and sense,The noonday silence of the summer hills,And this embracing solitude; o’er allThe sky unsearchable, which lays its claim,—A large redemption not to be annulled,—Upon the heart; and far below, the seaBreaking and breaking, smoothly, silently.What need I any further? Now once moreMy arrested life begins, and I am manComplete with eye, heart, brain, and that withinWhich is the centre and the light of being;O dull! who morning after morning choseNever to climb these gorse and heather slopesCairn-crowned, but last within one seaward nookWasted my soul on the ambiguous speechAnd slow eye-mesmerism of rolling waves,Courting oblivion of the heart. True lifeThat was not which possessed me while I layProne on the perilous edge, mere eye and ear,Staring upon the bright monotony,Having let slide all force from me, each thoughtYield to the vision of the gleaming blank,Each nerve of motion and of sense grow numb,Till to the bland persuasion of some breeze,Which played across my forehead and my hair,The lost volition would efface itself,And I was mingled wholly in the soundOf tumbling billow and upjetting surge,Long reluctation, welter and refluent moan,And the reverberating tumultuousness’Mid shelf and hollow and angle black with spray.Yet under all oblivion there remainedA sense of some frustration, a pale dreamOf Nature mocking man, and drawing down,As streams draw down the dust of gold, his will,His thought and passion to enrich herselfThe insatiable devourer.Welcome earth,My natural heritage! and this soft turf,These rocks which no insidious ocean saps,But the wide air flows over, and the sunIllumines. Take me, Mother, to thy breast,Gather me close in tender, sustinent arms,Lay bare thy bosom’s sweetness and its strengthThat I may drink vigour and joy and love.Oh, infinite composure of the hills!Thou large simplicity of this fair world,Candour and calmness, with no mockery,No soft frustration, flattering sigh or smileWhich masks a tyrannous purpose; and ye PowersOf these sky-circled heights, and PresencesAwful and strict, I find you favourable,Who seek not to exclude me or to slay,Rather accept my being, take me upInto your silence and your peace. ThereforeBy him whom ye reject not, gracious Ones,Pure vows are made that haply he will beNot all unworthy of the world; he castsForth from him, never to resume again,Veiled nameless things, frauds of the unfilled heart,Fantastic pleasures, delicate sadnesses,The lurid, and the curious, and the occult,Coward sleights and shifts, the manners of the slave,And long unnatural uses of dim life.Hence with you! Robes of angels touch these heightsBlown by pure winds and I lay hold upon them.Here is a perfect bell of purple heath,Made for the sky to gaze at reverently,As faultless as itself, and holding light,Glad air and silence in its slender dome;Small, but a needful moment in the sumOf God’s full joy—the abyss of ecstasyO’er which we hang as the bright bow of foamAbove the never-filled receptacleHangs seven-hued where the endless cataract leaps.O now I guess why you have summoned me,Headlands and heights, to your companionship;Confess that I this day am needful to you!The heavens were loaded with great light, the windsBrought you calm summer from a hundred fields,All night the stars had pricked you to desire,The imminent joy at its full season flowered,There was a consummation, the broad waveToppled and fell. And had ye voice for this?Sufficient song to unburden the urged breast?A pastoral pipe to play? a lyre to touch?The brightening glory of the heath and gorseCould not appease your passion, nor the cryOf this wild bird that flits from bush to bush.Me therefore you required, a voice for song,A pastoral pipe to play, a lyre to touch,I recognize your bliss to find me here;The sky at morning when the sun upleapsDemands her atom of intense melody,Her point of quivering passion and delight,And will not let the lark’s heart be at ease.Take me, the brain with various, subtile fold,The breast that knows swift joy, the vocal lips;I yield you here the cunning instrumentBetween your knees; now let the plectrum fall!

“LA RÉVÉLATION PAR LE DÉSERT”

“Toujours le désert se montre à l’horizon, quand vous prononcez le nom de Jéhovah.”

Edgar Quinet.Beyond the places haunted by the feetOf thoughts and swift desires, and where the eyesOf wing’d imaginings are wild, and dreamsGlide by on noiseless plumes, beyond the dimVeiled sisterhood of ever-circling mists,Who dip their urns in those enchanted meresWhere all thought fails, and every ardour dies,And through the vapour dead looms a low moon,Beyond the fountains of the dawn, beyondThe white home of the morning star, lies spreadA desert lifeless, bright, illimitable,The world’s confine, o’er which no sighing goesFrom weary winds of Time.I sat me downUpon a red stone flung on the red sand,In length as great as some sarcophagusWhich holds a king, but scribbled with no runes,Bald, and unstained by lichen or grey moss.Save me no living thing in that red landShowed under heaven; no furtive lizard slipped,No desert weed pushed upward the tough spineOr hairy lump, no slow bird was a spotOf moving black on the deserted air,Or stationary shrilled his tuneless cry;No shadow stirr’d, nor luminous haze uprose,Quivering against the blanched blue of the marge.I sat unbonneted, and my throat baked,And my tongue loll’d dogwise. Red sand below,And one unlidded eye above—mere GodBlazing from marge to marge. I did not pray,My heart was as a cinder in my breast,And with both hands I held my head which throbbed.I, who had sought for God, had followed GodThrough the fair world which stings with sharp desireFor him of whom its hints and whisperings are,Its gleams and tingling moments of the night,I, who in flower, and wave, and mountain-wind,And song of bird, and man’s diviner heartHad owned the present Deity, yet stroveFor naked access to his inmost shrine,—Now found God doubtless, for he filled the heavenLike brass, he breathed upon the air like fire.But I, a speck ’twixt the strown sand and sky,Being yet an atom of pure and living will,And perdurable as any God of brass,With all my soul, with all my mind and strengthHated this God. O, for a little cloudNo bigger than a man’s hand on the rim,To rise with rain and thunder in its womb,And blot God out! But no such cloud would come.I felt my brain on fire, heard each pulse tick;It was a God to make a man stark mad;I rose with neck out-thrust, and nodding head,While with dry chaps I could not choose but laugh;Ha, ha, ha, ha, across the air it rang,No sweeter than the barking of a dog,Hard as the echo from an iron cliff;It must have buffeted the heaven; I ceased,I looked to see from the mid sky an arm,And one sweep of the scimitar; I stood;And when the minute passed with no event,No doomsman’s stroke, no sundering soul and flesh,When silence dropt its heavy fold on fold,And God lay yet inert in heaven, or scorn’dHis rebel antic-sized, grotesque,—I swooned.Now when the sense returned my lips were wet,And cheeks and chin were wet, with a dank dew,Acrid and icy, and one shadow hugeHung over me blue-black, while all aroundThe fierce light glared. O joy, a living thing,Emperor of this red domain of sand,A giant snake! One fold, one massy wreathArched over me; a man’s expanded armsCould not embrace the girth of this great lordIn his least part, and low upon the sandHis small head lay, wrinkled, a flaccid bag,Set with two jewels of green fire, the eyesThat had not slept since making of the world.Whence grew I bold to gaze into such eyes?Thus gazing each conceived the other’s thought,Aware how each read each; the Serpent mused,“Are all the giants dead, a long time dead,Born of the broad-hipped women, grave and tall,In whom God’s sons poured a celestial seed?A long time dead, whose great deeds filled the earthWith clamour as of beaten shields, all dead,And Cush and Canaan, Mizraim and Phut,And the boy Nimrod storming through large landsLike earthquake through tower’d cities, these depart,And what remains? Behold, the elvish thingWe raised from out his swoon, this now is man.The pretty vermin! helpless to conceiveOf great, pure, simple sin, and vast revolt;The world escapes from deluge these new days,We build no Babels with the Shinar slime;What would this thin-legged grasshopper with us,The Dread Ones? Rather let him skip, and chirpHymns in his smooth grass to his novel God,‘The Father’; here no bland paternityHe meets, but visible Might blocks the broad sky,My great Co-mate, the Ancient. Hence! avoid!What wouldst thou prying on our solitude?For thee my sly small cousin may suffice,And sly small bites about the heart and groin;Hence to his haunt! Yet ere thou dost departI mark thee with my sign.”A vibrant tongueHad in a moment pricked upon my browThe mystic mark of brotherhood, Cain’s brand,But when I read within his eyes the words“Hence” and “avoid,” dim horror seized on me,And rising, with both arms stretched forth, and headBowed earthward, and not turning once I ran;And what things saw me as I raced by them,What hands plucked at my dress, what light wings brushedMy face, what waters in my hearing seethed,I know not, till I reached familiar lands,And saw grey clouds slow gathering for the night,Above sweet fields, whence the June mowers strolledHomewards with girls who chatted down the lane.Is this the secret lying round the world?A Dread One watching with unlidded eyeSlow century after century from his heaven,And that great lord, the worm of the red plain,Cold in mid sun, strenuous, untameable,Coiling his solitary strength alongSlow century after century, conscious eachHow in the life of his Arch-enemyHe lives, how ruin of one confounds the pair,—Is this the eternal dual mystery?One Source of being, Light, or Love, or Lord,Whose shadow is the brightness of the world,Still let thy dawns and twilights glimmer pureIn flow perpetual from hill to hill,Still bathe us in thy tides of day and night;Wash me at will a weed in thy free wave,Drenched in the sun and air and surge of Thee.