Poems. Volume 3

THE TEST OF MANHOOD

Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,An army issues out of wilderness,With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;Obstruction in the van; insane excessOft at the heart; yet hard the onward stressUnto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.Then was the gracious birth of man’s new day;Divided from the haunted night it shone.That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprangEthereal Beauty in full morningtide.Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:It was another earth unto him sang.Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?From the Persuader came it, in those valesWhereunto she melodiously invites,Her troops of eager servitors regales?Not far those two great Powers of Nature speedDisciple steps on earth when sole they lead;Nor either points for us the way of flame.From him predestined mightier it came;His task to hold them both in breast, and yieldTheir dues to each, and of their war be field.The foes that in repulsion never ceased,Must he, who once has been the goodly beastOf one or other, at whose beck he ran,Constrain to make him serviceable man;Offending neither, nor the natural claimEach pressed, denying, for his true man’s name.Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strifeTo hold them fast conjoined within him still;Submissive to his willAlong the road of life!And marvel not he wavered if at whilesThe forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.Delicious licence called it Nature’s cry;Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;A tread on shingle timed his lame advanceFlung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,He of the troubled marching army leanedOn godhead visible, on godhead screened;The radiant roseate, the curtained white;Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.He drank of fictions, till celestial aidMight seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;And ever that imagined succour slewThe soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.In fellowship religion has its founts:The solitary his own God reveres:Ascend no sacred MountsOur hungers or our fears.As only for the numbers Nature’s careIs shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,So to Divinity the spring of prayerFrom brotherhood the one way upward leads.Like the sustaining airAre both for flowers and weeds.But he who claims in spirit to be flower,Will find them both an air that doth devour.Whereby he smelt his treason, who imploredExternal gifts bestowed but on the sword;Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,His army’s foe, condemned to strive and fail;See a black adversary’s ghost prevail;Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to winWhile still the conflict tore his breast within.Out of that agony, misread for thoseImprisoned Powers warring unappeased,The ghost of his black adversary rose,To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.And long with him was wrestling ere emergedA mind to read in him the reflex shadeOf its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;By craven compromises hourly swayed.Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,The man’s mind opened under weight of cloud.To penetrate the dark was it endowed;Stood day before a vision shooting wide.Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;The traversed wilderness exposed its track.He felt the far advance in looking back;Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.Under the low-browed tempest’s eye of ire,That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwartAll ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;A stranger still, religiously divined;Not yet with understanding read aright.But when the mind, the cherishable mind,The multitude’s grave shepherd, took full flight,Himself as mirror raised among his kind,He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,Had come of many a grip in mastery,Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,And of his bosom made him lord, to keepThe starry roof of his unruffled frameAwake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deepBelow, above, aye with a wistful aim.The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.To whom unwittingly did he aspireIn wilderness, where bitter was his need:To whom in blindness, as an earthy seedFor light and air, he struck through crimson mire.But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,All choral in its fruitful garden camp,The spiritual the palpable illumed.This gift of penetration and embrace,His prize from tidal battles lost or won,Reveals the scheme to animate his race:How that it is a warfare but begun;Unending; with no Power to interpose;No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,Heard of the Highest; never battle’s close,The victory complete and victor crowned:Nor solace in defeat, save from that senseOf strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.In manhood must he find his competence;In his clear mind the spiritual food:God being there while he his fight maintains;Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,While he rejects the suicide despair;Accepts the spur of explicable pains;Obedient to Nature, not her slave:Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:—Whence Evil in a world unread before;That mystery to simple springs resolved.His God the Known, diviner to adore,Shows Nature’s savage riddles kindly solved.Inconscient, insensitive, she reignsIn iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.Back to the primal brute shall he retraceHis path, doth he permit to force her chainsA soft Persuader coursing through his veins,An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:What one the flash disdains;What one so gives it grace.But is he rightly manful in her eyes,A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,Desireing and desireable he shines;As peaches, that have caught the sun’s upriseAnd kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.Earth fills him with her juices, without fearThat she will cast him drunken down the steeps.All woman is she to this man most dear;He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:She conscient, she sensitive, in him;With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:By him humaner made; by his keen spursPricked to race past the pride in giant limb,Her crazy adoration of big thews,Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,Were thunder spitting lightnings on the worldIn daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.This man, this hero, works not to destroy;This godlike—as the rock in ocean stands;—He of the myriad eyes, the myriad handsCreative; in his edifice has joy.How strength may serve for purity is shownWhen he himself can scourge to make it clean.Withal his pitch of pride would not disownA sober world that walks the balanced meanBetween its tempters, rarely overthrown:And such at times his army’s march has been.Near is he to great Nature in the thoughtEach changing Season intimately saith,That nought save apparition knows the death;To the God-lighted mind of man ’tis nought.She counts not loss a word of any weight;It may befal his passions and his greedsTo lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,But life gone breathless will she reinstate.Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,Strike camp, and onward, like the wind’s cloud-fleets.Unresting she, unresting he, from changeTo change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;But he, the flower at head and soil at root,Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.And that way seems he bound; that way the road,With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,He travels, urged by some internal goad.Dares he behold the thing he is, what thingHe would become is in his mind its child;Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.So moves he forth in faith, if he has madeHis mind God’s temple, dedicate to truth.Earth’s nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;The star of sky upon his footway cast;Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,The body’s love and mind’s, whereof the soul’s.Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.Or is’t the widowed’s dream of her new mate?Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;With her the barren Huntress alternate;His rough refractory off on kicking heelsTo rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,His tumbled world.  What, then, the faith she feels?May not his aspect, like her own so fairReflexively, the central force belie,And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,Be rebel at the core?  What hope is there?’Tis that in each recovery he preserves,Between his upper and his nether wit,Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;With such a grasp upon his brute as tellsOf wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a SunResplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.

THE HUELESS LOVE

Unto that love must we through fire attain,   Which those two held as breath of common air;   The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.Midway the road of our life’s term they met,   And one another knew without surprise;   Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.To them it was revealed how they had found   The kindred nature and the needed mind;   The mate by long conspiracy designed;The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.Avowed in vigilant solicitude   For either, what most lived within each breast   They let be seen: yet every human testDemanding righteousness approved them good.She leaned on a strong arm, and little feared   Abandonment to help if heaved or sank   Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,Life rosier were she but less revered.An arm that never shook did not obscure   Her woman’s intuition of the bliss—   Their tempter’s moment o’er the black abyss,Across the narrow plank—he could abjure.Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,   And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,   Was all of earthly in their love untold,Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.So has there come the gust at South-west flung   By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,   When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.

UNION IN DISSEVERANCE

Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;She that star overhead in slow descent:That white star with the front of angel she;He undone in his rays of glory spentHalo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,He casts round her, and knows his hour of restIncomplete, were the light for which he dies,Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;Life’s full throb over breathless and abased:Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,One, more one than the bridally embraced.

SONG IN THE SONGLESS

They have no song, the sedges dry,   And still they sing.It is within my breast they sing,   As I pass by.Within my breast they touch a string,   They wake a sigh.There is but sound of sedges dry;   In me they sing.

THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH

If that thou hast the gift of strength, then knowThy part is to uplift the trodden low;Else in a giant’s grasp until the endA hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.

THE MAIN REGRET

WRITTEN FOR THE CHARING CROSS ALBUMISeen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of omission   Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly bare.They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;   Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to repair.IISunshine might we have been unto seed under soil, or have scattered   Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that shone.Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered   Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere human tone.ALTERNATIONBetween the fountain and the rillI passed, and saw the mighty willTo leap at sky; the careless run,As earth would lead her little son.Beneath them throbs an urgent well,That here is play, and there is war.I know not which had most to tellOf whence we spring and what we are.FOREST HISTORYIBeneath the vans of doom did men pass in.   Heroic who came out; for round them hung   A wavering phantom’s red volcano tongue,With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:IIOld Earth’s original Dragon; there retired   To his last fastness; overthrown by few.   Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.Then man to play devorant straight was fired.IIIMore intimate became the forest fear   While pillared darkness hatched malicious life   At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knifeAnd wary slid the glance from ear to ear.IVIn chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,   The forest’s heart of fog on mossed morass,   On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,Revealed where lured the swallower byway.VDead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound   Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.   It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spiteOf humble human being, held the ground.VIThrough friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow   The feet sustained by track of feet pursued   Pained steps, and found the common brotherhoodBy sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.VIIAnon a mason’s work amazed the sight,   And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there abode.   They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.VIIIWhat words they taught were nails to scratch the head.   Benignant works explained the chanting brood.   Their monastery lit black solitude,As one might think a star that heavenward led.IXUprose a fairer nest for weary feet,   Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,   Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,Or played with it, and had their white retreat.XInto big books of metal clasps they pored.   They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.   The treasures women are whose aim is praise,Was shown in them: the Garden half restored.XIA deluge billow scoured the land off seas,   With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.   For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.XIIWhence reverence round grey-haired story grew:   And inmost spots of ancient horror shone   As temples under beams of trials bygone;For in them sang brave times with God in view.XIIITill now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,   Like night’s first little stars through clearing showers.   Was rumoured how a castle’s falcon towersThe wilderness commanded with fierce mien.XIVTherein a serious Baron stuck his lance;   For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.   Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.XVIt might be that two errant lords across   The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry   They charged forthwith, the better man to try.One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.XVIPerchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay slain,   The robbers into gruesome durance drew.   Swift should her hero come, like lightning’s blue!She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.XVIIAs we, that ere the worst her hero haps,   Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:   A toady cave beside an ague fen,Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.XVIIIBy daylight now the forest fear could read   Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.   Straight for the roebuck’s neck the bowman spentA dart that laughed at distance and at speed.XIXRight loud the bugle’s hallali elate   Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;   And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.XXBefore the blackbird pecked the turf they woke;   At dawn the deer’s wet nostrils blew their last.   To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.XXIThe city urchin mooned on forest air,   On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick   As swallows o’er smooth streams, and sighed him sickFor thinking that his dearer home was there.XXIIFamiliar, still unseized, the forest sprang   An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.   The hunter’s horn might wind a jocund ring,But held in ear it had a chilly clang.XXIIISome shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;   Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,   As though the leagues of woodland held them wrongedTo hear an axe and see a township climb.XXIVThe forest’s erewhile emperor at eve   Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.   At midnight a small people danced the dales,So thin that they might dwindle through a sieveXXVRinged mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,   Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.   The pensioned forester beside his crutch,Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.XXVICame then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;   Devourer, and insensibly devoured;   In whom the city over forest flowered,The forest wreathed the city’s drama-mart.XXVIIThere found he in new form that Dragon old,   From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught   How blindly each its antidote besought;For either’s breath the needs of either told.XXVIIINow deep in woods, with song no sermon’s drone,   He showed what charm the human concourse works:   Amid the press of men, what virtue lurksWhere bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.XXIXOur conquest these: if haply we retain   The reverence that ne’er will overrun   Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,Nor let the poet’s awe in rapture wane.

FRAGMENTS OF THE ILIAD IN ENGLISH HEXAMETER VERSE

Iliad, i. 149

THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES“Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armèd Trojans,Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done;Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvestsRavaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksomeMountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justicePluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed!Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.Worse, it is thou whose threat ’tis to ravish my prize from me, portionWon with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when AchaiansGave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat,Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessèd thing boreOff to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed!So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems meHomeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store.”

Iliad, i. 225

“Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou!Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict,Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of AchaiaDared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a death-stroke.Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians,Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against thee.Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over abjects;Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise:Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf-budsNever again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the mountains,No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal clipped offLeaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement,Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent;Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of AchaiaThroughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying HectorTumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart-strings,Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of Achaians.”

Iliad, ii 455

MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANSLike as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far,So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the splendourGleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky-vault.They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged flocks,Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild-swans,Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaïstros;Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions,Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them resoundeth;So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings poured forthOn that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath themEarth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the horse-hooves.Stopped they then on the fair-flower’d field of Scamander, their thousandsMany as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse,Clouds of them, under some herdsman’s wonning, where then are the milk-pailsAlso, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time;Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush them.Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of goats, knowEasily one from the other when all get mixed o’er the pasture,So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for onslaught,Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his thunder,He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.

Iliad, xi, 148

AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHTThese, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the thickest,Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved Achaians.Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion,Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust-cloud,Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse-hooves)Hewed with the sword’s sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord AgamemnonFollowed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclippèd wood-land,This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the scrubwoodStretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire’s fury rageing,So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scatteredTrojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field,Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were outstretchedFlat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.

Iliad, xi, 378

PARIS AND DIOMEDES                  So he, with a clear shout of laughter,Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise:“Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had pierced theeInto the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life-breath!Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their direst,They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a lion.”Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:“Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins!If that thou dared’st face me here out in the open with weapons,Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows.Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole;Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant.Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that’s emasculate, noughtworth!Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the slightest,My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway.Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen slaughtered,Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood-drops,Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women.”