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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Poems, Volume 3 [of 3], by George Meredith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Poems, Volume 3 [of 3]
+
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2015  [eBook #1383]
+[This file was first posted on May 12, 1998]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, VOLUME 3 [OF 3]***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1912 Times Book Club “Surrey” edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+                       [Picture: The South Wester]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  POEMS
+                                 VOL. III
+
+
+                                    BY
+                             GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                              SURREY EDITION
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                           THE TIMES BOOK CLUB
+                        376–384 OXFORD STREET, W.
+                                   1912
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+         Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to his Majesty
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+A STAVE OF ROVING TIM,                                               1
+
+  The wind is East, the wind is West,
+JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE,                                                  5
+
+  A revelation came on Jane,
+THE RIDDLE FOR MEN,                                                 14
+
+  This Riddle rede or die,
+THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY,                             15
+
+  One fairest of the ripe unwedded left
+‘LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO,’                                           30
+‘ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE,’                                              30
+‘JOY IS FLEET,’                                                     31
+THE LESSON OF GRIEF,                                                31
+
+  Not ere the bitter herb we taste,
+WIND ON THE LYRE,                                                   32
+
+  That was the chirp of Ariel
+THE YOUTHFUL QUEST,                                                 33
+
+  His Lady queen of woods to meet,
+THE EMPTY PURSE,                                                    34
+
+  Thou, run to the dry on this wayside bank,
+TO THE COMIC SPIRIT,                                                56
+
+  Sword of Common Sense!—
+YOUTH IN MEMORY,                                                    68
+
+  Days, when the ball of our vision
+PENETRATION AND TRUST,                                              75
+
+  Sleek as a lizard at round of a stone,
+NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY,                                              76
+
+  With splendour of a silver day,
+THE TEACHING OF THE NUDE,                                           79
+
+  A Satyr spied a Goddess in her bath,
+BREATH OF THE BRIAR,                                                81
+
+  O briar-scents, on yon wet wing
+EMPEDOCLES,                                                         82
+
+  He leaped.  With none to hinder,
+ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM,                                           83
+
+  The day that is the night of days,
+TARDY SPRING,                                                       85
+
+  Now the North wind ceases,
+THE LABOURER,                                                       87
+
+  For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the
+  glory that follows
+FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE,                                             89
+
+  Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
+THE WARNING,                                                        99
+
+  We have seen mighty men ballooning high,
+OUTSIDE THE CROWD,                                                  99
+
+  To sit on History in an easy chair,
+TRAFALGAR DAY,                                                     100
+
+  He leads: we hear our Seaman’s call
+          Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History
+THE REVOLUTION,                                                    105
+
+  Not yet had History’s Aetna smoked the skies,
+NAPOLÉON,                                                          116
+
+  Cannon his name,
+FRANCE,                                                            140
+
+  We look for her that sunlike stood
+ALSACE-LORRAINE,                                                   150
+
+  The sister Hours in circles linked,
+THE CAGEING OF ARES,                                               170
+
+  How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
+THE NIGHT-WALK,                                                    175
+
+  Awakes for me and leaps from shroud
+AT THE CLOSE,                                                      178
+
+  To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
+A GARDEN IDYL,                                                     179
+
+  With sagest craft Arachne worked
+                          A Reading of Life
+THE VITAL CHOICE,                                                  185
+
+  Or shall we run with Artemis
+WITH THE HUNTRESS,                                                 186
+
+  Through the water-eye of night,
+WITH THE PERSUADER,                                                189
+
+  Who murmurs, hither, hither: who
+THE TEST OF MANHOOD,                                               200
+
+  Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
+THE HUELESS LOVE,                                                  208
+
+  Unto that love must we through fire attain,
+UNION IN DISSEVERANCE,                                             209
+
+  Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;
+SONG IN THE SONGLESS,                                              210
+
+  They have no song, the sedges dry,
+THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH,                                            210
+
+  If that thou hast the gift of strength, then know
+THE MAIN REGRET,                                                   211
+
+  Seen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of
+  omission
+ALTERNATION,                                                       211
+
+  Between the fountain and the rill
+FOREST HISTORY,                                                    212
+
+  Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
+          Fragments of the Iliad in English Hexameter Verse
+THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES,                                         221
+
+  ‘Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how
+  can one,
+
+  ‘Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a
+  deer, thou!
+MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANS,                                       225
+
+  Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,
+AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHT,                                            227
+
+  These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now
+  clashing the thickest,
+PARIS AND DIOMEDES,                                                228
+
+  So he, with a clear shout of laughter,
+HYPNOS ON IDA,                                                     230
+
+  They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild
+  beasts,
+CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS,                         231
+
+  Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon
+  shingle,
+THE HORSES OF ACHILLES,                                            232
+
+  So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the
+  war-ground,
+THE MARES OF THE CAMARGUE,                                         234
+
+  A hundred mares, all white! their manes
+‘ATKINS’,                                                          236
+
+  Yonder’s the man with his life in his hand,
+THE VOYAGE OF THE ‘OPHIR’,                                         237
+
+  Men of our race, we send you one
+THE CRISIS,                                                        239
+
+  Spirit of Russia, now has come
+OCTOBER 21, 1905,                                                  241
+
+  The hundred years have passed, and he
+THE CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI,                                        243
+
+  We who have seen Italia in the throes,
+THE WILD ROSE,                                                     245
+
+  High climbs June’s wild rose,
+THE CALL,                                                          247
+
+  Under what spell are we debased
+ON COMO,                                                           250
+
+  A rainless darkness drew o’er the lake
+MILTON,                                                            251
+
+  What splendour of imperial station man,
+IRELAND,                                                           253
+
+  Fire in her ashes Ireland feels
+THE YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS’ BELT,                            255
+
+  The years had worn their seasons’ belt,
+FRAGMENTS,                                                         257
+
+  Open horizons round,
+
+  A wilding little stubble flower
+
+  From labours through the night, outworn,
+
+  This love of nature, that allures to take
+IL Y A CENT ANS,                                                   259
+
+  That march of the funereal Past behold;
+YOUTH IN AGE,                                                      261
+
+  Once I was part of the music I heard
+                               Epitaphs
+TO A FRIEND LOST,                                                  265
+
+  When I remember, friend, whom lost I call,
+M. M.,                                                             265
+
+  Who call her Mother and who calls her Wife
+THE LADY C. M.,                                                    266
+
+  To them that knew her, there is vital flame
+ON THE TOMBSTONE OF JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON,                      266
+
+  Thou our beloved and light of Earth hast crossed
+GORDON OF KHARTOUM,                                                266
+
+  Of men he would have raised to light he fell:
+J. C. M.,                                                          267
+
+  A fountain of our sweetest, quick to spring
+THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME,                                 267
+
+  With Alfred and St. Louis he doth win
+ISLET THE DACHS,                                                   267
+
+  Our Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed
+ON HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE,                                   268
+
+  Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
+HAWARDEN,                                                          269
+
+  When comes the lighted day for men to read
+AT THE FUNERAL,                                                    270
+
+  Her sacred body bear: the tenement
+ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS,                                             270
+
+  Long with us, now she leaves us; she has rest
+THE YEAR’S SHEDDINGS,                                              270
+
+  The varied colours are a fitful heap:
+
+
+
+
+A STAVE OF ROVING TIM
+(ADDRESSED TO CERTAIN FRIENDLY TRAMPS.)
+
+
+I
+
+
+   THE wind is East, the wind is West,
+      Blows in and out of haven;
+   The wind that blows is the wind that’s best,
+      And croak, my jolly raven!
+   If here awhile we jigged and laughed,
+      The like we will do yonder;
+   For he’s the man who masters a craft,
+      And light as a lord can wander.
+         So, foot the measure, Roving Tim,
+            And croak, my jolly raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   You live in rows of snug abodes,
+      With gold, maybe, for counting;
+   And mine’s the beck of the rainy roads
+      Against the sun a-mounting.
+   I take the day as it behaves,
+      Nor shiver when ’tis airy;
+   But comes a breeze, all you are on waves,
+      Sick chickens o’ Mother Carey!
+         So, now for next, cries Roving Tim,
+            And croak, my jolly raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+   Sweet lass, you screw a lovely leer,
+      To make a man consider.
+   If you were up with the auctioneer,
+      I’d be a handsome bidder.
+   But wedlock clips the rover’s wing;
+      She tricks him fly to spider;
+   And when we get to fights in the Ring,
+      It’s trumps when you play outsider.
+         So, wrench and split, cries Roving Tim,
+            And croak, my jolly raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   Along my winding way I know
+      A shady dell that’s winking;
+   The very corner for Self and Co
+      To do a world of thinking.
+   And shall I this? and shall I that?
+      Till Nature answers, ne’ther!
+   Strike match and light your pipe in your hat,
+      Rejoicing in sound shoe-leather!
+         So lead along, cries Roving Tim,
+            And croak, my jolly raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+   A cunning hand ’ll hand you bread,
+      With freedom for your capers.
+   I’m not so sure of a cunning head;
+      It steers to pits or vapours.
+   But as for Life, we’ll bear in sight
+      The lesson Nature teaches;
+   Regard it in a sailoring light,
+      And treat it like thirsty leeches.
+         So, fly your jib, cries Roving Tim,
+            And top your boom, old raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   She’ll take, to please her dame and dad,
+      The shopman nicely shaven.
+   She’ll learn to think o’ the marching lad
+      When perchers show they’re craven.
+   You say the shopman piles a heap,
+      While I perhaps am fasting;
+   And bless your wits, it haunts him in sleep,
+      His tin-kettle chance of lasting!
+         So hail the road, cries Roving Tim,
+            And hail the rain, old raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   He’s half a wife, yon pecker bill;
+      A book and likewise preacher.
+   With any soul, in a game of skill,
+      He’ll prove your over-reacher.
+   The reason is, his brains are bent
+      On doing things right single.
+   You’d wish for them when pitching your tent
+      At night in a whirly dingle!
+         So, off we go, cries Roving Tim,
+            And on we go, old raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   Lord, no, man’s lot is not for bliss;
+      To call it woe is blindness:
+   It’ll here a kick, and it’s there a kiss,
+      And here and there a kindness.
+   He starts a hare and calls her joy;
+      He runs her down to sorrow:
+   The dogs within him bother the boy,
+      But ’tis a new day to-morrow.
+         So, I at helm, cries Roving Tim,
+            And you at bow, old raven!
+         The wind according to its whim
+            Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+
+JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE
+
+
+I
+
+
+   A REVELATION came on Jane,
+   The widow of a labouring swain:
+   And first her body trembled sharp,
+   Then all the woman was a harp
+   With winds along the strings; she heard,
+   Though there was neither tone nor word.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   For past our hearing was the air,
+   Beyond our speaking what it bare,
+   And she within herself had sight
+   Of heaven at work to cleanse outright,
+   To make of her a mansion fit
+   For angel hosts inside to sit.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+   They entered, and forthwith entranced,
+   Her body braced, her members danced;
+   Surprisingly the woman leapt;
+   And countenance composed she kept:
+   As gossip neighbours in the lane
+   Declared, who saw and pitied Jane.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   These knew she had been reading books,
+   The which was witnessed by her looks
+   Of late: she had a mania
+   For mad folk in America,
+   And said for sure they led the way,
+   But meat and beer were meant to stay.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+   That she had visited a fair,
+   Had seen a gauzy lady there,
+   Alive with tricks on legs alone,
+   As good as wings, was also known:
+   And longwhiles in a sullen mood,
+   Before her jumping, Jane would brood.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   A good knee’s height, they say, she sprang;
+   Her arms and feet like those who hang:
+   As if afire the body sped,
+   And neither pair contributed.
+   She jumped in silence: she was thought
+   A corpse to resurrection caught.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   The villagers were mostly dazed;
+   They jeered, they wondered, and they praised.
+   ’Twas guessed by some she was inspired,
+   And some would have it she had hired
+   An engine in her petticoats,
+   To turn their wits and win their votes.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   Her first was Winny Earnes, a kind
+   Of woman not to dance inclined;
+   But she went up, entirely won,
+   Ere Jump-to-glory Jane had done;
+   And once a vixen wild for speech,
+   She found the better way to preach.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   No long time after, Jane was seen
+   Directing jumps at Daddy Green;
+   And that old man, to watch her fly,
+   Had eyebrows made of arches high;
+   Till homeward he likewise did hop,
+   Oft calling on himself to stop!
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+   It was a scene when man and maid,
+   Abandoning all other trade,
+   And careless of the call to meals,
+   Went jumping at the woman’s heels.
+   By dozens they were counted soon,
+   Without a sound to tell their tune.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+   Along the roads they came, and crossed
+   The fields, and o’er the hills were lost,
+   And in the evening reappeared;
+   Then short like hobbled horses reared,
+   And down upon the grass they plumped:
+   Alone their Jane to glory jumped.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+   At morn they rose, to see her spring
+   All going as an engine thing;
+   And lighter than the gossamer
+   She led the bobbers following her,
+   Past old acquaintances, and where
+   They made the stranger stupid stare.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+   When turnips were a filling crop,
+   In scorn they jumped a butcher’s shop:
+   Or, spite of threats to flog and souse,
+   They jumped for shame a public-house:
+   And much their legs were seized with rage
+   If passing by the vicarage.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+   The tightness of a hempen rope
+   Their bodies got; but laundry soap
+   Not handsomer can rub the skin
+   For token of the washed within.
+   Occasionally coughers cast
+   A leg aloft and coughed their last.
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+   The weaker maids and some old men,
+   Requiring rafters for the pen
+   On rainy nights, were those who fell.
+   The rest were quite a miracle,
+   Refreshed as you may search all round
+   On Club-feast days and cry, Not found!
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+   For these poor innocents, that slept
+   Against the sky, soft women wept:
+   For never did they any theft;
+   ’Twas known when they their camping left,
+   And jumped the cold out of their rags;
+   In spirit rich as money-bags.
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+   They jumped the question, jumped reply;
+   And whether to insist, deny,
+   Reprove, persuade, they jumped in ranks
+   Or singly, straight the arms to flanks,
+   And straight the legs, with just a knee
+   For bending in a mild degree.
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+   The villagers might call them mad;
+   An endless holiday they had,
+   Of pleasure in a serious work:
+   They taught by leaps where perils lurk,
+   And with the lambkins practised sports
+   For ’scaping Satan’s pounds and quarts.
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+   It really seemed on certain days,
+   When they bobbed up their Lord to praise,
+   And bobbing up they caught the glance
+   Of light, our secret is to dance,
+   And hold the tongue from hindering peace;
+   To dance out preacher and police.
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+   Those flies of boys disturbed them sore
+   On Sundays and when daylight wore:
+   With withies cut from hedge or copse,
+   They treated them as whipping-tops,
+   And flung big stones with cruel aim;
+   Yet all the flock jumped on the same.
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+   For what could persecution do
+   To worry such a blessed crew,
+   On whom it was as wind to fire,
+   Which set them always jumping higher?
+   The parson and the lawyer tried,
+   By meek persistency defied.
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+   But if they bore, they could pursue
+   As well, and this the Bishop too;
+   When inner warnings proved him plain
+   The chase for Jump-to-glory Jane.
+   She knew it by his being sent
+   To bless the feasting in the tent.
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+   Not less than fifty years on end,
+   The Squire had been the Bishop’s friend:
+   And his poor tenants, harmless ones,
+   With souls to save! fed not on buns,
+   But angry meats: she took her place
+   Outside to show the way to grace.
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+   In apron suit the Bishop stood;
+   The crowding people kindly viewed.
+   A gaunt grey woman he saw rise
+   On air, with most beseeching eyes:
+   And evident as light in dark
+   It was, she set to him for mark.
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+   Her highest leap had come: with ease
+   She jumped to reach the Bishop’s knees:
+   Compressing tight her arms and lips,
+   She sought to jump the Bishop’s hips:
+   Her aim flew at his apron-band,
+   That he might see and understand.
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+   The mild inquiry of his gaze
+   Was altered to a peaked amaze,
+   At sight of thirty in ascent,
+   To gain his notice clearly bent:
+   And greatly Jane at heart was vexed
+   By his ploughed look of mind perplexed.
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+   In jumps that said, Beware the pit!
+   More eloquent than speaking it—
+   That said, Avoid the boiled, the roast;
+   The heated nose on face of ghost,
+   Which comes of drinking: up and o’er
+   The flesh with me! did Jane implore.
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+   She jumped him high as huntsmen go
+   Across the gate; she jumped him low,
+   To coax him to begin and feel
+   His infant steps returning, peel
+   His mortal pride, exposing fruit,
+   And off with hat and apron suit.
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+   We need much patience, well she knew,
+   And out and out, and through and through,
+   When we would gentlefolk address,
+   However we may seek to bless:
+   At times they hide them like the beasts
+   From sacred beams; and mostly priests.
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+   He gave no sign of making bare,
+   Nor she of faintness or despair.
+   Inflamed with hope that she might win,
+   If she but coaxed him to begin,
+   She used all arts for making fain;
+   The mother with her babe was Jane.
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+   Now stamped the Squire, and knowing not
+   Her business, waved her from the spot.
+   Encircled by the men of might,
+   The head of Jane, like flickering light,
+   As in a charger, they beheld
+   Ere she was from the park expelled.
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+   Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight,
+   Did Jane around communicate:
+   For that the moment when began
+   The holy but mistaken man,
+   In view of light, to take his lift,
+   They cut him from her charm adrift!
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+   And he was lost: a banished face
+   For ever from the ways of grace,
+   Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.
+   They saw the Bishop’s wavering sprite
+   Within her look, at come and go,
+   Long after he had caused her woe.
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+   Her greying eyes (until she sank
+   At Fredsham on the wayside bank,
+   Like cinder heaps that whitened lie
+   From coals that shot the flame to sky)
+   Had glassy vacancies, which yearned
+   For one in memory discerned.
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+   May those who ply the tongue that cheats,
+   And those who rush to beer and meats,
+   And those whose mean ambition aims
+   At palaces and titled names,
+   Depart in such a cheerful strain
+   As did our Jump-to-glory Jane!
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+   Her end was beautiful: one sigh.
+   She jumped a foot when it was nigh.
+   A lily in a linen clout
+   She looked when they had laid her out.
+   It is a lily-light she bears
+   For England up the ladder-stairs.
+
+
+
+
+THE RIDDLE FOR MEN
+
+
+I
+
+
+      THIS Riddle rede or die,
+      Says History since our Flood,
+      To warn her sons of power:—
+   It can be truth, it can be lie;
+   Be parasite to twist awry;
+   The drouthy vampire for your blood;
+   The fountain of the silver flower;
+   A brand, a lure, a web, a crest;
+   Supple of wax or tempered steel;
+   The spur to honour, snake in nest:
+   ’Tis as you will with it to deal;
+      To wear upon the breast,
+      Or trample under heel.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+      And rede you not aright,
+      Says Nature, still in red
+      Shall History’s tale be writ!
+   For solely thus you lead to light
+   The trailing chapters she must write,
+   And pass my fiery test of dead
+   Or living through the furnace-pit:
+   Dislinked from who the softer hold
+   In grip of brute, and brute remain:
+   Of whom the woeful tale is told,
+   How for one short Sultanic reign,
+      Their bodies lapse to mould,
+      Their souls behowl the plain.
+
+
+
+
+THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY
+
+
+I
+
+
+   ONE fairest of the ripe unwedded left
+   Her shadow on the Sage’s path; he found,
+   By common signs, that she had done a theft.
+   He could have made the sovereign heights resound
+   With questions of the wherefore of her state:
+   He on far other but an hour before
+   Intent.  And was it man, or was it mate,
+   That she disdained? or was there haply more?
+
+   About her mouth a placid humour slipped
+   The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve
+   Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.
+   The surface was attentive to receive,
+   The secret underneath enfolded fast.
+   She had the step of the unconquered, brave,
+   Not arrogant; and if the vessel’s mast
+   Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.
+   Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,
+   With something of a wavering line unspelt.
+   They hold the look whose tenderness condoles
+   For what the sister in the look has dealt
+   Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones
+   A woman’s honeyed amorous outvied,
+   As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans
+   Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide
+   Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill
+   Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.
+   Those voices are not magic of the will
+   To strike love’s wound, but of love’s wound give sound,
+   Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.
+   They waft to the moist tropics after storm,
+   When out of passion spent thick incense steams,
+   And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.
+
+   Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint
+   Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring
+   Of melody clasped motion in restraint:
+   The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.
+   With such endowments armed was she and decked
+   To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;
+   Surpassing many a giant intellect,
+   The marvel of that cradled infant mind.
+   It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;
+   Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;
+   And promised in fair feminine to grow
+   A Sage’s match and mate, more heavenly orbed.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Across his path the spouseless Lady cast
+   Her shadow, and the man that thing became.
+   His youth uprising called his age the Past.
+   This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,
+   And in his bosom an inverted Sage
+   Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.
+   But who while veins run blood shall know the page
+   Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?
+   Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,
+   Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in
+   To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,
+   Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin
+   Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs
+   Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;
+   They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs
+   For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!
+   Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,
+   The legends of her mission to beguile?
+
+   Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth
+   He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;
+   And not on her soft lips was it descried.
+   She stepped her way benevolently grave:
+   Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,
+   By tossing victim to the courtier knave,
+   Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.
+   Rather ’twas humbleness in being pursued,
+   As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.
+   Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?
+   All wisdom’s armoury this man could wield;
+   And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased
+   Traverse her woman’s curtain and poor shield,
+   For new example of a world diseased;
+   Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;
+   A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;
+   Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:
+   He worshipped like the young enthusiast,
+   Named simpleton or poet.  Did he read
+   Right through, and with the voice she held reserved
+   Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?
+
+   Compassion for the man thus noble nerved
+   The pity for herself she felt in him,
+   To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;
+   At least, be worthy.  That our soul may swim,
+   We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.
+   It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks.
+   But, ah! confession of a woman’s breast:
+   She eminent, she honoured of her sex!
+   Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,
+   To veil them.  None of women, save their vile,
+   Plays traitor to an army in the field.
+   The cries most vindicating most defile.
+   How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,
+   When, under pressure of their common foe,
+   Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,
+   On pain of his intolerable crow
+   Above the fiction, built for him, o’erthrown?
+   Irrational he is, irrational
+   Must they be, though not Reason’s light shall wane
+   In them with ever Nature at close call,
+   Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;
+   Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make
+   A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh:
+   Whereat men dread their lofty structure’s quake
+   Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply
+   The crazy roar of peril, leonine
+   For injured majesty.  That sigh of dames
+   Is rare and soon suppressed.  Not they combine
+   To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames
+   Their lustier if not wilder: fixed are they,
+   In elegancy scarce denoting ease;
+   And do they breathe, it is not to betray
+   The martyr in the caryatides.
+   Yet here and there along the graceful row
+   Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,
+   Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe
+   May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,
+   And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight
+   Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:
+   May stamp endurance by expounding fate.
+   She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone;
+   Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,
+   Frost-white.  She gave his hearing sight to view
+   The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf:
+   Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.
+   No further sign of heart could he discern:
+   The picture of her speech was winter sky;
+   A headless figure folding a cleft urn,
+   Where tears once at the overflow were dry.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+   So spake she her first utterance on the rack.
+   It softened torment, in the funeral hues
+   Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back
+   To listen to herself, herself accuse
+   Harshly as Love’s imperial cause allowed.
+   She meant to grovel, and her lover praised
+   So high o’er the condemnatory crowd,
+   That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.
+
+   The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,
+   Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged
+   Under the threatened flash of a bright brand
+   At arm’s length up, for severing action edged.
+   Why, then Love’s Court of Honour contemplate;
+   And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed
+   Above their lost, invoke an advocate
+   In Passion’s purity, thereby redeemed.
+
+   Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,
+   The woman stricken by an arrow falls.
+   His advocate she can be, not her own,
+   If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.
+   Have we such scenes of drapery’s mournfulness
+   On Beauty’s revelations, witched we plant,
+   Over the fair shape humbled to confess,
+   An angel’s buckler, with loud choiric chant.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,
+   The lady’s hand in her physician’s knew.
+   She had not hoped for them as her award,
+   When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew
+   Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:
+   But muteness whipped her skin.  She could have said,
+   Her free confession was to work his cure,
+   Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.
+   Were they not shown?  His muteness shook in thrall
+   Her body on the verge of that black pit
+   Sheer from the treacherous confessional,
+   Demanding further, while perusing it.
+
+   Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.
+   She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel
+   Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.
+   For the dark downward then her soul did reel.
+   A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:
+   A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.
+   She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,
+   Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:
+   Welcome to women, when, between man’s laws
+   And Nature’s thirsts, they, soul from body torn,
+   Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,
+   Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.
+   Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,
+   To think the cure so manifest, so frail
+   Her charm remaining.  Was the curtain’s rent
+   Too wide? he but a man of that herd male?
+   She saw him as that herd of the forked head
+   Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,
+   Clothed only in life’s last devouring red.
+   Confession at her fearful instant sees
+   Judicial Silence write the devil fact
+   In letters of the skeleton: at once,
+   Swayed on the supplication of her act,
+   The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,
+   She joins.  No longer colouring, with skips
+   At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears
+   Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips
+   To do the scaffold’s office at his ears.
+
+   Into the bitter judgement of that herd
+   On women, she, deeming it present, fell.
+   Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word
+   They stone with, and so pile their citadel
+   To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt.
+   As had he flung it, in her breast it burned.
+   Face and reflect it did her hot revolt
+   From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;
+   Because the golden buckler was withheld,
+   She to herself applies the powder-spark,
+   For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,
+   Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.
+
+   She had the Scriptural word so scored on brain,
+   It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world
+   That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;
+   Most women! see! by the man’s view dustward hurled,
+   Impenitent, submissive, torn in two.
+   They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,
+   And sops of nourishment may get some few,
+   In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.
+
+   Barely have seasoned women understood
+   The great Irrational, who thunders power,
+   Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,
+   And courts her in the covert’s dewy hour;
+   Returning to his fortress nigh night’s end,
+   With execration of her daughters’ lures.
+   They help him the proud fortress to defend,
+   Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,
+   The murder it commits; nor that its base
+   Is shifty as a huckster’s opening deal
+   For bargain under smoothest market face,
+   While Gentleness bids frigid Justice feel,
+   Justice protests that Reason is her seat;
+   Elect Convenience, as Reason masked,
+   Hears calmly cramped Humanity entreat;
+   Until a sentient world is overtasked,
+   And rouses Reason’s fountain-self: she calls
+   On Nature; Nature answers: Share your guilt
+   In common when contention cracks the walls
+   Of the big house which not on me is built.
+
+   The Lady said as much as breath will bear;
+   To happier sisters inconceivable:
+   Contemptible to veterans of the fair,
+   Who show for a convolving pearly shell,
+   A treasure of the shore, their written book.
+   As much as woman’s breath will bear and live
+   Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look,
+   That held as if for grain the summing sieve.
+   Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes
+   Our homely daylight after dread of spells.
+   Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes
+   Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells
+   About a story of the naked flesh,
+   Intending but to put some garment on,
+   Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh,
+   A traitor lurks and will be known anon.
+   Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt,
+   Stationed for index down an ancient track:
+   And ware of it was he while she poured out
+   A broken moon on forest-waters black.
+
+   Though past the stage where midway men are skilled
+   To scan their senses wriggling under plough,
+   When yet to the charmed seed of speech distilled,
+   Their hearts are fallow, he, and witless how,
+   Loathing, had yielded, like bruised limb to leech,
+   Not handsomely; but now beholding bleed
+   Soul of the woman in her prostrate speech,
+   The valour of that rawness he could read.
+   Thence flashed it, as the crimson currents ran
+   From senses up to thoughts, how she had read
+   Maternally the warm remainder man
+   Beneath his crust, and Nature’s pity shed,
+   In shedding dearer than heart’s blood to light
+   His vision of the path mild Wisdom walks.
+   Therewith he could espy Confession’s fright;
+   Her need of him: these flowers grow on stalks;
+   They suck from soil, and have their urgencies
+   Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves.
+   Veins of divergencies, convergencies,
+   Our botanist in womankind perceives;
+   And if he hugs no wound, the man can prize
+   That splendid consummation and sure proof
+   Of more than heart in her, who might despise,
+   Who drowns herself, for pity up aloof
+   To soar and be like Nature’s pity: she
+   Instinctive of what virtue in young days
+   Had served him for his pilot-star on sea,
+   To trouble him in haven.  Thus his gaze
+   Came out of rust, and more than the schooled tongue
+   Was gifted to encourage and assure.
+   He gave her of the deep well she had sprung;
+   And name it gratitude, the word is poor.
+   But name it gratitude, is aught as rare
+   From sex to sex?  And let it have survived
+   Their conflict, comes the peace between the pair,
+   Unknown to thousands husbanded and wived:
+   Unknown to Passion, generous for prey:
+   Unknown to Love, too blissful in a truce.
+   Their tenderest of self did each one slay;
+   His cloak of dignity, her fleur de luce;
+   Her lily flower, and his abolla cloak,
+   Things living, slew they, and no artery bled.
+   A moment of some sacrificial smoke
+   They passed, and were the dearer for their dead.
+
+   He learnt how much we gain who make no claims.
+   A nightcap on his flicker of grey fire
+   Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,
+   Confessing; and its conjured image dire,
+   Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed;
+   The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,
+   Visioned to hold corrected and abashed
+   Our senile emulous; which rolls its course
+   Proud to the shattering end; with these few last
+   Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice,
+   Squeezed out in anguish: all of that once vast!
+   And still, though having skin for man’s abuse,
+   Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath
+   Shot skyward from a blood at passionate jet,
+   Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth
+   Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;
+   And numb, of formal value.  Are we true
+   In nature, never natural thing repents;
+   Albeit receiving punishment for due,
+   Among the group of this world’s penitents;
+   Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft
+   Cravenly, while the scourge no shudder spares.
+
+   Our world believes it stabler if the soft
+   Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.
+   Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,
+   Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;
+   Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom
+   The chasm between our passions and our wits!
+
+   Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,
+   It trembles at betrayal of a sore.
+   Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose
+   Impurities for clearness at the core.
+
+   She to her hungered thundering in breast,
+   _Ye shall not starve_, not feebly designates
+   The world repressing as a life repressed,
+   Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.
+   How Sin, amid the shades Cimmerian,
+   Repents, she points for sight: and she avers,
+   The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan
+   Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.
+
+   Sin against immaturity, the sin
+   Of ravenous excess, what deed divides
+   Man from vitality; these bleed within;
+   Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.
+   Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,
+   A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.
+   But culprit who the law of man has crossed
+   With Nature’s dubiously within is blamed;
+   Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,
+   Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,
+   We but bewail a broken fellowship,
+   A sting, an isolation, a fall’n crown.
+
+   Abject of sinners is that sensitive,
+   The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled
+   Incorrigible: such title do we give
+   To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;
+   And, taking it for Nature, place in ban
+   Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,
+   The shame and baffler of the soul of man,
+   The recreant, reptilious.  Do thou build
+   Thy mind on her foundations in earth’s bed;
+   Behold man’s mind the child of her keen rod,
+   For teaching how the wits and passions wed
+   To rear that temple of the credible God;
+   Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,
+   Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:
+   Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,
+   Man’s laws appear the blind progressive worm,
+   That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings
+   The which to endow with vision, lift from mud
+   To level of their nature’s aims and springs,
+   Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,
+   Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife
+   (Whom the so rosy ferryman invites
+   To junction, and mid-channel over Life,
+   Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)
+   Instruct in deeper than Convenience,
+   In higher than the harvest of a year.
+   Only the rooted knowledge to high sense
+   Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur
+   For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
+   Beyond the path with grain on either hand,
+   Help to the steering of our social Ark
+   Over the barbarous waters unto land.
+
+   For us the double conscience and its war,
+   The serving of two masters, false to both,
+   Until those twain, who spring the root and are
+   The knowledge in division, plight a troth
+   Of equal hands: nor longer circulate
+   A pious token for their current coin,
+   To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,
+   Fair feminine and masculine shall join
+   Upon an upper plane, still common mould,
+   Where stamped religion and reflective pace
+   A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold
+   Rounds to horizon for their soul’s embrace.
+   Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun
+   Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.
+   But not till Nature’s laws and man’s are one,
+   Can marriage of the man and woman be.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+   He passed her through the sermon’s dull defile.
+   Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved
+   The city and the vale and mountain-pile.
+   She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.
+
+   A new land in an old beneath her lay;
+   And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,
+   As bride who without shame has come to say,
+   Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.
+
+   A natural woman’s heart, not more than clad
+   By station and bright raiment, gathers heat
+   From nakedness in trusted hands: she had
+   The joy of those who feel the world’s heart beat,
+   After long doubt of it as fire or ice;
+   Because one man had helped her to breathe free;
+   Surprised to faith in something of a price
+   Past the old charity in chivalry:—
+   Our first wild step to right the loaded scales
+   Displaying women shamefully outweighed.
+   The wisdom of humaneness best avails
+   For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.
+   Her buried body fed the life she drank.
+   And not another stripping of her wound!
+   The startled thought on black delirium sank,
+   While with her gentle surgeon she communed,
+   And woman’s prospect of the yoke repelled.
+   Her buried body gave her flowers and food;
+   The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;
+   Love, the large love that folds the multitude.
+   Soul’s chastity in honesty, and this
+   With beauty, made the dower to men refused.
+   And little do they know the prize they miss;
+   Which is their happy fortune!  Thus he mused
+
+   For him, the cynic in the Sage had play
+   A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;
+   To think, of all alive most wedded they,
+   Whom time disjoined!  He needed her quick thirst
+   For renovated earth: on earth she gazed,
+   With humble aim to foot beside the wise.
+   Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised
+   Yet lowly over morning’s pure grey eyes.
+
+
+
+
+‘LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO’
+
+
+      LOVE is winged for two,
+      In the worst he weathers,
+      When their hearts are tied;
+      But if they divide,
+      O too true!
+   Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,
+   Feathers all the ground bestrew.
+
+   I was breast of morning sea,
+   Rosy plume on forest dun,
+   I the laugh in rainy fleeces,
+      While with me
+      She made one.
+   Now must we pick up our pieces,
+   For that then so winged were we.
+
+
+
+
+‘ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE’
+
+
+   ASK, is Love divine,
+   Voices all are, ay.
+   Question for the sign,
+   There’s a common sigh.
+   Would we, through our years,
+   Love forego,
+   Quit of scars and tears?
+   Ah, but no, no, no!
+
+
+
+
+‘JOY IS FLEET’
+
+
+   JOY is fleet,
+   Sorrow slow.
+   Love, so sweet,
+   Sorrow will sow.
+   Love, that has flown
+   Ere day’s decline,
+   Love to have known,
+   Sorrow, be mine!
+
+
+
+
+THE LESSON OF GRIEF
+
+
+   Not ere the bitter herb we taste,
+   Which ages thought of happy times,
+   To plant us in a weeping waste,
+   Rings with our fellows this one heart
+               Accordant chimes.
+
+   When I had shed my glad year’s leaf,
+   I did believe I stood alone,
+   Till that great company of Grief
+   Taught me to know this craving heart
+         For not my own.
+
+
+
+
+WIND ON THE LYRE
+
+
+   THAT was the chirp of Ariel
+   You heard, as overhead it flew,
+   The farther going more to dwell,
+   And wing our green to wed our blue;
+   But whether note of joy or knell,
+   Not his own Father-singer knew;
+   Nor yet can any mortal tell,
+   Save only how it shivers through;
+   The breast of us a sounded shell,
+   The blood of us a lighted dew.
+
+
+
+
+THE YOUTHFUL QUEST
+
+
+   HIS Lady queen of woods to meet,
+      He wanders day and night:
+   The leaves have whisperings discreet,
+      The mossy ways invite.
+
+   Across a lustrous ring of space,
+      By covert hoods and caves,
+   Is promise of her secret face
+      In film that onward waves.
+
+   For darkness is the light astrain,
+      Astrain for light the dark.
+   A grey moth down a larches’ lane
+      Unwinds a ghostly spark.
+
+   Her lamp he sees, and young desire
+      Is fed while cloaked she flies.
+   She quivers shot of violet fire
+      To ash at look of eyes.
+
+
+
+
+THE EMPTY PURSE
+A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL SON
+
+
+   THOU, run to the dry on this wayside bank,
+   Too plainly of all the propellers bereft!
+      Quenched youth, and is that thy purse?
+   Even such limp slough as the snake has left
+   Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin,
+   For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,
+   In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;
+      And thine to crave and to curse
+      The sweet thing once within.
+   Accuse him: some devil committed the theft,
+      Which leaves of the portly a skin,
+      No more; of the weighty a whine.
+
+   Pursue him: and first, to be sure of his track,
+   Over devious ways that have led to this,
+      In the stream’s consecutive line,
+      Let memory lead thee back
+   To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,
+   Unflushed at the front of the roseate door
+   Unopened yet: never shadow there
+      Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis
+      For souls whose cry is, alack!
+   An ivory cradle rocks, apeep
+   Through his eyelashes’ laugh, a breathing pearl.
+   There the young chief of the animals wore
+   A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware
+   Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap.
+   In a dingle away from a rutted highroad,
+   Around him the earliest throstle and merle,
+   Our human smile between milk and sleep,
+      Effervescent of Nature he crowed.
+   Fair was that season; furl over furl
+   The banners of blossom; a dancing floor
+   This earth; very angels the clouds; and fair
+   Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast:
+   Careless, a centre of vigilant care.
+   Thy mother kisses an infant curl.
+   The room of the toys was a boundless nest,
+      A kingdom the field of the games,
+      Till entered the craving for more,
+      And the worshipped small body had aims.
+   A good little idol, as records attest,
+   When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream
+   By sweets and caresses: he gave but sign
+   That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race,
+   Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine.
+   Almost magician, his earliest dream
+      Was lord of the unpossessed
+      For a look; himself and his chase,
+      As on puffs of a wind at whirl,
+      Made one in the wink of a gleam.
+      She kisses a locket curl,
+   She conjures to vision a cherub face,
+      When her butterfly counted his day
+      All meadow and flowers, mishap
+      Derided, and taken for play
+      The fling of an urchin’s cap.
+   When her butterfly showed him an eaglet born,
+      For preying too heedlessly bred,
+      What a heart clapped in thee then!
+      With what fuller colours of morn!
+   And high to the uttermost heavens it flew,
+      Swift as on poet’s pen.
+      It flew to be wedded, to wed
+      The mystery scented around:
+      Issue of flower and dew,
+      Issue of light and sound:
+      Thinner than either; a thread
+      Spun of the dream they threw
+      To kindle, allure, evade.
+   It ran the sea-wave, the garden’s dance,
+   To the forest’s dark heart down a dappled glade;
+      Led on by a perishing glance,
+      By a twinkle’s eternal waylaid.
+   Woman, the name was, when she took form;
+   Sheaf of the wonders of life.  She fled,
+   Close imaged; she neared, far seen.  How she made
+   Palpitate earth of the living and dead!
+   Did she not show thee the world designed
+   Solely for loveliness?  Nested warm,
+   The day was the morrow in flight.  And for thee,
+   She muted the discords, tuned, refined;
+   Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak.
+   Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree,
+   Sliding on radiance, winging from shade,
+   With her witch-whisper o’er ruins, in reeds,
+   She sang low the song of her promise delayed;
+   Beckoned and died, as a finger of smoke
+   Astream over woodland.  And was not she
+   History’s heroines white on storm?
+   Remember her summons to valorous deeds.
+   Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm,
+   Most was her beam on the knightly: she led
+   For the honours of manhood more than the prize;
+      Waved her magnetical yoke
+      Whither the warrior bled,
+      Ere to the bower of sighs.
+   And shy of her secrets she was; under deeps
+   Plunged at the breath of a thirst that woke
+   The dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.
+
+   Away over heaven the young heart flew,
+   And caught many lustres, till some one said
+   (Or was it the thought into hearing grew?),
+      _Not thou as commoner men_!
+      Thy stature puffed and it swayed,
+      It stiffened to royal-erect;
+      A brassy trumpet brayed;
+      A whirling seized thy head;
+      The vision of beauty was flecked.
+      Note well the how and the when,
+      The thing that prompted and sped.
+      Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing,
+      Fixed eye, and the world was prey.
+   No simple world of thy greenblade Spring,
+      Nor world of thy flowerful prime
+      On the topmost Orient peak
+      Above a yet vaporous day.
+      Flesh was it, breast to beak:
+   A four-walled windowless world without ray,
+   Only darkening jets on a river of slime,
+   Where harsh over music as woodland jay,
+      A voice chants, Woe to the weak!
+      And along an insatiate feast,
+      Women and men are one
+      In the cup transforming to beast.
+   Magian worship they paid to their sun,
+   Lord of the Purse!  Behold him climb.
+      Stalked ever such figure of fun
+   For monarch in great-grin pantomime?
+   See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend;
+   The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat,
+   From a life that reeks of the rotted end;
+   While he—is he pictureable? replete,
+   Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil,
+      Hollow, more hollow at core.
+      And for him did the hundreds toil
+      Despised; in the cold and heat,
+      This image ridiculous bore
+      On their shoulders for morsels of meat!
+
+   Gross, with the fumes of incense full,
+   With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt,
+   He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull,
+      He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.
+   And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed;
+   Original man, as philosophers vouch;
+   Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed,
+   Frightfully living and armed to devour;
+   The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch;
+      The bait, the line and the hook:
+      To feed on his fellows intent.
+      God of the Danaé shower,
+      He had but to follow his bent.
+   He battened on fowl not safely hutched,
+      On sheep astray from the crook;
+      A lure for the foolish in fold:
+   To carrion turning what flesh he touched.
+      And O the grace of his air,
+      As he at the goblet sips,
+      A centre of girdles loosed,
+      With their grisly label, Sold!
+   Credulous hears the fidelity swear,
+   Which has roving eyes over yielded lips:
+   To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced,
+      The stuck in a treacherous slough,
+   Because of his faith in a purchased pair,
+      False to a vinous vow.
+
+   In his glory of banquet strip him bare,
+      And what is the creature we view?
+   Our pursy Apollo Apollyon’s tool;
+      A small one, still of the crew
+      By serpent Apollyon blest:
+   His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.
+   A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned;
+      Not viler, you hear him protest:
+   Of a popular countenance not incorrect.
+   But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds
+      Paint him the hooved and homed,
+      Despite the poor pother he pleads,
+      And his look of a nation’s elect.
+      We have him, our quarry confessed!
+      And scan him: the features inspect
+      Of that bestial multiform: cry,
+   Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!
+      The book of thy wisdom, proved
+      On me, its last hieroglyph page,
+      Alive in the horned and hooved?
+      Thou! will he make reply.
+
+      Thus has the plenary purse
+      Done often: to do will engage
+   Anew upon all of thy like, or worse.
+      And now is thy deepest regret
+      To be man, clean rescued from beast:
+      From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold,
+      Celestially released.
+
+      But now from his cavernous hold,
+      Free may thy soul be set,
+   As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn,
+      Refreshed by some bodily sweat,
+      The meaning of either in turn,
+      What issue may come of the two:—
+   A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach
+   Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold:
+   A firmament passing our visible blue.
+   To those having nought to reflect it, ’tis nought;
+   To those who are misty, ’tis mist on the beach
+   From the billow withdrawing; to those who see
+      Earth, our mother, in thought,
+      Her spirit it is, our key.
+
+   Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here,
+   Of one significance, pricking the blind.
+   This is thy gain now the surface is clear:
+   To read with a soul in the mirror of mind
+   Is man’s chief lesson.—Thou smilest!  I preach!
+      Acid smiling, my friend, reveals
+   Abysses within; frigid preaching a street
+      Paved unconcernedly smooth
+      For the lecturer straight on his heels,
+      Up and down a policeman’s beat;
+      Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.
+   Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.
+   It is not attractive in being too chaste.
+   The popular tale of adventure and crime
+   Would equally sicken an overdone taste.
+   So, then, onward.  Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe,
+   Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.
+
+   Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet;
+   It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth,
+      For the thirsts of our nature brine.
+   But manful has met it, manful will meet.
+   And think of thy privilege: supple with youth,
+      To have sight of the headlong swine,
+      Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!
+      As the coin of thy purse poured out:
+      An animal’s holiday past:
+   And free of them thou, to begin a new bout;
+   To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast:
+   No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse:
+   Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare;
+   Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book
+   Of the world can be read, by necessity urged.
+   For witness, what blinkers are they who look
+   From the state of the prince or the millionnaire!
+      They see but the fish they attract,
+      The hungers on them converged;
+   And never the thought in the shell of the act,
+      Nor ever life’s fangless mirth.
+   But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged,
+      Go into thyself, strike Earth.
+   She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.
+   Thou findest a pugilist countering quick,
+   Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred;
+   Not, after the studied professional trick,
+   Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight.  Strike Earth,
+   Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!
+      And thou com’st on a saving fact,
+      To nourish thy planted worth.
+
+   Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,
+   Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact:
+   The redemption of sinners deluded! the last
+      Dry handful, that bruises and saves.
+   To the common big heart are we bound right fast,
+      When our Mother admonishing nips
+      At the nakedness bare of a clout,
+      And we crave what the commonest craves.
+
+      This wealth was a fortress-wall,
+   Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout;
+   Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all;
+   With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt;
+      Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.
+      Thus are we man made firm;
+      Made warm by the numbers compact.
+   We follow no longer a trumpet-snout,
+      At a trot where the hog is tracked,
+      Nor wriggle the way of the worm.
+
+      Thou wilt spare us the cynical pout
+   At humanity: sign of a nature bechurled.
+      No stenchy anathemas cast
+      Upon Providence, women, the world.
+   Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.
+   The purchased are things of the mart, not classed
+   Among resonant types that have freely grown.
+
+   Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed:
+   As any sad dog’s of sweet flesh when he quits
+      The wayside wandering bone!
+   No revilings of comrades as ingrates: thee
+   The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened
+      By laws yet barbarous) own.
+
+   If some one performed Fiend’s deputy,
+      He was for awhile the Fiend.
+      Still, nursing a passion to speak,
+   As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,
+      When the ladle has finished its leak,
+   And the vessel is loquent of nature’s inane,
+      Hie where the demagogues roar
+   Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim’s force:
+      Hurrah to their jolly attack
+      On a City that smokes of the Plain;
+      A city of sin’s death-dyes,
+      Holding revel of worms in a corse;
+      A city of malady sore,
+      Over-ripe for the big doom’s crack:
+      A city of hymnical snore;
+      Connubial truths and lies
+      Demanding an instant divorce,
+      Clean as the bright from the black.
+   It were well for thy system to sermonize.
+   There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.
+
+      Then up stand thou in the midst:
+      Thy good grain out of thee thresh,
+      Hand upon heart: relate
+      What things thou legally didst
+      For the Archseducer of flesh.
+   Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,
+      Confess thee an instrument armed
+      To be snare of our wanton, our weak,
+      Of all by the sensual charmed.
+   For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:
+      Speak, though execrate, speak
+      A word on grandmotherly Laws
+      Giving rivers of gold to our young,
+   In the days of their hungers impure;
+   To furnish them beak and claws,
+   And make them a banquet’s lure.
+
+      Thou the example, saved
+   Miraculously by this poor skin!
+      Thereat let the Purse be waved:
+   The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:
+   A devil, if devil as devil behaved
+   Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,
+   Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;
+   O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!
+
+   And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,
+      Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize
+   Rough-rolling boulders and froth.
+   Gigantical enginery they can command,
+   For the crushing of enemies not of great size:
+      But hold to thy desperate stand.
+   Men’s right of bequeathing their all to their own
+   (With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);
+   Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone
+   Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last
+   Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.
+   The law they decree is their ultimate slave;
+   Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.
+   It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.
+   Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;
+   To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;
+   Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt
+   He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;
+   And how for his giving, the more will he get;
+   For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:
+   Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise,
+   Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,
+   The sun of their system a father of flies!
+
+   So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed;
+   ’Tis the portion of them who civilize,
+      Who speak the word novel and true:
+   How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,
+   Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;
+   How the God of old time will act Satan of new,
+   If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;
+   For whose habitation within us we scour
+   This house of our life; where our bitterest pains
+   Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps
+   Mire on the soul.  Take stripes or chains;
+      Grip at thy standard reviled.
+   And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?
+      Our spoken in protest remains.
+      A young generation reaps.
+
+   The young generation! ah, there is the child
+   Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof
+   That souls we have, with our senses filed,
+      Our shuttles at thread of the woof.
+      May it be braver than ours,
+   To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,
+   To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.
+   May it know how the mind in expansion revolts
+   From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,
+   And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,
+   In a field where the forefather print of the hoof
+   Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,
+   And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,
+      Till brain-rule splendidly towers.
+   For that large light we have laboured and tramped
+   Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive
+      Our animate morning stamped
+      With the lines of a sombre eve.
+
+   A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,
+   When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,
+      The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,
+      And the lion effulgently ramped.
+   Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,
+      By right of the better in kind.
+   But now will it breed yon bestial brood
+   Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,
+      As the healthy in chains with the sick,
+   Unto despot usage our issuing mind.
+   It signifies battle or death’s dull knell.
+   Precedents icily written on high
+   Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.
+   Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick
+   For the march, reads which the impediment well.
+   She smiles when of sapience is their boast.
+   O loose of the tug between blood run dry
+   And blood running flame may our offspring run!
+   May brain democratic be king of the host!
+   Less then shall the volumes of History tell
+   Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,
+   That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won
+   Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.
+
+   Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,
+   And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,
+      Their battle of instincts put by,
+      A moment examine this field:
+   On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,
+   Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.
+   It merits a glance at our history’s maps,
+   To see across Britain’s old shaggy unshorn,
+   Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot
+   The ruler’s close-reckoned direct to the mark.
+   From the head ran the vanquisher’s orderly route,
+   In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.
+   From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,
+   And we shoulder, we wrangle!  The light on us shed
+   Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,
+   The Goddess of gamblers, above.  From the head,
+   Then when it worked for the birth of a star
+   Fraternal with heaven’s in beauty and ray,
+   Sprang the Acropolis.  Ask what crown
+   Comes of our tides of the blood at war,
+   For men to bequeath generations down!
+   And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:
+   What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:
+   A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,
+   Desiring affairs to be left as they are.
+
+   So, thou takest Youth’s natural place in the fray,
+      As a Tentative, combating Peace,
+      Our lullaby word for decay.—
+      There will come an immediate decree
+   In thy mind for the opposite party’s decease,
+      If he bends not an instant knee.
+   Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain.
+      And accept a mild word of police:—
+      Be mannerly, measured; refrain
+   From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks.
+   Our political, even as the merchant main,
+      A temperate gale requires
+      For the ship that haven seeks;
+   Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.
+
+      Then observe the antagonist, con
+   His reasons for rocking the lullaby word.
+   You stand on a different stage of the stairs.
+   He fought certain battles, yon senile lord.
+   In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs.
+   We are now on his inches of ground hard won,
+   For a perch to a flight o’er his resting fence.
+
+   Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say,
+      That Time is both father and son?
+   Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense!—
+      Discern the paternal of Now
+      As the Then of thy present tense.
+      You may pull as you will either way,
+      You can never be other than one.
+      So, be filial.  Giants to slay
+      Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.
+
+   There are those whom we push from the path with respect.
+   Bow to that elder, though seeing him bow
+   To the backward as well, for a thunderous back
+   Upon thee.  In his day he was not all wrong.
+   Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked.
+   He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore.
+   The Future he sees as the slippery murk;
+   The Past as his doctrinal library lore.
+   He stands now the rock to the wave’s wild wash.
+   Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work
+      Heroical, one of our strong.
+   His gold to retain and his dross reject,
+   Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash.
+      Detest the dead squat of the Turk,
+      And suffice it to move him along.
+      Drink of faith in the brains a full draught
+      Before the oration: beware
+      Lest rhetoric moonily waft
+      Whither horrid activities snare.
+      Rhetoric, juice for the mob
+      Despising more luminous grape,
+      Oft at its fount has it laughed
+      In the cataracts rolling for rape
+      Of a Reason left single to sob!
+
+   ’Tis known how the permanent never is writ
+   In blood of the passions: mercurial they,
+   Shifty their issue: stir not that pit
+      To the game our brutes best play.
+
+   But with rhetoric loose, can we check man’s brute?
+   Assemblies of men on their legs invoke
+   Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot
+   Electrical sparks between their dry thatch
+   And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light.
+   ’Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch
+      (To match a Batrachian croak)
+   Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins.
+   Then may it be rather the well-worn joke
+   Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write
+   Penance for rhetoric.  Strange will it seem,
+   When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!
+
+      For the secret why demagogues fail,
+   Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme,
+      And knock out or knock in the nail
+      (We will rank them as flatly sincere,
+      Devoutly detesting a wrong,
+   Engines o’ercharged with our human steam),
+   Question thee, seething amid the throng.
+   And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat;
+   Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here;—
+   Aught more than the banquet and roundelay,
+   That is closed with a terrible terminal wail,
+      A retributive black ding-dong?
+   And ask of thyself: This furious Yea
+      Of a speech I thump to repeat,
+      In the cause I would have prevail,
+      For seed of a nourishing wheat,
+      _Is it accepted of Song_?
+      Does it sound to the mind through the ear,
+   Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet?
+      Thou wilt find it a test severe;
+      Unerring whatever the theme.
+   Rings it for Reason a melody clear,
+      We have bidden old Chaos retreat;
+      We have called on Creation to hear;
+   All forces that make us are one full stream.
+   Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse,
+   Showing its practical value and weight,
+   Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse,
+   Lead thee aloft to that high estate.—
+      The test is conclusive, I deem:
+      It embraces or mortally bites.
+      We have then the key-note for debate:
+      A Senate that sits on the heights
+      Over discords, to shape and amend.
+
+      And no singer is needed to serve
+      The musical God, my friend.
+   Needs only his law on a sensible nerve:
+      A law that to Measure invites,
+      Forbidding the passions contend.
+      Is it accepted of Song?
+      And if then the blunt answer be Nay,
+   Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde,
+   Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway,
+      The Queen of delirious rites,
+   Queen of those issueless mobs, that rend
+   For frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord,
+   Pursuing insensate, seething in throng,
+   Their wild idea to its ashen end.
+   Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong,
+   Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!
+
+      But thou, should the answer ring Ay,
+      Hast warrant of seed for thy word:
+      The musical God is nigh
+   To inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer
+      Through the shoals: is it worthy of Song,
+      There are souls all woman to hear,
+      Woman to bear and renew.
+   For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs,
+      Broad as the arms of his blue,
+      Fine as the web of his rays,
+   Justice, whose voice is a melody clear,
+   The one sure life for the numbered long,
+      From him are the brutal and vain,
+      The vile, the excessive, out-thrust:
+   He points to the God on the upmost throne:
+      He is the saver of grain,
+      The sifter of spirit from dust.
+   He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain
+      The virilities: Measure alone
+      Has votaries rich in the male:
+      Fathers embracing no cloud,
+      Sowing no harvestless main:
+   Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowed
+   To create, to perpetuate; woo, win, wed;
+   Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own,
+   Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff
+      Simulacra, though solid they sail,
+      And seem such imperial stuff:
+      Yes, the living divide off the dead.
+
+      Then thou with thy furies outgrown,
+   Not as Cybele’s beast will thy head lash tail
+   So præter-determinedly thermonous,
+      Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled.
+      Thou under stress of the strife
+      Shalt hear for sustainment supreme
+      The cry of the conscience of Life:
+      _Keep the young generations in hail_,
+      _And bequeath them no tumbled house_!
+
+      There hast thou the sacred theme,
+      Therein the inveterate spur,
+      Of the Innermost.  See her one blink
+      In vision past eyeballs.  Not thee
+      She cares for, but us.  Follow her.
+      Follow her, and thou wilt not sink.
+      With thy soul the Life espouse:
+   This Life of the visible, audible, ring
+   With thy love tight about; and no death will be;
+      The name be an empty thing,
+      And woe a forgotten old trick:
+   And battle will come as a challenge to drink;
+   As a warrior’s wound each transient sting.
+   She leads to the Uppermost link by link;
+   Exacts but vision, desires not vows.
+   Above us the singular number to see;
+   The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick,
+   A dot or a stop: that is our task;
+   Her lesson in figured arithmetic,
+   For the letters of Life behind its mask;
+   Her flower-like look under fearful brows.
+
+   As for thy special case, O my friend, one must think
+   Massilia’s victim, who held the carouse
+      For the length of a carnival year,
+   Knew worse: but the wretch had his opening choice.
+   For thee, by our law, no alternatives were:
+   Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice.
+      He cancelled the ravaging Plague,
+      With the roll of his fat off the cliff.
+   Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,
+   Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague
+      And catches the not too pink,
+   Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause
+   Is the cause of community.  Iterate,
+   Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:
+   Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:
+   Yet always in measure, with bearing polite:
+   The manner of one that would expiate
+      His share in grandmotherly Laws,
+      Which do the dark thing to destroy,
+   Under aspect of water so guilelessly white
+   For the general use, by the devils befouled.
+
+      Enough, poor prodigal boy!
+   Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled.
+   Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned.
+   And ’tis bony: denied thee thy succulent half
+   Of the parable’s blessing, to swineherd returned:
+   A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf!
+      By my faith, there is feasting to come,
+      Not the less, when our Earth we have seen
+   Beneath and on surface, her deeds and designs:
+   Who gives us the man-loving Nazarene,
+   The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines.
+   By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom;
+   Revelations, delights.  I can hear a faint crow
+   Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct;
+      As down the new shafting of mines,
+      A cry of the metally gnome.
+      When our Earth we have seen, and have linked
+   With the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold,
+   Imprisoned humanity open will throw
+   Its fortress gates, and the rivers of gold
+      For the congregate friendliness flow.
+   Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold:
+   Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real:
+   And laughter on lips, as the birds’ outburst
+   At the flooding of light.  No robbery then
+   The feast, nor a robber’s abode the home,
+   For a furnished model of our first den!
+      Nor Life as a stationed wheel;
+   Nor History written in blood or in foam,
+   For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed.
+   The God in the conscience of multitudes feel,
+      And we feel deep to Earth at her heart,
+      We have her communion with men,
+      New ground, new skies for appeal.
+   Yield into harness thy best and thy worst;
+   Away on the trot of thy servitude start,
+   Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air.
+   If courage should falter, ’tis wholesome to kneel.
+   Remember that well, for the secret with some,
+   Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer,
+   And free from impurities tower-like stand.
+   I promise not more, save that feasting will come
+   To a mind and a body no longer inversed:
+   The sense of large charity over the land,
+   Earth’s wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,
+   And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal
+      Through the active machine: lean fare,
+   But it carries a sparkle!  And now enough,
+      And part we as comrades part,
+   To meet again never or some day or soon.
+
+   Our season of drought is reminder rude:—
+      No later than yesternoon,
+      I looked on the horse of a cart,
+      By the wayside water-trough.
+   How at every draught of his bride of thirst
+   His nostrils widened!  The sight was good:
+      Food for us, food, such as first
+      Drew our thoughts to earth’s lowly for food.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE COMIC SPIRIT
+
+
+   SWORD of Common Sense!—
+   Our surest gift: the sacred chain
+   Of man to man: firm earth for trust
+   In structures vowed to permanence:—
+   Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!
+   Implacable perforce of just;
+   With that good treasure in defence,
+   Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain
+   Since first men planted foot and hand was king:
+   Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve
+   To wield thy double edge, retort
+   Or hold the deadlier reserve,
+   And through thy victim’s weapon sting:
+   Thine is the service, thine the sport
+   This shifty heart of ours to hunt
+   Across its webs and round the many a ring
+   Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds
+   Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke
+   Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster’s grunt;—
+   Once lion of our desert’s trodden weeds;
+   And but for thy straight finger at the yoke,
+   Again to be the lordly paw,
+   Naming his appetites his needs,
+   Behind a decorative cloak:
+   Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law
+   We read upon that building’s architrave
+   In the mind’s firmament, by men upraised
+   With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave
+   For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed,
+   Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw,
+   Thou, soul of wakened heads, art armed to warn,
+   Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang,
+   Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot,
+   Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn;
+   Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise,
+   Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen
+   His rebel agitation at our root:
+   Thou hast him out of hawking eyes;
+   Nor ever morning of the clang
+   Young Echo sped on hill from horn
+   In forest blown when scent was keen
+   Off earthy dews besprinkling blades
+   Of covert grass more merrily rang
+   The yelp of chase down alleys green,
+   Forth of the headlong-pouring glades,
+   Over the dappled fallows wild away,
+   Than thy fine unaccented scorn
+   At sight of man’s old secret brute,
+   Devout for pasture on his prey,
+   Advancing, yawning to devour;
+   With step of deer, with voice of flute,
+   Haply with visage of the lily flower.
+
+   Let the cock crow and ruddy morn
+   His handmaiden appear!  Youth claims his hour.
+   The generously ludicrous
+   Espouses it.  But see we sons of day,
+   Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight,
+   Accept the throb for lord of us;
+   For lord, for the main central light
+   That gives direction, not the eclipse;
+   Or dost thou look where niggard Age,
+   Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips
+   A tumbled top to grind a wolf’s worn tooth;—
+   Hoar despot on our final stage,
+   In dotage of a stunted Youth;—
+   Or it may be some venerable sage,
+   Not having thee awake in him, compact
+   Of wisdom else, the breast’s old tempter trips;
+   Or see we ceremonial state,
+   Robing the gilded beast, exact
+   Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate
+   Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact;
+   A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips;
+   These are thy game wherever men engage:
+   These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,
+   The major and the minor potentate,
+   Creative of their various ape;—
+   The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write
+   Upon a perishable page
+   An inch above their fellows’ height;—
+   The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose
+   Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed
+   Of our first hungry figure wide agape;—
+   Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.
+   These, that would have men still of men be foes,
+   Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;
+   Would keep our life the whirly pool
+   Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;
+   The herd the drover’s herd, the fool the fool,
+   Ourself our slavish self’s infernal sun:
+   These are the children of the heart untaught
+   By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee
+   Untamed to tone its passions under thought,
+   The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.
+   Of them a world of coltish heels for school
+   We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.
+
+   ’Tis written of the Gods of human mould,
+   Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn
+   To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed,
+   Satiric comments overbold,
+   From one whose part was by decree
+   The jester’s; but they boiled to feel him bite.
+   Better for them had they with Reason fenced
+   Or smiled corrected!  They in the great Gods’ might
+   Their prober crushed, as fingers flea.
+   Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire
+   His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit
+   Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,
+   The Satirist pass by on limping feet.
+   Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight
+   Below had then their last of airy glee;
+   They in the cup sought Laughter’s drownèd sprite,
+   Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.
+   Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,
+   And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.
+   This know we veritable.  O Sage of Mirth!
+   Can it be true, the story men recount
+   Of the fall’n plight of the great Gods on earth?
+   How they being deathless, though of human mould,
+   With human cravings, undecaying frames,
+   Must labour for subsistence; are a band
+   Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads
+   At haunts of holiday on summer sand:
+   And lightly he will hint to one that heeds
+   Names in pained designation of them, names
+   Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl
+   Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,
+   Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats
+   (His baby dimples in maternal chaps
+   Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)
+   Compassion for his masterful Trombone,
+   Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed
+   Of old: for him of the mountain-muscle feats,
+   Who guts a drum to fetch a snappish groan:
+   For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom
+   A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .
+   The creature is of earnest mien
+   To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.
+   His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued,
+   He names; they are a rayless red and white;
+   The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.
+   And, if we recognize his Tambourine,
+   He asks; exhausted names her: she has become
+   A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen
+   Of overflowing dome on dome;
+   Redundancy contending with the tight,
+   Leaping the dam!  He fondly calls, his girl,
+   The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile,
+   Refreshful.  O but now his brows are dun,
+   Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile,
+   To drop his venomous: the Dame of dames,
+   Flower of the world, that honey one,
+   She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl,
+   To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss;
+   He names her, as a worshipper he names,
+   And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.
+   The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike
+   Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.
+   Curtain her close! her open arms
+   Have suckers for beholders: she to this?
+   For that she could not, save in fury, hear
+   A sharp corrective utterance flick
+   Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike
+   Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer
+   Above the snows, among the flowers?  She reaps
+   This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?
+   Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms,
+   Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign,
+   From Greek resplendent to Phoenician foul,
+   The trader in attractions sinks, all brine
+   To thoughts of taste; is ’t love?—bark, dog! hoot, owl!
+   And she is blushless: ancient worship weeps.
+   Suicide Graces dangle down the charms
+   Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.
+   She stands in her unholy oily leer
+   A statue losing feature, weather-sick
+   Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.
+   The curtain cried for magnifies to see!—
+   We cannot quench our one corrupting glance:
+   The vision of the rumour will not flee.
+   Doth the Boy own such Mother?—shoot his dart
+   To bring her, countless as the crested deeps,
+   Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?
+   False is that vision, shrieks the devotee;
+   Incredible, we echo; and anew
+   Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.
+   Low humourist this leader seems; perchance
+   Pitched from his University career,
+   Adept at classic fooling.  Yet of mould
+   Human those Gods were: deathless too:
+   On high they not as meditatives paced:
+   Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh:
+   Descending, they would touch the lowest here:
+   And she, that lighted form of blue and gold,
+   Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced;
+   Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh;
+   Desired and hated, desperately dear;
+   Most human of them was.  No more pursue!
+   Enough that the black story can be told.
+   It preaches to the eminently placed:
+   For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due,
+   Paints omen.  Truly they our throbber had;
+   The passions plumping, passions playing leech,
+   Cunning to trick us for the day’s good cheer.
+   Our uncorrected human heart will swell
+   To notions monstrous, doings mad
+   As billows on a foam-lashed beach;
+   Borne on the tides of alternating heats,
+   Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well;
+   Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power
+   To speak in judgement: Nemesis, the fell:
+   Of those bright Gods assembled, offspring sour;
+   The last surviving on the upper seats;
+   As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.
+
+   Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,
+   Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.
+   Not wiser of our mark than at the start,
+   It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea
+   To countering winds; a force blind-eyed,
+   On endless rounds of aimless reach;
+   Emotion for the source of pride,
+   The grounds of faith in fixity
+   Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech,
+   Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump
+   Swung on a time-piece, and by turns
+   A quivering energy to jump
+   For seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns,
+   Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud
+   Capping a sullen crater: and mankind
+   We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,
+   Because of thy straight leadership declined;
+   At heels of this or that delusive spark:
+   Now when the multitudinous races press
+   Elbow to elbow hourly more,
+   A thickened host; when now we hear aloud
+   Life for the very life implore
+   A signal of a visioned mark;
+   Light of the mind, the mind’s discourse,
+   The rational in graciousness,
+   Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,
+   To tame and lead that blind-eyed force
+   In harmony of harness with the crowd,
+   For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,
+   Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed
+   To holy work, deems it the heart’s intent;
+   Or where a silken circle views it cowled,
+   The seeming figure of concordance, bent
+   On satiating tyrant lust
+   Or barren fits of sentiment.
+
+   Thou wilt not have our paths befouled
+   By simulation; are we vile to view,
+   The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,
+   Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:
+   They make their mirror upon faces true;
+   And where they win reflection, lucid heave
+   The under tides of this hot heart seen through.
+   Beneficently wilt thou clip
+   All oversteppings of the plumed,
+   The puffed, and bid the masker strip,
+   And into the crowned windbag thrust,
+   Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,
+   A lightning o’er the half-illumed,
+   Who to base brute-dominion cleave,
+   Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,
+   Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,
+   To spy a wound without a gash,
+   The magic in a turn of wrist,
+   And how are wedded heart and head regaled
+   When Wit o’er Folly blows the mort,
+   And their high note of union spreads
+   Wide from the timely word with conquest charged;
+   Victorious laughter, of no loud report,
+   If heard; derision as divinely veiled
+   As terrible Immortals in rose-mist,
+   Given to the vision of arrested men:
+   Whereat they feel within them weave
+   Community its closer threads,
+   And are to our fraternal state enlarged;
+   Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken:
+   They learn that thou art not of alien sort,
+   Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed,
+   Or of the frosty heights unsealed,
+   Or of the vain who simple speech distort,
+   Or of the vapours pointing on to nought
+   Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch;
+   As when sole homeward the belated treads,
+   And hears aloft a clamour wailed,
+   That once had seemed the broomstick witch
+   Horridly violating cloud for drought:
+   He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears,
+   Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train;
+   Homeliest order in black sky appears,
+   Not less than in the lighted village steads.
+   So do those half-illumed wax clear to share
+   A cry that is our common voice; the note
+   Of fellowship upon a loftier plane,
+   Above embattled castle-wall and moat;
+   And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.
+   So thou for washing a phantasmal air,
+   For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise,
+   Laughter—the joy of Reason seeing fade
+   Obstruction into Earth’s renewing beds,
+   Beneath the stroke of her good servant’s blade—
+   Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed;
+   Gain of the years, conjunction’s prize.
+   The greater heart in thy appeal to heads
+   They see, thou Captain of our civil Fort!
+   By more elusive savages assailed
+   On each ascending stage; untired
+   Both inner foe and outer to cut short,
+   And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist:
+   Showing old tiger’s claws, old crocodile’s
+   Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight,
+   Like forms in running water, oft when smiles,
+   When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight:
+   But never with the slayer’s malice fired:
+   As little as informs an infant’s fist
+   Clenched at the sneeze!  Thou wouldst but have us be
+   Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow
+   Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree;
+   Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court:
+   Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress;
+   Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.
+   Ambrosial heights of possible acquist,
+   Where souls of men with soul of man consort,
+   And all look higher to new loveliness
+   Begotten of the look: thy mark is there;
+   While on our temporal ground alive,
+   Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword
+   Of finer temper now a numbered learn
+   That they resisting thee themselves resist;
+   And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive,
+   Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare
+   Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts.
+   More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord
+   Thou lead’st to, doth this rebel heart discern,
+   When pinched ascetic and red sensualist
+   Alternately recurrent freeze or burn,
+   And of its old religions it has doubts.
+   It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare;
+   Less hates, part understands, nor much resents,
+   When the prized objects it has raised for prayer,
+   For fitful prayer;—repentance dreading fire,
+   Impelled by aches; the blindness which repents
+   Like the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire;—
+   Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probe
+   Old institutions and establishments,
+   Once fortresses against the floods of sin,
+   For what their worth; and questioningly prod
+   For why they stand upon a racing globe,
+   Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod;
+   Their angel out of them, a demon in.
+
+   This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to fret,
+   To hurl at vanities, to drift in shame
+   Of gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod,
+   Shall of predestination wed thee yet.
+   Something it gathers of what things should drop
+   At entrance on new times; of how thrice broad
+   The world of minds communicative; how
+   A straggling Nature classed in school, and scored
+   With stripes admonishing, may yield to plough
+   Fruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tame
+   Be feeble on an Earth whose gentler crop
+   Is its most living, in the mind that steers,
+   By Reason led, her way of tree and flame,
+   Beyond the genuflexions and the tears;
+   Upon an Earth that cannot stop,
+   Where upward is the visible aim,
+   And ever we espy the greater God,
+   For simple pointing at a good adored:
+   Proof of the closer neighbourhood.  Head on,
+   Sword of the many, light of the few! untwist
+   Or cut our tangles till fair space is won
+   Beyond a briared wood of austere brow,
+   Believed of discord by thy timely word
+   At intervals refreshing life: for thou
+   Art verify Keeper of the Muse’s Key;
+   Thyself no vacant melodist;
+   On lower land elective even as she;
+   Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred;
+   Advising to her measured steps in flow;
+   And teaching how for being subjected free
+   Past thought of freedom we may come to know
+   The music of the meaning of Accord.
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN MEMORY
+
+
+   DAYS, when the ball of our vision
+   Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;
+   When the grasp on the bow was decision,
+   And arrow and hand and eye were one;
+   When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,
+   Came heaving for rapture ahead!—
+   Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer
+   As lights over mounds of the dead.
+
+   Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead,
+   With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed,
+   Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear,
+   To bear the golden nectar-cup.
+   So flies desire at view of its delight,
+   When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.
+   We meanwhile who in hues of the sick year
+   The Spring-time paint to prick us for our lost,
+   Mount but the fatal half way up—
+   Whereon shut eyes!  This is decreed,
+   For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend,
+   By passion for the arms’ possession tossed,
+   It falls the way of sighs and hath their end;
+   A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.
+   Good if the arrowy eagle of the height
+   Be then the little bird that hops to feed.
+
+   Lame falls the cry to kindle days
+   Of radiant orb and daring gaze.
+   It does but clank our mortal chain.
+   For Earth reads through her felon old
+   The many-numbered of her fold,
+   Who forward tottering backward strain,
+   And would be thieves of treasure spent,
+   With their grey season soured.
+   She could write out their history in their thirst
+   To have again the much devoured,
+   And be the bud at burst;
+   In honey fancy join the flow,
+   Where Youth swims on as once they went,
+   All choiric for spontaneous glee
+   Of active eager lungs and thews;
+   They now bared roots beside the river bent;
+   Whose privilege themselves to see;
+   Their place in yonder tideway know;
+   The current glass peruse;
+   The depths intently sound;
+   And sapped by each returning flood
+   Accept for monitory nourishment
+   Those worn roped features under crust of mud,
+   Reflected in the silvery smooth around:
+   Not less the branching and high singing tree,
+   A home of nests, a landmark and a tent,
+   Until their hour for losing hold on ground.
+   Even such good harvest of the things that flee
+   Earth offers her subjected, and they choose
+   Rather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink,
+   And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.
+   So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.
+
+   Who cheerfully the little bird becomes,
+   Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs,
+   May have her dolings to the lightest touch;
+   As where some cripple muses by his crutch,
+   Unwitting that the spirit in him sings:
+   ‘When I had legs, then had I wings,
+   As good as any born of eggs,
+   To feed on all aërial things,
+   When I had legs!’
+   And if not to embrace he sighs,
+   She gives him breath of Youth awhile,
+   Perspective of a breezy mile,
+   Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies;
+   Scenes where his nested dreams upon their hoard
+   Brooded, or up to empyrean soared:
+   Enough to link him with a dotted line.
+   But cravings for an eagle’s flight,
+   To top white peaks and serve wild wine
+   Among the rosy undecayed,
+   Bring only flash of shade
+   From her full throbbing breast of day in night.
+   By what they crave are they betrayed:
+   And cavernous is that young dragon’s jaw,
+   Crimson for all the fiery reptile saw
+   In time now coveted, for teeth to flay,
+   Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.
+   They to their moment of drawn breath,
+   Which is the life that makes the death,
+   The death that makes ethereal life would bind:
+   The death that breeds the spectre do they find.
+   Darkness is wedded and the waste regrets
+   Beating as dead leaves on a fitful gust,
+   By souls no longer dowered to climb
+   Beneath their pack of dust,
+   Whom envy of a lustrous prime,
+   Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets,
+   And dooms to sink and water sable flowers,
+   That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.
+   Strain we the arms for Memory’s hours,
+   We are the seized Persephone.
+   Responsive never to the soft desire
+   For one prized tune is this our chord of life.
+   ’Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife,
+   In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.
+   Yet have we glad companionship of Youth,
+   Elysian meadows for the mind,
+   Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb
+   Filled with the parti-coloured bloom
+   Of loved and hated, grasp all human truth
+   Sowed by us down the mazy paths behind.
+   To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through:
+   Whence comes a line of continuity,
+   That brings our middle station into view,
+   Between those poles; a novel Earth we see,
+   In likeness of us, made of banned and blest;
+   The sower’s bed, but not the reaper’s rest:
+   An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet
+   Buried, and breathing, and to be.
+   Then of the junction of the three,
+   Even as a heart in brain, full sweet
+   May sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.
+
+   Only the soul can walk the dusty track
+   Where hangs our flowering under vapours black,
+   And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,
+   Quench recollection of a spacious pure.
+   They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,
+   Hard at each other point and gape,
+   Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,
+   To reappear with one they drape
+   For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,
+   Who such distorted issue did beget.
+   Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat
+   Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame
+   Has eaten, and old Self consumes.
+   Out of the purification will they leap,
+   Thee renovating while new light illumes
+   The dusky web of evil, known as pain,
+   That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;
+   Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain:
+   Midway the tameless oceanic brute
+   Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,
+   And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace
+   On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.
+
+   Forth of such passage through black fire we win
+   Clear hearing of the simple lute,
+   Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays
+   For them who can in quietness receive
+   Her restorative airs: a ditty thin
+   As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,
+   Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays
+   On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass
+   To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs
+   Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.
+   Solidity and bulk and martial brass,
+   Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score
+   A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,
+   While present in the spirit, vital there,
+   Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;
+   Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air
+   Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.
+   Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled
+   Historic of the soul, and heats anew
+   Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.
+   True of the man, and of mankind ’tis true,
+   Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,
+   Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred
+   Against the primal beast in us, and flung;
+   Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred
+   Above self-pity slain: or it was Prayer
+   First taken for Life’s cleanser; or the tongue
+   Spake for the world against this heart; or rings
+   Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;
+   Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb
+   From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob:
+   These quickening live.  But deepest at her springs,
+   Most filial, is an eye to love her young.
+   And had we it, to see with it, alive
+   Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.
+   Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then
+   The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men:
+   She tributary to her aged restores
+   The living in the dead; she will inspire
+   Faith homelier than on the Yonder shores,
+   Abhorring these as mire,
+   Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes,
+   With mortal tremours pricking hopes,
+   And, by the final Bacchic of the lusts
+   Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts:
+   A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants;
+   Not utterly misled, though blindly led,
+   Led round fermenting eddies.  Faith she plants
+   In her own firmness as our midway road:
+   Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read;
+   Her essence reading in her toothsome goad;
+   Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.
+   But love we well the young, her road midway
+   The darknesses runs consecrated clay.
+   Despite our feeble hold on this green home,
+   And the vast outer strangeness void of dome,
+   Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel,
+   Up to the moment of our prostrate fall,
+   The life they deem voluptuously real
+   Is more than empty echo of a call,
+   Or shadow of a shade, or swing of tides;
+   As brooding upon age, when veins congeal,
+   Grey palsy nods to think.  With us for guides,
+   Another step above the animal,
+   To views in Alpine thought are they helped on.
+   Good if so far we live in them when gone!
+
+   And there the arrowy eagle of the height
+   Becomes the little bird that hops to feed,
+   Glad of a crumb, for tempered appetite
+   To make it wholesome blood and fruitful seed.
+   Then Memory strikes on no slack string,
+   Nor sectional will varied Life appear:
+   Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hear
+   Earth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring.
+   And ours the mellow note, while sharing joys
+   No more subjecting mortals who have learnt
+   To build for happiness on equipoise,
+   The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt;
+   Know in our seasons an integral wheel,
+   That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed.
+   This, the truistic rubbish under heel
+   Of all the world, we peck at and are filled.
+
+
+
+
+PENETRATION AND TRUST
+
+
+I
+
+
+   SLEEK as a lizard at round of a stone,
+   The look of her heart slipped out and in.
+   Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone,
+   As innocents clear of a shade of sin.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   He laid a finger under her chin,
+   His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown:
+   Now, what will happen and who will win,
+   With me in the fight and my lady lone?
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+   He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone;
+   Was fire on her eyes till they let him in.
+   Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone,
+   And never a corner for serpent sin.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin;
+   Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown:
+   At home to the death my lord shall win,
+   When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone!
+
+
+
+
+NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY
+
+
+   WITH splendour of a silver day,
+   A frosted night had opened May:
+   And on that plumed and armoured night,
+   As one close temple hove our wood,
+   Its border leafage virgin white.
+   Remote down air an owl hallooed.
+   The black twig dropped without a twirl;
+   The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;
+   The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;
+   A crystal off the green leaf slipped.
+   Across the tracks of rimy tan,
+   Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;
+   A limping minnow-rillet ran,
+   To hang upon an icy foot.
+
+   In this shrill hush of quietude,
+   The ear conceived a severing cry.
+   Almost it let the sound elude,
+   When chuckles three, a warble shy,
+   From hazels of the garden came,
+   Near by the crimson-windowed farm.
+   They laid the trance on breath and frame,
+   A prelude of the passion-charm.
+
+   Then soon was heard, not sooner heard
+   Than answered, doubled, trebled, more,
+   Voice of an Eden in the bird
+   Renewing with his pipe of four
+   The sob: a troubled Eden, rich
+   In throb of heart: unnumbered throats
+   Flung upward at a fountain’s pitch,
+   The fervour of the four long notes,
+   That on the fountain’s pool subside,
+   Exult and ruffle and upspring:
+   Endless the crossing multiplied
+   Of silver and of golden string.
+   There chimed a bubbled underbrew
+   With witch-wild spray of vocal dew.
+
+   It seemed a single harper swept
+   Our wild wood’s inner chords and waked
+   A spirit that for yearning ached
+   Ere men desired and joyed or wept.
+   Or now a legion ravishing
+   Musician rivals did unite
+   In love of sweetness high to sing
+   The subtle song that rivals light;
+   From breast of earth to breast of sky:
+   And they were secret, they were nigh:
+   A hand the magic might disperse;
+   The magic swung my universe.
+
+   Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream,
+   Where all was visionary gleam;
+   Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed;
+   And feelings, passing joy and woe,
+   Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed,
+   Nor either was the one we know:
+   Nor pregnant of the heart contained
+   In us were they, that griefless plained,
+   That plaining soared; and through the heart
+   Struck to one note the wide apart:—
+   A passion surgent from despair;
+   A paining bliss in fervid cold;
+   Off the last vital edge of air,
+   Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled,
+   For rapture of a wine of tears;
+   As had a star among the spheres
+   Caught up our earth to some mid-height
+   Of double life to ear and sight,
+   She giving voice to thought that shines
+   Keen-brilliant of her deepest mines;
+   While steely drips the rillet clinked,
+   And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled.
+
+   Then was the lyre of earth beheld,
+   Then heard by me: it holds me linked;
+   Across the years to dead-ebb shores
+   I stand on, my blood-thrill restores.
+   But would I conjure into me
+   Those issue notes, I must review
+   What serious breath the woodland drew;
+   The low throb of expectancy;
+   How the white mother-muteness pressed
+   On leaf and meadow-herb; how shook,
+   Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crest
+   Seen spinning on the bracken-crook.
+
+
+
+
+THE TEACHING OF THE NUDE
+
+
+I
+
+
+   A SATYR spied a Goddess in her bath,
+   Unseen of her attendant nymphs; none knew.
+   Forthwith the creature to his fellows drew,
+   And looking backward on the curtained path,
+   He strove to tell; he could but heave a breast
+   Too full, and point to mouth, with failing leers:
+   Vainly he danced for speech, he giggled tears,
+   Made as if torn in two, as if tight pressed,
+   As if cast prone; then fetching whimpered tunes
+   For words, flung heel and set his hairy flight
+   Through forest-hollows, over rocky height.
+   The green leaves buried him three rounds of moons.
+   A senatorial Satyr named what herb
+   Had hurried him outrunning reason’s curb.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   ’Tis told how when that hieaway unchecked
+   To dell returned, he seemed of tempered mood:
+   Even as the valley of the torrent rude,
+   The torrent now a brook, the valley wrecked.
+   In him, to hale him high or hurl aheap,
+   Goddess and Goatfoot hourly wrestled sore;
+   Hourly the immortal prevailing more:
+   Till one hot noon saw Meliboeus peep
+   From thicket-sprays to where his full-blown dame,
+   In circle by the lusty friskers gripped,
+   Laughed the showered rose-leaves while her limbs were stripped.
+   She beckoned to our Satyr, and he came.
+   Then twirled she mounds of ripeness, wreath of arms.
+   His hoof kicked up the clothing for such charms.
+
+
+
+
+BREATH OF THE BRIAR
+
+
+I
+
+
+   O BRIAR-SCENTS, on yon wet wing
+   Of warm South-west wind brushing by,
+   You mind me of the sweetest thing
+   That ever mingled frank and shy:
+   When she and I, by love enticed,
+   Beneath the orchard-apples met,
+   In equal halves a ripe one sliced,
+   And smelt the juices ere we ate.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   That apple of the briar-scent,
+   Among our lost in Britain now,
+   Was green of rind, and redolent
+   Of sweetness as a milking cow.
+   The briar gives it back, well nigh
+   The damsel with her teeth on it;
+   Her twinkle between frank and shy,
+   My thirst to bite where she had bit.
+
+
+
+
+EMPEDOCLES
+
+
+I
+
+
+      HE leaped.  With none to hinder,
+   Of Aetna’s fiery scoriae
+   In the next vomit-shower, made he
+      A more peculiar cinder.
+   And this great Doctor, can it be,
+   He left no saner recipe
+   For men at issue with despair?
+   Admiring, even his poet owns,
+   While noting his fine lyric tones,
+   The last of him was heels in air!
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+      Comes Reverence, her features
+   Amazed to see high Wisdom hear,
+   With glimmer of a faunish leer,
+      One mock her pride of creatures.
+   Shall such sad incident degrade
+   A stature casting sunniest shade?
+   O Reverence! let Reason swim;
+   Each life its critic deed reveals;
+   And him reads Reason at his heels,
+   If heels in air the last of him!
+
+
+
+
+ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM
+
+
+I
+
+
+   THE day that is the night of days,
+   With cannon-fire for sun ablaze
+   We spy from any billow’s lift;
+   And England still this tidal drift!
+   Would she to sainted forethought vow
+   A space before the thunders flood,
+   That martyr of its hour might now
+      Spare her the tears of blood.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Asleep upon her ancient deeds,
+   She hugs the vision plethora breeds,
+   And counts her manifold increase
+   Of treasure in the fruits of peace.
+   What curse on earth’s improvident,
+   When the dread trumpet shatters rest,
+   Is wreaked, she knows, yet smiles content
+      As cradle rocked from breast.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+   She, impious to the Lord of Hosts,
+   The valour of her offspring boasts,
+   Mindless that now on land and main
+   His heeded prayer is active brain.
+   No more great heart may guard the home,
+   Save eyed and armed and skilled to cleave
+   Yon swallower wave with shroud of foam,
+      We see not distant heave.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   They stand to be her sacrifice,
+   The sons this mother flings like dice,
+   To face the odds and brave the Fates;
+   As in those days of starry dates,
+   When cannon cannon’s counterblast
+   Awakened, muzzle muzzle bowled,
+   And high in swathe of smoke the mast
+      Its fighting rag outrolled.
+
+1891.
+
+
+
+
+TARDY SPRING
+
+
+      NOW the North wind ceases,
+      The warm South-west awakes;
+      Swift fly the fleeces,
+      Thick the blossom-flakes.
+
+   Now hill to hill has made the stride,
+   And distance waves the without end:
+   Now in the breast a door flings wide;
+   Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.
+   And song of England’s rush of flowers
+   Is this full breeze with mellow stops,
+   That spins the lark for shine, for showers;
+   He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.
+   The stir in memory seem these things,
+   Which out of moistened turf and clay
+   Astrain for light push patient rings,
+   Or leap to find the waterway.
+   ’Tis equal to a wonder done,
+   Whatever simple lives renew
+   Their tricks beneath the father sun,
+   As though they caught a broken clue;
+   So hard was earth an eyewink back:
+   But now the common life has come,
+   The blotting cloud a dappled pack,
+   The grasses one vast underhum.
+   A City clothed in snow and soot,
+   With lamps for day in ghostly rows,
+   Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,
+   The river that reflective flows:
+   And there did fog down crypts of street
+   Play spectre upon eye and mouth:—
+   Their faces are a glass to greet
+   This magic of the whirl for South.
+   A burly joy each creature swells
+   With sound of its own hungry quest;
+   Earth has to fill her empty wells,
+   And speed the service of the nest;
+   The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,
+   That haunts the farmer’s look abroad,
+   Who sees what tomb a white night built,
+   Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
+   For iron Winter held her firm;
+   Across her sky he laid his hand;
+   And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;
+   A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
+   Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,
+   The bitten buds dared not unfold:
+   We raced on roads and ice to keep
+   Thought of the girl we love from cold.
+
+      But now the North wind ceases,
+      The warm South-west awakes,
+      The heavens are out in fleeces,
+      And earth’s green banner shakes.
+
+
+
+
+THE LABOURER
+
+
+   FOR a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that
+   follows
+      When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has
+   done.
+   But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer’s crown
+   is Apollo’s,
+      While stands he yet in his grime and sweat—to wrestle for fruits of
+   the Sun.
+
+   Can an enemy wither his cheer?  Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering
+   ladies,
+      Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and
+   clog.
+   ’Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul to
+   their Hades,
+      And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay
+   of the Dog.
+
+   Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new
+   fashions:
+      The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs lured
+   to run in a stream:
+   He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason to
+   swallow the passions,
+      Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!
+
+   Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer’s resolute hope: that by
+   him shall be written,
+      To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the
+   strong made just:
+   That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice
+   vitalised Britain,
+      Ashine with the light of the doing of right: at the gates of the
+   Future in trust.
+
+
+
+
+FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE
+
+
+   SPRUNG of the father blood, the mother brain,
+   Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
+   They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
+   When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
+
+   To see Life’s formless offspring and subdue
+   Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
+   Whose union is right reason: join they hands,
+   The world shall know itself and where it stands;
+   What cowering angel and what upright beast
+   Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
+   Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
+   When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
+
+   As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
+   Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
+   Some eddies near the brink borne swift along
+   Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
+   So, while the headlong world’s imperious force
+   Resounded under, heard I these discourse.
+
+   First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
+   To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
+
+   —Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
+   When still I find you in this mire alone.
+
+   —The few steps taken at a funeral pace
+   By men had slain me but for those you trace.
+
+   —Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
+   Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
+
+   —Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
+   And make me rich in feeling I can give.
+
+   —A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
+   Yet must I read my sister for the How.
+   My daisy better knows her God of beams
+   Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
+   She hath the secret never fieriest reach
+   Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.
+
+   —Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,
+   My semblance when I have you not as now.
+   The quiet creatures who escape mishap
+   Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
+   A picture of the settled peace desired
+   By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
+   I listen at their breasts: is there no jar
+   Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,
+   And such a picture as the piercing mind
+   Ranks beneath vegetation.  Not resigned
+   Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
+   What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,
+   Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
+   I am not Resignation’s counterpart.
+   If that I teach, ’tis little the dry word,
+   Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
+   We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;
+   Soon carrion if very earth are we!
+
+   The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use
+   Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;
+   Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,
+   And pass despised; ‘a-cold for lack of heat,’
+   Like other corpses, but without death’s plea.
+
+   —My sister calls for battle; is it she?
+
+   —Rather a world of pressing men in arms,
+   Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms
+   Each drowsy malady and coiling vice
+   With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
+   No home is here for peace while evil breeds,
+   While error governs, none; and must the seeds
+   You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,
+   Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,
+   Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood
+   Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!
+
+   —My sober little maid, when we meet first,
+   Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
+   So can I not of her till circumstance
+   Drugs cravings.  Here we see how men advance
+   A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,
+   Like dead weeds on whipped waters.  Shout the word
+   Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,
+   As to band-music under Victory’s arch.
+   Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then
+   The beauty of frank animals had men.
+
+   —Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
+   Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
+   Thence look this way, across the fields that show
+   Men’s early form of speech for Yes and No.
+
+   My sister a bruised infant’s utterance had;
+   And issuing stronger, to mankind ’twas mad.
+   I knew my home where I had choice to feel
+   The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.
+
+   —Speak of this Age.
+
+   —When you it shall discern
+   Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.
+
+   —For neither of us has it any care;
+   Its learning is through Science to despair.
+
+   —Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
+   With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
+   This Age climbs earth.
+
+   —To challenge heaven.
+
+   —Not less
+   The lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness!
+   That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
+   For one step upward on the crags you scale.
+   Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
+   Which means our soul asleep or body’s lust,
+   Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
+   A temperate common music, sunlike heat
+   The happiness not predatory sheds!
+
+   —But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads
+   Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
+   Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
+   Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
+   The world’s whole round smokes ominously, amazed
+   And trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.
+   Combustibles on hot combustibles
+   Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
+   The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
+   And leave the track of devils where men built.
+   Perceptive of a doom, the sinner’s guilt
+   Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
+   If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
+   To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
+   None save they but the souls which them contain.
+   No extramural God, the God within
+   Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
+   A world that for the spur of fool and knave
+   Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?
+   But men who ply their wits in such a school
+   Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.
+
+   —Much have I studied hard Necessity!
+   To know her Wisdom’s mother, and that we
+   May deem the harshness of her later cries
+   In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
+   If men among the warnings which convulse
+   Can gravely dread without the craven’s pulse.
+   Long ere the rising of this age of ours,
+   The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
+   Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
+   And are as lasting as the parent thing.
+   Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
+   They might o’ermatch and have mankind at will.
+   Behold such army gathering; ours the spur,
+   No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
+   Not fool or knave is now the enemy
+   O’ershadowing men, ’tis Folly, Knavery!
+   A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
+   Now must the brother soul alive in each
+   His traitorous individual devildom
+   Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
+   Dimly men see it menacing apace
+   To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.
+   Within, without, they are a field of tares:
+   Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
+   And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
+   Shines visible as life on either field.
+   That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
+   Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
+   Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
+   Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
+   Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
+   The human and Satanic intellect,
+   Determined for their uses to control
+   What forces on the earth and under roll,
+   Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
+   Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
+   They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
+   Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.
+
+   —My sister, as I read them in my glass,
+   Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
+   How waken them that have not any bent
+   Save browsing—the concrete indifferent!
+   Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
+   They fear not for the race when full the trough.
+   They have much fear of giving up the ghost;
+   And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.
+
+   —If I could see with you, and did not faint
+   In beating wing, the future I would paint.
+   Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
+   Now meanwhile is another mass awake,
+   Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
+   If I could see with you!  Could I but fly!
+
+   —The length of days that you with them have housed,
+   An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.
+
+   —O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,
+   While still they have a cause too piteous!
+   Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,
+   They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,
+   And quicken in the virtue of their cause,
+   To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
+   I wait the issue of a battling Age;
+   The toilers with your ‘troughsters’ now engage;
+   Instructing them, through their acutest sense,
+   How close the dangers of indifference!
+   Already have my people shown their worth,
+   More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
+   That love to love of labour leads: thence love
+   Of humankind—earth’s incense flung above.
+
+   —Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;
+   Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;
+   Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells
+   On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;
+   And if I bid it face what _I_ observe,
+   Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!
+
+   —Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,
+   Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
+   Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,
+   Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
+   Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
+   As little as Time’s earliest knew the sky.
+   Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame
+   At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
+   To strengthen our foundations is the task
+   Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,
+   Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves
+   The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
+   My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
+   To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
+   Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,
+   It moves: O much for me to say it moves!
+   About his Æthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,
+   Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
+   And where his tide of nourishment he drives,
+   An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
+   Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
+   He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,
+   The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;
+   Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
+   To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,
+   He is the vast Insensate who devours
+   His golden promise over leagues of seed,
+   Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
+   The races which on barbarous force begin
+   Inherit onward of their origin,
+   And cancelled blessings will the current length
+   Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
+   ’Tis not in men to recognize the need
+   Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
+   Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;
+   Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
+   Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,
+   For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
+   Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,
+   Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
+   —That rings of truth!  More do your people thrive;
+   Your Many are more merrily alive
+   Than erewhile when I gloried in the page
+   Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
+   Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;
+   Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
+   All structures built upon a narrow space
+   Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
+   O thrice must one be you, to see them shift
+   Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;
+   With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,
+   Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
+   And thrice must one be you, to wait release
+   From duress in the swamp of their increase.
+   At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,
+   A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed
+   Philosophers behold; desponding view
+   Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;
+   Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,
+   Dive down the fumy Ætna of their brains.
+   Belated vessels on a rising sea,
+   They seem: they pass!
+
+                     —But not Philosophy!
+
+   —Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise
+   Nought but the coward in us!  That way lies
+   The wisdom making passage through our slough.
+   Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;
+   Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
+   Philosophy is Life’s one match for Fate.
+   That photosphere of our high fountain One,
+   Our spirit’s Lord and Reason’s fostering sun,
+   Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,
+   Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
+   Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,
+   Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
+   Advantage to the Many: that we name
+   God’s voice; have there the surety in our aim.
+   This thought unto my sister do I owe,
+   And irony and satire off me throw.
+   They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
+   Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
+   Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,
+   Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
+   Who never yet of scattered lamps was born
+   To speed a world, a marching world to warn,
+   But sunward from the vivid Many springs,
+   Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.
+
+
+
+
+THE WARNING
+
+
+   WE have seen mighty men ballooning high,
+   And in another moment bump the ground.
+   He falls; and in his measurement is found
+   To count some inches o’er the common fry.
+   ’Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,
+   Yet ’twas enough above his fellows crowned,
+   Had he less panted.  Let his faithful hound
+   Bark at detractors.  He may walk or lie.
+   Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas—
+   This little Isle’s insatiable greed
+   For Continents—filled to inflation burst.
+   So do ripe nations into squalor pass,
+   When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,
+   They scorn the brain’s wild search for virtuous light.
+
+
+
+
+OUTSIDE THE CROWD
+
+
+   TO sit on History in an easy chair,
+   Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom ’twas writ!
+   Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,
+   Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air.
+   If more than hands’ and armsful be our share,
+   Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit.
+   Have we not heard derision infinite
+   When old men play the youth to chase the snare?
+   Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes,
+   Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent,
+   The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex,
+   Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent;
+   Armed to support her sword;—lest we compose
+   That Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.
+
+
+
+
+TRAFALGAR DAY
+
+
+   HE leads: we hear our Seaman’s call
+      In the roll of battles won;
+   For he is Britain’s Admiral
+      Till setting of her sun.
+
+   When Britain’s life was in her ships,
+      He kept the sea as his own right;
+   And saved us from more fell eclipse
+      Than drops on day from blackest night.
+   Again his battle spat the flame!
+      Again his victory flag men saw!
+   At sound of Nelson’s chieftain name,
+      A deeper breath did Freedom draw.
+
+   Each trusty captain knew his part:
+      They served as men, not marshalled kine:
+   The pulses they of his great heart,
+      With heads to work his main design.
+   Their Nelson’s word, to beat the foe,
+      And spare the fall’n, before them shone.
+   Good was the hour of blow for blow,
+      And clear their course while they fought on.
+
+   Behold the Envied vanward sweep!—
+      A day in mourning weeds adored!
+   Then Victory was wrought to weep;
+      Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.
+
+   A breezeless flag above a shroud
+      All Britain was when wind and wave,
+   To make her, passing human, proud,
+      Brought his last gift from o’er the grave!
+
+   Uprose the soul of him a star
+      On that brave day of Ocean days:
+   It rolled the smoke from Trafalgár
+      To darken Austerlitz ablaze.
+   Are we the men of old, its light
+      Will point us under every sky
+   The path he took; and must we fight,
+      Our Nelson be our battle-cry!
+
+   He leads: we hear our Seaman’s call
+      In the roll of battles won;
+   For he is Britain’s Admiral
+      Till setting of her sun.
+
+
+
+
+ODES IN CONTRIBUTION TO THE SONG OF FRENCH HISTORY
+
+
+THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+I
+
+
+   NOT yet had History’s Aetna smoked the skies,
+   And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained,
+   While overhead in ordered set and rise
+   Her kingly crowns immutably defiled;
+   Effulgent on funereal piled
+   Across the vacant heavens, and distrained
+   Her body, mutely, even as earth, to bear;
+   Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Through marching scores of winters racked she lay,
+   Beneath a hoar-frost’s brilliant crust,
+   Whereon the jewelled flies that drained
+   Her breasts disported in a glistering spray;
+   She, the land’s fount of fruits, enclosed with dust;
+   By good and evil angels fed, sustained
+   In part to curse, in part to pray,
+   Sucking the dubious rumours, till men saw
+   The throbs of her charged heart before the Just,
+   So worn the harrowed surface had become:
+   And still they deemed the dance above was Law,
+   Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.
+
+
+III
+
+
+   Then, on the unanticipated day,
+   Earth heaved, and rose a veinous mound
+   To roar of the underfloods; and off it sprang,
+   Ravishing as red wine in woman’s form,
+   A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh,
+   Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned;
+   She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray,
+   Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sang
+   Intoxication to her swarm,
+   Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole,
+   As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff,
+   Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay
+   (O ripeness of the time!  O Retribution sure,
+   If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!)
+   And, like a glad releasing of her soul,
+   Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue,
+   Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined,
+   In the face of men they joined: attest it true,
+   The million witnesses, that she,
+   For ages lying beside the mole,
+   Was on the unanticipated miracle day
+   Upraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal,
+   Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knew
+   What Lucifer of the Mint had coined
+   His bride’s adulterate currency
+   Of burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate;
+   She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate:
+   His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed.
+   Read backward on the hoar-frost’s brilliant crust;
+   Beneath it read.
+   Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood,
+   A radiance fringed with grim affright;
+   For them that hungered, she was nourishing food,
+   For those who sparkled, Night.
+   Read in her heart, and how before the Just
+   Her doings, her misdoings, plead.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   Down on her leap for him the young Angelical broke
+   To husband a resurgent France:
+   From whom, with her dethroning stroke,
+   Dishonour passed; the dalliance,
+   That is occasion’s yea or nay,
+   In issues for the soul to pay,
+   Discarded; and the cleft ’twixt deed and word,
+   The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird,
+   Wherein we see old Darkness peer,
+   Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence;
+   And hence the talons and the beak of prey;
+   Hence all the lures to silken swine
+   Thronging the troughs of indolence;
+   With every sleek convolvement serpentine;
+   The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer,
+   And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay.
+   He clasped in this revived, uprisen France,
+   A valorous dame, of countenance
+   The lightning’s upon cloud: unlit as yet
+   On brows and lips the lurid shine
+   Of seas in the night-wind’s whirl; unstirred
+   Her pouch of the centuries’ injuries compressed;
+   The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard:
+   Earth’s animate full flower she looked, intense
+   For worship, wholly given him, fair
+   Adoring or desiring; in her bright jet,
+   Earth’s crystal spring to sky: Earth’s warrior Best
+   To win Heaven’s Pure up that midway
+   We vision for new ground, where sense
+   And spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare,
+   Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarray
+   In scorn of the seductive insincere,
+   But martially nude for hot Bellona’s play,
+   And amorous of the loftiest in her view.
+
+
+V
+
+
+   She sprang from dust to drink of earth’s cool dew,
+   The breath of swaying grasses share,
+   Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear,
+   At wrestle with the tyrannic strong;
+   Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew,
+   As immortals may be in the mortal sphere.
+   Read through her launching heart, who had lain long
+   With Earth and heard till it became her own
+   Our good Great Mother’s eve and matin song:
+   The humming burden of Earth’s toil to feed
+   Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth,
+   Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown
+   Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both,
+   Of either aided on their hard ascent.
+   Now when she looked, with love’s benign delight
+   After great ecstasy, along the plains,
+   What foulest impregnation of her sight
+   Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops
+   Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent,
+   As were they winter sedges, broken hoops,
+   Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts,
+   With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains?
+   Recked she that some perverting devil had limned
+   Earth’s proudest to spout scorn of the Maker’s hand,
+   Who could a day behold these deathly hosts,
+   And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed,
+   A ribanded and gemmed elected few,
+   Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:—
+   Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game
+   Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame:
+   Beautiful statures; hideous,
+   By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains,
+   And flexile where is manhood straight;
+   Mortuaries where warm should beat
+   The brotherhood that keeps blood sweet:
+   Who dared in cantique impious
+   Proclaim the Just, to whom was due
+   Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state,
+   For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains,
+   On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew.
+   Surely a devil’s land when that meant death for each!
+   Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus,
+   With all the body’s life to plump the leech,
+   Is Nature’s way, she knew.  The abominable scene
+   Spat at the skies; and through her veins,
+   To cloud celestially sown,
+   Ran venom of what nourishment
+   Her dark sustainer subterrene
+   Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack,
+   Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains,
+   Under derisive revels, prone
+   As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   Now was her face white waves in the tempest’s sharp flame-blink;
+   Her skies shot black.
+   Now was it visioned infamy to drink
+   Of earth’s cool dew, and through the vines
+   Frolic in pearly laughter with her young,
+   Watching the healthful, natural, happy signs
+   Where hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung,
+   After their sly shy ventures from the leaf,
+   And promised bunches.  Now it seemed
+   The world was one malarious mire,
+   Crying for purification: chief
+   This land of France.  It seemed
+   A duteous desire
+   To drink of life’s hot flood, and the crimson streamed.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   She drank what makes man demon at the draught.
+   Her skies lowered black,
+   Her lover flew,
+   There swept a shudder over men.
+   Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed,
+   For laughter was her spirit’s weapon then.
+   The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   As mighty thews burst manacles, she went mad:
+   Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits.
+   Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had!
+   To tread her down in her live grave beneath
+   Their dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath,
+   They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits.
+   Without they girdled her, made nest within.
+   There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake.
+   They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood;
+   Believing it, in the mother’s mind at strain,
+   In the mother’s fears, and in young Liberty’s wail
+   Alarmed, for her encompassed children’s sake,
+   The sole sure way to save her priceless bud.
+   Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail,
+   Vengeance appeared as logically akin.
+   Insanely rational they; she rationally insane;
+   And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   Amid the plash of scarlet mud
+   Stained at the mouth, drunk with our common air,
+   Not lack of love was her defect;
+   The Fury mourned and raged and bled for France
+   Breathing from exultation to despair
+   At every wild-winged hope struck by mischance
+   Soaring at each faint gleam o’er her abyss.
+   Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect,
+   The frontier march she piped her sons, for where
+   Her crouching outer enemy camped,
+   Attendant on the deadlier inner’s hiss.
+   She piped her sons the frontier march, the wine
+   Of martial music, History’s cherished tune;
+   And they, the saintliest labourers that aye
+   Dropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped;
+   High-breasted to match men or elements,
+   Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled:
+   War’s ragged pupils; many a wavering line,
+   Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,
+   Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,
+   To jest at famine, ply
+   The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field;
+   Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents;
+   Fronting the red artillery straighten spine;
+   Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn;
+   Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;
+   Die, if the multiple hazards around said die;
+   Downward measure a foeman mightily sized;
+   Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised;
+   Lyrical on into death’s red roaring jaw-gape, steeled
+   Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply.
+   Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!
+
+
+X
+
+
+   Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind rattle their thunder
+   Loud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great
+   South-west,
+   Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the race:
+   Lo, in the day’s young beams the colossal invading pursuers
+   Burst upon rocks and were foam;
+   Ridged up a torrent crest;
+   Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder;
+   Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace.
+   Yesterday’s clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid comb;
+   They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under;
+   They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home;
+   They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers;
+   Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the pursuers.
+   Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace;
+   Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army dispieced;
+   Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb.
+   Fly! was the sportsman’s word; and the note of the quarry rang, Chase!
+
+
+XI
+
+
+   Banners from South, from East,
+   Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred;
+   The captive brides of valour, Sabine Wives
+   Plucked from the foeman’s blushful bed,
+   For glorious muted battle-tongues
+   Of deeds along the horizon’s red,
+   At cost of unreluctant lives;
+   Her toilful heroes homeward poured,
+   To give their fevered mother air of the lungs.
+   She breathed, and in the breathing craved.
+   Environed as she was, at bay,
+   Safety she kissed on her drawn sword,
+   And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved:
+   She craved for victory as her daily bread;
+   For victory as her daily banquet raved.
+
+
+XII
+
+
+   Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey
+   Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore
+   To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more
+   Devitalizing: red washer Auroral ray;
+   Desired if but to paint her pallid hue.
+   The passion for that young horizon red,
+   Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,
+   Like dotage of the past-meridian dame
+   For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled
+   Insatiate, to the voracious grew,
+   The glutton’s inward raveners bred;
+   Till she, mankind’s most dreaded, most abhorred,
+   Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,
+   As by the weaving Fates impelled,
+   To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,
+   Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+   Banners from East, from South,
+   She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,
+   Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne.
+   So may you see the village innocent,
+   With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,
+   In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone:
+   See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh
+   Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed.
+   False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,
+   She fell: from his ethereal home observed
+   Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead
+   Against the season’s fruit for deadly Seed,
+   But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,
+   Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought.
+   Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold
+   The doer of the monstrous; she aroused,
+   She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,
+   More strongly the divine in him than when
+   Joy of her as she sprang from mould
+   Drew him the midway heavens adown
+   To clasp her in his arms espoused
+   Before the sight of wondering men,
+   And put upon the day a deathless crown.
+   The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,
+   His alien love laid open, to divide
+   The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew
+   What cowardice in her valour could reside;
+   What strength her weakness covered; what abased
+   Sublimity so illumining, and what raised
+   This wallower in old slime to noblest heights,
+   Up to the union on the midway blue:—
+   Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs
+   Among dark History’s nocturnal lights,
+   With vivid beams indicative to the quick
+   Of all who have felt the vaulted body’s pangs
+   Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick.
+   She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned
+   To the one helping hand above;
+   Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,
+   Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love
+   That day: and he, the bright day’s husband, still with love,
+   Though alien, though to an upper seat retired,
+   Behold a wrangling heart, as ’twere her soul
+   On eddies of wild waters cast;
+   In wilderness division; fired
+   For domination, freedom, lust,
+   The Pleasures; lo, a witch’s snaky bowl
+   Set at her lips; the blood-drinker’s madness fast
+   Upon her; and therewith mistrust,
+   Most of herself: a mouth of guile.
+   Compassionately could he smile,
+   To hear the mouth disclaiming God,
+   And clamouring for the Just!
+   Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed
+   City and field; and pushed abroad
+   O’er hungry waves to thirsty sands,
+   Flaring at further; she had grown to be
+   The headless with the fearful hands;
+   To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced.
+   But he, remembering how his love began,
+   And of what creature, pitied when was plain
+   Another measure of captivity:
+   The need for strap and rod;
+   The penitential prayers again;
+   Again the bitter bowing down to dust;
+   The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God,
+   The answer when is call upon the Just.
+   Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode
+   Her master, saying, ‘I only; I who can!’
+   And echoed round her army, now her chain.
+   So learns the nation, closing Anarch’s reign,
+   That she had been in travail of a Man.
+
+
+
+NAPOLÉON
+
+
+I
+
+
+   CANNON his name,
+   Cannon his voice, he came.
+   Who heard of him heard shaken hills,
+   An earth at quake, to quiet stamped;
+   Who looked on him beheld the will of wills,
+   The driver of wild flocks where lions ramped:
+   Beheld War’s liveries flee him, like lumped grass
+   Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm;
+   While laurelled over his Imperial form,
+   Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
+   Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame.
+   Incarnate Victory, Power manifest,
+   Infernal or God-given to mankind,
+   On the quenched volcano’s cusp did he take stand,
+   A conquering army’s height above the land,
+   Which calls that army offspring of its breast,
+   And sees it mid the starry camps enshrined;
+   His eye the cannon’s flame,
+   The cannon’s cave his mind.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   To weld the nation in a name of dread,
+   And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed,
+   The Necessitated came, as comes from out
+   Electric ebon lightning’s javelin-head,
+   Threatening agitation in the revealed
+   Founts of our being; terrible with doubt,
+   With radiance restorative.  At one stride
+   Athwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway.
+   That Soliform made featureless beside
+   His brilliancy who neighboured: vapour they;
+   Vapour what postured statues barred his tread.
+   On high in amphitheatre field on field,
+   Italian, Egyptian, Austrian,
+   Far heard and of the carnage discord clear,
+   Bells of his escalading triumphs pealed
+   In crashes on a choral chant severe,
+   Heraldic of the authentic Charlemagne,
+   Globe, sceptre, sword, to enfold, to rule, to smite,
+   Make unity of the mass,
+   Coherent or refractory, by his might.
+
+   Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
+   Fame blew, and tuned the jangles, bent the knees
+   Rebellious or submissive; his decrees
+   Were thunder in those heavens and compelled:
+   Such as disordered earth, eclipsed of stars,
+   Endures for sign of Order’s calm return,
+   Whereunto she is vowed; and his wreckage-spars,
+   His harried ships, old riotous Ocean lifts alight,
+   Subdued to splendour in his delirant churn.
+   Glory suffused the accordant, quelled,
+   By magic of high sovereignty, revolt:
+   And he, the reader of men, himself unread;
+   The name of hope, the name of dread;
+   Bloom of the coming years or blight;
+   An arm to hurl the bolt
+   With aim Olympian; bore
+   Likeness to Godhead.  Whither his flashes hied
+   Hosts fell; what he constructed held rock-fast.
+   So did earth’s abjects deem of him that built and clove.
+   Torch on imagination, beams he cast,
+   Whereat they hailed him deified:
+   If less than an eagle-speeding Jove, than Vulcan more.
+   Or it might be a Vulcan-Jove,
+   Europe for smithy, Europe’s floor
+   Lurid with sparks in evanescent showers,
+   Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours,
+   Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.
+
+
+III
+
+
+   On him the long enchained, released
+   For bride of the miracle day up the midway blue;
+   She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast
+   Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue,
+   Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed.
+   Fawning, her body bent, she gazed
+   With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart:
+   Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears
+   This apparition, ghostly for belief;
+   Demoniac or divine, but sole
+   Over earth’s mightiest written Chief;
+   Earth’s chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart:
+   The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew;
+   The arbiter of circumstance;
+   High above limitations, as the spheres.
+   Nor ever had heroical Romance,
+   Never ensanguined History’s lengthened scroll,
+   Shown fulminant to shoot the levin dart
+   Terrific as this man, by whom upraised,
+   Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers;
+   Like midnight’s levying brazier-beacon blazed
+   Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons,
+   Day of the darkness; this man’s mate; by him,
+   Cannon his name,
+   Rescued from vivisectionist and knave,
+   Her body’s dominators and her shame;
+   By him with the rivers of ranked battalions, brave
+   Past mortal, girt: a march of swords and guns
+   Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice
+   He flung on the crested board, where chilly Fears
+   Behold the Reaper’s ground, Death sitting grim,
+   Awatch for his predestined ones,
+   Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these,
+   Inebriate of his inevitable device,
+   Hail it their hero’s wood of lustrous laurel-trees,
+   Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides,
+   The boiling life-blood in their cheers.
+   Unequalled since the world was man they pour
+   A spiky girdle round her; these, her sons,
+   His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roar
+   Obstruction shattered at his will or whim:
+   Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim,
+   And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   The flood that swept her to be slave
+   Adoring, under thought of being his mate,
+   These were, and unto the visibly unexcelled,
+   As much of heart as abjects can she gave,
+   Or what of heart the body bears for freight
+   When Majesty apparent overawes;
+   By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld,
+   Which let not feminine pride in him have pause
+   To question where the nobler pride rebelled.
+   She read the hieroglyphic on his brow,
+   Felt his firm hand to wield the giant’s mace;
+   Herself whirled upward in an eagle’s claws,
+   Past recollection of her earthly place;
+   And if cold Reason pressed her, called him Fate;
+   Offering abashed the servile woman’s vow.
+   Delirium was her virtue when the look
+   At fettered wrists and violated laws
+   Faith in a rectitude Supernal shook,
+   Till worship of him shone as her last rational state,
+   The slave’s apology for gemmed disgrace.
+   Far in her mind that leap from earth to the ghost
+   Midway on high; or felt as a troubled pool;
+   Or as a broken sleep that hunts a dream half lost,
+   Arrested and rebuked by the common school
+   Of daily things for truancy.  She could rejoice
+   To know with wakeful eyeballs Violence
+   Her crowned possessor, and, on every sense
+   Incumbent, Fact, Imperial Fact, her choice,
+   In scorn of barren visions, aims at a glassy void.
+   Who sprang for Liberty once, found slavery sweet;
+   And Tyranny, on alert subservience buoyed,
+   Spurred a blood-mare immeasureably fleet
+   To shoot the transient leagues in a passing wink,
+   Prompt for the glorious bound at the fanged abyss’s brink.
+   Scarce felt she that she bled when battle scored
+   On riddled flags the further conjured line;
+   From off the meteor gleam of his waved sword
+   Reflected bright in permanence: she bled
+   As the Bacchante spills her challengeing wine
+   With whirl o’ the cup before the kiss to lip;
+   And bade drudge History in his footprints tread,
+   For pride of sword-strokes o’er slow penmanship:
+   Each step of his a volume: his sharp word
+   The shower of steel and lead
+   Or pastoral sunshine.
+
+
+V
+
+
+   Persistent through the brazen chorus round
+   His thunderous footsteps on the foeman’s ground,
+   A broken carol of wild notes was heard,
+   As when an ailing infant wails a dream.
+   Strange in familiarity it rang:
+   And now along the dark blue vault might seem
+   Winged migratories having but heaven for home,
+   Now the lone sea-bird’s cry down shocks of foam,
+   Beneath a ruthless paw the captive’s pang.
+
+   It sang the gift that comes from God
+   To mind of man as air to lung.
+   So through her days of under sod
+   Her faith unto her heart had sung,
+   Like bedded seed by frozen clod,
+   With view of wide-armed heaven and buds at burst,
+   And midway up, Earth’s fluttering little lyre.
+   Even for a glimpse, for even a hope in chained desire
+   The vision of it watered thirst.
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   But whom those errant moans accused
+   As Liberty’s murderous mother, cried accursed,
+   France blew to deafness: for a space she mused;
+   She smoothed a startled look, and sought,
+   From treasuries of the adoring slave,
+   Her surest way to strangle thought;
+   Picturing her dread lord decree advance
+   Into the enemy’s land; artillery, bayonet, lance;
+   His ordering fingers point the dial’s to time their ranks:
+   Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest’s bayonet-glaive.
+   Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks,
+   By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains.
+   Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains.
+   They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute;
+   He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute;
+   Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox.
+   From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls;
+   From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls:
+   He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks;
+   They clash, they are knotted, and now ’tis the deed of the axe on the
+   log;
+   Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep
+   Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over heap
+   Right through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or shreds, or
+   a fog
+   Rolling off sunlight’s arrows.  Not mightier Phoebus in ire,
+   Nor deadlier Jove’s avengeing right hand, than he of the brain
+   Keen at an enemy’s mind to encircle and pierce and constrain,
+   Muffling his own for a fate-charged blow very Gods may admire.
+   Sure to behold are his eagles on high where the conflict raged.
+   Rightly, then, should France worship, and deafen the disaccord
+   Of those who dare withstand an irresistible sword
+   To thwart his predestined subjection of Europe.  Let them submit!
+   She said it aloud, and heard in her breast, as a singer caged,
+   With the beat of wings at bars, Earth’s fluttering little lyre.
+   No more at midway heaven, but liker midway to the pit:
+   Not singing the spirally upward of rapture, the downward of pain
+   Rather, the drop sheer downward from pressure of merciless weight.
+
+   Her strangled thought got breath, with her worship held debate;
+   To yield and sink, yet eye askant the mark she had missed.
+   Over the black-blue rollers of that broad Westerly main,
+   Steady to sky, the light of Liberty glowed
+   In a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a road
+   For Europe to cross, and see the thing lost subsist.
+   For there ’twas a shepherd led his people, no butcher of sheep;
+   Firmly there the banner he first upreared
+   Stands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reap
+   From a father beloved in life, in his death revered.
+   Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glance
+   Clearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain;
+   Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, France
+   Had view of her one-day’s heavenly lover again;
+   Saw him amid the bright host looking down on her; knew she had erred,
+   Knew him her judge, knew yonder the spirit preferred;
+   Yonder the base of the summit she strove that day to ascend,
+   Ere cannon mastered her soul, and all dreams had end.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   Soon felt she in her shivered frame
+   A bodeful drain of blood illume
+   Her wits with frosty fire to read
+   The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed
+   On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom
+   For victory that was victory scarce in name.
+   Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs
+   O’er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize;
+   Recalling how he stood by Frederic’s tomb,
+   With Frederic’s country underfoot and spurned:
+   There meditated; till her hope might guess,
+   Albeit his constant star prescribe success,
+   The savage strife would sink, the civil aim
+   To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous
+   Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned;
+   And Labour’s lovely peace, and Beauty’s courtly bloom,
+   The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious.
+   At such great height, where hero hero topped,
+   Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think
+   No further leaps at the fanged abyss’s brink
+   True Genius takes: be battle’s dice-box dropped!
+
+   She watched his desert features, hung to hear
+   The honey words desired, and veiled her face;
+   Hearing the Seaman’s name recur
+   Wrathfully, thick with a meaning worse
+   Than call to the march: for that inveterate Purse
+   Could kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place,
+   Conjure a heart into the trebly felled.
+   It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelled
+   To feed insurgent Europe: rear and van
+   Were haunted by the amphibious curse;
+   Here flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout:
+   The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout,
+   Distracted Europe’s Master, puffed remote
+   Those Indies of the swift Macedonian,
+   Whereon would Europe’s Master somewhiles doat,
+   In dreamings on a docile universe
+   Beneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.
+
+   Nor marvel France should veil a seer’s face,
+   And call on darkness as a blest retreat.
+   Magnanimously could her iron Emperor
+   Confront submission: hostile stirred to heat
+   All his vast enginery, allowed no halt
+   Up withered avenues of waste-blood war,
+   To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume,
+   As ’twere the world’s arteries opened!  Woe the race!
+   Ask wherefore Fortune’s vile caprice should balk
+   His panther spring across the foaming salt,
+   From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk!
+   There is no answer: seed of black defeat
+   She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom.
+   See since that Seaman’s epicycle sprite
+   Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase
+   Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white
+   With mother’s tears of France, that he may meet
+   Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat
+   Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea;
+   Earth’s power to baffle Ocean’s power resume;
+   Victorious army crown o’er Victory’s fleet;
+   And bearing low that Seaman upon knee,
+   Stay the vexed question of supremacy,
+   Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic’s tomb.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   Poured streams of Europe’s veins the flood
+   Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide
+   Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed:
+   And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood
+   Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast.
+   He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed.
+   She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts.
+   The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts
+   Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide
+   In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest,
+   Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked,
+   And crazy chuckles, with life’s tears at feud;
+   While near her heart the sunken sentinel
+   Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed
+   This torture, this anointed, this untracked
+   To mortal source, this alien of his kind;
+   Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars,
+   The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars;
+   Whose arts to lay the senses under spell
+   Aroused an insurrectionary mind.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   He, did he love her?  France was his weapon, shrewd
+   At edge, a wind in onset: he loved well
+   His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed
+   Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked,
+   Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle.
+   He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride,
+   Did but her blood in blindness given exact.
+   Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide:
+   She quivered at his word, and at his touch
+   Was hound or steed for any mark he espied.
+   He loved her more than little, less than much.
+   The fair subservient of Imperial Fact
+   Next to his consanguineous was placed
+   In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal,
+   Vexatious carnal appetites above,
+   Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced,
+   And rose but at command from under heel.
+   The love devolvent, the ascension love,
+   Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked,
+   Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks;
+   Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste,
+   Took up but solids for its glowing seal.
+   The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel,
+   Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks,
+   His night’s first quarter sicklied to distaste,
+   In warm enjoyment barely might distract.
+   A head that held an Europe half devoured
+   Taste in the blood’s conceit of pleasure soured.
+   Nought save his rounding aim, the means he plied,
+   Death for his cause, to him could point appeal.
+   His mistress was the thing of uses tried.
+   Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed,
+   But on his Policy his eye was lewd.
+   That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked
+   No foot across; a shade his ire provoked.
+   The blunder or the cruelty of a deed
+   His Policy imperative could plead.
+   He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he
+   Legitimate outside his Policy.
+   Men’s lives and works were due, from their birth’s date,
+   To the State’s shield and sword, himself the State.
+   He thought for them in mass, as Titan may;
+   For their pronounced well-being bade obey;
+   O’er each obstructive thicket thunderclapped,
+   And straight their easy road to market mapped.
+   Watched Argus to survey the huge preserves
+   He held or coveted; Mars was armed alert
+   At sign of motion; yet his brows were murk,
+   His gorge would surge, to see the butcher’s work,
+   The Reaper’s field; a sensitive in nerves.
+   He rode not over men to do them hurt.
+   As one who claimed to have for paramour
+   Earth’s fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow;
+   Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensure
+   Possession; free of rivals, not their foe.
+
+   The common Tyrant’s frenzies, rancour, spites,
+   He knew as little as men’s claim on rights.
+   A kindness for old servants, early friends,
+   Was constant in him while they served his ends;
+   And if irascible, ’twas the moment’s reek
+   From fires diverted by some gusty freak.
+   His Policy the act which breeds the act
+   Prevised, in issues accurately summed
+   From reckonings of men’s tempers, terrors, needs:—
+   That universal army, which he leads
+   Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact.
+   Within his hot brain’s hammering workshop hummed
+   A thousand furious wheels at whirr, untired
+   As Nature in her reproductive throes;
+   And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired:
+   The cause being aye the incendiary foes
+   Proved by prostration culpable.  His dispense
+   Of Justice made his active conscience;
+   His passive was of ceaseless labour formed.
+   So found this Tyrant sanction and repose;
+   Humanly just, inhumanly unwarmed.
+   Preventive fencings with the foul intent
+   Occult, by him observed and foiled betimes,
+   Let fool historians chronicle as crimes.
+   His blows were dealt to clear the way he went:
+   Too busy sword and mind for needless blows.
+   The mighty bird of sky minutest grains
+   On ground perceived; in heaven but rays or rains;
+   In humankind diversities of masks,
+   For rule of men the choice of bait or goads.
+   The statesman steered the despot to large tasks;
+   The despot drove the statesman on short roads.
+   For Order’s cause he laboured, as inclined
+   A soldier’s training and his Euclid mind.
+   His army unto men he could present
+   As model of the perfect instrument.
+   That creature, woman, was the sofa soft,
+   When warriors their dusty armour doffed,
+   And read their manuals for the making truce
+   With rosy frailties framed to reproduce.
+   He farmed his land, distillingly alive
+   For the utmost extract he might have and hive,
+   Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme,
+   Benign shone Hymen’s torch on young love’s dream.
+   Thus to be strong was he beneficent;
+   A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.
+
+   The disputant in words his eye dismayed:
+   Opinions blocked his passage.  Rent
+   Were Councils with a gesture; brayed
+   By hoarse camp-phrase what argument
+   Dared interpose to waken spleen
+   In him whose vision grasped the unseen,
+   Whose counsellor was the ready blade,
+   Whose argument the cannonade.
+   He loathed his land’s divergent parties, loth
+   To grant them speech, they were such idle troops;
+   The friable and the grumous, dizzards both.
+   Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops;
+   Some serviceable, none credible on oath.
+   The silly preference they nursed to die
+   In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie.
+   If magic made them pliable for his use,
+   Magician he could be by planned surprise.
+   For do they see the deuce in human guise,
+   As men’s acknowledged head appears the deuce,
+   And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal.
+   Among them certain vagrant wits that had
+   Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;
+   Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;
+   But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain
+   Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.
+   With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings
+   The way of such transfeminated things,
+   And France had sense of vacancy in Light.
+
+   That is the soul’s dead darkness, making clutch
+   Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch;
+   Adding to slavery’s chain the stringent twist;
+   Even when it brings close surety that aright
+   She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist;
+   Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
+   Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
+   Material grandeur’s ape, the Infernal’s hound;
+   Enormous, with no infinite around;
+   No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame
+   The dusty pattering pinions,
+   The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.
+
+
+X
+
+
+   Hugest of engines, a much limited man,
+   She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear
+   Through that smoked glass her last privation brought
+   To point her critic eye and spur her thought:
+   A heart but to propel Leviathan;
+   A spirit that breathed but in earth’s atmosphere.
+   Amid the plumed and sceptred ones
+   Irradiatingly Jovian,
+   The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;
+   A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:
+   Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike
+   Herself in all, yet with such power to strike,
+   That she the various features she could scan
+   Dared not to sum, though seeing: and befooled
+   By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed,
+   Subservient as roused echo round his guns.
+   Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons,
+   He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled.
+   Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained;
+   But irony, her spirit’s tongue, restrained.
+   The Critic, last of vital in the proud
+   Enslaved, when most detectively endowed,
+   Admired how irony’s venom off him ran,
+   Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze:
+   Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed,
+   Again her chant of eulogy began,
+   Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.
+
+   Her warrior, chief among the valorous great
+   In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame,
+   With radiance palpable in fruit and weight.
+   Heard she reproach, his victories blared response;
+   His victories bent the Critic to acclaim,
+   As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce.
+   Or heard she from scarred ranks of jolly growls
+   His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,
+   Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt
+   Their idol for some genial trick or fault,
+   She, too, became his marching veteran.
+   Again she took her breath from them who bore
+   His eagles through the tawny roar,
+   And murmured at a peaceful state,
+   That bred the title charlatan,
+   As missile from the mouth of hate,
+   For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled,
+   Cannon his name,
+   Shattering against a barrier world;
+   Her supreme player of man’s primaeval game.
+
+   The daemon filled him, and he filled her sons;
+   Strung them to stature over human height,
+   As march the standards down the smoky fight;
+   Her cherubim, her towering mastodons!
+   Directed vault or breach, break through
+   Earth’s toughest, seasons, elements, tame;
+   Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;
+   Count death the smallest of their debts:
+   Show that the will to do
+   Is masculine and begets!
+
+   These princes unto him the mother owed;
+   These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.
+   What wonder, though with wits awake
+   To read her riddle, for these her offspring’s sake;—
+   And she, before high heaven adulteress,
+   The lost to honour, in his glory clothed,
+   Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed;—
+   That she should quench her thought, nor worship less
+   Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew
+   The slave’s alternative, to worship or to rue!
+
+
+XI
+
+
+   Bright from the shell of that much limited man,
+   Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath,
+   Like soul that quits the tumbled body, soared:
+   And France, impulsive, nuptial with his plan,
+   Albeit the Critic fretting her, adored
+   Once more.  Exultingly her heart went forth,
+   Submissive to his mind and mood,
+   The way of those pent-eyebrows North;
+   For now was he to win the wreath
+   Surpassing sunniest in camp or Court;
+   Next, as the blessed harvest after years of blight,
+   Sit, the Great Emperor, to be known the Good!
+
+   Now had the Seaman’s volvent sprite,
+   Lean from the chase that barked his contraband,
+   A beggared applicant at every port,
+   To strew the profitless deeps and rot beneath,
+   Slung northward, for a hunted beast’s retort
+   On sovereign power; there his final stand,
+   Among the perjured Scythian’s shaggy horde,
+   The hydrocephalic aërolite
+   Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,
+   Though Europe’s Master Europe’s Rebel banned
+   To be earth’s outcast, ocean’s lord and sport.
+
+   Unmoved might seem the Master’s taunted sword.
+   Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped,
+   As on the map of that all-provident head;
+   He luting Peace the while, like morning’s cock
+   The quiet day to round the hours for bed;
+   No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock.
+   Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped.
+   To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews,
+   How trained to scale the eminences, pluck
+   The hazards for new footing, how compel
+   Those timely incidents by men named luck,
+   Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,
+   Her grovelling admiration had not yet
+   Imagined of the great man-miracle;
+   And France recounted with her comic smile
+   Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,
+   The silky female of his male in guile,
+   Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse
+   A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,
+   Before his feint for camisado struck
+   The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.
+
+   Splendours of earth repeating heaven’s at set
+   Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;
+   Since Asia upon Europe marched,
+   Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown
+   To Gallia’s over-runner, Rome’s inveterate foe,
+   Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,
+   Coruscant from the Master’s hand, compact
+   As reasoned thoughts in the Master’s head; were shown
+   Yon lightning moment when his acme might
+   Blazed o’er the stream that cuts the sandy tract
+   Borussian from Sarmatia’s famished flat;
+   The century’s flower; and off its pinnacled throne,
+   Rayed servitude on Europe’s ball of sight.
+
+
+XII
+
+
+   Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.
+   There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast
+   Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat
+   In expectation’s darkness, until cracked
+   The straining curtain-seams: a scaly light
+   Was ghost above an army under shroud.
+   Imperious on Imperial Fact
+   Incestuously the incredible begat.
+   His veterans and auxiliaries,
+   The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud,
+   Princely, scarce numerable to recite,—
+   Titanic of all Titan tragedies!—
+   That Northern curtain took them, as the seas
+   Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.
+
+   Alive in marble, she conceived in soul,
+   With barren eyes and mouth, the mother’s loss;
+   The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;
+   The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll
+   Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:
+   By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.
+
+   Was it a necromancer lured
+   To weave his tense betraying spell?
+   A Titan whom our God endured
+   Till he of his foul hungers fell,
+   By all his craft and labour scourged?
+   A deluge Europe’s liberated wave,
+   Pæan to sky, leapt over that vast grave.
+   Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged.
+   And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate,
+   In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate,
+   That tore her old credulity to strips,
+   Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips,
+   His withered slave for foregone miracles urged.
+   And he, whom now his ominous halo’s round,
+   A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned,
+   Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear
+   The realm of Darkness with its Prince’s air;
+   Assume in mien the resolute pretence
+   To satiate an hungered confidence,
+   Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower
+   Beside the generous face of that frail flower.
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+   Desire and terror then had each of each:
+   His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke;
+   Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech;
+   And both did barter under union’s cloak.
+   An union in hot fever and fierce need
+   Of either’s aid, distrust in trust did breed.
+   Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits
+   To issues.  Never human fortune throve
+   On such alliance.  Viewed by fits,
+   From Vulcan’s forge a hovering Jove
+   Evolved.  The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove.
+   Her awe of him his dread of her invoked:
+   His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked.
+   What wisdom counselled, Policy declined;
+   All perils dared he save the step behind.
+   Ahead his grand initiative becked:
+   One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked.
+   Stripped to the despot upstart, for success
+   He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.
+   He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,
+   While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught
+   He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance,
+   Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France;
+   Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun
+   The strength he taxed unripened for his throw,
+   In vengeful casts calamitous,
+   On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow,
+   The luminous the ruinous.
+   An incalescent scorpion,
+   And fierier for the mounded cirque
+   That narrowed at him thick and murk,
+   This gambler with his genius
+   Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung
+   His fortunes to the hosts he stung,
+   With victories clipped his eagle’s wings.
+   By the hands that built him up was he undone:
+   By the star aloft, which was his ram’s-head will
+   Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;
+   By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,
+   To cloud a rational mind for present things;
+   By his own force, the suicide in his mill.
+   Needs never God of Vengeance intervene
+   When giants their last lesson have to learn.
+   Fighting against an end he could discern,
+   The chivalry whereof he had none
+   He called from his worn slave’s abundant springs:
+   Not deigning spousally entreat
+   That ever blinded by his martial skill,
+   But harsh to have her worship counted out
+   In human coin, her vital rivers drained,
+   Her infant forests felled, commanded die
+   The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,
+   Where throning he her faith in him maintained;
+   Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat
+   Was triumph; and what strength in her remained
+   To head against the ultimate foreseen rout,
+   Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,
+   Servant and sycophant: without ally,
+   In Python’s coils, the Master Craftsman still;
+   The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,
+   The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,
+   The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,
+   Striking from black disaster starry showers.
+   Her supreme player of man’s primaeval game,
+   He won his harnessed victim’s rapturous shout,
+   When every move was mortal to her frame,
+   Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,
+   She to exchange his laurels for earth’s flowers.
+
+   The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell:
+   A vessel in mid-ocean under storm.
+   Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,
+   He sprang to sight, in human form
+   Revealed, from no celestial aids:
+   The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.
+
+   Cannon his name,
+   Cannon his voice, he came.
+   The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,
+   Amazing even on his Imperial stage,
+   Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours
+   And winged o’er human earth’s heroical shone.
+   Into the press of cumulative foes,
+   Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,
+   A broken structure bore his furious powers;
+   The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;
+   Match for all rivals; in himself but flame
+   Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.
+   Yet loud as when he first showed War’s effete
+   Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,
+   And summoned to subject who dared compete,
+   The cannon in the name Napoleon
+   Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky.
+   So through a tropic day a regnant sun,
+   Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,
+   His glory’s trappings laid on them: comes night,
+   Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat
+   From his anterior splendours, and shall seem
+   Day instant, Day’s own lord in the furnace gleam,
+   The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged,
+   When severed darkness, all flaminical bright,
+   Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight;
+   Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar,
+   As wrestled he with manacles and gags,
+   To speed across a cowering world once more,
+   Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags.
+   His name on silence thundered, on the obscure
+   Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song:
+   Earth of her prodigy’s extinction long,
+   With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.
+
+   Snapped was the chord that made the resonant bow,
+   In France, abased and like a shrunken corse;
+   Amid the weakest weak, the lowest low,
+   From the highest fallen, stagnant off her source;
+   Condemned to hear the nations’ hostile mirth;
+   See curtained heavens, and smell a sulphurous earth;
+   Which told how evermore shall tyrant Force
+   Beget the greater for its overthrow.
+   The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke
+   A foreign tongue; Earth’s fluttering little lyre
+   Unlike, but like the raven’s ravening croak.
+   Not till her breath of being could aspire
+   Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found
+   Our common brotherhood in sight and sound:
+   When mellow rang the name Napoleon,
+   And dim aloft her young Angelical waved.
+   Between ethereal and gross to choose,
+   She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved.
+   They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun
+   Behind o’ershadowing foemen: on a tide
+   They drew the nature having need of pride
+   Among her fellows for its vital dues:
+   He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,
+   Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.
+
+
+
+FRANCE
+DECEMBER 1870 {140}
+
+
+I
+
+
+   WE look for her that sunlike stood
+   Upon the forehead of our day,
+   An orb of nations, radiating food
+   For body and for mind alway.
+   Where is the Shape of glad array;
+   The nervous hands, the front of steel,
+   The clarion tongue?  Where is the bold proud face?
+   We see a vacant place;
+   We hear an iron heel.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   O she that made the brave appeal
+   For manhood when our time was dark,
+   And from our fetters drove the spark
+   Which was as lightning to reveal
+   New seasons, with the swifter play
+   Of pulses, and benigner day;
+   She that divinely shook the dead
+   From living man; that stretched ahead
+   Her resolute forefinger straight,
+   And marched toward the gloomy gate
+   Of earth’s Untried, gave note, and in
+   The good name of Humanity
+   Called forth the daring vision! she,
+   She likewise half corrupt of sin,
+   Angel and Wanton! can it be?
+   Her star has foundered in eclipse,
+   The shriek of madness on her lips;
+   Shreds of her, and no more, we see.
+   There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,
+   As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.
+
+
+III
+
+
+   Look not for spreading boughs
+   On the riven forest tree.
+   Look down where deep in blood and mire
+   Black thunder plants his feet and ploughs
+   The soil for ruin: that is France:
+   Still thrilling like a lyre,
+   Amazed to shivering discord from a fall
+   Sudden as that the lurid hosts recall
+   Who met in heaven the irreparable mischance.
+   O that is France!
+   The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss,
+   The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss,
+   Breasts that a sighing world inspire,
+   And laughter-dimpled countenance
+   Where soul and senses caught desire!
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   Ever invoking fire from heaven, the fire
+   Has grasped her, unconsumable, but framed
+   For all the ecstasies of suffering dire.
+   Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed:
+   Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark
+   For outrage: Mother of Luxury, stripped stark:
+   Mother of Heroes, bondsmen: thro’ the rains,
+   Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains!
+   Fond Mother of her martial youth; they pass,
+   Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass!
+   Mother of Honour, and dishonoured: Mother
+   Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays
+   Her victor, and be fountain of his praise.
+   Is there another curse?  There is another:
+   Compassionate her madness: is she not
+   Mother of Reason? she that sees them mown
+   Like grass, her young ones!  Yea, in the low groan
+   And under the fixed thunder of this hour
+   Which holds the animate world in one foul blot
+   Tranced circumambient while relentless Power
+   Beaks at her heart and claws her limbs down-thrown,
+   She, with the plungeing lightnings overshot,
+   With madness for an armour against pain,
+   With milkless breasts for little ones athirst,
+   And round her all her noblest dying in vain,
+   Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed,
+   To feel, to see, to justify the blow;
+   Chamber to chamber of her sequent brain
+   Gives answer of the cause of her great woe,
+   Inexorably echoing thro’ the vaults,
+   ‘’Tis thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow:
+   ‘This is the sum of self-absolvëd faults.’
+   Doubt not that thro’ her grief, with sight supreme,
+   Thro’ her delirium and despair’s last dream,
+   Thro’ pride, thro’ bright illusion and the brood
+   Bewildering of her various Motherhood,
+   The high strong light within her, tho’ she bleeds,
+   Traces the letters of returned misdeeds.
+   She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late,
+   Bears this fierce crop; and she discerns her fate
+   From origin to agony, and on
+   As far as the wave washes long and wan
+   Off one disastrous impulse: for of waves
+   Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves
+   Blown rolling to the sunset from the dawn.
+
+
+V
+
+
+   Ah, what a dawn of splendour, when her sowers
+   Went forth and bent the necks of populations
+   And of their terrors and humiliations
+   Wove her the starry wreath that earthward lowers
+   Now in the figure of a burning yoke!
+   Her legions traversed North and South and East,
+   Of triumph they enjoyed the glutton’s feast:
+   They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak.
+   They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalp
+   The icy precipices, and clove sheer through
+   The heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp,
+   Emerging not as men whom mortals knew.
+   They were the earthquake and the hurricane,
+   The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight,
+   Plagues of the revel: they were Deluge rain,
+   And dreaded Conflagration; lawless Might.
+   Death writes a reeling line along the snows,
+   Where under frozen mists they may be tracked,
+   Who men and elements provoked to foes,
+   And Gods: they were of god and beast compact:
+   Abhorred of all.  Yet, how they sucked the teats
+   Of Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam,
+   Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme,
+   Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets.
+   The gay young generations mask her grief;
+   Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf.
+   Forgetful is green earth; the Gods alone
+   Remember everlastingly: they strike
+   Remorselessly, and ever like for like.
+   By their great memories the Gods are known.
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   They are with her now, and in her ears, and known.
+   ’Tis they that cast her to the dust for Strength,
+   Their slave, to feed on her fair body’s length,
+   That once the sweetest and the proudest shone;
+   Scoring for hideous dismemberment
+   Her limbs, as were the anguish-taking breath
+   Gone out of her in the insufferable descent
+   From her high chieftainship; as were she death,
+   Who hears a voice of justice, feels the knife
+   Of torture, drinks all ignominy of life.
+   They are with her, and the painful Gods might weep,
+   If ever rain of tears came out of heaven
+   To flatter Weakness and bid conscience sleep,
+   Viewing the woe of this Immortal, driven
+   For the soul’s life to drain the maddening cup
+   Of her own children’s blood implacably:
+   Unsparing even as they to furrow up
+   The yellow land to likeness of a sea:
+   The bountiful fair land of vine and grain,
+   Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots,
+   Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits;
+   Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey main
+   Behind the black obliterating cyclone.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   Behold, the Gods are with her, and are known.
+   Whom they abandon misery persecutes
+   No more: them half-eyed apathy may loan
+   The happiness of pitiable brutes.
+   Whom the just Gods abandon have no light,
+   No ruthless light of introspective eyes
+   That in the midst of misery scrutinize
+   The heart and its iniquities outright.
+   They rest, they smile and rest; have earned perchance
+   Of ancient service quiet for a term;
+   Quiet of old men dropping to the worm;
+   And so goes out the soul.  But not of France.
+   She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries,
+   For fearfully their loosened hands chastize,
+   And icily they watch the rod’s caress
+   Ravage her flesh from scourges merciless,
+   But she, inveterate of brain, discerns
+   That Pity has as little place as Joy
+   Among their roll of gifts; for Strength she yearns.
+   For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy.
+   Lo, Strength is of the plain root-Virtues born:
+   Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,
+   Train by endurance, by devotion shape.
+   Strength is not won by miracle or rape.
+   It is the offspring of the modest years,
+   The gift of sire to son, thro’ those firm laws
+   Which we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,
+   The cause of man, and manhood’s ministers.
+   Could France accept the fables of her priests,
+   Who blest her banners in this game of beasts,
+   And now bid hope that heaven will intercede
+   To violate its laws in her sore need,
+   She would find comfort in their opiates:
+   Mother of Reason! can she cheat the Fates?
+   Would she, the champion of the open mind,
+   The Omnipotent’s prime gift—the gift of growth—
+   Consent even for a night-time to be blind,
+   And sink her soul on the delusive sloth,
+   For fruits ethereal and material, both,
+   In peril of her place among mankind?
+   The Mother of the many Laughters might
+   Call one poor shade of laughter in the light
+   Of her unwavering lamp to mark what things
+   The world puts faith in, careless of the truth:
+   What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings,
+   Attached by credence, we appear in sooth,
+   Demanding intercession, direct aid,
+   When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade!
+
+   She swung the sword for centuries; in a day
+   It slipped her, like a stream cut off from source.
+   She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray,
+   Clamoured of treachery, and had recourse
+   To drunken outcries in her dream that Force
+   Needed but hear her shouting to obey.
+   Was she not formed to conquer?  The bright plumes
+   Of crested vanity shed graceful nods:
+   Transcendent in her foundries, Arts and looms,
+   Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods?
+   Her faith was on her battle-roll of names
+   Sheathed in the records of old war; with dance
+   And song she thrilled her warriors and her dames,
+   Embracing her Dishonour: gave him France
+   From head to foot, France present and to come,
+   So she might hear the trumpet and the drum—
+   Bellona and Bacchante! rushing forth
+   On yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North.
+
+   Inveterate of brain, well knows she why
+   Strength failed her, faithful to himself the first:
+   Her dream is done, and she can read the sky,
+   And she can take into her heart the worst
+   Calamity to drug the shameful thought
+   Of days that made her as the man she served
+   A name of terror, but a thing unnerved:
+   Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought,
+   She for dominion, he to patch a throne.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   Henceforth of her the Gods are known,
+   Open to them her breast is laid.
+   Inveterate of brain, heart-valiant,
+   Never did fairer creature pant
+   Before the altar and the blade!
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   Swift fall the blows, and men upbraid,
+   And friends give echo blunt and cold,
+   The echo of the forest to the axe.
+   Within her are the fires that wax
+   For resurrection from the mould.
+
+
+X
+
+
+   She snatched at heaven’s flame of old,
+   And kindled nations: she was weak:
+   Frail sister of her heroic prototype,
+   The Man; for sacrifice unripe,
+   She too must fill a Vulture’s beak.
+   Deride the vanquished, and acclaim
+   The conqueror, who stains her fame,
+   Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim
+   Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.
+
+
+XI
+
+
+   She shall rise worthier of her prototype
+   Thro’ her abasement deep; the pain that runs
+   From nerve to nerve some victory achieves.
+   They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leaves
+   Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!
+   And of their death her life is: of their blood
+   From many streams now urging to a flood,
+   No more divided, France shall rise afresh.
+   Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:—
+   The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,
+   A hunter hunting down the beast in man:
+   That till the chasing out of its last vice,
+   The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.
+
+   Immortal Mother of a mortal host!
+   Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,
+   Wounds that bring death but take not life away!—
+   Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:
+   Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.
+   Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:
+   The torture lurks in them, with them the blame
+   Shall pass to leave thee purer than before.
+   Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,
+   For what, and of the abominable name
+   Of her who in imperial beauty wore.
+
+   O Mother of a fated fleeting host
+   Conceived in the past days of sin, and born
+   Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,
+   Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,
+   Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim
+   With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds
+   Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:
+   Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds
+   Each new discernment of the undying ones,
+   Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide
+   Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll;
+   These ashes have the lesson for the soul.
+   ‘Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,
+   Strip off thy Luxury: that thou may’st live,
+   Die to thyself,’ they say, ‘as we have died
+   From dear existence and the foe forgive,
+   Nor pray for aught save in our little space
+   To warn good seed to greet the fair earth’s face.’
+   O Mother! take their counsel, and so shall
+   The broader world breathe in on this thy home,
+   Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,
+   Strength give thee, like an ocean’s vast expanse
+   Off mountain cliffs, the generations all,
+   Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,
+   But as a river forward.  Soaring France!
+   Now is Humanity on trial in thee:
+   Now may’st thou gather humankind in fee:
+   Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;
+   Make of calamity thine aureole,
+   And bleeding head us thro’ the troubles of the sea.
+
+
+
+ALSACE-LORRAINE
+
+
+I
+
+
+   THE sister Hours in circles linked,
+   Daughters of men, of men the mates,
+   Are gone on flow with the day that winked,
+   With the night that spanned at golden gates.
+   Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;
+   They bear us grain or flower or weed,
+   As we have sown; is nought extinct
+   For them we fill to be our Fates.
+   Life of the breath is but the loan;
+   Passing death what we have sown.
+
+   Pearly are they till the pale inherited stain
+   Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow
+   Darken to feature and nature: a volumed chain,
+   Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.
+   Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read
+   Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:
+   There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane
+   Stand as a tree whereon numberless clusters grow:
+   Legible there how the heart, with its one false move
+   Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.
+
+   Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief;
+   Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;
+   Our craving heart of passion suckling grief
+   Disowns the author’s work it must peruse;
+   Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,
+   A round of harvests red from crimson seed,
+   It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf,
+   And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;
+   Though sometimes it may think what novel light
+   Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and starred
+   Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,
+   Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.
+   Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,
+   They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,
+   That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,
+   Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.
+   Only to Earth’s best loved, at the breathless turns
+   Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,
+   And a ghostly lamp of their moment’s union burns,
+   Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.
+
+   Voice of Earth’s very soul to the soul she would see renewed:
+   A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breast
+   Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves’ bells upon ferns
+   In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.
+   Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;
+   Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;
+   Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;
+   Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scuts
+   Flashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.
+   Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts,
+   To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.
+   Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,
+   Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.
+   Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive’s grey;
+   A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;
+   The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,
+   Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.
+   Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades;
+   Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;
+   Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,
+   On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.
+   Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receive
+   Balm of a sound Earth’s primary heart at its active beat:
+   The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;
+   Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:
+   Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;
+   Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt
+   To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;
+   Its day’s hard business done, the score to the good accompt.
+   Creatures of forest and mead, Earth’s essays in being, all kinds
+   Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,
+   They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,
+   Cut man’s tangles for Earth’s first broad rectilinear way:
+   Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,
+   Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;
+   Not always the sprouts of Earth’s root-Laws preserving her brutes;
+   Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.
+
+   Yet the like aërial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
+   Infant of Earth’s most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
+   For entry on Life’s upper fields: and soul thus flourishing pays
+   The martyr’s penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.
+
+   Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools of the dry,
+   Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth remake;
+   Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie,
+   Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake,
+   As it were with the Resurrection’s eyelids uplifted, to see
+   Honour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fount
+   Jets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-tree
+   Spout, with our Earth’s unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount,
+   Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it be.
+   For this at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth,
+   However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall,
+   The chastisement drawn down on us merited: are we of worth
+   Amid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call,
+   Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the God who is in us and round,
+   Consenting, the God there seen.  Impiety speaks despair;
+   Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy ground,
+   Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we share.
+   Not such of the crowned discrowned
+   Can Earth or humanity spare;
+   Such not the God let die.
+
+
+III
+
+
+   Eastward of Paris morn is high;
+   And darkness on that Eastward side
+   The heart of France beholds: a thorn
+   Is in her frame where shines the morn:
+   A rigid wave usurps her sky,
+   With eagle crest and eagle-eyed
+   To scan what wormy wrinkles hint
+   Her forces gathering: she the thrown
+   From station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone,
+   Reading late History as a foul misprint:
+   Imperial, Angelical,
+   At strife commingled in her frame convulsed;
+   Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall;
+   Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed;
+   These tortures to distract her underneath
+   Her whelmed Aurora’s shade.  But in that space
+   When lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath,
+   Like an unburied body mid the tombs,
+   Feeling against her heart life’s bitter probe
+   For life, she saw how children of her race,
+   The many sober sons and daughters, plied,
+   By cottage lamplight through the water-globe,
+   By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms,
+   Afield, in factories, with the birds astir,
+   Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied
+   Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.
+   So like Earth’s indestructible they were,
+   That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride,
+   To feel where in each breast the thought of her,
+   On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs,
+   Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone
+   At lip or in a fluttered look,
+   A shortened breath: and they were her loved own;
+   Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears,
+   For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke,
+   Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt,
+   The Mother having conscience in arrears;
+   Ready to gush the flood of vain regret,
+   Else hearken to her weaponed children’s moan
+   Of stifled rage invoking vengeance: hell’s,
+   If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swells
+   In blood and brain for retribution swift.
+   Those helped not: wings to her soul were these who yet
+   Could welcome day for labour, night for rest,
+   Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift,
+   Of honest heart, beyond all miracles;
+   And likened to Earth’s humblest were Earth’s best.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   Brooding on her deep fall, the many strings
+   Which formed her nature set a thought on Kings,
+   As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift;
+   And one among them hummed devoutly leal,
+   While passed the sighing breeze along her breast.
+   Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed down
+   Her gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown;
+   Upon her through long seasons was its grasp,
+   For neither soul’s nor body’s weal;
+   As much bestows the robber wasp,
+   That in the hanging apple makes a meal,
+   And carves a face of abscess where was fruit
+   Ripe ruddy.  They would blot
+   Her radiant leap above the slopes acute,
+   Of summit to celestial; impute
+   The wanton’s aim to her divinest shot;
+   Bid her walk History backward over gaps;
+   Abhor the day of Phrygian caps;
+   Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself;
+   The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph,
+   Admire repentant; reverently prostrate
+   Her person unto the belly-god; of whom
+   Is inward plenty and external bloom;
+   Enough of pomp and state
+   And carnival to quench
+   The breast’s desires of an intemperate wench,
+   The head’s ideas beyond legitimate.
+
+   She flung them: she was France: nor with far frown
+   Her lover from the embrace of her refrained:
+   But in her voice an interwoven wire,
+   The exultation of her gross renown,
+   Struck deafness at her heavens, and they waned
+   Over a look ill-gifted to aspire.
+   Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate,
+   The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days,
+   Her treasure-galleon’s wondrous freight.
+   The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferred
+   Her soul’s allegiance; o’er the Tyrant slurred,
+   Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze,
+   To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.
+
+
+V
+
+
+   She hailed him Saint:
+   And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!
+   The virgin who conceived a France when funeral glooms
+   Across a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung:
+   Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth;
+   Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman’s taint;
+   Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth,
+   Have joy of unity: the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed,
+   Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of faggot fumes;
+   Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.
+
+   For her people to hail her Saint,
+   Were no lifting of her, Earth’s gem,
+   Earth’s chosen, Earth’s throb on divine:
+   In the ranks of the starred she is one,
+   While man has thought on our line:
+   No lifting of her, but for them,
+   Breath of the mountain, beam of the sun
+   Through mist, out of swamp-fires’ lures release,
+   Youth on the forehead, the rough right way
+   Seen to be footed: for them the heart’s peace,
+   By the mind’s war won for a permanent miracle day.
+
+   Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed,
+   The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne
+   Into the furnace-pit she tossed
+   Before her body knew the flame,
+   And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work,
+   An undivided power to speed her aim.
+   She had no self but France: the sainted man
+   No France but self.  Him warrior and clerk,
+   Free of his iron clutch; and him her young,
+   In whirled imagination mastodonized;
+   And him her penmen, him her poets; all
+   For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain;
+   Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue,
+   Till solely through his glory France was prized.
+   She who had her Jeanne;
+   The child of her industrious;
+   Earth’s truest, earth’s pure fount from the main;
+   And she who had her one day’s mate,
+   In the soul’s view illustrious
+   Past blazonry, her Immaculate,
+   Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;
+   Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain
+   She heard upon a day in ‘I who can’;
+   Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare
+   Of that Caesarean Italian
+   Across the storied fields of trampled grain,
+   As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul
+   Blowing the rally against a Caesar’s reign.
+   Her soul’s protesting sobs she drowned to swear
+   Fidelity unto the sainted man,
+   Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again
+   The foreigner in Europe, known of none,
+   None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun.
+   Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe’s van;
+   The dream she nursed a snare,
+   The flag she bore a pall.
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   In Nature is no rearward step allowed.
+   Hard on the rock Reality do we dash
+   To be shattered, if the material dream propels.
+   The worship to departed splendour vowed
+   Conjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,
+   For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.
+
+   Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her hills;
+   For the will of wills,
+   Its flaccid ape,
+   Weak as the final echo off a giant’s bawl:
+   Napoleon for disdain,
+   His banner steeped in crape.
+   Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;
+   The frozen billow crested to its fall;
+   Dismemberment; disfigurement;
+   Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;
+   And ever that one word to reperuse,
+   With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;
+   Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiled
+   Showed her sons’ valour as a frenzied child
+   In arms of the mailed man.
+   Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,
+   Lest burst it: unto her eyes a ghost,
+   Incredible though manifest: a scene
+   Stamped with her new Saint’s name: and all his host
+   A wattled flock the foeman’s dogs between!
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bare
+   Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throes
+   Beneath her Purgatorial Saint’s evocative stare:
+   Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend’s close.
+   A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night’s dead-born,
+   His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a fray
+   Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor’s instinctive scorn
+   Of the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold grey,
+   Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,
+   Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted ranks.
+   The golden eagles flap lame wings,
+   The black double-headed are round their flanks.
+   He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake, trod
+   into union; lo,
+   These are his Epic’s tutored Dardans, yon that Rhapsode’s Achaeans to
+   know.
+   Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the weaker’s flashed
+   device;
+   Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal, assured,
+   precise.
+   Ruled by the mathematician’s hand, they solve their problem, as on a
+   slate.
+   This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly
+   hazarded date.
+   His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of plains for
+   the warrior’s guile
+   Displayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office mercantile.
+   And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble
+   reduced to nought.
+   Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive, all
+   writhen caught?
+   Arterial blood of an army’s heart outpoured the Grey Observer sees:
+   A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off her
+   Pyrenees.
+   Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against iron,
+   reason, Fate;
+   It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the
+   helmeted feel its weight.
+   So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to screaming
+   withdrawal, but snatched,
+   Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o’er the waste of brave
+   men outmatched.
+   The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose
+   honour was dearer than life;
+   The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his pupil,
+   the scholar in strife.
+
+   He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,
+   From sleep or debate, a mannikin squire
+   With head of a merlin hawk and quill
+   Acrow on an ear.  At him rained fire
+   From a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,
+   To say what a deadly poison stuffed
+   The France here laid in her bloody ditch,
+   Through the Legend passing human puffed.
+
+   Credible ghost of the field which from him descends,
+   Each dark anniversary day will its father return,
+   Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,
+   That penman trumpeter’s part in the wreck discern.
+
+   There, with the cup it presents at her lips, she stands,
+   France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.
+   The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;
+   The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.
+   Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,
+   To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,
+   At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.
+   Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick
+   Nigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,
+   Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.
+
+   Of love is wisdom.  Is it great love, then wise
+   Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more
+   By its mentor’s counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.
+   Desire of the wave for the shore,
+   Passion for one last agony under skies,
+   To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   On her lost arm love bade her look;
+   On her one hand to meditate;
+   The tumult of her blood abate;
+   Disaster face, derision brook:
+   Forbade the page of her Historic Muse,
+   Until her demon his last hold forsook,
+   And smoothly, with no countenance of hate,
+   Her conqueror she could scan to measure.  Thence
+   The strange new Winter stream of ruling sense,
+   Cold, comfortless, but braced to disabuse,
+   Ran through the mind of this most lowly laid;
+   From the top billow of victorious War,
+   Down in the flagless troughs at ebb and flow;
+   A wreck; her past, her future, both in shade.
+   She read the things that are;
+   Reality unaccepted read
+   For sign of the distraught, and took her blow
+   To brain; herself read through;
+   Wherefore her predatory Glory paid
+   Napoleon ransom knew.
+   Her nature’s many strings hot gusts did jar
+   Against the note of reason uttered low,
+   Ere passionate with duty she might wed,
+   Compel the bride’s embrace of her stern groom,
+   Joined at an altar liker to the tomb,
+   Nest of the Furies their first nuptial bed,
+   They not the less were mated and proclaimed
+   The rational their issue.  Then she rose.
+
+   See how the rush of southern Springtide glows
+   Oceanic in the chariot-wheel’s ascent,
+   Illuminated with one breath.  The maimed,
+   Tom, tortured, winter-visaged, suddenly
+   Had stature; to the world’s wonderment,
+   Fair features, grace of mien, nor least
+   The comic dimples round her April mouth,
+   Sprung of her intimate humanity.
+   She stood before mankind the very South
+   Rapt out of frost to flowery drapery;
+   Unshadowed save when somewhiles she looked East.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   Let but the rational prevail,
+   Our footing is on ground though all else fail:
+   Our kiss of Earth is then a plight
+   To walk within her Laws and have her light.
+   Choice of the life or death lies in ourselves;
+   There is no fate but when unreason lours.
+   This Land the cheerful toiler delves,
+   The thinker brightens with fine wit,
+   The lovelier grace as lyric flowers,
+   Those rosed and starred revolving Twelves
+   Shall nurse for effort infinite
+   While leashed to brain the heart of France the Fair
+   Beats tempered music and its lead subserves.
+   Washed from her eyes the Napoleonic glare,
+   Divinely raised by that in her divine,
+   Not the clear sight of Earth’s blunt actual swerves
+   When her lost look, as on a wave of wine,
+   Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries
+   Caress with folds and curves
+   The fortress over Rhine,
+   Beneath the one tall spire.
+   Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,
+   Her anguish in desire,
+   She sees, above the brutish paw
+   Alert on her still quivering limb—
+   As little in past time she saw,
+   Nor when dispieced as prey,
+   As victrix when abhorred—
+   A Grand Germania, stout on soil;
+   Audacious up the ethereal dim;
+   The forest’s Infant; the strong hand for toil;
+   The patient brain in twilights when astray;
+   Shrewdest of heads to foil and counterfoil;
+   The sceptic and devout; the potent sword;
+   With will and armed to help in hewing way
+   For Europe’s march; and of the most golden chord
+   Of the Heliconian lyre
+   Excellent mistress.  Yea, she sees, and can admire;
+   Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;
+   And with what shield upon Alsace-Lorraine
+   Her wary sister’s doubtful look misreads
+   A mother’s throbs for her lost: so loved: so near:
+   Magnetic.  Hard the course for her to steer,
+   The leap against the sharpened spikes restrain.
+   For the belted Overshadower hard the course,
+   On whom devolves the spirit’s touchstone, Force:
+   Which is the strenuous arm, to strike inclined,
+   That too much adamantine makes the mind;
+   Forgets it coin of Nature’s rich Exchange;
+   Contracts horizons within present sight:
+   Amalekite to-day, across its range
+   Indisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.
+
+
+X
+
+
+   The mother who gave birth to Jeanne;
+   Who to her young Angelical sprang;
+   Who lay with Earth and heard the notes she sang,
+   And heard her truest sing them; she may reach
+   Heights yet unknown of nations; haply teach
+   A thirsting world to learn ’tis ‘she who can.’
+
+   She that in History’s Heliaea pleads
+   The nation flowering conscience o’er the beast;
+   With heart expurged of rancour, tame of greeds;
+   With the winged mind from fang and claw released;—
+   Will such a land be seen?  It will be seen;—
+   Shall stand adjudged our foremost and Earth’s Queen.
+   Acknowledgement that she of God proceeds
+   The invisible makes visible, as his priest,
+   To her is yielded by a world reclaimed.
+   And stands she mutilated, fancy-shamed,
+   Yet strong in arms, yet strong in self-control,
+   Known valiant, her maternal throbs repressed,
+   Discarding vengeance, Giant with a soul;—
+   My faith in her when she lay low
+   Was fountain; now as wave at flow
+   Beneath the lights, my faith in God is best;—
+   On France has come the test
+   Of what she holds within
+   Responsive to Life’s deeper springs.
+   She above the nations blest
+   In fruitful and in liveliest,
+   In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,
+   The devotee of Glory, she may win
+   Glory despoiling none, enrich her kind,
+   Illume her land, and take the royal seat
+   Unto the strong self-conqueror assigned.
+   But ah, when speaks a loaded breath the double name,
+   Humanity’s old Foeman winks agrin.
+   Her constant Angel eyes her heart’s quick beat,
+   The thrill of shadow coursing through her frame.
+   Like wind among the ranks of amber wheat.
+   Our Europe, vowed to unity or torn,
+   Observes her face, as shepherds note the morn,
+   And in a ruddy beacon mark an end
+   That for the flock in their grave hearing rings.
+   Specked overhead the imminent vulture wings
+   At poise, one fatal movement indiscreet,
+   Sprung from the Aetna passions’ mad revolts,
+   Draws down; the midnight hovers to descend;
+   And dire as Indian noons of ulcer heat
+   Anticipating tempest and the bolts,
+   Hangs curtained terrors round her next day’s door,
+   Death’s emblems for the breast of Europe flings;
+   The breast that waits a spark to fire her store.
+   Shall, then, the great vitality, France,
+   Signal the backward step once more;
+   Again a Goddess Fortune trace
+   Amid the Deities, and pledge to chance
+   One whom we never could replace?
+   Now may she tune her nature’s many strings
+   To noble harmony, be seen, be known.
+
+   It was the foreign France, the unruly, feared;
+   Little for all her witcheries endeared;
+   Theatrical of arrogance, a sprite
+   With gaseous vapours overblown,
+   In her conceit of power ensphered,
+   Foredoomed to violate and atone;
+   Her the grim conqueror’s iron might
+   Avengeing clutched, distrusting rent;
+   Not that sharp intellect with fire endowed
+   To cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;
+   Not virtual France, the France benevolent,
+   The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublime
+   At intervals, and oft in sweetest chime;
+   Though perilously instrument,
+   A breast for any having godlike gleam.
+   This France could no antagonist disesteem,
+   To spurn at heel and confiscate her brood.
+   Albeit a waverer between heart and mind,
+   And laurels won from sky or plucked from blood,
+   Which wither all the wreath when intertwined,
+   This cherishable France she may redeem.
+   Beloved of Earth, her heart should feel at length
+   How much unto Earth’s offspring it doth owe.
+   Obstructions are for levelling, have we strength;
+   ’Tis poverty of soul conceived a foe.
+   Rejected be the wrath that keeps unhealed
+   Her panting wound; to higher Courts appealed
+   The wrongs discerned of higher: Europe waits:
+   She chooses God or gambles with the Fates.
+   Shines the new Helen in Alsace-Lorraine,
+   A darker river severs Rhine and Rhone,
+   Is heard a deadlier Epic of the twain;
+   We see a Paris burn
+   Or France Napoleon.
+
+   For yet he breathes whom less her heart forswears
+   While trembles its desire to thwart her mind:
+   The Tyrant lives in Victory’s return.
+   What figure with recurrent footstep fares
+   Around those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,
+   To sow her future from an ashen urn
+   By lantern-light, as dragons’ teeth are sown?
+   Of bleeding pride the piercing seër is blind.
+   But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scud
+   Distorting her true features, to be shown
+   Benignly luminous, one who bears
+   Humanity at breast, and she might learn
+   How surely the excelling generous find
+   Renouncement is possession.  Sure
+   As light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,
+   The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,
+   Magnanimous magnanimous creates.
+   So to majestic beauty stricken rears
+   Hard-visaged rock against the risen glow;
+   And men are in the secret with the spheres,
+   Whose glory is celestially to bestow.
+
+   Now nation looks to nation, that may live
+   Their common nurseling, like the torrent’s flower,
+   Shaken by foul Destruction’s fast-piled heap.
+   On France is laid the proud initiative
+   Of sacrifice in one self-mastering hour,
+   Whereby more than her lost one will she reap;
+   Perchance the very lost regain,
+   To count it less than her superb reward.
+   Our Europe, where is debtor each to each,
+   Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain,
+   Fraternal from the Seaman’s beach,
+   From answering Rhine in grand accord,
+   From Neva beneath Northern cloud,
+   And from our Transatlantic Europe loud,
+   Will hail the rare example for their theme;
+   Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze;
+   In their entrusted nurseling know them one:
+   Like a brave vessel under press of steam,
+   Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas,
+   Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present sun,
+   Will drive through darkness, and, with faith supreme,
+   Have sight of haven and the crowded quays.
+
+
+
+
+THE CAGEING OF ARES
+ILIAD, v. 385
+
+
+              [DEDICATED TO THE COUNCIL AT THE HAGUE, 1899]
+
+   HOW big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
+   At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
+   Each over other as they neighboured home,
+   Fronting the day’s descent across green slopes,
+   And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.
+   Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
+   Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
+   It signalled some adventurous master-trick
+   To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
+   Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
+   The Tyranny menaced.  Ephialtes high
+   On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
+   For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
+   Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
+   While Otos aped the prisoner’s wrists and knees,
+   With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
+   Till Gaea’s lap receiving them, they stretched,
+   And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
+   Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
+   Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
+   The hurried spout.  And as when drifting storm
+   Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
+   A peak, a forest mound, a valley’s gleam
+   Of grass and the river’s crooks and snaky coils,
+   Signification marvellous she caught,
+   Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
+   Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
+   Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
+   With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
+   Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe
+   That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
+   These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
+   Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
+   Still by the reckoning infants among men,
+   Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
+   In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:
+   These two combining strength and craft had snared,
+   Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
+   The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
+   Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
+   The barren furrower of anointed fields;
+   The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
+   Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:
+   Great Ares.  And they gagged his trumpet mouth
+   When they had seized on his implacable spear,
+   Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
+   His godlike fury startled from amaze.
+   For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
+   The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
+   Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
+   Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
+   On Earth’s original fisticuffs they called
+   For ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,
+   Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
+   Good servitors of Ares they would be,
+   And ply the pointed spear to dominate
+   Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood
+   Vowed to defy Immortals.  So it chanced
+   Amusedly he watched them, and as one
+   The lusty twain were on him and they had him.
+   Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!
+   Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!
+   Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!
+   Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,
+   Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;
+   A desolating fire to blind the sight
+   With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;
+   The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;
+   Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,
+   Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.
+   Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,
+   And tumbled down the cave.  But rather look—
+   Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,
+   Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,
+   Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!
+   Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,
+   And shatter earth’s delirious holiday,
+   Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,
+   Resolving to composure on its throbs.
+   But see her in the Seasons through that year;
+   That one glad year and the fair opening month.
+   Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!
+   War with her, gentle war with her, each day
+   Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,
+   On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength
+   Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,
+   From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,
+   Her ready secret: the abounding life
+   Returned for valiant labour: she and they
+   Defeated and victorious turn by turn;
+   By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.
+   Exchange of powers of this conflict came;
+   Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.
+   Is battle nature’s mandate, here it reigned,
+   As music unto the hand that smote the strings;
+   And she the rosier from their showery brows,
+   They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.
+   Back to the primal rational of those
+   Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp
+   Stability in hatred of the insane,
+   Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce
+   The mortal mind’s concept of earth’s divorced
+   Above; those beautiful, those masterful,
+   Those lawless.  High they sit, and if descend,
+   Descend to reap, not sowing.  Is it just?
+   Earth in her happy children asked that word,
+   Whereto within their breast was her reply.
+   Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,
+   Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;
+   Yet they (’twas the Great Mother’s voice inspired
+   The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,
+   Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,
+   To meet the certain fate of earth’s divorced,
+   And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,
+   Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,
+   Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled
+   The Tyranny.  This her voice within them told,
+   When softly the Great Mother chid her sons
+   Not of the giant brood, who did create
+   Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain
+   Set moving by an abject blood, that waked
+   To wanton under elements more benign,
+   And planted aliens on Olympian heights;—
+   Imagination’s cradle poesy
+   Become a monstrous pressure upon men;—
+   Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed
+   By light from her, born of the love of her,
+   Their lordship the illumined brain rejects
+   For earth’s beneficent, the sons of Law,
+   Her other name.  So spake she in their heart,
+   Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath
+   Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,
+   Confidently to cling.  And when brown corn
+   Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,
+   With gold necks bent for any zephyr’s kiss;
+   When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil
+   Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;
+   When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,
+   Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;
+   The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,
+   And yet a burning lion for the spring;
+   Then in that time of general cherishment,
+   Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,
+   He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,
+   Then did good Gaea’s children gratefully
+   Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,
+   Delightful Peace, that answers Reason’s call
+   Harmoniously and images her Law;
+   Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,
+   In memories made present on the brain
+   By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;
+   The picture of an earth allied to heaven;
+   Between them the known smile behind black masks;
+   Rightly their various moods interpreted;
+   And frolic because toilful children borne
+   With larger comprehension of Earth’s aim
+   At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT-WALK
+
+
+   AWAKES for me and leaps from shroud
+   All radiantly the moon’s own night
+   Of folded showers in streamer cloud;
+   Our shadows down the highway white
+   Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,
+   With yon and yon a stem alight.
+
+   I see marauder runagates
+   Across us shoot their dusky wink;
+   I hear the parliament of chats
+   In haws beside the river’s brink;
+   And drops the vole off alder-banks,
+   To push his arrow through the stream.
+   These busy people had our thanks
+   For tickling sight and sound, but theme
+   They were not more than breath we drew
+   Delighted with our world’s embrace:
+   The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
+   And watered grass in breezy space;
+   The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
+   Among their folds, by distance draped.
+   ’Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
+   That cried to have its chaos shaped:
+   Absorbing, little noting, still
+   Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
+   With wistful looks on each far hill
+   For something hidden, something owed.
+   Unto his mantled sister, Day
+   Had given the secret things we sought
+   And she was grave and saintly gay;
+   At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
+   She flew on it, then folded wings,
+   In meditation passing lone,
+   To breathe around the secret things,
+   Which have no word, and yet are known;
+   Of thirst for them are known, as air
+   Is health in blood: we gained enough
+   By this to feel it honest fare;
+   Impalpable, not barren, stuff.
+
+   A pride of legs in motion kept
+   Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
+   And what was deepest dreaming slept:
+   The posts that named the swallowed mile;
+   Beside the straight canal the hut
+   Abandoned; near the river’s source
+   Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
+   The roadway missed; were our discourse;
+   At times dear poets, whom some view
+   Transcendent or subdued evoked
+   To speak the memorable, the true,
+   The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
+   For proof that there, among earth’s dumb,
+   A soul had passed and said our best.
+   Or it might be we chimed on some
+   Historic favourite’s astral crest,
+   With part to reverence in its gleam,
+   And part to rivalry the shout:
+   So royal, unuttered, is youth’s dream
+   Of power within to strike without.
+   But most the silences were sweet,
+   Like mothers’ breasts, to bid it feel
+   It lived in such divine conceit
+   As envies aught we stamp for real.
+
+   To either then an untold tale
+   Was Life, and author, hero, we.
+   The chapters holding peaks to scale,
+   Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
+   For we were armed of inner fires,
+   Unbled in us the ripe desires;
+   And passion rolled a quiet sea,
+   Whereon was Love the phantom sail.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE CLOSE
+
+
+   TO Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
+   Who straightway sound the call to arms.  Thou know’st;
+   And that black spot in each embattled host,
+   Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.
+   Now is it red artillery and white steel;
+   Till on a day will ring the victor’s boast,
+   That ’tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
+   Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.
+   So in all times of man’s descent insane
+   To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
+   Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.
+   But at the close he entered Thy domain,
+   Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
+   He tore the fall’n, the Eternal was his Foe.
+
+
+
+
+A GARDEN IDYL
+
+
+   WITH sagest craft Arachne worked
+   Her web, and at a corner lurked,
+   Awaiting what should plump her soon,
+   To case it in the death-cocoon.
+   Sagaciously her home she chose
+   For visits that would never close;
+   Inside my chalet-porch her feast
+   Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.
+
+   The finished structure, bar on bar,
+   Had snatched from light to form a star,
+   And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
+   Like music of the very Muse.
+   Great artists pass our single sense;
+   We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
+   Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
+   To think such beauty means a trap.
+   But Nature’s genius, even man’s
+   At best, is practical in plans;
+   Subservient to the needy thought,
+   However rare the weapon wrought.
+   As long as Nature holds it good
+   To urge her creatures’ quest for food
+   Will beauty stamp the just intent
+   Of weapons upon service bent.
+   For beauty is a flower of roots
+   Embedded lower than our boots;
+   Out of the primal strata springs,
+   And shows for crown of useful things.
+
+   Arachne’s dream of prey to size
+   Aspired; so she could nigh despise
+   The puny specks the breezes round
+   Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
+   Assured of her fat fly to come;
+   Perhaps a blue, the spider’s plum;
+   Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
+   And gives repast an appetite,
+   By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
+   Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
+   A shrouded lump, for her to see
+   Her banquet in her victory.
+
+   This matron of the unnumbered threads,
+   One day of dandelions’ heads
+   Distributing their gray perruques
+   Up every gust, I watched with looks
+   Discreet beside the chalet-door;
+   And gracefully a light wind bore,
+   Direct upon my webster’s wall,
+   A monster in the form of ball;
+   The mildest captive ever snared,
+   That neither struggled nor despaired,
+   On half the net invading hung,
+   And plain as in her mother tongue,
+   While low the weaver cursed her lures,
+   Remarked, “You have me; I am yours.”
+
+   Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
+   Her dream of size she saw, agape.
+   Midway the vast round-raying beard
+   A desiccated midge appeared;
+   Whose body pricked the name of meal,
+   Whose hair had growth in earth’s unreal;
+   Provocative of dread and wrath,
+   Contempt and horror, in one froth,
+   Inextricable, insensible,
+   His poison presence there would dwell,
+   Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
+   A catch to compliment the skilled;
+   And she reduced to beaky skin,
+   Disgraceful among kith and kin
+
+   Against her corner, humped and aged,
+   Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
+   Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
+   Ridiculously volatile
+   He seemed to her last spark of mind;
+   And that in pallid ash declined
+   Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
+   Wherein throughout her frame she felt
+   That he, the light wind’s libertine,
+   Without a scoff, without a grin,
+   And mannered like the courtly few,
+   Who merely danced when light winds blew,
+   Impervious to beak and claws,
+   Tradition’s ruinous Whitebeard was;
+   Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
+   Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
+   With word, that less than feather-weight,
+   He smote the web like bolt of Fate.
+
+   This muted drama, hour by hour,
+   I watched amid a world in flower,
+   Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
+   Their gray-blue o’er the grass’s blade,
+   And still along the garden-run
+   The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
+   Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
+   Her visitor performed a dance;
+   She puckered thinner; he the same
+   As when on that light wind he came.
+
+   Next day was told what deeds of night
+   Were done; the web had vanished quite;
+   With it the strange opposing pair;
+   And listless waved on vacant air,
+   For her adieu to heart’s content,
+   A solitary filament.
+
+
+
+
+A READING OF LIFE
+
+
+THE VITAL CHOICE
+
+
+I
+
+
+   OR shall we run with Artemis
+   Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?
+   Both are mighty;
+   Both give bliss;
+   Each can torture if divided;
+   Each claims worship undivided,
+   In her wake would have us wallow.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Youth must offer on bent knees
+   Homage unto one or other;
+   Earth, the mother,
+   This decrees;
+   And unto the pallid Scyther
+   Either points us shun we either
+   Shun or too devoutly follow.
+
+
+
+WITH THE HUNTRESS
+
+
+   THROUGH the water-eye of night,
+   Midway between eve and dawn,
+   See the chase, the rout, the flight
+   In deep forest; oread, faun,
+   Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;
+   Ravenous all the line for speed.
+   See yon wavy sparkle beck
+   Sign of the Virgin Lady’s lead.
+   Down her course a serpent star
+   Coils and shatters at her heels;
+   Peals the horn exulting, peals
+   Plaintive, is it near or far.
+   Huntress, arrowy to pursue,
+   In and out of woody glen,
+   Under cliffs that tear the blue,
+   Over torrent, over fen,
+   She and forest, where she skims
+   Feathery, darken and relume:
+   Those are her white-lightning limbs
+   Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.
+   Mountains hear her and call back,
+   Shrewd with night: a frosty wail
+   Distant: her the emerald vale
+   Folds, and wonders in her track.
+   Now her retinue is lean,
+   Many rearward; streams the chase
+   Eager forth of covert; seen
+   One hot tide the rapturous race.
+   Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,
+   Up on a flash the lighted mound
+   Leaps she, bow to shoulder, shaft
+   Strung to barb with archer’s craft,
+   Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet
+   Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.
+   Fearful swiftness they outrun,
+   Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,
+   Challenge, charge of tusks elude:
+   Theirs the dance to tame the rude;
+   Beast, and beast in manhood tame,
+   Follow we their silver flame.
+   Pride of flesh from bondage free,
+   Reaping vigour of its waste,
+   Marks her servitors, and she
+   Sanctifies the unembraced.
+   Nought of perilous she reeks;
+   Valour clothes her open breast;
+   Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;
+   Hallowed by the sex confessed.
+   Huntress arrowy to pursue,
+   Colder she than sunless dew,
+   She, that breath of upper air;
+   Ay, but never lyrist sang,
+   Draught of Bacchus never sprang
+   Blood the bliss of Gods to share,
+   High o’er sweep of eagle wings,
+   Like the run with her, when rings
+   Clear her rally, and her dart,
+   In the forest’s cavern heart,
+   Tells of her victorious aim.
+   Then is pause and chatter, cheer,
+   Laughter at some satyr lame,
+   Looks upon the fallen deer,
+   Measuring his noble crest;
+   Here a favourite in her train,
+   Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;
+   All applauded.  Shall she reign
+   Worshipped?  O to be with her there!
+   She, that breath of nimble air,
+   Lifts the breast to giant power.
+   Maid and man, and man and maid,
+   Who each other would devour
+   Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,
+   There are comrades, led by her,
+   Maid-preserver, man-maker.
+
+
+
+WITH THE PERSUADER
+
+
+   WHO murmurs, hither, hither: who
+   Where nought is audible so fills the ear?
+   Where nought is visible can make appear
+   A veil with eyes that waver through,
+   Like twilight’s pledge of blessed night to come,
+   Or day most golden?  All unseen and dumb,
+   She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,
+   Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire
+   To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,
+   Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,
+   Flame in a crystal vessel sails
+   Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,
+   For land that drops the rosy day
+   On nights of throbbing nightingales.
+
+   Landward did the wonder flit,
+   Or heart’s desire of her, all earth in it.
+   We saw the heavens fling down their rose;
+   On rapturous waves we saw her glide;
+   The pearly sea-shell half enclose;
+   The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;
+   And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more
+   Behold than tracks along a startled shore,
+   With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign
+   An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.
+
+   More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,
+   The very she called forth by ripened blood
+   For its next breath of being, murmurs; she,
+   Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,
+   The stream within us urged to flood;
+   Man’s cry, earth’s answer, heaven’s consent; O she,
+   Maid, woman and divinity;
+   Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate
+   Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit
+   Untasted; she our written fate
+   Unread; Life’s flowering, Life’s root:
+   Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;
+   The evanescent, ever-present she,
+   Great Nature’s stern necessity
+   In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;
+   With a sword’s edge of sweetness keen to take
+   Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.
+
+   The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.
+   Man’s cry, earth’s answer, heaven’s consent,
+   Her form is given to pardoned sight,
+   And lets our mortal eyes receive
+   The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;
+   Adored by them who solitarily pace,
+   In dusk of the underworld’s perpetual eve,
+   The paths among the meadow asphodel,
+   Remembering.  Never there her face
+   Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell
+   Around such whiteness the enamoured air
+   Of noon that clothes her, never there.
+   Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+   She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,
+   Sweet in her disregard of aid
+   Divine to conquer or persuade.
+   A fountain jets from moss; a flower
+   Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.
+   By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen
+   With eyelids unabashed the passion’s Queen.
+
+   Shorn of attendant Graces she can use
+   Her natural snares to make her will supreme.
+   A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse
+   Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:
+   One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;
+   Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way
+   A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,
+   Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.
+   The bud of fresh virginity awaits
+   The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:
+   She touches on the hour of happy mates;
+   Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.
+
+   And while commanding blissful sight believe
+   It holds her as a body strained to breast,
+   Down on the underworld’s perpetual eve
+   She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
+   And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
+   Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
+   The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
+   A thirst’s delusion, a defeated aim.
+
+   The rapture shed the torture weaves;
+   The direst blow on human heart she deals:
+   The pain to know the seen deceives;
+   Nought true but what insufferably feels.
+   And stabs of her delicious note,
+   That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
+   Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
+   We answer as the midnight’s morning’s bird.
+
+   She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
+   In her delicious laughter part revealed;
+   Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
+   For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.
+   Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:
+   Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
+   Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
+   Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.
+   We dolorous complainers had a dream,
+   Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
+   We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
+   The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.
+
+   Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
+   Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
+   And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
+   She nods: at once that creature wears her lure.
+   Blush of our being between birth and death:
+   Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:
+   Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
+   Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
+   The generous Goddess yields.  And she can arm
+   Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
+   Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.
+   Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.
+   But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
+   Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.
+   The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
+   And holds the reason in perceptive thought.
+   More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
+   Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.
+   Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
+   Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
+   In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:
+   Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
+   For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.
+   Comes there a tremor of night’s forest horn
+   Across her garden from the insaner crew,
+   She darkens to malignity of scorn.
+   A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:
+   Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
+   The hunter’s shouts, are heard afar, and bring
+   Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.
+   These, the irreverent of Life’s design,
+   Division between natural and divine
+   Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
+   In veins of gathered strength Life’s tide arrest;
+   And these because the roses flood their cheeks,
+   Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.
+   With them is war; and well the Goddess knows
+   What undermines the race who mount the rose;
+   How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,
+   Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:
+   Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,
+   The strong when Beauty gleams o’er Nature’s needs,
+   And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.
+   They who her sway withstand a sea defy,
+   At every point of juncture must be proof;
+   Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge
+   Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge
+   For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.
+   She, tenderness, is pitiless to them
+   Resisting in her godhead nature’s truth.
+   No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;
+   Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.
+   These miserably disinclined,
+   The lamentably unembraced,
+   Insult the Pleasures Earth designed
+   To people and beflower the waste.
+   Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:
+   For death they live, in life they die.
+
+   Her head the Goddess from them turns,
+   As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.
+   She views her quivering couples unconsoled,
+   And of her beauty mirror they become,
+   Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,
+   Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.
+   Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,
+   Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,
+   Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,
+   They play the music made of two:
+   Oldest of earth, earth’s youngest till earth’s end:
+   Cunninger than the numbered strings,
+   For melodies, for harmonies,
+   For mastered discords, and the things
+   Not vocable, whose mysteries
+   Are inmost Love’s, Life’s reach of Life extend.
+
+   Is it an anguish overflowing shame
+   And the tongue’s pudency confides to her,
+   With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,
+   The woman’s marrow in some dear youth’s name,
+   Then is the Goddess tenderness
+   Maternal, and she has a sister’s tones
+   Benign to soothe intemperate distress,
+   Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.
+   Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease
+   To those of her milk-bearer votaries
+   As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source
+   Direct; erratic but in heart’s excess;
+   Being mortal and ill-matched for Love’s great force;
+   Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.
+   And pray they under skies less overcast,
+   That swiftly may her star of eve descend,
+   Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,
+   To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.
+
+   Unfailing her reply to woman’s voice
+   In supplication instant.  Is it man’s,
+   She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,
+   And him: the flowers are various, he has choice.
+   Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;
+   Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;
+   And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise
+   Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.
+
+   She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps
+   To her invoked: distraction is implored.
+   A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps
+   Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.
+   His tales of her declare she condescends;
+   Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:
+   Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose
+   A queenlier gem than woman’s wayside rose.
+   She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs
+   Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;
+   Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.
+   ’Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse
+   Rarely the music made of two ascends,
+   And Beauty’s Queen some other way is won.
+   Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends
+   Herself to all, and yields herself to none,
+   Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised
+   In hot assurance under shade of doubt:
+   And numerous are the images bepraised
+   As Beauty’s Queen, should passion head the rout.
+
+   Be sure the ruddy hue is Love’s: to woo
+   Love’s Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.
+   That is her garden’s precept, seen where shines
+   Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.
+   Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+   She bids her couples face full East,
+   Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast
+   Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,
+   The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.
+   In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;
+   High confidence in her whose aid is lent
+   To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,
+   Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.
+   And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,
+   Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,
+   Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun’s.
+
+   Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe
+   He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.
+   For him requiring woman’s arts to please
+   Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,
+   No race of giants!  In the woman’s veins
+   Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.
+   Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,
+   Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;
+   Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss
+   In her high Lady’s mandate, yields the kiss;
+   And is it needed that Love’s daintier brute
+   Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.
+   She is great Nature’s ever intimate
+   In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,
+   Until perverted by her senseless male,
+   She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,
+   The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,
+   Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.
+
+   Hence has the Goddess, Nature’s earliest Power,
+   And greatest and most present, with her dower
+   Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute
+   For meditated guile.  She laughs to hear
+   A charge her garden’s labyrinths scarce confute,
+   Her garden’s histories tell of to all near.
+   Let it be said, But less upon her guile
+   Doth she rely for her immortal smile.
+   Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens
+   To push her conquests by the simplest means.
+   While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves
+   From earth’s good labours, Beauty’s Queen he serves.
+
+   Her spacious garden and her garden’s grant
+   She offers in reward for handsome cheer:
+   Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant
+   The secret down a dewy leer
+   Of corner eyelids into haze:
+   Many a fair Aphrosyne
+   Like flower-bell to honey-bee:
+   And here they flicker round the maze
+   Bewildering him in heart and head:
+   And here they wear the close demure,
+   With subtle peeps to reassure:
+   Others parade where love has bled,
+   And of its crimson weave their mesh:
+   Others to snap of fingers leap,
+   As bearing breast with love asleep.
+   These are her laughters in the flesh.
+   Or would she fit a warrior mood,
+   She lights her seeming unsubdued,
+   And indicates the fortress-key.
+   Or is it heart for heart that craves,
+   She flecks along a run of waves
+   The one to promise deeper sea.
+
+   Bands of her limpid primitives,
+   Or patterned in the curious braid,
+   Are the blest man’s; and whatsoever he gives,
+   For what he gives is he repaid.
+   Good is it if by him ’tis held
+   He wins the fairest ever welled
+   From Nature’s founts: she whispers it: Even I
+   Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,
+   Else little is he lover.  Those he clasps,
+   Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer,—
+   And be they doves or be they asps,—
+   Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
+   Else counts he soon among life’s wholly tamed.
+   Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,
+   Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
+   The lover.  Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,
+   He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,
+   Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
+   Doth man divide divine Necessity
+   From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty’s breasts
+   A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
+   Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.
+   Of this he perishes; not she, the throned
+   On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
+   A loftier Reason out of deeper founts
+   Earth’s chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned
+   While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
+   And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
+   Earth’s answer, heaven’s consent unto man’s cry,
+   Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.
+
+   Quickened of Nature’s eye and ear,
+   When the wild sap at high tide smites
+   Within us; or benignly clear
+   To vision; or as the iris lights
+   On fluctuant waters; she is ours
+   Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;
+   Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
+   A soft compulsion on terrene
+   By heavenly: and the world is hers
+   While hunger after Beauty spurs.
+
+   So is it sung in any space
+   She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
+   Forbidding love’s devised embrace,
+   The music Beauty from it draws.
+
+
+
+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 excess
+   Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
+   Unto 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 sprang
+   Ethereal 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 vales
+   Whereunto she melodiously invites,
+   Her troops of eager servitors regales?
+   Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed
+   Disciple 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 yield
+   Their dues to each, and of their war be field.
+
+   The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
+   Must he, who once has been the goodly beast
+   Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
+   Constrain to make him serviceable man;
+   Offending neither, nor the natural claim
+   Each pressed, denying, for his true man’s name.
+
+   Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
+   To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
+   Submissive to his will
+   Along the road of life!
+   And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
+   The 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 advance
+   Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
+   He of the troubled marching army leaned
+   On 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 aid
+   Might 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 slew
+   The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.
+
+   In fellowship religion has its founts:
+   The solitary his own God reveres:
+   Ascend no sacred Mounts
+   Our hungers or our fears.
+   As only for the numbers Nature’s care
+   Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
+   So to Divinity the spring of prayer
+   From brotherhood the one way upward leads.
+   Like the sustaining air
+   Are 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 implored
+   External 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 win
+   While still the conflict tore his breast within.
+
+   Out of that agony, misread for those
+   Imprisoned 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 emerged
+   A mind to read in him the reflex shade
+   Of 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 athwart
+   All 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 keep
+   The starry roof of his unruffled frame
+   Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
+   Below, 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 aspire
+   In wilderness, where bitter was his need:
+   To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
+   For 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 sense
+   Of 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 reigns
+   In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.
+   Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
+   His path, doth he permit to force her chains
+   A 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 uprise
+   And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
+   Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
+   That 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 spurs
+   Pricked 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 world
+   In 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 hands
+   Creative; in his edifice has joy.
+   How strength may serve for purity is shown
+   When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
+   Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
+   A sober world that walks the balanced mean
+   Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:
+   And such at times his army’s march has been.
+
+   Near is he to great Nature in the thought
+   Each 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 greeds
+   To 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 change
+   To 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 thing
+   He 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 made
+   His 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 heels
+   To 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 fair
+   Reflexively, 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 tells
+   Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
+   A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun
+   Resplendent 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 test
+   Demanding 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 spent
+
+   Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,
+   He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest
+   Incomplete, 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 know
+   Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;
+   Else in a giant’s grasp until the end
+   A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.
+
+
+
+THE MAIN REGRET
+WRITTEN FOR THE CHARING CROSS ALBUM
+
+
+I
+
+
+   SEEN, 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.
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Sunshine 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.
+
+
+
+ALTERNATION
+
+
+   BETWEEN the fountain and the rill
+   I passed, and saw the mighty will
+   To 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 tell
+   Of whence we spring and what we are.
+
+
+
+FOREST HISTORY
+
+
+I
+
+
+   BENEATH 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:
+
+
+II
+
+
+   Old 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.
+
+
+III
+
+
+   More intimate became the forest fear
+      While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
+      At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
+   And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+   In 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.
+
+
+V
+
+
+   Dead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound
+      Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.
+      It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite
+   Of humble human being, held the ground.
+
+
+VI
+
+
+   Through friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow
+      The feet sustained by track of feet pursued
+      Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood
+   By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+   Anon 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.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+   What 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.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+   Uprose 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.
+
+
+X
+
+
+   Into 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.
+
+
+XI
+
+
+   A 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.
+
+
+XII
+
+
+   Whence 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.
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+   Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,
+      Like night’s first little stars through clearing showers.
+      Was rumoured how a castle’s falcon towers
+   The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+   Therein 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.
+
+
+XV
+
+
+   It 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.
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+   Perchance 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.
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+   As 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.
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+   By daylight now the forest fear could read
+      Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.
+      Straight for the roebuck’s neck the bowman spent
+   A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+   Right 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.
+
+
+XX
+
+
+   Before 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.
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+   The city urchin mooned on forest air,
+      On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick
+      As swallows o’er smooth streams, and sighed him sick
+   For thinking that his dearer home was there.
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+   Familiar, 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.
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+   Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;
+      Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,
+      As though the leagues of woodland held them wronged
+   To hear an axe and see a township climb.
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+   The 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 sieve
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+   Ringed 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.
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+   Came 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.
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+   There 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.
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+   Now deep in woods, with song no sermon’s drone,
+      He showed what charm the human concourse works:
+      Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks
+   Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+   Our 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 harvests
+   Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome
+   Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.
+   O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice
+   Pluck 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,
+   portion
+   Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.
+   Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians
+   Gave 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 bore
+   Off 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 me
+   Homeward 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 Achaia
+   Dared 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-buds
+   Never 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
+   off
+   Leaves 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 Achaia
+   Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,
+   How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector
+   Tumble 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 ACHAIANS
+
+
+   LIKE 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
+   splendour
+   Gleam 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
+   forth
+   On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them
+   Earth 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
+   thousands
+   Many 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-pails
+   Also, 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,
+   know
+   Easily 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 FIGHT
+
+
+   THESE, 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 Agamemnon
+   Followed, 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
+   scrubwood
+   Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire’s fury rageing,
+   So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
+   Trojans 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
+   outstretched
+   Flat 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 thee
+   Into 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.”
+
+
+
+ILIAD, xiv, 283
+HYPNOS ON IDA
+
+
+   THEY then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,
+   Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,
+   Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the woodland.
+   There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,
+   Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida
+   Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.
+   There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for
+   concealment,
+   That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the
+   mountains,
+   Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.
+
+
+
+ILIAD, xvii, 426
+CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS
+
+
+   NOT the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,
+   Whipped from the sea’s deeps up by the terrible blast of the
+   Northwind;
+   Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire’s rush so arousing,
+   Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;
+   Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-trees’
+   Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;
+   As rose then stupendous the Trojan’s cry and Achaians’,
+   Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.
+
+
+
+ILIAD, xvii, 426
+THE HORSES OF ACHILLES
+
+
+   SO now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,
+   Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown there,
+   Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.
+   Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,
+   Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and
+   oft, too,
+   Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.
+   Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont spacious,
+   Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.
+   Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,
+   Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;
+   Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,
+   Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessant
+   Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,
+   Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,
+   Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the
+   yoke-bow.
+      Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook
+   Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his bosom;
+   “Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal
+   Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!
+   Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have
+   heart-grief?
+   ’Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder nowhere
+   Aught over earth’s range found that is gifted with breath and has
+   movement.”
+
+
+
+
+THE MARES OF THE CAMARGUE
+FROM THE ‘MIRÈIO’ OF MISTRAL
+
+
+      A HUNDRED mares, all white! their manes
+      Like mace-reed of the marshy plains
+      Thick-tufted, wavy, free o’ the shears:
+      And when the fiery squadron rears
+      Bursting at speed, each mane appears
+      Even as the white scarf of a fay
+   Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.
+
+      O race of humankind, take shame!
+      For never yet a hand could tame,
+      Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue
+      The mares of the Camargue.  I have known,
+      By treason snared, some captives shown;
+      Expatriate from their native Rhone,
+   Led off, their saline pastures far from view:
+
+      And on a day, with prompt rebound,
+      They have flung their riders to the ground,
+      And at a single gallop, scouring free,
+      Wide-nostril’d to the wind, twice ten
+      Of long marsh-leagues devour’d, and then,
+      Back to the Vacarés again,
+   After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea
+
+      For of this savage race unbent,
+      The ocean is the element.
+      Of old escaped from Neptune’s car, full sure,
+      Still with the white foam fleck’d are they,
+      And when the sea puffs black from grey,
+      And ships part cables, loudly neigh
+   The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;
+
+      And keen as a whip they lash and crack
+      Their tails that drag the dust, and back
+      Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,
+      The God, drives deep his trident teeth,
+      Who in one horror, above, beneath,
+      Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,
+   And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.
+
+                                                               _Cant._ iv.
+
+
+
+
+‘ATKINS’
+
+
+   YONDER’S the man with his life in his hand,
+   Legs on the march for whatever the land,
+      Or to the slaughter, or to the maiming,
+         Getting the dole of a dog for pay.
+   Laurels he clasps in the words ‘duty done,’
+   England his heart under every sun:—
+      Exquisite humour! that gives him a naming
+         Base to the ear as an ass’s bray.
+
+
+
+
+THE VOYAGE OF THE ‘OPHIR’
+
+
+   MEN of our race, we send you one
+   Round whom Victoria’s holy name
+   Is halo from the sunken sun
+   Of her grand Summer’s day aflame.
+   The heart of your loved Motherland,
+   To them she loves as her own blood,
+   This Flower of Ocean bears in hand,
+      Assured of gift as good.
+
+   Forth for our Southern shores the fleet
+   Which crowns a nation’s wisdom steams,
+   That there may Briton Briton greet,
+   And stamp as fact Imperial dreams.
+   Across the globe, from sea to sea,
+   The long smoke-pennon trails above,
+   Writes over sky how wise will be
+      The Power that trusts to love.
+
+   A love that springs from heart and brain
+   In union gives for ripest fruit
+   The concord Kings and States in vain
+   Have sought, who played the lofty brute,
+   And fondly deeming they possessed,
+   On force relied, and found it break:
+   That truth once scored on Britain’s breast
+      Now keeps her mind awake.
+
+   Australian, Canadian,
+   To tone old veins with streams of youth,
+   Our trust be on the best in man
+   Henceforth, and we shall prove that truth.
+   Prove to a world of brows down-bent
+   That in the Britain thus endowed,
+   Imperial means beneficent,
+      And strength to service vowed.
+
+
+
+
+THE CRISIS
+
+
+   SPIRIT of Russia, now has come
+   The day when thou canst not be dumb.
+   Around thee foams the torrent tide,
+   Above thee its fell fountain, Pride.
+   The senseless rock awaits thy word
+   To crumble; shall it be unheard?
+   Already, like a tempest-sun,
+   That shoots the flare and shuts to dun,
+   Thy land ’twixt flame and darkness heaves,
+   Showing the blade wherewith Fate cleaves,
+   If mortals in high courage fail
+   At the one breath before the gale.
+   Those rulers in all forms of lust,
+   Who trod thy children down to dust
+   On the red Sunday, know right well
+   What word for them thy voice would spell,
+   What quick perdition for them weave,
+   Did they in such a voice believe.
+   Not thine to raise the avenger’s shriek,
+   Nor turn to them a Tolstoi cheek;
+   Nor menace him, the waverer still,
+   Man of much heart and little will,
+   The criminal of his high seat,
+   Whose plea of Guiltless judges it.
+   For him thy voice shall bring to hand
+   Salvation, and to thy torn land,
+   Seen on the breakers.  Now has come
+   The day when thou canst not be dumb,
+   Spirit of Russia:—those who bind
+   Thy limbs and iron-cap thy mind,
+   Take thee for quaking flesh, misdoubt
+   That thou art of the rabble rout
+   Which cries and flees, with whimpering lip,
+   From reckless gun and brutal whip;
+   But he who has at heart the deeds
+   Of thy heroic offspring reads
+   In them a soul; not given to shrink
+   From peril on the abyss’s brink;
+   With never dread of murderous power;
+   With view beyond the crimson hour;
+   Neither an instinct-driven might,
+   Nor visionary erudite;
+   A soul; that art thou.  It remains
+   For thee to stay thy children’s veins,
+   The countertides of hate arrest,
+   Give to thy sons a breathing breast,
+   And Him resembling, in His sight,
+   Say to thy land, Let there be Light.
+
+
+
+
+OCTOBER 21, 1905
+
+
+      THE hundred years have passed, and he
+      Whose name appeased a nation’s fears,
+      As with a hand laid over sea;
+      To thunder through the foeman’s ears
+      Defeat before his blast of fire;
+      Lives in the immortality
+   That poets dream and noblest souls desire.
+
+      Never did nation’s need evoke
+      Hero like him for aid, the while
+      A Continent was cannon-smoke
+      Or peace in slavery: this one Isle
+      Reflecting Nature: this one man
+      Her sea-hound and her mortal stroke,
+   With war-worn body aye in battle’s van.
+
+      And do we love him well, as well
+      As he his country, we may greet,
+      With hand on steel, our passing bell
+      Nigh on the swing, for prelude sweet
+      To the music heard when his last breath
+      Hung on its ebb beside the knell,
+   And VICTORY in his ear sang gracious Death.
+
+      Ah, day of glory! day of tears!
+      Day of a people bowed as one!
+      Behold across those hundred years
+      The lion flash of gun at gun:
+      Our bitter pride; our love bereaved;
+      What pall of cloud o’ercame our sun
+   That day, to bear his wreath, the end achieved.
+
+      Joy that no more with murder’s frown
+      The ancient rivals bark apart.
+      Now Nelson to brave France is shown
+      A hero after her own heart:
+      And he now scanning that quick race,
+      To whom through life his glove was thrown,
+   Would know a sister spirit to embrace.
+
+
+
+
+THE CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI
+
+
+   WE who have seen Italia in the throes,
+   Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now
+   Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough
+   All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those
+   Who blew the breath of life into her frame:
+   Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:
+   Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free
+   From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.
+
+   That aim, albeit they were of minds diverse,
+   Conjoined them, not to strive without surcease;
+   For them could be no babblement of peace
+   While lay their country under Slavery’s curse.
+
+   The set of torn Italia’s glorious day
+   Was ever sunrise in each filial breast.
+   Of eagle beaks by righteousness unblest
+   They felt her pulsing body made the prey.
+
+   Wherefore they struck, and had to count their dead.
+   With bitter smile of resolution nerved
+   To try new issues, holding faith unswerved,
+   Promise they gathered from the rich blood shed.
+
+   In them Italia, visible to us then
+   As living, rose; for proof that huge brute Force
+   Has never being from celestial source,
+   And is the lord of cravens, not of men.
+
+   Now breaking up the crust of temporal strife,
+   Who reads their acts enshrined in History, sees
+   That Tyrants were the Revolutionaries,
+   The Rebels men heart-vowed to hallowed life.
+
+   Pure as the Archangel’s cleaving Darkness thro’,
+   The Sword he sees, the keen unwearied Sword,
+   A single blade against a circling horde,
+   And aye for Freedom and the trampled few.
+
+   The cry of Liberty from dungeon cell,
+   From exile, was his God’s command to smite,
+   As for a swim in sea he joined the fight,
+   With radiant face, full sure that he did well.
+
+   Behold a warrior dealing mortal strokes,
+   Whose nature was a child’s: amid his foes
+   A wary trickster: at the battle’s close,
+   No gentler friend this leopard dashed with fox.
+
+   Down the long roll of History will run
+   The story of these deeds, and speed his race
+   Beneath defeat more hotly to embrace
+   The noble cause and trust to another sun.
+
+   And lo, that sun is in Italia’s skies
+   This day, by grace of his good sword in part.
+   It beckons her to keep a warrior heart
+   For guard of beauty, all too sweet a prize.
+
+   Earth gave him: blessèd be the Earth that gave.
+   Earth’s Master crowned his honest work on earth:
+   Proudly Italia names his place of birth:
+   The bosom of Humanity his grave.
+
+
+
+
+THE WILD ROSE
+
+
+   HIGH climbs June’s wild rose,
+   Her bush all blooms in a swarm;
+   And swift from the bud she blows,
+   In a day when the wooer is warm;
+   Frank to receive and give,
+   Her bosom is open to bee and sun:
+   Pride she has none,
+   Nor shame she knows;
+   Happy to live.
+
+   Unlike those of the garden nigh,
+   Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;
+   Loosening petals one by one
+   To the fiery Passion’s dart
+   Superbly shy.
+   For them in some glory of hair,
+   Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,
+   Or path of the bride bestrew.
+   Ever are they the theme for song.
+   But nought of that is her share.
+   Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,
+   A glance they care not to renew.
+
+   And she at a word of the claims of kin
+   Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:
+   She is only a plain princess of the weeds,
+   As an outcast witless of sin:
+   Much disregarded, save by the few
+   Who love her, that has not a spot of deceit,
+   No promise of sweet beyond sweet,
+   Often descending to sour.
+   On any fair breast she would die in an hour.
+   Praises she scarce could bear,
+   Were any wild poet to praise.
+   Her aim is to rise into light and air.
+   One of the darlings of Earth, no more,
+   And little it seems in the dusty ways,
+   Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;
+   The bird clapping wings to soar,
+   The clouds of an evetide’s wreath.
+
+
+
+
+THE CALL
+
+
+      UNDER what spell are we debased
+         By fears for our inviolate Isle,
+      Whose record is of dangers faced
+         And flung to heel with even smile?
+   Is it a vaster force, a subtler guile?
+
+      They say Exercitus designs
+         To match the famed Salsipotent
+      Where on her sceptre she reclines;
+         Awake: but were a slumber sent
+   By guilty gods, more fell his foul intent.
+
+      The subtler web, the vaster foe,
+         Well may we meet when drilled for deeds:
+      But in these days of wealth at flow,
+         A word of breezy warning breeds
+   The pained responses seen in lakeside reeds.
+
+      We fain would stand contemplative,
+         All innocent as meadow grass;
+      In human goodness fain believe,
+         Believe a cloud is formed to pass;
+   Its shadows chase with draughts of hippocras.
+
+      Others have gone; the way they went
+         Sweet sunny now, and safe our nest.
+      Humanity, enlightenment,
+         Against the warning hum protest:
+   Let the world hear that we know what is best.
+
+      So do the beatific speak;
+         Yet have they ears, and eyes as well;
+      And if not with a paler cheek,
+         They feel the shivers in them dwell,
+   That something of a dubious future tell.
+
+      For huge possessions render slack
+         The power we need to hold them fast;
+      Save when a quickened heart shall make
+         Our people one, to meet what blast
+   May blow from temporal heavens overcast.
+
+      Our people one!  Nor they with strength
+         Dependent on a single arm:
+      Alert, and braced the whole land’s length,
+         Rejoicing in their manhood’s charm
+   For friend or foe; to succour, not to harm.
+
+      Has ever weakness won esteem?
+         Or counts it as a prized ally?
+      They who have read in History deem
+         It ranks among the slavish fry,
+   Whose claim to live justiciary Fates deny.
+
+      It can not be declared we are
+         A nation till from end to end
+      The land can show such front to war
+         As bids a crouching foe expend
+   His ire in air, and preferably be friend.
+
+      We dreading him, we do him wrong;
+         For fears discolour, fears invite.
+      Like him, our task is to be strong;
+         Unlike him, claiming not by might
+   To snatch an envied treasure as a right.
+
+      So may a stouter brotherhood
+         At home be signalled over sea
+      For righteous, and be understood,
+         Nay, welcomed, when ’tis shown that we
+   All duties have embraced in being free.
+
+      This Britain slumbering, she is rich;
+         Lies placid as a cradled child;
+      At times with an uneasy twitch,
+         That tells of dreams unduly wild.
+   Shall she be with a foreign drug defiled?
+
+      The grandeur of her deeds recall;
+         Look on her face so kindly fair:
+      This Britain! and were she to fall,
+         Mankind would breathe a harsher air,
+   The nations miss a light of leading rare.
+
+
+
+
+ON COMO
+
+
+   A RAINLESS darkness drew o’er the lake
+   As we lay in our boat with oars unshipped.
+   It seemed neither cloud nor water awake,
+   And forth of the low black curtain slipped
+   Thunderless lightning.  Scoff no more
+   At angels imagined in downward flight
+   For the daughters of earth as fabled of yore:
+   Here was beauty might well invite
+   Dark heavens to gleam with the fire of a sun
+   Resurgent; here the exchanged embrace
+   Worthy of heaven and earth made one.
+
+   And witness it, ye of the privileged space,
+   Said the flash; and the mountains, as from an abyss
+   For quivering seconds leaped up to attest
+   That given, received, renewed was the kiss;
+   The lips to lips and the breast to breast;
+   All in a glory of ecstasy, swift
+   As an eagle at prey, and pure as the prayer
+   Of an infant bidden joined hands uplift
+   To be guarded through darkness by spirits of air,
+   Ere setting the sails of sleep till day.
+   Slowly the low cloud swung, and far
+   It panted along its mirrored way;
+   Above loose threads one sanctioning star,
+   The wonder of what had been witnessed, sealed,
+   And with me still as in crystal glassed
+   Are the depths alight, the heavens revealed,
+   Where on to the Alps the muteness passed.
+
+
+
+
+MILTON
+DECEMBER 9, 1608: DECEMBER 9, 1908
+
+
+   WHAT splendour of imperial station man,
+   The Tree of Life, may reach when, rooted fast,
+   His branching stem points way to upper air
+   And skyward still aspires, we see in him
+   Who sang for us the Archangelical host,
+   Made Morning, by old Darkness urged to the abyss;
+   A voice that down three centuries onward rolls;
+   Onward will roll while lives our English tongue,
+   In the devout of music unsurpassed
+   Since Piety won Heaven’s ear on Israel’s harp.
+
+   The face of Earth, the soul of Earth, her charm,
+   Her dread austerity; the quavering fate
+   Of mortals with blind hope by passion swayed,
+   His mind embraced, the while on trodden soil,
+   Defender of the Commonwealth, he joined
+   Our temporal fray, whereof is vital fruit,
+   And, choosing armoury of the Scholar, stood
+   Beside his peers to raise the voice for Freedom:
+   Nor has fair Liberty a champion armed
+   To meet on heights or plains the Sophister
+   Throughout the ages, equal to this man,
+   Whose spirit breathed high Heaven, and drew thence
+   The ethereal sword to smite.
+
+                  Were England sunk
+   Beneath the shifting tides, her heart, her brain,
+   The smile she wears, the faith she holds, her best,
+   Would live full-toned in the grand delivery
+   Of his cathedral speech: an utterance
+   Almost divine, and such as Hellespont,
+   Crashing its breakers under Ida’s frown,
+   Inspired: yet worthier he, whose instrument
+   Was by comparison the coarse reed-pipe;
+   Whereof have come the marvellous harmonies,
+   Which, with his lofty theme, of infinite range,
+   Abash, entrance, exalt.
+
+                  We need him now,
+   This latest Age in repetition cries:
+   For Belial, the adroit, is in our midst;
+   Mammon, more swoln to squeeze the slavish sweat
+   From hopeless toil: and overshadowingly
+   (Aggrandized, monstrous in his grinning mask
+   Of hypocritical Peace,) inveterate Moloch
+   Remains the great example.
+
+                  Homage to him
+   His debtor band, innumerable as waves
+   Running all golden from an eastern sun,
+   Joyfully render, in deep reverence
+   Subscribe, and as they speak their Milton’s name,
+   Rays of his glory on their foreheads bear.
+
+
+
+
+IRELAND
+
+
+   FIRE in her ashes Ireland feels
+      And in her veins a glow of heat.
+   To her the lost old time, appeals
+      For resurrection, good to greet:
+   Not as a shape with spectral eyes,
+      But humanly maternal, young
+   In all that quickens pride, and wise
+      To speak the best her bards have sung.
+
+   You read her as a land distraught,
+      Where bitterest rebel passions seethe.
+   Look with a core of heart in thought,
+      For so is known the truth beneath.
+   She came to you a loathing bride,
+      And it has been no happy bed.
+   Believe in her as friend, allied
+      By bonds as close as those who wed.
+
+   Her speech is held for hatred’s cry;
+      Her silence tells of treason hid:
+   Were it her aim to burst the tie,
+      She sees what iron laws forbid.
+   Excess of heart obscures from view
+      A head as keen as yours to count.
+   Trust her, that she may prove her true
+      In links whereof is love the fount.
+
+   May she not call herself her own?
+      That is her cry, and thence her spits
+   Of fury, thence her graceless tone
+      At justice given in bits and bits.
+   The limbs once raw with gnawing chains
+      Will fret at silken when God’s beams
+   Of Freedom beckon o’er the plains
+      From mounts that show it more than dreams.
+
+   She, generous, craves your generous dole;
+      That will not rouse the crack of doom.
+   It ends the blundering past control
+      Simply to give her elbow-room.
+   Her offspring feels they are a race,
+      To be a nation is their claim;
+   Yet stronger bound in your embrace
+      Than when the tie was but a name.
+
+   A nation she, and formed to charm,
+      With heart for heart and hands all round.
+   No longer England’s broken arm,
+      Would England know where strength is found.
+   And strength to-day is England’s need;
+      To-morrow it may be for both
+   Salvation: heed the portents, heed
+      The warnings; free the mind from sloth.
+
+   Too long the pair have danced in mud,
+      With no advance from sun to sun.
+   Ah, what a bounding course of blood
+      Has England with an Ireland one!
+   Behold yon shadow cross the downs,
+      And off away to yeasty seas.
+   Lightly will fly old rancour’s frowns
+      When solid with high heart stand these.
+
+
+
+
+THE YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS’ BELT
+
+
+   THE years had worn their seasons’ belt,
+      From bud to rosy prime,
+   Since Nellie by the larch-pole knelt
+      And helped the hop to climb.
+
+   Most diligent of teachers then,
+      But now with all to learn,
+   She breathed beyond a thought of men,
+      Though formed to make men burn.
+
+   She dwelt where ’twixt low-beaten thorns
+      Two mill-blades, like a snail,
+   Enormous, with inquiring horns,
+      Looked down on half the vale.
+
+   You know the grey of dew on grass
+      Ere with the young sun fired,
+   And you know well the thirst one has
+      For the coming and desired.
+
+   Quick in our ring she leapt, and gave
+      Her hand to left, to right.
+   No claim on her had any, save
+      To feed the joy of sight.
+
+   For man and maid a laughing word
+      She tossed, in notes as clear
+   As when the February bird
+      Sings out that Spring is near.
+
+   Of what befell behind that scone,
+      Let none who knows reveal.
+   In ballad days she might have been
+      A heroine rousing steel.
+
+   On us did she bestow the hour,
+      And fixed it firm in thought;
+   Her spirit like a meadow flower
+      That gives, and asks for nought.
+
+   She seemed to make the sunlight stay
+      And show her in its pride.
+   O she was fair as a beech in May
+      With the sun on the yonder side.
+
+   There was more life than breath can give,
+      In the looks in her fair form;
+   For little can we say we live
+      Until the heart is warm.
+
+
+
+
+FRAGMENTS
+
+
+   OPEN horizons round,
+   O mounting mind, to scenes unsung,
+   Wherein shall walk a lusty Time:
+   Our Earth is young;
+   Of measure without bound;
+   Infinite are the heights to climb,
+   The depths to sound.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+   A WILDING little stubble flower
+   The sickle scorned which cut for wheat,
+   Such was our hope in that dark hour
+   When nought save uses held the street,
+   And daily pleasures, daily needs,
+   With barren vision, looked ahead.
+   And still the same result of seeds
+   Gave likeness ’twixt the live and dead.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+   FROM labours through the night, outworn,
+   Above the hills the front of morn
+   We see, whose eyes to heights are raised,
+   And the world’s wise may deem us crazed.
+   While yet her lord lies under seas,
+   She takes us as the wind the trees’
+   Delighted leafage; all in song
+   We mount to her, to her belong.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+   THIS love of nature, that allures to take
+   Irregularity for harmony
+   Of larger scope than our hard measures make,
+   Cherish it as thy school for when on thee
+   The ills of life descend.
+
+
+
+
+IL Y A CENT ANS
+
+
+   THAT march of the funereal Past behold;
+      How Glory sat on Bondage for its throne;
+   How men, like dazzled insects, through the mould
+      Still worked their way, and bled to keep their own.
+
+   We know them, as they strove and wrought and yearned;
+      Their hopes, their fears; what page of Life they wist:
+   At whiles their vision upon us was turned,
+      Baffled by shapes limmed loosely on thick mist.
+
+   Beneath the fortress bulk of Power they bent
+      Blunt heads, adoring or in shackled hate,
+   All save the rebel hymned him; and it meant
+      A world submitting to incarnate Fate.
+
+   From this he drew fresh appetite for sway,
+      And of it fell: whereat was chorus raised,
+   How surely shall a mad ambition pay
+      Dues to Humanity, erewhile amazed.
+
+   ’Twas dreamed by some the deluge would ensue,
+      So trembling was the tension long constrained;
+   A spirit of faith was in the chosen few,
+      That steps to the millennium had been gained.
+
+   But mainly the rich business of the hour,
+      Their sight, made blind by urgency of blood,
+   Embraced; and facts, the passing sweet or sour,
+      To them were solid things that nought withstood.
+
+   Their facts are going headlong on the tides,
+      Like commas on a line of History’s page;
+   Nor that which once they took for Truth abides,
+      Save in the form of youth enlarged from age.
+
+   Meantime give ear to woodland notes around,
+      Look on our Earth full-breasted to our sun:
+   So was it when their poets heard the sound,
+      Beheld the scene: in them our days are one.
+
+   What figures will be shown the century hence?
+      What lands intact?  We do but know that Power
+   From piety divorced, though seen immense,
+      Shall sink on envy of the humblest flower.
+
+   Our cry for cradled Peace, while men are still
+      The three-parts brute which smothers the divine,
+   Heaven answers: Guard it with forethoughtful will,
+      Or buy it; all your gains from War resign.
+
+   A land, not indefensibly alarmed,
+      May see, unwarned by hint of friendly gods,
+   Between a hermit crab at all points armed,
+      And one without a shell, decisive odds.
+
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN AGE
+
+
+   ONCE I was part of the music I heard
+      On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky,
+   For joy of the beating of wings on high
+      My heart shot into the breast of the bird.
+
+   I hear it now and I see it fly,
+      And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
+   My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,
+      As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.
+
+
+
+
+EPITAPHS
+
+
+TO A FRIEND LOST
+(TOM TAYLOR)
+
+
+   WHEN I remember, friend, whom lost I call,
+   Because a man beloved is taken hence,
+   The tender humour and the fire of sense
+   In your good eyes; how full of heart for all,
+   And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,
+   You bore that lamp of sane benevolence;
+   Then see I round you Death his shadows dense
+   Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.
+   For surely are you one with the white host,
+   Spirits, whose memory is our vital air,
+   Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these,
+   Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,
+   Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,
+   Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.
+
+
+
+M. M.
+
+
+   WHO call her Mother and who calls her Wife
+   Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.
+
+
+
+THE LADY C. M.
+
+
+   TO them that knew her, there is vital flame
+   In these the simple letters of her name.
+   To them that knew her not, be it but said,
+   So strong a spirit is not of the dead.
+
+
+
+ON THE TOMBSTONE OF
+JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON
+(d. APRIL 11, 1884)
+IN HEADLEY CHURCHYARD, SURREY
+
+
+   THOU our beloved and light of Earth hast crossed
+   The sea of darkness to the yonder shore.
+   There dost thou shine a light transferred, not lost,
+   Through love to kindle in our souls the more.
+
+
+
+GORDON OF KHARTOUM
+
+
+   OF men he would have raised to light he fell:
+   In soul he conquered with those nerveless hands.
+   His country’s pride and her abasement knell
+   The Man of England circled by the sands.
+
+
+
+J. C. M.
+
+
+   A FOUNTAIN of our sweetest, quick to spring
+   In fellowship abounding, here subsides:
+   And never passage of a cloud on wing
+   To gladden blue forgets him; near he hides.
+
+
+
+THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME
+
+
+   WITH Alfred and St. Louis he doth win
+   Grander than crowned head’s mortuary dome:
+   His gentle heroic manhood enters in
+   The ever-flowering common heart for home.
+
+
+
+ISLET THE DACHS
+
+
+   OUR Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed
+   From his quaint tenement, quits hates and loves.
+   There lived with us a wagging humourist
+   In that hound’s arch dwarf-legged on boxing-gloves.
+
+
+
+ON HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE
+(THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING)
+
+
+   NOW dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
+   And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier.
+   Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:
+   We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
+   We see a spirit on Earth’s loftiest peak
+   Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:
+   See a great Tree of Life that never sere
+   Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak.
+   Such ending is not Death: such living shows
+   What wide illumination brightness sheds
+   From one big heart, to conquer man’s old foes:
+   The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
+   Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
+   When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.
+
+_December_ 13, 1889.
+
+
+
+HAWARDEN
+
+
+   WHEN comes the lighted day for men to read
+   Life’s meaning, with the work before their hands
+   Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
+   Earth will not hear her children’s wailful bands
+   Deplore the chieftain fall’n in sob and dirge;
+   Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.
+   The sun that dropped down our horizon’s verge
+   Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,
+   Now seen in sum, most glorious; and ’tis known
+   By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.
+   A splendid image built of man has flown;
+   His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.
+   Ours the great privilege to have had one
+   Among us who celestial tasks has done.
+
+
+
+AT THE FUNERAL
+FEBRUARY 2, 1901
+
+
+   HER sacred body bear: the tenement
+      Of that strong soul now ranked with God’s Elect
+   Her heart upon her people’s heart she spent;
+      Hence is she Royalty’s lodestar to direct.
+
+   The peace is hers, of whom all lands have praised
+      Majestic virtues ere her day unseen.
+   Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,
+      And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.
+
+
+
+ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS
+
+
+   LONG with us, now she leaves us; she has rest
+      Beneath our sacred sod:
+   A woman vowed to Good, whom all attest,
+      The daylight gift of God.
+
+
+
+THE YEAR’S SHEDDINGS
+
+
+   THE varied colours are a fitful heap:
+   They pass in constant service though they sleep;
+   The self gone out of them, therewith the pain:
+   Read that, who still to spell our earth remain.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{140}  Written in December 1870, printed in the ‘Fortnightly Review,’ and
+published in the volume ‘Ballads and Poems.’
+
+
+
+
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Poems, Volume 3 [of 3], by George Meredith</title>
+    <style type="text/css">
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+    .GutSmall { font-size: 0.7em; }
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Poems, Volume 3 [of 3], by George Meredith
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Poems, Volume 3 [of 3]
+
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2015  [eBook #1383]
+[This file was first posted on May 12, 1998]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, VOLUME 3 [OF 3]***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1912 Times Book Club &ldquo;Surrey&rdquo;
+edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Book cover"
+title=
+"Book cover"
+ src="images/covers.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fpb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The South Wester"
+title=
+"The South Wester"
+ src="images/fps.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>POEMS<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">VOL. III</span></h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+GEORGE MEREDITH</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">SURREY EDITION</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON<br />
+THE TIMES BOOK CLUB<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">376&ndash;384 OXFORD STREET, W.</span><br
+/>
+1912</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pageiv"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. iv</span>Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable,
+Printers to his Majesty</p>
+<h2><a name="pagev"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+v</span>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A STAVE OF ROVING TIM,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The wind is East, the wind is West,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A revelation came on Jane,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page5">5</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE RIDDLE FOR MEN,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">This Riddle rede or die,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">One fairest of the ripe unwedded left</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO,&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE,&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;JOY IS FLEET,&rsquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE LESSON OF GRIEF,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Not ere the bitter herb we taste,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>WIND ON THE LYRE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">That was the chirp of Ariel</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE YOUTHFUL QUEST,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">His Lady queen of woods to meet,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE EMPTY PURSE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Thou, run to the dry on this wayside
+bank,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page34">34</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>TO THE COMIC SPIRIT,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sword of Common Sense!&mdash;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page56">56</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>YOUTH IN MEMORY,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Days, when the ball of our vision</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>PENETRATION AND TRUST,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sleek as a lizard at round of a stone,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagevi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vi</span>NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">With splendour of a silver day,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page76">76</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE TEACHING OF THE NUDE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A Satyr spied a Goddess in her bath,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>BREATH OF THE BRIAR,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">O briar-scents, on yon wet wing</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page81">81</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>EMPEDOCLES,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">He leaped.&nbsp; With none to hinder,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The day that is the night of days,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page83">83</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>TARDY SPRING,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Now the North wind ceases,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page85">85</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE LABOURER,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is
+never the glory that follows</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sprung of the father blood, the mother
+brain,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE WARNING,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">We have seen mighty men ballooning high,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>OUTSIDE THE CROWD,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">To sit on History in an easy chair,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page99">99</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>TRAFALGAR DAY,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">He leads: we hear our Seaman&rsquo;s
+call</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page100">100</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><b>Odes in
+Contribution to the Song of French History</b></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE REVOLUTION,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Not yet had History&rsquo;s Aetna smoked the
+skies,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>NAPOL&Eacute;ON,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Cannon his name,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page116">116</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vii</span>FRANCE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">We look for her that sunlike stood</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ALSACE-LORRAINE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The sister Hours in circles linked,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page150">150</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE CAGEING OF ARES,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">How big of breast our Mother Gaea
+laughed</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE NIGHT-WALK,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Awakes for me and leaps from shroud</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>AT THE CLOSE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>A GARDEN IDYL,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">With sagest craft Arachne worked</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page179">179</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><b>A Reading of
+Life</b></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE VITAL CHOICE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Or shall we run with Artemis</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>WITH THE HUNTRESS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Through the water-eye of night,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page186">186</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>WITH THE PERSUADER,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Who murmurs, hither, hither: who</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE TEST OF MANHOOD,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Like a flood river whirled at rocky
+banks,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page200">200</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE HUELESS LOVE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Unto that love must we through fire
+attain,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>UNION IN DISSEVERANCE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>SONG IN THE SONGLESS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">They have no song, the sedges dry,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pageviii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+viii</span>THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">If that thou hast the gift of strength, then
+know</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE MAIN REGRET,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Seen, too clear and historic within us, our
+sins of omission</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ALTERNATION,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Between the fountain and the rill</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>FOREST HISTORY,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Beneath the vans of doom did men pass
+in.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><b>Fragments of the
+Iliad in English Hexameter Verse</b></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&lsquo;Heigh me! brazen of front, thou
+glutton for plunder, how can one,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&lsquo;Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur,
+having heart of a deer, thou!</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page221">221</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a
+forest enormous,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHT,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">These, then, he left, and away where ranks
+were now clashing the thickest,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page227">227</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>PARIS AND DIOMEDES,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">So he, with a clear shout of laughter,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>HYPNOS ON IDA,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother
+of wild beasts,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page230">230</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it
+bursts upon shingle,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE HORSES OF ACHILLES,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of
+the war-ground,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. ix</span>THE
+MARES OF THE CAMARGUE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A hundred mares, all white! their manes</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&lsquo;ATKINS&rsquo;,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Yonder&rsquo;s the man with his life in his
+hand,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE VOYAGE OF THE &lsquo;OPHIR&rsquo;,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Men of our race, we send you one</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE CRISIS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Spirit of Russia, now has come</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page239">239</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>OCTOBER 21, 1905,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The hundred years have passed, and he</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page241">241</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">We who have seen Italia in the throes,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE WILD ROSE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">High climbs June&rsquo;s wild rose,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page245">245</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE CALL,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Under what spell are we debased</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page247">247</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ON COMO,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A rainless darkness drew o&rsquo;er the
+lake</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page250">250</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>MILTON,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">What splendour of imperial station man,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page251">251</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>IRELAND,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Fire in her ashes Ireland feels</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page253">253</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS&rsquo; BELT,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The years had worn their seasons&rsquo;
+belt,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page255">255</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>FRAGMENTS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Open horizons round,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A wilding little stubble flower</p>
+<p class="gutindent">From labours through the night, outworn,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">This love of nature, that allures to
+take</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page257">257</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>IL Y A CENT ANS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">That march of the funereal Past behold;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page259">259</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagex"></a><span class="pagenum">p. x</span>YOUTH
+IN AGE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Once I was part of the music I heard</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page261">261</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p style="text-align: center"><b>Epitaphs</b></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>TO A FRIEND LOST,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">When I remember, friend, whom lost I
+call,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page265">265</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>M. M.,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Who call her Mother and who calls her
+Wife</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page265">265</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE LADY C. M.,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">To them that knew her, there is vital
+flame</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page266">266</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ON THE TOMBSTONE OF JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Thou our beloved and light of Earth hast
+crossed</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page266">266</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>GORDON OF KHARTOUM,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Of men he would have raised to light he
+fell:</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page266">266</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>J. C. M.,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">A fountain of our sweetest, quick to
+spring</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">With Alfred and St. Louis he doth win</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ISLET THE DACHS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Our Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page267">267</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ON HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Now dumb is he who waked the world to
+speak,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page268">268</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>HAWARDEN,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">When comes the lighted day for men to
+read</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page269">269</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>AT THE FUNERAL,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Her sacred body bear: the tenement</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Long with us, now she leaves us; she has
+rest</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>THE YEAR&rsquo;S SHEDDINGS,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">The varied colours are a fitful heap:</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page270">270</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>A STAVE
+OF ROVING TIM<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">(ADDRESSED TO CERTAIN FRIENDLY
+TRAMPS.)</span></h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">The</span> wind is East,
+the wind is West,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Blows in and out of haven;<br />
+The wind that blows is the wind that&rsquo;s best,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And croak, my jolly raven!<br />
+If here awhile we jigged and laughed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The like we will do yonder;<br />
+For he&rsquo;s the man who masters a craft,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And light as a lord can wander.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page2"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 2</span>So, foot the measure, Roving Tim,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And croak, my
+jolly raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">You live in rows of snug abodes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With gold, maybe, for counting;<br />
+And mine&rsquo;s the beck of the rainy roads<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Against the sun a-mounting.<br />
+I take the day as it behaves,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor shiver when &rsquo;tis airy;<br />
+But comes a breeze, all you are on waves,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sick chickens o&rsquo; Mother Carey!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So, now for next, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And croak, my
+jolly raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Sweet lass, you screw a lovely leer,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To make a man consider.<br />
+If you were up with the auctioneer,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I&rsquo;d be a handsome bidder.<br />
+But wedlock clips the rover&rsquo;s wing;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She tricks him fly to spider;<br />
+And when we get to fights in the Ring,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It&rsquo;s trumps when you play outsider.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So, wrench and split, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And croak, my
+jolly raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Along my winding way I know<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A shady dell that&rsquo;s winking;<br />
+The very corner for Self and Co<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To do a world of thinking.<br />
+And shall I this? and shall I that?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till Nature answers, ne&rsquo;ther!<br />
+Strike match and light your pipe in your hat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rejoicing in sound shoe-leather!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So lead along, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And croak, my
+jolly raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3><a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 3</span>V</h3>
+<p class="poetry">A cunning hand &rsquo;ll hand you bread,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With freedom for your capers.<br />
+I&rsquo;m not so sure of a cunning head;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It steers to pits or vapours.<br />
+But as for Life, we&rsquo;ll bear in sight<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The lesson Nature teaches;<br />
+Regard it in a sailoring light,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And treat it like thirsty leeches.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So, fly your jib, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And top your
+boom, old raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>VI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">She&rsquo;ll take, to please her dame and
+dad,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The shopman nicely shaven.<br />
+She&rsquo;ll learn to think o&rsquo; the marching lad<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When perchers show they&rsquo;re craven.<br />
+You say the shopman piles a heap,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While I perhaps am fasting;<br />
+And bless your wits, it haunts him in sleep,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; His tin-kettle chance of lasting!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So hail the road, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And hail the
+rain, old raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>VII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">He&rsquo;s half a wife, yon pecker bill;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A book and likewise preacher.<br />
+With any soul, in a game of skill,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll prove your over-reacher.<br />
+<a name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 4</span>The reason
+is, his brains are bent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On doing things right single.<br />
+You&rsquo;d wish for them when pitching your tent<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At night in a whirly dingle!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So, off we go, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And on we go,
+old raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Lord, no, man&rsquo;s lot is not for bliss;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To call it woe is blindness:<br />
+It&rsquo;ll here a kick, and it&rsquo;s there a kiss,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And here and there a kindness.<br />
+He starts a hare and calls her joy;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He runs her down to sorrow:<br />
+The dogs within him bother the boy,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But &rsquo;tis a new day to-morrow.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; So, I at helm, cries Roving
+Tim,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And you at bow,
+old raven!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The wind according to its whim<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is in and out of
+haven.</p>
+<h2><a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+5</span>JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry">A <span class="smcap">revelation</span> came on
+Jane,<br />
+The widow of a labouring swain:<br />
+And first her body trembled sharp,<br />
+Then all the woman was a harp<br />
+With winds along the strings; she heard,<br />
+Though there was neither tone nor word.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">For past our hearing was the air,<br />
+Beyond our speaking what it bare,<br />
+And she within herself had sight<br />
+Of heaven at work to cleanse outright,<br />
+To make of her a mansion fit<br />
+For angel hosts inside to sit.</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p class="poetry">They entered, and forthwith entranced,<br />
+Her body braced, her members danced;<br />
+Surprisingly the woman leapt;<br />
+And countenance composed she kept:<br />
+As gossip neighbours in the lane<br />
+Declared, who saw and pitied Jane.</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">These knew she had been reading books,<br />
+The which was witnessed by her looks<br />
+Of late: she had a mania<br />
+For mad folk in America,<br />
+And said for sure they led the way,<br />
+But meat and beer were meant to stay.</p>
+<h3><a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 6</span>V</h3>
+<p class="poetry">That she had visited a fair,<br />
+Had seen a gauzy lady there,<br />
+Alive with tricks on legs alone,<br />
+As good as wings, was also known:<br />
+And longwhiles in a sullen mood,<br />
+Before her jumping, Jane would brood.</p>
+<h3>VI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">A good knee&rsquo;s height, they say, she
+sprang;<br />
+Her arms and feet like those who hang:<br />
+As if afire the body sped,<br />
+And neither pair contributed.<br />
+She jumped in silence: she was thought<br />
+A corpse to resurrection caught.</p>
+<h3>VII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">The villagers were mostly dazed;<br />
+They jeered, they wondered, and they praised.<br />
+&rsquo;Twas guessed by some she was inspired,<br />
+And some would have it she had hired<br />
+An engine in her petticoats,<br />
+To turn their wits and win their votes.</p>
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Her first was Winny Earnes, a kind<br />
+Of woman not to dance inclined;<br />
+But she went up, entirely won,<br />
+Ere Jump-to-glory Jane had done;<br />
+And once a vixen wild for speech,<br />
+She found the better way to preach.</p>
+<h3><a name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>IX</h3>
+<p class="poetry">No long time after, Jane was seen<br />
+Directing jumps at Daddy Green;<br />
+And that old man, to watch her fly,<br />
+Had eyebrows made of arches high;<br />
+Till homeward he likewise did hop,<br />
+Oft calling on himself to stop!</p>
+<h3>X</h3>
+<p class="poetry">It was a scene when man and maid,<br />
+Abandoning all other trade,<br />
+And careless of the call to meals,<br />
+Went jumping at the woman&rsquo;s heels.<br />
+By dozens they were counted soon,<br />
+Without a sound to tell their tune.</p>
+<h3>XI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Along the roads they came, and crossed<br />
+The fields, and o&rsquo;er the hills were lost,<br />
+And in the evening reappeared;<br />
+Then short like hobbled horses reared,<br />
+And down upon the grass they plumped:<br />
+Alone their Jane to glory jumped.</p>
+<h3>XII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">At morn they rose, to see her spring<br />
+All going as an engine thing;<br />
+And lighter than the gossamer<br />
+She led the bobbers following her,<br />
+Past old acquaintances, and where<br />
+They made the stranger stupid stare.</p>
+<h3><a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+8</span>XIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">When turnips were a filling crop,<br />
+In scorn they jumped a butcher&rsquo;s shop:<br />
+Or, spite of threats to flog and souse,<br />
+They jumped for shame a public-house:<br />
+And much their legs were seized with rage<br />
+If passing by the vicarage.</p>
+<h3>XIV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">The tightness of a hempen rope<br />
+Their bodies got; but laundry soap<br />
+Not handsomer can rub the skin<br />
+For token of the washed within.<br />
+Occasionally coughers cast<br />
+A leg aloft and coughed their last.</p>
+<h3>XV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">The weaker maids and some old men,<br />
+Requiring rafters for the pen<br />
+On rainy nights, were those who fell.<br />
+The rest were quite a miracle,<br />
+Refreshed as you may search all round<br />
+On Club-feast days and cry, Not found!</p>
+<h3>XVI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">For these poor innocents, that slept<br />
+Against the sky, soft women wept:<br />
+For never did they any theft;<br />
+&rsquo;Twas known when they their camping left,<br />
+And jumped the cold out of their rags;<br />
+In spirit rich as money-bags.</p>
+<h3><a name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+9</span>XVII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">They jumped the question, jumped reply;<br />
+And whether to insist, deny,<br />
+Reprove, persuade, they jumped in ranks<br />
+Or singly, straight the arms to flanks,<br />
+And straight the legs, with just a knee<br />
+For bending in a mild degree.</p>
+<h3>XVIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">The villagers might call them mad;<br />
+An endless holiday they had,<br />
+Of pleasure in a serious work:<br />
+They taught by leaps where perils lurk,<br />
+And with the lambkins practised sports<br />
+For &rsquo;scaping Satan&rsquo;s pounds and quarts.</p>
+<h3>XIX</h3>
+<p class="poetry">It really seemed on certain days,<br />
+When they bobbed up their Lord to praise,<br />
+And bobbing up they caught the glance<br />
+Of light, our secret is to dance,<br />
+And hold the tongue from hindering peace;<br />
+To dance out preacher and police.</p>
+<h3>XX</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Those flies of boys disturbed them sore<br />
+On Sundays and when daylight wore:<br />
+With withies cut from hedge or copse,<br />
+They treated them as whipping-tops,<br />
+And flung big stones with cruel aim;<br />
+Yet all the flock jumped on the same.</p>
+<h3><a name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+10</span>XXI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">For what could persecution do<br />
+To worry such a blessed crew,<br />
+On whom it was as wind to fire,<br />
+Which set them always jumping higher?<br />
+The parson and the lawyer tried,<br />
+By meek persistency defied.</p>
+<h3>XXII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">But if they bore, they could pursue<br />
+As well, and this the Bishop too;<br />
+When inner warnings proved him plain<br />
+The chase for Jump-to-glory Jane.<br />
+She knew it by his being sent<br />
+To bless the feasting in the tent.</p>
+<h3>XXIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Not less than fifty years on end,<br />
+The Squire had been the Bishop&rsquo;s friend:<br />
+And his poor tenants, harmless ones,<br />
+With souls to save! fed not on buns,<br />
+But angry meats: she took her place<br />
+Outside to show the way to grace.</p>
+<h3>XXIV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">In apron suit the Bishop stood;<br />
+The crowding people kindly viewed.<br />
+A gaunt grey woman he saw rise<br />
+On air, with most beseeching eyes:<br />
+And evident as light in dark<br />
+It was, she set to him for mark.</p>
+<h3><a name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+11</span>XXV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Her highest leap had come: with ease<br />
+She jumped to reach the Bishop&rsquo;s knees:<br />
+Compressing tight her arms and lips,<br />
+She sought to jump the Bishop&rsquo;s hips:<br />
+Her aim flew at his apron-band,<br />
+That he might see and understand.</p>
+<h3>XXVI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">The mild inquiry of his gaze<br />
+Was altered to a peaked amaze,<br />
+At sight of thirty in ascent,<br />
+To gain his notice clearly bent:<br />
+And greatly Jane at heart was vexed<br />
+By his ploughed look of mind perplexed.</p>
+<h3>XXVII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">In jumps that said, Beware the pit!<br />
+More eloquent than speaking it&mdash;<br />
+That said, Avoid the boiled, the roast;<br />
+The heated nose on face of ghost,<br />
+Which comes of drinking: up and o&rsquo;er<br />
+The flesh with me! did Jane implore.</p>
+<h3>XXVIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">She jumped him high as huntsmen go<br />
+Across the gate; she jumped him low,<br />
+To coax him to begin and feel<br />
+His infant steps returning, peel<br />
+His mortal pride, exposing fruit,<br />
+And off with hat and apron suit.</p>
+<h3><a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+12</span>XXIX</h3>
+<p class="poetry">We need much patience, well she knew,<br />
+And out and out, and through and through,<br />
+When we would gentlefolk address,<br />
+However we may seek to bless:<br />
+At times they hide them like the beasts<br />
+From sacred beams; and mostly priests.</p>
+<h3>XXX</h3>
+<p class="poetry">He gave no sign of making bare,<br />
+Nor she of faintness or despair.<br />
+Inflamed with hope that she might win,<br />
+If she but coaxed him to begin,<br />
+She used all arts for making fain;<br />
+The mother with her babe was Jane.</p>
+<h3>XXXI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Now stamped the Squire, and knowing not<br />
+Her business, waved her from the spot.<br />
+Encircled by the men of might,<br />
+The head of Jane, like flickering light,<br />
+As in a charger, they beheld<br />
+Ere she was from the park expelled.</p>
+<h3>XXXII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight,<br />
+Did Jane around communicate:<br />
+For that the moment when began<br />
+The holy but mistaken man,<br />
+In view of light, to take his lift,<br />
+They cut him from her charm adrift!</p>
+<h3><a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+13</span>XXXIII</h3>
+<p class="poetry">And he was lost: a banished face<br />
+For ever from the ways of grace,<br />
+Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.<br />
+They saw the Bishop&rsquo;s wavering sprite<br />
+Within her look, at come and go,<br />
+Long after he had caused her woe.</p>
+<h3>XXXIV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Her greying eyes (until she sank<br />
+At Fredsham on the wayside bank,<br />
+Like cinder heaps that whitened lie<br />
+From coals that shot the flame to sky)<br />
+Had glassy vacancies, which yearned<br />
+For one in memory discerned.</p>
+<h3>XXXV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">May those who ply the tongue that cheats,<br />
+And those who rush to beer and meats,<br />
+And those whose mean ambition aims<br />
+At palaces and titled names,<br />
+Depart in such a cheerful strain<br />
+As did our Jump-to-glory Jane!</p>
+<h3>XXXVI</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Her end was beautiful: one sigh.<br />
+She jumped a foot when it was nigh.<br />
+A lily in a linen clout<br />
+She looked when they had laid her out.<br />
+It is a lily-light she bears<br />
+For England up the ladder-stairs.</p>
+<h2><a name="page14"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 14</span>THE
+RIDDLE FOR MEN</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">This</span> Riddle rede or die,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Says History since our Flood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To warn her sons of power:&mdash;<br />
+It can be truth, it can be lie;<br />
+Be parasite to twist awry;<br />
+The drouthy vampire for your blood;<br />
+The fountain of the silver flower;<br />
+A brand, a lure, a web, a crest;<br />
+Supple of wax or tempered steel;<br />
+The spur to honour, snake in nest:<br />
+&rsquo;Tis as you will with it to deal;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To wear upon the breast,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or trample under heel.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And rede you not aright,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Says Nature, still in red<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shall History&rsquo;s tale be writ!<br />
+For solely thus you lead to light<br />
+The trailing chapters she must write,<br />
+And pass my fiery test of dead<br />
+Or living through the furnace-pit:<br />
+Dislinked from who the softer hold<br />
+In grip of brute, and brute remain:<br />
+Of whom the woeful tale is told,<br />
+How for one short Sultanic reign,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their bodies lapse to mould,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their souls behowl the plain.</p>
+<h2><a name="page15"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 15</span>THE
+SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">One</span> fairest of the
+ripe unwedded left<br />
+Her shadow on the Sage&rsquo;s path; he found,<br />
+By common signs, that she had done a theft.<br />
+He could have made the sovereign heights resound<br />
+With questions of the wherefore of her state:<br />
+He on far other but an hour before<br />
+Intent.&nbsp; And was it man, or was it mate,<br />
+That she disdained? or was there haply more?</p>
+<p class="poetry">About her mouth a placid humour slipped<br />
+The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve<br />
+Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.<br />
+The surface was attentive to receive,<br />
+The secret underneath enfolded fast.<br />
+She had the step of the unconquered, brave,<br />
+Not arrogant; and if the vessel&rsquo;s mast<br />
+Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.<br />
+Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,<br />
+With something of a wavering line unspelt.<br />
+They hold the look whose tenderness condoles<br />
+For what the sister in the look has dealt<br />
+Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones<br />
+A woman&rsquo;s honeyed amorous outvied,<br />
+As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans<br />
+Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide<br />
+<a name="page16"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 16</span>Like
+infants for themselves, less deep to thrill<br />
+Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.<br />
+Those voices are not magic of the will<br />
+To strike love&rsquo;s wound, but of love&rsquo;s wound give
+sound,<br />
+Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.<br />
+They waft to the moist tropics after storm,<br />
+When out of passion spent thick incense steams,<br />
+And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint<br />
+Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring<br />
+Of melody clasped motion in restraint:<br />
+The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.<br />
+With such endowments armed was she and decked<br />
+To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;<br />
+Surpassing many a giant intellect,<br />
+The marvel of that cradled infant mind.<br />
+It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;<br />
+Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;<br />
+And promised in fair feminine to grow<br />
+A Sage&rsquo;s match and mate, more heavenly orbed.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Across his path the spouseless Lady cast<br />
+Her shadow, and the man that thing became.<br />
+His youth uprising called his age the Past.<br />
+This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,<br />
+And in his bosom an inverted Sage<br />
+Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.<br />
+But who while veins run blood shall know the page<br />
+Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?<br />
+Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,<br />
+Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in<br />
+To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,<br />
+Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin<br />
+<a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>Quick as
+the young, and spell those hieroglyphs<br />
+Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;<br />
+They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs<br />
+For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!<br />
+Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,<br />
+The legends of her mission to beguile?</p>
+<p class="poetry">Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth<br
+/>
+He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;<br />
+And not on her soft lips was it descried.<br />
+She stepped her way benevolently grave:<br />
+Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,<br />
+By tossing victim to the courtier knave,<br />
+Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.<br />
+Rather &rsquo;twas humbleness in being pursued,<br />
+As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.<br />
+Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?<br />
+All wisdom&rsquo;s armoury this man could wield;<br />
+And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased<br />
+Traverse her woman&rsquo;s curtain and poor shield,<br />
+For new example of a world diseased;<br />
+Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;<br />
+A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;<br />
+Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:<br />
+He worshipped like the young enthusiast,<br />
+Named simpleton or poet.&nbsp; Did he read<br />
+Right through, and with the voice she held reserved<br />
+Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?</p>
+<p class="poetry">Compassion for the man thus noble nerved<br />
+The pity for herself she felt in him,<br />
+To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;<br />
+At least, be worthy.&nbsp; That our soul may swim,<br />
+We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.<br />
+<a name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 18</span>It bubbles
+till it drops among the wrecks.<br />
+But, ah! confession of a woman&rsquo;s breast:<br />
+She eminent, she honoured of her sex!<br />
+Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,<br />
+To veil them.&nbsp; None of women, save their vile,<br />
+Plays traitor to an army in the field.<br />
+The cries most vindicating most defile.<br />
+How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,<br />
+When, under pressure of their common foe,<br />
+Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,<br />
+On pain of his intolerable crow<br />
+Above the fiction, built for him, o&rsquo;erthrown?<br />
+Irrational he is, irrational<br />
+Must they be, though not Reason&rsquo;s light shall wane<br />
+In them with ever Nature at close call,<br />
+Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;<br />
+Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make<br />
+A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh:<br />
+Whereat men dread their lofty structure&rsquo;s quake<br />
+Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply<br />
+The crazy roar of peril, leonine<br />
+For injured majesty.&nbsp; That sigh of dames<br />
+Is rare and soon suppressed.&nbsp; Not they combine<br />
+To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames<br />
+Their lustier if not wilder: fixed are they,<br />
+In elegancy scarce denoting ease;<br />
+And do they breathe, it is not to betray<br />
+The martyr in the caryatides.<br />
+Yet here and there along the graceful row<br />
+Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,<br />
+Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe<br />
+May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,<br />
+And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight<br />
+Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:<br />
+May stamp endurance by expounding fate.<br />
+<a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 19</span>She turned
+to him, and, This you seek is gone;<br />
+Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,<br />
+Frost-white.&nbsp; She gave his hearing sight to view<br />
+The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf:<br />
+Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.<br />
+No further sign of heart could he discern:<br />
+The picture of her speech was winter sky;<br />
+A headless figure folding a cleft urn,<br />
+Where tears once at the overflow were dry.</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p class="poetry">So spake she her first utterance on the
+rack.<br />
+It softened torment, in the funeral hues<br />
+Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back<br />
+To listen to herself, herself accuse<br />
+Harshly as Love&rsquo;s imperial cause allowed.<br />
+She meant to grovel, and her lover praised<br />
+So high o&rsquo;er the condemnatory crowd,<br />
+That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,<br
+/>
+Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged<br />
+Under the threatened flash of a bright brand<br />
+At arm&rsquo;s length up, for severing action edged.<br />
+Why, then Love&rsquo;s Court of Honour contemplate;<br />
+And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed<br />
+Above their lost, invoke an advocate<br />
+In Passion&rsquo;s purity, thereby redeemed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,<br
+/>
+The woman stricken by an arrow falls.<br />
+His advocate she can be, not her own,<br />
+If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.<br />
+<a name="page20"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 20</span>Have we
+such scenes of drapery&rsquo;s mournfulness<br />
+On Beauty&rsquo;s revelations, witched we plant,<br />
+Over the fair shape humbled to confess,<br />
+An angel&rsquo;s buckler, with loud choiric chant.</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of
+bard,<br />
+The lady&rsquo;s hand in her physician&rsquo;s knew.<br />
+She had not hoped for them as her award,<br />
+When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew<br />
+Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:<br />
+But muteness whipped her skin.&nbsp; She could have said,<br />
+Her free confession was to work his cure,<br />
+Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.<br />
+Were they not shown?&nbsp; His muteness shook in thrall<br />
+Her body on the verge of that black pit<br />
+Sheer from the treacherous confessional,<br />
+Demanding further, while perusing it.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.<br
+/>
+She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel<br />
+Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.<br />
+For the dark downward then her soul did reel.<br />
+A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:<br />
+A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.<br />
+She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,<br />
+Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:<br />
+Welcome to women, when, between man&rsquo;s laws<br />
+And Nature&rsquo;s thirsts, they, soul from body torn,<br />
+Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,<br />
+Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.<br />
+<a name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 21</span>Nathless
+her forehead twitched a sad content,<br />
+To think the cure so manifest, so frail<br />
+Her charm remaining.&nbsp; Was the curtain&rsquo;s rent<br />
+Too wide? he but a man of that herd male?<br />
+She saw him as that herd of the forked head<br />
+Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,<br />
+Clothed only in life&rsquo;s last devouring red.<br />
+Confession at her fearful instant sees<br />
+Judicial Silence write the devil fact<br />
+In letters of the skeleton: at once,<br />
+Swayed on the supplication of her act,<br />
+The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,<br />
+She joins.&nbsp; No longer colouring, with skips<br />
+At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears<br />
+Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips<br />
+To do the scaffold&rsquo;s office at his ears.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Into the bitter judgement of that herd<br />
+On women, she, deeming it present, fell.<br />
+Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word<br />
+They stone with, and so pile their citadel<br />
+To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt.<br />
+As had he flung it, in her breast it burned.<br />
+Face and reflect it did her hot revolt<br />
+From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;<br />
+Because the golden buckler was withheld,<br />
+She to herself applies the powder-spark,<br />
+For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,<br />
+Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She had the Scriptural word so scored on
+brain,<br />
+It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world<br />
+That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;<br />
+Most women! see! by the man&rsquo;s view dustward hurled,<br />
+<a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+22</span>Impenitent, submissive, torn in two.<br />
+They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,<br />
+And sops of nourishment may get some few,<br />
+In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Barely have seasoned women understood<br />
+The great Irrational, who thunders power,<br />
+Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,<br />
+And courts her in the covert&rsquo;s dewy hour;<br />
+Returning to his fortress nigh night&rsquo;s end,<br />
+With execration of her daughters&rsquo; lures.<br />
+They help him the proud fortress to defend,<br />
+Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,<br />
+The murder it commits; nor that its base<br />
+Is shifty as a huckster&rsquo;s opening deal<br />
+For bargain under smoothest market face,<br />
+While Gentleness bids frigid Justice feel,<br />
+Justice protests that Reason is her seat;<br />
+Elect Convenience, as Reason masked,<br />
+Hears calmly cramped Humanity entreat;<br />
+Until a sentient world is overtasked,<br />
+And rouses Reason&rsquo;s fountain-self: she calls<br />
+On Nature; Nature answers: Share your guilt<br />
+In common when contention cracks the walls<br />
+Of the big house which not on me is built.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The Lady said as much as breath will bear;<br
+/>
+To happier sisters inconceivable:<br />
+Contemptible to veterans of the fair,<br />
+Who show for a convolving pearly shell,<br />
+A treasure of the shore, their written book.<br />
+As much as woman&rsquo;s breath will bear and live<br />
+Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look,<br />
+That held as if for grain the summing sieve.<br />
+<a name="page23"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 23</span>Her judge
+now brightened without pause, as wakes<br />
+Our homely daylight after dread of spells.<br />
+Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes<br />
+Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells<br />
+About a story of the naked flesh,<br />
+Intending but to put some garment on,<br />
+Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh,<br />
+A traitor lurks and will be known anon.<br />
+Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt,<br />
+Stationed for index down an ancient track:<br />
+And ware of it was he while she poured out<br />
+A broken moon on forest-waters black.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Though past the stage where midway men are
+skilled<br />
+To scan their senses wriggling under plough,<br />
+When yet to the charmed seed of speech distilled,<br />
+Their hearts are fallow, he, and witless how,<br />
+Loathing, had yielded, like bruised limb to leech,<br />
+Not handsomely; but now beholding bleed<br />
+Soul of the woman in her prostrate speech,<br />
+The valour of that rawness he could read.<br />
+Thence flashed it, as the crimson currents ran<br />
+From senses up to thoughts, how she had read<br />
+Maternally the warm remainder man<br />
+Beneath his crust, and Nature&rsquo;s pity shed,<br />
+In shedding dearer than heart&rsquo;s blood to light<br />
+His vision of the path mild Wisdom walks.<br />
+Therewith he could espy Confession&rsquo;s fright;<br />
+Her need of him: these flowers grow on stalks;<br />
+They suck from soil, and have their urgencies<br />
+Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves.<br />
+Veins of divergencies, convergencies,<br />
+Our botanist in womankind perceives;<br />
+<a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 24</span>And if he
+hugs no wound, the man can prize<br />
+That splendid consummation and sure proof<br />
+Of more than heart in her, who might despise,<br />
+Who drowns herself, for pity up aloof<br />
+To soar and be like Nature&rsquo;s pity: she<br />
+Instinctive of what virtue in young days<br />
+Had served him for his pilot-star on sea,<br />
+To trouble him in haven.&nbsp; Thus his gaze<br />
+Came out of rust, and more than the schooled tongue<br />
+Was gifted to encourage and assure.<br />
+He gave her of the deep well she had sprung;<br />
+And name it gratitude, the word is poor.<br />
+But name it gratitude, is aught as rare<br />
+From sex to sex?&nbsp; And let it have survived<br />
+Their conflict, comes the peace between the pair,<br />
+Unknown to thousands husbanded and wived:<br />
+Unknown to Passion, generous for prey:<br />
+Unknown to Love, too blissful in a truce.<br />
+Their tenderest of self did each one slay;<br />
+His cloak of dignity, her fleur de luce;<br />
+Her lily flower, and his abolla cloak,<br />
+Things living, slew they, and no artery bled.<br />
+A moment of some sacrificial smoke<br />
+They passed, and were the dearer for their dead.</p>
+<p class="poetry">He learnt how much we gain who make no
+claims.<br />
+A nightcap on his flicker of grey fire<br />
+Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,<br />
+Confessing; and its conjured image dire,<br />
+Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed;<br />
+The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,<br />
+Visioned to hold corrected and abashed<br />
+Our senile emulous; which rolls its course<br />
+<a name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>Proud to
+the shattering end; with these few last<br />
+Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice,<br />
+Squeezed out in anguish: all of that once vast!<br />
+And still, though having skin for man&rsquo;s abuse,<br />
+Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath<br />
+Shot skyward from a blood at passionate jet,<br />
+Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth<br />
+Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;<br />
+And numb, of formal value.&nbsp; Are we true<br />
+In nature, never natural thing repents;<br />
+Albeit receiving punishment for due,<br />
+Among the group of this world&rsquo;s penitents;<br />
+Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft<br />
+Cravenly, while the scourge no shudder spares.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Our world believes it stabler if the soft<br />
+Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.<br />
+Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,<br />
+Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;<br />
+Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom<br />
+The chasm between our passions and our wits!</p>
+<p class="poetry">Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,<br />
+It trembles at betrayal of a sore.<br />
+Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose<br />
+Impurities for clearness at the core.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She to her hungered thundering in breast,<br />
+<i>Ye shall not starve</i>, not feebly designates<br />
+The world repressing as a life repressed,<br />
+Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.<br />
+<a name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 26</span>How Sin,
+amid the shades Cimmerian,<br />
+Repents, she points for sight: and she avers,<br />
+The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan<br />
+Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Sin against immaturity, the sin<br />
+Of ravenous excess, what deed divides<br />
+Man from vitality; these bleed within;<br />
+Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.<br />
+Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,<br />
+A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.<br />
+But culprit who the law of man has crossed<br />
+With Nature&rsquo;s dubiously within is blamed;<br />
+Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,<br />
+Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,<br />
+We but bewail a broken fellowship,<br />
+A sting, an isolation, a fall&rsquo;n crown.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Abject of sinners is that sensitive,<br />
+The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled<br />
+Incorrigible: such title do we give<br />
+To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;<br />
+And, taking it for Nature, place in ban<br />
+Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,<br />
+The shame and baffler of the soul of man,<br />
+The recreant, reptilious.&nbsp; Do thou build<br />
+Thy mind on her foundations in earth&rsquo;s bed;<br />
+Behold man&rsquo;s mind the child of her keen rod,<br />
+For teaching how the wits and passions wed<br />
+To rear that temple of the credible God;<br />
+Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,<br />
+Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:<br />
+Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,<br />
+Man&rsquo;s laws appear the blind progressive worm,<br />
+<a name="page27"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 27</span>That moves
+by touch, and thrust of linking rings<br />
+The which to endow with vision, lift from mud<br />
+To level of their nature&rsquo;s aims and springs,<br />
+Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,<br />
+Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife<br />
+(Whom the so rosy ferryman invites<br />
+To junction, and mid-channel over Life,<br />
+Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)<br />
+Instruct in deeper than Convenience,<br />
+In higher than the harvest of a year.<br />
+Only the rooted knowledge to high sense<br />
+Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur<br />
+For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark<br />
+Beyond the path with grain on either hand,<br />
+Help to the steering of our social Ark<br />
+Over the barbarous waters unto land.</p>
+<p class="poetry">For us the double conscience and its war,<br />
+The serving of two masters, false to both,<br />
+Until those twain, who spring the root and are<br />
+The knowledge in division, plight a troth<br />
+Of equal hands: nor longer circulate<br />
+A pious token for their current coin,<br />
+To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,<br />
+Fair feminine and masculine shall join<br />
+Upon an upper plane, still common mould,<br />
+Where stamped religion and reflective pace<br />
+A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold<br />
+Rounds to horizon for their soul&rsquo;s embrace.<br />
+Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun<br />
+Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.<br />
+But not till Nature&rsquo;s laws and man&rsquo;s are one,<br />
+Can marriage of the man and woman be.</p>
+<h3><a name="page28"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 28</span>V</h3>
+<p class="poetry">He passed her through the sermon&rsquo;s dull
+defile.<br />
+Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved<br />
+The city and the vale and mountain-pile.<br />
+She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A new land in an old beneath her lay;<br />
+And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,<br />
+As bride who without shame has come to say,<br />
+Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A natural woman&rsquo;s heart, not more than
+clad<br />
+By station and bright raiment, gathers heat<br />
+From nakedness in trusted hands: she had<br />
+The joy of those who feel the world&rsquo;s heart beat,<br />
+After long doubt of it as fire or ice;<br />
+Because one man had helped her to breathe free;<br />
+Surprised to faith in something of a price<br />
+Past the old charity in chivalry:&mdash;<br />
+Our first wild step to right the loaded scales<br />
+Displaying women shamefully outweighed.<br />
+The wisdom of humaneness best avails<br />
+For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.<br />
+Her buried body fed the life she drank.<br />
+And not another stripping of her wound!<br />
+The startled thought on black delirium sank,<br />
+While with her gentle surgeon she communed,<br />
+And woman&rsquo;s prospect of the yoke repelled.<br />
+Her buried body gave her flowers and food;<br />
+The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;<br />
+Love, the large love that folds the multitude.<br />
+<a name="page29"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+29</span>Soul&rsquo;s chastity in honesty, and this<br />
+With beauty, made the dower to men refused.<br />
+And little do they know the prize they miss;<br />
+Which is their happy fortune!&nbsp; Thus he mused</p>
+<p class="poetry">For him, the cynic in the Sage had play<br />
+A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;<br />
+To think, of all alive most wedded they,<br />
+Whom time disjoined!&nbsp; He needed her quick thirst<br />
+For renovated earth: on earth she gazed,<br />
+With humble aim to foot beside the wise.<br />
+Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised<br />
+Yet lowly over morning&rsquo;s pure grey eyes.</p>
+<h2><a name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+30</span>&lsquo;LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO&rsquo;</h2>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">Love</span> is winged for two,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the worst he weathers,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When their hearts are tied;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But if they divide,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; O too true!<br />
+Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,<br />
+Feathers all the ground bestrew.</p>
+<p class="poetry">I was breast of morning sea,<br />
+Rosy plume on forest dun,<br />
+I the laugh in rainy fleeces,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While with me<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She made one.<br />
+Now must we pick up our pieces,<br />
+For that then so winged were we.</p>
+<h2>&lsquo;ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE&rsquo;</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Ask</span>, is Love
+divine,<br />
+Voices all are, ay.<br />
+Question for the sign,<br />
+There&rsquo;s a common sigh.<br />
+Would we, through our years,<br />
+Love forego,<br />
+Quit of scars and tears?<br />
+Ah, but no, no, no!</p>
+<h2><a name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+31</span>&lsquo;JOY IS FLEET&rsquo;</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Joy</span> is fleet,<br />
+Sorrow slow.<br />
+Love, so sweet,<br />
+Sorrow will sow.<br />
+Love, that has flown<br />
+Ere day&rsquo;s decline,<br />
+Love to have known,<br />
+Sorrow, be mine!</p>
+<h2>THE LESSON OF GRIEF</h2>
+<p class="poetry">Not ere the bitter herb we taste,<br />
+Which ages thought of happy times,<br />
+To plant us in a weeping waste,<br />
+Rings with our fellows this one heart<br />
+
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+Accordant chimes.</p>
+<p class="poetry">When I had shed my glad year&rsquo;s leaf,<br
+/>
+I did believe I stood alone,<br />
+Till that great company of Grief<br />
+Taught me to know this craving heart<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For not my own.</p>
+<h2><a name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>WIND
+ON THE LYRE</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">That</span> was the chirp
+of Ariel<br />
+You heard, as overhead it flew,<br />
+The farther going more to dwell,<br />
+And wing our green to wed our blue;<br />
+But whether note of joy or knell,<br />
+Not his own Father-singer knew;<br />
+Nor yet can any mortal tell,<br />
+Save only how it shivers through;<br />
+The breast of us a sounded shell,<br />
+The blood of us a lighted dew.</p>
+<h2><a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 33</span>THE
+YOUTHFUL QUEST</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">His</span> Lady queen of
+woods to meet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He wanders day and night:<br />
+The leaves have whisperings discreet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The mossy ways invite.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Across a lustrous ring of space,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By covert hoods and caves,<br />
+Is promise of her secret face<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In film that onward waves.</p>
+<p class="poetry">For darkness is the light astrain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Astrain for light the dark.<br />
+A grey moth down a larches&rsquo; lane<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Unwinds a ghostly spark.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her lamp he sees, and young desire<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Is fed while cloaked she flies.<br />
+She quivers shot of violet fire<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To ash at look of eyes.</p>
+<h2><a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 34</span>THE
+EMPTY PURSE<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL
+SON</span></h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Thou</span>, run to the dry
+on this wayside bank,<br />
+Too plainly of all the propellers bereft!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Quenched youth, and is that thy purse?<br />
+Even such limp slough as the snake has left<br />
+Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin,<br />
+For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,<br />
+In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And thine to crave and to curse<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The sweet thing once within.<br />
+Accuse him: some devil committed the theft,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Which leaves of the portly a skin,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; No more; of the weighty a whine.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Pursue him: and first, to be sure of his
+track,<br />
+Over devious ways that have led to this,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the stream&rsquo;s consecutive line,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Let memory lead thee back<br />
+To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,<br />
+Unflushed at the front of the roseate door<br />
+Unopened yet: never shadow there<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For souls whose cry is, alack!<br />
+An ivory cradle rocks, apeep<br />
+Through his eyelashes&rsquo; laugh, a breathing pearl.<br />
+<a name="page35"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 35</span>There the
+young chief of the animals wore<br />
+A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware<br />
+Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap.<br />
+In a dingle away from a rutted highroad,<br />
+Around him the earliest throstle and merle,<br />
+Our human smile between milk and sleep,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Effervescent of Nature he crowed.<br />
+Fair was that season; furl over furl<br />
+The banners of blossom; a dancing floor<br />
+This earth; very angels the clouds; and fair<br />
+Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast:<br />
+Careless, a centre of vigilant care.<br />
+Thy mother kisses an infant curl.<br />
+The room of the toys was a boundless nest,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A kingdom the field of the games,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till entered the craving for more,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And the worshipped small body had aims.<br />
+A good little idol, as records attest,<br />
+When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream<br />
+By sweets and caresses: he gave but sign<br />
+That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race,<br />
+Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine.<br />
+Almost magician, his earliest dream<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Was lord of the unpossessed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For a look; himself and his chase,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As on puffs of a wind at whirl,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made one in the wink of a gleam.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She kisses a locket curl,<br />
+She conjures to vision a cherub face,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When her butterfly counted his day<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; All meadow and flowers, mishap<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Derided, and taken for play<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The fling of an urchin&rsquo;s cap.<br />
+<a name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 36</span>When her
+butterfly showed him an eaglet born,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For preying too heedlessly bred,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What a heart clapped in thee then!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With what fuller colours of morn!<br />
+And high to the uttermost heavens it flew,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Swift as on poet&rsquo;s pen.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It flew to be wedded, to wed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The mystery scented around:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Issue of flower and dew,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Issue of light and sound:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thinner than either; a thread<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Spun of the dream they threw<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To kindle, allure, evade.<br />
+It ran the sea-wave, the garden&rsquo;s dance,<br />
+To the forest&rsquo;s dark heart down a dappled glade;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Led on by a perishing glance,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By a twinkle&rsquo;s eternal waylaid.<br />
+Woman, the name was, when she took form;<br />
+Sheaf of the wonders of life.&nbsp; She fled,<br />
+Close imaged; she neared, far seen.&nbsp; How she made<br />
+Palpitate earth of the living and dead!<br />
+Did she not show thee the world designed<br />
+Solely for loveliness?&nbsp; Nested warm,<br />
+The day was the morrow in flight.&nbsp; And for thee,<br />
+She muted the discords, tuned, refined;<br />
+Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak.<br />
+Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree,<br />
+Sliding on radiance, winging from shade,<br />
+With her witch-whisper o&rsquo;er ruins, in reeds,<br />
+She sang low the song of her promise delayed;<br />
+Beckoned and died, as a finger of smoke<br />
+Astream over woodland.&nbsp; And was not she<br />
+History&rsquo;s heroines white on storm?<br />
+Remember her summons to valorous deeds.<br />
+Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm,<br />
+<a name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 37</span>Most was
+her beam on the knightly: she led<br />
+For the honours of manhood more than the prize;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Waved her magnetical yoke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whither the warrior bled,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Ere to the bower of sighs.<br />
+And shy of her secrets she was; under deeps<br />
+Plunged at the breath of a thirst that woke<br />
+The dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Away over heaven the young heart flew,<br />
+And caught many lustres, till some one said<br />
+(Or was it the thought into hearing grew?),<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Not thou as commoner men</i>!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thy stature puffed and it swayed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It stiffened to royal-erect;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A brassy trumpet brayed;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A whirling seized thy head;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The vision of beauty was flecked.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Note well the how and the when,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The thing that prompted and sped.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Fixed eye, and the world was prey.<br />
+No simple world of thy greenblade Spring,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor world of thy flowerful prime<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On the topmost Orient peak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Above a yet vaporous day.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Flesh was it, breast to beak:<br />
+A four-walled windowless world without ray,<br />
+Only darkening jets on a river of slime,<br />
+Where harsh over music as woodland jay,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A voice chants, Woe to the weak!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And along an insatiate feast,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Women and men are one<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the cup transforming to beast.<br />
+<a name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 38</span>Magian
+worship they paid to their sun,<br />
+Lord of the Purse!&nbsp; Behold him climb.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Stalked ever such figure of fun<br />
+For monarch in great-grin pantomime?<br />
+See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend;<br />
+The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat,<br />
+From a life that reeks of the rotted end;<br />
+While he&mdash;is he pictureable? replete,<br />
+Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hollow, more hollow at core.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And for him did the hundreds toil<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Despised; in the cold and heat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This image ridiculous bore<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On their shoulders for morsels of meat!</p>
+<p class="poetry">Gross, with the fumes of incense full,<br />
+With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt,<br />
+He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.<br />
+And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed;<br />
+Original man, as philosophers vouch;<br />
+Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed,<br />
+Frightfully living and armed to devour;<br />
+The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The bait, the line and the hook:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To feed on his fellows intent.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; God of the Dana&eacute; shower,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He had but to follow his bent.<br />
+He battened on fowl not safely hutched,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On sheep astray from the crook;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A lure for the foolish in fold:<br />
+To carrion turning what flesh he touched.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And O the grace of his air,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As he at the goblet sips,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page39"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+39</span>A centre of girdles loosed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With their grisly label, Sold!<br />
+Credulous hears the fidelity swear,<br />
+Which has roving eyes over yielded lips:<br />
+To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The stuck in a treacherous slough,<br />
+Because of his faith in a purchased pair,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; False to a vinous vow.</p>
+<p class="poetry">In his glory of banquet strip him bare,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And what is the creature we view?<br />
+Our pursy Apollo Apollyon&rsquo;s tool;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A small one, still of the crew<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By serpent Apollyon blest:<br />
+His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.<br />
+A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Not viler, you hear him protest:<br />
+Of a popular countenance not incorrect.<br />
+But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Paint him the hooved and homed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Despite the poor pother he pleads,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And his look of a nation&rsquo;s elect.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We have him, our quarry confessed!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And scan him: the features inspect<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of that bestial multiform: cry,<br />
+Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The book of thy wisdom, proved<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On me, its last hieroglyph page,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Alive in the horned and hooved?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thou! will he make reply.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thus has the plenary purse<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Done often: to do will engage<br />
+Anew upon all of thy like, or worse.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+40</span>And now is thy deepest regret<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To be man, clean rescued from beast:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Celestially released.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But now from his cavernous
+hold,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Free may thy soul be set,<br />
+As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Refreshed by some bodily sweat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The meaning of either in turn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What issue may come of the two:&mdash;<br />
+A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach<br />
+Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold:<br />
+A firmament passing our visible blue.<br />
+To those having nought to reflect it, &rsquo;tis nought;<br />
+To those who are misty, &rsquo;tis mist on the beach<br />
+From the billow withdrawing; to those who see<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Earth, our mother, in thought,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her spirit it is, our key.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us
+here,<br />
+Of one significance, pricking the blind.<br />
+This is thy gain now the surface is clear:<br />
+To read with a soul in the mirror of mind<br />
+Is man&rsquo;s chief lesson.&mdash;Thou smilest!&nbsp; I
+preach!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Acid smiling, my friend, reveals<br />
+Abysses within; frigid preaching a street<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Paved unconcernedly smooth<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the lecturer straight on his heels,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Up and down a policeman&rsquo;s beat;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.<br />
+Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.<br />
+It is not attractive in being too chaste.<br />
+The popular tale of adventure and crime<br />
+<a name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 41</span>Would
+equally sicken an overdone taste.<br />
+So, then, onward.&nbsp; Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe,<br />
+Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of
+sweet;<br />
+It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the thirsts of our nature brine.<br />
+But manful has met it, manful will meet.<br />
+And think of thy privilege: supple with youth,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To have sight of the headlong swine,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As the coin of thy purse poured out:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; An animal&rsquo;s holiday past:<br />
+And free of them thou, to begin a new bout;<br />
+To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast:<br />
+No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse:<br />
+Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare;<br />
+Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book<br />
+Of the world can be read, by necessity urged.<br />
+For witness, what blinkers are they who look<br />
+From the state of the prince or the millionnaire!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They see but the fish they attract,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The hungers on them converged;<br />
+And never the thought in the shell of the act,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor ever life&rsquo;s fangless mirth.<br />
+But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Go into thyself, strike Earth.<br />
+She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.<br />
+Thou findest a pugilist countering quick,<br />
+Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred;<br />
+Not, after the studied professional trick,<br />
+Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight.&nbsp; Strike Earth,<br />
+Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And thou com&rsquo;st on a saving fact,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To nourish thy planted worth.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page42"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+42</span>Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,<br />
+Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact:<br />
+The redemption of sinners deluded! the last<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dry handful, that bruises and saves.<br />
+To the common big heart are we bound right fast,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When our Mother admonishing nips<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At the nakedness bare of a clout,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And we crave what the commonest craves.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This wealth was a
+fortress-wall,<br />
+Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout;<br />
+Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all;<br />
+With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus are we man made firm;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Made warm by the numbers compact.<br />
+We follow no longer a trumpet-snout,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At a trot where the hog is tracked,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor wriggle the way of the worm.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thou wilt spare us the
+cynical pout<br />
+At humanity: sign of a nature bechurled.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; No stenchy anathemas cast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Upon Providence, women, the world.<br />
+Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.<br />
+The purchased are things of the mart, not classed<br />
+Among resonant types that have freely grown.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed:<br
+/>
+As any sad dog&rsquo;s of sweet flesh when he quits<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The wayside wandering bone!<br />
+No revilings of comrades as ingrates: thee<br />
+The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By laws yet barbarous) own.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+43</span>If some one performed Fiend&rsquo;s deputy,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He was for awhile the Fiend.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Still, nursing a passion to speak,<br />
+As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When the ladle has finished its leak,<br />
+And the vessel is loquent of nature&rsquo;s inane,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hie where the demagogues roar<br />
+Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim&rsquo;s force:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hurrah to their jolly attack<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On a City that smokes of the Plain;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A city of sin&rsquo;s death-dyes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Holding revel of worms in a corse;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A city of malady sore,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Over-ripe for the big doom&rsquo;s crack:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A city of hymnical snore;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Connubial truths and lies<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Demanding an instant divorce,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Clean as the bright from the black.<br />
+It were well for thy system to sermonize.<br />
+There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Then up stand thou in the
+midst:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thy good grain out of thee thresh,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hand upon heart: relate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What things thou legally didst<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the Archseducer of flesh.<br />
+Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Confess thee an instrument armed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To be snare of our wanton, our weak,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of all by the sensual charmed.<br />
+For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Speak, though execrate, speak<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A word on grandmotherly Laws<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Giving rivers of gold to our young,<br />
+<a name="page44"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 44</span>In the
+days of their hungers impure;<br />
+To furnish them beak and claws,<br />
+And make them a banquet&rsquo;s lure.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Thou the example, saved<br />
+Miraculously by this poor skin!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thereat let the Purse be waved:<br />
+The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:<br />
+A devil, if devil as devil behaved<br />
+Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,<br />
+Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;<br />
+O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!</p>
+<p class="poetry">And commend for a washing the torrents of
+wrath,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize<br />
+Rough-rolling boulders and froth.<br />
+Gigantical enginery they can command,<br />
+For the crushing of enemies not of great size:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But hold to thy desperate stand.<br />
+Men&rsquo;s right of bequeathing their all to their own<br />
+(With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);<br />
+Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone<br />
+Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last<br />
+Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.<br />
+The law they decree is their ultimate slave;<br />
+Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.<br />
+It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.<br />
+Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;<br />
+To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;<br />
+Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt<br />
+He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;<br />
+And how for his giving, the more will he get;<br />
+For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:<br />
+<a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 45</span>Till they
+see, with the gape of a startled surprise,<br />
+Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,<br />
+The sun of their system a father of flies!</p>
+<p class="poetry">So, for such good hope, take their scourge
+unashamed;<br />
+&rsquo;Tis the portion of them who civilize,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who speak the word novel and true:<br />
+How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,<br />
+Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;<br />
+How the God of old time will act Satan of new,<br />
+If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;<br />
+For whose habitation within us we scour<br />
+This house of our life; where our bitterest pains<br />
+Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps<br />
+Mire on the soul.&nbsp; Take stripes or chains;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Grip at thy standard reviled.<br />
+And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our spoken in protest remains.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A young generation reaps.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The young generation! ah, there is the child<br
+/>
+Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof<br />
+That souls we have, with our senses filed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our shuttles at thread of the woof.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; May it be braver than ours,<br />
+To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,<br />
+To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.<br />
+May it know how the mind in expansion revolts<br />
+From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,<br />
+And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,<br />
+In a field where the forefather print of the hoof<br />
+Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,<br />
+And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till brain-rule splendidly towers.<br />
+<a name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 46</span>For that
+large light we have laboured and tramped<br />
+Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our animate morning stamped<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With the lines of a sombre eve.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,<br />
+When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And the lion effulgently ramped.<br />
+Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By right of the better in kind.<br />
+But now will it breed yon bestial brood<br />
+Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As the healthy in chains with the sick,<br />
+Unto despot usage our issuing mind.<br />
+It signifies battle or death&rsquo;s dull knell.<br />
+Precedents icily written on high<br />
+Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.<br />
+Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick<br />
+For the march, reads which the impediment well.<br />
+She smiles when of sapience is their boast.<br />
+O loose of the tug between blood run dry<br />
+And blood running flame may our offspring run!<br />
+May brain democratic be king of the host!<br />
+Less then shall the volumes of History tell<br />
+Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,<br />
+That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won<br />
+Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,<br />
+And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their battle of instincts put by,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A moment examine this field:<br />
+On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,<br />
+Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.<br />
+<a name="page47"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 47</span>It merits
+a glance at our history&rsquo;s maps,<br />
+To see across Britain&rsquo;s old shaggy unshorn,<br />
+Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot<br />
+The ruler&rsquo;s close-reckoned direct to the mark.<br />
+From the head ran the vanquisher&rsquo;s orderly route,<br />
+In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.<br />
+From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,<br />
+And we shoulder, we wrangle!&nbsp; The light on us shed<br />
+Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,<br />
+The Goddess of gamblers, above.&nbsp; From the head,<br />
+Then when it worked for the birth of a star<br />
+Fraternal with heaven&rsquo;s in beauty and ray,<br />
+Sprang the Acropolis.&nbsp; Ask what crown<br />
+Comes of our tides of the blood at war,<br />
+For men to bequeath generations down!<br />
+And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:<br />
+What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:<br />
+A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,<br />
+Desiring affairs to be left as they are.</p>
+<p class="poetry">So, thou takest Youth&rsquo;s natural place in
+the fray,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As a Tentative, combating Peace,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our lullaby word for decay.&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There will come an immediate decree<br />
+In thy mind for the opposite party&rsquo;s decease,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; If he bends not an instant knee.<br />
+Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And accept a mild word of police:&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Be mannerly, measured; refrain<br />
+From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks.<br />
+Our political, even as the merchant main,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A temperate gale requires<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the ship that haven seeks;<br />
+Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a name="page48"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 48</span>Then observe the antagonist, con<br
+/>
+His reasons for rocking the lullaby word.<br />
+You stand on a different stage of the stairs.<br />
+He fought certain battles, yon senile lord.<br />
+In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs.<br />
+We are now on his inches of ground hard won,<br />
+For a perch to a flight o&rsquo;er his resting fence.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That Time is both father and son?<br />
+Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense!&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Discern the paternal of Now<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As the Then of thy present tense.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; You may pull as you will either way,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; You can never be other than one.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; So, be filial.&nbsp; Giants to slay<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.</p>
+<p class="poetry">There are those whom we push from the path with
+respect.<br />
+Bow to that elder, though seeing him bow<br />
+To the backward as well, for a thunderous back<br />
+Upon thee.&nbsp; In his day he was not all wrong.<br />
+Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked.<br />
+He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore.<br />
+The Future he sees as the slippery murk;<br />
+The Past as his doctrinal library lore.<br />
+He stands now the rock to the wave&rsquo;s wild wash.<br />
+Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heroical, one of our strong.<br />
+His gold to retain and his dross reject,<br />
+Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Detest the dead squat of the Turk,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And suffice it to move him along.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+49</span>Drink of faith in the brains a full draught<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Before the oration: beware<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Lest rhetoric moonily waft<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whither horrid activities snare.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rhetoric, juice for the mob<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Despising more luminous grape,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Oft at its fount has it laughed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the cataracts rolling for rape<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of a Reason left single to sob!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&rsquo;Tis known how the permanent never is
+writ<br />
+In blood of the passions: mercurial they,<br />
+Shifty their issue: stir not that pit<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To the game our brutes best play.</p>
+<p class="poetry">But with rhetoric loose, can we check
+man&rsquo;s brute?<br />
+Assemblies of men on their legs invoke<br />
+Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot<br />
+Electrical sparks between their dry thatch<br />
+And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; (To match a Batrachian croak)<br />
+Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins.<br />
+Then may it be rather the well-worn joke<br />
+Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write<br />
+Penance for rhetoric.&nbsp; Strange will it seem,<br />
+When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For the secret why demagogues
+fail,<br />
+Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And knock out or knock in the nail<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; (We will rank them as flatly sincere,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Devoutly detesting a wrong,<br />
+Engines o&rsquo;ercharged with our human steam),<br />
+<a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>Question
+thee, seething amid the throng.<br />
+And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat;<br />
+Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here;&mdash;<br />
+Aught more than the banquet and roundelay,<br />
+That is closed with a terrible terminal wail,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A retributive black ding-dong?<br />
+And ask of thyself: This furious Yea<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of a speech I thump to repeat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the cause I would have prevail,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For seed of a nourishing wheat,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Is it accepted of Song</i>?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Does it sound to the mind through the ear,<br />
+Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thou wilt find it a test severe;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Unerring whatever the theme.<br />
+Rings it for Reason a melody clear,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We have bidden old Chaos retreat;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We have called on Creation to hear;<br />
+All forces that make us are one full stream.<br />
+Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse,<br />
+Showing its practical value and weight,<br />
+Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse,<br />
+Lead thee aloft to that high estate.&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The test is conclusive, I deem:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It embraces or mortally bites.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We have then the key-note for debate:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A Senate that sits on the heights<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Over discords, to shape and amend.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And no singer is needed to
+serve<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The musical God, my friend.<br />
+Needs only his law on a sensible nerve:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A law that to Measure invites,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Forbidding the passions contend.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+51</span>Is it accepted of Song?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And if then the blunt answer be Nay,<br />
+Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde,<br />
+Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Queen of delirious rites,<br />
+Queen of those issueless mobs, that rend<br />
+For frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord,<br />
+Pursuing insensate, seething in throng,<br />
+Their wild idea to its ashen end.<br />
+Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong,<br />
+Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But thou, should the answer
+ring Ay,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hast warrant of seed for thy word:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The musical God is nigh<br />
+To inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through the shoals: is it worthy of Song,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; There are souls all woman to hear,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Woman to bear and renew.<br />
+For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Broad as the arms of his blue,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Fine as the web of his rays,<br />
+Justice, whose voice is a melody clear,<br />
+The one sure life for the numbered long,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From him are the brutal and vain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The vile, the excessive, out-thrust:<br />
+He points to the God on the upmost throne:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He is the saver of grain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The sifter of spirit from dust.<br />
+He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The virilities: Measure alone<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Has votaries rich in the male:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Fathers embracing no cloud,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sowing no harvestless main:<br />
+Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowed<br />
+<a name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>To create,
+to perpetuate; woo, win, wed;<br />
+Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own,<br />
+Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Simulacra, though solid they sail,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And seem such imperial stuff:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Yes, the living divide off the dead.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Then thou with thy furies
+outgrown,<br />
+Not as Cybele&rsquo;s beast will thy head lash tail<br />
+So pr&aelig;ter-determinedly thermonous,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thou under stress of the strife<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shalt hear for sustainment supreme<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The cry of the conscience of Life:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Keep the young generations in hail</i>,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>And bequeath them no tumbled house</i>!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;There hast thou the sacred
+theme,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Therein the inveterate spur,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of the Innermost.&nbsp; See her one blink<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In vision past eyeballs.&nbsp; Not thee<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She cares for, but us.&nbsp; Follow her.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Follow her, and thou wilt not sink.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With thy soul the Life espouse:<br />
+This Life of the visible, audible, ring<br />
+With thy love tight about; and no death will be;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The name be an empty thing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And woe a forgotten old trick:<br />
+And battle will come as a challenge to drink;<br />
+As a warrior&rsquo;s wound each transient sting.<br />
+She leads to the Uppermost link by link;<br />
+Exacts but vision, desires not vows.<br />
+Above us the singular number to see;<br />
+The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick,<br />
+A dot or a stop: that is our task;<br />
+<a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 53</span>Her lesson
+in figured arithmetic,<br />
+For the letters of Life behind its mask;<br />
+Her flower-like look under fearful brows.</p>
+<p class="poetry">As for thy special case, O my friend, one must
+think<br />
+Massilia&rsquo;s victim, who held the carouse<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the length of a carnival year,<br />
+Knew worse: but the wretch had his opening choice.<br />
+For thee, by our law, no alternatives were:<br />
+Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He cancelled the ravaging Plague,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With the roll of his fat off the cliff.<br />
+Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,<br />
+Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And catches the not too pink,<br />
+Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause<br />
+Is the cause of community.&nbsp; Iterate,<br />
+Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:<br />
+Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:<br />
+Yet always in measure, with bearing polite:<br />
+The manner of one that would expiate<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; His share in grandmotherly Laws,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Which do the dark thing to destroy,<br />
+Under aspect of water so guilelessly white<br />
+For the general use, by the devils befouled.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Enough, poor prodigal boy!<br
+/>
+Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled.<br />
+Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned.<br />
+And &rsquo;tis bony: denied thee thy succulent half<br />
+Of the parable&rsquo;s blessing, to swineherd returned:<br />
+A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By my faith, there is feasting to come,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Not the less, when our Earth we have seen<br />
+Beneath and on surface, her deeds and designs:<br />
+<a name="page54"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 54</span>Who gives
+us the man-loving Nazarene,<br />
+The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines.<br />
+By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom;<br />
+Revelations, delights.&nbsp; I can hear a faint crow<br />
+Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As down the new shafting of mines,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A cry of the metally gnome.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When our Earth we have seen, and have linked<br />
+With the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold,<br />
+Imprisoned humanity open will throw<br />
+Its fortress gates, and the rivers of gold<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the congregate friendliness flow.<br />
+Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold:<br />
+Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real:<br />
+And laughter on lips, as the birds&rsquo; outburst<br />
+At the flooding of light.&nbsp; No robbery then<br />
+The feast, nor a robber&rsquo;s abode the home,<br />
+For a furnished model of our first den!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor Life as a stationed wheel;<br />
+Nor History written in blood or in foam,<br />
+For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed.<br />
+The God in the conscience of multitudes feel,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And we feel deep to Earth at her heart,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We have her communion with men,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; New ground, new skies for appeal.<br />
+Yield into harness thy best and thy worst;<br />
+Away on the trot of thy servitude start,<br />
+Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air.<br />
+If courage should falter, &rsquo;tis wholesome to kneel.<br />
+Remember that well, for the secret with some,<br />
+Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer,<br />
+And free from impurities tower-like stand.<br />
+I promise not more, save that feasting will come<br />
+To a mind and a body no longer inversed:<br />
+The sense of large charity over the land,<br />
+<a name="page55"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+55</span>Earth&rsquo;s wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the
+rough,<br />
+And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Through the active machine: lean fare,<br />
+But it carries a sparkle!&nbsp; And now enough,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And part we as comrades part,<br />
+To meet again never or some day or soon.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Our season of drought is reminder
+rude:&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; No later than yesternoon,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; I looked on the horse of a cart,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By the wayside water-trough.<br />
+How at every draught of his bride of thirst<br />
+His nostrils widened!&nbsp; The sight was good:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Food for us, food, such as first<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Drew our thoughts to earth&rsquo;s lowly for
+food.</p>
+<h2><a name="page56"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 56</span>TO THE
+COMIC SPIRIT</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Sword</span> of Common
+Sense!&mdash;<br />
+Our surest gift: the sacred chain<br />
+Of man to man: firm earth for trust<br />
+In structures vowed to permanence:&mdash;<br />
+Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!<br />
+Implacable perforce of just;<br />
+With that good treasure in defence,<br />
+Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain<br />
+Since first men planted foot and hand was king:<br />
+Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve<br />
+To wield thy double edge, retort<br />
+Or hold the deadlier reserve,<br />
+And through thy victim&rsquo;s weapon sting:<br />
+Thine is the service, thine the sport<br />
+This shifty heart of ours to hunt<br />
+Across its webs and round the many a ring<br />
+Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds<br />
+Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke<br />
+Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster&rsquo;s
+grunt;&mdash;<br />
+Once lion of our desert&rsquo;s trodden weeds;<br />
+And but for thy straight finger at the yoke,<br />
+Again to be the lordly paw,<br />
+Naming his appetites his needs,<br />
+Behind a decorative cloak:<br />
+Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law<br />
+We read upon that building&rsquo;s architrave<br />
+In the mind&rsquo;s firmament, by men upraised<br />
+With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave<br />
+For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed,<br />
+Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw,<br />
+<a name="page57"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 57</span>Thou, soul
+of wakened heads, art armed to warn,<br />
+Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang,<br />
+Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot,<br />
+Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn;<br />
+Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise,<br />
+Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen<br />
+His rebel agitation at our root:<br />
+Thou hast him out of hawking eyes;<br />
+Nor ever morning of the clang<br />
+Young Echo sped on hill from horn<br />
+In forest blown when scent was keen<br />
+Off earthy dews besprinkling blades<br />
+Of covert grass more merrily rang<br />
+The yelp of chase down alleys green,<br />
+Forth of the headlong-pouring glades,<br />
+Over the dappled fallows wild away,<br />
+Than thy fine unaccented scorn<br />
+At sight of man&rsquo;s old secret brute,<br />
+Devout for pasture on his prey,<br />
+Advancing, yawning to devour;<br />
+With step of deer, with voice of flute,<br />
+Haply with visage of the lily flower.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Let the cock crow and ruddy morn<br />
+His handmaiden appear!&nbsp; Youth claims his hour.<br />
+The generously ludicrous<br />
+Espouses it.&nbsp; But see we sons of day,<br />
+Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight,<br />
+Accept the throb for lord of us;<br />
+For lord, for the main central light<br />
+That gives direction, not the eclipse;<br />
+Or dost thou look where niggard Age,<br />
+Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips<br />
+A tumbled top to grind a wolf&rsquo;s worn tooth;&mdash;<br />
+Hoar despot on our final stage,<br />
+<a name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>In dotage
+of a stunted Youth;&mdash;<br />
+Or it may be some venerable sage,<br />
+Not having thee awake in him, compact<br />
+Of wisdom else, the breast&rsquo;s old tempter trips;<br />
+Or see we ceremonial state,<br />
+Robing the gilded beast, exact<br />
+Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate<br />
+Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact;<br />
+A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips;<br />
+These are thy game wherever men engage:<br />
+These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,<br />
+The major and the minor potentate,<br />
+Creative of their various ape;&mdash;<br />
+The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write<br />
+Upon a perishable page<br />
+An inch above their fellows&rsquo; height;&mdash;<br />
+The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose<br />
+Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed<br />
+Of our first hungry figure wide agape;&mdash;<br />
+Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.<br />
+These, that would have men still of men be foes,<br />
+Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;<br />
+Would keep our life the whirly pool<br />
+Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;<br />
+The herd the drover&rsquo;s herd, the fool the fool,<br />
+Ourself our slavish self&rsquo;s infernal sun:<br />
+These are the children of the heart untaught<br />
+By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee<br />
+Untamed to tone its passions under thought,<br />
+The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.<br />
+Of them a world of coltish heels for school<br />
+We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&rsquo;Tis written of the Gods of human
+mould,<br />
+Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn<br />
+<a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 59</span>To quicken
+hymns, that they did hear, incensed,<br />
+Satiric comments overbold,<br />
+From one whose part was by decree<br />
+The jester&rsquo;s; but they boiled to feel him bite.<br />
+Better for them had they with Reason fenced<br />
+Or smiled corrected!&nbsp; They in the great Gods&rsquo; might<br
+/>
+Their prober crushed, as fingers flea.<br />
+Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire<br />
+His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit<br />
+Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,<br />
+The Satirist pass by on limping feet.<br />
+Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight<br />
+Below had then their last of airy glee;<br />
+They in the cup sought Laughter&rsquo;s drown&egrave;d sprite,<br
+/>
+Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.<br />
+Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,<br />
+And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.<br />
+This know we veritable.&nbsp; O Sage of Mirth!<br />
+Can it be true, the story men recount<br />
+Of the fall&rsquo;n plight of the great Gods on earth?<br />
+How they being deathless, though of human mould,<br />
+With human cravings, undecaying frames,<br />
+Must labour for subsistence; are a band<br />
+Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads<br />
+At haunts of holiday on summer sand:<br />
+And lightly he will hint to one that heeds<br />
+Names in pained designation of them, names<br />
+Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl<br />
+Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,<br />
+Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats<br />
+(His baby dimples in maternal chaps<br />
+Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)<br />
+Compassion for his masterful Trombone,<br />
+Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed<br />
+Of old: for him of the mountain-muscle feats,<br />
+<a name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 60</span>Who guts a
+drum to fetch a snappish groan:<br />
+For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom<br />
+A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .<br />
+The creature is of earnest mien<br />
+To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.<br />
+His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued,<br />
+He names; they are a rayless red and white;<br />
+The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.<br />
+And, if we recognize his Tambourine,<br />
+He asks; exhausted names her: she has become<br />
+A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen<br />
+Of overflowing dome on dome;<br />
+Redundancy contending with the tight,<br />
+Leaping the dam!&nbsp; He fondly calls, his girl,<br />
+The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile,<br />
+Refreshful.&nbsp; O but now his brows are dun,<br />
+Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile,<br />
+To drop his venomous: the Dame of dames,<br />
+Flower of the world, that honey one,<br />
+She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl,<br />
+To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss;<br />
+He names her, as a worshipper he names,<br />
+And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.<br />
+The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike<br />
+Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.<br />
+Curtain her close! her open arms<br />
+Have suckers for beholders: she to this?<br />
+For that she could not, save in fury, hear<br />
+A sharp corrective utterance flick<br />
+Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike<br />
+Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer<br />
+Above the snows, among the flowers?&nbsp; She reaps<br />
+This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?<br />
+Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms,<br />
+Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign,<br />
+<a name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>From Greek
+resplendent to Phoenician foul,<br />
+The trader in attractions sinks, all brine<br />
+To thoughts of taste; is &rsquo;t love?&mdash;bark, dog! hoot,
+owl!<br />
+And she is blushless: ancient worship weeps.<br />
+Suicide Graces dangle down the charms<br />
+Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.<br />
+She stands in her unholy oily leer<br />
+A statue losing feature, weather-sick<br />
+Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.<br />
+The curtain cried for magnifies to see!&mdash;<br />
+We cannot quench our one corrupting glance:<br />
+The vision of the rumour will not flee.<br />
+Doth the Boy own such Mother?&mdash;shoot his dart<br />
+To bring her, countless as the crested deeps,<br />
+Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?<br />
+False is that vision, shrieks the devotee;<br />
+Incredible, we echo; and anew<br />
+Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.<br />
+Low humourist this leader seems; perchance<br />
+Pitched from his University career,<br />
+Adept at classic fooling.&nbsp; Yet of mould<br />
+Human those Gods were: deathless too:<br />
+On high they not as meditatives paced:<br />
+Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh:<br />
+Descending, they would touch the lowest here:<br />
+And she, that lighted form of blue and gold,<br />
+Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced;<br />
+Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh;<br />
+Desired and hated, desperately dear;<br />
+Most human of them was.&nbsp; No more pursue!<br />
+Enough that the black story can be told.<br />
+It preaches to the eminently placed:<br />
+For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due,<br />
+Paints omen.&nbsp; Truly they our throbber had;<br />
+The passions plumping, passions playing leech,<br />
+<a name="page62"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 62</span>Cunning to
+trick us for the day&rsquo;s good cheer.<br />
+Our uncorrected human heart will swell<br />
+To notions monstrous, doings mad<br />
+As billows on a foam-lashed beach;<br />
+Borne on the tides of alternating heats,<br />
+Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well;<br />
+Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power<br />
+To speak in judgement: Nemesis, the fell:<br />
+Of those bright Gods assembled, offspring sour;<br />
+The last surviving on the upper seats;<br />
+As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,<br
+/>
+Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.<br />
+Not wiser of our mark than at the start,<br />
+It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea<br />
+To countering winds; a force blind-eyed,<br />
+On endless rounds of aimless reach;<br />
+Emotion for the source of pride,<br />
+The grounds of faith in fixity<br />
+Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech,<br />
+Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump<br />
+Swung on a time-piece, and by turns<br />
+A quivering energy to jump<br />
+For seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns,<br />
+Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud<br />
+Capping a sullen crater: and mankind<br />
+We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,<br />
+Because of thy straight leadership declined;<br />
+At heels of this or that delusive spark:<br />
+Now when the multitudinous races press<br />
+Elbow to elbow hourly more,<br />
+A thickened host; when now we hear aloud<br />
+Life for the very life implore<br />
+A signal of a visioned mark;<br />
+<a name="page63"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 63</span>Light of
+the mind, the mind&rsquo;s discourse,<br />
+The rational in graciousness,<br />
+Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,<br />
+To tame and lead that blind-eyed force<br />
+In harmony of harness with the crowd,<br />
+For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,<br />
+Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed<br />
+To holy work, deems it the heart&rsquo;s intent;<br />
+Or where a silken circle views it cowled,<br />
+The seeming figure of concordance, bent<br />
+On satiating tyrant lust<br />
+Or barren fits of sentiment.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thou wilt not have our paths befouled<br />
+By simulation; are we vile to view,<br />
+The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,<br />
+Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:<br />
+They make their mirror upon faces true;<br />
+And where they win reflection, lucid heave<br />
+The under tides of this hot heart seen through.<br />
+Beneficently wilt thou clip<br />
+All oversteppings of the plumed,<br />
+The puffed, and bid the masker strip,<br />
+And into the crowned windbag thrust,<br />
+Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,<br />
+A lightning o&rsquo;er the half-illumed,<br />
+Who to base brute-dominion cleave,<br />
+Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,<br />
+Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,<br />
+To spy a wound without a gash,<br />
+The magic in a turn of wrist,<br />
+And how are wedded heart and head regaled<br />
+When Wit o&rsquo;er Folly blows the mort,<br />
+And their high note of union spreads<br />
+Wide from the timely word with conquest charged;<br />
+<a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 64</span>Victorious
+laughter, of no loud report,<br />
+If heard; derision as divinely veiled<br />
+As terrible Immortals in rose-mist,<br />
+Given to the vision of arrested men:<br />
+Whereat they feel within them weave<br />
+Community its closer threads,<br />
+And are to our fraternal state enlarged;<br />
+Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken:<br />
+They learn that thou art not of alien sort,<br />
+Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed,<br />
+Or of the frosty heights unsealed,<br />
+Or of the vain who simple speech distort,<br />
+Or of the vapours pointing on to nought<br />
+Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch;<br />
+As when sole homeward the belated treads,<br />
+And hears aloft a clamour wailed,<br />
+That once had seemed the broomstick witch<br />
+Horridly violating cloud for drought:<br />
+He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears,<br />
+Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train;<br />
+Homeliest order in black sky appears,<br />
+Not less than in the lighted village steads.<br />
+So do those half-illumed wax clear to share<br />
+A cry that is our common voice; the note<br />
+Of fellowship upon a loftier plane,<br />
+Above embattled castle-wall and moat;<br />
+And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.<br />
+So thou for washing a phantasmal air,<br />
+For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise,<br />
+Laughter&mdash;the joy of Reason seeing fade<br />
+Obstruction into Earth&rsquo;s renewing beds,<br />
+Beneath the stroke of her good servant&rsquo;s blade&mdash;<br />
+Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed;<br />
+Gain of the years, conjunction&rsquo;s prize.<br />
+The greater heart in thy appeal to heads<br />
+<a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>They see,
+thou Captain of our civil Fort!<br />
+By more elusive savages assailed<br />
+On each ascending stage; untired<br />
+Both inner foe and outer to cut short,<br />
+And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist:<br />
+Showing old tiger&rsquo;s claws, old crocodile&rsquo;s<br />
+Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight,<br />
+Like forms in running water, oft when smiles,<br />
+When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight:<br />
+But never with the slayer&rsquo;s malice fired:<br />
+As little as informs an infant&rsquo;s fist<br />
+Clenched at the sneeze!&nbsp; Thou wouldst but have us be<br />
+Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow<br />
+Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree;<br />
+Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court:<br />
+Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress;<br />
+Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.<br />
+Ambrosial heights of possible acquist,<br />
+Where souls of men with soul of man consort,<br />
+And all look higher to new loveliness<br />
+Begotten of the look: thy mark is there;<br />
+While on our temporal ground alive,<br />
+Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword<br />
+Of finer temper now a numbered learn<br />
+That they resisting thee themselves resist;<br />
+And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive,<br />
+Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare<br />
+Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts.<br />
+More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord<br />
+Thou lead&rsquo;st to, doth this rebel heart discern,<br />
+When pinched ascetic and red sensualist<br />
+Alternately recurrent freeze or burn,<br />
+And of its old religions it has doubts.<br />
+It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare;<br />
+Less hates, part understands, nor much resents,<br />
+<a name="page66"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 66</span>When the
+prized objects it has raised for prayer,<br />
+For fitful prayer;&mdash;repentance dreading fire,<br />
+Impelled by aches; the blindness which repents<br />
+Like the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire;&mdash;<br />
+Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probe<br />
+Old institutions and establishments,<br />
+Once fortresses against the floods of sin,<br />
+For what their worth; and questioningly prod<br />
+For why they stand upon a racing globe,<br />
+Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod;<br />
+Their angel out of them, a demon in.</p>
+<p class="poetry">This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to
+fret,<br />
+To hurl at vanities, to drift in shame<br />
+Of gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod,<br />
+Shall of predestination wed thee yet.<br />
+Something it gathers of what things should drop<br />
+At entrance on new times; of how thrice broad<br />
+The world of minds communicative; how<br />
+A straggling Nature classed in school, and scored<br />
+With stripes admonishing, may yield to plough<br />
+Fruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tame<br />
+Be feeble on an Earth whose gentler crop<br />
+Is its most living, in the mind that steers,<br />
+By Reason led, her way of tree and flame,<br />
+Beyond the genuflexions and the tears;<br />
+Upon an Earth that cannot stop,<br />
+Where upward is the visible aim,<br />
+And ever we espy the greater God,<br />
+For simple pointing at a good adored:<br />
+Proof of the closer neighbourhood.&nbsp; Head on,<br />
+Sword of the many, light of the few! untwist<br />
+Or cut our tangles till fair space is won<br />
+Beyond a briared wood of austere brow,<br />
+Believed of discord by thy timely word<br />
+<a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 67</span>At
+intervals refreshing life: for thou<br />
+Art verify Keeper of the Muse&rsquo;s Key;<br />
+Thyself no vacant melodist;<br />
+On lower land elective even as she;<br />
+Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred;<br />
+Advising to her measured steps in flow;<br />
+And teaching how for being subjected free<br />
+Past thought of freedom we may come to know<br />
+The music of the meaning of Accord.</p>
+<h2><a name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 68</span>YOUTH
+IN MEMORY</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Days</span>, when the ball
+of our vision<br />
+Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;<br />
+When the grasp on the bow was decision,<br />
+And arrow and hand and eye were one;<br />
+When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,<br />
+Came heaving for rapture ahead!&mdash;<br />
+Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer<br />
+As lights over mounds of the dead.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead,<br />
+With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed,<br />
+Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear,<br />
+To bear the golden nectar-cup.<br />
+So flies desire at view of its delight,<br />
+When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.<br />
+We meanwhile who in hues of the sick year<br />
+The Spring-time paint to prick us for our lost,<br />
+Mount but the fatal half way up&mdash;<br />
+Whereon shut eyes!&nbsp; This is decreed,<br />
+For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend,<br />
+By passion for the arms&rsquo; possession tossed,<br />
+It falls the way of sighs and hath their end;<br />
+A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.<br />
+Good if the arrowy eagle of the height<br />
+Be then the little bird that hops to feed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Lame falls the cry to kindle days<br />
+Of radiant orb and daring gaze.<br />
+It does but clank our mortal chain.<br />
+For Earth reads through her felon old<br />
+<a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 69</span>The
+many-numbered of her fold,<br />
+Who forward tottering backward strain,<br />
+And would be thieves of treasure spent,<br />
+With their grey season soured.<br />
+She could write out their history in their thirst<br />
+To have again the much devoured,<br />
+And be the bud at burst;<br />
+In honey fancy join the flow,<br />
+Where Youth swims on as once they went,<br />
+All choiric for spontaneous glee<br />
+Of active eager lungs and thews;<br />
+They now bared roots beside the river bent;<br />
+Whose privilege themselves to see;<br />
+Their place in yonder tideway know;<br />
+The current glass peruse;<br />
+The depths intently sound;<br />
+And sapped by each returning flood<br />
+Accept for monitory nourishment<br />
+Those worn roped features under crust of mud,<br />
+Reflected in the silvery smooth around:<br />
+Not less the branching and high singing tree,<br />
+A home of nests, a landmark and a tent,<br />
+Until their hour for losing hold on ground.<br />
+Even such good harvest of the things that flee<br />
+Earth offers her subjected, and they choose<br />
+Rather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink,<br />
+And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.<br />
+So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Who cheerfully the little bird becomes,<br />
+Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs,<br />
+May have her dolings to the lightest touch;<br />
+As where some cripple muses by his crutch,<br />
+Unwitting that the spirit in him sings:<br />
+&lsquo;When I had legs, then had I wings,<br />
+<a name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>As good as
+any born of eggs,<br />
+To feed on all a&euml;rial things,<br />
+When I had legs!&rsquo;<br />
+And if not to embrace he sighs,<br />
+She gives him breath of Youth awhile,<br />
+Perspective of a breezy mile,<br />
+Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies;<br />
+Scenes where his nested dreams upon their hoard<br />
+Brooded, or up to empyrean soared:<br />
+Enough to link him with a dotted line.<br />
+But cravings for an eagle&rsquo;s flight,<br />
+To top white peaks and serve wild wine<br />
+Among the rosy undecayed,<br />
+Bring only flash of shade<br />
+From her full throbbing breast of day in night.<br />
+By what they crave are they betrayed:<br />
+And cavernous is that young dragon&rsquo;s jaw,<br />
+Crimson for all the fiery reptile saw<br />
+In time now coveted, for teeth to flay,<br />
+Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.<br />
+They to their moment of drawn breath,<br />
+Which is the life that makes the death,<br />
+The death that makes ethereal life would bind:<br />
+The death that breeds the spectre do they find.<br />
+Darkness is wedded and the waste regrets<br />
+Beating as dead leaves on a fitful gust,<br />
+By souls no longer dowered to climb<br />
+Beneath their pack of dust,<br />
+Whom envy of a lustrous prime,<br />
+Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets,<br />
+And dooms to sink and water sable flowers,<br />
+That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.<br />
+Strain we the arms for Memory&rsquo;s hours,<br />
+We are the seized Persephone.<br />
+<a name="page71"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 71</span>Responsive
+never to the soft desire<br />
+For one prized tune is this our chord of life.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife,<br />
+In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.<br />
+Yet have we glad companionship of Youth,<br />
+Elysian meadows for the mind,<br />
+Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb<br />
+Filled with the parti-coloured bloom<br />
+Of loved and hated, grasp all human truth<br />
+Sowed by us down the mazy paths behind.<br />
+To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through:<br />
+Whence comes a line of continuity,<br />
+That brings our middle station into view,<br />
+Between those poles; a novel Earth we see,<br />
+In likeness of us, made of banned and blest;<br />
+The sower&rsquo;s bed, but not the reaper&rsquo;s rest:<br />
+An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet<br />
+Buried, and breathing, and to be.<br />
+Then of the junction of the three,<br />
+Even as a heart in brain, full sweet<br />
+May sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Only the soul can walk the dusty track<br />
+Where hangs our flowering under vapours black,<br />
+And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,<br />
+Quench recollection of a spacious pure.<br />
+They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,<br />
+Hard at each other point and gape,<br />
+Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,<br />
+To reappear with one they drape<br />
+For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,<br />
+Who such distorted issue did beget.<br />
+Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat<br />
+Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame<br />
+Has eaten, and old Self consumes.<br />
+<a name="page72"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 72</span>Out of the
+purification will they leap,<br />
+Thee renovating while new light illumes<br />
+The dusky web of evil, known as pain,<br />
+That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;<br />
+Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain:<br />
+Midway the tameless oceanic brute<br />
+Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,<br />
+And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace<br />
+On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Forth of such passage through black fire we
+win<br />
+Clear hearing of the simple lute,<br />
+Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays<br />
+For them who can in quietness receive<br />
+Her restorative airs: a ditty thin<br />
+As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,<br />
+Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays<br />
+On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass<br />
+To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs<br />
+Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.<br />
+Solidity and bulk and martial brass,<br />
+Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score<br />
+A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,<br />
+While present in the spirit, vital there,<br />
+Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;<br />
+Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air<br />
+Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.<br />
+Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled<br />
+Historic of the soul, and heats anew<br />
+Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.<br />
+True of the man, and of mankind &rsquo;tis true,<br />
+Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,<br />
+Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred<br />
+Against the primal beast in us, and flung;<br />
+Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred<br />
+<a name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>Above
+self-pity slain: or it was Prayer<br />
+First taken for Life&rsquo;s cleanser; or the tongue<br />
+Spake for the world against this heart; or rings<br />
+Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;<br />
+Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb<br />
+From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob:<br />
+These quickening live.&nbsp; But deepest at her springs,<br />
+Most filial, is an eye to love her young.<br />
+And had we it, to see with it, alive<br />
+Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.<br />
+Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then<br />
+The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men:<br />
+She tributary to her aged restores<br />
+The living in the dead; she will inspire<br />
+Faith homelier than on the Yonder shores,<br />
+Abhorring these as mire,<br />
+Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes,<br />
+With mortal tremours pricking hopes,<br />
+And, by the final Bacchic of the lusts<br />
+Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts:<br />
+A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants;<br />
+Not utterly misled, though blindly led,<br />
+Led round fermenting eddies.&nbsp; Faith she plants<br />
+In her own firmness as our midway road:<br />
+Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read;<br />
+Her essence reading in her toothsome goad;<br />
+Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.<br />
+But love we well the young, her road midway<br />
+The darknesses runs consecrated clay.<br />
+Despite our feeble hold on this green home,<br />
+And the vast outer strangeness void of dome,<br />
+Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel,<br />
+Up to the moment of our prostrate fall,<br />
+The life they deem voluptuously real<br />
+Is more than empty echo of a call,<br />
+<a name="page74"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 74</span>Or shadow
+of a shade, or swing of tides;<br />
+As brooding upon age, when veins congeal,<br />
+Grey palsy nods to think.&nbsp; With us for guides,<br />
+Another step above the animal,<br />
+To views in Alpine thought are they helped on.<br />
+Good if so far we live in them when gone!</p>
+<p class="poetry">And there the arrowy eagle of the height<br />
+Becomes the little bird that hops to feed,<br />
+Glad of a crumb, for tempered appetite<br />
+To make it wholesome blood and fruitful seed.<br />
+Then Memory strikes on no slack string,<br />
+Nor sectional will varied Life appear:<br />
+Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hear<br />
+Earth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring.<br />
+And ours the mellow note, while sharing joys<br />
+No more subjecting mortals who have learnt<br />
+To build for happiness on equipoise,<br />
+The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt;<br />
+Know in our seasons an integral wheel,<br />
+That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed.<br />
+This, the truistic rubbish under heel<br />
+Of all the world, we peck at and are filled.</p>
+<h2><a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+75</span>PENETRATION AND TRUST</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Sleek</span> as a lizard at
+round of a stone,<br />
+The look of her heart slipped out and in.<br />
+Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone,<br />
+As innocents clear of a shade of sin.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">He laid a finger under her chin,<br />
+His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown:<br />
+Now, what will happen and who will win,<br />
+With me in the fight and my lady lone?</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p class="poetry">He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone;<br
+/>
+Was fire on her eyes till they let him in.<br />
+Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone,<br />
+And never a corner for serpent sin.</p>
+<h3>IV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin;<br
+/>
+Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown:<br />
+At home to the death my lord shall win,<br />
+When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone!</p>
+<h2><a name="page76"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 76</span>NIGHT
+OF FROST IN MAY</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">With</span> splendour of a
+silver day,<br />
+A frosted night had opened May:<br />
+And on that plumed and armoured night,<br />
+As one close temple hove our wood,<br />
+Its border leafage virgin white.<br />
+Remote down air an owl hallooed.<br />
+The black twig dropped without a twirl;<br />
+The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;<br />
+The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;<br />
+A crystal off the green leaf slipped.<br />
+Across the tracks of rimy tan,<br />
+Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;<br />
+A limping minnow-rillet ran,<br />
+To hang upon an icy foot.</p>
+<p class="poetry">In this shrill hush of quietude,<br />
+The ear conceived a severing cry.<br />
+Almost it let the sound elude,<br />
+When chuckles three, a warble shy,<br />
+From hazels of the garden came,<br />
+Near by the crimson-windowed farm.<br />
+They laid the trance on breath and frame,<br />
+A prelude of the passion-charm.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Then soon was heard, not sooner heard<br />
+Than answered, doubled, trebled, more,<br />
+Voice of an Eden in the bird<br />
+Renewing with his pipe of four<br />
+<a name="page77"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 77</span>The sob: a
+troubled Eden, rich<br />
+In throb of heart: unnumbered throats<br />
+Flung upward at a fountain&rsquo;s pitch,<br />
+The fervour of the four long notes,<br />
+That on the fountain&rsquo;s pool subside,<br />
+Exult and ruffle and upspring:<br />
+Endless the crossing multiplied<br />
+Of silver and of golden string.<br />
+There chimed a bubbled underbrew<br />
+With witch-wild spray of vocal dew.</p>
+<p class="poetry">It seemed a single harper swept<br />
+Our wild wood&rsquo;s inner chords and waked<br />
+A spirit that for yearning ached<br />
+Ere men desired and joyed or wept.<br />
+Or now a legion ravishing<br />
+Musician rivals did unite<br />
+In love of sweetness high to sing<br />
+The subtle song that rivals light;<br />
+From breast of earth to breast of sky:<br />
+And they were secret, they were nigh:<br />
+A hand the magic might disperse;<br />
+The magic swung my universe.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream,<br />
+Where all was visionary gleam;<br />
+Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed;<br />
+And feelings, passing joy and woe,<br />
+Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed,<br />
+Nor either was the one we know:<br />
+Nor pregnant of the heart contained<br />
+In us were they, that griefless plained,<br />
+That plaining soared; and through the heart<br />
+Struck to one note the wide apart:&mdash;<br />
+<a name="page78"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 78</span>A passion
+surgent from despair;<br />
+A paining bliss in fervid cold;<br />
+Off the last vital edge of air,<br />
+Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled,<br />
+For rapture of a wine of tears;<br />
+As had a star among the spheres<br />
+Caught up our earth to some mid-height<br />
+Of double life to ear and sight,<br />
+She giving voice to thought that shines<br />
+Keen-brilliant of her deepest mines;<br />
+While steely drips the rillet clinked,<br />
+And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Then was the lyre of earth beheld,<br />
+Then heard by me: it holds me linked;<br />
+Across the years to dead-ebb shores<br />
+I stand on, my blood-thrill restores.<br />
+But would I conjure into me<br />
+Those issue notes, I must review<br />
+What serious breath the woodland drew;<br />
+The low throb of expectancy;<br />
+How the white mother-muteness pressed<br />
+On leaf and meadow-herb; how shook,<br />
+Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crest<br />
+Seen spinning on the bracken-crook.</p>
+<h2><a name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>THE
+TEACHING OF THE NUDE</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry">A <span class="smcap">Satyr</span> spied a
+Goddess in her bath,<br />
+Unseen of her attendant nymphs; none knew.<br />
+Forthwith the creature to his fellows drew,<br />
+And looking backward on the curtained path,<br />
+He strove to tell; he could but heave a breast<br />
+Too full, and point to mouth, with failing leers:<br />
+Vainly he danced for speech, he giggled tears,<br />
+Made as if torn in two, as if tight pressed,<br />
+As if cast prone; then fetching whimpered tunes<br />
+For words, flung heel and set his hairy flight<br />
+Through forest-hollows, over rocky height.<br />
+The green leaves buried him three rounds of moons.<br />
+A senatorial Satyr named what herb<br />
+Had hurried him outrunning reason&rsquo;s curb.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&rsquo;Tis told how when that hieaway
+unchecked<br />
+To dell returned, he seemed of tempered mood:<br />
+Even as the valley of the torrent rude,<br />
+The torrent now a brook, the valley wrecked.<br />
+In him, to hale him high or hurl aheap,<br />
+Goddess and Goatfoot hourly wrestled sore;<br />
+Hourly the immortal prevailing more:<br />
+Till one hot noon saw Meliboeus peep<br />
+From thicket-sprays to where his full-blown dame,<br />
+<a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 80</span>In circle
+by the lusty friskers gripped,<br />
+Laughed the showered rose-leaves while her limbs were
+stripped.<br />
+She beckoned to our Satyr, and he came.<br />
+Then twirled she mounds of ripeness, wreath of arms.<br />
+His hoof kicked up the clothing for such charms.</p>
+<h2><a name="page81"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 81</span>BREATH
+OF THE BRIAR</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry">O <span class="smcap">briar-scents</span>, on
+yon wet wing<br />
+Of warm South-west wind brushing by,<br />
+You mind me of the sweetest thing<br />
+That ever mingled frank and shy:<br />
+When she and I, by love enticed,<br />
+Beneath the orchard-apples met,<br />
+In equal halves a ripe one sliced,<br />
+And smelt the juices ere we ate.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">That apple of the briar-scent,<br />
+Among our lost in Britain now,<br />
+Was green of rind, and redolent<br />
+Of sweetness as a milking cow.<br />
+The briar gives it back, well nigh<br />
+The damsel with her teeth on it;<br />
+Her twinkle between frank and shy,<br />
+My thirst to bite where she had bit.</p>
+<h2><a name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+82</span>EMPEDOCLES</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="smcap">He</span>
+leaped.&nbsp; With none to hinder,<br />
+Of Aetna&rsquo;s fiery scoriae<br />
+In the next vomit-shower, made he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A more peculiar cinder.<br />
+And this great Doctor, can it be,<br />
+He left no saner recipe<br />
+For men at issue with despair?<br />
+Admiring, even his poet owns,<br />
+While noting his fine lyric tones,<br />
+The last of him was heels in air!</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Comes Reverence, her
+features<br />
+Amazed to see high Wisdom hear,<br />
+With glimmer of a faunish leer,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; One mock her pride of creatures.<br />
+Shall such sad incident degrade<br />
+A stature casting sunniest shade?<br />
+O Reverence! let Reason swim;<br />
+Each life its critic deed reveals;<br />
+And him reads Reason at his heels,<br />
+If heels in air the last of him!</p>
+<h2><a name="page83"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+83</span>ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM</h2>
+<h3>I</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">The</span> day that is the
+night of days,<br />
+With cannon-fire for sun ablaze<br />
+We spy from any billow&rsquo;s lift;<br />
+And England still this tidal drift!<br />
+Would she to sainted forethought vow<br />
+A space before the thunders flood,<br />
+That martyr of its hour might now<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Spare her the tears of blood.</p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+<p class="poetry">Asleep upon her ancient deeds,<br />
+She hugs the vision plethora breeds,<br />
+And counts her manifold increase<br />
+Of treasure in the fruits of peace.<br />
+What curse on earth&rsquo;s improvident,<br />
+When the dread trumpet shatters rest,<br />
+Is wreaked, she knows, yet smiles content<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As cradle rocked from breast.</p>
+<h3>III</h3>
+<p class="poetry">She, impious to the Lord of Hosts,<br />
+The valour of her offspring boasts,<br />
+Mindless that now on land and main<br />
+His heeded prayer is active brain.<br />
+No more great heart may guard the home,<br />
+Save eyed and armed and skilled to cleave<br />
+Yon swallower wave with shroud of foam,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; We see not distant heave.</p>
+<h3><a name="page84"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+84</span>IV</h3>
+<p class="poetry">They stand to be her sacrifice,<br />
+The sons this mother flings like dice,<br />
+To face the odds and brave the Fates;<br />
+As in those days of starry dates,<br />
+When cannon cannon&rsquo;s counterblast<br />
+Awakened, muzzle muzzle bowled,<br />
+And high in swathe of smoke the mast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Its fighting rag outrolled.</p>
+<p>1891.</p>
+<h2><a name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 85</span>TARDY
+SPRING</h2>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">Now</span> the North wind ceases,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The warm South-west awakes;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Swift fly the fleeces,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thick the blossom-flakes.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Now hill to hill has made the stride,<br />
+And distance waves the without end:<br />
+Now in the breast a door flings wide;<br />
+Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.<br />
+And song of England&rsquo;s rush of flowers<br />
+Is this full breeze with mellow stops,<br />
+That spins the lark for shine, for showers;<br />
+He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.<br />
+The stir in memory seem these things,<br />
+Which out of moistened turf and clay<br />
+Astrain for light push patient rings,<br />
+Or leap to find the waterway.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis equal to a wonder done,<br />
+Whatever simple lives renew<br />
+Their tricks beneath the father sun,<br />
+As though they caught a broken clue;<br />
+So hard was earth an eyewink back:<br />
+But now the common life has come,<br />
+The blotting cloud a dappled pack,<br />
+The grasses one vast underhum.<br />
+A City clothed in snow and soot,<br />
+With lamps for day in ghostly rows,<br />
+Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,<br />
+The river that reflective flows:<br />
+<a name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 86</span>And there
+did fog down crypts of street<br />
+Play spectre upon eye and mouth:&mdash;<br />
+Their faces are a glass to greet<br />
+This magic of the whirl for South.<br />
+A burly joy each creature swells<br />
+With sound of its own hungry quest;<br />
+Earth has to fill her empty wells,<br />
+And speed the service of the nest;<br />
+The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,<br />
+That haunts the farmer&rsquo;s look abroad,<br />
+Who sees what tomb a white night built,<br />
+Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.<br />
+For iron Winter held her firm;<br />
+Across her sky he laid his hand;<br />
+And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;<br />
+A sightless heaven, a shaven land.<br />
+Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,<br />
+The bitten buds dared not unfold:<br />
+We raced on roads and ice to keep<br />
+Thought of the girl we love from cold.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;But now the North wind
+ceases,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The warm South-west awakes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The heavens are out in fleeces,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And earth&rsquo;s green banner shakes.</p>
+<h2><a name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>THE
+LABOURER</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">For</span> a Heracles in
+his fighting ire there is never the glory that follows<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of
+the work he has done.<br />
+But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the
+Labourer&rsquo;s crown is Apollo&rsquo;s,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While stands he yet in his grime and sweat&mdash;to
+wrestle for fruits of the Sun.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Can an enemy wither his cheer?&nbsp; Not you,
+ye fair yellow-flowering ladies,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a
+bosom heroic, and clog.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a
+great soul to their Hades,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears
+the deep bay of the Dog.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a
+policy carving new fashions:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The winninger course than the rule of force, and the
+springs lured to run in a stream:<br />
+He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason
+to swallow the passions,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a
+trouble extreme!</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+88</span>Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer&rsquo;s
+resolute hope: that by him shall be written,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak
+from the strong made just:<br />
+That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice
+vitalised Britain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Ashine with the light of the doing of right: at the
+gates of the Future in trust.</p>
+<h2><a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+89</span>FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Sprung</span> of the father
+blood, the mother brain,<br />
+Are they who point our pathway and sustain.<br />
+They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.<br />
+When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.</p>
+<p class="poetry">To see Life&rsquo;s formless offspring and
+subdue<br />
+Desire of times unripe, we have these two,<br />
+Whose union is right reason: join they hands,<br />
+The world shall know itself and where it stands;<br />
+What cowering angel and what upright beast<br />
+Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,<br />
+Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.<br />
+When these two meet, a point of time is ours.</p>
+<p class="poetry">As in a land of waterfalls, that flow<br />
+Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,<br />
+Some eddies near the brink borne swift along<br />
+Will capture hearing with the liquid song,<br />
+So, while the headlong world&rsquo;s imperious force<br />
+Resounded under, heard I these discourse.</p>
+<p class="poetry">First words, where down my woodland walk she
+led,<br />
+To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Your faith in me appals, to shake my
+own,<br />
+When still I find you in this mire alone.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+90</span>&mdash;The few steps taken at a funeral pace<br />
+By men had slain me but for those you trace.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Look I once back, a broken pinion I:<br
+/>
+Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Needs must you drink of me while here
+you live,<br />
+And make me rich in feeling I can give.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:<br
+/>
+Yet must I read my sister for the How.<br />
+My daisy better knows her God of beams<br />
+Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.<br />
+She hath the secret never fieriest reach<br />
+Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Liker the clod flaked by the driving
+plough,<br />
+My semblance when I have you not as now.<br />
+The quiet creatures who escape mishap<br />
+Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:<br />
+A picture of the settled peace desired<br />
+By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.<br />
+I listen at their breasts: is there no jar<br />
+Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,<br />
+And such a picture as the piercing mind<br />
+Ranks beneath vegetation.&nbsp; Not resigned<br />
+Are my true pupils while the world is brute.<br />
+What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,<br />
+Stronger impels the motion of my heart.<br />
+I am not Resignation&rsquo;s counterpart.<br />
+If that I teach, &rsquo;tis little the dry word,<br />
+Content, but how to savour hope deferred.<br />
+We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;<br />
+Soon carrion if very earth are we!</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page91"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+91</span>The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use<br />
+Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;<br />
+Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,<br />
+And pass despised; &lsquo;a-cold for lack of heat,&rsquo;<br />
+Like other corpses, but without death&rsquo;s plea.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;My sister calls for battle; is it
+she?</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Rather a world of pressing men in
+arms,<br />
+Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms<br />
+Each drowsy malady and coiling vice<br />
+With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!<br />
+No home is here for peace while evil breeds,<br />
+While error governs, none; and must the seeds<br />
+You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,<br />
+Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,<br />
+Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood<br />
+Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;My sober little maid, when we meet
+first,<br />
+Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.<br />
+So can I not of her till circumstance<br />
+Drugs cravings.&nbsp; Here we see how men advance<br />
+A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,<br />
+Like dead weeds on whipped waters.&nbsp; Shout the word<br />
+Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,<br />
+As to band-music under Victory&rsquo;s arch.<br />
+Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then<br />
+The beauty of frank animals had men.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Observe them, and down rearward for a
+term,<br />
+Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.<br />
+Thence look this way, across the fields that show<br />
+Men&rsquo;s early form of speech for Yes and No.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+92</span>My sister a bruised infant&rsquo;s utterance had;<br />
+And issuing stronger, to mankind &rsquo;twas mad.<br />
+I knew my home where I had choice to feel<br />
+The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Speak of this Age.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;When you it shall discern<br />
+Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;For neither of us has it any care;<br />
+Its learning is through Science to despair.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Despair lies down and grovels, grapples
+not<br />
+With evil, casts the burden of its lot.<br />
+This Age climbs earth.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;To challenge heaven.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Not less<br />
+The lower deeps.&nbsp; It laughs at Happiness!<br />
+That know I, though the echoes of it wail,<br />
+For one step upward on the crags you scale.<br />
+Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,<br />
+Which means our soul asleep or body&rsquo;s lust,<br />
+Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat<br />
+A temperate common music, sunlike heat<br />
+The happiness not predatory sheds!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;But your fierce Yes and No of butting
+heads<br />
+Now rages to outdo a horny Past.<br />
+Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast<br />
+Are thrown by every novel light upraised.<br />
+The world&rsquo;s whole round smokes ominously, amazed<br />
+<a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>And
+trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.<br />
+Combustibles on hot combustibles<br />
+Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire<br />
+The mountain-torrent of infernal ire<br />
+And leave the track of devils where men built.<br />
+Perceptive of a doom, the sinner&rsquo;s guilt<br />
+Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,<br />
+If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,<br />
+To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:<br />
+None save they but the souls which them contain.<br />
+No extramural God, the God within<br />
+Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.<br />
+A world that for the spur of fool and knave<br />
+Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?<br />
+But men who ply their wits in such a school<br />
+Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Much have I studied hard Necessity!<br
+/>
+To know her Wisdom&rsquo;s mother, and that we<br />
+May deem the harshness of her later cries<br />
+In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,<br />
+If men among the warnings which convulse<br />
+Can gravely dread without the craven&rsquo;s pulse.<br />
+Long ere the rising of this age of ours,<br />
+The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.<br />
+Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,<br />
+And are as lasting as the parent thing.<br />
+Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,<br />
+They might o&rsquo;ermatch and have mankind at will.<br />
+Behold such army gathering; ours the spur,<br />
+No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.<br />
+Not fool or knave is now the enemy<br />
+O&rsquo;ershadowing men, &rsquo;tis Folly, Knavery!<br />
+A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.<br />
+Now must the brother soul alive in each<br />
+<a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 94</span>His
+traitorous individual devildom<br />
+Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.<br />
+Dimly men see it menacing apace<br />
+To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.<br />
+Within, without, they are a field of tares:<br />
+Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,<br />
+And wherefore warrior service they must yield,<br />
+Shines visible as life on either field.<br />
+That is my comfort, following shock on shock,<br />
+Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.<br />
+Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,<br />
+Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,<br />
+Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,<br />
+The human and Satanic intellect,<br />
+Determined for their uses to control<br />
+What forces on the earth and under roll,<br />
+Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand<br />
+Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.<br />
+They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:<br />
+Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;My sister, as I read them in my
+glass,<br />
+Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.<br />
+How waken them that have not any bent<br />
+Save browsing&mdash;the concrete indifferent!<br />
+Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:<br />
+They fear not for the race when full the trough.<br />
+They have much fear of giving up the ghost;<br />
+And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;If I could see with you, and did not
+faint<br />
+In beating wing, the future I would paint.<br />
+Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:<br />
+Now meanwhile is another mass awake,<br />
+<a name="page95"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 95</span>Once
+denser than the grunters of the sty.<br />
+If I could see with you!&nbsp; Could I but fly!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;The length of days that you with them
+have housed,<br />
+An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;O true, they have a cause, and woe for
+us,<br />
+While still they have a cause too piteous!<br />
+Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,<br />
+They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,<br />
+And quicken in the virtue of their cause,<br />
+To think me a poor mouther of old saws!<br />
+I wait the issue of a battling Age;<br />
+The toilers with your &lsquo;troughsters&rsquo; now engage;<br />
+Instructing them, through their acutest sense,<br />
+How close the dangers of indifference!<br />
+Already have my people shown their worth,<br />
+More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.<br />
+That love to love of labour leads: thence love<br />
+Of humankind&mdash;earth&rsquo;s incense flung above.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Admit some other features: Faithless,
+mean;<br />
+Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;<br />
+Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells<br />
+On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;<br />
+And if I bid it face what <i>I</i> observe,<br />
+Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Oft has your prophet, for reward of
+toil,<br />
+Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:<br />
+Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,<br />
+Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.<br />
+Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:<br />
+As little as Time&rsquo;s earliest knew the sky.<br />
+<a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 96</span>Perchance
+among them shoots a lustrous flame<br />
+At intervals, in proof of whom they came.<br />
+To strengthen our foundations is the task<br />
+Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,<br />
+Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves<br />
+The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.<br />
+My sister sees no round beyond her mood;<br />
+To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.<br />
+Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,<br />
+It moves: O much for me to say it moves!<br />
+About his &AElig;thiop Highlands Nile is Nile,<br />
+Though not the stream of the paternal smile:<br />
+And where his tide of nourishment he drives,<br />
+An Abyssinian wantonness revives.<br />
+Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;<br />
+He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,<br />
+The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;<br />
+Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.<br />
+To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,<br />
+He is the vast Insensate who devours<br />
+His golden promise over leagues of seed,<br />
+Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.<br />
+The races which on barbarous force begin<br />
+Inherit onward of their origin,<br />
+And cancelled blessings will the current length<br />
+Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis not in men to recognize the need<br />
+Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.<br />
+Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;<br />
+Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.<br />
+Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,<br />
+For tens up the safe mountains at his head.<br />
+Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,<br />
+Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.<br />
+<a name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+97</span>&mdash;That rings of truth!&nbsp; More do your people
+thrive;<br />
+Your Many are more merrily alive<br />
+Than erewhile when I gloried in the page<br />
+Of radiant singer and anointed sage.<br />
+Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;<br />
+Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!<br />
+All structures built upon a narrow space<br />
+Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.<br />
+O thrice must one be you, to see them shift<br />
+Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;<br />
+With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,<br />
+Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!<br />
+And thrice must one be you, to wait release<br />
+From duress in the swamp of their increase.<br />
+At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,<br />
+A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed<br />
+Philosophers behold; desponding view<br />
+Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;<br />
+Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,<br />
+Dive down the fumy &AElig;tna of their brains.<br />
+Belated vessels on a rising sea,<br />
+They seem: they pass!</p>
+<p
+class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&mdash;But
+not Philosophy!</p>
+<p class="poetry">&mdash;Ay, be we faithful to ourselves:
+despise<br />
+Nought but the coward in us!&nbsp; That way lies<br />
+The wisdom making passage through our slough.<br />
+Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;<br />
+Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.<br />
+Philosophy is Life&rsquo;s one match for Fate.<br />
+That photosphere of our high fountain One,<br />
+Our spirit&rsquo;s Lord and Reason&rsquo;s fostering sun,<br />
+Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,<br />
+Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.<br />
+<a name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+98</span>Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,<br />
+Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!<br />
+Advantage to the Many: that we name<br />
+God&rsquo;s voice; have there the surety in our aim.<br />
+This thought unto my sister do I owe,<br />
+And irony and satire off me throw.<br />
+They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,<br />
+Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.<br />
+Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,<br />
+Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.<br />
+Who never yet of scattered lamps was born<br />
+To speed a world, a marching world to warn,<br />
+But sunward from the vivid Many springs,<br />
+Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.</p>
+<h2><a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 99</span>THE
+WARNING</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">We</span> have seen mighty
+men ballooning high,<br />
+And in another moment bump the ground.<br />
+He falls; and in his measurement is found<br />
+To count some inches o&rsquo;er the common fry.<br />
+&rsquo;Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,<br />
+Yet &rsquo;twas enough above his fellows crowned,<br />
+Had he less panted.&nbsp; Let his faithful hound<br />
+Bark at detractors.&nbsp; He may walk or lie.<br />
+Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas&mdash;<br />
+This little Isle&rsquo;s insatiable greed<br />
+For Continents&mdash;filled to inflation burst.<br />
+So do ripe nations into squalor pass,<br />
+When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,<br />
+They scorn the brain&rsquo;s wild search for virtuous light.</p>
+<h2>OUTSIDE THE CROWD</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">To</span> sit on History in
+an easy chair,<br />
+Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom &rsquo;twas writ!<br />
+Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,<br />
+Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air.<br />
+If more than hands&rsquo; and armsful be our share,<br />
+Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit.<br />
+Have we not heard derision infinite<br />
+When old men play the youth to chase the snare?<br />
+Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes,<br />
+Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent,<br />
+The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex,<br />
+Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent;<br />
+Armed to support her sword;&mdash;lest we compose<br />
+That Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.</p>
+<h2><a name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+100</span>TRAFALGAR DAY</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">He</span> leads: we hear
+our Seaman&rsquo;s call<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the roll of battles won;<br />
+For he is Britain&rsquo;s Admiral<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till setting of her sun.</p>
+<p class="poetry">When Britain&rsquo;s life was in her ships,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He kept the sea as his own right;<br />
+And saved us from more fell eclipse<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Than drops on day from blackest night.<br />
+Again his battle spat the flame!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Again his victory flag men saw!<br />
+At sound of Nelson&rsquo;s chieftain name,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A deeper breath did Freedom draw.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Each trusty captain knew his part:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They served as men, not marshalled kine:<br />
+The pulses they of his great heart,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With heads to work his main design.<br />
+Their Nelson&rsquo;s word, to beat the foe,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And spare the fall&rsquo;n, before them shone.<br />
+Good was the hour of blow for blow,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And clear their course while they fought on.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Behold the Envied vanward sweep!&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A day in mourning weeds adored!<br />
+Then Victory was wrought to weep;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+101</span>A breezeless flag above a shroud<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; All Britain was when wind and wave,<br />
+To make her, passing human, proud,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Brought his last gift from o&rsquo;er the grave!</p>
+<p class="poetry">Uprose the soul of him a star<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On that brave day of Ocean days:<br />
+It rolled the smoke from Trafalg&aacute;r<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To darken Austerlitz ablaze.<br />
+Are we the men of old, its light<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Will point us under every sky<br />
+The path he took; and must we fight,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our Nelson be our battle-cry!</p>
+<p class="poetry">He leads: we hear our Seaman&rsquo;s call<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the roll of battles won;<br />
+For he is Britain&rsquo;s Admiral<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Till setting of her sun.</p>
+<h2><a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>ODES
+IN CONTRIBUTION TO THE SONG OF FRENCH HISTORY</h2>
+<h3><a name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 105</span>THE
+REVOLUTION</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Not</span> yet had
+History&rsquo;s Aetna smoked the skies,<br />
+And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained,<br />
+While overhead in ordered set and rise<br />
+Her kingly crowns immutably defiled;<br />
+Effulgent on funereal piled<br />
+Across the vacant heavens, and distrained<br />
+Her body, mutely, even as earth, to bear;<br />
+Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Through marching scores of winters racked she
+lay,<br />
+Beneath a hoar-frost&rsquo;s brilliant crust,<br />
+Whereon the jewelled flies that drained<br />
+Her breasts disported in a glistering spray;<br />
+She, the land&rsquo;s fount of fruits, enclosed with dust;<br />
+By good and evil angels fed, sustained<br />
+In part to curse, in part to pray,<br />
+Sucking the dubious rumours, till men saw<br />
+The throbs of her charged heart before the Just,<br />
+So worn the harrowed surface had become:<br />
+And still they deemed the dance above was Law,<br />
+Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Then, on the unanticipated day,<br />
+Earth heaved, and rose a veinous mound<br />
+<a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>To roar
+of the underfloods; and off it sprang,<br />
+Ravishing as red wine in woman&rsquo;s form,<br />
+A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh,<br />
+Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned;<br />
+She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray,<br />
+Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sang<br />
+Intoxication to her swarm,<br />
+Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole,<br />
+As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff,<br />
+Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay<br />
+(O ripeness of the time!&nbsp; O Retribution sure,<br />
+If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!)<br />
+And, like a glad releasing of her soul,<br />
+Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue,<br />
+Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined,<br />
+In the face of men they joined: attest it true,<br />
+The million witnesses, that she,<br />
+For ages lying beside the mole,<br />
+Was on the unanticipated miracle day<br />
+Upraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal,<br />
+Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knew<br />
+What Lucifer of the Mint had coined<br />
+His bride&rsquo;s adulterate currency<br />
+Of burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate;<br />
+She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate:<br />
+His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed.<br />
+Read backward on the hoar-frost&rsquo;s brilliant crust;<br />
+Beneath it read.<br />
+Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood,<br />
+A radiance fringed with grim affright;<br />
+For them that hungered, she was nourishing food,<br />
+For those who sparkled, Night.<br />
+Read in her heart, and how before the Just<br />
+Her doings, her misdoings, plead.</p>
+<h4><a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+107</span>IV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Down on her leap for him the young Angelical
+broke<br />
+To husband a resurgent France:<br />
+From whom, with her dethroning stroke,<br />
+Dishonour passed; the dalliance,<br />
+That is occasion&rsquo;s yea or nay,<br />
+In issues for the soul to pay,<br />
+Discarded; and the cleft &rsquo;twixt deed and word,<br />
+The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird,<br />
+Wherein we see old Darkness peer,<br />
+Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence;<br />
+And hence the talons and the beak of prey;<br />
+Hence all the lures to silken swine<br />
+Thronging the troughs of indolence;<br />
+With every sleek convolvement serpentine;<br />
+The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer,<br />
+And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay.<br />
+He clasped in this revived, uprisen France,<br />
+A valorous dame, of countenance<br />
+The lightning&rsquo;s upon cloud: unlit as yet<br />
+On brows and lips the lurid shine<br />
+Of seas in the night-wind&rsquo;s whirl; unstirred<br />
+Her pouch of the centuries&rsquo; injuries compressed;<br />
+The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard:<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s animate full flower she looked, intense<br />
+For worship, wholly given him, fair<br />
+Adoring or desiring; in her bright jet,<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s crystal spring to sky: Earth&rsquo;s warrior
+Best<br />
+To win Heaven&rsquo;s Pure up that midway<br />
+We vision for new ground, where sense<br />
+And spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare,<br />
+Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarray<br />
+In scorn of the seductive insincere,<br />
+But martially nude for hot Bellona&rsquo;s play,<br />
+And amorous of the loftiest in her view.</p>
+<h4><a name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+108</span>V</h4>
+<p class="poetry">She sprang from dust to drink of earth&rsquo;s
+cool dew,<br />
+The breath of swaying grasses share,<br />
+Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear,<br />
+At wrestle with the tyrannic strong;<br />
+Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew,<br />
+As immortals may be in the mortal sphere.<br />
+Read through her launching heart, who had lain long<br />
+With Earth and heard till it became her own<br />
+Our good Great Mother&rsquo;s eve and matin song:<br />
+The humming burden of Earth&rsquo;s toil to feed<br />
+Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth,<br />
+Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown<br />
+Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both,<br />
+Of either aided on their hard ascent.<br />
+Now when she looked, with love&rsquo;s benign delight<br />
+After great ecstasy, along the plains,<br />
+What foulest impregnation of her sight<br />
+Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops<br />
+Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent,<br />
+As were they winter sedges, broken hoops,<br />
+Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts,<br />
+With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains?<br />
+Recked she that some perverting devil had limned<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s proudest to spout scorn of the Maker&rsquo;s
+hand,<br />
+Who could a day behold these deathly hosts,<br />
+And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed,<br />
+A ribanded and gemmed elected few,<br />
+Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:&mdash;<br />
+Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game<br />
+Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame:<br />
+Beautiful statures; hideous,<br />
+By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains,<br />
+And flexile where is manhood straight;<br />
+Mortuaries where warm should beat<br />
+<a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 109</span>The
+brotherhood that keeps blood sweet:<br />
+Who dared in cantique impious<br />
+Proclaim the Just, to whom was due<br />
+Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state,<br />
+For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains,<br />
+On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew.<br />
+Surely a devil&rsquo;s land when that meant death for each!<br />
+Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus,<br />
+With all the body&rsquo;s life to plump the leech,<br />
+Is Nature&rsquo;s way, she knew.&nbsp; The abominable scene<br />
+Spat at the skies; and through her veins,<br />
+To cloud celestially sown,<br />
+Ran venom of what nourishment<br />
+Her dark sustainer subterrene<br />
+Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack,<br />
+Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains,<br />
+Under derisive revels, prone<br />
+As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.</p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Now was her face white waves in the
+tempest&rsquo;s sharp flame-blink;<br />
+Her skies shot black.<br />
+Now was it visioned infamy to drink<br />
+Of earth&rsquo;s cool dew, and through the vines<br />
+Frolic in pearly laughter with her young,<br />
+Watching the healthful, natural, happy signs<br />
+Where hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung,<br />
+After their sly shy ventures from the leaf,<br />
+And promised bunches.&nbsp; Now it seemed<br />
+The world was one malarious mire,<br />
+Crying for purification: chief<br />
+This land of France.&nbsp; It seemed<br />
+A duteous desire<br />
+To drink of life&rsquo;s hot flood, and the crimson streamed.</p>
+<h4><a name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+110</span>VII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">She drank what makes man demon at the
+draught.<br />
+Her skies lowered black,<br />
+Her lover flew,<br />
+There swept a shudder over men.<br />
+Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed,<br />
+For laughter was her spirit&rsquo;s weapon then.<br />
+The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.</p>
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">As mighty thews burst manacles, she went
+mad:<br />
+Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits.<br />
+Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had!<br />
+To tread her down in her live grave beneath<br />
+Their dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath,<br />
+They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits.<br />
+Without they girdled her, made nest within.<br />
+There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake.<br />
+They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood;<br />
+Believing it, in the mother&rsquo;s mind at strain,<br />
+In the mother&rsquo;s fears, and in young Liberty&rsquo;s wail<br
+/>
+Alarmed, for her encompassed children&rsquo;s sake,<br />
+The sole sure way to save her priceless bud.<br />
+Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail,<br />
+Vengeance appeared as logically akin.<br />
+Insanely rational they; she rationally insane;<br />
+And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.</p>
+<h4>IX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Amid the plash of scarlet mud<br />
+Stained at the mouth, drunk with our common air,<br />
+Not lack of love was her defect;<br />
+The Fury mourned and raged and bled for France<br />
+Breathing from exultation to despair<br />
+At every wild-winged hope struck by mischance<br />
+<a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 111</span>Soaring
+at each faint gleam o&rsquo;er her abyss.<br />
+Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect,<br />
+The frontier march she piped her sons, for where<br />
+Her crouching outer enemy camped,<br />
+Attendant on the deadlier inner&rsquo;s hiss.<br />
+She piped her sons the frontier march, the wine<br />
+Of martial music, History&rsquo;s cherished tune;<br />
+And they, the saintliest labourers that aye<br />
+Dropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped;<br />
+High-breasted to match men or elements,<br />
+Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled:<br />
+War&rsquo;s ragged pupils; many a wavering line,<br />
+Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,<br />
+Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,<br />
+To jest at famine, ply<br />
+The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field;<br />
+Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents;<br />
+Fronting the red artillery straighten spine;<br />
+Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn;<br />
+Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;<br />
+Die, if the multiple hazards around said die;<br />
+Downward measure a foeman mightily sized;<br />
+Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised;<br />
+Lyrical on into death&rsquo;s red roaring jaw-gape, steeled<br />
+Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply.<br />
+Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!</p>
+<h4>X</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind
+rattle their thunder<br />
+Loud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great
+South-west,<br />
+Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the
+race:<br />
+<a name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 112</span>Lo, in
+the day&rsquo;s young beams the colossal invading pursuers<br />
+Burst upon rocks and were foam;<br />
+Ridged up a torrent crest;<br />
+Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder;<br />
+Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace.<br
+/>
+Yesterday&rsquo;s clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid
+comb;<br />
+They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under;<br />
+They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home;<br />
+They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers;<br
+/>
+Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the
+pursuers.<br />
+Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace;<br />
+Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army
+dispieced;<br />
+Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb.<br />
+Fly! was the sportsman&rsquo;s word; and the note of the quarry
+rang, Chase!</p>
+<h4>XI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Banners from South, from East,<br />
+Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred;<br />
+The captive brides of valour, Sabine Wives<br />
+Plucked from the foeman&rsquo;s blushful bed,<br />
+For glorious muted battle-tongues<br />
+Of deeds along the horizon&rsquo;s red,<br />
+At cost of unreluctant lives;<br />
+Her toilful heroes homeward poured,<br />
+To give their fevered mother air of the lungs.<br />
+<a name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>She
+breathed, and in the breathing craved.<br />
+Environed as she was, at bay,<br />
+Safety she kissed on her drawn sword,<br />
+And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved:<br />
+She craved for victory as her daily bread;<br />
+For victory as her daily banquet raved.</p>
+<h4>XII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey<br
+/>
+Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore<br />
+To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more<br />
+Devitalizing: red washer Auroral ray;<br />
+Desired if but to paint her pallid hue.<br />
+The passion for that young horizon red,<br />
+Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,<br />
+Like dotage of the past-meridian dame<br />
+For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled<br />
+Insatiate, to the voracious grew,<br />
+The glutton&rsquo;s inward raveners bred;<br />
+Till she, mankind&rsquo;s most dreaded, most abhorred,<br />
+Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,<br />
+As by the weaving Fates impelled,<br />
+To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,<br />
+Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.</p>
+<h4>XIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Banners from East, from South,<br />
+She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,<br />
+Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne.<br />
+So may you see the village innocent,<br />
+With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,<br />
+In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone:<br />
+See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh<br />
+Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed.<br />
+False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,<br />
+<a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 114</span>She
+fell: from his ethereal home observed<br />
+Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead<br />
+Against the season&rsquo;s fruit for deadly Seed,<br />
+But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,<br />
+Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought.<br />
+Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold<br />
+The doer of the monstrous; she aroused,<br />
+She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,<br />
+More strongly the divine in him than when<br />
+Joy of her as she sprang from mould<br />
+Drew him the midway heavens adown<br />
+To clasp her in his arms espoused<br />
+Before the sight of wondering men,<br />
+And put upon the day a deathless crown.<br />
+The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,<br />
+His alien love laid open, to divide<br />
+The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew<br />
+What cowardice in her valour could reside;<br />
+What strength her weakness covered; what abased<br />
+Sublimity so illumining, and what raised<br />
+This wallower in old slime to noblest heights,<br />
+Up to the union on the midway blue:&mdash;<br />
+Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs<br />
+Among dark History&rsquo;s nocturnal lights,<br />
+With vivid beams indicative to the quick<br />
+Of all who have felt the vaulted body&rsquo;s pangs<br />
+Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick.<br />
+She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned<br />
+To the one helping hand above;<br />
+Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,<br />
+Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love<br />
+That day: and he, the bright day&rsquo;s husband, still with
+love,<br />
+Though alien, though to an upper seat retired,<br />
+Behold a wrangling heart, as &rsquo;twere her soul<br />
+<a name="page115"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 115</span>On
+eddies of wild waters cast;<br />
+In wilderness division; fired<br />
+For domination, freedom, lust,<br />
+The Pleasures; lo, a witch&rsquo;s snaky bowl<br />
+Set at her lips; the blood-drinker&rsquo;s madness fast<br />
+Upon her; and therewith mistrust,<br />
+Most of herself: a mouth of guile.<br />
+Compassionately could he smile,<br />
+To hear the mouth disclaiming God,<br />
+And clamouring for the Just!<br />
+Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed<br />
+City and field; and pushed abroad<br />
+O&rsquo;er hungry waves to thirsty sands,<br />
+Flaring at further; she had grown to be<br />
+The headless with the fearful hands;<br />
+To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced.<br />
+But he, remembering how his love began,<br />
+And of what creature, pitied when was plain<br />
+Another measure of captivity:<br />
+The need for strap and rod;<br />
+The penitential prayers again;<br />
+Again the bitter bowing down to dust;<br />
+The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God,<br />
+The answer when is call upon the Just.<br />
+Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode<br />
+Her master, saying, &lsquo;I only; I who can!&rsquo;<br />
+And echoed round her army, now her chain.<br />
+So learns the nation, closing Anarch&rsquo;s reign,<br />
+That she had been in travail of a Man.</p>
+<h3><a name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+116</span>NAPOL&Eacute;ON</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Cannon</span> his name,<br
+/>
+Cannon his voice, he came.<br />
+Who heard of him heard shaken hills,<br />
+An earth at quake, to quiet stamped;<br />
+Who looked on him beheld the will of wills,<br />
+The driver of wild flocks where lions ramped:<br />
+Beheld War&rsquo;s liveries flee him, like lumped grass<br />
+Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm;<br />
+While laurelled over his Imperial form,<br />
+Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,<br />
+Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame.<br />
+Incarnate Victory, Power manifest,<br />
+Infernal or God-given to mankind,<br />
+On the quenched volcano&rsquo;s cusp did he take stand,<br />
+A conquering army&rsquo;s height above the land,<br />
+Which calls that army offspring of its breast,<br />
+And sees it mid the starry camps enshrined;<br />
+His eye the cannon&rsquo;s flame,<br />
+The cannon&rsquo;s cave his mind.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">To weld the nation in a name of dread,<br />
+And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed,<br />
+The Necessitated came, as comes from out<br />
+Electric ebon lightning&rsquo;s javelin-head,<br />
+Threatening agitation in the revealed<br />
+Founts of our being; terrible with doubt,<br />
+<a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 117</span>With
+radiance restorative.&nbsp; At one stride<br />
+Athwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway.<br />
+That Soliform made featureless beside<br />
+His brilliancy who neighboured: vapour they;<br />
+Vapour what postured statues barred his tread.<br />
+On high in amphitheatre field on field,<br />
+Italian, Egyptian, Austrian,<br />
+Far heard and of the carnage discord clear,<br />
+Bells of his escalading triumphs pealed<br />
+In crashes on a choral chant severe,<br />
+Heraldic of the authentic Charlemagne,<br />
+Globe, sceptre, sword, to enfold, to rule, to smite,<br />
+Make unity of the mass,<br />
+Coherent or refractory, by his might.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey
+brass,<br />
+Fame blew, and tuned the jangles, bent the knees<br />
+Rebellious or submissive; his decrees<br />
+Were thunder in those heavens and compelled:<br />
+Such as disordered earth, eclipsed of stars,<br />
+Endures for sign of Order&rsquo;s calm return,<br />
+Whereunto she is vowed; and his wreckage-spars,<br />
+His harried ships, old riotous Ocean lifts alight,<br />
+Subdued to splendour in his delirant churn.<br />
+Glory suffused the accordant, quelled,<br />
+By magic of high sovereignty, revolt:<br />
+And he, the reader of men, himself unread;<br />
+The name of hope, the name of dread;<br />
+Bloom of the coming years or blight;<br />
+An arm to hurl the bolt<br />
+With aim Olympian; bore<br />
+Likeness to Godhead.&nbsp; Whither his flashes hied<br />
+Hosts fell; what he constructed held rock-fast.<br />
+So did earth&rsquo;s abjects deem of him that built and clove.<br
+/>
+<a name="page118"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 118</span>Torch on
+imagination, beams he cast,<br />
+Whereat they hailed him deified:<br />
+If less than an eagle-speeding Jove, than Vulcan more.<br />
+Or it might be a Vulcan-Jove,<br />
+Europe for smithy, Europe&rsquo;s floor<br />
+Lurid with sparks in evanescent showers,<br />
+Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours,<br />
+Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p class="poetry">On him the long enchained, released<br />
+For bride of the miracle day up the midway blue;<br />
+She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast<br />
+Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue,<br />
+Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed.<br />
+Fawning, her body bent, she gazed<br />
+With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart:<br />
+Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears<br />
+This apparition, ghostly for belief;<br />
+Demoniac or divine, but sole<br />
+Over earth&rsquo;s mightiest written Chief;<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart:<br />
+The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew;<br />
+The arbiter of circumstance;<br />
+High above limitations, as the spheres.<br />
+Nor ever had heroical Romance,<br />
+Never ensanguined History&rsquo;s lengthened scroll,<br />
+Shown fulminant to shoot the levin dart<br />
+Terrific as this man, by whom upraised,<br />
+Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers;<br />
+Like midnight&rsquo;s levying brazier-beacon blazed<br />
+Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons,<br />
+<a name="page119"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 119</span>Day of
+the darkness; this man&rsquo;s mate; by him,<br />
+Cannon his name,<br />
+Rescued from vivisectionist and knave,<br />
+Her body&rsquo;s dominators and her shame;<br />
+By him with the rivers of ranked battalions, brave<br />
+Past mortal, girt: a march of swords and guns<br />
+Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice<br />
+He flung on the crested board, where chilly Fears<br />
+Behold the Reaper&rsquo;s ground, Death sitting grim,<br />
+Awatch for his predestined ones,<br />
+Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these,<br />
+Inebriate of his inevitable device,<br />
+Hail it their hero&rsquo;s wood of lustrous laurel-trees,<br />
+Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides,<br />
+The boiling life-blood in their cheers.<br />
+Unequalled since the world was man they pour<br />
+A spiky girdle round her; these, her sons,<br />
+His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roar<br />
+Obstruction shattered at his will or whim:<br />
+Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim,<br />
+And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">The flood that swept her to be slave<br />
+Adoring, under thought of being his mate,<br />
+These were, and unto the visibly unexcelled,<br />
+As much of heart as abjects can she gave,<br />
+Or what of heart the body bears for freight<br />
+When Majesty apparent overawes;<br />
+By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld,<br />
+Which let not feminine pride in him have pause<br />
+To question where the nobler pride rebelled.<br />
+She read the hieroglyphic on his brow,<br />
+Felt his firm hand to wield the giant&rsquo;s mace;<br />
+<a name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 120</span>Herself
+whirled upward in an eagle&rsquo;s claws,<br />
+Past recollection of her earthly place;<br />
+And if cold Reason pressed her, called him Fate;<br />
+Offering abashed the servile woman&rsquo;s vow.<br />
+Delirium was her virtue when the look<br />
+At fettered wrists and violated laws<br />
+Faith in a rectitude Supernal shook,<br />
+Till worship of him shone as her last rational state,<br />
+The slave&rsquo;s apology for gemmed disgrace.<br />
+Far in her mind that leap from earth to the ghost<br />
+Midway on high; or felt as a troubled pool;<br />
+Or as a broken sleep that hunts a dream half lost,<br />
+Arrested and rebuked by the common school<br />
+Of daily things for truancy.&nbsp; She could rejoice<br />
+To know with wakeful eyeballs Violence<br />
+Her crowned possessor, and, on every sense<br />
+Incumbent, Fact, Imperial Fact, her choice,<br />
+In scorn of barren visions, aims at a glassy void.<br />
+Who sprang for Liberty once, found slavery sweet;<br />
+And Tyranny, on alert subservience buoyed,<br />
+Spurred a blood-mare immeasureably fleet<br />
+To shoot the transient leagues in a passing wink,<br />
+Prompt for the glorious bound at the fanged abyss&rsquo;s
+brink.<br />
+Scarce felt she that she bled when battle scored<br />
+On riddled flags the further conjured line;<br />
+From off the meteor gleam of his waved sword<br />
+Reflected bright in permanence: she bled<br />
+As the Bacchante spills her challengeing wine<br />
+With whirl o&rsquo; the cup before the kiss to lip;<br />
+And bade drudge History in his footprints tread,<br />
+For pride of sword-strokes o&rsquo;er slow penmanship:<br />
+Each step of his a volume: his sharp word<br />
+The shower of steel and lead<br />
+Or pastoral sunshine.</p>
+<h4><a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+121</span>V</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Persistent through the brazen chorus round<br
+/>
+His thunderous footsteps on the foeman&rsquo;s ground,<br />
+A broken carol of wild notes was heard,<br />
+As when an ailing infant wails a dream.<br />
+Strange in familiarity it rang:<br />
+And now along the dark blue vault might seem<br />
+Winged migratories having but heaven for home,<br />
+Now the lone sea-bird&rsquo;s cry down shocks of foam,<br />
+Beneath a ruthless paw the captive&rsquo;s pang.</p>
+<p class="poetry">It sang the gift that comes from God<br />
+To mind of man as air to lung.<br />
+So through her days of under sod<br />
+Her faith unto her heart had sung,<br />
+Like bedded seed by frozen clod,<br />
+With view of wide-armed heaven and buds at burst,<br />
+And midway up, Earth&rsquo;s fluttering little lyre.<br />
+Even for a glimpse, for even a hope in chained desire<br />
+The vision of it watered thirst.</p>
+<h4>VI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">But whom those errant moans accused<br />
+As Liberty&rsquo;s murderous mother, cried accursed,<br />
+France blew to deafness: for a space she mused;<br />
+She smoothed a startled look, and sought,<br />
+From treasuries of the adoring slave,<br />
+Her surest way to strangle thought;<br />
+Picturing her dread lord decree advance<br />
+Into the enemy&rsquo;s land; artillery, bayonet, lance;<br />
+His ordering fingers point the dial&rsquo;s to time their
+ranks:<br />
+Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest&rsquo;s
+bayonet-glaive.<br />
+Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks,<br />
+<a name="page122"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 122</span>By mount
+and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains.<br />
+Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains.<br />
+They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute;<br
+/>
+He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute;<br />
+Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox.<br />
+From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller
+falls;<br />
+From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls:<br
+/>
+He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks;<br
+/>
+They clash, they are knotted, and now &rsquo;tis the deed of the
+axe on the log;<br />
+Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep<br />
+Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over
+heap<br />
+Right through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or
+shreds, or a fog<br />
+Rolling off sunlight&rsquo;s arrows.&nbsp; Not mightier Phoebus
+in ire,<br />
+Nor deadlier Jove&rsquo;s avengeing right hand, than he of the
+brain<br />
+Keen at an enemy&rsquo;s mind to encircle and pierce and
+constrain,<br />
+Muffling his own for a fate-charged blow very Gods may admire.<br
+/>
+Sure to behold are his eagles on high where the conflict
+raged.<br />
+Rightly, then, should France worship, and deafen the disaccord<br
+/>
+Of those who dare withstand an irresistible sword<br />
+To thwart his predestined subjection of Europe.&nbsp; Let them
+submit!<br />
+<a name="page123"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 123</span>She said
+it aloud, and heard in her breast, as a singer caged,<br />
+With the beat of wings at bars, Earth&rsquo;s fluttering little
+lyre.<br />
+No more at midway heaven, but liker midway to the pit:<br />
+Not singing the spirally upward of rapture, the downward of
+pain<br />
+Rather, the drop sheer downward from pressure of merciless
+weight.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her strangled thought got breath, with her
+worship held debate;<br />
+To yield and sink, yet eye askant the mark she had missed.<br />
+Over the black-blue rollers of that broad Westerly main,<br />
+Steady to sky, the light of Liberty glowed<br />
+In a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a road<br
+/>
+For Europe to cross, and see the thing lost subsist.<br />
+For there &rsquo;twas a shepherd led his people, no butcher of
+sheep;<br />
+Firmly there the banner he first upreared<br />
+Stands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reap<br />
+From a father beloved in life, in his death revered.<br />
+Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glance<br />
+Clearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain;<br />
+Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, France<br />
+Had view of her one-day&rsquo;s heavenly lover again;<br />
+Saw him amid the bright host looking down on her; knew she had
+erred,<br />
+Knew him her judge, knew yonder the spirit preferred;<br />
+Yonder the base of the summit she strove that day to ascend,<br
+/>
+Ere cannon mastered her soul, and all dreams had end.</p>
+<h4><a name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+124</span>VII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Soon felt she in her shivered frame<br />
+A bodeful drain of blood illume<br />
+Her wits with frosty fire to read<br />
+The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed<br />
+On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom<br />
+For victory that was victory scarce in name.<br />
+Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs<br />
+O&rsquo;er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize;<br />
+Recalling how he stood by Frederic&rsquo;s tomb,<br />
+With Frederic&rsquo;s country underfoot and spurned:<br />
+There meditated; till her hope might guess,<br />
+Albeit his constant star prescribe success,<br />
+The savage strife would sink, the civil aim<br />
+To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous<br />
+Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned;<br />
+And Labour&rsquo;s lovely peace, and Beauty&rsquo;s courtly
+bloom,<br />
+The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious.<br />
+At such great height, where hero hero topped,<br />
+Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think<br />
+No further leaps at the fanged abyss&rsquo;s brink<br />
+True Genius takes: be battle&rsquo;s dice-box dropped!</p>
+<p class="poetry">She watched his desert features, hung to
+hear<br />
+The honey words desired, and veiled her face;<br />
+Hearing the Seaman&rsquo;s name recur<br />
+Wrathfully, thick with a meaning worse<br />
+Than call to the march: for that inveterate Purse<br />
+Could kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place,<br />
+Conjure a heart into the trebly felled.<br />
+It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelled<br />
+To feed insurgent Europe: rear and van<br />
+Were haunted by the amphibious curse;<br />
+<a name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 125</span>Here
+flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout:<br />
+The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout,<br />
+Distracted Europe&rsquo;s Master, puffed remote<br />
+Those Indies of the swift Macedonian,<br />
+Whereon would Europe&rsquo;s Master somewhiles doat,<br />
+In dreamings on a docile universe<br />
+Beneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Nor marvel France should veil a seer&rsquo;s
+face,<br />
+And call on darkness as a blest retreat.<br />
+Magnanimously could her iron Emperor<br />
+Confront submission: hostile stirred to heat<br />
+All his vast enginery, allowed no halt<br />
+Up withered avenues of waste-blood war,<br />
+To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume,<br />
+As &rsquo;twere the world&rsquo;s arteries opened!&nbsp; Woe the
+race!<br />
+Ask wherefore Fortune&rsquo;s vile caprice should balk<br />
+His panther spring across the foaming salt,<br />
+From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk!<br />
+There is no answer: seed of black defeat<br />
+She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom.<br />
+See since that Seaman&rsquo;s epicycle sprite<br />
+Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase<br />
+Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white<br />
+With mother&rsquo;s tears of France, that he may meet<br />
+Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat<br />
+Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea;<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s power to baffle Ocean&rsquo;s power resume;<br />
+Victorious army crown o&rsquo;er Victory&rsquo;s fleet;<br />
+And bearing low that Seaman upon knee,<br />
+Stay the vexed question of supremacy,<br />
+Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic&rsquo;s tomb.</p>
+<h4><a name="page126"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+126</span>VIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Poured streams of Europe&rsquo;s veins the
+flood<br />
+Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide<br />
+Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed:<br />
+And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood<br />
+Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast.<br />
+He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed.<br />
+She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts.<br />
+The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts<br />
+Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide<br />
+In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest,<br />
+Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked,<br />
+And crazy chuckles, with life&rsquo;s tears at feud;<br />
+While near her heart the sunken sentinel<br />
+Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed<br />
+This torture, this anointed, this untracked<br />
+To mortal source, this alien of his kind;<br />
+Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars,<br />
+The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars;<br />
+Whose arts to lay the senses under spell<br />
+Aroused an insurrectionary mind.</p>
+<h4>IX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">He, did he love her?&nbsp; France was his
+weapon, shrewd<br />
+At edge, a wind in onset: he loved well<br />
+His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed<br />
+Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked,<br />
+Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle.<br />
+He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride,<br />
+Did but her blood in blindness given exact.<br />
+Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide:<br />
+She quivered at his word, and at his touch<br />
+Was hound or steed for any mark he espied.<br />
+He loved her more than little, less than much.<br />
+<a name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 127</span>The fair
+subservient of Imperial Fact<br />
+Next to his consanguineous was placed<br />
+In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal,<br />
+Vexatious carnal appetites above,<br />
+Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced,<br />
+And rose but at command from under heel.<br />
+The love devolvent, the ascension love,<br />
+Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked,<br />
+Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks;<br />
+Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste,<br />
+Took up but solids for its glowing seal.<br />
+The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel,<br />
+Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks,<br />
+His night&rsquo;s first quarter sicklied to distaste,<br />
+In warm enjoyment barely might distract.<br />
+A head that held an Europe half devoured<br />
+Taste in the blood&rsquo;s conceit of pleasure soured.<br />
+Nought save his rounding aim, the means he plied,<br />
+Death for his cause, to him could point appeal.<br />
+His mistress was the thing of uses tried.<br />
+Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed,<br />
+But on his Policy his eye was lewd.<br />
+That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked<br />
+No foot across; a shade his ire provoked.<br />
+The blunder or the cruelty of a deed<br />
+His Policy imperative could plead.<br />
+He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he<br />
+Legitimate outside his Policy.<br />
+Men&rsquo;s lives and works were due, from their birth&rsquo;s
+date,<br />
+To the State&rsquo;s shield and sword, himself the State.<br />
+He thought for them in mass, as Titan may;<br />
+For their pronounced well-being bade obey;<br />
+O&rsquo;er each obstructive thicket thunderclapped,<br />
+And straight their easy road to market mapped.<br />
+<a name="page128"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 128</span>Watched
+Argus to survey the huge preserves<br />
+He held or coveted; Mars was armed alert<br />
+At sign of motion; yet his brows were murk,<br />
+His gorge would surge, to see the butcher&rsquo;s work,<br />
+The Reaper&rsquo;s field; a sensitive in nerves.<br />
+He rode not over men to do them hurt.<br />
+As one who claimed to have for paramour<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow;<br />
+Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensure<br />
+Possession; free of rivals, not their foe.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The common Tyrant&rsquo;s frenzies, rancour,
+spites,<br />
+He knew as little as men&rsquo;s claim on rights.<br />
+A kindness for old servants, early friends,<br />
+Was constant in him while they served his ends;<br />
+And if irascible, &rsquo;twas the moment&rsquo;s reek<br />
+From fires diverted by some gusty freak.<br />
+His Policy the act which breeds the act<br />
+Prevised, in issues accurately summed<br />
+From reckonings of men&rsquo;s tempers, terrors, needs:&mdash;<br
+/>
+That universal army, which he leads<br />
+Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact.<br />
+Within his hot brain&rsquo;s hammering workshop hummed<br />
+A thousand furious wheels at whirr, untired<br />
+As Nature in her reproductive throes;<br />
+And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired:<br />
+The cause being aye the incendiary foes<br />
+Proved by prostration culpable.&nbsp; His dispense<br />
+Of Justice made his active conscience;<br />
+His passive was of ceaseless labour formed.<br />
+So found this Tyrant sanction and repose;<br />
+Humanly just, inhumanly unwarmed.<br />
+<a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+129</span>Preventive fencings with the foul intent<br />
+Occult, by him observed and foiled betimes,<br />
+Let fool historians chronicle as crimes.<br />
+His blows were dealt to clear the way he went:<br />
+Too busy sword and mind for needless blows.<br />
+The mighty bird of sky minutest grains<br />
+On ground perceived; in heaven but rays or rains;<br />
+In humankind diversities of masks,<br />
+For rule of men the choice of bait or goads.<br />
+The statesman steered the despot to large tasks;<br />
+The despot drove the statesman on short roads.<br />
+For Order&rsquo;s cause he laboured, as inclined<br />
+A soldier&rsquo;s training and his Euclid mind.<br />
+His army unto men he could present<br />
+As model of the perfect instrument.<br />
+That creature, woman, was the sofa soft,<br />
+When warriors their dusty armour doffed,<br />
+And read their manuals for the making truce<br />
+With rosy frailties framed to reproduce.<br />
+He farmed his land, distillingly alive<br />
+For the utmost extract he might have and hive,<br />
+Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme,<br />
+Benign shone Hymen&rsquo;s torch on young love&rsquo;s dream.<br
+/>
+Thus to be strong was he beneficent;<br />
+A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The disputant in words his eye dismayed:<br />
+Opinions blocked his passage.&nbsp; Rent<br />
+Were Councils with a gesture; brayed<br />
+By hoarse camp-phrase what argument<br />
+Dared interpose to waken spleen<br />
+In him whose vision grasped the unseen,<br />
+Whose counsellor was the ready blade,<br />
+Whose argument the cannonade.<br />
+<a name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>He
+loathed his land&rsquo;s divergent parties, loth<br />
+To grant them speech, they were such idle troops;<br />
+The friable and the grumous, dizzards both.<br />
+Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops;<br />
+Some serviceable, none credible on oath.<br />
+The silly preference they nursed to die<br />
+In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie.<br />
+If magic made them pliable for his use,<br />
+Magician he could be by planned surprise.<br />
+For do they see the deuce in human guise,<br />
+As men&rsquo;s acknowledged head appears the deuce,<br />
+And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal.<br />
+Among them certain vagrant wits that had<br />
+Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;<br />
+Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;<br />
+But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain<br />
+Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.<br />
+With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings<br />
+The way of such transfeminated things,<br />
+And France had sense of vacancy in Light.</p>
+<p class="poetry">That is the soul&rsquo;s dead darkness, making
+clutch<br />
+Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch;<br />
+Adding to slavery&rsquo;s chain the stringent twist;<br />
+Even when it brings close surety that aright<br />
+She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist;<br />
+Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;<br />
+Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;<br />
+Material grandeur&rsquo;s ape, the Infernal&rsquo;s hound;<br />
+Enormous, with no infinite around;<br />
+No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame<br />
+The dusty pattering pinions,<br />
+The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.</p>
+<h4><a name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+131</span>X</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Hugest of engines, a much limited man,<br />
+She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear<br />
+Through that smoked glass her last privation brought<br />
+To point her critic eye and spur her thought:<br />
+A heart but to propel Leviathan;<br />
+A spirit that breathed but in earth&rsquo;s atmosphere.<br />
+Amid the plumed and sceptred ones<br />
+Irradiatingly Jovian,<br />
+The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;<br />
+A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:<br />
+Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike<br />
+Herself in all, yet with such power to strike,<br />
+That she the various features she could scan<br />
+Dared not to sum, though seeing: and befooled<br />
+By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed,<br />
+Subservient as roused echo round his guns.<br />
+Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons,<br />
+He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled.<br />
+Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained;<br />
+But irony, her spirit&rsquo;s tongue, restrained.<br />
+The Critic, last of vital in the proud<br />
+Enslaved, when most detectively endowed,<br />
+Admired how irony&rsquo;s venom off him ran,<br />
+Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze:<br />
+Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed,<br />
+Again her chant of eulogy began,<br />
+Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her warrior, chief among the valorous great<br
+/>
+In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame,<br />
+With radiance palpable in fruit and weight.<br />
+Heard she reproach, his victories blared response;<br />
+His victories bent the Critic to acclaim,<br />
+As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce.<br />
+<a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 132</span>Or heard
+she from scarred ranks of jolly growls<br />
+His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,<br />
+Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt<br />
+Their idol for some genial trick or fault,<br />
+She, too, became his marching veteran.<br />
+Again she took her breath from them who bore<br />
+His eagles through the tawny roar,<br />
+And murmured at a peaceful state,<br />
+That bred the title charlatan,<br />
+As missile from the mouth of hate,<br />
+For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled,<br />
+Cannon his name,<br />
+Shattering against a barrier world;<br />
+Her supreme player of man&rsquo;s primaeval game.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The daemon filled him, and he filled her
+sons;<br />
+Strung them to stature over human height,<br />
+As march the standards down the smoky fight;<br />
+Her cherubim, her towering mastodons!<br />
+Directed vault or breach, break through<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s toughest, seasons, elements, tame;<br />
+Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;<br />
+Count death the smallest of their debts:<br />
+Show that the will to do<br />
+Is masculine and begets!</p>
+<p class="poetry">These princes unto him the mother owed;<br />
+These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.<br />
+What wonder, though with wits awake<br />
+To read her riddle, for these her offspring&rsquo;s
+sake;&mdash;<br />
+And she, before high heaven adulteress,<br />
+The lost to honour, in his glory clothed,<br />
+Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed;&mdash;<br />
+That she should quench her thought, nor worship less<br />
+Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew<br />
+The slave&rsquo;s alternative, to worship or to rue!</p>
+<h4><a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+133</span>XI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Bright from the shell of that much limited
+man,<br />
+Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath,<br />
+Like soul that quits the tumbled body, soared:<br />
+And France, impulsive, nuptial with his plan,<br />
+Albeit the Critic fretting her, adored<br />
+Once more.&nbsp; Exultingly her heart went forth,<br />
+Submissive to his mind and mood,<br />
+The way of those pent-eyebrows North;<br />
+For now was he to win the wreath<br />
+Surpassing sunniest in camp or Court;<br />
+Next, as the blessed harvest after years of blight,<br />
+Sit, the Great Emperor, to be known the Good!</p>
+<p class="poetry">Now had the Seaman&rsquo;s volvent sprite,<br
+/>
+Lean from the chase that barked his contraband,<br />
+A beggared applicant at every port,<br />
+To strew the profitless deeps and rot beneath,<br />
+Slung northward, for a hunted beast&rsquo;s retort<br />
+On sovereign power; there his final stand,<br />
+Among the perjured Scythian&rsquo;s shaggy horde,<br />
+The hydrocephalic a&euml;rolite<br />
+Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,<br />
+Though Europe&rsquo;s Master Europe&rsquo;s Rebel banned<br />
+To be earth&rsquo;s outcast, ocean&rsquo;s lord and sport.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Unmoved might seem the Master&rsquo;s taunted
+sword.<br />
+Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped,<br />
+As on the map of that all-provident head;<br />
+He luting Peace the while, like morning&rsquo;s cock<br />
+The quiet day to round the hours for bed;<br />
+No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock.<br />
+Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped.<br />
+To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews,<br />
+<a name="page134"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 134</span>How
+trained to scale the eminences, pluck<br />
+The hazards for new footing, how compel<br />
+Those timely incidents by men named luck,<br />
+Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,<br />
+Her grovelling admiration had not yet<br />
+Imagined of the great man-miracle;<br />
+And France recounted with her comic smile<br />
+Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,<br />
+The silky female of his male in guile,<br />
+Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse<br />
+A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,<br />
+Before his feint for camisado struck<br />
+The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Splendours of earth repeating heaven&rsquo;s at
+set<br />
+Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;<br />
+Since Asia upon Europe marched,<br />
+Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown<br />
+To Gallia&rsquo;s over-runner, Rome&rsquo;s inveterate foe,<br />
+Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,<br />
+Coruscant from the Master&rsquo;s hand, compact<br />
+As reasoned thoughts in the Master&rsquo;s head; were shown<br />
+Yon lightning moment when his acme might<br />
+Blazed o&rsquo;er the stream that cuts the sandy tract<br />
+Borussian from Sarmatia&rsquo;s famished flat;<br />
+The century&rsquo;s flower; and off its pinnacled throne,<br />
+Rayed servitude on Europe&rsquo;s ball of sight.</p>
+<h4>XII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.<br
+/>
+There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast<br />
+Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat<br />
+In expectation&rsquo;s darkness, until cracked<br />
+<a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 135</span>The
+straining curtain-seams: a scaly light<br />
+Was ghost above an army under shroud.<br />
+Imperious on Imperial Fact<br />
+Incestuously the incredible begat.<br />
+His veterans and auxiliaries,<br />
+The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud,<br />
+Princely, scarce numerable to recite,&mdash;<br />
+Titanic of all Titan tragedies!&mdash;<br />
+That Northern curtain took them, as the seas<br />
+Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Alive in marble, she conceived in soul,<br />
+With barren eyes and mouth, the mother&rsquo;s loss;<br />
+The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;<br />
+The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll<br />
+Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:<br />
+By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Was it a necromancer lured<br />
+To weave his tense betraying spell?<br />
+A Titan whom our God endured<br />
+Till he of his foul hungers fell,<br />
+By all his craft and labour scourged?<br />
+A deluge Europe&rsquo;s liberated wave,<br />
+P&aelig;an to sky, leapt over that vast grave.<br />
+Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged.<br />
+And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate,<br />
+In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate,<br />
+That tore her old credulity to strips,<br />
+Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips,<br />
+His withered slave for foregone miracles urged.<br />
+And he, whom now his ominous halo&rsquo;s round,<br />
+A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned,<br />
+Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear<br />
+The realm of Darkness with its Prince&rsquo;s air;<br />
+<a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 136</span>Assume
+in mien the resolute pretence<br />
+To satiate an hungered confidence,<br />
+Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower<br />
+Beside the generous face of that frail flower.</p>
+<h4>XIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Desire and terror then had each of each:<br />
+His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke;<br />
+Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech;<br />
+And both did barter under union&rsquo;s cloak.<br />
+An union in hot fever and fierce need<br />
+Of either&rsquo;s aid, distrust in trust did breed.<br />
+Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits<br />
+To issues.&nbsp; Never human fortune throve<br />
+On such alliance.&nbsp; Viewed by fits,<br />
+From Vulcan&rsquo;s forge a hovering Jove<br />
+Evolved.&nbsp; The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove.<br />
+Her awe of him his dread of her invoked:<br />
+His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked.<br />
+What wisdom counselled, Policy declined;<br />
+All perils dared he save the step behind.<br />
+Ahead his grand initiative becked:<br />
+One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked.<br />
+Stripped to the despot upstart, for success<br />
+He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.<br />
+He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,<br />
+While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught<br />
+He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance,<br />
+Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France;<br />
+Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun<br />
+The strength he taxed unripened for his throw,<br />
+In vengeful casts calamitous,<br />
+On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow,<br />
+The luminous the ruinous.<br />
+An incalescent scorpion,<br />
+<a name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 137</span>And
+fierier for the mounded cirque<br />
+That narrowed at him thick and murk,<br />
+This gambler with his genius<br />
+Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung<br />
+His fortunes to the hosts he stung,<br />
+With victories clipped his eagle&rsquo;s wings.<br />
+By the hands that built him up was he undone:<br />
+By the star aloft, which was his ram&rsquo;s-head will<br />
+Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;<br />
+By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,<br />
+To cloud a rational mind for present things;<br />
+By his own force, the suicide in his mill.<br />
+Needs never God of Vengeance intervene<br />
+When giants their last lesson have to learn.<br />
+Fighting against an end he could discern,<br />
+The chivalry whereof he had none<br />
+He called from his worn slave&rsquo;s abundant springs:<br />
+Not deigning spousally entreat<br />
+That ever blinded by his martial skill,<br />
+But harsh to have her worship counted out<br />
+In human coin, her vital rivers drained,<br />
+Her infant forests felled, commanded die<br />
+The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,<br />
+Where throning he her faith in him maintained;<br />
+Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat<br />
+Was triumph; and what strength in her remained<br />
+To head against the ultimate foreseen rout,<br />
+Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,<br />
+Servant and sycophant: without ally,<br />
+In Python&rsquo;s coils, the Master Craftsman still;<br />
+The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,<br />
+The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,<br />
+The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,<br />
+Striking from black disaster starry showers.<br />
+Her supreme player of man&rsquo;s primaeval game,<br />
+<a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 138</span>He won
+his harnessed victim&rsquo;s rapturous shout,<br />
+When every move was mortal to her frame,<br />
+Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,<br />
+She to exchange his laurels for earth&rsquo;s flowers.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell:<br />
+A vessel in mid-ocean under storm.<br />
+Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,<br />
+He sprang to sight, in human form<br />
+Revealed, from no celestial aids:<br />
+The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Cannon his name,<br />
+Cannon his voice, he came.<br />
+The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,<br />
+Amazing even on his Imperial stage,<br />
+Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours<br />
+And winged o&rsquo;er human earth&rsquo;s heroical shone.<br />
+Into the press of cumulative foes,<br />
+Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,<br />
+A broken structure bore his furious powers;<br />
+The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;<br />
+Match for all rivals; in himself but flame<br />
+Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.<br />
+Yet loud as when he first showed War&rsquo;s effete<br />
+Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,<br />
+And summoned to subject who dared compete,<br />
+The cannon in the name Napoleon<br />
+Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky.<br />
+So through a tropic day a regnant sun,<br />
+Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,<br />
+His glory&rsquo;s trappings laid on them: comes night,<br />
+Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat<br />
+From his anterior splendours, and shall seem<br />
+Day instant, Day&rsquo;s own lord in the furnace gleam,<br />
+The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged,<br />
+<a name="page139"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 139</span>When
+severed darkness, all flaminical bright,<br />
+Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight;<br />
+Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar,<br />
+As wrestled he with manacles and gags,<br />
+To speed across a cowering world once more,<br />
+Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags.<br />
+His name on silence thundered, on the obscure<br />
+Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song:<br />
+Earth of her prodigy&rsquo;s extinction long,<br />
+With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Snapped was the chord that made the resonant
+bow,<br />
+In France, abased and like a shrunken corse;<br />
+Amid the weakest weak, the lowest low,<br />
+From the highest fallen, stagnant off her source;<br />
+Condemned to hear the nations&rsquo; hostile mirth;<br />
+See curtained heavens, and smell a sulphurous earth;<br />
+Which told how evermore shall tyrant Force<br />
+Beget the greater for its overthrow.<br />
+The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke<br />
+A foreign tongue; Earth&rsquo;s fluttering little lyre<br />
+Unlike, but like the raven&rsquo;s ravening croak.<br />
+Not till her breath of being could aspire<br />
+Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found<br />
+Our common brotherhood in sight and sound:<br />
+When mellow rang the name Napoleon,<br />
+And dim aloft her young Angelical waved.<br />
+Between ethereal and gross to choose,<br />
+She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved.<br />
+They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun<br />
+Behind o&rsquo;ershadowing foemen: on a tide<br />
+They drew the nature having need of pride<br />
+Among her fellows for its vital dues:<br />
+He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,<br />
+Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.</p>
+<h3><a name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+140</span>FRANCE<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">DECEMBER 1870</span> <a
+name="citation140"></a><a href="#footnote140"
+class="citation">[140]</a></h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">We</span> look for her that
+sunlike stood<br />
+Upon the forehead of our day,<br />
+An orb of nations, radiating food<br />
+For body and for mind alway.<br />
+Where is the Shape of glad array;<br />
+The nervous hands, the front of steel,<br />
+The clarion tongue?&nbsp; Where is the bold proud face?<br />
+We see a vacant place;<br />
+We hear an iron heel.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">O she that made the brave appeal<br />
+For manhood when our time was dark,<br />
+And from our fetters drove the spark<br />
+Which was as lightning to reveal<br />
+New seasons, with the swifter play<br />
+Of pulses, and benigner day;<br />
+She that divinely shook the dead<br />
+From living man; that stretched ahead<br />
+Her resolute forefinger straight,<br />
+And marched toward the gloomy gate<br />
+Of earth&rsquo;s Untried, gave note, and in<br />
+The good name of Humanity<br />
+Called forth the daring vision! she,<br />
+She likewise half corrupt of sin,<br />
+Angel and Wanton! can it be?<br />
+<a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 141</span>Her star
+has foundered in eclipse,<br />
+The shriek of madness on her lips;<br />
+Shreds of her, and no more, we see.<br />
+There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,<br />
+As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Look not for spreading boughs<br />
+On the riven forest tree.<br />
+Look down where deep in blood and mire<br />
+Black thunder plants his feet and ploughs<br />
+The soil for ruin: that is France:<br />
+Still thrilling like a lyre,<br />
+Amazed to shivering discord from a fall<br />
+Sudden as that the lurid hosts recall<br />
+Who met in heaven the irreparable mischance.<br />
+O that is France!<br />
+The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss,<br />
+The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss,<br />
+Breasts that a sighing world inspire,<br />
+And laughter-dimpled countenance<br />
+Where soul and senses caught desire!</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Ever invoking fire from heaven, the fire<br />
+Has grasped her, unconsumable, but framed<br />
+For all the ecstasies of suffering dire.<br />
+Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed:<br />
+Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark<br />
+For outrage: Mother of Luxury, stripped stark:<br />
+Mother of Heroes, bondsmen: thro&rsquo; the rains,<br />
+Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains!<br />
+Fond Mother of her martial youth; they pass,<br />
+Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass!<br />
+<a name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 142</span>Mother
+of Honour, and dishonoured: Mother<br />
+Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays<br />
+Her victor, and be fountain of his praise.<br />
+Is there another curse?&nbsp; There is another:<br />
+Compassionate her madness: is she not<br />
+Mother of Reason? she that sees them mown<br />
+Like grass, her young ones!&nbsp; Yea, in the low groan<br />
+And under the fixed thunder of this hour<br />
+Which holds the animate world in one foul blot<br />
+Tranced circumambient while relentless Power<br />
+Beaks at her heart and claws her limbs down-thrown,<br />
+She, with the plungeing lightnings overshot,<br />
+With madness for an armour against pain,<br />
+With milkless breasts for little ones athirst,<br />
+And round her all her noblest dying in vain,<br />
+Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed,<br />
+To feel, to see, to justify the blow;<br />
+Chamber to chamber of her sequent brain<br />
+Gives answer of the cause of her great woe,<br />
+Inexorably echoing thro&rsquo; the vaults,<br />
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow:<br
+/>
+&lsquo;This is the sum of self-absolv&euml;d faults.&rsquo;<br />
+Doubt not that thro&rsquo; her grief, with sight supreme,<br />
+Thro&rsquo; her delirium and despair&rsquo;s last dream,<br />
+Thro&rsquo; pride, thro&rsquo; bright illusion and the brood<br
+/>
+Bewildering of her various Motherhood,<br />
+The high strong light within her, tho&rsquo; she bleeds,<br />
+Traces the letters of returned misdeeds.<br />
+She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late,<br />
+Bears this fierce crop; and she discerns her fate<br />
+From origin to agony, and on<br />
+As far as the wave washes long and wan<br />
+Off one disastrous impulse: for of waves<br />
+Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves<br />
+Blown rolling to the sunset from the dawn.</p>
+<h4><a name="page143"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+143</span>V</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Ah, what a dawn of splendour, when her
+sowers<br />
+Went forth and bent the necks of populations<br />
+And of their terrors and humiliations<br />
+Wove her the starry wreath that earthward lowers<br />
+Now in the figure of a burning yoke!<br />
+Her legions traversed North and South and East,<br />
+Of triumph they enjoyed the glutton&rsquo;s feast:<br />
+They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak.<br />
+They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalp<br />
+The icy precipices, and clove sheer through<br />
+The heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp,<br />
+Emerging not as men whom mortals knew.<br />
+They were the earthquake and the hurricane,<br />
+The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight,<br />
+Plagues of the revel: they were Deluge rain,<br />
+And dreaded Conflagration; lawless Might.<br />
+Death writes a reeling line along the snows,<br />
+Where under frozen mists they may be tracked,<br />
+Who men and elements provoked to foes,<br />
+And Gods: they were of god and beast compact:<br />
+Abhorred of all.&nbsp; Yet, how they sucked the teats<br />
+Of Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam,<br />
+Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme,<br />
+Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets.<br />
+The gay young generations mask her grief;<br />
+Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf.<br />
+Forgetful is green earth; the Gods alone<br />
+Remember everlastingly: they strike<br />
+Remorselessly, and ever like for like.<br />
+By their great memories the Gods are known.</p>
+<h4><a name="page144"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+144</span>VI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">They are with her now, and in her ears, and
+known.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis they that cast her to the dust for Strength,<br />
+Their slave, to feed on her fair body&rsquo;s length,<br />
+That once the sweetest and the proudest shone;<br />
+Scoring for hideous dismemberment<br />
+Her limbs, as were the anguish-taking breath<br />
+Gone out of her in the insufferable descent<br />
+From her high chieftainship; as were she death,<br />
+Who hears a voice of justice, feels the knife<br />
+Of torture, drinks all ignominy of life.<br />
+They are with her, and the painful Gods might weep,<br />
+If ever rain of tears came out of heaven<br />
+To flatter Weakness and bid conscience sleep,<br />
+Viewing the woe of this Immortal, driven<br />
+For the soul&rsquo;s life to drain the maddening cup<br />
+Of her own children&rsquo;s blood implacably:<br />
+Unsparing even as they to furrow up<br />
+The yellow land to likeness of a sea:<br />
+The bountiful fair land of vine and grain,<br />
+Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots,<br />
+Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits;<br />
+Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey main<br />
+Behind the black obliterating cyclone.</p>
+<h4>VII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Behold, the Gods are with her, and are
+known.<br />
+Whom they abandon misery persecutes<br />
+No more: them half-eyed apathy may loan<br />
+The happiness of pitiable brutes.<br />
+Whom the just Gods abandon have no light,<br />
+No ruthless light of introspective eyes<br />
+That in the midst of misery scrutinize<br />
+The heart and its iniquities outright.<br />
+<a name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 145</span>They
+rest, they smile and rest; have earned perchance<br />
+Of ancient service quiet for a term;<br />
+Quiet of old men dropping to the worm;<br />
+And so goes out the soul.&nbsp; But not of France.<br />
+She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries,<br />
+For fearfully their loosened hands chastize,<br />
+And icily they watch the rod&rsquo;s caress<br />
+Ravage her flesh from scourges merciless,<br />
+But she, inveterate of brain, discerns<br />
+That Pity has as little place as Joy<br />
+Among their roll of gifts; for Strength she yearns.<br />
+For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy.<br />
+Lo, Strength is of the plain root-Virtues born:<br />
+Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,<br />
+Train by endurance, by devotion shape.<br />
+Strength is not won by miracle or rape.<br />
+It is the offspring of the modest years,<br />
+The gift of sire to son, thro&rsquo; those firm laws<br />
+Which we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,<br />
+The cause of man, and manhood&rsquo;s ministers.<br />
+Could France accept the fables of her priests,<br />
+Who blest her banners in this game of beasts,<br />
+And now bid hope that heaven will intercede<br />
+To violate its laws in her sore need,<br />
+She would find comfort in their opiates:<br />
+Mother of Reason! can she cheat the Fates?<br />
+Would she, the champion of the open mind,<br />
+The Omnipotent&rsquo;s prime gift&mdash;the gift of
+growth&mdash;<br />
+Consent even for a night-time to be blind,<br />
+And sink her soul on the delusive sloth,<br />
+For fruits ethereal and material, both,<br />
+In peril of her place among mankind?<br />
+The Mother of the many Laughters might<br />
+Call one poor shade of laughter in the light<br />
+<a name="page146"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 146</span>Of her
+unwavering lamp to mark what things<br />
+The world puts faith in, careless of the truth:<br />
+What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings,<br />
+Attached by credence, we appear in sooth,<br />
+Demanding intercession, direct aid,<br />
+When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade!</p>
+<p class="poetry">She swung the sword for centuries; in a day<br
+/>
+It slipped her, like a stream cut off from source.<br />
+She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray,<br />
+Clamoured of treachery, and had recourse<br />
+To drunken outcries in her dream that Force<br />
+Needed but hear her shouting to obey.<br />
+Was she not formed to conquer?&nbsp; The bright plumes<br />
+Of crested vanity shed graceful nods:<br />
+Transcendent in her foundries, Arts and looms,<br />
+Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods?<br />
+Her faith was on her battle-roll of names<br />
+Sheathed in the records of old war; with dance<br />
+And song she thrilled her warriors and her dames,<br />
+Embracing her Dishonour: gave him France<br />
+From head to foot, France present and to come,<br />
+So she might hear the trumpet and the drum&mdash;<br />
+Bellona and Bacchante! rushing forth<br />
+On yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Inveterate of brain, well knows she why<br />
+Strength failed her, faithful to himself the first:<br />
+Her dream is done, and she can read the sky,<br />
+And she can take into her heart the worst<br />
+Calamity to drug the shameful thought<br />
+Of days that made her as the man she served<br />
+A name of terror, but a thing unnerved:<br />
+Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought,<br />
+She for dominion, he to patch a throne.</p>
+<h4><a name="page147"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+147</span>VIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Henceforth of her the Gods are known,<br />
+Open to them her breast is laid.<br />
+Inveterate of brain, heart-valiant,<br />
+Never did fairer creature pant<br />
+Before the altar and the blade!</p>
+<h4>IX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Swift fall the blows, and men upbraid,<br />
+And friends give echo blunt and cold,<br />
+The echo of the forest to the axe.<br />
+Within her are the fires that wax<br />
+For resurrection from the mould.</p>
+<h4>X</h4>
+<p class="poetry">She snatched at heaven&rsquo;s flame of old,<br
+/>
+And kindled nations: she was weak:<br />
+Frail sister of her heroic prototype,<br />
+The Man; for sacrifice unripe,<br />
+She too must fill a Vulture&rsquo;s beak.<br />
+Deride the vanquished, and acclaim<br />
+The conqueror, who stains her fame,<br />
+Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim<br />
+Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.</p>
+<h4>XI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">She shall rise worthier of her prototype<br />
+Thro&rsquo; her abasement deep; the pain that runs<br />
+From nerve to nerve some victory achieves.<br />
+They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leaves<br />
+Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!<br />
+And of their death her life is: of their blood<br />
+From many streams now urging to a flood,<br />
+<a name="page148"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 148</span>No more
+divided, France shall rise afresh.<br />
+Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:&mdash;<br />
+The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,<br />
+A hunter hunting down the beast in man:<br />
+That till the chasing out of its last vice,<br />
+The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Immortal Mother of a mortal host!<br />
+Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,<br />
+Wounds that bring death but take not life away!&mdash;<br />
+Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:<br />
+Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.<br />
+Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:<br />
+The torture lurks in them, with them the blame<br />
+Shall pass to leave thee purer than before.<br />
+Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,<br />
+For what, and of the abominable name<br />
+Of her who in imperial beauty wore.</p>
+<p class="poetry">O Mother of a fated fleeting host<br />
+Conceived in the past days of sin, and born<br />
+Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,<br />
+Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,<br />
+Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim<br />
+With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds<br />
+Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:<br />
+Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds<br />
+Each new discernment of the undying ones,<br />
+Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide<br />
+Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll;<br />
+These ashes have the lesson for the soul.<br />
+&lsquo;Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,<br />
+Strip off thy Luxury: that thou may&rsquo;st live,<br />
+Die to thyself,&rsquo; they say, &lsquo;as we have died<br />
+From dear existence and the foe forgive,<br />
+<a name="page149"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 149</span>Nor pray
+for aught save in our little space<br />
+To warn good seed to greet the fair earth&rsquo;s face.&rsquo;<br
+/>
+O Mother! take their counsel, and so shall<br />
+The broader world breathe in on this thy home,<br />
+Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,<br />
+Strength give thee, like an ocean&rsquo;s vast expanse<br />
+Off mountain cliffs, the generations all,<br />
+Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,<br />
+But as a river forward.&nbsp; Soaring France!<br />
+Now is Humanity on trial in thee:<br />
+Now may&rsquo;st thou gather humankind in fee:<br />
+Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;<br />
+Make of calamity thine aureole,<br />
+And bleeding head us thro&rsquo; the troubles of the sea.</p>
+<h3><a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+150</span>ALSACE-LORRAINE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">The</span> sister Hours in
+circles linked,<br />
+Daughters of men, of men the mates,<br />
+Are gone on flow with the day that winked,<br />
+With the night that spanned at golden gates.<br />
+Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;<br />
+They bear us grain or flower or weed,<br />
+As we have sown; is nought extinct<br />
+For them we fill to be our Fates.<br />
+Life of the breath is but the loan;<br />
+Passing death what we have sown.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Pearly are they till the pale inherited
+stain<br />
+Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow<br />
+Darken to feature and nature: a volumed chain,<br />
+Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.<br />
+Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read<br />
+Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:<br />
+There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane<br />
+Stand as a tree whereon numberless clusters grow:<br />
+Legible there how the heart, with its one false move<br />
+Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Our fervid heart has filled that Book in
+chief;<br />
+Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;<br />
+Our craving heart of passion suckling grief<br />
+Disowns the author&rsquo;s work it must peruse;<br />
+Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,<br />
+A round of harvests red from crimson seed,<br />
+<a name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 151</span>It marks
+the current Hours show leaf by leaf,<br />
+And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;<br />
+Though sometimes it may think what novel light<br />
+Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and
+starred<br />
+Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,<br />
+Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.<br />
+Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,<br />
+They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,<br
+/>
+That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,<br />
+Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.<br />
+Only to Earth&rsquo;s best loved, at the breathless turns<br />
+Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,<br />
+And a ghostly lamp of their moment&rsquo;s union burns,<br />
+Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Voice of Earth&rsquo;s very soul to the soul
+she would see renewed:<br />
+A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the
+breast<br />
+Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves&rsquo; bells upon
+ferns<br />
+In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.<br />
+Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;<br
+/>
+Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;<br
+/>
+Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;<br />
+Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scuts<br />
+Flashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed
+burrow-mouth.<br />
+Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of
+huts,<br />
+<a name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 152</span>To greet
+those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.<br />
+Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,<br />
+Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.<br />
+Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive&rsquo;s
+grey;<br />
+A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;<br />
+The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,<br />
+Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.<br />
+Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long
+colonnades;<br />
+Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;<br />
+Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,<br />
+On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in
+dirt.<br />
+Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to
+receive<br />
+Balm of a sound Earth&rsquo;s primary heart at its active
+beat:<br />
+The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;<br />
+Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great
+conceit:<br />
+Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;<br />
+Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt<br
+/>
+To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the
+scythes;<br />
+Its day&rsquo;s hard business done, the score to the good
+accompt.<br />
+<a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>Creatures of forest and mead, Earth&rsquo;s essays in
+being, all kinds<br />
+Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,<br />
+They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,<br
+/>
+Cut man&rsquo;s tangles for Earth&rsquo;s first broad rectilinear
+way:<br />
+Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,<br />
+Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;<br />
+Not always the sprouts of Earth&rsquo;s root-Laws preserving her
+brutes;<br />
+Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Yet the like a&euml;rial growths may chance be
+the delicate sprays,<br />
+Infant of Earth&rsquo;s most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal<br
+/>
+For entry on Life&rsquo;s upper fields: and soul thus flourishing
+pays<br />
+The martyr&rsquo;s penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools
+of the dry,<br />
+Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth
+remake;<br />
+Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie,<br />
+Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake,<br />
+As it were with the Resurrection&rsquo;s eyelids uplifted, to
+see<br />
+Honour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fount<br />
+Jets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-tree<br />
+Spout, with our Earth&rsquo;s unbaffled resurgent desire for the
+mount,<br />
+Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it
+be.<br />
+<a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 154</span>For this
+at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth,<br />
+However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall,<br />
+The chastisement drawn down on us merited: are we of worth<br />
+Amid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call,<br
+/>
+Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the God who is in us and
+round,<br />
+Consenting, the God there seen.&nbsp; Impiety speaks despair;<br
+/>
+Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy
+ground,<br />
+Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we
+share.<br />
+Not such of the crowned discrowned<br />
+Can Earth or humanity spare;<br />
+Such not the God let die.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Eastward of Paris morn is high;<br />
+And darkness on that Eastward side<br />
+The heart of France beholds: a thorn<br />
+Is in her frame where shines the morn:<br />
+A rigid wave usurps her sky,<br />
+With eagle crest and eagle-eyed<br />
+To scan what wormy wrinkles hint<br />
+Her forces gathering: she the thrown<br />
+From station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone,<br />
+Reading late History as a foul misprint:<br />
+Imperial, Angelical,<br />
+At strife commingled in her frame convulsed;<br />
+Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall;<br />
+Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed;<br />
+<a name="page155"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 155</span>These
+tortures to distract her underneath<br />
+Her whelmed Aurora&rsquo;s shade.&nbsp; But in that space<br />
+When lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath,<br />
+Like an unburied body mid the tombs,<br />
+Feeling against her heart life&rsquo;s bitter probe<br />
+For life, she saw how children of her race,<br />
+The many sober sons and daughters, plied,<br />
+By cottage lamplight through the water-globe,<br />
+By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms,<br />
+Afield, in factories, with the birds astir,<br />
+Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied<br />
+Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.<br />
+So like Earth&rsquo;s indestructible they were,<br />
+That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride,<br />
+To feel where in each breast the thought of her,<br />
+On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs,<br />
+Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone<br />
+At lip or in a fluttered look,<br />
+A shortened breath: and they were her loved own;<br />
+Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears,<br />
+For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke,<br />
+Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt,<br />
+The Mother having conscience in arrears;<br />
+Ready to gush the flood of vain regret,<br />
+Else hearken to her weaponed children&rsquo;s moan<br />
+Of stifled rage invoking vengeance: hell&rsquo;s,<br />
+If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swells<br />
+In blood and brain for retribution swift.<br />
+Those helped not: wings to her soul were these who yet<br />
+Could welcome day for labour, night for rest,<br />
+Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift,<br />
+Of honest heart, beyond all miracles;<br />
+And likened to Earth&rsquo;s humblest were Earth&rsquo;s
+best.</p>
+<h4><a name="page156"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+156</span>IV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Brooding on her deep fall, the many strings<br
+/>
+Which formed her nature set a thought on Kings,<br />
+As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift;<br />
+And one among them hummed devoutly leal,<br />
+While passed the sighing breeze along her breast.<br />
+Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed down<br />
+Her gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown;<br />
+Upon her through long seasons was its grasp,<br />
+For neither soul&rsquo;s nor body&rsquo;s weal;<br />
+As much bestows the robber wasp,<br />
+That in the hanging apple makes a meal,<br />
+And carves a face of abscess where was fruit<br />
+Ripe ruddy.&nbsp; They would blot<br />
+Her radiant leap above the slopes acute,<br />
+Of summit to celestial; impute<br />
+The wanton&rsquo;s aim to her divinest shot;<br />
+Bid her walk History backward over gaps;<br />
+Abhor the day of Phrygian caps;<br />
+Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself;<br />
+The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph,<br />
+Admire repentant; reverently prostrate<br />
+Her person unto the belly-god; of whom<br />
+Is inward plenty and external bloom;<br />
+Enough of pomp and state<br />
+And carnival to quench<br />
+The breast&rsquo;s desires of an intemperate wench,<br />
+The head&rsquo;s ideas beyond legitimate.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She flung them: she was France: nor with far
+frown<br />
+Her lover from the embrace of her refrained:<br />
+But in her voice an interwoven wire,<br />
+The exultation of her gross renown,<br />
+Struck deafness at her heavens, and they waned<br />
+Over a look ill-gifted to aspire.<br />
+<a name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+157</span>Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate,<br />
+The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days,<br />
+Her treasure-galleon&rsquo;s wondrous freight.<br />
+The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferred<br />
+Her soul&rsquo;s allegiance; o&rsquo;er the Tyrant slurred,<br />
+Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze,<br />
+To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p class="poetry">She hailed him Saint:<br />
+And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!<br />
+The virgin who conceived a France when funeral glooms<br />
+Across a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung:<br />
+Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth;<br />
+Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman&rsquo;s taint;<br
+/>
+Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth,<br />
+Have joy of unity: the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed,<br />
+Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of faggot fumes;<br />
+Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.</p>
+<p class="poetry">For her people to hail her Saint,<br />
+Were no lifting of her, Earth&rsquo;s gem,<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s chosen, Earth&rsquo;s throb on divine:<br />
+In the ranks of the starred she is one,<br />
+While man has thought on our line:<br />
+No lifting of her, but for them,<br />
+Breath of the mountain, beam of the sun<br />
+Through mist, out of swamp-fires&rsquo; lures release,<br />
+Youth on the forehead, the rough right way<br />
+Seen to be footed: for them the heart&rsquo;s peace,<br />
+By the mind&rsquo;s war won for a permanent miracle day.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed,<br />
+The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne<br />
+Into the furnace-pit she tossed<br />
+<a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 158</span>Before
+her body knew the flame,<br />
+And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work,<br />
+An undivided power to speed her aim.<br />
+She had no self but France: the sainted man<br />
+No France but self.&nbsp; Him warrior and clerk,<br />
+Free of his iron clutch; and him her young,<br />
+In whirled imagination mastodonized;<br />
+And him her penmen, him her poets; all<br />
+For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain;<br />
+Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue,<br />
+Till solely through his glory France was prized.<br />
+She who had her Jeanne;<br />
+The child of her industrious;<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s truest, earth&rsquo;s pure fount from the main;<br
+/>
+And she who had her one day&rsquo;s mate,<br />
+In the soul&rsquo;s view illustrious<br />
+Past blazonry, her Immaculate,<br />
+Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;<br />
+Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain<br />
+She heard upon a day in &lsquo;I who can&rsquo;;<br />
+Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare<br />
+Of that Caesarean Italian<br />
+Across the storied fields of trampled grain,<br />
+As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul<br />
+Blowing the rally against a Caesar&rsquo;s reign.<br />
+Her soul&rsquo;s protesting sobs she drowned to swear<br />
+Fidelity unto the sainted man,<br />
+Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again<br />
+The foreigner in Europe, known of none,<br />
+None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun.<br />
+Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe&rsquo;s van;<br />
+The dream she nursed a snare,<br />
+The flag she bore a pall.</p>
+<h4><a name="page159"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+159</span>VI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">In Nature is no rearward step allowed.<br />
+Hard on the rock Reality do we dash<br />
+To be shattered, if the material dream propels.<br />
+The worship to departed splendour vowed<br />
+Conjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,<br />
+For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her
+hills;<br />
+For the will of wills,<br />
+Its flaccid ape,<br />
+Weak as the final echo off a giant&rsquo;s bawl:<br />
+Napoleon for disdain,<br />
+His banner steeped in crape.<br />
+Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;<br />
+The frozen billow crested to its fall;<br />
+Dismemberment; disfigurement;<br />
+Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;<br />
+And ever that one word to reperuse,<br />
+With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;<br />
+Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiled<br />
+Showed her sons&rsquo; valour as a frenzied child<br />
+In arms of the mailed man.<br />
+Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,<br />
+Lest burst it: unto her eyes a ghost,<br />
+Incredible though manifest: a scene<br />
+Stamped with her new Saint&rsquo;s name: and all his host<br />
+A wattled flock the foeman&rsquo;s dogs between!</p>
+<h4>VII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to
+view that bare<br />
+Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its
+throes<br />
+Beneath her Purgatorial Saint&rsquo;s evocative stare:<br />
+<a name="page160"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 160</span>Brand on
+his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend&rsquo;s close.<br />
+A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night&rsquo;s
+dead-born,<br />
+His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a fray<br
+/>
+Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor&rsquo;s
+instinctive scorn<br />
+Of the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold
+grey,<br />
+Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,<br />
+Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted
+ranks.<br />
+The golden eagles flap lame wings,<br />
+The black double-headed are round their flanks.<br />
+He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake,
+trod into union; lo,<br />
+These are his Epic&rsquo;s tutored Dardans, yon that
+Rhapsode&rsquo;s Achaeans to know.<br />
+Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the
+weaker&rsquo;s flashed device;<br />
+Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal,
+assured, precise.<br />
+Ruled by the mathematician&rsquo;s hand, they solve their
+problem, as on a slate.<br />
+This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly
+hazarded date.<br />
+His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of
+plains for the warrior&rsquo;s guile<br />
+Displayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office
+mercantile.<br />
+And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble
+reduced to nought.<br />
+Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive,
+all writhen caught?<br />
+<a name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 161</span>Arterial
+blood of an army&rsquo;s heart outpoured the Grey Observer
+sees:<br />
+A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off
+her Pyrenees.<br />
+Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against
+iron, reason, Fate;<br />
+It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the
+helmeted feel its weight.<br />
+So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to
+screaming withdrawal, but snatched,<br />
+Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o&rsquo;er the waste
+of brave men outmatched.<br />
+The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose
+honour was dearer than life;<br />
+The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his
+pupil, the scholar in strife.</p>
+<p class="poetry">He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,<br />
+From sleep or debate, a mannikin squire<br />
+With head of a merlin hawk and quill<br />
+Acrow on an ear.&nbsp; At him rained fire<br />
+From a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,<br />
+To say what a deadly poison stuffed<br />
+The France here laid in her bloody ditch,<br />
+Through the Legend passing human puffed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Credible ghost of the field which from him
+descends,<br />
+Each dark anniversary day will its father return,<br />
+Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,<br />
+That penman trumpeter&rsquo;s part in the wreck discern.</p>
+<p class="poetry">There, with the cup it presents at her lips,
+she stands,<br />
+France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.<br />
+The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;<br />
+The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.<br />
+<a name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 162</span>Lopped
+of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,<br />
+To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,<br />
+At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.<br />
+Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick<br />
+Nigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,<br />
+Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Of love is wisdom.&nbsp; Is it great love, then
+wise<br />
+Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more<br />
+By its mentor&rsquo;s counselling voice than thoughtfully
+reined.<br />
+Desire of the wave for the shore,<br />
+Passion for one last agony under skies,<br />
+To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained</p>
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">On her lost arm love bade her look;<br />
+On her one hand to meditate;<br />
+The tumult of her blood abate;<br />
+Disaster face, derision brook:<br />
+Forbade the page of her Historic Muse,<br />
+Until her demon his last hold forsook,<br />
+And smoothly, with no countenance of hate,<br />
+Her conqueror she could scan to measure.&nbsp; Thence<br />
+The strange new Winter stream of ruling sense,<br />
+Cold, comfortless, but braced to disabuse,<br />
+Ran through the mind of this most lowly laid;<br />
+From the top billow of victorious War,<br />
+Down in the flagless troughs at ebb and flow;<br />
+A wreck; her past, her future, both in shade.<br />
+<a name="page163"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 163</span>She read
+the things that are;<br />
+Reality unaccepted read<br />
+For sign of the distraught, and took her blow<br />
+To brain; herself read through;<br />
+Wherefore her predatory Glory paid<br />
+Napoleon ransom knew.<br />
+Her nature&rsquo;s many strings hot gusts did jar<br />
+Against the note of reason uttered low,<br />
+Ere passionate with duty she might wed,<br />
+Compel the bride&rsquo;s embrace of her stern groom,<br />
+Joined at an altar liker to the tomb,<br />
+Nest of the Furies their first nuptial bed,<br />
+They not the less were mated and proclaimed<br />
+The rational their issue.&nbsp; Then she rose.</p>
+<p class="poetry">See how the rush of southern Springtide
+glows<br />
+Oceanic in the chariot-wheel&rsquo;s ascent,<br />
+Illuminated with one breath.&nbsp; The maimed,<br />
+Tom, tortured, winter-visaged, suddenly<br />
+Had stature; to the world&rsquo;s wonderment,<br />
+Fair features, grace of mien, nor least<br />
+The comic dimples round her April mouth,<br />
+Sprung of her intimate humanity.<br />
+She stood before mankind the very South<br />
+Rapt out of frost to flowery drapery;<br />
+Unshadowed save when somewhiles she looked East.</p>
+<h4>IX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Let but the rational prevail,<br />
+Our footing is on ground though all else fail:<br />
+Our kiss of Earth is then a plight<br />
+To walk within her Laws and have her light.<br />
+Choice of the life or death lies in ourselves;<br />
+There is no fate but when unreason lours.<br />
+<a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 164</span>This
+Land the cheerful toiler delves,<br />
+The thinker brightens with fine wit,<br />
+The lovelier grace as lyric flowers,<br />
+Those rosed and starred revolving Twelves<br />
+Shall nurse for effort infinite<br />
+While leashed to brain the heart of France the Fair<br />
+Beats tempered music and its lead subserves.<br />
+Washed from her eyes the Napoleonic glare,<br />
+Divinely raised by that in her divine,<br />
+Not the clear sight of Earth&rsquo;s blunt actual swerves<br />
+When her lost look, as on a wave of wine,<br />
+Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries<br />
+Caress with folds and curves<br />
+The fortress over Rhine,<br />
+Beneath the one tall spire.<br />
+Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,<br />
+Her anguish in desire,<br />
+She sees, above the brutish paw<br />
+Alert on her still quivering limb&mdash;<br />
+As little in past time she saw,<br />
+Nor when dispieced as prey,<br />
+As victrix when abhorred&mdash;<br />
+A Grand Germania, stout on soil;<br />
+Audacious up the ethereal dim;<br />
+The forest&rsquo;s Infant; the strong hand for toil;<br />
+The patient brain in twilights when astray;<br />
+Shrewdest of heads to foil and counterfoil;<br />
+The sceptic and devout; the potent sword;<br />
+With will and armed to help in hewing way<br />
+For Europe&rsquo;s march; and of the most golden chord<br />
+Of the Heliconian lyre<br />
+Excellent mistress.&nbsp; Yea, she sees, and can admire;<br />
+Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;<br />
+And with what shield upon Alsace-Lorraine<br />
+Her wary sister&rsquo;s doubtful look misreads<br />
+<a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 165</span>A
+mother&rsquo;s throbs for her lost: so loved: so near:<br />
+Magnetic.&nbsp; Hard the course for her to steer,<br />
+The leap against the sharpened spikes restrain.<br />
+For the belted Overshadower hard the course,<br />
+On whom devolves the spirit&rsquo;s touchstone, Force:<br />
+Which is the strenuous arm, to strike inclined,<br />
+That too much adamantine makes the mind;<br />
+Forgets it coin of Nature&rsquo;s rich Exchange;<br />
+Contracts horizons within present sight:<br />
+Amalekite to-day, across its range<br />
+Indisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.</p>
+<h4>X</h4>
+<p class="poetry">The mother who gave birth to Jeanne;<br />
+Who to her young Angelical sprang;<br />
+Who lay with Earth and heard the notes she sang,<br />
+And heard her truest sing them; she may reach<br />
+Heights yet unknown of nations; haply teach<br />
+A thirsting world to learn &rsquo;tis &lsquo;she who
+can.&rsquo;</p>
+<p class="poetry">She that in History&rsquo;s Heliaea pleads<br
+/>
+The nation flowering conscience o&rsquo;er the beast;<br />
+With heart expurged of rancour, tame of greeds;<br />
+With the winged mind from fang and claw released;&mdash;<br />
+Will such a land be seen?&nbsp; It will be seen;&mdash;<br />
+Shall stand adjudged our foremost and Earth&rsquo;s Queen.<br />
+Acknowledgement that she of God proceeds<br />
+The invisible makes visible, as his priest,<br />
+To her is yielded by a world reclaimed.<br />
+And stands she mutilated, fancy-shamed,<br />
+Yet strong in arms, yet strong in self-control,<br />
+Known valiant, her maternal throbs repressed,<br />
+Discarding vengeance, Giant with a soul;&mdash;<br />
+<a name="page166"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 166</span>My faith
+in her when she lay low<br />
+Was fountain; now as wave at flow<br />
+Beneath the lights, my faith in God is best;&mdash;<br />
+On France has come the test<br />
+Of what she holds within<br />
+Responsive to Life&rsquo;s deeper springs.<br />
+She above the nations blest<br />
+In fruitful and in liveliest,<br />
+In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,<br />
+The devotee of Glory, she may win<br />
+Glory despoiling none, enrich her kind,<br />
+Illume her land, and take the royal seat<br />
+Unto the strong self-conqueror assigned.<br />
+But ah, when speaks a loaded breath the double name,<br />
+Humanity&rsquo;s old Foeman winks agrin.<br />
+Her constant Angel eyes her heart&rsquo;s quick beat,<br />
+The thrill of shadow coursing through her frame.<br />
+Like wind among the ranks of amber wheat.<br />
+Our Europe, vowed to unity or torn,<br />
+Observes her face, as shepherds note the morn,<br />
+And in a ruddy beacon mark an end<br />
+That for the flock in their grave hearing rings.<br />
+Specked overhead the imminent vulture wings<br />
+At poise, one fatal movement indiscreet,<br />
+Sprung from the Aetna passions&rsquo; mad revolts,<br />
+Draws down; the midnight hovers to descend;<br />
+And dire as Indian noons of ulcer heat<br />
+Anticipating tempest and the bolts,<br />
+Hangs curtained terrors round her next day&rsquo;s door,<br />
+Death&rsquo;s emblems for the breast of Europe flings;<br />
+The breast that waits a spark to fire her store.<br />
+Shall, then, the great vitality, France,<br />
+Signal the backward step once more;<br />
+<a name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 167</span>Again a
+Goddess Fortune trace<br />
+Amid the Deities, and pledge to chance<br />
+One whom we never could replace?<br />
+Now may she tune her nature&rsquo;s many strings<br />
+To noble harmony, be seen, be known.</p>
+<p class="poetry">It was the foreign France, the unruly,
+feared;<br />
+Little for all her witcheries endeared;<br />
+Theatrical of arrogance, a sprite<br />
+With gaseous vapours overblown,<br />
+In her conceit of power ensphered,<br />
+Foredoomed to violate and atone;<br />
+Her the grim conqueror&rsquo;s iron might<br />
+Avengeing clutched, distrusting rent;<br />
+Not that sharp intellect with fire endowed<br />
+To cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;<br />
+Not virtual France, the France benevolent,<br />
+The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublime<br />
+At intervals, and oft in sweetest chime;<br />
+Though perilously instrument,<br />
+A breast for any having godlike gleam.<br />
+This France could no antagonist disesteem,<br />
+To spurn at heel and confiscate her brood.<br />
+Albeit a waverer between heart and mind,<br />
+And laurels won from sky or plucked from blood,<br />
+Which wither all the wreath when intertwined,<br />
+This cherishable France she may redeem.<br />
+Beloved of Earth, her heart should feel at length<br />
+How much unto Earth&rsquo;s offspring it doth owe.<br />
+Obstructions are for levelling, have we strength;<br />
+&rsquo;Tis poverty of soul conceived a foe.<br />
+Rejected be the wrath that keeps unhealed<br />
+Her panting wound; to higher Courts appealed<br />
+The wrongs discerned of higher: Europe waits:<br />
+She chooses God or gambles with the Fates.<br />
+<a name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 168</span>Shines
+the new Helen in Alsace-Lorraine,<br />
+A darker river severs Rhine and Rhone,<br />
+Is heard a deadlier Epic of the twain;<br />
+We see a Paris burn<br />
+Or France Napoleon.</p>
+<p class="poetry">For yet he breathes whom less her heart
+forswears<br />
+While trembles its desire to thwart her mind:<br />
+The Tyrant lives in Victory&rsquo;s return.<br />
+What figure with recurrent footstep fares<br />
+Around those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,<br />
+To sow her future from an ashen urn<br />
+By lantern-light, as dragons&rsquo; teeth are sown?<br />
+Of bleeding pride the piercing se&euml;r is blind.<br />
+But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scud<br />
+Distorting her true features, to be shown<br />
+Benignly luminous, one who bears<br />
+Humanity at breast, and she might learn<br />
+How surely the excelling generous find<br />
+Renouncement is possession.&nbsp; Sure<br />
+As light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,<br />
+The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,<br />
+Magnanimous magnanimous creates.<br />
+So to majestic beauty stricken rears<br />
+Hard-visaged rock against the risen glow;<br />
+And men are in the secret with the spheres,<br />
+Whose glory is celestially to bestow.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Now nation looks to nation, that may live<br />
+Their common nurseling, like the torrent&rsquo;s flower,<br />
+Shaken by foul Destruction&rsquo;s fast-piled heap.<br />
+On France is laid the proud initiative<br />
+Of sacrifice in one self-mastering hour,<br />
+Whereby more than her lost one will she reap;<br />
+<a name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+169</span>Perchance the very lost regain,<br />
+To count it less than her superb reward.<br />
+Our Europe, where is debtor each to each,<br />
+Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain,<br />
+Fraternal from the Seaman&rsquo;s beach,<br />
+From answering Rhine in grand accord,<br />
+From Neva beneath Northern cloud,<br />
+And from our Transatlantic Europe loud,<br />
+Will hail the rare example for their theme;<br />
+Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze;<br />
+In their entrusted nurseling know them one:<br />
+Like a brave vessel under press of steam,<br />
+Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas,<br />
+Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present sun,<br />
+Will drive through darkness, and, with faith supreme,<br />
+Have sight of haven and the crowded quays.</p>
+<h2><a name="page170"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 170</span>THE
+CAGEING OF ARES<br />
+<span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, v. 385</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">[DEDICATED
+TO THE COUNCIL AT THE HAGUE, 1899]</span></p>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">How</span> big of breast
+our Mother Gaea laughed<br />
+At sight of her boy Giants on the leap<br />
+Each over other as they neighboured home,<br />
+Fronting the day&rsquo;s descent across green slopes,<br />
+And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.<br />
+Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,<br />
+Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,<br />
+It signalled some adventurous master-trick<br />
+To set Olympians buzzing in debate,<br />
+Lest it might be their godhead undermined,<br />
+The Tyranny menaced.&nbsp; Ephialtes high<br />
+On shoulders of his brother Otos waved<br />
+For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,<br />
+Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar<br />
+While Otos aped the prisoner&rsquo;s wrists and knees,<br />
+With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;<br />
+Till Gaea&rsquo;s lap receiving them, they stretched,<br />
+And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,<br />
+Burst the hot story out of throats of both,<br />
+Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut<br />
+The hurried spout.&nbsp; And as when drifting storm<br />
+Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon<br />
+A peak, a forest mound, a valley&rsquo;s gleam<br />
+Of grass and the river&rsquo;s crooks and snaky coils,<br />
+Signification marvellous she caught,<br />
+Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,<br />
+Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last<br />
+<a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+171</span>Subsided, and the serious naked deed,<br />
+With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,<br />
+Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe<br />
+That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,<br />
+These two made up of lion, bear and fox,<br />
+Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,<br />
+Still by the reckoning infants among men,<br />
+Had done the deed to strike the Titan host<br />
+In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:<br />
+These two combining strength and craft had snared,<br />
+Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged<br />
+The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;<br />
+Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;<br />
+The barren furrower of anointed fields;<br />
+The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,<br />
+Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:<br />
+Great Ares.&nbsp; And they gagged his trumpet mouth<br />
+When they had seized on his implacable spear,<br />
+Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite<br />
+His godlike fury startled from amaze.<br />
+For he had eyed them nearing him in play,<br />
+The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,<br />
+Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount<br />
+Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there<br />
+On Earth&rsquo;s original fisticuffs they called<br />
+For ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,<br />
+Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,<br />
+Good servitors of Ares they would be,<br />
+And ply the pointed spear to dominate<br />
+Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood<br />
+Vowed to defy Immortals.&nbsp; So it chanced<br />
+Amusedly he watched them, and as one<br />
+The lusty twain were on him and they had him.<br />
+Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!<br />
+Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!<br />
+<a name="page172"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 172</span>Bound
+like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!<br />
+Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,<br />
+Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;<br />
+A desolating fire to blind the sight<br />
+With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;<br />
+The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;<br />
+Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,<br />
+Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.<br />
+Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,<br />
+And tumbled down the cave.&nbsp; But rather look&mdash;<br />
+Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,<br />
+Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,<br />
+Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!<br />
+Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,<br />
+And shatter earth&rsquo;s delirious holiday,<br />
+Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,<br />
+Resolving to composure on its throbs.<br />
+But see her in the Seasons through that year;<br />
+That one glad year and the fair opening month.<br />
+Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!<br />
+War with her, gentle war with her, each day<br />
+Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,<br />
+On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength<br />
+Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,<br />
+From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,<br />
+Her ready secret: the abounding life<br />
+Returned for valiant labour: she and they<br />
+Defeated and victorious turn by turn;<br />
+By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.<br />
+Exchange of powers of this conflict came;<br />
+Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.<br />
+Is battle nature&rsquo;s mandate, here it reigned,<br />
+As music unto the hand that smote the strings;<br />
+And she the rosier from their showery brows,<br />
+They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.<br />
+<a name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 173</span>Back to
+the primal rational of those<br />
+Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp<br />
+Stability in hatred of the insane,<br />
+Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce<br />
+The mortal mind&rsquo;s concept of earth&rsquo;s divorced<br />
+Above; those beautiful, those masterful,<br />
+Those lawless.&nbsp; High they sit, and if descend,<br />
+Descend to reap, not sowing.&nbsp; Is it just?<br />
+Earth in her happy children asked that word,<br />
+Whereto within their breast was her reply.<br />
+Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,<br />
+Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;<br />
+Yet they (&rsquo;twas the Great Mother&rsquo;s voice inspired<br
+/>
+The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,<br />
+Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,<br />
+To meet the certain fate of earth&rsquo;s divorced,<br />
+And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,<br />
+Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,<br />
+Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled<br />
+The Tyranny.&nbsp; This her voice within them told,<br />
+When softly the Great Mother chid her sons<br />
+Not of the giant brood, who did create<br />
+Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain<br />
+Set moving by an abject blood, that waked<br />
+To wanton under elements more benign,<br />
+And planted aliens on Olympian heights;&mdash;<br />
+Imagination&rsquo;s cradle poesy<br />
+Become a monstrous pressure upon men;&mdash;<br />
+Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed<br />
+By light from her, born of the love of her,<br />
+Their lordship the illumined brain rejects<br />
+For earth&rsquo;s beneficent, the sons of Law,<br />
+Her other name.&nbsp; So spake she in their heart,<br />
+Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath<br />
+Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,<br />
+<a name="page174"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+174</span>Confidently to cling.&nbsp; And when brown corn<br />
+Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,<br />
+With gold necks bent for any zephyr&rsquo;s kiss;<br />
+When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil<br />
+Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;<br />
+When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,<br />
+Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;<br />
+The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,<br />
+And yet a burning lion for the spring;<br />
+Then in that time of general cherishment,<br />
+Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,<br />
+He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,<br />
+Then did good Gaea&rsquo;s children gratefully<br />
+Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,<br />
+Delightful Peace, that answers Reason&rsquo;s call<br />
+Harmoniously and images her Law;<br />
+Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,<br />
+In memories made present on the brain<br />
+By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;<br />
+The picture of an earth allied to heaven;<br />
+Between them the known smile behind black masks;<br />
+Rightly their various moods interpreted;<br />
+And frolic because toilful children borne<br />
+With larger comprehension of Earth&rsquo;s aim<br />
+At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.</p>
+<h2><a name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 175</span>THE
+NIGHT-WALK</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Awakes</span> for me and
+leaps from shroud<br />
+All radiantly the moon&rsquo;s own night<br />
+Of folded showers in streamer cloud;<br />
+Our shadows down the highway white<br />
+Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,<br />
+With yon and yon a stem alight.</p>
+<p class="poetry">I see marauder runagates<br />
+Across us shoot their dusky wink;<br />
+I hear the parliament of chats<br />
+In haws beside the river&rsquo;s brink;<br />
+And drops the vole off alder-banks,<br />
+To push his arrow through the stream.<br />
+These busy people had our thanks<br />
+For tickling sight and sound, but theme<br />
+They were not more than breath we drew<br />
+Delighted with our world&rsquo;s embrace:<br />
+The moss-root smell where beeches grew,<br />
+And watered grass in breezy space;<br />
+The silken heights, of ghostly bloom<br />
+Among their folds, by distance draped.<br />
+&rsquo;Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,<br />
+That cried to have its chaos shaped:<br />
+Absorbing, little noting, still<br />
+Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;<br />
+With wistful looks on each far hill<br />
+For something hidden, something owed.<br />
+Unto his mantled sister, Day<br />
+Had given the secret things we sought<br />
+<a name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 176</span>And she
+was grave and saintly gay;<br />
+At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;<br />
+She flew on it, then folded wings,<br />
+In meditation passing lone,<br />
+To breathe around the secret things,<br />
+Which have no word, and yet are known;<br />
+Of thirst for them are known, as air<br />
+Is health in blood: we gained enough<br />
+By this to feel it honest fare;<br />
+Impalpable, not barren, stuff.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A pride of legs in motion kept<br />
+Our spirits to their task meanwhile,<br />
+And what was deepest dreaming slept:<br />
+The posts that named the swallowed mile;<br />
+Beside the straight canal the hut<br />
+Abandoned; near the river&rsquo;s source<br />
+Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;<br />
+The roadway missed; were our discourse;<br />
+At times dear poets, whom some view<br />
+Transcendent or subdued evoked<br />
+To speak the memorable, the true,<br />
+The luminous as a moon uncloaked;<br />
+For proof that there, among earth&rsquo;s dumb,<br />
+A soul had passed and said our best.<br />
+Or it might be we chimed on some<br />
+Historic favourite&rsquo;s astral crest,<br />
+With part to reverence in its gleam,<br />
+And part to rivalry the shout:<br />
+So royal, unuttered, is youth&rsquo;s dream<br />
+Of power within to strike without.<br />
+But most the silences were sweet,<br />
+Like mothers&rsquo; breasts, to bid it feel<br />
+It lived in such divine conceit<br />
+As envies aught we stamp for real.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page177"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+177</span>To either then an untold tale<br />
+Was Life, and author, hero, we.<br />
+The chapters holding peaks to scale,<br />
+Or depths to fathom, made our glee;<br />
+For we were armed of inner fires,<br />
+Unbled in us the ripe desires;<br />
+And passion rolled a quiet sea,<br />
+Whereon was Love the phantom sail.</p>
+<h2><a name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>AT
+THE CLOSE</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">To</span> Thee, dear God of
+Mercy, both appeal,<br />
+Who straightway sound the call to arms.&nbsp; Thou
+know&rsquo;st;<br />
+And that black spot in each embattled host,<br />
+Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.<br />
+Now is it red artillery and white steel;<br />
+Till on a day will ring the victor&rsquo;s boast,<br />
+That &rsquo;tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,<br />
+Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.<br />
+So in all times of man&rsquo;s descent insane<br />
+To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,<br />
+Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.<br />
+But at the close he entered Thy domain,<br />
+Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like<br />
+He tore the fall&rsquo;n, the Eternal was his Foe.</p>
+<h2><a name="page179"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 179</span>A
+GARDEN IDYL</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">With</span> sagest craft
+Arachne worked<br />
+Her web, and at a corner lurked,<br />
+Awaiting what should plump her soon,<br />
+To case it in the death-cocoon.<br />
+Sagaciously her home she chose<br />
+For visits that would never close;<br />
+Inside my chalet-porch her feast<br />
+Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The finished structure, bar on bar,<br />
+Had snatched from light to form a star,<br />
+And struck on sight, when quick with dews,<br />
+Like music of the very Muse.<br />
+Great artists pass our single sense;<br />
+We hear in seeing, strung to tense;<br />
+Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,<br />
+To think such beauty means a trap.<br />
+But Nature&rsquo;s genius, even man&rsquo;s<br />
+At best, is practical in plans;<br />
+Subservient to the needy thought,<br />
+However rare the weapon wrought.<br />
+As long as Nature holds it good<br />
+To urge her creatures&rsquo; quest for food<br />
+Will beauty stamp the just intent<br />
+Of weapons upon service bent.<br />
+For beauty is a flower of roots<br />
+Embedded lower than our boots;<br />
+Out of the primal strata springs,<br />
+And shows for crown of useful things.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+180</span>Arachne&rsquo;s dream of prey to size<br />
+Aspired; so she could nigh despise<br />
+The puny specks the breezes round<br />
+Supplied, and let them shake unwound;<br />
+Assured of her fat fly to come;<br />
+Perhaps a blue, the spider&rsquo;s plum;<br />
+Who takes the fatal odds in fight,<br />
+And gives repast an appetite,<br />
+By plunging, whizzing, till his wings<br />
+Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,<br />
+A shrouded lump, for her to see<br />
+Her banquet in her victory.</p>
+<p class="poetry">This matron of the unnumbered threads,<br />
+One day of dandelions&rsquo; heads<br />
+Distributing their gray perruques<br />
+Up every gust, I watched with looks<br />
+Discreet beside the chalet-door;<br />
+And gracefully a light wind bore,<br />
+Direct upon my webster&rsquo;s wall,<br />
+A monster in the form of ball;<br />
+The mildest captive ever snared,<br />
+That neither struggled nor despaired,<br />
+On half the net invading hung,<br />
+And plain as in her mother tongue,<br />
+While low the weaver cursed her lures,<br />
+Remarked, &ldquo;You have me; I am yours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,<br />
+Her dream of size she saw, agape.<br />
+Midway the vast round-raying beard<br />
+A desiccated midge appeared;<br />
+Whose body pricked the name of meal,<br />
+Whose hair had growth in earth&rsquo;s unreal;<br />
+Provocative of dread and wrath,<br />
+Contempt and horror, in one froth,<br />
+<a name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+181</span>Inextricable, insensible,<br />
+His poison presence there would dwell,<br />
+Declaring him her dream fulfilled,<br />
+A catch to compliment the skilled;<br />
+And she reduced to beaky skin,<br />
+Disgraceful among kith and kin</p>
+<p class="poetry">Against her corner, humped and aged,<br />
+Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,<br />
+Beyond disgust or hope in guile.<br />
+Ridiculously volatile<br />
+He seemed to her last spark of mind;<br />
+And that in pallid ash declined<br />
+Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,<br />
+Wherein throughout her frame she felt<br />
+That he, the light wind&rsquo;s libertine,<br />
+Without a scoff, without a grin,<br />
+And mannered like the courtly few,<br />
+Who merely danced when light winds blew,<br />
+Impervious to beak and claws,<br />
+Tradition&rsquo;s ruinous Whitebeard was;<br />
+Of whom, as actors in old scenes,<br />
+Had grannam weavers warned their weans,<br />
+With word, that less than feather-weight,<br />
+He smote the web like bolt of Fate.</p>
+<p class="poetry">This muted drama, hour by hour,<br />
+I watched amid a world in flower,<br />
+Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid<br />
+Their gray-blue o&rsquo;er the grass&rsquo;s blade,<br />
+And still along the garden-run<br />
+The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.<br />
+Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance<br />
+Her visitor performed a dance;<br />
+<a name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 182</span>She
+puckered thinner; he the same<br />
+As when on that light wind he came.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Next day was told what deeds of night<br />
+Were done; the web had vanished quite;<br />
+With it the strange opposing pair;<br />
+And listless waved on vacant air,<br />
+For her adieu to heart&rsquo;s content,<br />
+A solitary filament.</p>
+<h2><a name="page183"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 183</span>A
+READING OF LIFE</h2>
+<h3><a name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>THE
+VITAL CHOICE</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Or</span> shall we run with
+Artemis<br />
+Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?<br />
+Both are mighty;<br />
+Both give bliss;<br />
+Each can torture if divided;<br />
+Each claims worship undivided,<br />
+In her wake would have us wallow.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Youth must offer on bent knees<br />
+Homage unto one or other;<br />
+Earth, the mother,<br />
+This decrees;<br />
+And unto the pallid Scyther<br />
+Either points us shun we either<br />
+Shun or too devoutly follow.</p>
+<h3><a name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 186</span>WITH
+THE HUNTRESS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Through</span> the
+water-eye of night,<br />
+Midway between eve and dawn,<br />
+See the chase, the rout, the flight<br />
+In deep forest; oread, faun,<br />
+Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;<br />
+Ravenous all the line for speed.<br />
+See yon wavy sparkle beck<br />
+Sign of the Virgin Lady&rsquo;s lead.<br />
+Down her course a serpent star<br />
+Coils and shatters at her heels;<br />
+Peals the horn exulting, peals<br />
+Plaintive, is it near or far.<br />
+Huntress, arrowy to pursue,<br />
+In and out of woody glen,<br />
+Under cliffs that tear the blue,<br />
+Over torrent, over fen,<br />
+She and forest, where she skims<br />
+Feathery, darken and relume:<br />
+Those are her white-lightning limbs<br />
+Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.<br />
+Mountains hear her and call back,<br />
+Shrewd with night: a frosty wail<br />
+Distant: her the emerald vale<br />
+Folds, and wonders in her track.<br />
+Now her retinue is lean,<br />
+Many rearward; streams the chase<br />
+Eager forth of covert; seen<br />
+One hot tide the rapturous race.<br />
+Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,<br />
+Up on a flash the lighted mound<br />
+<a name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 187</span>Leaps
+she, bow to shoulder, shaft<br />
+Strung to barb with archer&rsquo;s craft,<br />
+Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet<br />
+Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.<br />
+Fearful swiftness they outrun,<br />
+Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,<br />
+Challenge, charge of tusks elude:<br />
+Theirs the dance to tame the rude;<br />
+Beast, and beast in manhood tame,<br />
+Follow we their silver flame.<br />
+Pride of flesh from bondage free,<br />
+Reaping vigour of its waste,<br />
+Marks her servitors, and she<br />
+Sanctifies the unembraced.<br />
+Nought of perilous she reeks;<br />
+Valour clothes her open breast;<br />
+Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;<br />
+Hallowed by the sex confessed.<br />
+Huntress arrowy to pursue,<br />
+Colder she than sunless dew,<br />
+She, that breath of upper air;<br />
+Ay, but never lyrist sang,<br />
+Draught of Bacchus never sprang<br />
+Blood the bliss of Gods to share,<br />
+High o&rsquo;er sweep of eagle wings,<br />
+Like the run with her, when rings<br />
+Clear her rally, and her dart,<br />
+In the forest&rsquo;s cavern heart,<br />
+Tells of her victorious aim.<br />
+Then is pause and chatter, cheer,<br />
+Laughter at some satyr lame,<br />
+Looks upon the fallen deer,<br />
+Measuring his noble crest;<br />
+Here a favourite in her train,<br />
+Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;<br />
+<a name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 188</span>All
+applauded.&nbsp; Shall she reign<br />
+Worshipped?&nbsp; O to be with her there!<br />
+She, that breath of nimble air,<br />
+Lifts the breast to giant power.<br />
+Maid and man, and man and maid,<br />
+Who each other would devour<br />
+Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,<br />
+There are comrades, led by her,<br />
+Maid-preserver, man-maker.</p>
+<h3><a name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 189</span>WITH
+THE PERSUADER</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Who</span> murmurs, hither,
+hither: who<br />
+Where nought is audible so fills the ear?<br />
+Where nought is visible can make appear<br />
+A veil with eyes that waver through,<br />
+Like twilight&rsquo;s pledge of blessed night to come,<br />
+Or day most golden?&nbsp; All unseen and dumb,<br />
+She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,<br />
+Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire<br />
+To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,<br />
+Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,<br />
+Flame in a crystal vessel sails<br />
+Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,<br />
+For land that drops the rosy day<br />
+On nights of throbbing nightingales.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Landward did the wonder flit,<br />
+Or heart&rsquo;s desire of her, all earth in it.<br />
+We saw the heavens fling down their rose;<br />
+On rapturous waves we saw her glide;<br />
+The pearly sea-shell half enclose;<br />
+The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;<br />
+And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more<br />
+Behold than tracks along a startled shore,<br />
+With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign<br />
+An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.</p>
+<p class="poetry">More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,<br
+/>
+The very she called forth by ripened blood<br />
+<a name="page190"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 190</span>For its
+next breath of being, murmurs; she,<br />
+Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,<br />
+The stream within us urged to flood;<br />
+Man&rsquo;s cry, earth&rsquo;s answer, heaven&rsquo;s consent; O
+she,<br />
+Maid, woman and divinity;<br />
+Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate<br />
+Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit<br />
+Untasted; she our written fate<br />
+Unread; Life&rsquo;s flowering, Life&rsquo;s root:<br />
+Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;<br />
+The evanescent, ever-present she,<br />
+Great Nature&rsquo;s stern necessity<br />
+In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;<br />
+With a sword&rsquo;s edge of sweetness keen to take<br />
+Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.<br />
+Man&rsquo;s cry, earth&rsquo;s answer, heaven&rsquo;s consent,<br
+/>
+Her form is given to pardoned sight,<br />
+And lets our mortal eyes receive<br />
+The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;<br />
+Adored by them who solitarily pace,<br />
+In dusk of the underworld&rsquo;s perpetual eve,<br />
+The paths among the meadow asphodel,<br />
+Remembering.&nbsp; Never there her face<br />
+Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell<br />
+Around such whiteness the enamoured air<br />
+Of noon that clothes her, never there.<br />
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,<br />
+She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,<br />
+Sweet in her disregard of aid<br />
+Divine to conquer or persuade.<br />
+A fountain jets from moss; a flower<br />
+Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.<br />
+By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen<br />
+With eyelids unabashed the passion&rsquo;s Queen.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+191</span>Shorn of attendant Graces she can use<br />
+Her natural snares to make her will supreme.<br />
+A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse<br />
+Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:<br />
+One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;<br />
+Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way<br />
+A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,<br />
+Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.<br />
+The bud of fresh virginity awaits<br />
+The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:<br />
+She touches on the hour of happy mates;<br />
+Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.</p>
+<p class="poetry">And while commanding blissful sight believe<br
+/>
+It holds her as a body strained to breast,<br />
+Down on the underworld&rsquo;s perpetual eve<br />
+She plunges the possessor dispossessed;<br />
+And bids believe that image, heaving warm,<br />
+Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;<br />
+The phantom any breeze blows out of form;<br />
+A thirst&rsquo;s delusion, a defeated aim.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The rapture shed the torture weaves;<br />
+The direst blow on human heart she deals:<br />
+The pain to know the seen deceives;<br />
+Nought true but what insufferably feels.<br />
+And stabs of her delicious note,<br />
+That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard<br />
+Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,<br />
+We answer as the midnight&rsquo;s morning&rsquo;s bird.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;<br />
+In her delicious laughter part revealed;<br />
+Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,<br />
+For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.<br />
+<a name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 192</span>Yet
+would she bless, it is her task to bless:<br />
+Yon folded couples, passing under shade,<br />
+Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,<br />
+Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.<br />
+We dolorous complainers had a dream,<br />
+Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,<br />
+We saw stand bare of her celestial beam<br />
+The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips<br
+/>
+Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;<br />
+And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips<br />
+She nods: at once that creature wears her lure.<br />
+Blush of our being between birth and death:<br />
+Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:<br />
+Her wily semblance nought of her denies;<br />
+Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,<br />
+The generous Goddess yields.&nbsp; And she can arm<br />
+Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;<br />
+Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.<br />
+Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.<br />
+But scorn she has for them that walk alone;<br />
+Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.<br />
+The men as chief of criminals she disdains,<br />
+And holds the reason in perceptive thought.<br />
+More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,<br />
+Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.<br />
+Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,<br />
+Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,<br />
+In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:<br />
+Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes<br />
+For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.<br />
+Comes there a tremor of night&rsquo;s forest horn<br />
+Across her garden from the insaner crew,<br />
+She darkens to malignity of scorn.<br />
+<a name="page193"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 193</span>A shiver
+courses through her garden-grounds:<br />
+Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,<br />
+The hunter&rsquo;s shouts, are heard afar, and bring<br />
+Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.<br />
+These, the irreverent of Life&rsquo;s design,<br />
+Division between natural and divine<br />
+Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,<br />
+In veins of gathered strength Life&rsquo;s tide arrest;<br />
+And these because the roses flood their cheeks,<br />
+Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.<br />
+With them is war; and well the Goddess knows<br />
+What undermines the race who mount the rose;<br />
+How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,<br />
+Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:<br />
+Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,<br />
+The strong when Beauty gleams o&rsquo;er Nature&rsquo;s needs,<br
+/>
+And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.<br />
+They who her sway withstand a sea defy,<br />
+At every point of juncture must be proof;<br />
+Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge<br />
+Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge<br />
+For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.<br />
+She, tenderness, is pitiless to them<br />
+Resisting in her godhead nature&rsquo;s truth.<br />
+No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;<br />
+Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.<br />
+These miserably disinclined,<br />
+The lamentably unembraced,<br />
+Insult the Pleasures Earth designed<br />
+To people and beflower the waste.<br />
+Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:<br />
+For death they live, in life they die.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her head the Goddess from them turns,<br />
+As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.<br />
+<a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 194</span>She
+views her quivering couples unconsoled,<br />
+And of her beauty mirror they become,<br />
+Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,<br />
+Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.<br />
+Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,<br />
+Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,<br />
+Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,<br />
+They play the music made of two:<br />
+Oldest of earth, earth&rsquo;s youngest till earth&rsquo;s
+end:<br />
+Cunninger than the numbered strings,<br />
+For melodies, for harmonies,<br />
+For mastered discords, and the things<br />
+Not vocable, whose mysteries<br />
+Are inmost Love&rsquo;s, Life&rsquo;s reach of Life extend.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Is it an anguish overflowing shame<br />
+And the tongue&rsquo;s pudency confides to her,<br />
+With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,<br />
+The woman&rsquo;s marrow in some dear youth&rsquo;s name,<br />
+Then is the Goddess tenderness<br />
+Maternal, and she has a sister&rsquo;s tones<br />
+Benign to soothe intemperate distress,<br />
+Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.<br />
+Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease<br />
+To those of her milk-bearer votaries<br />
+As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source<br />
+Direct; erratic but in heart&rsquo;s excess;<br />
+Being mortal and ill-matched for Love&rsquo;s great force;<br />
+Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.<br />
+And pray they under skies less overcast,<br />
+That swiftly may her star of eve descend,<br />
+Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,<br />
+To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Unfailing her reply to woman&rsquo;s voice<br
+/>
+In supplication instant.&nbsp; Is it man&rsquo;s,<br />
+<a name="page195"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 195</span>She
+hears, approves his words, her garden scans,<br />
+And him: the flowers are various, he has choice.<br />
+Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;<br />
+Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;<br />
+And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise<br />
+Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps<br
+/>
+To her invoked: distraction is implored.<br />
+A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps<br />
+Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.<br />
+His tales of her declare she condescends;<br />
+Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:<br />
+Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose<br />
+A queenlier gem than woman&rsquo;s wayside rose.<br />
+She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs<br />
+Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;<br />
+Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.<br />
+&rsquo;Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse<br />
+Rarely the music made of two ascends,<br />
+And Beauty&rsquo;s Queen some other way is won.<br />
+Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends<br />
+Herself to all, and yields herself to none,<br />
+Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised<br />
+In hot assurance under shade of doubt:<br />
+And numerous are the images bepraised<br />
+As Beauty&rsquo;s Queen, should passion head the rout.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Be sure the ruddy hue is Love&rsquo;s: to
+woo<br />
+Love&rsquo;s Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.<br />
+That is her garden&rsquo;s precept, seen where shines<br />
+Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.<br />
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,<br />
+She bids her couples face full East,<br />
+Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast<br />
+<a name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 196</span>Their
+outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,<br />
+The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.<br />
+In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;<br />
+High confidence in her whose aid is lent<br />
+To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,<br />
+Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.<br />
+And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,<br />
+Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,<br />
+Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun&rsquo;s.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe<br
+/>
+He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.<br />
+For him requiring woman&rsquo;s arts to please<br />
+Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,<br />
+No race of giants!&nbsp; In the woman&rsquo;s veins<br />
+Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.<br />
+Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,<br />
+Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;<br />
+Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss<br />
+In her high Lady&rsquo;s mandate, yields the kiss;<br />
+And is it needed that Love&rsquo;s daintier brute<br />
+Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.<br />
+She is great Nature&rsquo;s ever intimate<br />
+In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,<br />
+Until perverted by her senseless male,<br />
+She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,<br />
+The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,<br />
+Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Hence has the Goddess, Nature&rsquo;s earliest
+Power,<br />
+And greatest and most present, with her dower<br />
+Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute<br />
+For meditated guile.&nbsp; She laughs to hear<br />
+A charge her garden&rsquo;s labyrinths scarce confute,<br />
+Her garden&rsquo;s histories tell of to all near.<br />
+<a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 197</span>Let it
+be said, But less upon her guile<br />
+Doth she rely for her immortal smile.<br />
+Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens<br />
+To push her conquests by the simplest means.<br />
+While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves<br />
+From earth&rsquo;s good labours, Beauty&rsquo;s Queen he
+serves.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her spacious garden and her garden&rsquo;s
+grant<br />
+She offers in reward for handsome cheer:<br />
+Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant<br />
+The secret down a dewy leer<br />
+Of corner eyelids into haze:<br />
+Many a fair Aphrosyne<br />
+Like flower-bell to honey-bee:<br />
+And here they flicker round the maze<br />
+Bewildering him in heart and head:<br />
+And here they wear the close demure,<br />
+With subtle peeps to reassure:<br />
+Others parade where love has bled,<br />
+And of its crimson weave their mesh:<br />
+Others to snap of fingers leap,<br />
+As bearing breast with love asleep.<br />
+These are her laughters in the flesh.<br />
+Or would she fit a warrior mood,<br />
+She lights her seeming unsubdued,<br />
+And indicates the fortress-key.<br />
+Or is it heart for heart that craves,<br />
+She flecks along a run of waves<br />
+The one to promise deeper sea.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Bands of her limpid primitives,<br />
+Or patterned in the curious braid,<br />
+Are the blest man&rsquo;s; and whatsoever he gives,<br />
+For what he gives is he repaid.<br />
+<a name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 198</span>Good is
+it if by him &rsquo;tis held<br />
+He wins the fairest ever welled<br />
+From Nature&rsquo;s founts: she whispers it: Even I<br />
+Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,<br />
+Else little is he lover.&nbsp; Those he clasps,<br />
+Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer,&mdash;<br />
+And be they doves or be they asps,&mdash;<br />
+Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;<br />
+Else counts he soon among life&rsquo;s wholly tamed.<br />
+Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,<br />
+Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned<br />
+The lover.&nbsp; Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,<br />
+He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,<br />
+Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.<br />
+Doth man divide divine Necessity<br />
+From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty&rsquo;s breasts<br />
+A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain<br />
+Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.<br />
+Of this he perishes; not she, the throned<br />
+On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.<br />
+A loftier Reason out of deeper founts<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned<br />
+While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,<br />
+And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s answer, heaven&rsquo;s consent unto man&rsquo;s
+cry,<br />
+Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Quickened of Nature&rsquo;s eye and ear,<br />
+When the wild sap at high tide smites<br />
+Within us; or benignly clear<br />
+To vision; or as the iris lights<br />
+On fluctuant waters; she is ours<br />
+Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;<br />
+Flushing the world with odorous flowers:<br />
+<a name="page199"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 199</span>A soft
+compulsion on terrene<br />
+By heavenly: and the world is hers<br />
+While hunger after Beauty spurs.</p>
+<p class="poetry">So is it sung in any space<br />
+She fills, with laugh at shallow laws<br />
+Forbidding love&rsquo;s devised embrace,<br />
+The music Beauty from it draws.</p>
+<h3><a name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 200</span>THE
+TEST OF MANHOOD</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Like</span> a flood river
+whirled at rocky banks,<br />
+An army issues out of wilderness,<br />
+With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;<br />
+Obstruction in the van; insane excess<br />
+Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress<br />
+Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,<br />
+And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,<br />
+The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.<br />
+They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;<br />
+A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.<br />
+Then was the gracious birth of man&rsquo;s new day;<br />
+Divided from the haunted night it shone.</p>
+<p class="poetry">That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof
+sprang<br />
+Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide.<br />
+Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:<br />
+It was another earth unto him sang.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Came Reverence from the Huntress on her
+heights?<br />
+From the Persuader came it, in those vales<br />
+Whereunto she melodiously invites,<br />
+Her troops of eager servitors regales?<br />
+Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed<br />
+Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;<br />
+Nor either points for us the way of flame.<br />
+From him predestined mightier it came;<br />
+His task to hold them both in breast, and yield<br />
+Their dues to each, and of their war be field.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The foes that in repulsion never ceased,<br />
+Must he, who once has been the goodly beast<br />
+<a name="page201"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 201</span>Of one
+or other, at whose beck he ran,<br />
+Constrain to make him serviceable man;<br />
+Offending neither, nor the natural claim<br />
+Each pressed, denying, for his true man&rsquo;s name.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife<br
+/>
+To hold them fast conjoined within him still;<br />
+Submissive to his will<br />
+Along the road of life!<br />
+And marvel not he wavered if at whiles<br />
+The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.<br />
+For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;<br />
+Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.<br />
+Delicious licence called it Nature&rsquo;s cry;<br />
+Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;<br />
+A tread on shingle timed his lame advance<br />
+Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,<br />
+He of the troubled marching army leaned<br />
+On godhead visible, on godhead screened;<br />
+The radiant roseate, the curtained white;<br />
+Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.</p>
+<p class="poetry">He drank of fictions, till celestial aid<br />
+Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;<br />
+Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,<br />
+To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;<br />
+And ever that imagined succour slew<br />
+The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.</p>
+<p class="poetry">In fellowship religion has its founts:<br />
+The solitary his own God reveres:<br />
+Ascend no sacred Mounts<br />
+Our hungers or our fears.<br />
+<a name="page202"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 202</span>As only
+for the numbers Nature&rsquo;s care<br />
+Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,<br />
+So to Divinity the spring of prayer<br />
+From brotherhood the one way upward leads.<br />
+Like the sustaining air<br />
+Are both for flowers and weeds.<br />
+But he who claims in spirit to be flower,<br />
+Will find them both an air that doth devour.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored<br
+/>
+External gifts bestowed but on the sword;<br />
+Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,<br />
+Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,<br />
+His army&rsquo;s foe, condemned to strive and fail;<br />
+See a black adversary&rsquo;s ghost prevail;<br />
+Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win<br />
+While still the conflict tore his breast within.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Out of that agony, misread for those<br />
+Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,<br />
+The ghost of his black adversary rose,<br />
+To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.<br />
+And long with him was wrestling ere emerged<br />
+A mind to read in him the reflex shade<br />
+Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;<br />
+By craven compromises hourly swayed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Crouched as a nestling, still its wings
+untried,<br />
+The man&rsquo;s mind opened under weight of cloud.<br />
+To penetrate the dark was it endowed;<br />
+Stood day before a vision shooting wide.<br />
+Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;<br />
+The traversed wilderness exposed its track.<br />
+He felt the far advance in looking back;<br />
+Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page203"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+203</span>Under the low-browed tempest&rsquo;s eye of ire,<br />
+That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,<br />
+Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart<br />
+All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;<br />
+A stranger still, religiously divined;<br />
+Not yet with understanding read aright.<br />
+But when the mind, the cherishable mind,<br />
+The multitude&rsquo;s grave shepherd, took full flight,<br />
+Himself as mirror raised among his kind,<br />
+He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:<br />
+Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,<br />
+His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,<br />
+Had come of many a grip in mastery,<br />
+Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,<br />
+And of his bosom made him lord, to keep<br />
+The starry roof of his unruffled frame<br />
+Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep<br />
+Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The mastering mind in him, by tempests
+blown,<br />
+By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;<br />
+Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,<br />
+The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.<br />
+To whom unwittingly did he aspire<br />
+In wilderness, where bitter was his need:<br />
+To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed<br />
+For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.<br />
+But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,<br />
+And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,<br />
+All choral in its fruitful garden camp,<br />
+The spiritual the palpable illumed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">This gift of penetration and embrace,<br />
+His prize from tidal battles lost or won,<br />
+Reveals the scheme to animate his race:<br />
+<a name="page204"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 204</span>How that
+it is a warfare but begun;<br />
+Unending; with no Power to interpose;<br />
+No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,<br />
+Heard of the Highest; never battle&rsquo;s close,<br />
+The victory complete and victor crowned:<br />
+Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense<br />
+Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.<br />
+In manhood must he find his competence;<br />
+In his clear mind the spiritual food:<br />
+God being there while he his fight maintains;<br />
+Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,<br />
+While he rejects the suicide despair;<br />
+Accepts the spur of explicable pains;<br />
+Obedient to Nature, not her slave:<br />
+Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;<br />
+Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,<br />
+And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:&mdash;<br />
+Whence Evil in a world unread before;<br />
+That mystery to simple springs resolved.<br />
+His God the Known, diviner to adore,<br />
+Shows Nature&rsquo;s savage riddles kindly solved.<br />
+Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns<br />
+In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.<br />
+Back to the primal brute shall he retrace<br />
+His path, doth he permit to force her chains<br />
+A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,<br />
+An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:<br />
+What one the flash disdains;<br />
+What one so gives it grace.</p>
+<p class="poetry">But is he rightly manful in her eyes,<br />
+A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,<br />
+A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,<br />
+Desireing and desireable he shines;<br />
+As peaches, that have caught the sun&rsquo;s uprise<br />
+And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.<br />
+<a name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 205</span>Earth
+fills him with her juices, without fear<br />
+That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.<br />
+All woman is she to this man most dear;<br />
+He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:<br />
+She conscient, she sensitive, in him;<br />
+With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:<br />
+By him humaner made; by his keen spurs<br />
+Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,<br />
+Her crazy adoration of big thews,<br />
+Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,<br />
+Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world<br />
+In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.</p>
+<p class="poetry">This man, this hero, works not to destroy;<br
+/>
+This godlike&mdash;as the rock in ocean stands;&mdash;<br />
+He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands<br />
+Creative; in his edifice has joy.<br />
+How strength may serve for purity is shown<br />
+When he himself can scourge to make it clean.<br />
+Withal his pitch of pride would not disown<br />
+A sober world that walks the balanced mean<br />
+Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:<br />
+And such at times his army&rsquo;s march has been.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Near is he to great Nature in the thought<br />
+Each changing Season intimately saith,<br />
+That nought save apparition knows the death;<br />
+To the God-lighted mind of man &rsquo;tis nought.<br />
+She counts not loss a word of any weight;<br />
+It may befal his passions and his greeds<br />
+To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,<br />
+But life gone breathless will she reinstate.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,<br
+/>
+When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,<br />
+<a name="page206"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 206</span>Alive to
+breast a future wrapped in haze,<br />
+Strike camp, and onward, like the wind&rsquo;s cloud-fleets.<br
+/>
+Unresting she, unresting he, from change<br />
+To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;<br />
+She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,<br />
+Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.</p>
+<p class="poetry">No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,<br />
+She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;<br />
+But he, the flower at head and soil at root,<br />
+Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.<br />
+And that way seems he bound; that way the road,<br />
+With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,<br />
+Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,<br />
+He travels, urged by some internal goad.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing<br
+/>
+He would become is in his mind its child;<br />
+Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;<br />
+For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.<br />
+So moves he forth in faith, if he has made<br />
+His mind God&rsquo;s temple, dedicate to truth.<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,<br />
+He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.<br />
+Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;<br />
+The star of sky upon his footway cast;<br />
+Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,<br />
+The body&rsquo;s love and mind&rsquo;s, whereof the
+soul&rsquo;s.<br />
+Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,<br />
+To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Or is&rsquo;t the widowed&rsquo;s dream of her
+new mate?<br />
+Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;<br />
+The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;<br />
+With her the barren Huntress alternate;<br />
+<a name="page207"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 207</span>His
+rough refractory off on kicking heels<br />
+To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;<br />
+And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,<br />
+His tumbled world.&nbsp; What, then, the faith she feels?<br />
+May not his aspect, like her own so fair<br />
+Reflexively, the central force belie,<br />
+And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,<br />
+Be rebel at the core?&nbsp; What hope is there?</p>
+<p class="poetry">&rsquo;Tis that in each recovery he
+preserves,<br />
+Between his upper and his nether wit,<br />
+Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;<br />
+He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;<br />
+With such a grasp upon his brute as tells<br />
+Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.<br />
+A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun<br />
+Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.</p>
+<h3><a name="page208"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 208</span>THE
+HUELESS LOVE</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Unto</span> that love must
+we through fire attain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Which those two held as breath of common air;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;<br
+/>
+Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Midway the road of our life&rsquo;s term they
+met,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And one another knew without surprise;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;<br />
+Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.</p>
+<p class="poetry">To them it was revealed how they had found<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The kindred nature and the needed mind;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The mate by long conspiracy designed;<br />
+The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Avowed in vigilant solicitude<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For either, what most lived within each breast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They let be seen: yet every human test<br />
+Demanding righteousness approved them good.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She leaned on a strong arm, and little
+feared<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Abandonment to help if heaved or sank<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,<br
+/>
+Life rosier were she but less revered.</p>
+<p class="poetry">An arm that never shook did not obscure<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her woman&rsquo;s intuition of the bliss&mdash;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their tempter&rsquo;s moment o&rsquo;er the black
+abyss,<br />
+Across the narrow plank&mdash;he could abjure.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page209"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+209</span>Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Was all of earthly in their love untold,<br />
+Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">So has there come the gust at South-west
+flung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,<br />
+And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.</p>
+<h3>UNION IN DISSEVERANCE</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Sunset</span> worn to its
+last vermilion he;<br />
+She that star overhead in slow descent:<br />
+That white star with the front of angel she;<br />
+He undone in his rays of glory spent</p>
+<p class="poetry">Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,<br />
+He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest<br />
+Incomplete, were the light for which he dies,<br />
+Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;<br
+/>
+Life&rsquo;s full throb over breathless and abased:<br />
+Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,<br />
+One, more one than the bridally embraced.</p>
+<h3><a name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 210</span>SONG
+IN THE SONGLESS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">They</span> have no song,
+the sedges dry,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And still they sing.<br />
+It is within my breast they sing,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As I pass by.<br />
+Within my breast they touch a string,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They wake a sigh.<br />
+There is but sound of sedges dry;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In me they sing.</p>
+<h3>THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">If</span> that thou hast
+the gift of strength, then know<br />
+Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;<br />
+Else in a giant&rsquo;s grasp until the end<br />
+A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.</p>
+<h3><a name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 211</span>THE
+MAIN REGRET<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WRITTEN FOR THE CHARING CROSS
+ALBUM</span></h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Seen</span>, too clear and
+historic within us, our sins of omission<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly
+bare.<br />
+They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to
+repair.</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Sunshine might we have been unto seed under
+soil, or have scattered<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that
+shone.<br />
+Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere
+human tone.</p>
+<h3>ALTERNATION</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Between</span> the fountain
+and the rill<br />
+I passed, and saw the mighty will<br />
+To leap at sky; the careless run,<br />
+As earth would lead her little son.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Beneath them throbs an urgent well,<br />
+That here is play, and there is war.<br />
+I know not which had most to tell<br />
+Of whence we spring and what we are.</p>
+<h3><a name="page212"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+212</span>FOREST HISTORY</h3>
+<h4>I</h4>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Beneath</span> the vans of
+doom did men pass in.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Heroic who came out; for round them hung<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A wavering phantom&rsquo;s red volcano tongue,<br />
+With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:</p>
+<h4>II</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Old Earth&rsquo;s original Dragon; there
+retired<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To his last fastness; overthrown by few.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.<br />
+Then man to play devorant straight was fired.</p>
+<h4>III</h4>
+<p class="poetry">More intimate became the forest fear<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; While pillared darkness hatched malicious life<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife<br />
+And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.</p>
+<h4>IV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">In chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The forest&rsquo;s heart of fog on mossed morass,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,<br />
+Revealed where lured the swallower byway.</p>
+<h4>V</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Dead outlook, flattened back with hard
+rebound<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite<br />
+Of humble human being, held the ground.</p>
+<h4><a name="page213"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+213</span>VI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Through friendless wastes, through treacherous
+woodland, slow<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The feet sustained by track of feet pursued<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood<br />
+By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.</p>
+<h4>VII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Anon a mason&rsquo;s work amazed the sight,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there
+abode.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;<br
+/>
+Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.</p>
+<h4>VIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">What words they taught were nails to scratch
+the head.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Benignant works explained the chanting brood.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their monastery lit black solitude,<br />
+As one might think a star that heavenward led.</p>
+<h4>IX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Uprose a fairer nest for weary feet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,<br />
+Or played with it, and had their white retreat.</p>
+<h4>X</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Into big books of metal clasps they pored.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The treasures women are whose aim is praise,<br />
+Was shown in them: the Garden half restored.</p>
+<h4><a name="page214"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+214</span>XI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">A deluge billow scoured the land off seas,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,<br />
+The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.</p>
+<h4>XII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Whence reverence round grey-haired story
+grew:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And inmost spots of ancient horror shone<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As temples under beams of trials bygone;<br />
+For in them sang brave times with God in view.</p>
+<h4>XIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces
+green,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like night&rsquo;s first little stars through
+clearing showers.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Was rumoured how a castle&rsquo;s falcon towers<br
+/>
+The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.</p>
+<h4>XIV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Therein a serious Baron stuck his lance;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,<br />
+Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.</p>
+<h4>XV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">It might be that two errant lords across<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They charged forthwith, the better man to try.<br />
+One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.</p>
+<h4><a name="page215"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+215</span>XVI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Perchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay
+slain,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The robbers into gruesome durance drew.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Swift should her hero come, like lightning&rsquo;s
+blue!<br />
+She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.</p>
+<h4>XVII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">As we, that ere the worst her hero haps,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A toady cave beside an ague fen,<br />
+Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.</p>
+<h4>XVIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">By daylight now the forest fear could read<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Straight for the roebuck&rsquo;s neck the bowman
+spent<br />
+A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.</p>
+<h4>XIX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Right loud the bugle&rsquo;s hallali elate<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,<br />
+But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.</p>
+<h4>XX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Before the blackbird pecked the turf they
+woke;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At dawn the deer&rsquo;s wet nostrils blew their
+last.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,<br />
+With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.</p>
+<h4><a name="page216"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+216</span>XXI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">The city urchin mooned on forest air,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As swallows o&rsquo;er smooth streams, and sighed
+him sick<br />
+For thinking that his dearer home was there.</p>
+<h4>XXII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Familiar, still unseized, the forest sprang<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The hunter&rsquo;s horn might wind a jocund ring,<br
+/>
+But held in ear it had a chilly clang.</p>
+<h4>XXIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As though the leagues of woodland held them
+wronged<br />
+To hear an axe and see a township climb.</p>
+<h4>XXIV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">The forest&rsquo;s erewhile emperor at eve<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At midnight a small people danced the dales,<br />
+So thin that they might dwindle through a sieve</p>
+<h4>XXV</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Ringed mushrooms told of them, and in their
+throats,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The pensioned forester beside his crutch,<br />
+Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.</p>
+<h4><a name="page217"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+217</span>XXVI</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Came then the one, all ear, all eye, all
+heart;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Devourer, and insensibly devoured;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In whom the city over forest flowered,<br />
+The forest wreathed the city&rsquo;s drama-mart.</p>
+<h4>XXVII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">There found he in new form that Dragon old,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How blindly each its antidote besought;<br />
+For either&rsquo;s breath the needs of either told.</p>
+<h4>XXVIII</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Now deep in woods, with song no sermon&rsquo;s
+drone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; He showed what charm the human concourse works:<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks<br />
+Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.</p>
+<h4>XXIX</h4>
+<p class="poetry">Our conquest these: if haply we retain<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The reverence that ne&rsquo;er will overrun<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,<br />
+Nor let the poet&rsquo;s awe in rapture wane.</p>
+<h2><a name="page219"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+219</span>FRAGMENTS OF THE ILIAD IN ENGLISH HEXAMETER VERSE</h2>
+<h3><a name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+221</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, i. 149<br />
+THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES</h3>
+<p class="poetry">&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Heigh</span> me!
+brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,<br />
+Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,<br />
+Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?<br
+/>
+I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-arm&egrave;d
+Trojans,<br />
+Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm
+done;<br />
+Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;<br
+/>
+Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests<br
+/>
+Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome<br
+/>
+Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy
+sea-waters.<br />
+O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee,
+justice<br />
+Pluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou
+dog-eyed!<br />
+Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.<br
+/>
+<a name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 222</span>Worse,
+it is thou whose threat &rsquo;tis to ravish my prize from me,
+portion<br />
+Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of
+Achaia.<br />
+Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when
+Achaians<br />
+Gave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.<br />
+Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the
+combat,<br />
+Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,<br />
+Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small bless&egrave;d
+thing bore<br />
+Off to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the
+bloodshed!<br />
+So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems me<br />
+Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in
+prospect,<br />
+I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and
+wealth-store.&rdquo;</p>
+<h4><a name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+223</span>Iliad, i. 225</h4>
+<p class="poetry">&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Bibber</span>
+besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou!<br
+/>
+Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the
+conflict,<br />
+Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of Achaia<br />
+Dared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a
+death-stroke.<br />
+Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of
+Achaians,<br />
+Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted
+against thee.<br />
+Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over
+abjects;<br />
+Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.<br
+/>
+Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it
+likewise:<br />
+Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and
+leaf-buds<br />
+Never again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the
+mountains,<br />
+No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal
+clipped off<br />
+Leaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,<br />
+Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the
+judgement,<br />
+Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its
+portent;<br />
+Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of Achaia<br
+/>
+<a name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+224</span>Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though
+in an anguish,<br />
+How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying
+Hector<br />
+Tumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy
+heart-strings,<br />
+Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of
+Achaians.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+225</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, ii 455<br />
+MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Like</span> as a terrible
+fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,<br />
+Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round
+far,<br />
+So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the
+splendour<br />
+Gleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the
+sky-vault.<br />
+They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged
+flocks,<br />
+Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the
+wild-swans,<br />
+Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of
+Ka&iuml;stros;<br />
+Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their
+pinions,<br />
+Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them
+resoundeth;<br />
+So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings
+poured forth<br />
+On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them<br
+/>
+Earth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the
+horse-hooves.<br />
+Stopped they then on the fair-flower&rsquo;d field of Scamander,
+their thousands<br />
+Many as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.<br
+/>
+Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes
+traverse,<br />
+<a name="page226"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 226</span>Clouds
+of them, under some herdsman&rsquo;s wonning, where then are the
+milk-pails<br />
+Also, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of
+spring-time;<br />
+Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,<br
+/>
+Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush
+them.<br />
+Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of
+goats, know<br />
+Easily one from the other when all get mixed o&rsquo;er the
+pasture,<br />
+So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for
+onslaught,<br />
+Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,<br
+/>
+He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his
+thunder,<br />
+He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.</p>
+<h3><a name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+227</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, xi, 148<br />
+AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHT</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">These</span>, then, he
+left, and away where ranks were now clashing the thickest,<br />
+Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved
+Achaians.<br />
+Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful
+compulsion,<br />
+Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the
+dust-cloud,<br />
+Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering
+horse-hooves)<br />
+Hewed with the sword&rsquo;s sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord
+Agamemnon<br />
+Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the
+Argives.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Now, as when fire voracious catches the
+unclipp&egrave;d wood-land,<br />
+This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the
+scrubwood<br />
+Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire&rsquo;s fury
+rageing,<br />
+So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered<br />
+Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,<br
+/>
+Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the
+war-field,<br />
+Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were
+outstretched<br />
+Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their
+home-mates.</p>
+<h3><a name="page228"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+228</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, xi, 378<br />
+PARIS AND DIOMEDES</h3>
+<p
+class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">So</span> he, with a clear shout of laughter,<br />
+Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering
+thiswise:<br />
+&ldquo;Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it
+had pierced thee<br />
+Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of
+life-breath!<br />
+Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their
+direst,<br />
+They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a
+lion.&rdquo;<br />
+Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:<br />
+&ldquo;Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at
+virgins!<br />
+If that thou dared&rsquo;st face me here out in the open with
+weapons,<br />
+Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of
+arrows.<br />
+Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my
+footsole;<br />
+Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish
+infant.<br />
+Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that&rsquo;s emasculate,
+noughtworth!<br />
+Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the
+slightest,<br />
+My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen
+straightway.<br />
+<a name="page229"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 229</span>Torn,
+troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen
+slaughtered,<br />
+Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his
+blood-drops,<br />
+Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the
+women.&rdquo;</p>
+<h3><a name="page230"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+230</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, xiv, 283<br />
+HYPNOS ON IDA</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">They</span> then to
+fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,<br />
+Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at
+Lektos,<br />
+Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the
+woodland.<br />
+There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,<br
+/>
+Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida<br />
+Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.<br />
+There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for
+concealment,<br />
+That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the
+mountains,<br />
+Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as
+Kymindis.</p>
+<h3><a name="page231"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+231</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, xvii, 426<br />
+CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Not</span> the sea-wave so
+bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,<br />
+Whipped from the sea&rsquo;s deeps up by the terrible blast of
+the Northwind;<br />
+Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire&rsquo;s rush so
+arousing,<br />
+Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a
+woodland;<br />
+Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the
+oak-trees&rsquo;<br />
+Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;<br />
+As rose then stupendous the Trojan&rsquo;s cry and
+Achaians&rsquo;,<br />
+Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the
+conflict.</p>
+<h3><a name="page232"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+232</span><span class="smcap">Iliad</span>, xvii, 426<br />
+THE HORSES OF ACHILLES</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">So</span> now the horses of
+Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,<br />
+Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown
+there,<br />
+Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying
+Hector.<br />
+Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,<br />
+Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip,
+and oft, too,<br />
+Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.<br
+/>
+Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont
+spacious,<br />
+Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the
+Achaians.<br />
+Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,<br />
+Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;<br />
+Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious
+war-car,<br />
+Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting
+incessant<br />
+Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their
+eyelids,<br />
+Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes
+dusty-clotted,<br />
+Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of
+the yoke-bow.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page233"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+233</span>Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his
+head shook<br />
+Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his
+bosom;<br />
+&ldquo;Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal<br />
+Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!<br />
+Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have
+heart-grief?<br />
+&rsquo;Tis most true, than the race of these men is there
+wretcheder nowhere<br />
+Aught over earth&rsquo;s range found that is gifted with breath
+and has movement.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page234"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 234</span>THE
+MARES OF THE CAMARGUE<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">FROM THE &lsquo;MIR&Egrave;IO&rsquo; OF
+MISTRAL</span></h2>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A <span
+class="smcap">hundred</span> mares, all white! their manes<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like mace-reed of the marshy plains<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Thick-tufted, wavy, free o&rsquo; the shears:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And when the fiery squadron rears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bursting at speed, each mane appears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Even as the white scarf of a fay<br />
+Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;O race of humankind, take
+shame!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For never yet a hand could tame,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The mares of the Camargue.&nbsp; I have known,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By treason snared, some captives shown;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Expatriate from their native Rhone,<br />
+Led off, their saline pastures far from view:</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And on a day, with prompt
+rebound,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They have flung their riders to the ground,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And at a single gallop, scouring free,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Wide-nostril&rsquo;d to the wind, twice ten<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of long marsh-leagues devour&rsquo;d, and then,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Back to the Vacar&eacute;s again,<br />
+After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For of this savage race
+unbent,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The ocean is the element.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of old escaped from Neptune&rsquo;s car, full
+sure,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page235"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+235</span>Still with the white foam fleck&rsquo;d are they,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And when the sea puffs black from grey,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And ships part cables, loudly neigh<br />
+The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And keen as a whip they lash
+and crack<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their tails that drag the dust, and back<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their
+flesh, where he,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The God, drives deep his trident teeth,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Who in one horror, above, beneath,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,<br />
+And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><i>Cant.</i> iv.</p>
+<h2><a name="page236"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+236</span>&lsquo;ATKINS&rsquo;</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Yonder&rsquo;s</span> the
+man with his life in his hand,<br />
+Legs on the march for whatever the land,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or to the slaughter, or to the maiming,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Getting the dole of a dog for
+pay.<br />
+Laurels he clasps in the words &lsquo;duty done,&rsquo;<br />
+England his heart under every sun:&mdash;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Exquisite humour! that gives him a naming<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Base to the ear as an ass&rsquo;s
+bray.</p>
+<h2><a name="page237"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 237</span>THE
+VOYAGE OF THE &lsquo;OPHIR&rsquo;</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Men</span> of our race, we
+send you one<br />
+Round whom Victoria&rsquo;s holy name<br />
+Is halo from the sunken sun<br />
+Of her grand Summer&rsquo;s day aflame.<br />
+The heart of your loved Motherland,<br />
+To them she loves as her own blood,<br />
+This Flower of Ocean bears in hand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Assured of gift as good.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Forth for our Southern shores the fleet<br />
+Which crowns a nation&rsquo;s wisdom steams,<br />
+That there may Briton Briton greet,<br />
+And stamp as fact Imperial dreams.<br />
+Across the globe, from sea to sea,<br />
+The long smoke-pennon trails above,<br />
+Writes over sky how wise will be<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The Power that trusts to love.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A love that springs from heart and brain<br />
+In union gives for ripest fruit<br />
+The concord Kings and States in vain<br />
+Have sought, who played the lofty brute,<br />
+And fondly deeming they possessed,<br />
+On force relied, and found it break:<br />
+That truth once scored on Britain&rsquo;s breast<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Now keeps her mind awake.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page238"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+238</span>Australian, Canadian,<br />
+To tone old veins with streams of youth,<br />
+Our trust be on the best in man<br />
+Henceforth, and we shall prove that truth.<br />
+Prove to a world of brows down-bent<br />
+That in the Britain thus endowed,<br />
+Imperial means beneficent,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And strength to service vowed.</p>
+<h2><a name="page239"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 239</span>THE
+CRISIS</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Spirit</span> of Russia,
+now has come<br />
+The day when thou canst not be dumb.<br />
+Around thee foams the torrent tide,<br />
+Above thee its fell fountain, Pride.<br />
+The senseless rock awaits thy word<br />
+To crumble; shall it be unheard?<br />
+Already, like a tempest-sun,<br />
+That shoots the flare and shuts to dun,<br />
+Thy land &rsquo;twixt flame and darkness heaves,<br />
+Showing the blade wherewith Fate cleaves,<br />
+If mortals in high courage fail<br />
+At the one breath before the gale.<br />
+Those rulers in all forms of lust,<br />
+Who trod thy children down to dust<br />
+On the red Sunday, know right well<br />
+What word for them thy voice would spell,<br />
+What quick perdition for them weave,<br />
+Did they in such a voice believe.<br />
+Not thine to raise the avenger&rsquo;s shriek,<br />
+Nor turn to them a Tolstoi cheek;<br />
+Nor menace him, the waverer still,<br />
+Man of much heart and little will,<br />
+The criminal of his high seat,<br />
+Whose plea of Guiltless judges it.<br />
+For him thy voice shall bring to hand<br />
+Salvation, and to thy torn land,<br />
+Seen on the breakers.&nbsp; Now has come<br />
+The day when thou canst not be dumb,<br />
+<a name="page240"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 240</span>Spirit
+of Russia:&mdash;those who bind<br />
+Thy limbs and iron-cap thy mind,<br />
+Take thee for quaking flesh, misdoubt<br />
+That thou art of the rabble rout<br />
+Which cries and flees, with whimpering lip,<br />
+From reckless gun and brutal whip;<br />
+But he who has at heart the deeds<br />
+Of thy heroic offspring reads<br />
+In them a soul; not given to shrink<br />
+From peril on the abyss&rsquo;s brink;<br />
+With never dread of murderous power;<br />
+With view beyond the crimson hour;<br />
+Neither an instinct-driven might,<br />
+Nor visionary erudite;<br />
+A soul; that art thou.&nbsp; It remains<br />
+For thee to stay thy children&rsquo;s veins,<br />
+The countertides of hate arrest,<br />
+Give to thy sons a breathing breast,<br />
+And Him resembling, in His sight,<br />
+Say to thy land, Let there be Light.</p>
+<h2><a name="page241"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+241</span>OCTOBER 21, 1905</h2>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">The</span> hundred years have passed, and he<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose name appeased a nation&rsquo;s fears,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As with a hand laid over sea;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To thunder through the foeman&rsquo;s ears<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Defeat before his blast of fire;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Lives in the immortality<br />
+That poets dream and noblest souls desire.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Never did nation&rsquo;s need
+evoke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hero like him for aid, the while<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A Continent was cannon-smoke<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or peace in slavery: this one Isle<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Reflecting Nature: this one man<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her sea-hound and her mortal stroke,<br />
+With war-worn body aye in battle&rsquo;s van.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;And do we love him well, as
+well<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As he his country, we may greet,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With hand on steel, our passing bell<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nigh on the swing, for prelude sweet<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To the music heard when his last breath<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hung on its ebb beside the knell,<br />
+And <span class="smcap">Victory</span> in his ear sang gracious
+Death.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Ah, day of glory! day of
+tears!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Day of a people bowed as one!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Behold across those hundred years<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <a name="page242"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+242</span>The lion flash of gun at gun:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Our bitter pride; our love bereaved;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What pall of cloud o&rsquo;ercame our sun<br />
+That day, to bear his wreath, the end achieved.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Joy that no more with
+murder&rsquo;s frown<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The ancient rivals bark apart.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Now Nelson to brave France is shown<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A hero after her own heart:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And he now scanning that quick race,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To whom through life his glove was thrown,<br />
+Would know a sister spirit to embrace.</p>
+<h2><a name="page243"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 243</span>THE
+CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">We</span> who have seen
+Italia in the throes,<br />
+Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now<br />
+Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough<br />
+All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those<br />
+Who blew the breath of life into her frame:<br />
+Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:<br />
+Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free<br />
+From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.</p>
+<p class="poetry">That aim, albeit they were of minds diverse,<br
+/>
+Conjoined them, not to strive without surcease;<br />
+For them could be no babblement of peace<br />
+While lay their country under Slavery&rsquo;s curse.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The set of torn Italia&rsquo;s glorious day<br
+/>
+Was ever sunrise in each filial breast.<br />
+Of eagle beaks by righteousness unblest<br />
+They felt her pulsing body made the prey.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Wherefore they struck, and had to count their
+dead.<br />
+With bitter smile of resolution nerved<br />
+To try new issues, holding faith unswerved,<br />
+Promise they gathered from the rich blood shed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">In them Italia, visible to us then<br />
+As living, rose; for proof that huge brute Force<br />
+Has never being from celestial source,<br />
+And is the lord of cravens, not of men.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+244</span>Now breaking up the crust of temporal strife,<br />
+Who reads their acts enshrined in History, sees<br />
+That Tyrants were the Revolutionaries,<br />
+The Rebels men heart-vowed to hallowed life.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Pure as the Archangel&rsquo;s cleaving Darkness
+thro&rsquo;,<br />
+The Sword he sees, the keen unwearied Sword,<br />
+A single blade against a circling horde,<br />
+And aye for Freedom and the trampled few.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The cry of Liberty from dungeon cell,<br />
+From exile, was his God&rsquo;s command to smite,<br />
+As for a swim in sea he joined the fight,<br />
+With radiant face, full sure that he did well.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Behold a warrior dealing mortal strokes,<br />
+Whose nature was a child&rsquo;s: amid his foes<br />
+A wary trickster: at the battle&rsquo;s close,<br />
+No gentler friend this leopard dashed with fox.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Down the long roll of History will run<br />
+The story of these deeds, and speed his race<br />
+Beneath defeat more hotly to embrace<br />
+The noble cause and trust to another sun.</p>
+<p class="poetry">And lo, that sun is in Italia&rsquo;s skies<br
+/>
+This day, by grace of his good sword in part.<br />
+It beckons her to keep a warrior heart<br />
+For guard of beauty, all too sweet a prize.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Earth gave him: bless&egrave;d be the Earth
+that gave.<br />
+Earth&rsquo;s Master crowned his honest work on earth:<br />
+Proudly Italia names his place of birth:<br />
+The bosom of Humanity his grave.</p>
+<h2><a name="page245"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 245</span>THE
+WILD ROSE</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">High</span> climbs
+June&rsquo;s wild rose,<br />
+Her bush all blooms in a swarm;<br />
+And swift from the bud she blows,<br />
+In a day when the wooer is warm;<br />
+Frank to receive and give,<br />
+Her bosom is open to bee and sun:<br />
+Pride she has none,<br />
+Nor shame she knows;<br />
+Happy to live.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Unlike those of the garden nigh,<br />
+Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;<br />
+Loosening petals one by one<br />
+To the fiery Passion&rsquo;s dart<br />
+Superbly shy.<br />
+For them in some glory of hair,<br />
+Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,<br />
+Or path of the bride bestrew.<br />
+Ever are they the theme for song.<br />
+But nought of that is her share.<br />
+Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,<br />
+A glance they care not to renew.</p>
+<p class="poetry">And she at a word of the claims of kin<br />
+Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:<br />
+She is only a plain princess of the weeds,<br />
+As an outcast witless of sin:<br />
+Much disregarded, save by the few<br />
+<a name="page246"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 246</span>Who love
+her, that has not a spot of deceit,<br />
+No promise of sweet beyond sweet,<br />
+Often descending to sour.<br />
+On any fair breast she would die in an hour.<br />
+Praises she scarce could bear,<br />
+Were any wild poet to praise.<br />
+Her aim is to rise into light and air.<br />
+One of the darlings of Earth, no more,<br />
+And little it seems in the dusty ways,<br />
+Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;<br />
+The bird clapping wings to soar,<br />
+The clouds of an evetide&rsquo;s wreath.</p>
+<h2><a name="page247"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 247</span>THE
+CALL</h2>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span
+class="smcap">Under</span> what spell are we debased<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; By fears for our inviolate
+Isle,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Whose record is of dangers faced<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And flung to heel with even
+smile?<br />
+Is it a vaster force, a subtler guile?</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;They say Exercitus designs<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To match the famed Salsipotent<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where on her sceptre she reclines;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Awake: but were a slumber sent<br
+/>
+By guilty gods, more fell his foul intent.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The subtler web, the vaster
+foe,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Well may we meet when drilled for
+deeds:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But in these days of wealth at flow,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A word of breezy warning breeds<br
+/>
+The pained responses seen in lakeside reeds.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We fain would stand
+contemplative,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; All innocent as meadow grass;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In human goodness fain believe,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Believe a cloud is formed to
+pass;<br />
+Its shadows chase with draughts of hippocras.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Others have gone; the way
+they went<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Sweet sunny now, and safe our
+nest.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Humanity, enlightenment,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Against the warning hum
+protest:<br />
+Let the world hear that we know what is best.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a name="page248"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 248</span>So do the beatific speak;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Yet have they ears, and eyes as
+well;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And if not with a paler cheek,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; They feel the shivers in them
+dwell,<br />
+That something of a dubious future tell.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;For huge possessions render
+slack<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The power we need to hold them
+fast;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Save when a quickened heart shall make<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Our people one, to meet what
+blast<br />
+May blow from temporal heavens overcast.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Our people one!&nbsp; Nor
+they with strength<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dependent on a single arm:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Alert, and braced the whole land&rsquo;s length,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Rejoicing in their manhood&rsquo;s
+charm<br />
+For friend or foe; to succour, not to harm.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Has ever weakness won
+esteem?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Or counts it as a prized ally?<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; They who have read in History deem<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It ranks among the slavish fry,<br
+/>
+Whose claim to live justiciary Fates deny.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;It can not be declared we
+are<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A nation till from end to end<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The land can show such front to war<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As bids a crouching foe expend <br
+/>
+His ire in air, and preferably be friend.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We dreading him, we do him
+wrong;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For fears discolour, fears
+invite.<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like him, our task is to be strong;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Unlike him, claiming not by
+might<br />
+To snatch an envied treasure as a right.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a name="page249"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 249</span>So may a stouter brotherhood<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; At home be signalled over sea<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For righteous, and be understood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Nay, welcomed, when &rsquo;tis
+shown that we<br />
+All duties have embraced in being free.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;This Britain slumbering, she
+is rich;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Lies placid as a cradled child;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At times with an uneasy twitch,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That tells of dreams unduly
+wild.<br />
+Shall she be with a foreign drug defiled?</p>
+<p class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The grandeur of her deeds
+recall;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Look on her face so kindly
+fair:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; This Britain! and were she to fall,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Mankind would breathe a harsher
+air,<br />
+The nations miss a light of leading rare.</p>
+<h2><a name="page250"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 250</span>ON
+COMO</h2>
+<p class="poetry">A <span class="smcap">rainless</span> darkness
+drew o&rsquo;er the lake<br />
+As we lay in our boat with oars unshipped.<br />
+It seemed neither cloud nor water awake,<br />
+And forth of the low black curtain slipped<br />
+Thunderless lightning.&nbsp; Scoff no more<br />
+At angels imagined in downward flight<br />
+For the daughters of earth as fabled of yore:<br />
+Here was beauty might well invite<br />
+Dark heavens to gleam with the fire of a sun<br />
+Resurgent; here the exchanged embrace<br />
+Worthy of heaven and earth made one.</p>
+<p class="poetry">And witness it, ye of the privileged space,<br
+/>
+Said the flash; and the mountains, as from an abyss<br />
+For quivering seconds leaped up to attest<br />
+That given, received, renewed was the kiss;<br />
+The lips to lips and the breast to breast;<br />
+All in a glory of ecstasy, swift<br />
+As an eagle at prey, and pure as the prayer<br />
+Of an infant bidden joined hands uplift<br />
+To be guarded through darkness by spirits of air,<br />
+Ere setting the sails of sleep till day.<br />
+Slowly the low cloud swung, and far<br />
+It panted along its mirrored way;<br />
+Above loose threads one sanctioning star,<br />
+The wonder of what had been witnessed, sealed,<br />
+And with me still as in crystal glassed<br />
+Are the depths alight, the heavens revealed,<br />
+Where on to the Alps the muteness passed.</p>
+<h2><a name="page251"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+251</span>MILTON<br />
+DECEMBER 9, 1608: DECEMBER 9, 1908</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">What</span> splendour of
+imperial station man,<br />
+The Tree of Life, may reach when, rooted fast,<br />
+His branching stem points way to upper air<br />
+And skyward still aspires, we see in him<br />
+Who sang for us the Archangelical host,<br />
+Made Morning, by old Darkness urged to the abyss;<br />
+A voice that down three centuries onward rolls;<br />
+Onward will roll while lives our English tongue,<br />
+In the devout of music unsurpassed<br />
+Since Piety won Heaven&rsquo;s ear on Israel&rsquo;s harp.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The face of Earth, the soul of Earth, her
+charm,<br />
+Her dread austerity; the quavering fate<br />
+Of mortals with blind hope by passion swayed,<br />
+His mind embraced, the while on trodden soil,<br />
+Defender of the Commonwealth, he joined<br />
+Our temporal fray, whereof is vital fruit,<br />
+And, choosing armoury of the Scholar, stood<br />
+Beside his peers to raise the voice for Freedom:<br />
+Nor has fair Liberty a champion armed<br />
+To meet on heights or plains the Sophister<br />
+Throughout the ages, equal to this man,<br />
+Whose spirit breathed high Heaven, and drew thence<br />
+The ethereal sword to smite.</p>
+<p
+class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Were
+England sunk<br />
+Beneath the shifting tides, her heart, her brain,<br />
+The smile she wears, the faith she holds, her best,<br />
+<a name="page252"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 252</span>Would
+live full-toned in the grand delivery<br />
+Of his cathedral speech: an utterance<br />
+Almost divine, and such as Hellespont,<br />
+Crashing its breakers under Ida&rsquo;s frown,<br />
+Inspired: yet worthier he, whose instrument<br />
+Was by comparison the coarse reed-pipe;<br />
+Whereof have come the marvellous harmonies,<br />
+Which, with his lofty theme, of infinite range,<br />
+Abash, entrance, exalt.</p>
+<p
+class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;We
+need him now,<br />
+This latest Age in repetition cries:<br />
+For Belial, the adroit, is in our midst;<br />
+Mammon, more swoln to squeeze the slavish sweat<br />
+From hopeless toil: and overshadowingly<br />
+(Aggrandized, monstrous in his grinning mask<br />
+Of hypocritical Peace,) inveterate Moloch<br />
+Remains the great example.</p>
+<p
+class="poetry">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Homage
+to him<br />
+His debtor band, innumerable as waves<br />
+Running all golden from an eastern sun,<br />
+Joyfully render, in deep reverence<br />
+Subscribe, and as they speak their Milton&rsquo;s name,<br />
+Rays of his glory on their foreheads bear.</p>
+<h2><a name="page253"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+253</span>IRELAND</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Fire</span> in her ashes
+Ireland feels<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And in her veins a glow of heat.<br />
+To her the lost old time, appeals<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For resurrection, good to greet:<br />
+Not as a shape with spectral eyes,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But humanly maternal, young<br />
+In all that quickens pride, and wise<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To speak the best her bards have sung.</p>
+<p class="poetry">You read her as a land distraught,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where bitterest rebel passions seethe.<br />
+Look with a core of heart in thought,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For so is known the truth beneath.<br />
+She came to you a loathing bride,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And it has been no happy bed.<br />
+Believe in her as friend, allied<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; By bonds as close as those who wed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Her speech is held for hatred&rsquo;s cry;<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her silence tells of treason hid:<br />
+Were it her aim to burst the tie,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She sees what iron laws forbid.<br />
+Excess of heart obscures from view<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A head as keen as yours to count.<br />
+Trust her, that she may prove her true<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In links whereof is love the fount.</p>
+<p class="poetry">May she not call herself her own?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That is her cry, and thence her spits<br />
+Of fury, thence her graceless tone<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; At justice given in bits and bits.<br />
+<a name="page254"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 254</span>The
+limbs once raw with gnawing chains<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Will fret at silken when God&rsquo;s beams<br />
+Of Freedom beckon o&rsquo;er the plains<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From mounts that show it more than dreams.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She, generous, craves your generous dole;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That will not rouse the crack of doom.<br />
+It ends the blundering past control<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Simply to give her elbow-room.<br />
+Her offspring feels they are a race,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To be a nation is their claim;<br />
+Yet stronger bound in your embrace<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Than when the tie was but a name.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A nation she, and formed to charm,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With heart for heart and hands all round.<br />
+No longer England&rsquo;s broken arm,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Would England know where strength is found.<br />
+And strength to-day is England&rsquo;s need;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To-morrow it may be for both<br />
+Salvation: heed the portents, heed<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The warnings; free the mind from sloth.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Too long the pair have danced in mud,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With no advance from sun to sun.<br />
+Ah, what a bounding course of blood<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Has England with an Ireland one!<br />
+Behold yon shadow cross the downs,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And off away to yeasty seas.<br />
+Lightly will fly old rancour&rsquo;s frowns<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When solid with high heart stand these.</p>
+<h2><a name="page255"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 255</span>THE
+YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS&rsquo; BELT</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">The</span> years had worn
+their seasons&rsquo; belt,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; From bud to rosy prime,<br />
+Since Nellie by the larch-pole knelt<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And helped the hop to climb.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Most diligent of teachers then,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; But now with all to learn,<br />
+She breathed beyond a thought of men,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Though formed to make men burn.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She dwelt where &rsquo;twixt low-beaten
+thorns<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Two mill-blades, like a snail,<br />
+Enormous, with inquiring horns,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Looked down on half the vale.</p>
+<p class="poetry">You know the grey of dew on grass<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Ere with the young sun fired,<br />
+And you know well the thirst one has<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; For the coming and desired.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Quick in our ring she leapt, and gave<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Her hand to left, to right.<br />
+No claim on her had any, save<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To feed the joy of sight.</p>
+<p class="poetry">For man and maid a laughing word<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; She tossed, in notes as clear<br />
+As when the February bird<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sings out that Spring is near.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page256"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+256</span>Of what befell behind that scone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Let none who knows reveal.<br />
+In ballad days she might have been<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A heroine rousing steel.</p>
+<p class="poetry">On us did she bestow the hour,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And fixed it firm in thought;<br />
+Her spirit like a meadow flower<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That gives, and asks for nought.</p>
+<p class="poetry">She seemed to make the sunlight stay<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And show her in its pride.<br />
+O she was fair as a beech in May<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With the sun on the yonder side.</p>
+<p class="poetry">There was more life than breath can give,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; In the looks in her fair form;<br />
+For little can we say we live<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Until the heart is warm.</p>
+<h2><a name="page257"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+257</span>FRAGMENTS</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Open</span> horizons
+round,<br />
+O mounting mind, to scenes unsung,<br />
+Wherein shall walk a lusty Time:<br />
+Our Earth is young;<br />
+Of measure without bound;<br />
+Infinite are the heights to climb,<br />
+The depths to sound.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p class="poetry">A <span class="smcap">wilding</span> little
+stubble flower<br />
+The sickle scorned which cut for wheat,<br />
+Such was our hope in that dark hour<br />
+When nought save uses held the street,<br />
+And daily pleasures, daily needs,<br />
+With barren vision, looked ahead.<br />
+And still the same result of seeds<br />
+Gave likeness &rsquo;twixt the live and dead.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page258"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+258</span><span class="smcap">From</span> labours through the
+night, outworn,<br />
+Above the hills the front of morn<br />
+We see, whose eyes to heights are raised,<br />
+And the world&rsquo;s wise may deem us crazed.<br />
+While yet her lord lies under seas,<br />
+She takes us as the wind the trees&rsquo;<br />
+Delighted leafage; all in song<br />
+We mount to her, to her belong.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">This</span> love of nature,
+that allures to take<br />
+Irregularity for harmony<br />
+Of larger scope than our hard measures make,<br />
+Cherish it as thy school for when on thee<br />
+The ills of life descend.</p>
+<h2><a name="page259"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 259</span>IL Y
+A CENT ANS</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">That</span> march of the
+funereal Past behold;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; How Glory sat on Bondage for its throne;<br />
+How men, like dazzled insects, through the mould<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Still worked their way, and bled to keep their
+own.</p>
+<p class="poetry">We know them, as they strove and wrought and
+yearned;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their hopes, their fears; what page of Life they
+wist:<br />
+At whiles their vision upon us was turned,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Baffled by shapes limmed loosely on thick mist.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Beneath the fortress bulk of Power they bent<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Blunt heads, adoring or in shackled hate,<br />
+All save the rebel hymned him; and it meant<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; A world submitting to incarnate Fate.</p>
+<p class="poetry">From this he drew fresh appetite for sway,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And of it fell: whereat was chorus raised,<br />
+How surely shall a mad ambition pay<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Dues to Humanity, erewhile amazed.</p>
+<p class="poetry">&rsquo;Twas dreamed by some the deluge would
+ensue,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; So trembling was the tension long constrained;<br />
+A spirit of faith was in the chosen few,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; That steps to the millennium had been gained.</p>
+<p class="poetry">But mainly the rich business of the hour,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Their sight, made blind by urgency of blood,<br />
+Embraced; and facts, the passing sweet or sour,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; To them were solid things that nought withstood.</p>
+<p class="poetry"><a name="page260"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+260</span>Their facts are going headlong on the tides,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Like commas on a line of History&rsquo;s page;<br />
+Nor that which once they took for Truth abides,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Save in the form of youth enlarged from age.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Meantime give ear to woodland notes around,<br
+/>
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Look on our Earth full-breasted to our sun:<br />
+So was it when their poets heard the sound,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Beheld the scene: in them our days are one.</p>
+<p class="poetry">What figures will be shown the century
+hence?<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; What lands intact?&nbsp; We do but know that
+Power<br />
+From piety divorced, though seen immense,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Shall sink on envy of the humblest flower.</p>
+<p class="poetry">Our cry for cradled Peace, while men are
+still<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The three-parts brute which smothers the divine,<br
+/>
+Heaven answers: Guard it with forethoughtful will,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Or buy it; all your gains from War resign.</p>
+<p class="poetry">A land, not indefensibly alarmed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; May see, unwarned by hint of friendly gods,<br />
+Between a hermit crab at all points armed,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And one without a shell, decisive odds.</p>
+<h2><a name="page261"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+261</span>YOUTH IN AGE</h2>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Once</span> I was part of
+the music I heard<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky,<br />
+For joy of the beating of wings on high<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; My heart shot into the breast of the bird.</p>
+<p class="poetry">I hear it now and I see it fly,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,<br />
+My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; As it will for sheer love till the last long
+sigh.</p>
+<h2><a name="page263"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+263</span>EPITAPHS</h2>
+<h3><a name="page265"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 265</span>TO A
+FRIEND LOST<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">(TOM TAYLOR)</span></h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">When</span> I remember,
+friend, whom lost I call,<br />
+Because a man beloved is taken hence,<br />
+The tender humour and the fire of sense<br />
+In your good eyes; how full of heart for all,<br />
+And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,<br />
+You bore that lamp of sane benevolence;<br />
+Then see I round you Death his shadows dense<br />
+Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.<br />
+For surely are you one with the white host,<br />
+Spirits, whose memory is our vital air,<br />
+Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these,<br />
+Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,<br />
+Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,<br />
+Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.</p>
+<h3>M. M.</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Who</span> call her Mother
+and who calls her Wife<br />
+Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.</p>
+<h3><a name="page266"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 266</span>THE
+LADY C. M.</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">To</span> them that knew
+her, there is vital flame<br />
+In these the simple letters of her name.<br />
+To them that knew her not, be it but said,<br />
+So strong a spirit is not of the dead.</p>
+<h3><span class="GutSmall">ON THE TOMBSTONE OF</span><br />
+JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">(d. APRIL 11, 1884)</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">IN HEADLEY CHURCHYARD, SURREY</span></h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Thou</span> our beloved and
+light of Earth hast crossed<br />
+The sea of darkness to the yonder shore.<br />
+There dost thou shine a light transferred, not lost,<br />
+Through love to kindle in our souls the more.</p>
+<h3>GORDON OF KHARTOUM</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Of</span> men he would have
+raised to light he fell:<br />
+In soul he conquered with those nerveless hands.<br />
+His country&rsquo;s pride and her abasement knell<br />
+The Man of England circled by the sands.</p>
+<h3><a name="page267"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 267</span>J.
+C. M.</h3>
+<p class="poetry">A <span class="smcap">fountain</span> of our
+sweetest, quick to spring<br />
+In fellowship abounding, here subsides:<br />
+And never passage of a cloud on wing<br />
+To gladden blue forgets him; near he hides.</p>
+<h3>THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">With</span> Alfred and St.
+Louis he doth win<br />
+Grander than crowned head&rsquo;s mortuary dome:<br />
+His gentle heroic manhood enters in<br />
+The ever-flowering common heart for home.</p>
+<h3>ISLET THE DACHS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Our</span> Islet out of
+Helgoland, dismissed<br />
+From his quaint tenement, quits hates and loves.<br />
+There lived with us a wagging humourist<br />
+In that hound&rsquo;s arch dwarf-legged on boxing-gloves.</p>
+<h3><a name="page268"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 268</span>ON
+HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">(THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING)</span></h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Now</span> dumb is he who
+waked the world to speak,<br />
+And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier.<br />
+Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:<br />
+We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.<br />
+We see a spirit on Earth&rsquo;s loftiest peak<br />
+Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:<br />
+See a great Tree of Life that never sere<br />
+Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak.<br />
+Such ending is not Death: such living shows<br />
+What wide illumination brightness sheds<br />
+From one big heart, to conquer man&rsquo;s old foes:<br />
+The coward, and the tyrant, and the force<br />
+Of all those weedy monsters raising heads<br />
+When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.</p>
+<p><i>December</i> 13, 1889.</p>
+<h3><a name="page269"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+269</span>HAWARDEN</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">When</span> comes the
+lighted day for men to read<br />
+Life&rsquo;s meaning, with the work before their hands<br />
+Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,<br />
+Earth will not hear her children&rsquo;s wailful bands<br />
+Deplore the chieftain fall&rsquo;n in sob and dirge;<br />
+Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.<br />
+The sun that dropped down our horizon&rsquo;s verge<br />
+Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,<br />
+Now seen in sum, most glorious; and &rsquo;tis known<br />
+By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.<br />
+A splendid image built of man has flown;<br />
+His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.<br />
+Ours the great privilege to have had one<br />
+Among us who celestial tasks has done.</p>
+<h3><a name="page270"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 270</span>AT
+THE FUNERAL<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">FEBRUARY 2, 1901</span></h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Her</span> sacred body
+bear: the tenement<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of that strong soul now ranked with God&rsquo;s
+Elect<br />
+Her heart upon her people&rsquo;s heart she spent;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Hence is she Royalty&rsquo;s lodestar to direct.</p>
+<p class="poetry">The peace is hers, of whom all lands have
+praised<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Majestic virtues ere her day unseen.<br />
+Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.</p>
+<h3>ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">Long</span> with us, now
+she leaves us; she has rest<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Beneath our sacred sod:<br />
+A woman vowed to Good, whom all attest,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; The daylight gift of God.</p>
+<h3>THE YEAR&rsquo;S SHEDDINGS</h3>
+<p class="poetry"><span class="smcap">The</span> varied colours
+are a fitful heap:<br />
+They pass in constant service though they sleep;<br />
+The self gone out of them, therewith the pain:<br />
+Read that, who still to spell our earth remain.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote140"></a><a href="#citation140"
+class="footnote">[140]</a>&nbsp; Written in December 1870,
+printed in the &lsquo;Fortnightly Review,&rsquo; and published in
+the volume &lsquo;Ballads and Poems.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS, VOLUME 3 [OF 3]***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
+***** This file should be named 1383-h.htm or 1383-h.zip******
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+Poems by George Meredith--Volume 3
+
+
+
+
+A STAVE OF ROVING TIM
+(ADDRESSED TO CERTAIN FRIENDLY TRAMPS.)
+
+
+
+I
+
+The wind is East, the wind is West,
+Blows in and out of haven;
+The wind that blows is the wind that's best,
+And croak, my jolly raven!
+If here awhile we jigged and laughed,
+The like we will do yonder;
+For he's the man who masters a craft,
+And light as a lord can wander.
+So, foot the measure, Roving Tim,
+And croak, my jolly raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+II
+
+You live in rows of snug abodes,
+With gold, maybe, for counting;
+And mine's the beck of the rainy roads
+Against the sun a-mounting.
+I take the day as it behaves,
+Nor shiver when 'tis airy;
+But comes a breeze, all you are on waves,
+Sick chickens o' Mother Carey!
+So, now for next, cries Roving Tim,
+And croak, my jolly raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+III
+
+Sweet lass, you screw a lovely leer,
+To make a man consider.
+If you were up with the auctioneer,
+I'd be a handsome bidder.
+But wedlock clips the rover's wing;
+She tricks him fly to spider;
+And when we get to fights in the Ring,
+It's trumps when you play outsider.
+So, wrench and split, cries Roving Tim,
+And croak, my jolly raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+IV
+
+Along my winding way I know
+A shady dell that's winking;
+The very corner for Self and Co
+To do a world of thinking.
+And shall I this? and shall I that?
+Till Nature answers, ne'ther!
+Strike match and light your pipe in your hat,
+Rejoicing in sound shoe-leather!
+So lead along, cries Roving Tim,
+And croak, my jolly raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+V
+
+A cunning hand 'll hand you bread,
+With freedom for your capers.
+I'm not so sure of a cunning head;
+It steers to pits or vapours.
+But as for Life, we'll bear in sight
+The lesson Nature teaches;
+Regard it in a sailoring light,
+And treat it like thirsty leeches.
+So, fly your jib, cries Roving Tim,
+And top your boom, old raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+VI
+
+She'll take, to please her dame and dad,
+The shopman nicely shaven.
+She'll learn to think o' the marching lad
+When perchers show they're craven.
+You say the shopman piles a heap,
+While I perhaps am fasting;
+And bless your wits, it haunts him in sleep,
+His tin-kettle chance of lasting!
+So hail the road, cries Roving Tim,
+And hail the rain, old raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+VII
+
+He's half a wife, yon pecker bill;
+A book and likewise preacher.
+With any soul, in a game of skill,
+He'll prove your over-reacher.
+The reason is, his brains are bent
+On doing things right single.
+You'd wish for them when pitching your tent
+At night in a whirly dingle!
+So, off we go, cries Roving Tim,
+And on we go, old raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+VIII
+
+Lord, no, man's lot is not for bliss;
+To call it woe is blindness:
+It'll here a kick, and it's there a kiss,
+And here and there a kindness.
+He starts a hare and calls her joy;
+He runs her down to sorrow:
+The dogs within him bother the boy,
+But 'tis a new day to-morrow.
+So, I at helm, cries Roving Tim,
+And you at bow, old raven!
+The wind according to its whim
+Is in and out of haven.
+
+
+
+JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE
+
+
+
+I
+
+A revelation came on Jane,
+The widow of a labouring swain:
+And first her body trembled sharp,
+Then all the woman was a harp
+With winds along the strings; she heard,
+Though there was neither tone nor word.
+
+II
+
+For past our hearing was the air,
+Beyond our speaking what it bare,
+And she within herself had sight
+Of heaven at work to cleanse outright,
+To make of her a mansion fit
+For angel hosts inside to sit.
+
+III
+
+They entered, and forthwith entranced,
+Her body braced, her members danced;
+Surprisingly the woman leapt;
+And countenance composed she kept:
+As gossip neighbours in the lane
+Declared, who saw and pitied Jane.
+
+IV
+
+These knew she had been reading books,
+The which was witnessed by her looks
+Of late:  she had a mania
+For mad folk in America,
+And said for sure they led the way,
+But meat and beer were meant to stay.
+
+V
+
+That she had visited a fair,
+Had seen a gauzy lady there,
+Alive with tricks on legs alone,
+As good as wings, was also known:
+And longwhiles in a sullen mood,
+Before her jumping, Jane would brood.
+
+VI
+
+A good knee's height, they say, she sprang;
+Her arms and feet like those who hang:
+As if afire the body sped,
+And neither pair contributed.
+She jumped in silence:  she was thought
+A corpse to resurrection caught.
+
+VII
+
+The villagers were mostly dazed;
+They jeered, they wondered, and they praised.
+'Twas guessed by some she was inspired,
+And some would have it she had hired
+An engine in her petticoats,
+To turn their wits and win their votes.
+
+VIII
+
+Her first was Winny Earnes, a kind
+Of woman not to dance inclined;
+But she went up, entirely won,
+Ere Jump-to-glory Jane had done;
+And once a vixen wild for speech,
+She found the better way to preach.
+
+IX
+
+No long time after, Jane was seen
+Directing jumps at Daddy Green;
+And that old man, to watch her fly,
+Had eyebrows made of arches high;
+Till homeward he likewise did hop,
+Oft calling on himself to stop!
+
+X
+
+It was a scene when man and maid,
+Abandoning all other trade,
+And careless of the call to meals,
+Went jumping at the woman's heels.
+By dozens they were counted soon,
+Without a sound to tell their tune.
+
+XI
+
+Along the roads they came, and crossed
+The fields, and o'er the hills were lost,
+And in the evening reappeared;
+Then short like hobbled horses reared,
+And down upon the grass they plumped:
+Alone their Jane to glory jumped.
+
+XII
+
+At morn they rose, to see her spring
+All going as an engine thing;
+And lighter than the gossamer
+She led the bobbers following her,
+Past old acquaintances, and where
+They made the stranger stupid stare.
+
+XIII
+
+When turnips were a filling crop,
+In scorn they jumped a butcher's shop:
+Or, spite of threats to flog and souse,
+They jumped for shame a public-house:
+And much their legs were seized with rage
+If passing by the vicarage.
+
+XIV
+
+The tightness of a hempen rope
+Their bodies got; but laundry soap
+Not handsomer can rub the skin
+For token of the washed within.
+Occasionally coughers cast
+A leg aloft and coughed their last.
+
+XV
+
+The weaker maids and some old men,
+Requiring rafters for the pen
+On rainy nights, were those who fell.
+The rest were quite a miracle,
+Refreshed as you may search all round
+On Club-feast days and cry, Not found!
+
+XVI
+
+For these poor innocents, that slept
+Against the sky, soft women wept:
+For never did they any theft;
+'Twas known when they their camping left,
+And jumped the cold out of their rags;
+In spirit rich as money-bags.
+
+XVII
+
+They jumped the question, jumped reply;
+And whether to insist, deny,
+Reprove, persuade, they jumped in ranks
+Or singly, straight the arms to flanks,
+And straight the legs, with just a knee
+For bending in a mild degree.
+
+XVIII
+
+The villagers might call them mad;
+An endless holiday they had,
+Of pleasure in a serious work:
+They taught by leaps where perils lurk,
+And with the lambkins practised sports
+For 'scaping Satan's pounds and quarts.
+
+XIX
+
+It really seemed on certain days,
+When they bobbed up their Lord to praise,
+And bobbing up they caught the glance
+Of light, our secret is to dance,
+And hold the tongue from hindering peace;
+To dance out preacher and police.
+
+XX
+
+Those flies of boys disturbed them sore
+On Sundays and when daylight wore:
+With withies cut from hedge or copse,
+They treated them as whipping-tops,
+And flung big stones with cruel aim;
+Yet all the flock jumped on the same.
+
+XXI
+
+For what could persecution do
+To worry such a blessed crew,
+On whom it was as wind to fire,
+Which set them always jumping higher?
+The parson and the lawyer tried,
+By meek persistency defied.
+
+XXII
+
+But if they bore, they could pursue
+As well, and this the Bishop too;
+When inner warnings proved him plain
+The chase for Jump-to-glory Jane.
+She knew it by his being sent
+To bless the feasting in the tent.
+
+XXIII
+
+Not less than fifty years on end,
+The Squire had been the Bishop's friend:
+And his poor tenants, harmless ones,
+With souls to save! fed not on buns,
+But angry meats:  she took her place
+Outside to show the way to grace.
+
+XXIV
+
+In apron suit the Bishop stood;
+The crowding people kindly viewed.
+A gaunt grey woman he saw rise
+On air, with most beseeching eyes:
+And evident as light in dark
+It was, she set to him for mark.
+
+XXV
+
+Her highest leap had come:  with ease
+She jumped to reach the Bishop's knees:
+Compressing tight her arms and lips,
+She sought to jump the Bishop's hips:
+Her aim flew at his apron-band,
+That he might see and understand.
+
+XXVI
+
+The mild inquiry of his gaze
+Was altered to a peaked amaze,
+At sight of thirty in ascent,
+To gain his notice clearly bent:
+And greatly Jane at heart was vexed
+By his ploughed look of mind perplexed.
+
+XXVII
+
+In jumps that said, Beware the pit!
+More eloquent than speaking it -
+That said, Avoid the boiled, the roast;
+The heated nose on face of ghost,
+Which comes of drinking:  up and o'er
+The flesh with me! did Jane implore.
+
+XXVIII
+
+She jumped him high as huntsmen go
+Across the gate; she jumped him low,
+To coax him to begin and feel
+His infant steps returning, peel
+His mortal pride, exposing fruit,
+And off with hat and apron suit.
+
+XXIX
+
+We need much patience, well she knew,
+And out and out, and through and through,
+When we would gentlefolk address,
+However we may seek to bless:
+At times they hide them like the beasts
+From sacred beams; and mostly priests.
+
+XXX
+
+He gave no sign of making bare,
+Nor she of faintness or despair.
+Inflamed with hope that she might win,
+If she but coaxed him to begin,
+She used all arts for making fain;
+The mother with her babe was Jane.
+
+XXXI
+
+Now stamped the Squire, and knowing not
+Her business, waved her from the spot.
+Encircled by the men of might,
+The head of Jane, like flickering light,
+As in a charger, they beheld
+Ere she was from the park expelled.
+
+XXXII
+
+Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight,
+Did Jane around communicate:
+For that the moment when began
+The holy but mistaken man,
+In view of light, to take his lift,
+They cut him from her charm adrift!
+
+XXXIII
+
+And he was lost:  a banished face
+For ever from the ways of grace,
+Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.
+They saw the Bishop's wavering sprite
+Within her look, at come and go,
+Long after he had caused her woe.
+
+XXXIV
+
+Her greying eyes (until she sank
+At Fredsham on the wayside bank,
+Like cinder heaps that whitened lie
+From coals that shot the flame to sky)
+Had glassy vacancies, which yearned
+For one in memory discerned.
+
+XXXV
+
+May those who ply the tongue that cheats,
+And those who rush to beer and meats,
+And those whose mean ambition aims
+At palaces and titled names,
+Depart in such a cheerful strain
+As did our Jump-to-glory Jane!
+
+XXXVI
+
+Her end was beautiful:  one sigh.
+She jumped a foot when it was nigh.
+A lily in a linen clout
+She looked when they had laid her out.
+It is a lily-light she bears
+For England up the ladder-stairs.
+
+
+
+THE RIDDLE FOR MEN
+
+
+
+I
+
+This Riddle rede or die,
+Says History since our Flood,
+To warn her sons of power:-
+It can be truth, it can be lie;
+Be parasite to twist awry;
+The drouthy vampire for your blood;
+The fountain of the silver flower;
+A brand, a lure, a web, a crest;
+Supple of wax or tempered steel;
+The spur to honour, snake in nest:
+'Tis as you will with it to deal;
+To wear upon the breast,
+Or trample under heel.
+
+II
+
+And rede you not aright,
+Says Nature, still in red
+Shall History's tale be writ!
+For solely thus you lead to light
+The trailing chapters she must write,
+And pass my fiery test of dead
+Or living through the furnace-pit:
+Dislinked from who the softer hold
+In grip of brute, and brute remain:
+Of whom the woeful tale is told,
+How for one short Sultanic reign,
+Their bodies lapse to mould,
+Their souls behowl the plain.
+
+
+
+THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY
+
+
+
+I
+
+One fairest of the ripe unwedded left
+Her shadow on the Sage's path; he found,
+By common signs, that she had done a theft.
+He could have made the sovereign heights resound
+With questions of the wherefore of her state:
+He on far other but an hour before
+Intent.  And was it man, or was it mate,
+That she disdained? or was there haply more?
+
+About her mouth a placid humour slipped
+The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve
+Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.
+The surface was attentive to receive,
+The secret underneath enfolded fast.
+She had the step of the unconquered, brave,
+Not arrogant; and if the vessel's mast
+Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.
+Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,
+With something of a wavering line unspelt.
+They hold the look whose tenderness condoles
+For what the sister in the look has dealt
+Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones
+A woman's honeyed amorous outvied,
+As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans
+Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide
+Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill
+Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.
+Those voices are not magic of the will
+To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound,
+Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.
+They waft to the moist tropics after storm,
+When out of passion spent thick incense steams,
+And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.
+
+Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint
+Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring
+Of melody clasped motion in restraint:
+The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.
+With such endowments armed was she and decked
+To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;
+Surpassing many a giant intellect,
+The marvel of that cradled infant mind.
+It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;
+Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;
+And promised in fair feminine to grow
+A Sage's match and mate, more heavenly orbed.
+
+II
+
+Across his path the spouseless Lady cast
+Her shadow, and the man that thing became.
+His youth uprising called his age the Past.
+This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,
+And in his bosom an inverted Sage
+Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.
+But who while veins run blood shall know the page
+Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?
+Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,
+Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in
+To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,
+Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin
+Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs
+Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;
+They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs
+For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!
+Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,
+The legends of her mission to beguile?
+
+Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth
+He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;
+And not on her soft lips was it descried.
+She stepped her way benevolently grave:
+Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,
+By tossing victim to the courtier knave,
+Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.
+Rather 'twas humbleness in being pursued,
+As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.
+Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?
+All wisdom's armoury this man could wield;
+And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased
+Traverse her woman's curtain and poor shield,
+For new example of a world diseased;
+Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;
+A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;
+Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:
+He worshipped like the young enthusiast,
+Named simpleton or poet.  Did he read
+Right through, and with the voice she held reserved
+Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?
+
+Compassion for the man thus noble nerved
+The pity for herself she felt in him,
+To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;
+At least, be worthy.  That our soul may swim,
+We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.
+It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks.
+But, ah! confession of a woman's breast:
+She eminent, she honoured of her sex!
+Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,
+To veil them.  None of women, save their vile,
+Plays traitor to an army in the field.
+The cries most vindicating most defile.
+How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,
+When, under pressure of their common foe,
+Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,
+On pain of his intolerable crow
+Above the fiction, built for him, o'erthrown?
+Irrational he is, irrational
+Must they be, though not Reason's light shall wane
+In them with ever Nature at close call,
+Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;
+Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make
+A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh:
+Whereat men dread their lofty structure's quake
+Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply
+The crazy roar of peril, leonine
+For injured majesty.  That sigh of dames
+Is rare and soon suppressed.  Not they combine
+To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames
+Their lustier if not wilder:  fixed are they,
+In elegancy scarce denoting ease;
+And do they breathe, it is not to betray
+The martyr in the caryatides.
+Yet here and there along the graceful row
+Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,
+Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe
+May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,
+And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight
+Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:
+May stamp endurance by expounding fate.
+She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone;
+Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,
+Frost-white.  She gave his hearing sight to view
+The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf:
+Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.
+No further sign of heart could he discern:
+The picture of her speech was winter sky;
+A headless figure folding a cleft urn,
+Where tears once at the overflow were dry.
+
+III
+
+So spake she her first utterance on the rack.
+It softened torment, in the funeral hues
+Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back
+To listen to herself, herself accuse
+Harshly as Love's imperial cause allowed.
+She meant to grovel, and her lover praised
+So high o'er the condemnatory crowd,
+That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.
+
+The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,
+Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged
+Under the threatened flash of a bright brand
+At arm's length up, for severing action edged.
+Why, then Love's Court of Honour contemplate;
+And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed
+Above their lost, invoke an advocate
+In Passion's purity, thereby redeemed.
+
+Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,
+The woman stricken by an arrow falls.
+His advocate she can be, not her own,
+If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.
+Have we such scenes of drapery's mournfulness
+On Beauty's revelations, witched we plant,
+Over the fair shape humbled to confess,
+An angel's buckler, with loud choiric chant.
+
+IV
+
+No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,
+The lady's hand in her physician's knew.
+She had not hoped for them as her award,
+When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew
+Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:
+But muteness whipped her skin.  She could have said,
+Her free confession was to work his cure,
+Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.
+Were they not shown?  His muteness shook in thrall
+Her body on the verge of that black pit
+Sheer from the treacherous confessional,
+Demanding further, while perusing it.
+
+Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.
+She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel
+Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.
+For the dark downward then her soul did reel.
+A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:
+A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.
+She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,
+Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:
+Welcome to women, when, between man's laws
+And Nature's thirsts, they, soul from body torn,
+Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,
+Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.
+Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,
+To think the cure so manifest, so frail
+Her charm remaining.  Was the curtain's rent
+Too wide? he but a man of that herd male?
+She saw him as that herd of the forked head
+Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,
+Clothed only in life's last devouring red.
+Confession at her fearful instant sees
+Judicial Silence write the devil fact
+In letters of the skeleton:  at once,
+Swayed on the supplication of her act,
+The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,
+She joins.  No longer colouring, with skips
+At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears
+Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips
+To do the scaffold's office at his ears.
+
+Into the bitter judgement of that herd
+On women, she, deeming it present, fell.
+Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word
+They stone with, and so pile their citadel
+To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt.
+As had he flung it, in her breast it burned.
+Face and reflect it did her hot revolt
+From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;
+Because the golden buckler was withheld,
+She to herself applies the powder-spark,
+For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,
+Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.
+
+She had the Scriptural word so scored on brain,
+It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world
+That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;
+Most women! see! by the man's view dustward hurled,
+Impenitent, submissive, torn in two.
+They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,
+And sops of nourishment may get some few,
+In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.
+
+Barely have seasoned women understood
+The great Irrational, who thunders power,
+Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,
+And courts her in the covert's dewy hour;
+Returning to his fortress nigh night's end,
+With execration of her daughters' lures.
+They help him the proud fortress to defend,
+Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,
+The murder it commits; nor that its base
+Is shifty as a huckster's opening deal
+For bargain under smoothest market face,
+While Gentleness bids frigid Justice feel,
+Justice protests that Reason is her seat;
+Elect Convenience, as Reason masked,
+Hears calmly cramped Humanity entreat;
+Until a sentient world is overtasked,
+And rouses Reason's fountain-self:  she calls
+On Nature; Nature answers:  Share your guilt
+In common when contention cracks the walls
+Of the big house which not on me is built.
+
+The Lady said as much as breath will bear;
+To happier sisters inconceivable:
+Contemptible to veterans of the fair,
+Who show for a convolving pearly shell,
+A treasure of the shore, their written book.
+As much as woman's breath will bear and live
+Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look,
+That held as if for grain the summing sieve.
+Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes
+Our homely daylight after dread of spells.
+Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes
+Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells
+About a story of the naked flesh,
+Intending but to put some garment on,
+Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh,
+A traitor lurks and will be known anon.
+Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt,
+Stationed for index down an ancient track:
+And ware of it was he while she poured out
+A broken moon on forest-waters black.
+
+Though past the stage where midway men are skilled
+To scan their senses wriggling under plough,
+When yet to the charmed seed of speech distilled,
+Their hearts are fallow, he, and witless how,
+Loathing, had yielded, like bruised limb to leech,
+Not handsomely; but now beholding bleed
+Soul of the woman in her prostrate speech,
+The valour of that rawness he could read.
+Thence flashed it, as the crimson currents ran
+From senses up to thoughts, how she had read
+Maternally the warm remainder man
+Beneath his crust, and Nature's pity shed,
+In shedding dearer than heart's blood to light
+His vision of the path mild Wisdom walks.
+Therewith he could espy Confession's fright;
+Her need of him:  these flowers grow on stalks;
+They suck from soil, and have their urgencies
+Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves.
+Veins of divergencies, convergencies,
+Our botanist in womankind perceives;
+And if he hugs no wound, the man can prize
+That splendid consummation and sure proof
+Of more than heart in her, who might despise,
+Who drowns herself, for pity up aloof
+To soar and be like Nature's pity:  she
+Instinctive of what virtue in young days
+Had served him for his pilot-star on sea,
+To trouble him in haven.  Thus his gaze
+Came out of rust, and more than the schooled tongue
+Was gifted to encourage and assure.
+He gave her of the deep well she had sprung;
+And name it gratitude, the word is poor.
+But name it gratitude, is aught as rare
+From sex to sex?  And let it have survived
+Their conflict, comes the peace between the pair,
+Unknown to thousands husbanded and wived:
+Unknown to Passion, generous for prey:
+Unknown to Love, too blissful in a truce.
+Their tenderest of self did each one slay;
+His cloak of dignity, her fleur de luce;
+Her lily flower, and his abolla cloak,
+Things living, slew they, and no artery bled.
+A moment of some sacrificial smoke
+They passed, and were the dearer for their dead.
+
+He learnt how much we gain who make no claims.
+A nightcap on his flicker of grey fire
+Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,
+Confessing; and its conjured image dire,
+Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed;
+The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,
+Visioned to hold corrected and abashed
+Our senile emulous; which rolls its course
+Proud to the shattering end; with these few last
+Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice,
+Squeezed out in anguish:  all of that once vast!
+And still, though having skin for man's abuse,
+Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath
+Shot skyward from a blood at passionate jet,
+Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth
+Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;
+And numb, of formal value.  Are we true
+In nature, never natural thing repents;
+Albeit receiving punishment for due,
+Among the group of this world's penitents;
+Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft
+Cravenly, while the scourge no shudder spares.
+
+Our world believes it stabler if the soft
+Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.
+Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,
+Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;
+Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom
+The chasm between our passions and our wits!
+
+Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,
+It trembles at betrayal of a sore.
+Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose
+Impurities for clearness at the core.
+
+She to her hungered thundering in breast,
+YE SHALL NOT STARVE, not feebly designates
+The world repressing as a life repressed,
+Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.
+How Sin, amid the shades Cimmerian,
+Repents, she points for sight:  and she avers,
+The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan
+Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.
+
+Sin against immaturity, the sin
+Of ravenous excess, what deed divides
+Man from vitality; these bleed within;
+Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.
+Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,
+A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.
+But culprit who the law of man has crossed
+With Nature's dubiously within is blamed;
+Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,
+Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,
+We but bewail a broken fellowship,
+A sting, an isolation, a fall'n crown.
+
+Abject of sinners is that sensitive,
+The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled
+Incorrigible:  such title do we give
+To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;
+And, taking it for Nature, place in ban
+Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,
+The shame and baffler of the soul of man,
+The recreant, reptilious.  Do thou build
+Thy mind on her foundations in earth's bed;
+Behold man's mind the child of her keen rod,
+For teaching how the wits and passions wed
+To rear that temple of the credible God;
+Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,
+Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:
+Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,
+Man's laws appear the blind progressive worm,
+That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings
+The which to endow with vision, lift from mud
+To level of their nature's aims and springs,
+Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,
+Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife
+(Whom the so rosy ferryman invites
+To junction, and mid-channel over Life,
+Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)
+Instruct in deeper than Convenience,
+In higher than the harvest of a year.
+Only the rooted knowledge to high sense
+Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur
+For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
+Beyond the path with grain on either hand,
+Help to the steering of our social Ark
+Over the barbarous waters unto land.
+
+For us the double conscience and its war,
+The serving of two masters, false to both,
+Until those twain, who spring the root and are
+The knowledge in division, plight a troth
+Of equal hands:  nor longer circulate
+A pious token for their current coin,
+To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,
+Fair feminine and masculine shall join
+Upon an upper plane, still common mould,
+Where stamped religion and reflective pace
+A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold
+Rounds to horizon for their soul's embrace.
+Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun
+Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.
+But not till Nature's laws and man's are one,
+Can marriage of the man and woman be.
+
+V
+
+He passed her through the sermon's dull defile.
+Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved
+The city and the vale and mountain-pile.
+She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.
+
+A new land in an old beneath her lay;
+And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,
+As bride who without shame has come to say,
+Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.
+
+A natural woman's heart, not more than clad
+By station and bright raiment, gathers heat
+From nakedness in trusted hands:  she had
+The joy of those who feel the world's heart beat,
+After long doubt of it as fire or ice;
+Because one man had helped her to breathe free;
+Surprised to faith in something of a price
+Past the old charity in chivalry:-
+Our first wild step to right the loaded scales
+Displaying women shamefully outweighed.
+The wisdom of humaneness best avails
+For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.
+Her buried body fed the life she drank.
+And not another stripping of her wound!
+The startled thought on black delirium sank,
+While with her gentle surgeon she communed,
+And woman's prospect of the yoke repelled.
+Her buried body gave her flowers and food;
+The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;
+Love, the large love that folds the multitude.
+Soul's chastity in honesty, and this
+With beauty, made the dower to men refused.
+And little do they know the prize they miss;
+Which is their happy fortune!  Thus he mused
+
+For him, the cynic in the Sage had play
+A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;
+To think, of all alive most wedded they,
+Whom time disjoined!  He needed her quick thirst
+For renovated earth:  on earth she gazed,
+With humble aim to foot beside the wise.
+Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised
+Yet lowly over morning's pure grey eyes.
+
+
+
+'LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO'
+
+
+
+Love is winged for two,
+In the worst he weathers,
+When their hearts are tied;
+But if they divide,
+O too true!
+Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,
+Feathers all the ground bestrew.
+
+I was breast of morning sea,
+Rosy plume on forest dun,
+I the laugh in rainy fleeces,
+While with me
+She made one.
+Now must we pick up our pieces,
+For that then so winged were we.
+
+
+
+'ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE'
+
+
+
+Ask, is Love divine,
+Voices all are, ay.
+Question for the sign,
+There's a common sigh.
+Would we, through our years,
+Love forego,
+Quit of scars and tears?
+Ah, but no, no, no!
+
+
+
+'JOY IS FLEET'
+
+
+
+Joy is fleet,
+Sorrow slow.
+Love, so sweet,
+Sorrow will sow.
+Love, that has flown
+Ere day's decline,
+Love to have known,
+Sorrow, be mine!
+
+
+
+THE LESSON OF GRIEF
+
+
+
+Not ere the bitter herb we taste,
+Which ages thought of happy times,
+To plant us in a weeping waste,
+Rings with our fellows this one heart
+Accordant chimes.
+
+When I had shed my glad year's leaf,
+I did believe I stood alone,
+Till that great company of Grief
+Taught me to know this craving heart
+For not my own.
+
+
+
+WIND ON THE LYRE
+
+
+
+That was the chirp of Ariel
+You heard, as overhead it flew,
+The farther going more to dwell,
+And wing our green to wed our blue;
+But whether note of joy or knell,
+Not his own Father-singer knew;
+Nor yet can any mortal tell,
+Save only how it shivers through;
+The breast of us a sounded shell,
+The blood of us a lighted dew.
+
+
+
+THE YOUTHFUL QUEST
+
+
+
+His Lady queen of woods to meet,
+He wanders day and night:
+The leaves have whisperings discreet,
+The mossy ways invite.
+
+Across a lustrous ring of space,
+By covert hoods and caves,
+Is promise of her secret face
+In film that onward waves.
+
+For darkness is the light astrain,
+Astrain for light the dark.
+A grey moth down a larches' lane
+Unwinds a ghostly spark.
+
+Her lamp he sees, and young desire
+Is fed while cloaked she flies.
+She quivers shot of violet fire
+To ash at look of eyes.
+
+
+
+THE EMPTY PURSE--A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL SON
+
+
+
+Thou, run to the dry on this wayside bank,
+Too plainly of all the propellers bereft!
+Quenched youth, and is that thy purse?
+Even such limp slough as the snake has left
+Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin,
+For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,
+In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;
+And thine to crave and to curse
+The sweet thing once within.
+Accuse him:  some devil committed the theft,
+Which leaves of the portly a skin,
+No more; of the weighty a whine.
+
+Pursue him:  and first, to be sure of his track,
+Over devious ways that have led to this,
+In the stream's consecutive line,
+Let memory lead thee back
+To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,
+Unflushed at the front of the roseate door
+Unopened yet:  never shadow there
+Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis
+For souls whose cry is, alack!
+An ivory cradle rocks, apeep
+Through his eyelashes' laugh, a breathing pearl.
+There the young chief of the animals wore
+A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware
+Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap.
+In a dingle away from a rutted highroad,
+Around him the earliest throstle and merle,
+Our human smile between milk and sleep,
+Effervescent of Nature he crowed.
+Fair was that season; furl over furl
+The banners of blossom; a dancing floor
+This earth; very angels the clouds; and fair
+Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast:
+Careless, a centre of vigilant care.
+Thy mother kisses an infant curl.
+The room of the toys was a boundless nest,
+A kingdom the field of the games,
+Till entered the craving for more,
+And the worshipped small body had aims.
+A good little idol, as records attest,
+When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream
+By sweets and caresses:  he gave but sign
+That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race,
+Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine.
+Almost magician, his earliest dream
+Was lord of the unpossessed
+For a look; himself and his chase,
+As on puffs of a wind at whirl,
+Made one in the wink of a gleam.
+She kisses a locket curl,
+She conjures to vision a cherub face,
+When her butterfly counted his day
+All meadow and flowers, mishap
+Derided, and taken for play
+The fling of an urchin's cap.
+When her butterfly showed him an eaglet born,
+For preying too heedlessly bred,
+What a heart clapped in thee then!
+With what fuller colours of morn!
+And high to the uttermost heavens it flew,
+Swift as on poet's pen.
+It flew to be wedded, to wed
+The mystery scented around:
+Issue of flower and dew,
+Issue of light and sound:
+Thinner than either; a thread
+Spun of the dream they threw
+To kindle, allure, evade.
+It ran the sea-wave, the garden's dance,
+To the forest's dark heart down a dappled glade;
+Led on by a perishing glance,
+By a twinkle's eternal waylaid.
+Woman, the name was, when she took form;
+Sheaf of the wonders of life.  She fled,
+Close imaged; she neared, far seen.  How she made
+Palpitate earth of the living and dead!
+Did she not show thee the world designed
+Solely for loveliness?  Nested warm,
+The day was the morrow in flight.  And for thee,
+She muted the discords, tuned, refined;
+Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak.
+Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree,
+Sliding on radiance, winging from shade,
+With her witch-whisper o'er ruins, in reeds,
+She sang low the song of her promise delayed;
+Beckoned and died, as a finger of smoke
+Astream over woodland.  And was not she
+History's heroines white on storm?
+Remember her summons to valorous deeds.
+Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm,
+Most was her beam on the knightly:  she led
+For the honours of manhood more than the prize;
+Waved her magnetical yoke
+Whither the warrior bled,
+Ere to the bower of sighs.
+And shy of her secrets she was; under deeps
+Plunged at the breath of a thirst that woke
+The dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.
+
+Away over heaven the young heart flew,
+And caught many lustres, till some one said
+(Or was it the thought into hearing grew?),
+NOT THOU AS COMMONER MEN!
+Thy stature puffed and it swayed,
+It stiffened to royal-erect;
+A brassy trumpet brayed;
+A whirling seized thy head;
+The vision of beauty was flecked.
+Note well the how and the when,
+The thing that prompted and sped.
+Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing,
+Fixed eye, and the world was prey.
+No simple world of thy greenblade Spring,
+Nor world of thy flowerful prime
+On the topmost Orient peak
+Above a yet vaporous day.
+Flesh was it, breast to beak:
+A four-walled windowless world without ray,
+Only darkening jets on a river of slime,
+Where harsh over music as woodland jay,
+A voice chants, Woe to the weak!
+And along an insatiate feast,
+Women and men are one
+In the cup transforming to beast.
+Magian worship they paid to their sun,
+Lord of the Purse!  Behold him climb.
+Stalked ever such figure of fun
+For monarch in great-grin pantomime?
+See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend;
+The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat,
+From a life that reeks of the rotted end;
+While he--is he pictureable? replete,
+Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil,
+Hollow, more hollow at core.
+And for him did the hundreds toil
+Despised; in the cold and heat,
+This image ridiculous bore
+On their shoulders for morsels of meat!
+
+Gross, with the fumes of incense full,
+With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt,
+He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull,
+He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.
+And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed;
+Original man, as philosophers vouch;
+Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed,
+Frightfully living and armed to devour;
+The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch;
+The bait, the line and the hook:
+To feed on his fellows intent.
+God of the Danae shower,
+He had but to follow his bent.
+He battened on fowl not safely hutched,
+On sheep astray from the crook;
+A lure for the foolish in fold:
+To carrion turning what flesh he touched.
+And O the grace of his air,
+As he at the goblet sips,
+A centre of girdles loosed,
+With their grisly label, Sold!
+Credulous hears the fidelity swear,
+Which has roving eyes over yielded lips:
+To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced,
+The stuck in a treacherous slough,
+Because of his faith in a purchased pair,
+False to a vinous vow.
+
+In his glory of banquet strip him bare,
+And what is the creature we view?
+Our pursy Apollo Apollyon's tool;
+A small one, still of the crew
+By serpent Apollyon blest:
+His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.
+A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned;
+Not viler, you hear him protest:
+Of a popular countenance not incorrect.
+But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds
+Paint him the hooved and homed,
+Despite the poor pother he pleads,
+And his look of a nation's elect.
+We have him, our quarry confessed!
+And scan him:  the features inspect
+Of that bestial multiform:  cry,
+Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!
+The book of thy wisdom, proved
+On me, its last hieroglyph page,
+Alive in the horned and hooved?
+Thou! will he make reply.
+
+Thus has the plenary purse
+Done often:  to do will engage
+Anew upon all of thy like, or worse.
+And now is thy deepest regret
+To be man, clean rescued from beast:
+From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold,
+Celestially released.
+
+But now from his cavernous hold,
+Free may thy soul be set,
+As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn,
+Refreshed by some bodily sweat,
+The meaning of either in turn,
+What issue may come of the two:-
+A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach
+Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold:
+A firmament passing our visible blue.
+To those having nought to reflect it, 'tis nought;
+To those who are misty, 'tis mist on the beach
+From the billow withdrawing; to those who see
+Earth, our mother, in thought,
+Her spirit it is, our key.
+
+Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here,
+Of one significance, pricking the blind.
+This is thy gain now the surface is clear:
+To read with a soul in the mirror of mind
+Is man's chief lesson.--Thou smilest!  I preach!
+Acid smiling, my friend, reveals
+Abysses within; frigid preaching a street
+Paved unconcernedly smooth
+For the lecturer straight on his heels,
+Up and down a policeman's beat;
+Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.
+Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.
+It is not attractive in being too chaste.
+The popular tale of adventure and crime
+Would equally sicken an overdone taste.
+So, then, onward.  Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe,
+Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.
+
+Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet;
+It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth,
+For the thirsts of our nature brine.
+But manful has met it, manful will meet.
+And think of thy privilege:  supple with youth,
+To have sight of the headlong swine,
+Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!
+As the coin of thy purse poured out:
+An animal's holiday past:
+And free of them thou, to begin a new bout;
+To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast:
+No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse:
+Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare;
+Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book
+Of the world can be read, by necessity urged.
+For witness, what blinkers are they who look
+From the state of the prince or the millionnaire!
+They see but the fish they attract,
+The hungers on them converged;
+And never the thought in the shell of the act,
+Nor ever life's fangless mirth.
+But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged,
+Go into thyself, strike Earth.
+She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.
+Thou findest a pugilist countering quick,
+Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred;
+Not, after the studied professional trick,
+Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight.  Strike Earth,
+Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!
+And thou com'st on a saving fact,
+To nourish thy planted worth.
+
+Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,
+Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact:
+The redemption of sinners deluded! the last
+Dry handful, that bruises and saves.
+To the common big heart are we bound right fast,
+When our Mother admonishing nips
+At the nakedness bare of a clout,
+And we crave what the commonest craves.
+
+This wealth was a fortress-wall,
+Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout;
+Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all;
+With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt;
+Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.
+Thus are we man made firm;
+Made warm by the numbers compact.
+We follow no longer a trumpet-snout,
+At a trot where the hog is tracked,
+Nor wriggle the way of the worm.
+
+Thou wilt spare us the cynical pout
+At humanity:  sign of a nature bechurled.
+No stenchy anathemas cast
+Upon Providence, women, the world.
+Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.
+The purchased are things of the mart, not classed
+Among resonant types that have freely grown.
+
+Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed:
+As any sad dog's of sweet flesh when he quits
+The wayside wandering bone!
+No revilings of comrades as ingrates:  thee
+The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened
+By laws yet barbarous) own.
+
+If some one performed Fiend's deputy,
+He was for awhile the Fiend.
+Still, nursing a passion to speak,
+As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,
+When the ladle has finished its leak,
+And the vessel is loquent of nature's inane,
+Hie where the demagogues roar
+Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim's force:
+Hurrah to their jolly attack
+On a City that smokes of the Plain;
+A city of sin's death-dyes,
+Holding revel of worms in a corse;
+A city of malady sore,
+Over-ripe for the big doom's crack:
+A city of hymnical snore;
+Connubial truths and lies
+Demanding an instant divorce,
+Clean as the bright from the black.
+It were well for thy system to sermonize.
+There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.
+
+Then up stand thou in the midst:
+Thy good grain out of thee thresh,
+Hand upon heart:  relate
+What things thou legally didst
+For the Archseducer of flesh.
+Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,
+Confess thee an instrument armed
+To be snare of our wanton, our weak,
+Of all by the sensual charmed.
+For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:
+Speak, though execrate, speak
+A word on grandmotherly Laws
+Giving rivers of gold to our young,
+In the days of their hungers impure;
+To furnish them beak and claws,
+And make them a banquet's lure.
+
+Thou the example, saved
+Miraculously by this poor skin!
+Thereat let the Purse be waved:
+The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:
+A devil, if devil as devil behaved
+Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,
+Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;
+O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!
+
+And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,
+Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize
+Rough-rolling boulders and froth.
+Gigantical enginery they can command,
+For the crushing of enemies not of great size:
+But hold to thy desperate stand.
+Men's right of bequeathing their all to their own
+(With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);
+Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone
+Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last
+Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.
+The law they decree is their ultimate slave;
+Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.
+It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.
+Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;
+To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;
+Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt
+He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;
+And how for his giving, the more will he get;
+For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:
+Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise,
+Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,
+The sun of their system a father of flies!
+
+So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed;
+'Tis the portion of them who civilize,
+Who speak the word novel and true:
+How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,
+Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;
+How the God of old time will act Satan of new,
+If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;
+For whose habitation within us we scour
+This house of our life; where our bitterest pains
+Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps
+Mire on the soul.  Take stripes or chains;
+Grip at thy standard reviled.
+And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?
+Our spoken in protest remains.
+A young generation reaps.
+
+The young generation! ah, there is the child
+Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof
+That souls we have, with our senses filed,
+Our shuttles at thread of the woof.
+May it be braver than ours,
+To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,
+To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.
+May it know how the mind in expansion revolts
+From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,
+And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,
+In a field where the forefather print of the hoof
+Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,
+And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,
+Till brain-rule splendidly towers.
+For that large light we have laboured and tramped
+Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive
+Our animate morning stamped
+With the lines of a sombre eve.
+
+A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,
+When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,
+The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,
+And the lion effulgently ramped.
+Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,
+By right of the better in kind.
+But now will it breed yon bestial brood
+Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,
+As the healthy in chains with the sick,
+Unto despot usage our issuing mind.
+It signifies battle or death's dull knell.
+Precedents icily written on high
+Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.
+Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick
+For the march, reads which the impediment well.
+She smiles when of sapience is their boast.
+O loose of the tug between blood run dry
+And blood running flame may our offspring run!
+May brain democratic be king of the host!
+Less then shall the volumes of History tell
+Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,
+That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won
+Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.
+
+Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,
+And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,
+Their battle of instincts put by,
+A moment examine this field:
+On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,
+Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.
+It merits a glance at our history's maps,
+To see across Britain's old shaggy unshorn,
+Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot
+The ruler's close-reckoned direct to the mark.
+From the head ran the vanquisher's orderly route,
+In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.
+From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,
+And we shoulder, we wrangle!  The light on us shed
+Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,
+The Goddess of gamblers, above.  From the head,
+Then when it worked for the birth of a star
+Fraternal with heaven's in beauty and ray,
+Sprang the Acropolis.  Ask what crown
+Comes of our tides of the blood at war,
+For men to bequeath generations down!
+And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:
+What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:
+A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,
+Desiring affairs to be left as they are.
+
+So, thou takest Youth's natural place in the fray,
+As a Tentative, combating Peace,
+Our lullaby word for decay. -
+There will come an immediate decree
+In thy mind for the opposite party's decease,
+If he bends not an instant knee.
+Expunge it:  extinguishing counts poor gain.
+And accept a mild word of police:-
+Be mannerly, measured; refrain
+From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks.
+Our political, even as the merchant main,
+A temperate gale requires
+For the ship that haven seeks;
+Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.
+
+Then observe the antagonist, con
+His reasons for rocking the lullaby word.
+You stand on a different stage of the stairs.
+He fought certain battles, yon senile lord.
+In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs.
+We are now on his inches of ground hard won,
+For a perch to a flight o'er his resting fence.
+
+Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say,
+That Time is both father and son?
+Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense! -
+Discern the paternal of Now
+As the Then of thy present tense.
+You may pull as you will either way,
+You can never be other than one.
+So, be filial.  Giants to slay
+Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.
+
+There are those whom we push from the path with respect.
+Bow to that elder, though seeing him bow
+To the backward as well, for a thunderous back
+Upon thee.  In his day he was not all wrong.
+Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked.
+He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore.
+The Future he sees as the slippery murk;
+The Past as his doctrinal library lore.
+He stands now the rock to the wave's wild wash.
+Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work
+Heroical, one of our strong.
+His gold to retain and his dross reject,
+Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash.
+Detest the dead squat of the Turk,
+And suffice it to move him along.
+Drink of faith in the brains a full draught
+Before the oration:  beware
+Lest rhetoric moonily waft
+Whither horrid activities snare.
+Rhetoric, juice for the mob
+Despising more luminous grape,
+Oft at its fount has it laughed
+In the cataracts rolling for rape
+Of a Reason left single to sob!
+
+'Tis known how the permanent never is writ
+In blood of the passions:  mercurial they,
+Shifty their issue:  stir not that pit
+To the game our brutes best play.
+
+But with rhetoric loose, can we check man's brute?
+Assemblies of men on their legs invoke
+Excitement for wholesome diversion:  there shoot
+Electrical sparks between their dry thatch
+And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light.
+'Tis instant between you:  the trick of a catch
+(To match a Batrachian croak)
+Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins.
+Then may it be rather the well-worn joke
+Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write
+Penance for rhetoric.  Strange will it seem,
+When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!
+
+For the secret why demagogues fail,
+Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme,
+And knock out or knock in the nail
+(We will rank them as flatly sincere,
+Devoutly detesting a wrong,
+Engines o'ercharged with our human steam),
+Question thee, seething amid the throng.
+And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat;
+Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here; -
+Aught more than the banquet and roundelay,
+That is closed with a terrible terminal wail,
+A retributive black ding-dong?
+And ask of thyself:  This furious Yea
+Of a speech I thump to repeat,
+In the cause I would have prevail,
+For seed of a nourishing wheat,
+IS IT ACCEPTED OF SONG?
+Does it sound to the mind through the ear,
+Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet?
+Thou wilt find it a test severe;
+Unerring whatever the theme.
+Rings it for Reason a melody clear,
+We have bidden old Chaos retreat;
+We have called on Creation to hear;
+All forces that make us are one full stream.
+Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse,
+Showing its practical value and weight,
+Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse,
+Lead thee aloft to that high estate. -
+The test is conclusive, I deem:
+It embraces or mortally bites.
+We have then the key-note for debate:
+A Senate that sits on the heights
+Over discords, to shape and amend.
+
+And no singer is needed to serve
+The musical God, my friend.
+Needs only his law on a sensible nerve:
+A law that to Measure invites,
+Forbidding the passions contend.
+Is it accepted of Song?
+And if then the blunt answer be Nay,
+Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde,
+Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway,
+The Queen of delirious rites,
+Queen of those issueless mobs, that rend
+For frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord,
+Pursuing insensate, seething in throng,
+Their wild idea to its ashen end.
+Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong,
+Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!
+
+But thou, should the answer ring Ay,
+Hast warrant of seed for thy word:
+The musical God is nigh
+To inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer
+Through the shoals:  is it worthy of Song,
+There are souls all woman to hear,
+Woman to bear and renew.
+For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs,
+Broad as the arms of his blue,
+Fine as the web of his rays,
+Justice, whose voice is a melody clear,
+The one sure life for the numbered long,
+From him are the brutal and vain,
+The vile, the excessive, out-thrust:
+He points to the God on the upmost throne:
+He is the saver of grain,
+The sifter of spirit from dust.
+He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain
+The virilities:  Measure alone
+Has votaries rich in the male:
+Fathers embracing no cloud,
+Sowing no harvestless main:
+Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowed
+To create, to perpetuate; woo, win, wed;
+Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own,
+Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff
+Simulacra, though solid they sail,
+And seem such imperial stuff:
+Yes, the living divide off the dead.
+
+Then thou with thy furies outgrown,
+Not as Cybele's beast will thy head lash tail
+So praeter-determinedly thermonous,
+Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled.
+Thou under stress of the strife
+Shalt hear for sustainment supreme
+The cry of the conscience of Life:
+KEEP THE YOUNG GENERATIONS IN HAIL,
+AND BEQUEATH THEM NO TUMBLED HOUSE!
+
+There hast thou the sacred theme,
+Therein the inveterate spur,
+Of the Innermost.  See her one blink
+In vision past eyeballs.  Not thee
+She cares for, but us.  Follow her.
+Follow her, and thou wilt not sink.
+With thy soul the Life espouse:
+This Life of the visible, audible, ring
+With thy love tight about; and no death will be;
+The name be an empty thing,
+And woe a forgotten old trick:
+And battle will come as a challenge to drink;
+As a warrior's wound each transient sting.
+She leads to the Uppermost link by link;
+Exacts but vision, desires not vows.
+Above us the singular number to see;
+The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick,
+A dot or a stop:  that is our task;
+Her lesson in figured arithmetic,
+For the letters of Life behind its mask;
+Her flower-like look under fearful brows.
+
+As for thy special case, O my friend, one must think
+Massilia's victim, who held the carouse
+For the length of a carnival year,
+Knew worse:  but the wretch had his opening choice.
+For thee, by our law, no alternatives were:
+Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice.
+He cancelled the ravaging Plague,
+With the roll of his fat off the cliff.
+Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,
+Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague
+And catches the not too pink,
+Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause
+Is the cause of community.  Iterate,
+Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:
+Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:
+Yet always in measure, with bearing polite:
+The manner of one that would expiate
+His share in grandmotherly Laws,
+Which do the dark thing to destroy,
+Under aspect of water so guilelessly white
+For the general use, by the devils befouled.
+
+Enough, poor prodigal boy!
+Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled.
+Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned.
+And 'tis bony:  denied thee thy succulent half
+Of the parable's blessing, to swineherd returned:
+A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf!
+By my faith, there is feasting to come,
+Not the less, when our Earth we have seen
+Beneath and on surface, her deeds and designs:
+Who gives us the man-loving Nazarene,
+The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines.
+By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom;
+Revelations, delights.  I can hear a faint crow
+Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct;
+As down the new shafting of mines,
+A cry of the metally gnome.
+When our Earth we have seen, and have linked
+With the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold,
+Imprisoned humanity open will throw
+Its fortress gates, and the rivers of gold
+For the congregate friendliness flow.
+Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold:
+Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real:
+And laughter on lips, as the birds' outburst
+At the flooding of light.  No robbery then
+The feast, nor a robber's abode the home,
+For a furnished model of our first den!
+Nor Life as a stationed wheel;
+Nor History written in blood or in foam,
+For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed.
+The God in the conscience of multitudes feel,
+And we feel deep to Earth at her heart,
+We have her communion with men,
+New ground, new skies for appeal.
+Yield into harness thy best and thy worst;
+Away on the trot of thy servitude start,
+Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air.
+If courage should falter, 'tis wholesome to kneel.
+Remember that well, for the secret with some,
+Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer,
+And free from impurities tower-like stand.
+I promise not more, save that feasting will come
+To a mind and a body no longer inversed:
+The sense of large charity over the land,
+Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,
+And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal
+Through the active machine:  lean fare,
+But it carries a sparkle!  And now enough,
+And part we as comrades part,
+To meet again never or some day or soon.
+
+Our season of drought is reminder rude:-
+No later than yesternoon,
+I looked on the horse of a cart,
+By the wayside water-trough.
+How at every draught of his bride of thirst
+His nostrils widened!  The sight was good:
+Food for us, food, such as first
+Drew our thoughts to earth's lowly for food.
+
+
+
+TO THE COMIC SPIRIT
+
+
+
+Sword of Common Sense! -
+Our surest gift:  the sacred chain
+Of man to man:  firm earth for trust
+In structures vowed to permanence:-
+Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!
+Implacable perforce of just;
+With that good treasure in defence,
+Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain
+Since first men planted foot and hand was king:
+Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve
+To wield thy double edge, retort
+Or hold the deadlier reserve,
+And through thy victim's weapon sting:
+Thine is the service, thine the sport
+This shifty heart of ours to hunt
+Across its webs and round the many a ring
+Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds
+Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke
+Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster's grunt; -
+Once lion of our desert's trodden weeds;
+And but for thy straight finger at the yoke,
+Again to be the lordly paw,
+Naming his appetites his needs,
+Behind a decorative cloak:
+Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law
+We read upon that building's architrave
+In the mind's firmament, by men upraised
+With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave
+For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed,
+Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw,
+Thou, soul of wakened heads, art armed to warn,
+Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang,
+Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot,
+Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn;
+Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise,
+Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen
+His rebel agitation at our root:
+Thou hast him out of hawking eyes;
+Nor ever morning of the clang
+Young Echo sped on hill from horn
+In forest blown when scent was keen
+Off earthy dews besprinkling blades
+Of covert grass more merrily rang
+The yelp of chase down alleys green,
+Forth of the headlong-pouring glades,
+Over the dappled fallows wild away,
+Than thy fine unaccented scorn
+At sight of man's old secret brute,
+Devout for pasture on his prey,
+Advancing, yawning to devour;
+With step of deer, with voice of flute,
+Haply with visage of the lily flower.
+
+Let the cock crow and ruddy morn
+His handmaiden appear!  Youth claims his hour.
+The generously ludicrous
+Espouses it.  But see we sons of day,
+Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight,
+Accept the throb for lord of us;
+For lord, for the main central light
+That gives direction, not the eclipse;
+Or dost thou look where niggard Age,
+Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips
+A tumbled top to grind a wolf's worn tooth; -
+Hoar despot on our final stage,
+In dotage of a stunted Youth; -
+Or it may be some venerable sage,
+Not having thee awake in him, compact
+Of wisdom else, the breast's old tempter trips;
+Or see we ceremonial state,
+Robing the gilded beast, exact
+Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate
+Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact;
+A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips;
+These are thy game wherever men engage:
+These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,
+The major and the minor potentate,
+Creative of their various ape; -
+The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write
+Upon a perishable page
+An inch above their fellows' height; -
+The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose
+Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed
+Of our first hungry figure wide agape; -
+Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.
+These, that would have men still of men be foes,
+Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;
+Would keep our life the whirly pool
+Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;
+The herd the drover's herd, the fool the fool,
+Ourself our slavish self's infernal sun:
+These are the children of the heart untaught
+By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee
+Untamed to tone its passions under thought,
+The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.
+Of them a world of coltish heels for school
+We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.
+
+'Tis written of the Gods of human mould,
+Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn
+To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed,
+Satiric comments overbold,
+From one whose part was by decree
+The jester's; but they boiled to feel him bite.
+Better for them had they with Reason fenced
+Or smiled corrected!  They in the great Gods' might
+Their prober crushed, as fingers flea.
+Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire
+His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit
+Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,
+The Satirist pass by on limping feet.
+Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight
+Below had then their last of airy glee;
+They in the cup sought Laughter's drowned sprite,
+Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.
+Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,
+And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.
+This know we veritable.  O Sage of Mirth!
+Can it be true, the story men recount
+Of the fall'n plight of the great Gods on earth?
+How they being deathless, though of human mould,
+With human cravings, undecaying frames,
+Must labour for subsistence; are a band
+Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads
+At haunts of holiday on summer sand:
+And lightly he will hint to one that heeds
+Names in pained designation of them, names
+Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl
+Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,
+Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats
+(His baby dimples in maternal chaps
+Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)
+Compassion for his masterful Trombone,
+Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed
+Of old:  for him of the mountain-muscle feats,
+Who guts a drum to fetch a snappish groan:
+For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom
+A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .
+The creature is of earnest mien
+To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.
+His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued,
+He names; they are a rayless red and white;
+The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.
+And, if we recognize his Tambourine,
+He asks; exhausted names her:  she has become
+A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen
+Of overflowing dome on dome;
+Redundancy contending with the tight,
+Leaping the dam!  He fondly calls, his girl,
+The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile,
+Refreshful.  O but now his brows are dun,
+Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile,
+To drop his venomous:  the Dame of dames,
+Flower of the world, that honey one,
+She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl,
+To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss;
+He names her, as a worshipper he names,
+And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.
+The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike
+Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.
+Curtain her close! her open arms
+Have suckers for beholders:  she to this?
+For that she could not, save in fury, hear
+A sharp corrective utterance flick
+Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike
+Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer
+Above the snows, among the flowers?  She reaps
+This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?
+Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms,
+Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign,
+From Greek resplendent to Phoenician foul,
+The trader in attractions sinks, all brine
+To thoughts of taste; is 't love?--bark, dog! hoot, owl!
+And she is blushless:  ancient worship weeps.
+Suicide Graces dangle down the charms
+Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.
+She stands in her unholy oily leer
+A statue losing feature, weather-sick
+Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.
+The curtain cried for magnifies to see! -
+We cannot quench our one corrupting glance:
+The vision of the rumour will not flee.
+Doth the Boy own such Mother?--shoot his dart
+To bring her, countless as the crested deeps,
+Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?
+False is that vision, shrieks the devotee;
+Incredible, we echo; and anew
+Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.
+Low humourist this leader seems; perchance
+Pitched from his University career,
+Adept at classic fooling.  Yet of mould
+Human those Gods were:  deathless too:
+On high they not as meditatives paced:
+Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh:
+Descending, they would touch the lowest here:
+And she, that lighted form of blue and gold,
+Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced;
+Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh;
+Desired and hated, desperately dear;
+Most human of them was.  No more pursue!
+Enough that the black story can be told.
+It preaches to the eminently placed:
+For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due,
+Paints omen.  Truly they our throbber had;
+The passions plumping, passions playing leech,
+Cunning to trick us for the day's good cheer.
+Our uncorrected human heart will swell
+To notions monstrous, doings mad
+As billows on a foam-lashed beach;
+Borne on the tides of alternating heats,
+Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well;
+Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power
+To speak in judgement:  Nemesis, the fell:
+Of those bright Gods assembled, offspring sour;
+The last surviving on the upper seats;
+As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.
+
+Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,
+Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.
+Not wiser of our mark than at the start,
+It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea
+To countering winds; a force blind-eyed,
+On endless rounds of aimless reach;
+Emotion for the source of pride,
+The grounds of faith in fixity
+Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech,
+Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump
+Swung on a time-piece, and by turns
+A quivering energy to jump
+For seats angelical:  it shrinks, it yearns,
+Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud
+Capping a sullen crater:  and mankind
+We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,
+Because of thy straight leadership declined;
+At heels of this or that delusive spark:
+Now when the multitudinous races press
+Elbow to elbow hourly more,
+A thickened host; when now we hear aloud
+Life for the very life implore
+A signal of a visioned mark;
+Light of the mind, the mind's discourse,
+The rational in graciousness,
+Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,
+To tame and lead that blind-eyed force
+In harmony of harness with the crowd,
+For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,
+Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed
+To holy work, deems it the heart's intent;
+Or where a silken circle views it cowled,
+The seeming figure of concordance, bent
+On satiating tyrant lust
+Or barren fits of sentiment.
+
+Thou wilt not have our paths befouled
+By simulation; are we vile to view,
+The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,
+Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:
+They make their mirror upon faces true;
+And where they win reflection, lucid heave
+The under tides of this hot heart seen through.
+Beneficently wilt thou clip
+All oversteppings of the plumed,
+The puffed, and bid the masker strip,
+And into the crowned windbag thrust,
+Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,
+A lightning o'er the half-illumed,
+Who to base brute-dominion cleave,
+Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,
+Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,
+To spy a wound without a gash,
+The magic in a turn of wrist,
+And how are wedded heart and head regaled
+When Wit o'er Folly blows the mort,
+And their high note of union spreads
+Wide from the timely word with conquest charged;
+Victorious laughter, of no loud report,
+If heard; derision as divinely veiled
+As terrible Immortals in rose-mist,
+Given to the vision of arrested men:
+Whereat they feel within them weave
+Community its closer threads,
+And are to our fraternal state enlarged;
+Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken:
+They learn that thou art not of alien sort,
+Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed,
+Or of the frosty heights unsealed,
+Or of the vain who simple speech distort,
+Or of the vapours pointing on to nought
+Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch;
+As when sole homeward the belated treads,
+And hears aloft a clamour wailed,
+That once had seemed the broomstick witch
+Horridly violating cloud for drought:
+He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears,
+Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train;
+Homeliest order in black sky appears,
+Not less than in the lighted village steads.
+So do those half-illumed wax clear to share
+A cry that is our common voice; the note
+Of fellowship upon a loftier plane,
+Above embattled castle-wall and moat;
+And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.
+So thou for washing a phantasmal air,
+For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise,
+Laughter--the joy of Reason seeing fade
+Obstruction into Earth's renewing beds,
+Beneath the stroke of her good servant's blade -
+Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed;
+Gain of the years, conjunction's prize.
+The greater heart in thy appeal to heads
+They see, thou Captain of our civil Fort!
+By more elusive savages assailed
+On each ascending stage; untired
+Both inner foe and outer to cut short,
+And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist:
+Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile's
+Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight,
+Like forms in running water, oft when smiles,
+When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight:
+But never with the slayer's malice fired:
+As little as informs an infant's fist
+Clenched at the sneeze!  Thou wouldst but have us be
+Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow
+Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree;
+Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court:
+Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress;
+Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.
+Ambrosial heights of possible acquist,
+Where souls of men with soul of man consort,
+And all look higher to new loveliness
+Begotten of the look:  thy mark is there;
+While on our temporal ground alive,
+Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword
+Of finer temper now a numbered learn
+That they resisting thee themselves resist;
+And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive,
+Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare
+Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts.
+More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord
+Thou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern,
+When pinched ascetic and red sensualist
+Alternately recurrent freeze or burn,
+And of its old religions it has doubts.
+It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare;
+Less hates, part understands, nor much resents,
+When the prized objects it has raised for prayer,
+For fitful prayer;--repentance dreading fire,
+Impelled by aches; the blindness which repents
+Like the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire; -
+Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probe
+Old institutions and establishments,
+Once fortresses against the floods of sin,
+For what their worth; and questioningly prod
+For why they stand upon a racing globe,
+Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod;
+Their angel out of them, a demon in.
+
+This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to fret,
+To hurl at vanities, to drift in shame
+Of gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod,
+Shall of predestination wed thee yet.
+Something it gathers of what things should drop
+At entrance on new times; of how thrice broad
+The world of minds communicative; how
+A straggling Nature classed in school, and scored
+With stripes admonishing, may yield to plough
+Fruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tame
+Be feeble on an Earth whose gentler crop
+Is its most living, in the mind that steers,
+By Reason led, her way of tree and flame,
+Beyond the genuflexions and the tears;
+Upon an Earth that cannot stop,
+Where upward is the visible aim,
+And ever we espy the greater God,
+For simple pointing at a good adored:
+Proof of the closer neighbourhood.  Head on,
+Sword of the many, light of the few! untwist
+Or cut our tangles till fair space is won
+Beyond a briared wood of austere brow,
+Believed of discord by thy timely word
+At intervals refreshing life:  for thou
+Art verify Keeper of the Muse's Key;
+Thyself no vacant melodist;
+On lower land elective even as she;
+Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred;
+Advising to her measured steps in flow;
+And teaching how for being subjected free
+Past thought of freedom we may come to know
+The music of the meaning of Accord.
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN MEMORY
+
+
+
+Days, when the ball of our vision
+Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;
+When the grasp on the bow was decision,
+And arrow and hand and eye were one;
+When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,
+Came heaving for rapture ahead! -
+Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer
+As lights over mounds of the dead.
+
+Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead,
+With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed,
+Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear,
+To bear the golden nectar-cup.
+So flies desire at view of its delight,
+When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.
+We meanwhile who in hues of the sick year
+The Spring-time paint to prick us for our lost,
+Mount but the fatal half way up -
+Whereon shut eyes!  This is decreed,
+For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend,
+By passion for the arms' possession tossed,
+It falls the way of sighs and hath their end;
+A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.
+Good if the arrowy eagle of the height
+Be then the little bird that hops to feed.
+
+Lame falls the cry to kindle days
+Of radiant orb and daring gaze.
+It does but clank our mortal chain.
+For Earth reads through her felon old
+The many-numbered of her fold,
+Who forward tottering backward strain,
+And would be thieves of treasure spent,
+With their grey season soured.
+She could write out their history in their thirst
+To have again the much devoured,
+And be the bud at burst;
+In honey fancy join the flow,
+Where Youth swims on as once they went,
+All choiric for spontaneous glee
+Of active eager lungs and thews;
+They now bared roots beside the river bent;
+Whose privilege themselves to see;
+Their place in yonder tideway know;
+The current glass peruse;
+The depths intently sound;
+And sapped by each returning flood
+Accept for monitory nourishment
+Those worn roped features under crust of mud,
+Reflected in the silvery smooth around:
+Not less the branching and high singing tree,
+A home of nests, a landmark and a tent,
+Until their hour for losing hold on ground.
+Even such good harvest of the things that flee
+Earth offers her subjected, and they choose
+Rather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink,
+And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.
+So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.
+
+Who cheerfully the little bird becomes,
+Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs,
+May have her dolings to the lightest touch;
+As where some cripple muses by his crutch,
+Unwitting that the spirit in him sings:
+'When I had legs, then had I wings,
+As good as any born of eggs,
+To feed on all aerial things,
+When I had legs!'
+And if not to embrace he sighs,
+She gives him breath of Youth awhile,
+Perspective of a breezy mile,
+Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies;
+Scenes where his nested dreams upon their hoard
+Brooded, or up to empyrean soared:
+Enough to link him with a dotted line.
+But cravings for an eagle's flight,
+To top white peaks and serve wild wine
+Among the rosy undecayed,
+Bring only flash of shade
+From her full throbbing breast of day in night.
+By what they crave are they betrayed:
+And cavernous is that young dragon's jaw,
+Crimson for all the fiery reptile saw
+In time now coveted, for teeth to flay,
+Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.
+They to their moment of drawn breath,
+Which is the life that makes the death,
+The death that makes ethereal life would bind:
+The death that breeds the spectre do they find.
+Darkness is wedded and the waste regrets
+Beating as dead leaves on a fitful gust,
+By souls no longer dowered to climb
+Beneath their pack of dust,
+Whom envy of a lustrous prime,
+Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets,
+And dooms to sink and water sable flowers,
+That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.
+Strain we the arms for Memory's hours,
+We are the seized Persephone.
+Responsive never to the soft desire
+For one prized tune is this our chord of life.
+'Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife,
+In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.
+Yet have we glad companionship of Youth,
+Elysian meadows for the mind,
+Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb
+Filled with the parti-coloured bloom
+Of loved and hated, grasp all human truth
+Sowed by us down the mazy paths behind.
+To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through:
+Whence comes a line of continuity,
+That brings our middle station into view,
+Between those poles; a novel Earth we see,
+In likeness of us, made of banned and blest;
+The sower's bed, but not the reaper's rest:
+An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet
+Buried, and breathing, and to be.
+Then of the junction of the three,
+Even as a heart in brain, full sweet
+May sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.
+
+Only the soul can walk the dusty track
+Where hangs our flowering under vapours black,
+And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,
+Quench recollection of a spacious pure.
+They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,
+Hard at each other point and gape,
+Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,
+To reappear with one they drape
+For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,
+Who such distorted issue did beget.
+Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat
+Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame
+Has eaten, and old Self consumes.
+Out of the purification will they leap,
+Thee renovating while new light illumes
+The dusky web of evil, known as pain,
+That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;
+Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain:
+Midway the tameless oceanic brute
+Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,
+And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace
+On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.
+
+Forth of such passage through black fire we win
+Clear hearing of the simple lute,
+Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays
+For them who can in quietness receive
+Her restorative airs:  a ditty thin
+As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,
+Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays
+On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass
+To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs
+Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.
+Solidity and bulk and martial brass,
+Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score
+A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,
+While present in the spirit, vital there,
+Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;
+Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air
+Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.
+Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled
+Historic of the soul, and heats anew
+Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.
+True of the man, and of mankind 'tis true,
+Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,
+Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred
+Against the primal beast in us, and flung;
+Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred
+Above self-pity slain:  or it was Prayer
+First taken for Life's cleanser; or the tongue
+Spake for the world against this heart; or rings
+Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;
+Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb
+From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob:
+These quickening live.  But deepest at her springs,
+Most filial, is an eye to love her young.
+And had we it, to see with it, alive
+Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.
+Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then
+The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men:
+She tributary to her aged restores
+The living in the dead; she will inspire
+Faith homelier than on the Yonder shores,
+Abhorring these as mire,
+Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes,
+With mortal tremours pricking hopes,
+And, by the final Bacchic of the lusts
+Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts:
+A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants;
+Not utterly misled, though blindly led,
+Led round fermenting eddies.  Faith she plants
+In her own firmness as our midway road:
+Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read;
+Her essence reading in her toothsome goad;
+Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.
+But love we well the young, her road midway
+The darknesses runs consecrated clay.
+Despite our feeble hold on this green home,
+And the vast outer strangeness void of dome,
+Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel,
+Up to the moment of our prostrate fall,
+The life they deem voluptuously real
+Is more than empty echo of a call,
+Or shadow of a shade, or swing of tides;
+As brooding upon age, when veins congeal,
+Grey palsy nods to think.  With us for guides,
+Another step above the animal,
+To views in Alpine thought are they helped on.
+Good if so far we live in them when gone!
+
+And there the arrowy eagle of the height
+Becomes the little bird that hops to feed,
+Glad of a crumb, for tempered appetite
+To make it wholesome blood and fruitful seed.
+Then Memory strikes on no slack string,
+Nor sectional will varied Life appear:
+Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hear
+Earth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring.
+And ours the mellow note, while sharing joys
+No more subjecting mortals who have learnt
+To build for happiness on equipoise,
+The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt;
+Know in our seasons an integral wheel,
+That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed.
+This, the truistic rubbish under heel
+Of all the world, we peck at and are filled.
+
+
+
+PENETRATION AND TRUST
+
+
+
+I
+
+Sleek as a lizard at round of a stone,
+The look of her heart slipped out and in.
+Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone,
+As innocents clear of a shade of sin.
+
+II
+
+He laid a finger under her chin,
+His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown:
+Now, what will happen and who will win,
+With me in the fight and my lady lone?
+
+III
+
+He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone;
+Was fire on her eyes till they let him in.
+Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone,
+And never a corner for serpent sin.
+
+IV
+
+Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin;
+Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown:
+At home to the death my lord shall win,
+When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone!
+
+
+
+NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY
+
+
+
+With splendour of a silver day,
+A frosted night had opened May:
+And on that plumed and armoured night,
+As one close temple hove our wood,
+Its border leafage virgin white.
+Remote down air an owl hallooed.
+The black twig dropped without a twirl;
+The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;
+The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;
+A crystal off the green leaf slipped.
+Across the tracks of rimy tan,
+Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;
+A limping minnow-rillet ran,
+To hang upon an icy foot.
+
+In this shrill hush of quietude,
+The ear conceived a severing cry.
+Almost it let the sound elude,
+When chuckles three, a warble shy,
+From hazels of the garden came,
+Near by the crimson-windowed farm.
+They laid the trance on breath and frame,
+A prelude of the passion-charm.
+
+Then soon was heard, not sooner heard
+Than answered, doubled, trebled, more,
+Voice of an Eden in the bird
+Renewing with his pipe of four
+The sob:  a troubled Eden, rich
+In throb of heart:  unnumbered throats
+Flung upward at a fountain's pitch,
+The fervour of the four long notes,
+That on the fountain's pool subside,
+Exult and ruffle and upspring:
+Endless the crossing multiplied
+Of silver and of golden string.
+There chimed a bubbled underbrew
+With witch-wild spray of vocal dew.
+
+It seemed a single harper swept
+Our wild wood's inner chords and waked
+A spirit that for yearning ached
+Ere men desired and joyed or wept.
+Or now a legion ravishing
+Musician rivals did unite
+In love of sweetness high to sing
+The subtle song that rivals light;
+From breast of earth to breast of sky:
+And they were secret, they were nigh:
+A hand the magic might disperse;
+The magic swung my universe.
+
+Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream,
+Where all was visionary gleam;
+Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed;
+And feelings, passing joy and woe,
+Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed,
+Nor either was the one we know:
+Nor pregnant of the heart contained
+In us were they, that griefless plained,
+That plaining soared; and through the heart
+Struck to one note the wide apart:-
+A passion surgent from despair;
+A paining bliss in fervid cold;
+Off the last vital edge of air,
+Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled,
+For rapture of a wine of tears;
+As had a star among the spheres
+Caught up our earth to some mid-height
+Of double life to ear and sight,
+She giving voice to thought that shines
+Keen-brilliant of her deepest mines;
+While steely drips the rillet clinked,
+And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled.
+
+Then was the lyre of earth beheld,
+Then heard by me:  it holds me linked;
+Across the years to dead-ebb shores
+I stand on, my blood-thrill restores.
+But would I conjure into me
+Those issue notes, I must review
+What serious breath the woodland drew;
+The low throb of expectancy;
+How the white mother-muteness pressed
+On leaf and meadow-herb; how shook,
+Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crest
+Seen spinning on the bracken-crook.
+
+
+
+THE TEACHING OF THE NUDE
+
+
+
+I
+
+A satyr spied a Goddess in her bath,
+Unseen of her attendant nymphs; none knew.
+Forthwith the creature to his fellows drew,
+And looking backward on the curtained path,
+He strove to tell; he could but heave a breast
+Too full, and point to mouth, with failing leers:
+Vainly he danced for speech, he giggled tears,
+Made as if torn in two, as if tight pressed,
+As if cast prone; then fetching whimpered tunes
+For words, flung heel and set his hairy flight
+Through forest-hollows, over rocky height.
+The green leaves buried him three rounds of moons.
+A senatorial Satyr named what herb
+Had hurried him outrunning reason's curb.
+
+II
+
+'Tis told how when that hieaway unchecked
+To dell returned, he seemed of tempered mood:
+Even as the valley of the torrent rude,
+The torrent now a brook, the valley wrecked.
+In him, to hale him high or hurl aheap,
+Goddess and Goatfoot hourly wrestled sore;
+Hourly the immortal prevailing more:
+Till one hot noon saw Meliboeus peep
+From thicket-sprays to where his full-blown dame,
+In circle by the lusty friskers gripped,
+Laughed the showered rose-leaves while her limbs were stripped.
+She beckoned to our Satyr, and he came.
+Then twirled she mounds of ripeness, wreath of arms.
+His hoof kicked up the clothing for such charms.
+
+
+
+BREATH OF THE BRIAR
+
+
+
+I
+
+O briar-scents, on yon wet wing
+Of warm South-west wind brushing by,
+You mind me of the sweetest thing
+That ever mingled frank and shy:
+When she and I, by love enticed,
+Beneath the orchard-apples met,
+In equal halves a ripe one sliced,
+And smelt the juices ere we ate.
+
+II
+
+That apple of the briar-scent,
+Among our lost in Britain now,
+Was green of rind, and redolent
+Of sweetness as a milking cow.
+The briar gives it back, well nigh
+The damsel with her teeth on it;
+Her twinkle between frank and shy,
+My thirst to bite where she had bit.
+
+
+
+EMPEDOCLES
+
+
+
+I
+
+He leaped.  With none to hinder,
+Of Aetna's fiery scoriae
+In the next vomit-shower, made he
+A more peculiar cinder.
+And this great Doctor, can it be,
+He left no saner recipe
+For men at issue with despair?
+Admiring, even his poet owns,
+While noting his fine lyric tones,
+The last of him was heels in air!
+
+II
+
+Comes Reverence, her features
+Amazed to see high Wisdom hear,
+With glimmer of a faunish leer,
+One mock her pride of creatures.
+Shall such sad incident degrade
+A stature casting sunniest shade?
+O Reverence! let Reason swim;
+Each life its critic deed reveals;
+And him reads Reason at his heels,
+If heels in air the last of him!
+
+
+
+ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM
+
+
+
+I
+
+The day that is the night of days,
+With cannon-fire for sun ablaze
+We spy from any billow's lift;
+And England still this tidal drift!
+Would she to sainted forethought vow
+A space before the thunders flood,
+That martyr of its hour might now
+Spare her the tears of blood.
+
+II
+
+Asleep upon her ancient deeds,
+She hugs the vision plethora breeds,
+And counts her manifold increase
+Of treasure in the fruits of peace.
+What curse on earth's improvident,
+When the dread trumpet shatters rest,
+Is wreaked, she knows, yet smiles content
+As cradle rocked from breast.
+
+III
+
+She, impious to the Lord of Hosts,
+The valour of her offspring boasts,
+Mindless that now on land and main
+His heeded prayer is active brain.
+No more great heart may guard the home,
+Save eyed and armed and skilled to cleave
+Yon swallower wave with shroud of foam,
+We see not distant heave.
+
+IV
+
+They stand to be her sacrifice,
+The sons this mother flings like dice,
+To face the odds and brave the Fates;
+As in those days of starry dates,
+When cannon cannon's counterblast
+Awakened, muzzle muzzle bowled,
+And high in swathe of smoke the mast
+Its fighting rag outrolled.
+
+1891.
+
+
+
+TARDY SPRING
+
+
+
+Now the North wind ceases,
+The warm South-west awakes;
+Swift fly the fleeces,
+Thick the blossom-flakes.
+
+Now hill to hill has made the stride,
+And distance waves the without end:
+Now in the breast a door flings wide;
+Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.
+And song of England's rush of flowers
+Is this full breeze with mellow stops,
+That spins the lark for shine, for showers;
+He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.
+The stir in memory seem these things,
+Which out of moistened turf and clay
+Astrain for light push patient rings,
+Or leap to find the waterway.
+'Tis equal to a wonder done,
+Whatever simple lives renew
+Their tricks beneath the father sun,
+As though they caught a broken clue;
+So hard was earth an eyewink back:
+But now the common life has come,
+The blotting cloud a dappled pack,
+The grasses one vast underhum.
+A City clothed in snow and soot,
+With lamps for day in ghostly rows,
+Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,
+The river that reflective flows:
+And there did fog down crypts of street
+Play spectre upon eye and mouth:-
+Their faces are a glass to greet
+This magic of the whirl for South.
+A burly joy each creature swells
+With sound of its own hungry quest;
+Earth has to fill her empty wells,
+And speed the service of the nest;
+The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,
+That haunts the farmer's look abroad,
+Who sees what tomb a white night built,
+Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
+For iron Winter held her firm;
+Across her sky he laid his hand;
+And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;
+A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
+Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,
+The bitten buds dared not unfold:
+We raced on roads and ice to keep
+Thought of the girl we love from cold.
+
+But now the North wind ceases,
+The warm South-west awakes,
+The heavens are out in fleeces,
+And earth's green banner shakes.
+
+
+
+THE LABOURER
+
+
+
+For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that
+follows
+When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has
+done.
+But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer's
+crown is Apollo's,
+While stands he yet in his grime and sweat--to wrestle for fruits of
+the Sun.
+
+Can an enemy wither his cheer?  Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering
+ladies,
+Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and
+clog.
+'Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul
+to their Hades,
+And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay of
+the Dog.
+
+Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new
+fashions:
+The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs lured
+to run in a stream:
+He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason to
+swallow the passions,
+Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!
+
+Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer's resolute hope:  that
+by him shall be written,
+To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the strong
+made just:
+That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice
+vitalised Britain,
+Ashine with the light of the doing of right:  at the gates of the
+Future in trust.
+
+
+
+FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE
+
+
+
+Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
+Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
+They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
+When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.
+
+To see Life's formless offspring and subdue
+Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
+Whose union is right reason:  join they hands,
+The world shall know itself and where it stands;
+What cowering angel and what upright beast
+Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
+Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
+When these two meet, a point of time is ours.
+
+As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
+Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
+Some eddies near the brink borne swift along
+Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
+So, while the headlong world's imperious force
+Resounded under, heard I these discourse.
+
+First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
+To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:
+
+- Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
+When still I find you in this mire alone.
+
+- The few steps taken at a funeral pace
+By men had slain me but for those you trace.
+
+- Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
+Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!
+
+- Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
+And make me rich in feeling I can give.
+
+- A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
+Yet must I read my sister for the How.
+My daisy better knows her God of beams
+Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
+She hath the secret never fieriest reach
+Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.
+
+- Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,
+My semblance when I have you not as now.
+The quiet creatures who escape mishap
+Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
+A picture of the settled peace desired
+By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
+I listen at their breasts:  is there no jar
+Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,
+And such a picture as the piercing mind
+Ranks beneath vegetation.  Not resigned
+Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
+What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,
+Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
+I am not Resignation's counterpart.
+If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word,
+Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
+We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;
+Soon carrion if very earth are we!
+
+The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use
+Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;
+Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,
+And pass despised; 'a-cold for lack of heat,'
+Like other corpses, but without death's plea.
+
+- My sister calls for battle; is it she?
+
+- Rather a world of pressing men in arms,
+Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms
+Each drowsy malady and coiling vice
+With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
+No home is here for peace while evil breeds,
+While error governs, none; and must the seeds
+You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,
+Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,
+Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood
+Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!
+
+- My sober little maid, when we meet first,
+Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
+So can I not of her till circumstance
+Drugs cravings.  Here we see how men advance
+A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,
+Like dead weeds on whipped waters.  Shout the word
+Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,
+As to band-music under Victory's arch.
+Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then
+The beauty of frank animals had men.
+
+- Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
+Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
+Thence look this way, across the fields that show
+Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.
+
+My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;
+And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.
+I knew my home where I had choice to feel
+The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.
+
+- Speak of this Age.
+
+- When you it shall discern
+Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.
+
+- For neither of us has it any care;
+Its learning is through Science to despair.
+
+- Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
+With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
+This Age climbs earth.
+
+-To challenge heaven.
+
+- Not less
+The lower deeps.  It laughs at Happiness!
+That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
+For one step upward on the crags you scale.
+Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
+Which means our soul asleep or body's lust,
+Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
+A temperate common music, sunlike heat
+The happiness not predatory sheds!
+
+- But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads
+Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
+Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
+Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
+The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed
+And trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.
+Combustibles on hot combustibles
+Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
+The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
+And leave the track of devils where men built.
+Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt
+Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
+If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
+To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
+None save they but the souls which them contain.
+No extramural God, the God within
+Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
+A world that for the spur of fool and knave
+Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?
+But men who ply their wits in such a school
+Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.
+
+- Much have I studied hard Necessity!
+To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we
+May deem the harshness of her later cries
+In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
+If men among the warnings which convulse
+Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.
+Long ere the rising of this age of ours,
+The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
+Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
+And are as lasting as the parent thing.
+Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
+They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.
+Behold such army gathering; ours the spur,
+No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
+Not fool or knave is now the enemy
+O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!
+A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
+Now must the brother soul alive in each
+His traitorous individual devildom
+Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
+Dimly men see it menacing apace
+To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.
+Within, without, they are a field of tares:
+Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
+And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
+Shines visible as life on either field.
+That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
+Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
+Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
+Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
+Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
+The human and Satanic intellect,
+Determined for their uses to control
+What forces on the earth and under roll,
+Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
+Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
+They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
+Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.
+
+- My sister, as I read them in my glass,
+Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
+How waken them that have not any bent
+Save browsing--the concrete indifferent!
+Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
+They fear not for the race when full the trough.
+They have much fear of giving up the ghost;
+And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.
+
+- If I could see with you, and did not faint
+In beating wing, the future I would paint.
+Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
+Now meanwhile is another mass awake,
+Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
+If I could see with you!  Could I but fly!
+
+- The length of days that you with them have housed,
+An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.
+
+- O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,
+While still they have a cause too piteous!
+Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,
+They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,
+And quicken in the virtue of their cause,
+To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
+I wait the issue of a battling Age;
+The toilers with your 'troughsters' now engage;
+Instructing them, through their acutest sense,
+How close the dangers of indifference!
+Already have my people shown their worth,
+More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
+That love to love of labour leads:  thence love
+Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.
+
+- Admit some other features:  Faithless, mean;
+Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;
+Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells
+On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;
+And if I bid it face what I observe,
+Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!
+
+- Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,
+Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
+Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,
+Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
+Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
+As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.
+Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame
+At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
+To strengthen our foundations is the task
+Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,
+Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves
+The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
+My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
+To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
+Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,
+It moves:  O much for me to say it moves!
+About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,
+Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
+And where his tide of nourishment he drives,
+An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
+Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
+He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,
+The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;
+Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
+To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,
+He is the vast Insensate who devours
+His golden promise over leagues of seed,
+Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
+The races which on barbarous force begin
+Inherit onward of their origin,
+And cancelled blessings will the current length
+Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
+'Tis not in men to recognize the need
+Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
+Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;
+Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
+Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,
+For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
+Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,
+Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
+- That rings of truth!  More do your people thrive;
+Your Many are more merrily alive
+Than erewhile when I gloried in the page
+Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
+Greece was my lamp:  burnt out for lack of oil;
+Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
+All structures built upon a narrow space
+Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
+O thrice must one be you, to see them shift
+Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;
+With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,
+Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
+And thrice must one be you, to wait release
+From duress in the swamp of their increase.
+At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,
+A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed
+Philosophers behold; desponding view
+Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;
+Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,
+Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.
+Belated vessels on a rising sea,
+They seem:  they pass!
+
+- But not Philosophy!
+
+- Ay, be we faithful to ourselves:  despise
+Nought but the coward in us!  That way lies
+The wisdom making passage through our slough.
+Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;
+Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
+Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.
+That photosphere of our high fountain One,
+Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun,
+Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,
+Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
+Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,
+Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
+Advantage to the Many:  that we name
+God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.
+This thought unto my sister do I owe,
+And irony and satire off me throw.
+They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
+Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
+Now let the perils thicken:  clearer seen,
+Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
+Who never yet of scattered lamps was born
+To speed a world, a marching world to warn,
+But sunward from the vivid Many springs,
+Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.
+
+
+
+THE WARNING
+
+
+
+We have seen mighty men ballooning high,
+And in another moment bump the ground.
+He falls; and in his measurement is found
+To count some inches o'er the common fry.
+'Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,
+Yet 'twas enough above his fellows crowned,
+Had he less panted.  Let his faithful hound
+Bark at detractors.  He may walk or lie.
+Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas -
+This little Isle's insatiable greed
+For Continents--filled to inflation burst.
+So do ripe nations into squalor pass,
+When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,
+They scorn the brain's wild search for virtuous light.
+
+
+
+OUTSIDE THE CROWD
+
+
+
+To sit on History in an easy chair,
+Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom 'twas writ!
+Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,
+Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air.
+If more than hands' and armsful be our share,
+Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit.
+Have we not heard derision infinite
+When old men play the youth to chase the snare?
+Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes,
+Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent,
+The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex,
+Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent;
+Armed to support her sword;--lest we compose
+That Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.
+
+
+
+TRAFALGAR DAY
+
+
+
+He leads:  we hear our Seaman's call
+In the roll of battles won;
+For he is Britain's Admiral
+Till setting of her sun.
+
+When Britain's life was in her ships,
+He kept the sea as his own right;
+And saved us from more fell eclipse
+Than drops on day from blackest night.
+Again his battle spat the flame!
+Again his victory flag men saw!
+At sound of Nelson's chieftain name,
+A deeper breath did Freedom draw.
+
+Each trusty captain knew his part:
+They served as men, not marshalled kine:
+The pulses they of his great heart,
+With heads to work his main design.
+Their Nelson's word, to beat the foe,
+And spare the fall'n, before them shone.
+Good was the hour of blow for blow,
+And clear their course while they fought on.
+
+Behold the Envied vanward sweep! -
+A day in mourning weeds adored!
+Then Victory was wrought to weep;
+Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.
+
+A breezeless flag above a shroud
+All Britain was when wind and wave,
+To make her, passing human, proud,
+Brought his last gift from o'er the grave!
+
+Uprose the soul of him a star
+On that brave day of Ocean days:
+It rolled the smoke from Trafalger
+To darken Austerlitz ablaze.
+Are we the men of old, its light
+Will point us under every sky
+The path he took; and must we fight,
+Our Nelson be our battle-cry!
+
+He leads:  we hear our Seaman's call
+In the roll of battles won;
+For he is Britain's Admiral
+Till setting of her sun.
+
+
+
+THE REVOLUTION
+
+
+
+I
+
+Not yet had History's Aetna smoked the skies,
+And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained,
+While overhead in ordered set and rise
+Her kingly crowns immutably defiled;
+Effulgent on funereal piled
+Across the vacant heavens, and distrained
+Her body, mutely, even as earth, to bear;
+Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.
+
+II
+
+Through marching scores of winters racked she lay,
+Beneath a hoar-frost's brilliant crust,
+Whereon the jewelled flies that drained
+Her breasts disported in a glistering spray;
+She, the land's fount of fruits, enclosed with dust;
+By good and evil angels fed, sustained
+In part to curse, in part to pray,
+Sucking the dubious rumours, till men saw
+The throbs of her charged heart before the Just,
+So worn the harrowed surface had become:
+And still they deemed the dance above was Law,
+Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.
+
+III
+
+Then, on the unanticipated day,
+Earth heaved, and rose a veinous mound
+To roar of the underfloods; and off it sprang,
+Ravishing as red wine in woman's form,
+A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh,
+Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned;
+She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray,
+Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sang
+Intoxication to her swarm,
+Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole,
+As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff,
+Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay
+(O ripeness of the time!  O Retribution sure,
+If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!)
+And, like a glad releasing of her soul,
+Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue,
+Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined,
+In the face of men they joined:  attest it true,
+The million witnesses, that she,
+For ages lying beside the mole,
+Was on the unanticipated miracle day
+Upraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal,
+Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knew
+What Lucifer of the Mint had coined
+His bride's adulterate currency
+Of burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate;
+She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate:
+His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed.
+Read backward on the hoar-frost's brilliant crust;
+Beneath it read.
+Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood,
+A radiance fringed with grim affright;
+For them that hungered, she was nourishing food,
+For those who sparkled, Night.
+Read in her heart, and how before the Just
+Her doings, her misdoings, plead.
+
+IV
+
+Down on her leap for him the young Angelical broke
+To husband a resurgent France:
+From whom, with her dethroning stroke,
+Dishonour passed; the dalliance,
+That is occasion's yea or nay,
+In issues for the soul to pay,
+Discarded; and the cleft 'twixt deed and word,
+The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird,
+Wherein we see old Darkness peer,
+Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence;
+And hence the talons and the beak of prey;
+Hence all the lures to silken swine
+Thronging the troughs of indolence;
+With every sleek convolvement serpentine;
+The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer,
+And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay.
+He clasped in this revived, uprisen France,
+A valorous dame, of countenance
+The lightning's upon cloud:  unlit as yet
+On brows and lips the lurid shine
+Of seas in the night-wind's whirl; unstirred
+Her pouch of the centuries' injuries compressed;
+The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard:
+Earth's animate full flower she looked, intense
+For worship, wholly given him, fair
+Adoring or desiring; in her bright jet,
+Earth's crystal spring to sky:  Earth's warrior Best
+To win Heaven's Pure up that midway
+We vision for new ground, where sense
+And spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare,
+Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarray
+In scorn of the seductive insincere,
+But martially nude for hot Bellona's play,
+And amorous of the loftiest in her view.
+
+V
+
+She sprang from dust to drink of earth's cool dew,
+The breath of swaying grasses share,
+Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear,
+At wrestle with the tyrannic strong;
+Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew,
+As immortals may be in the mortal sphere.
+Read through her launching heart, who had lain long
+With Earth and heard till it became her own
+Our good Great Mother's eve and matin song:
+The humming burden of Earth's toil to feed
+Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth,
+Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown
+Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both,
+Of either aided on their hard ascent.
+Now when she looked, with love's benign delight
+After great ecstasy, along the plains,
+What foulest impregnation of her sight
+Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops
+Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent,
+As were they winter sedges, broken hoops,
+Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts,
+With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains?
+Recked she that some perverting devil had limned
+Earth's proudest to spout scorn of the Maker's hand,
+Who could a day behold these deathly hosts,
+And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed,
+A ribanded and gemmed elected few,
+Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:-
+Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game
+Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame:
+Beautiful statures; hideous,
+By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains,
+And flexile where is manhood straight;
+Mortuaries where warm should beat
+The brotherhood that keeps blood sweet:
+Who dared in cantique impious
+Proclaim the Just, to whom was due
+Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state,
+For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains,
+On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew.
+Surely a devil's land when that meant death for each!
+Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus,
+With all the body's life to plump the leech,
+Is Nature's way, she knew.  The abominable scene
+Spat at the skies; and through her veins,
+To cloud celestially sown,
+Ran venom of what nourishment
+Her dark sustainer subterrene
+Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack,
+Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains,
+Under derisive revels, prone
+As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.
+
+VI
+
+Now was her face white waves in the tempest's sharp flame-blink;
+Her skies shot black.
+Now was it visioned infamy to drink
+Of earth's cool dew, and through the vines
+Frolic in pearly laughter with her young,
+Watching the healthful, natural, happy signs
+Where hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung,
+After their sly shy ventures from the leaf,
+And promised bunches.  Now it seemed
+The world was one malarious mire,
+Crying for purification:  chief
+This land of France.  It seemed
+A duteous desire
+To drink of life's hot flood, and the crimson streamed.
+
+VII
+
+She drank what makes man demon at the draught.
+Her skies lowered black,
+Her lover flew,
+There swept a shudder over men.
+Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed,
+For laughter was her spirit's weapon then.
+The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.
+
+VIII
+
+As mighty thews burst manacles, she went mad:
+Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits.
+Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had!
+To tread her down in her live grave beneath
+Their dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath,
+They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits.
+Without they girdled her, made nest within.
+There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake.
+They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood;
+Believing it, in the mother's mind at strain,
+In the mother's fears, and in young Liberty's wail
+Alarmed, for her encompassed children's sake,
+The sole sure way to save her priceless bud.
+Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail,
+Vengeance appeared as logically akin.
+Insanely rational they; she rationally insane;
+And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.
+
+IX
+
+Amid the plash of scarlet mud
+Stained at the mouth, drunk with our common air,
+Not lack of love was her defect;
+The Fury mourned and raged and bled for France
+Breathing from exultation to despair
+At every wild-winged hope struck by mischance
+Soaring at each faint gleam o'er her abyss.
+Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect,
+The frontier march she piped her sons, for where
+Her crouching outer enemy camped,
+Attendant on the deadlier inner's hiss.
+She piped her sons the frontier march, the wine
+Of martial music, History's cherished tune;
+And they, the saintliest labourers that aye
+Dropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped;
+High-breasted to match men or elements,
+Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled:
+War's ragged pupils; many a wavering line,
+Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,
+Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,
+To jest at famine, ply
+The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field;
+Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents;
+Fronting the red artillery straighten spine;
+Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn;
+Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;
+Die, if the multiple hazards around said die;
+Downward measure a foeman mightily sized;
+Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised;
+Lyrical on into death's red roaring jaw-gape, steeled
+Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply.
+Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!
+
+X
+
+Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind rattle their thunder
+Loud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great South-
+west,
+Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the race:
+Lo, in the day's young beams the colossal invading pursuers
+Burst upon rocks and were foam;
+Ridged up a torrent crest;
+Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder;
+Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace.
+Yesterday's clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid comb;
+They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under;
+They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home;
+They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers;
+Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the pursuers.
+Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace;
+Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army dispieced;
+Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb.
+Fly! was the sportsman's word; and the note of the quarry rang,
+Chase!
+
+XI
+
+Banners from South, from East,
+Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred;
+The captive brides of valour, Sabine Wives
+Plucked from the foeman's blushful bed,
+For glorious muted battle-tongues
+Of deeds along the horizon's red,
+At cost of unreluctant lives;
+Her toilful heroes homeward poured,
+To give their fevered mother air of the lungs.
+She breathed, and in the breathing craved.
+Environed as she was, at bay,
+Safety she kissed on her drawn sword,
+And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved:
+She craved for victory as her daily bread;
+For victory as her daily banquet raved.
+
+XII
+
+Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey
+Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore
+To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more
+Devitalizing:  red washer Auroral ray;
+Desired if but to paint her pallid hue.
+The passion for that young horizon red,
+Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,
+Like dotage of the past-meridian dame
+For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled
+Insatiate, to the voracious grew,
+The glutton's inward raveners bred;
+Till she, mankind's most dreaded, most abhorred,
+Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,
+As by the weaving Fates impelled,
+To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,
+Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.
+
+XIII
+
+Banners from East, from South,
+She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,
+Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne.
+So may you see the village innocent,
+With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,
+In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone:
+See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh
+Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed.
+False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,
+She fell:  from his ethereal home observed
+Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead
+Against the season's fruit for deadly Seed,
+But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,
+Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought.
+Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold
+The doer of the monstrous; she aroused,
+She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,
+More strongly the divine in him than when
+Joy of her as she sprang from mould
+Drew him the midway heavens adown
+To clasp her in his arms espoused
+Before the sight of wondering men,
+And put upon the day a deathless crown.
+The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,
+His alien love laid open, to divide
+The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew
+What cowardice in her valour could reside;
+What strength her weakness covered; what abased
+Sublimity so illumining, and what raised
+This wallower in old slime to noblest heights,
+Up to the union on the midway blue:-
+Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs
+Among dark History's nocturnal lights,
+With vivid beams indicative to the quick
+Of all who have felt the vaulted body's pangs
+Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick.
+She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned
+To the one helping hand above;
+Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,
+Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love
+That day:  and he, the bright day's husband, still with love,
+Though alien, though to an upper seat retired,
+Behold a wrangling heart, as 'twere her soul
+On eddies of wild waters cast;
+In wilderness division; fired
+For domination, freedom, lust,
+The Pleasures; lo, a witch's snaky bowl
+Set at her lips; the blood-drinker's madness fast
+Upon her; and therewith mistrust,
+Most of herself:  a mouth of guile.
+Compassionately could he smile,
+To hear the mouth disclaiming God,
+And clamouring for the Just!
+Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed
+City and field; and pushed abroad
+O'er hungry waves to thirsty sands,
+Flaring at further; she had grown to be
+The headless with the fearful hands;
+To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced.
+But he, remembering how his love began,
+And of what creature, pitied when was plain
+Another measure of captivity:
+The need for strap and rod;
+The penitential prayers again;
+Again the bitter bowing down to dust;
+The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God,
+The answer when is call upon the Just.
+Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode
+Her master, saying, 'I only; I who can!'
+And echoed round her army, now her chain.
+So learns the nation, closing Anarch's reign,
+That she had been in travail of a Man.
+
+
+
+NAPOLEON
+
+
+
+I
+
+Cannon his name,
+Cannon his voice, he came.
+Who heard of him heard shaken hills,
+An earth at quake, to quiet stamped;
+Who looked on him beheld the will of wills,
+The driver of wild flocks where lions ramped:
+Beheld War's liveries flee him, like lumped grass
+Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm;
+While laurelled over his Imperial form,
+Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
+Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame.
+Incarnate Victory, Power manifest,
+Infernal or God-given to mankind,
+On the quenched volcano's cusp did he take stand,
+A conquering army's height above the land,
+Which calls that army offspring of its breast,
+And sees it mid the starry camps enshrined;
+His eye the cannon's flame,
+The cannon's cave his mind.
+
+II
+
+To weld the nation in a name of dread,
+And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed,
+The Necessitated came, as comes from out
+Electric ebon lightning's javelin-head,
+Threatening agitation in the revealed
+Founts of our being; terrible with doubt,
+With radiance restorative.  At one stride
+Athwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway.
+That Soliform made featureless beside
+His brilliancy who neighboured:  vapour they;
+Vapour what postured statues barred his tread.
+On high in amphitheatre field on field,
+Italian, Egyptian, Austrian,
+Far heard and of the carnage discord clear,
+Bells of his escalading triumphs pealed
+In crashes on a choral chant severe,
+Heraldic of the authentic Charlemagne,
+Globe, sceptre, sword, to enfold, to rule, to smite,
+Make unity of the mass,
+Coherent or refractory, by his might.
+
+Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
+Fame blew, and tuned the jangles, bent the knees
+Rebellious or submissive; his decrees
+Were thunder in those heavens and compelled:
+Such as disordered earth, eclipsed of stars,
+Endures for sign of Order's calm return,
+Whereunto she is vowed; and his wreckage-spars,
+His harried ships, old riotous Ocean lifts alight,
+Subdued to splendour in his delirant churn.
+Glory suffused the accordant, quelled,
+By magic of high sovereignty, revolt:
+And he, the reader of men, himself unread;
+The name of hope, the name of dread;
+Bloom of the coming years or blight;
+An arm to hurl the bolt
+With aim Olympian; bore
+Likeness to Godhead.  Whither his flashes hied
+Hosts fell; what he constructed held rock-fast.
+So did earth's abjects deem of him that built and clove.
+Torch on imagination, beams he cast,
+Whereat they hailed him deified:
+If less than an eagle-speeding Jove, than Vulcan more.
+Or it might be a Vulcan-Jove,
+Europe for smithy, Europe's floor
+Lurid with sparks in evanescent showers,
+Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours,
+Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.
+
+III
+
+On him the long enchained, released
+For bride of the miracle day up the midway blue;
+She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast
+Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue,
+Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed.
+Fawning, her body bent, she gazed
+With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart:
+Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears
+This apparition, ghostly for belief;
+Demoniac or divine, but sole
+Over earth's mightiest written Chief;
+Earth's chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart:
+The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew;
+The arbiter of circumstance;
+High above limitations, as the spheres.
+Nor ever had heroical Romance,
+Never ensanguined History's lengthened scroll,
+Shown fulminant to shoot the levin dart
+Terrific as this man, by whom upraised,
+Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers;
+Like midnight's levying brazier-beacon blazed
+Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons,
+Day of the darkness; this man's mate; by him,
+Cannon his name,
+Rescued from vivisectionist and knave,
+Her body's dominators and her shame;
+By him with the rivers of ranked battalions, brave
+Past mortal, girt:  a march of swords and guns
+Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice
+He flung on the crested board, where chilly Fears
+Behold the Reaper's ground, Death sitting grim,
+Awatch for his predestined ones,
+Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these,
+Inebriate of his inevitable device,
+Hail it their hero's wood of lustrous laurel-trees,
+Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides,
+The boiling life-blood in their cheers.
+Unequalled since the world was man they pour
+A spiky girdle round her; these, her sons,
+His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roar
+Obstruction shattered at his will or whim:
+Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim,
+And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.
+
+IV
+
+The flood that swept her to be slave
+Adoring, under thought of being his mate,
+These were, and unto the visibly unexcelled,
+As much of heart as abjects can she gave,
+Or what of heart the body bears for freight
+When Majesty apparent overawes;
+By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld,
+Which let not feminine pride in him have pause
+To question where the nobler pride rebelled.
+She read the hieroglyphic on his brow,
+Felt his firm hand to wield the giant's mace;
+Herself whirled upward in an eagle's claws,
+Past recollection of her earthly place;
+And if cold Reason pressed her, called him Fate;
+Offering abashed the servile woman's vow.
+Delirium was her virtue when the look
+At fettered wrists and violated laws
+Faith in a rectitude Supernal shook,
+Till worship of him shone as her last rational state,
+The slave's apology for gemmed disgrace.
+Far in her mind that leap from earth to the ghost
+Midway on high; or felt as a troubled pool;
+Or as a broken sleep that hunts a dream half lost,
+Arrested and rebuked by the common school
+Of daily things for truancy.  She could rejoice
+To know with wakeful eyeballs Violence
+Her crowned possessor, and, on every sense
+Incumbent, Fact, Imperial Fact, her choice,
+In scorn of barren visions, aims at a glassy void.
+Who sprang for Liberty once, found slavery sweet;
+And Tyranny, on alert subservience buoyed,
+Spurred a blood-mare immeasureably fleet
+To shoot the transient leagues in a passing wink,
+Prompt for the glorious bound at the fanged abyss's brink.
+Scarce felt she that she bled when battle scored
+On riddled flags the further conjured line;
+From off the meteor gleam of his waved sword
+Reflected bright in permanence:  she bled
+As the Bacchante spills her challengeing wine
+With whirl o' the cup before the kiss to lip;
+And bade drudge History in his footprints tread,
+For pride of sword-strokes o'er slow penmanship:
+Each step of his a volume:  his sharp word
+The shower of steel and lead
+Or pastoral sunshine.
+
+V
+
+Persistent through the brazen chorus round
+His thunderous footsteps on the foeman's ground,
+A broken carol of wild notes was heard,
+As when an ailing infant wails a dream.
+Strange in familiarity it rang:
+And now along the dark blue vault might seem
+Winged migratories having but heaven for home,
+Now the lone sea-bird's cry down shocks of foam,
+Beneath a ruthless paw the captive's pang.
+
+It sang the gift that comes from God
+To mind of man as air to lung.
+So through her days of under sod
+Her faith unto her heart had sung,
+Like bedded seed by frozen clod,
+With view of wide-armed heaven and buds at burst,
+And midway up, Earth's fluttering little lyre.
+Even for a glimpse, for even a hope in chained desire
+The vision of it watered thirst.
+
+VI
+
+But whom those errant moans accused
+As Liberty's murderous mother, cried accursed,
+France blew to deafness:  for a space she mused;
+She smoothed a startled look, and sought,
+From treasuries of the adoring slave,
+Her surest way to strangle thought;
+Picturing her dread lord decree advance
+Into the enemy's land; artillery, bayonet, lance;
+His ordering fingers point the dial's to time their ranks:
+Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest's bayonet-glaive.
+Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks,
+By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains.
+Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains.
+They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute;
+He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute;
+Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox.
+From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls;
+From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls:
+He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks;
+They clash, they are knotted, and now 'tis the deed of the axe on
+the log;
+Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep
+Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over heap
+Right through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or shreds,
+or a fog
+Rolling off sunlight's arrows.  Not mightier Phoebus in ire,
+Nor deadlier Jove's avengeing right hand, than he of the brain
+Keen at an enemy's mind to encircle and pierce and constrain,
+Muffling his own for a fate-charged blow very Gods may admire.
+Sure to behold are his eagles on high where the conflict raged.
+Rightly, then, should France worship, and deafen the disaccord
+Of those who dare withstand an irresistible sword
+To thwart his predestined subjection of Europe.  Let them submit!
+She said it aloud, and heard in her breast, as a singer caged,
+With the beat of wings at bars, Earth's fluttering little lyre.
+No more at midway heaven, but liker midway to the pit:
+Not singing the spirally upward of rapture, the downward of pain
+Rather, the drop sheer downward from pressure of merciless weight.
+
+Her strangled thought got breath, with her worship held debate;
+To yield and sink, yet eye askant the mark she had missed.
+Over the black-blue rollers of that broad Westerly main,
+Steady to sky, the light of Liberty glowed
+In a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a road
+For Europe to cross, and see the thing lost subsist.
+For there 'twas a shepherd led his people, no butcher of sheep;
+Firmly there the banner he first upreared
+Stands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reap
+From a father beloved in life, in his death revered.
+Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glance
+Clearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain;
+Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, France
+Had view of her one-day's heavenly lover again;
+Saw him amid the bright host looking down on her; knew she had
+erred,
+Knew him her judge, knew yonder the spirit preferred;
+Yonder the base of the summit she strove that day to ascend,
+Ere cannon mastered her soul, and all dreams had end.
+
+VII
+
+Soon felt she in her shivered frame
+A bodeful drain of blood illume
+Her wits with frosty fire to read
+The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed
+On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom
+For victory that was victory scarce in name.
+Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs
+O'er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize;
+Recalling how he stood by Frederic's tomb,
+With Frederic's country underfoot and spurned:
+There meditated; till her hope might guess,
+Albeit his constant star prescribe success,
+The savage strife would sink, the civil aim
+To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous
+Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned;
+And Labour's lovely peace, and Beauty's courtly bloom,
+The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious.
+At such great height, where hero hero topped,
+Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think
+No further leaps at the fanged abyss's brink
+True Genius takes:  be battle's dice-box dropped!
+
+She watched his desert features, hung to hear
+The honey words desired, and veiled her face;
+Hearing the Seaman's name recur
+Wrathfully, thick with a meaning worse
+Than call to the march:  for that inveterate Purse
+Could kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place,
+Conjure a heart into the trebly felled.
+It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelled
+To feed insurgent Europe:  rear and van
+Were haunted by the amphibious curse;
+Here flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout:
+The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout,
+Distracted Europe's Master, puffed remote
+Those Indies of the swift Macedonian,
+Whereon would Europe's Master somewhiles doat,
+In dreamings on a docile universe
+Beneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.
+
+Nor marvel France should veil a seer's face,
+And call on darkness as a blest retreat.
+Magnanimously could her iron Emperor
+Confront submission:  hostile stirred to heat
+All his vast enginery, allowed no halt
+Up withered avenues of waste-blood war,
+To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume,
+As 'twere the world's arteries opened!  Woe the race!
+Ask wherefore Fortune's vile caprice should balk
+His panther spring across the foaming salt,
+From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk!
+There is no answer:  seed of black defeat
+She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom.
+See since that Seaman's epicycle sprite
+Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase
+Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white
+With mother's tears of France, that he may meet
+Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat
+Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea;
+Earth's power to baffle Ocean's power resume;
+Victorious army crown o'er Victory's fleet;
+And bearing low that Seaman upon knee,
+Stay the vexed question of supremacy,
+Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic's tomb.
+
+VIII
+
+Poured streams of Europe's veins the flood
+Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide
+Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed:
+And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood
+Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast.
+He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed.
+She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts.
+The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts
+Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide
+In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest,
+Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked,
+And crazy chuckles, with life's tears at feud;
+While near her heart the sunken sentinel
+Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed
+This torture, this anointed, this untracked
+To mortal source, this alien of his kind;
+Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars,
+The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars;
+Whose arts to lay the senses under spell
+Aroused an insurrectionary mind.
+
+IX
+
+He, did he love her?  France was his weapon, shrewd
+At edge, a wind in onset:  he loved well
+His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed
+Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked,
+Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle.
+He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride,
+Did but her blood in blindness given exact.
+Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide:
+She quivered at his word, and at his touch
+Was hound or steed for any mark he espied.
+He loved her more than little, less than much.
+The fair subservient of Imperial Fact
+Next to his consanguineous was placed
+In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal,
+Vexatious carnal appetites above,
+Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced,
+And rose but at command from under heel.
+The love devolvent, the ascension love,
+Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked,
+Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks;
+Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste,
+Took up but solids for its glowing seal.
+The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel,
+Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks,
+His night's first quarter sicklied to distaste,
+In warm enjoyment barely might distract.
+A head that held an Europe half devoured
+Taste in the blood's conceit of pleasure soured.
+Nought save his rounding aim, the means he plied,
+Death for his cause, to him could point appeal.
+His mistress was the thing of uses tried.
+Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed,
+But on his Policy his eye was lewd.
+That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked
+No foot across; a shade his ire provoked.
+The blunder or the cruelty of a deed
+His Policy imperative could plead.
+He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he
+Legitimate outside his Policy.
+Men's lives and works were due, from their birth's date,
+To the State's shield and sword, himself the State.
+He thought for them in mass, as Titan may;
+For their pronounced well-being bade obey;
+O'er each obstructive thicket thunderclapped,
+And straight their easy road to market mapped.
+Watched Argus to survey the huge preserves
+He held or coveted; Mars was armed alert
+At sign of motion; yet his brows were murk,
+His gorge would surge, to see the butcher's work,
+The Reaper's field; a sensitive in nerves.
+He rode not over men to do them hurt.
+As one who claimed to have for paramour
+Earth's fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow;
+Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensure
+Possession; free of rivals, not their foe.
+
+The common Tyrant's frenzies, rancour, spites,
+He knew as little as men's claim on rights.
+A kindness for old servants, early friends,
+Was constant in him while they served his ends;
+And if irascible, 'twas the moment's reek
+From fires diverted by some gusty freak.
+His Policy the act which breeds the act
+Prevised, in issues accurately summed
+From reckonings of men's tempers, terrors, needs:-
+That universal army, which he leads
+Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact.
+Within his hot brain's hammering workshop hummed
+A thousand furious wheels at whirr, untired
+As Nature in her reproductive throes;
+And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired:
+The cause being aye the incendiary foes
+Proved by prostration culpable.  His dispense
+Of Justice made his active conscience;
+His passive was of ceaseless labour formed.
+So found this Tyrant sanction and repose;
+Humanly just, inhumanly unwarmed.
+Preventive fencings with the foul intent
+Occult, by him observed and foiled betimes,
+Let fool historians chronicle as crimes.
+His blows were dealt to clear the way he went:
+Too busy sword and mind for needless blows.
+The mighty bird of sky minutest grains
+On ground perceived; in heaven but rays or rains;
+In humankind diversities of masks,
+For rule of men the choice of bait or goads.
+The statesman steered the despot to large tasks;
+The despot drove the statesman on short roads.
+For Order's cause he laboured, as inclined
+A soldier's training and his Euclid mind.
+His army unto men he could present
+As model of the perfect instrument.
+That creature, woman, was the sofa soft,
+When warriors their dusty armour doffed,
+And read their manuals for the making truce
+With rosy frailties framed to reproduce.
+He farmed his land, distillingly alive
+For the utmost extract he might have and hive,
+Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme,
+Benign shone Hymen's torch on young love's dream.
+Thus to be strong was he beneficent;
+A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.
+
+The disputant in words his eye dismayed:
+Opinions blocked his passage.  Rent
+Were Councils with a gesture; brayed
+By hoarse camp-phrase what argument
+Dared interpose to waken spleen
+In him whose vision grasped the unseen,
+Whose counsellor was the ready blade,
+Whose argument the cannonade.
+He loathed his land's divergent parties, loth
+To grant them speech, they were such idle troops;
+The friable and the grumous, dizzards both.
+Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops;
+Some serviceable, none credible on oath.
+The silly preference they nursed to die
+In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie.
+If magic made them pliable for his use,
+Magician he could be by planned surprise.
+For do they see the deuce in human guise,
+As men's acknowledged head appears the deuce,
+And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal.
+Among them certain vagrant wits that had
+Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;
+Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;
+But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain
+Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.
+With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings
+The way of such transfeminated things,
+And France had sense of vacancy in Light.
+
+That is the soul's dead darkness, making clutch
+Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch;
+Adding to slavery's chain the stringent twist;
+Even when it brings close surety that aright
+She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist;
+Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
+Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
+Material grandeur's ape, the Infernal's hound;
+Enormous, with no infinite around;
+No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame
+The dusty pattering pinions,
+The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.
+
+X
+
+Hugest of engines, a much limited man,
+She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear
+Through that smoked glass her last privation brought
+To point her critic eye and spur her thought:
+A heart but to propel Leviathan;
+A spirit that breathed but in earth's atmosphere.
+Amid the plumed and sceptred ones
+Irradiatingly Jovian,
+The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;
+A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:
+Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike
+Herself in all, yet with such power to strike,
+That she the various features she could scan
+Dared not to sum, though seeing:  and befooled
+By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed,
+Subservient as roused echo round his guns.
+Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons,
+He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled.
+Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained;
+But irony, her spirit's tongue, restrained.
+The Critic, last of vital in the proud
+Enslaved, when most detectively endowed,
+Admired how irony's venom off him ran,
+Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze:
+Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed,
+Again her chant of eulogy began,
+Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.
+
+Her warrior, chief among the valorous great
+In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame,
+With radiance palpable in fruit and weight.
+Heard she reproach, his victories blared response;
+His victories bent the Critic to acclaim,
+As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce.
+Or heard she from scarred ranks of jolly growls
+His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,
+Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt
+Their idol for some genial trick or fault,
+She, too, became his marching veteran.
+Again she took her breath from them who bore
+His eagles through the tawny roar,
+And murmured at a peaceful state,
+That bred the title charlatan,
+As missile from the mouth of hate,
+For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled,
+Cannon his name,
+Shattering against a barrier world;
+Her supreme player of man's primaeval game.
+
+The daemon filled him, and he filled her sons;
+Strung them to stature over human height,
+As march the standards down the smoky fight;
+Her cherubim, her towering mastodons!
+Directed vault or breach, break through
+Earth's toughest, seasons, elements, tame;
+Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;
+Count death the smallest of their debts:
+Show that the will to do
+Is masculine and begets!
+
+These princes unto him the mother owed;
+These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.
+What wonder, though with wits awake
+To read her riddle, for these her offspring's sake; -
+And she, before high heaven adulteress,
+The lost to honour, in his glory clothed,
+Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed; -
+That she should quench her thought, nor worship less
+Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew
+The slave's alternative, to worship or to rue!
+
+XI
+
+Bright from the shell of that much limited man,
+Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath,
+Like soul that quits the tumbled body, soared:
+And France, impulsive, nuptial with his plan,
+Albeit the Critic fretting her, adored
+Once more.  Exultingly her heart went forth,
+Submissive to his mind and mood,
+The way of those pent-eyebrows North;
+For now was he to win the wreath
+Surpassing sunniest in camp or Court;
+Next, as the blessed harvest after years of blight,
+Sit, the Great Emperor, to be known the Good!
+
+Now had the Seaman's volvent sprite,
+Lean from the chase that barked his contraband,
+A beggared applicant at every port,
+To strew the profitless deeps and rot beneath,
+Slung northward, for a hunted beast's retort
+On sovereign power; there his final stand,
+Among the perjured Scythian's shaggy horde,
+The hydrocephalic aerolite
+Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,
+Though Europe's Master Europe's Rebel banned
+To be earth's outcast, ocean's lord and sport.
+
+Unmoved might seem the Master's taunted sword.
+Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped,
+As on the map of that all-provident head;
+He luting Peace the while, like morning's cock
+The quiet day to round the hours for bed;
+No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock.
+Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped.
+To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews,
+How trained to scale the eminences, pluck
+The hazards for new footing, how compel
+Those timely incidents by men named luck,
+Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,
+Her grovelling admiration had not yet
+Imagined of the great man-miracle;
+And France recounted with her comic smile
+Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,
+The silky female of his male in guile,
+Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse
+A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,
+Before his feint for camisado struck
+The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.
+
+Splendours of earth repeating heaven's at set
+Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;
+Since Asia upon Europe marched,
+Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown
+To Gallia's over-runner, Rome's inveterate foe,
+Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,
+Coruscant from the Master's hand, compact
+As reasoned thoughts in the Master's head; were shown
+Yon lightning moment when his acme might
+Blazed o'er the stream that cuts the sandy tract
+Borussian from Sarmatia's famished flat;
+The century's flower; and off its pinnacled throne,
+Rayed servitude on Europe's ball of sight.
+
+XII
+
+Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.
+There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast
+Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat
+In expectation's darkness, until cracked
+The straining curtain-seams:  a scaly light
+Was ghost above an army under shroud.
+Imperious on Imperial Fact
+Incestuously the incredible begat.
+His veterans and auxiliaries,
+The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud,
+Princely, scarce numerable to recite, -
+Titanic of all Titan tragedies! -
+That Northern curtain took them, as the seas
+Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.
+
+Alive in marble, she conceived in soul,
+With barren eyes and mouth, the mother's loss;
+The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;
+The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll
+Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:
+By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.
+
+Was it a necromancer lured
+To weave his tense betraying spell?
+A Titan whom our God endured
+Till he of his foul hungers fell,
+By all his craft and labour scourged?
+A deluge Europe's liberated wave,
+Paean to sky, leapt over that vast grave.
+Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged.
+And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate,
+In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate,
+That tore her old credulity to strips,
+Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips,
+His withered slave for foregone miracles urged.
+And he, whom now his ominous halo's round,
+A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned,
+Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear
+The realm of Darkness with its Prince's air;
+Assume in mien the resolute pretence
+To satiate an hungered confidence,
+Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower
+Beside the generous face of that frail flower.
+
+XIII
+
+Desire and terror then had each of each:
+His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke;
+Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech;
+And both did barter under union's cloak.
+An union in hot fever and fierce need
+Of either's aid, distrust in trust did breed.
+Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits
+To issues.  Never human fortune throve
+On such alliance.  Viewed by fits,
+From Vulcan's forge a hovering Jove
+Evolved.  The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove.
+Her awe of him his dread of her invoked:
+His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked.
+What wisdom counselled, Policy declined;
+All perils dared he save the step behind.
+Ahead his grand initiative becked:
+One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked.
+Stripped to the despot upstart, for success
+He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.
+He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,
+While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught
+He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance,
+Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France;
+Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun
+The strength he taxed unripened for his throw,
+In vengeful casts calamitous,
+On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow,
+The luminous the ruinous.
+An incalescent scorpion,
+And fierier for the mounded cirque
+That narrowed at him thick and murk,
+This gambler with his genius
+Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung
+His fortunes to the hosts he stung,
+With victories clipped his eagle's wings.
+By the hands that built him up was he undone:
+By the star aloft, which was his ram's-head will
+Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;
+By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,
+To cloud a rational mind for present things;
+By his own force, the suicide in his mill.
+Needs never God of Vengeance intervene
+When giants their last lesson have to learn.
+Fighting against an end he could discern,
+The chivalry whereof he had none
+He called from his worn slave's abundant springs:
+Not deigning spousally entreat
+That ever blinded by his martial skill,
+But harsh to have her worship counted out
+In human coin, her vital rivers drained,
+Her infant forests felled, commanded die
+The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,
+Where throning he her faith in him maintained;
+Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat
+Was triumph; and what strength in her remained
+To head against the ultimate foreseen rout,
+Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,
+Servant and sycophant:  without ally,
+In Python's coils, the Master Craftsman still;
+The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,
+The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,
+The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,
+Striking from black disaster starry showers.
+Her supreme player of man's primaeval game,
+He won his harnessed victim's rapturous shout,
+When every move was mortal to her frame,
+Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,
+She to exchange his laurels for earth's flowers.
+
+The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell:
+A vessel in mid-ocean under storm.
+Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,
+He sprang to sight, in human form
+Revealed, from no celestial aids:
+The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.
+
+Cannon his name,
+Cannon his voice, he came.
+The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,
+Amazing even on his Imperial stage,
+Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours
+And winged o'er human earth's heroical shone.
+Into the press of cumulative foes,
+Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,
+A broken structure bore his furious powers;
+The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;
+Match for all rivals; in himself but flame
+Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.
+Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete
+Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,
+And summoned to subject who dared compete,
+The cannon in the name Napoleon
+Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky.
+So through a tropic day a regnant sun,
+Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,
+His glory's trappings laid on them:  comes night,
+Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat
+From his anterior splendours, and shall seem
+Day instant, Day's own lord in the furnace gleam,
+The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged,
+When severed darkness, all flaminical bright,
+Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight;
+Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar,
+As wrestled he with manacles and gags,
+To speed across a cowering world once more,
+Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags.
+His name on silence thundered, on the obscure
+Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song:
+Earth of her prodigy's extinction long,
+With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.
+
+Snapped was the chord that made the resonant bow,
+In France, abased and like a shrunken corse;
+Amid the weakest weak, the lowest low,
+From the highest fallen, stagnant off her source;
+Condemned to hear the nations' hostile mirth;
+See curtained heavens, and smell a sulphurous earth;
+Which told how evermore shall tyrant Force
+Beget the greater for its overthrow.
+The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke
+A foreign tongue; Earth's fluttering little lyre
+Unlike, but like the raven's ravening croak.
+Not till her breath of being could aspire
+Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found
+Our common brotherhood in sight and sound:
+When mellow rang the name Napoleon,
+And dim aloft her young Angelical waved.
+Between ethereal and gross to choose,
+She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved.
+They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun
+Behind o'ershadowing foemen:  on a tide
+They drew the nature having need of pride
+Among her fellows for its vital dues:
+He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,
+Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.
+
+
+
+FRANCE--DECEMBER 1870
+
+
+
+I
+
+We look for her that sunlike stood
+Upon the forehead of our day,
+An orb of nations, radiating food
+For body and for mind alway.
+Where is the Shape of glad array;
+The nervous hands, the front of steel,
+The clarion tongue?  Where is the bold proud face?
+We see a vacant place;
+We hear an iron heel.
+
+II
+
+O she that made the brave appeal
+For manhood when our time was dark,
+And from our fetters drove the spark
+Which was as lightning to reveal
+New seasons, with the swifter play
+Of pulses, and benigner day;
+She that divinely shook the dead
+From living man; that stretched ahead
+Her resolute forefinger straight,
+And marched toward the gloomy gate
+Of earth's Untried, gave note, and in
+The good name of Humanity
+Called forth the daring vision! she,
+She likewise half corrupt of sin,
+Angel and Wanton! can it be?
+Her star has foundered in eclipse,
+The shriek of madness on her lips;
+Shreds of her, and no more, we see.
+There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,
+As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.
+
+III
+
+Look not for spreading boughs
+On the riven forest tree.
+Look down where deep in blood and mire
+Black thunder plants his feet and ploughs
+The soil for ruin:  that is France:
+Still thrilling like a lyre,
+Amazed to shivering discord from a fall
+Sudden as that the lurid hosts recall
+Who met in heaven the irreparable mischance.
+O that is France!
+The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss,
+The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss,
+Breasts that a sighing world inspire,
+And laughter-dimpled countenance
+Where soul and senses caught desire!
+
+IV
+
+Ever invoking fire from heaven, the fire
+Has grasped her, unconsumable, but framed
+For all the ecstasies of suffering dire.
+Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed:
+Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark
+For outrage:  Mother of Luxury, stripped stark:
+Mother of Heroes, bondsmen:  thro' the rains,
+Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains!
+Fond Mother of her martial youth; they pass,
+Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass!
+Mother of Honour, and dishonoured:  Mother
+Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays
+Her victor, and be fountain of his praise.
+Is there another curse?  There is another:
+Compassionate her madness:  is she not
+Mother of Reason? she that sees them mown
+Like grass, her young ones!  Yea, in the low groan
+And under the fixed thunder of this hour
+Which holds the animate world in one foul blot
+Tranced circumambient while relentless Power
+Beaks at her heart and claws her limbs down-thrown,
+She, with the plungeing lightnings overshot,
+With madness for an armour against pain,
+With milkless breasts for little ones athirst,
+And round her all her noblest dying in vain,
+Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed,
+To feel, to see, to justify the blow;
+Chamber to chamber of her sequent brain
+Gives answer of the cause of her great woe,
+Inexorably echoing thro' the vaults,
+''Tis thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow:
+'This is the sum of self-absolved faults.'
+Doubt not that thro' her grief, with sight supreme,
+Thro' her delirium and despair's last dream,
+Thro' pride, thro' bright illusion and the brood
+Bewildering of her various Motherhood,
+The high strong light within her, tho' she bleeds,
+Traces the letters of returned misdeeds.
+She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late,
+Bears this fierce crop; and she discerns her fate
+From origin to agony, and on
+As far as the wave washes long and wan
+Off one disastrous impulse:  for of waves
+Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves
+Blown rolling to the sunset from the dawn.
+
+V
+
+Ah, what a dawn of splendour, when her sowers
+Went forth and bent the necks of populations
+And of their terrors and humiliations
+Wove her the starry wreath that earthward lowers
+Now in the figure of a burning yoke!
+Her legions traversed North and South and East,
+Of triumph they enjoyed the glutton's feast:
+They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak.
+They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalp
+The icy precipices, and clove sheer through
+The heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp,
+Emerging not as men whom mortals knew.
+They were the earthquake and the hurricane,
+The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight,
+Plagues of the revel:  they were Deluge rain,
+And dreaded Conflagration; lawless Might.
+Death writes a reeling line along the snows,
+Where under frozen mists they may be tracked,
+Who men and elements provoked to foes,
+And Gods:  they were of god and beast compact:
+Abhorred of all.  Yet, how they sucked the teats
+Of Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam,
+Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme,
+Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets.
+The gay young generations mask her grief;
+Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf.
+Forgetful is green earth; the Gods alone
+Remember everlastingly:  they strike
+Remorselessly, and ever like for like.
+By their great memories the Gods are known.
+
+VI
+
+They are with her now, and in her ears, and known.
+'Tis they that cast her to the dust for Strength,
+Their slave, to feed on her fair body's length,
+That once the sweetest and the proudest shone;
+Scoring for hideous dismemberment
+Her limbs, as were the anguish-taking breath
+Gone out of her in the insufferable descent
+From her high chieftainship; as were she death,
+Who hears a voice of justice, feels the knife
+Of torture, drinks all ignominy of life.
+They are with her, and the painful Gods might weep,
+If ever rain of tears came out of heaven
+To flatter Weakness and bid conscience sleep,
+Viewing the woe of this Immortal, driven
+For the soul's life to drain the maddening cup
+Of her own children's blood implacably:
+Unsparing even as they to furrow up
+The yellow land to likeness of a sea:
+The bountiful fair land of vine and grain,
+Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots,
+Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits;
+Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey main
+Behind the black obliterating cyclone.
+
+VII
+
+Behold, the Gods are with her, and are known.
+Whom they abandon misery persecutes
+No more:  them half-eyed apathy may loan
+The happiness of pitiable brutes.
+Whom the just Gods abandon have no light,
+No ruthless light of introspective eyes
+That in the midst of misery scrutinize
+The heart and its iniquities outright.
+They rest, they smile and rest; have earned perchance
+Of ancient service quiet for a term;
+Quiet of old men dropping to the worm;
+And so goes out the soul.  But not of France.
+She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries,
+For fearfully their loosened hands chastize,
+And icily they watch the rod's caress
+Ravage her flesh from scourges merciless,
+But she, inveterate of brain, discerns
+That Pity has as little place as Joy
+Among their roll of gifts; for Strength she yearns.
+For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy.
+Lo, Strength is of the plain root-Virtues born:
+Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,
+Train by endurance, by devotion shape.
+Strength is not won by miracle or rape.
+It is the offspring of the modest years,
+The gift of sire to son, thro' those firm laws
+Which we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,
+The cause of man, and manhood's ministers.
+Could France accept the fables of her priests,
+Who blest her banners in this game of beasts,
+And now bid hope that heaven will intercede
+To violate its laws in her sore need,
+She would find comfort in their opiates:
+Mother of Reason! can she cheat the Fates?
+Would she, the champion of the open mind,
+The Omnipotent's prime gift--the gift of growth -
+Consent even for a night-time to be blind,
+And sink her soul on the delusive sloth,
+For fruits ethereal and material, both,
+In peril of her place among mankind?
+The Mother of the many Laughters might
+Call one poor shade of laughter in the light
+Of her unwavering lamp to mark what things
+The world puts faith in, careless of the truth:
+What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings,
+Attached by credence, we appear in sooth,
+Demanding intercession, direct aid,
+When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade!
+
+She swung the sword for centuries; in a day
+It slipped her, like a stream cut off from source.
+She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray,
+Clamoured of treachery, and had recourse
+To drunken outcries in her dream that Force
+Needed but hear her shouting to obey.
+Was she not formed to conquer?  The bright plumes
+Of crested vanity shed graceful nods:
+Transcendent in her foundries, Arts and looms,
+Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods?
+Her faith was on her battle-roll of names
+Sheathed in the records of old war; with dance
+And song she thrilled her warriors and her dames,
+Embracing her Dishonour:  gave him France
+From head to foot, France present and to come,
+So she might hear the trumpet and the drum -
+Bellona and Bacchante! rushing forth
+On yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North.
+
+Inveterate of brain, well knows she why
+Strength failed her, faithful to himself the first:
+Her dream is done, and she can read the sky,
+And she can take into her heart the worst
+Calamity to drug the shameful thought
+Of days that made her as the man she served
+A name of terror, but a thing unnerved:
+Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought,
+She for dominion, he to patch a throne.
+
+VIII
+
+Henceforth of her the Gods are known,
+Open to them her breast is laid.
+Inveterate of brain, heart-valiant,
+Never did fairer creature pant
+Before the altar and the blade!
+
+IX
+
+Swift fall the blows, and men upbraid,
+And friends give echo blunt and cold,
+The echo of the forest to the axe.
+Within her are the fires that wax
+For resurrection from the mould.
+
+X
+
+She snatched at heaven's flame of old,
+And kindled nations:  she was weak:
+Frail sister of her heroic prototype,
+The Man; for sacrifice unripe,
+She too must fill a Vulture's beak.
+Deride the vanquished, and acclaim
+The conqueror, who stains her fame,
+Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim
+Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.
+
+XI
+
+She shall rise worthier of her prototype
+Thro' her abasement deep; the pain that runs
+From nerve to nerve some victory achieves.
+They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leaves
+Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!
+And of their death her life is:  of their blood
+From many streams now urging to a flood,
+No more divided, France shall rise afresh.
+Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:-
+The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,
+A hunter hunting down the beast in man:
+That till the chasing out of its last vice,
+The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.
+
+Immortal Mother of a mortal host!
+Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,
+Wounds that bring death but take not life away! -
+Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:
+Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.
+Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:
+The torture lurks in them, with them the blame
+Shall pass to leave thee purer than before.
+Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,
+For what, and of the abominable name
+Of her who in imperial beauty wore.
+
+O Mother of a fated fleeting host
+Conceived in the past days of sin, and born
+Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,
+Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,
+Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim
+With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds
+Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:
+Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds
+Each new discernment of the undying ones,
+Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide
+Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll;
+These ashes have the lesson for the soul.
+'Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,
+Strip off thy Luxury:  that thou may'st live,
+Die to thyself,' they say, 'as we have died
+From dear existence and the foe forgive,
+Nor pray for aught save in our little space
+To warn good seed to greet the fair earth's face.'
+O Mother! take their counsel, and so shall
+The broader world breathe in on this thy home,
+Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,
+Strength give thee, like an ocean's vast expanse
+Off mountain cliffs, the generations all,
+Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,
+But as a river forward.  Soaring France!
+Now is Humanity on trial in thee:
+Now may'st thou gather humankind in fee:
+Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;
+Make of calamity thine aureole,
+And bleeding head us thro' the troubles of the sea.
+
+
+
+ALSACE-LORRAINE
+
+
+
+I
+
+The sister Hours in circles linked,
+Daughters of men, of men the mates,
+Are gone on flow with the day that winked,
+With the night that spanned at golden gates.
+Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;
+They bear us grain or flower or weed,
+As we have sown; is nought extinct
+For them we fill to be our Fates.
+Life of the breath is but the loan;
+Passing death what we have sown.
+
+Pearly are they till the pale inherited stain
+Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow
+Darken to feature and nature:  a volumed chain,
+Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.
+Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read
+Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:
+There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane
+Stand as a tree whereon numberless clusters grow:
+Legible there how the heart, with its one false move
+Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.
+
+Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief;
+Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;
+Our craving heart of passion suckling grief
+Disowns the author's work it must peruse;
+Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,
+A round of harvests red from crimson seed,
+It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf,
+And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;
+Though sometimes it may think what novel light
+Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.
+
+II
+
+Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and starred
+Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,
+Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.
+Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,
+They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,
+That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,
+Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.
+Only to Earth's best loved, at the breathless turns
+Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,
+And a ghostly lamp of their moment's union burns,
+Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.
+
+Voice of Earth's very soul to the soul she would see renewed:
+A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breast
+Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves' bells upon ferns
+In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.
+Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;
+Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;
+Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;
+Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scuts
+Flashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.
+Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts,
+To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.
+Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,
+Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.
+Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive's grey;
+A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;
+The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,
+Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.
+Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades;
+Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;
+Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,
+On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.
+Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receive
+Balm of a sound Earth's primary heart at its active beat:
+The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;
+Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:
+Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;
+Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt
+To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;
+Its day's hard business done, the score to the good accompt.
+Creatures of forest and mead, Earth's essays in being, all kinds
+Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,
+They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,
+Cut man's tangles for Earth's first broad rectilinear way:
+Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,
+Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;
+Not always the sprouts of Earth's root-Laws preserving her brutes;
+Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.
+
+Yet the like aerial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
+Infant of Earth's most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
+For entry on Life's upper fields:  and soul thus flourishing pays
+The martyr's penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.
+
+Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools of the dry,
+Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth remake;
+Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie,
+Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake,
+As it were with the Resurrection's eyelids uplifted, to see
+Honour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fount
+Jets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-tree
+Spout, with our Earth's unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount,
+Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it be.
+For this at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth,
+However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall,
+The chastisement drawn down on us merited:  are we of worth
+Amid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call,
+Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the God who is in us and round,
+Consenting, the God there seen.  Impiety speaks despair;
+Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy ground,
+Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we
+share.
+Not such of the crowned discrowned
+Can Earth or humanity spare;
+Such not the God let die.
+
+III
+
+Eastward of Paris morn is high;
+And darkness on that Eastward side
+The heart of France beholds:  a thorn
+Is in her frame where shines the morn:
+A rigid wave usurps her sky,
+With eagle crest and eagle-eyed
+To scan what wormy wrinkles hint
+Her forces gathering:  she the thrown
+From station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone,
+Reading late History as a foul misprint:
+Imperial, Angelical,
+At strife commingled in her frame convulsed;
+Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall;
+Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed;
+These tortures to distract her underneath
+Her whelmed Aurora's shade.  But in that space
+When lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath,
+Like an unburied body mid the tombs,
+Feeling against her heart life's bitter probe
+For life, she saw how children of her race,
+The many sober sons and daughters, plied,
+By cottage lamplight through the water-globe,
+By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms,
+Afield, in factories, with the birds astir,
+Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied
+Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.
+So like Earth's indestructible they were,
+That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride,
+To feel where in each breast the thought of her,
+On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs,
+Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone
+At lip or in a fluttered look,
+A shortened breath:  and they were her loved own;
+Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears,
+For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke,
+Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt,
+The Mother having conscience in arrears;
+Ready to gush the flood of vain regret,
+Else hearken to her weaponed children's moan
+Of stifled rage invoking vengeance:  hell's,
+If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swells
+In blood and brain for retribution swift.
+Those helped not:  wings to her soul were these who yet
+Could welcome day for labour, night for rest,
+Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift,
+Of honest heart, beyond all miracles;
+And likened to Earth's humblest were Earth's best.
+
+IV
+
+Brooding on her deep fall, the many strings
+Which formed her nature set a thought on Kings,
+As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift;
+And one among them hummed devoutly leal,
+While passed the sighing breeze along her breast.
+Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed down
+Her gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown;
+Upon her through long seasons was its grasp,
+For neither soul's nor body's weal;
+As much bestows the robber wasp,
+That in the hanging apple makes a meal,
+And carves a face of abscess where was fruit
+Ripe ruddy.  They would blot
+Her radiant leap above the slopes acute,
+Of summit to celestial; impute
+The wanton's aim to her divinest shot;
+Bid her walk History backward over gaps;
+Abhor the day of Phrygian caps;
+Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself;
+The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph,
+Admire repentant; reverently prostrate
+Her person unto the belly-god; of whom
+Is inward plenty and external bloom;
+Enough of pomp and state
+And carnival to quench
+The breast's desires of an intemperate wench,
+The head's ideas beyond legitimate.
+
+She flung them:  she was France:  nor with far frown
+Her lover from the embrace of her refrained:
+But in her voice an interwoven wire,
+The exultation of her gross renown,
+Struck deafness at her heavens, and they waned
+Over a look ill-gifted to aspire.
+Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate,
+The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days,
+Her treasure-galleon's wondrous freight.
+The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferred
+Her soul's allegiance; o'er the Tyrant slurred,
+Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze,
+To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.
+
+V
+
+She hailed him Saint:
+And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!
+The virgin who conceived a France when funeral glooms
+Across a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung:
+Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth;
+Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman's taint;
+Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth,
+Have joy of unity:  the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed,
+Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of faggot fumes;
+Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.
+
+For her people to hail her Saint,
+Were no lifting of her, Earth's gem,
+Earth's chosen, Earth's throb on divine:
+In the ranks of the starred she is one,
+While man has thought on our line:
+No lifting of her, but for them,
+Breath of the mountain, beam of the sun
+Through mist, out of swamp-fires' lures release,
+Youth on the forehead, the rough right way
+Seen to be footed:  for them the heart's peace,
+By the mind's war won for a permanent miracle day.
+
+Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed,
+The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne
+Into the furnace-pit she tossed
+Before her body knew the flame,
+And sucked its essence:  warmth for righteous work,
+An undivided power to speed her aim.
+She had no self but France:  the sainted man
+No France but self.  Him warrior and clerk,
+Free of his iron clutch; and him her young,
+In whirled imagination mastodonized;
+And him her penmen, him her poets; all
+For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain;
+Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue,
+Till solely through his glory France was prized.
+She who had her Jeanne;
+The child of her industrious;
+Earth's truest, earth's pure fount from the main;
+And she who had her one day's mate,
+In the soul's view illustrious
+Past blazonry, her Immaculate,
+Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;
+Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain
+She heard upon a day in 'I who can';
+Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare
+Of that Caesarean Italian
+Across the storied fields of trampled grain,
+As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul
+Blowing the rally against a Caesar's reign.
+Her soul's protesting sobs she drowned to swear
+Fidelity unto the sainted man,
+Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again
+The foreigner in Europe, known of none,
+None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun.
+Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe's van;
+The dream she nursed a snare,
+The flag she bore a pall.
+
+VI
+
+In Nature is no rearward step allowed.
+Hard on the rock Reality do we dash
+To be shattered, if the material dream propels.
+The worship to departed splendour vowed
+Conjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,
+For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.
+
+Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her hills;
+For the will of wills,
+Its flaccid ape,
+Weak as the final echo off a giant's bawl:
+Napoleon for disdain,
+His banner steeped in crape.
+Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;
+The frozen billow crested to its fall;
+Dismemberment; disfigurement;
+Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;
+And ever that one word to reperuse,
+With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;
+Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiled
+Showed her sons' valour as a frenzied child
+In arms of the mailed man.
+Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,
+Lest burst it:  unto her eyes a ghost,
+Incredible though manifest:  a scene
+Stamped with her new Saint's name:  and all his host
+A wattled flock the foeman's dogs between!
+
+VII
+
+Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bare
+Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throes
+Beneath her Purgatorial Saint's evocative stare:
+Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend's close.
+A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night's dead-born,
+His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a fray
+Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor's instinctive scorn
+Of the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold grey,
+Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,
+Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted ranks.
+The golden eagles flap lame wings,
+The black double-headed are round their flanks.
+He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake, trod
+into union; lo,
+These are his Epic's tutored Dardans, yon that Rhapsode's Achaeans
+to know.
+Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the weaker's
+flashed device;
+Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal, assured,
+precise.
+Ruled by the mathematician's hand, they solve their problem, as on a
+slate.
+This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly
+hazarded date.
+His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of plains
+for the warrior's guile
+Displayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office
+mercantile.
+And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble
+reduced to nought.
+Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive,
+all writhen caught?
+Arterial blood of an army's heart outpoured the Grey Observer sees:
+A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off her
+Pyrenees.
+Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against iron,
+reason, Fate;
+It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the
+helmeted feel its weight.
+So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to screaming
+withdrawal, but snatched,
+Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o'er the waste of brave
+men outmatched.
+The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose
+honour was dearer than life;
+The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his pupil,
+the scholar in strife.
+
+He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,
+From sleep or debate, a mannikin squire
+With head of a merlin hawk and quill
+Acrow on an ear.  At him rained fire
+From a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,
+To say what a deadly poison stuffed
+The France here laid in her bloody ditch,
+Through the Legend passing human puffed.
+
+Credible ghost of the field which from him descends,
+Each dark anniversary day will its father return,
+Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,
+That penman trumpeter's part in the wreck discern.
+
+There, with the cup it presents at her lips, she stands,
+France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.
+The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;
+The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.
+Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,
+To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,
+At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.
+Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick
+Nigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,
+Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.
+
+Of love is wisdom.  Is it great love, then wise
+Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more
+By its mentor's counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.
+Desire of the wave for the shore,
+Passion for one last agony under skies,
+To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained
+
+VIII
+
+On her lost arm love bade her look;
+On her one hand to meditate;
+The tumult of her blood abate;
+Disaster face, derision brook:
+Forbade the page of her Historic Muse,
+Until her demon his last hold forsook,
+And smoothly, with no countenance of hate,
+Her conqueror she could scan to measure.  Thence
+The strange new Winter stream of ruling sense,
+Cold, comfortless, but braced to disabuse,
+Ran through the mind of this most lowly laid;
+From the top billow of victorious War,
+Down in the flagless troughs at ebb and flow;
+A wreck; her past, her future, both in shade.
+She read the things that are;
+Reality unaccepted read
+For sign of the distraught, and took her blow
+To brain; herself read through;
+Wherefore her predatory Glory paid
+Napoleon ransom knew.
+Her nature's many strings hot gusts did jar
+Against the note of reason uttered low,
+Ere passionate with duty she might wed,
+Compel the bride's embrace of her stern groom,
+Joined at an altar liker to the tomb,
+Nest of the Furies their first nuptial bed,
+They not the less were mated and proclaimed
+The rational their issue.  Then she rose.
+
+See how the rush of southern Springtide glows
+Oceanic in the chariot-wheel's ascent,
+Illuminated with one breath.  The maimed,
+Tom, tortured, winter-visaged, suddenly
+Had stature; to the world's wonderment,
+Fair features, grace of mien, nor least
+The comic dimples round her April mouth,
+Sprung of her intimate humanity.
+She stood before mankind the very South
+Rapt out of frost to flowery drapery;
+Unshadowed save when somewhiles she looked East.
+
+IX
+
+Let but the rational prevail,
+Our footing is on ground though all else fail:
+Our kiss of Earth is then a plight
+To walk within her Laws and have her light.
+Choice of the life or death lies in ourselves;
+There is no fate but when unreason lours.
+This Land the cheerful toiler delves,
+The thinker brightens with fine wit,
+The lovelier grace as lyric flowers,
+Those rosed and starred revolving Twelves
+Shall nurse for effort infinite
+While leashed to brain the heart of France the Fair
+Beats tempered music and its lead subserves.
+Washed from her eyes the Napoleonic glare,
+Divinely raised by that in her divine,
+Not the clear sight of Earth's blunt actual swerves
+When her lost look, as on a wave of wine,
+Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries
+Caress with folds and curves
+The fortress over Rhine,
+Beneath the one tall spire.
+Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,
+Her anguish in desire,
+She sees, above the brutish paw
+Alert on her still quivering limb -
+As little in past time she saw,
+Nor when dispieced as prey,
+As victrix when abhorred -
+A Grand Germania, stout on soil;
+Audacious up the ethereal dim;
+The forest's Infant; the strong hand for toil;
+The patient brain in twilights when astray;
+Shrewdest of heads to foil and counterfoil;
+The sceptic and devout; the potent sword;
+With will and armed to help in hewing way
+For Europe's march; and of the most golden chord
+Of the Heliconian lyre
+Excellent mistress.  Yea, she sees, and can admire;
+Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;
+And with what shield upon Alsace-Lorraine
+Her wary sister's doubtful look misreads
+A mother's throbs for her lost:  so loved:  so near:
+Magnetic.  Hard the course for her to steer,
+The leap against the sharpened spikes restrain.
+For the belted Overshadower hard the course,
+On whom devolves the spirit's touchstone, Force:
+Which is the strenuous arm, to strike inclined,
+That too much adamantine makes the mind;
+Forgets it coin of Nature's rich Exchange;
+Contracts horizons within present sight:
+Amalekite to-day, across its range
+Indisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.
+
+X
+
+The mother who gave birth to Jeanne;
+Who to her young Angelical sprang;
+Who lay with Earth and heard the notes she sang,
+And heard her truest sing them; she may reach
+Heights yet unknown of nations; haply teach
+A thirsting world to learn 'tis 'she who can.'
+
+She that in History's Heliaea pleads
+The nation flowering conscience o'er the beast;
+With heart expurged of rancour, tame of greeds;
+With the winged mind from fang and claw released; -
+Will such a land be seen?  It will be seen; -
+Shall stand adjudged our foremost and Earth's Queen.
+Acknowledgement that she of God proceeds
+The invisible makes visible, as his priest,
+To her is yielded by a world reclaimed.
+And stands she mutilated, fancy-shamed,
+Yet strong in arms, yet strong in self-control,
+Known valiant, her maternal throbs repressed,
+Discarding vengeance, Giant with a soul; -
+My faith in her when she lay low
+Was fountain; now as wave at flow
+Beneath the lights, my faith in God is best; -
+On France has come the test
+Of what she holds within
+Responsive to Life's deeper springs.
+She above the nations blest
+In fruitful and in liveliest,
+In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,
+The devotee of Glory, she may win
+Glory despoiling none, enrich her kind,
+Illume her land, and take the royal seat
+Unto the strong self-conqueror assigned.
+But ah, when speaks a loaded breath the double name,
+Humanity's old Foeman winks agrin.
+Her constant Angel eyes her heart's quick beat,
+The thrill of shadow coursing through her frame.
+Like wind among the ranks of amber wheat.
+Our Europe, vowed to unity or torn,
+Observes her face, as shepherds note the morn,
+And in a ruddy beacon mark an end
+That for the flock in their grave hearing rings.
+Specked overhead the imminent vulture wings
+At poise, one fatal movement indiscreet,
+Sprung from the Aetna passions' mad revolts,
+Draws down; the midnight hovers to descend;
+And dire as Indian noons of ulcer heat
+Anticipating tempest and the bolts,
+Hangs curtained terrors round her next day's door,
+Death's emblems for the breast of Europe flings;
+The breast that waits a spark to fire her store.
+Shall, then, the great vitality, France,
+Signal the backward step once more;
+Again a Goddess Fortune trace
+Amid the Deities, and pledge to chance
+One whom we never could replace?
+Now may she tune her nature's many strings
+To noble harmony, be seen, be known.
+
+It was the foreign France, the unruly, feared;
+Little for all her witcheries endeared;
+Theatrical of arrogance, a sprite
+With gaseous vapours overblown,
+In her conceit of power ensphered,
+Foredoomed to violate and atone;
+Her the grim conqueror's iron might
+Avengeing clutched, distrusting rent;
+Not that sharp intellect with fire endowed
+To cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;
+Not virtual France, the France benevolent,
+The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublime
+At intervals, and oft in sweetest chime;
+Though perilously instrument,
+A breast for any having godlike gleam.
+This France could no antagonist disesteem,
+To spurn at heel and confiscate her brood.
+Albeit a waverer between heart and mind,
+And laurels won from sky or plucked from blood,
+Which wither all the wreath when intertwined,
+This cherishable France she may redeem.
+Beloved of Earth, her heart should feel at length
+How much unto Earth's offspring it doth owe.
+Obstructions are for levelling, have we strength;
+'Tis poverty of soul conceived a foe.
+Rejected be the wrath that keeps unhealed
+Her panting wound; to higher Courts appealed
+The wrongs discerned of higher:  Europe waits:
+She chooses God or gambles with the Fates.
+Shines the new Helen in Alsace-Lorraine,
+A darker river severs Rhine and Rhone,
+Is heard a deadlier Epic of the twain;
+We see a Paris burn
+Or France Napoleon.
+
+For yet he breathes whom less her heart forswears
+While trembles its desire to thwart her mind:
+The Tyrant lives in Victory's return.
+What figure with recurrent footstep fares
+Around those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,
+To sow her future from an ashen urn
+By lantern-light, as dragons' teeth are sown?
+Of bleeding pride the piercing seer is blind.
+But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scud
+Distorting her true features, to be shown
+Benignly luminous, one who bears
+Humanity at breast, and she might learn
+How surely the excelling generous find
+Renouncement is possession.  Sure
+As light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,
+The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,
+Magnanimous magnanimous creates.
+So to majestic beauty stricken rears
+Hard-visaged rock against the risen glow;
+And men are in the secret with the spheres,
+Whose glory is celestially to bestow.
+
+Now nation looks to nation, that may live
+Their common nurseling, like the torrent's flower,
+Shaken by foul Destruction's fast-piled heap.
+On France is laid the proud initiative
+Of sacrifice in one self-mastering hour,
+Whereby more than her lost one will she reap;
+Perchance the very lost regain,
+To count it less than her superb reward.
+Our Europe, where is debtor each to each,
+Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain,
+Fraternal from the Seaman's beach,
+From answering Rhine in grand accord,
+From Neva beneath Northern cloud,
+And from our Transatlantic Europe loud,
+Will hail the rare example for their theme;
+Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze;
+In their entrusted nurseling know them one:
+Like a brave vessel under press of steam,
+Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas,
+Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present sun,
+Will drive through darkness, and, with faith supreme,
+Have sight of haven and the crowded quays.
+
+
+
+THE CAGEING OF ARES
+
+
+
+[Iliad, v. V. 385--Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]
+
+How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
+At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
+Each over other as they neighboured home,
+Fronting the day's descent across green slopes,
+And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.
+Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
+Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
+It signalled some adventurous master-trick
+To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
+Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
+The Tyranny menaced.  Ephialtes high
+On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
+For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
+Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
+While Otos aped the prisoner's wrists and knees,
+With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
+Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched,
+And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
+Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
+Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
+The hurried spout.  And as when drifting storm
+Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
+A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam
+Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils,
+Signification marvellous she caught,
+Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
+Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
+Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
+With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
+Stood in her sight confirmed:  she could believe
+That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
+These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
+Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
+Still by the reckoning infants among men,
+Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
+In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:
+These two combining strength and craft had snared,
+Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
+The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
+Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
+The barren furrower of anointed fields;
+The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
+Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:
+Great Ares.  And they gagged his trumpet mouth
+When they had seized on his implacable spear,
+Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
+His godlike fury startled from amaze.
+For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
+The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
+Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
+Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
+On Earth's original fisticuffs they called
+For ease of sharp dispute:  whereat the God,
+Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
+Good servitors of Ares they would be,
+And ply the pointed spear to dominate
+Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood
+Vowed to defy Immortals.  So it chanced
+Amusedly he watched them, and as one
+The lusty twain were on him and they had him.
+Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!
+Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!
+Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!
+Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,
+Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;
+A desolating fire to blind the sight
+With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;
+The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;
+Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,
+Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.
+Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,
+And tumbled down the cave.  But rather look -
+Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,
+Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,
+Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!
+Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,
+And shatter earth's delirious holiday,
+Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,
+Resolving to composure on its throbs.
+But see her in the Seasons through that year;
+That one glad year and the fair opening month.
+Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!
+War with her, gentle war with her, each day
+Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,
+On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength
+Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,
+From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,
+Her ready secret:  the abounding life
+Returned for valiant labour:  she and they
+Defeated and victorious turn by turn;
+By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.
+Exchange of powers of this conflict came;
+Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.
+Is battle nature's mandate, here it reigned,
+As music unto the hand that smote the strings;
+And she the rosier from their showery brows,
+They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.
+Back to the primal rational of those
+Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp
+Stability in hatred of the insane,
+Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce
+The mortal mind's concept of earth's divorced
+Above; those beautiful, those masterful,
+Those lawless.  High they sit, and if descend,
+Descend to reap, not sowing.  Is it just?
+Earth in her happy children asked that word,
+Whereto within their breast was her reply.
+Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,
+Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;
+Yet they ('twas the Great Mother's voice inspired
+The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,
+Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,
+To meet the certain fate of earth's divorced,
+And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,
+Up to the farthest bourne:  immortal still,
+Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled
+The Tyranny.  This her voice within them told,
+When softly the Great Mother chid her sons
+Not of the giant brood, who did create
+Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain
+Set moving by an abject blood, that waked
+To wanton under elements more benign,
+And planted aliens on Olympian heights; -
+Imagination's cradle poesy
+Become a monstrous pressure upon men; -
+Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed
+By light from her, born of the love of her,
+Their lordship the illumined brain rejects
+For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law,
+Her other name.  So spake she in their heart,
+Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath
+Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,
+Confidently to cling.  And when brown corn
+Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,
+With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss;
+When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil
+Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;
+When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,
+Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;
+The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,
+And yet a burning lion for the spring;
+Then in that time of general cherishment,
+Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,
+He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,
+Then did good Gaea's children gratefully
+Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,
+Delightful Peace, that answers Reason's call
+Harmoniously and images her Law;
+Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,
+In memories made present on the brain
+By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;
+The picture of an earth allied to heaven;
+Between them the known smile behind black masks;
+Rightly their various moods interpreted;
+And frolic because toilful children borne
+With larger comprehension of Earth's aim
+At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.
+
+
+
+THE NIGHT-WALK
+
+
+
+Awakes for me and leaps from shroud
+All radiantly the moon's own night
+Of folded showers in streamer cloud;
+Our shadows down the highway white
+Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,
+With yon and yon a stem alight.
+
+I see marauder runagates
+Across us shoot their dusky wink;
+I hear the parliament of chats
+In haws beside the river's brink;
+And drops the vole off alder-banks,
+To push his arrow through the stream.
+These busy people had our thanks
+For tickling sight and sound, but theme
+They were not more than breath we drew
+Delighted with our world's embrace:
+The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
+And watered grass in breezy space;
+The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
+Among their folds, by distance draped.
+'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
+That cried to have its chaos shaped:
+Absorbing, little noting, still
+Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
+With wistful looks on each far hill
+For something hidden, something owed.
+Unto his mantled sister, Day
+Had given the secret things we sought
+And she was grave and saintly gay;
+At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
+She flew on it, then folded wings,
+In meditation passing lone,
+To breathe around the secret things,
+Which have no word, and yet are known;
+Of thirst for them are known, as air
+Is health in blood:  we gained enough
+By this to feel it honest fare;
+Impalpable, not barren, stuff.
+
+A pride of legs in motion kept
+Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
+And what was deepest dreaming slept:
+The posts that named the swallowed mile;
+Beside the straight canal the hut
+Abandoned; near the river's source
+Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
+The roadway missed; were our discourse;
+At times dear poets, whom some view
+Transcendent or subdued evoked
+To speak the memorable, the true,
+The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
+For proof that there, among earth's dumb,
+A soul had passed and said our best.
+Or it might be we chimed on some
+Historic favourite's astral crest,
+With part to reverence in its gleam,
+And part to rivalry the shout:
+So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream
+Of power within to strike without.
+But most the silences were sweet,
+Like mothers' breasts, to bid it feel
+It lived in such divine conceit
+As envies aught we stamp for real.
+
+To either then an untold tale
+Was Life, and author, hero, we.
+The chapters holding peaks to scale,
+Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
+For we were armed of inner fires,
+Unbled in us the ripe desires;
+And passion rolled a quiet sea,
+Whereon was Love the phantom sail.
+
+
+
+AT THE CLOSE
+
+
+
+To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
+Who straightway sound the call to arms.  Thou know'st;
+And that black spot in each embattled host,
+Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.
+Now is it red artillery and white steel;
+Till on a day will ring the victor's boast,
+That 'tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
+Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.
+So in all times of man's descent insane
+To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
+Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.
+But at the close he entered Thy domain,
+Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
+He tore the fall'n, the Eternal was his Foe.
+
+
+
+A GARDEN IDYL
+
+
+
+With sagest craft Arachne worked
+Her web, and at a corner lurked,
+Awaiting what should plump her soon,
+To case it in the death-cocoon.
+Sagaciously her home she chose
+For visits that would never close;
+Inside my chalet-porch her feast
+Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.
+
+The finished structure, bar on bar,
+Had snatched from light to form a star,
+And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
+Like music of the very Muse.
+Great artists pass our single sense;
+We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
+Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
+To think such beauty means a trap.
+But Nature's genius, even man's
+At best, is practical in plans;
+Subservient to the needy thought,
+However rare the weapon wrought.
+As long as Nature holds it good
+To urge her creatures' quest for food
+Will beauty stamp the just intent
+Of weapons upon service bent.
+For beauty is a flower of roots
+Embedded lower than our boots;
+Out of the primal strata springs,
+And shows for crown of useful things
+
+Arachne's dream of prey to size
+Aspired; so she could nigh despise
+The puny specks the breezes round
+Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
+Assured of her fat fly to come;
+Perhaps a blue, the spider's plum;
+Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
+And gives repast an appetite,
+By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
+Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
+A shrouded lump, for her to see
+Her banquet in her victory.
+
+This matron of the unnumbered threads,
+One day of dandelions' heads
+Distributing their gray perruques
+Up every gust, I watched with looks
+Discreet beside the chalet-door;
+And gracefully a light wind bore,
+Direct upon my webster's wall,
+A monster in the form of ball;
+The mildest captive ever snared,
+That neither struggled nor despaired,
+On half the net invading hung,
+And plain as in her mother tongue,
+While low the weaver cursed her lures,
+Remarked, "You have me; I am yours."
+
+Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
+Her dream of size she saw, agape.
+Midway the vast round-raying beard
+A desiccated midge appeared;
+Whose body pricked the name of meal,
+Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal;
+Provocative of dread and wrath,
+Contempt and horror, in one froth,
+Inextricable, insensible,
+His poison presence there would dwell,
+Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
+A catch to compliment the skilled;
+And she reduced to beaky skin,
+Disgraceful among kith and kin
+
+Against her corner, humped and aged,
+Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
+Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
+Ridiculously volatile
+He seemed to her last spark of mind;
+And that in pallid ash declined
+Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
+Wherein throughout her frame she felt
+That he, the light wind's libertine,
+Without a scoff, without a grin,
+And mannered like the courtly few,
+Who merely danced when light winds blew,
+Impervious to beak and claws,
+Tradition's ruinous Whitebeard was;
+Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
+Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
+With word, that less than feather-weight,
+He smote the web like bolt of Fate.
+
+This muted drama, hour by hour,
+I watched amid a world in flower,
+Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
+Their gray-blue o'er the grass's blade,
+And still along the garden-run
+The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
+Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
+Her visitor performed a dance;
+She puckered thinner; he the same
+As when on that light wind he came.
+
+Next day was told what deeds of night
+Were done; the web had vanished quite;
+With it the strange opposing pair;
+And listless waved on vacant air,
+For her adieu to heart's content,
+A solitary filament.
+
+
+
+A READING OF LIFE--THE VITAL CHOICE
+
+
+
+I
+
+Or shall we run with Artemis
+Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?
+Both are mighty;
+Both give bliss;
+Each can torture if divided;
+Each claims worship undivided,
+In her wake would have us wallow.
+
+II
+
+Youth must offer on bent knees
+Homage unto one or other;
+Earth, the mother,
+This decrees;
+And unto the pallid Scyther
+Either points us shun we either
+Shun or too devoutly follow.
+
+
+
+A READING OF LIFE--WITH THE HUNTRESS
+
+
+
+Through the water-eye of night,
+Midway between eve and dawn,
+See the chase, the rout, the flight
+In deep forest; oread, faun,
+Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;
+Ravenous all the line for speed.
+See yon wavy sparkle beck
+Sign of the Virgin Lady's lead.
+Down her course a serpent star
+Coils and shatters at her heels;
+Peals the horn exulting, peals
+Plaintive, is it near or far.
+Huntress, arrowy to pursue,
+In and out of woody glen,
+Under cliffs that tear the blue,
+Over torrent, over fen,
+She and forest, where she skims
+Feathery, darken and relume:
+Those are her white-lightning limbs
+Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.
+Mountains hear her and call back,
+Shrewd with night:  a frosty wail
+Distant:  her the emerald vale
+Folds, and wonders in her track.
+Now her retinue is lean,
+Many rearward; streams the chase
+Eager forth of covert; seen
+One hot tide the rapturous race.
+Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,
+Up on a flash the lighted mound
+Leaps she, bow to shoulder, shaft
+Strung to barb with archer's craft,
+Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet
+Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.
+Fearful swiftness they outrun,
+Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,
+Challenge, charge of tusks elude:
+Theirs the dance to tame the rude;
+Beast, and beast in manhood tame,
+Follow we their silver flame.
+Pride of flesh from bondage free,
+Reaping vigour of its waste,
+Marks her servitors, and she
+Sanctifies the unembraced.
+Nought of perilous she reeks;
+Valour clothes her open breast;
+Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;
+Hallowed by the sex confessed.
+Huntress arrowy to pursue,
+Colder she than sunless dew,
+She, that breath of upper air;
+Ay, but never lyrist sang,
+Draught of Bacchus never sprang
+Blood the bliss of Gods to share,
+High o'er sweep of eagle wings,
+Like the run with her, when rings
+Clear her rally, and her dart,
+In the forest's cavern heart,
+Tells of her victorious aim.
+Then is pause and chatter, cheer,
+Laughter at some satyr lame,
+Looks upon the fallen deer,
+Measuring his noble crest;
+Here a favourite in her train,
+Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;
+All applauded.  Shall she reign
+Worshipped?  O to be with her there!
+She, that breath of nimble air,
+Lifts the breast to giant power.
+Maid and man, and man and maid,
+Who each other would devour
+Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,
+There are comrades, led by her,
+Maid-preserver, man-maker.
+
+
+
+A READING OF LIFE--WITH THE PERSUADER
+
+
+
+Who murmurs, hither, hither:  who
+Where nought is audible so fills the ear?
+Where nought is visible can make appear
+A veil with eyes that waver through,
+Like twilight's pledge of blessed night to come,
+Or day most golden?  All unseen and dumb,
+She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,
+Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire
+To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,
+Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,
+Flame in a crystal vessel sails
+Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,
+For land that drops the rosy day
+On nights of throbbing nightingales.
+
+Landward did the wonder flit,
+Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it.
+We saw the heavens fling down their rose;
+On rapturous waves we saw her glide;
+The pearly sea-shell half enclose;
+The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;
+And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more
+Behold than tracks along a startled shore,
+With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign
+An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.
+
+More closely, warmly:  hither, hither! she,
+The very she called forth by ripened blood
+For its next breath of being, murmurs; she,
+Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,
+The stream within us urged to flood;
+Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent; O she,
+Maid, woman and divinity;
+Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate
+Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit
+Untasted; she our written fate
+Unread; Life's flowering, Life's root:
+Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;
+The evanescent, ever-present she,
+Great Nature's stern necessity
+In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;
+With a sword's edge of sweetness keen to take
+Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.
+
+The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.
+Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent,
+Her form is given to pardoned sight,
+And lets our mortal eyes receive
+The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;
+Adored by them who solitarily pace,
+In dusk of the underworld's perpetual eve,
+The paths among the meadow asphodel,
+Remembering.  Never there her face
+Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell
+Around such whiteness the enamoured air
+Of noon that clothes her, never there.
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,
+Sweet in her disregard of aid
+Divine to conquer or persuade.
+A fountain jets from moss; a flower
+Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.
+By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen
+With eyelids unabashed the passion's Queen.
+
+Shorn of attendant Graces she can use
+Her natural snares to make her will supreme.
+A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse
+Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:
+One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;
+Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way
+A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,
+Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.
+The bud of fresh virginity awaits
+The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:
+She touches on the hour of happy mates;
+Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.
+
+And while commanding blissful sight believe
+It holds her as a body strained to breast,
+Down on the underworld's perpetual eve
+She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
+And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
+Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
+The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
+A thirst's delusion, a defeated aim.
+
+The rapture shed the torture weaves;
+The direst blow on human heart she deals:
+The pain to know the seen deceives;
+Nought true but what insufferably feels.
+And stabs of her delicious note,
+That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
+Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
+We answer as the midnight's morning's bird.
+
+She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
+In her delicious laughter part revealed;
+Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
+For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.
+Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:
+Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
+Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
+Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.
+We dolorous complainers had a dream,
+Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
+We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
+The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.
+
+Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
+Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
+And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
+She nods:  at once that creature wears her lure.
+Blush of our being between birth and death:
+Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:
+Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
+Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
+The generous Goddess yields.  And she can arm
+Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
+Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.
+Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.
+But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
+Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.
+The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
+And holds the reason in perceptive thought.
+More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
+Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.
+Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
+Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
+In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:
+Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
+For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.
+Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn
+Across her garden from the insaner crew,
+She darkens to malignity of scorn.
+A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:
+Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
+The hunter's shouts, are heard afar, and bring
+Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.
+These, the irreverent of Life's design,
+Division between natural and divine
+Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
+In veins of gathered strength Life's tide arrest;
+And these because the roses flood their cheeks,
+Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.
+With them is war; and well the Goddess knows
+What undermines the race who mount the rose;
+How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,
+Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:
+Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,
+The strong when Beauty gleams o'er Nature's needs,
+And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.
+They who her sway withstand a sea defy,
+At every point of juncture must be proof;
+Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge
+Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge
+For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.
+She, tenderness, is pitiless to them
+Resisting in her godhead nature's truth.
+No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;
+Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.
+These miserably disinclined,
+The lamentably unembraced,
+Insult the Pleasures Earth designed
+To people and beflower the waste.
+Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:
+For death they live, in life they die.
+
+Her head the Goddess from them turns,
+As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.
+She views her quivering couples unconsoled,
+And of her beauty mirror they become,
+Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,
+Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.
+Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,
+Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,
+Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,
+They play the music made of two:
+Oldest of earth, earth's youngest till earth's end:
+Cunninger than the numbered strings,
+For melodies, for harmonies,
+For mastered discords, and the things
+Not vocable, whose mysteries
+Are inmost Love's, Life's reach of Life extend.
+
+Is it an anguish overflowing shame
+And the tongue's pudency confides to her,
+With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,
+The woman's marrow in some dear youth's name,
+Then is the Goddess tenderness
+Maternal, and she has a sister's tones
+Benign to soothe intemperate distress,
+Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.
+Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease
+To those of her milk-bearer votaries
+As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source
+Direct; erratic but in heart's excess;
+Being mortal and ill-matched for Love's great force;
+Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.
+And pray they under skies less overcast,
+That swiftly may her star of eve descend,
+Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,
+To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.
+
+Unfailing her reply to woman's voice
+In supplication instant.  Is it man's,
+She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,
+And him:  the flowers are various, he has choice.
+Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;
+Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;
+And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise
+Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.
+
+She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps
+To her invoked:  distraction is implored.
+A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps
+Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.
+His tales of her declare she condescends;
+Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:
+Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose
+A queenlier gem than woman's wayside rose.
+She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs
+Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;
+Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.
+'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse
+Rarely the music made of two ascends,
+And Beauty's Queen some other way is won.
+Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends
+Herself to all, and yields herself to none,
+Save heavenliest:  though claims by men are raised
+In hot assurance under shade of doubt:
+And numerous are the images bepraised
+As Beauty's Queen, should passion head the rout.
+
+Be sure the ruddy hue is Love's:  to woo
+Love's Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.
+That is her garden's precept, seen where shines
+Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.
+Daughter of light, the joyful light,
+She bids her couples face full East,
+Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast
+Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,
+The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.
+In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;
+High confidence in her whose aid is lent
+To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,
+Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.
+And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,
+Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,
+Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun's.
+
+Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe
+He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.
+For him requiring woman's arts to please
+Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,
+No race of giants!  In the woman's veins
+Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.
+Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,
+Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;
+Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss
+In her high Lady's mandate, yields the kiss;
+And is it needed that Love's daintier brute
+Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.
+She is great Nature's ever intimate
+In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,
+Until perverted by her senseless male,
+She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,
+The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,
+Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.
+
+Hence has the Goddess, Nature's earliest Power,
+And greatest and most present, with her dower
+Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute
+For meditated guile.  She laughs to hear
+A charge her garden's labyrinths scarce confute,
+Her garden's histories tell of to all near.
+Let it be said, But less upon her guile
+Doth she rely for her immortal smile.
+Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens
+To push her conquests by the simplest means.
+While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves
+From earth's good labours, Beauty's Queen he serves.
+
+Her spacious garden and her garden's grant
+She offers in reward for handsome cheer:
+Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant
+The secret down a dewy leer
+Of corner eyelids into haze:
+Many a fair Aphrosyne
+Like flower-bell to honey-bee:
+And here they flicker round the maze
+Bewildering him in heart and head:
+And here they wear the close demure,
+With subtle peeps to reassure:
+Others parade where love has bled,
+And of its crimson weave their mesh:
+Others to snap of fingers leap,
+As bearing breast with love asleep.
+These are her laughters in the flesh.
+Or would she fit a warrior mood,
+She lights her seeming unsubdued,
+And indicates the fortress-key.
+Or is it heart for heart that craves,
+She flecks along a run of waves
+The one to promise deeper sea.
+
+Bands of her limpid primitives,
+Or patterned in the curious braid,
+Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives,
+For what he gives is he repaid.
+Good is it if by him 'tis held
+He wins the fairest ever welled
+From Nature's founts:  she whispers it:  Even I
+Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,
+Else little is he lover.  Those he clasps,
+Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer, -
+And be they doves or be they asps, -
+Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
+Else counts he soon among life's wholly tamed.
+Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,
+Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
+The lover.  Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,
+He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,
+Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
+Doth man divide divine Necessity
+From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts
+A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
+Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.
+Of this he perishes; not she, the throned
+On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
+A loftier Reason out of deeper founts
+Earth's chosen Goddess bears:  by none disowned
+While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
+And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
+Earth's answer, heaven's consent unto man's cry,
+Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.
+
+Quickened of Nature's eye and ear,
+When the wild sap at high tide smites
+Within us; or benignly clear
+To vision; or as the iris lights
+On fluctuant waters; she is ours
+Till set of man:  the dreamed, the seen;
+Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
+A soft compulsion on terrene
+By heavenly:  and the world is hers
+While hunger after Beauty spurs.
+
+So is it sung in any space
+She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
+Forbidding love's devised embrace,
+The music Beauty from it draws.
+
+
+
+A READING OF LIFE--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 excess
+Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
+Unto 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 sprang
+Ethereal 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 vales
+Whereunto she melodiously invites,
+Her troops of eager servitors regales?
+Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed
+Disciple 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 yield
+Their dues to each, and of their war be field.
+
+The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
+Must he, who once has been the goodly beast
+Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
+Constrain to make him serviceable man;
+Offending neither, nor the natural claim
+Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.
+
+Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
+To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
+Submissive to his will
+Along the road of life!
+And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
+The 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 advance
+Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
+He of the troubled marching army leaned
+On 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 aid
+Might 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 slew
+The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.
+
+In fellowship religion has its founts:
+The solitary his own God reveres:
+Ascend no sacred Mounts
+Our hungers or our fears.
+As only for the numbers Nature's care
+Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
+So to Divinity the spring of prayer
+From brotherhood the one way upward leads.
+Like the sustaining air
+Are 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 implored
+External 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 win
+While still the conflict tore his breast within.
+
+Out of that agony, misread for those
+Imprisoned 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 emerged
+A mind to read in him the reflex shade
+Of 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 athwart
+All 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 keep
+The starry roof of his unruffled frame
+Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
+Below, 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 aspire
+In wilderness, where bitter was his need:
+To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
+For 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 sense
+Of 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 reigns
+In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.
+Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
+His path, doth he permit to force her chains
+A 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 uprise
+And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
+Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
+That 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 spurs
+Pricked 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 world
+In 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 hands
+Creative; in his edifice has joy.
+How strength may serve for purity is shown
+When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
+Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
+A sober world that walks the balanced mean
+Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:
+And such at times his army's march has been.
+
+Near is he to great Nature in the thought
+Each 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 greeds
+To 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 change
+To 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 thing
+He 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 made
+His 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 heels
+To 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 fair
+Reflexively, 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 tells
+Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
+A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun
+Resplendent 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 test
+Demanding 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 spent
+
+Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,
+He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest
+Incomplete, 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 know
+Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;
+Else in a giant's grasp until the end
+A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.
+
+
+
+THE MAIN REGRET
+
+
+
+[Written for the Charing Cross Album]
+
+I
+
+Seen, 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.
+
+II
+
+Sunshine 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.
+
+
+
+ALTERNATION
+
+
+
+Between the fountain and the rill
+I passed, and saw the mighty will
+To 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 tell
+Of whence we spring and what we are.
+
+
+
+FOREST HISTORY
+
+
+
+I
+
+Beneath 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:
+
+II
+
+Old 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.
+
+III
+
+More intimate became the forest fear
+While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
+At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
+And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.
+
+IV
+
+In 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.
+
+V
+
+Dead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound
+Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.
+It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite
+Of humble human being, held the ground.
+
+VI
+
+Through friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow
+The feet sustained by track of feet pursued
+Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood
+By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.
+
+VII
+
+Anon 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.
+
+VIII
+
+What 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.
+
+IX
+
+Uprose 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.
+
+X
+
+Into 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.
+
+XI
+
+A 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.
+
+XII
+
+Whence 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.
+
+XIII
+
+Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,
+Like night's first little stars through clearing showers.
+Was rumoured how a castle's falcon towers
+The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.
+
+XIV
+
+Therein 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.
+
+XV
+
+It 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.
+
+XVI
+
+Perchance 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.
+
+XVII
+
+As 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.
+
+XVIII
+
+By daylight now the forest fear could read
+Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.
+Straight for the roebuck's neck the bowman spent
+A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.
+
+XIX
+
+Right 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.
+
+XX
+
+Before 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.
+
+XXI
+
+The city urchin mooned on forest air,
+On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick
+As swallows o'er smooth streams, and sighed him sick
+For thinking that his dearer home was there.
+
+XXII
+
+Familiar, 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.
+
+XXIII
+
+Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;
+Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,
+As though the leagues of woodland held them wronged
+To hear an axe and see a township climb.
+
+XXIV
+
+The 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 sieve
+
+XXV
+
+Ringed 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.
+
+XXVI
+
+Came 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.
+
+XXVII
+
+There 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.
+
+XXVIII
+
+Now deep in woods, with song no sermon's drone,
+He showed what charm the human concourse works:
+Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks
+Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.
+
+XXIX
+
+Our 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.
+
+
+
+THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES--Iliad, i. 149
+
+
+
+"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-armed 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 harvests
+Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome
+Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.
+O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice
+Pluck 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,
+portion
+Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.
+Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians
+Gave 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 blessed thing bore
+Off 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 me
+Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,
+I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store."
+
+
+
+THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES--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 Achaia
+Dared 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-buds
+Never 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 off
+Leaves 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 Achaia
+Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,
+How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector
+Tumble 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."
+
+
+
+MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANS--Iliad, ii 455
+
+
+
+Like 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
+splendour
+Gleam 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 Kaistros;
+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 forth
+On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them
+Earth 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
+thousands
+Many 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-pails
+Also, 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, know
+Easily 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.
+
+
+
+AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHT--Iliad, xi, 148
+
+
+
+These, 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 Agamemnon
+Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.
+
+Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped wood-land,
+This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the
+scrubwood
+Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's fury rageing,
+So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
+Trojans 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
+outstretched
+Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.
+
+
+
+PARIS AND DIOMEDES--Iliad, xi, 378
+
+
+
+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 thee
+Into 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."
+
+
+
+HYPNOS ON IDA--Iliad, xiv, 283
+
+
+
+They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,
+Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,
+Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the
+woodland.
+There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,
+Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida
+Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.
+There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for
+concealment,
+That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the
+mountains,
+Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.
+
+
+
+CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS--Iliad, xvii, 426
+
+
+
+Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,
+Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the
+Northwind;
+Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing,
+Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;
+Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-trees'
+Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;
+As rose then stupendous the Trojan's cry and Achaians',
+Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.
+
+
+
+THE HORSES OF ACHILLES--Iliad, xvii, 426
+
+
+
+So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,
+Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown
+there,
+Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.
+Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,
+Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and
+oft, too,
+Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.
+Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont
+spacious,
+Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.
+Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,
+Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;
+Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,
+Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessant
+Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,
+Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,
+Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the
+yoke-bow.
+Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook
+Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his
+bosom;
+"Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal
+Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!
+Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart-
+grief?
+'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder
+nowhere
+Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with breath and has
+movement."
+
+
+
+THE MARES OF THE CAMARGUE--From the 'Mireio' of Mistral
+
+
+
+A hundred mares, all white! their manes
+Like mace-reed of the marshy plains
+Thick-tufted, wavy, free o' the shears:
+And when the fiery squadron rears
+Bursting at speed, each mane appears
+Even as the white scarf of a fay
+Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.
+
+O race of humankind, take shame!
+For never yet a hand could tame,
+Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue
+The mares of the Camargue.  I have known,
+By treason snared, some captives shown;
+Expatriate from their native Rhone,
+Led off, their saline pastures far from view:
+
+And on a day, with prompt rebound,
+They have flung their riders to the ground,
+And at a single gallop, scouring free,
+Wide-nostril'd to the wind, twice ten
+Of long marsh-leagues devour'd, and then,
+Back to the Vacares again,
+After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea
+
+For of this savage race unbent,
+The ocean is the element.
+Of old escaped from Neptune's car, full sure,
+Still with the white foam fleck'd are they,
+And when the sea puffs black from grey,
+And ships part cables, loudly neigh
+The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;
+
+And keen as a whip they lash and crack
+Their tails that drag the dust, and back
+Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,
+The God, drives deep his trident teeth,
+Who in one horror, above, beneath,
+Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,
+And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.
+
+Cant. iv.
+
+
+
+'ATKINS'
+
+
+
+Yonder's the man with his life in his hand,
+Legs on the march for whatever the land,
+Or to the slaughter, or to the maiming,
+Getting the dole of a dog for pay.
+Laurels he clasps in the words 'duty done,'
+England his heart under every sun:-
+Exquisite humour! that gives him a naming
+Base to the ear as an ass's bray.
+
+
+
+THE VOYAGE OF THE 'OPHIR'
+
+
+
+Men of our race, we send you one
+Round whom Victoria's holy name
+Is halo from the sunken sun
+Of her grand Summer's day aflame.
+The heart of your loved Motherland,
+To them she loves as her own blood,
+This Flower of Ocean bears in hand,
+Assured of gift as good.
+
+Forth for our Southern shores the fleet
+Which crowns a nation's wisdom steams,
+That there may Briton Briton greet,
+And stamp as fact Imperial dreams.
+Across the globe, from sea to sea,
+The long smoke-pennon trails above,
+Writes over sky how wise will be
+The Power that trusts to love.
+
+A love that springs from heart and brain
+In union gives for ripest fruit
+The concord Kings and States in vain
+Have sought, who played the lofty brute,
+And fondly deeming they possessed,
+On force relied, and found it break:
+That truth once scored on Britain's breast
+Now keeps her mind awake.
+
+Australian, Canadian,
+To tone old veins with streams of youth,
+Our trust be on the best in man
+Henceforth, and we shall prove that truth.
+Prove to a world of brows down-bent
+That in the Britain thus endowed,
+Imperial means beneficent,
+And strength to service vowed.
+
+
+
+THE CRISIS
+
+
+
+Spirit of Russia, now has come
+The day when thou canst not be dumb.
+Around thee foams the torrent tide,
+Above thee its fell fountain, Pride.
+The senseless rock awaits thy word
+To crumble; shall it be unheard?
+Already, like a tempest-sun,
+That shoots the flare and shuts to dun,
+Thy land 'twixt flame and darkness heaves,
+Showing the blade wherewith Fate cleaves,
+If mortals in high courage fail
+At the one breath before the gale.
+Those rulers in all forms of lust,
+Who trod thy children down to dust
+On the red Sunday, know right well
+What word for them thy voice would spell,
+What quick perdition for them weave,
+Did they in such a voice believe.
+Not thine to raise the avenger's shriek,
+Nor turn to them a Tolstoi cheek;
+Nor menace him, the waverer still,
+Man of much heart and little will,
+The criminal of his high seat,
+Whose plea of Guiltless judges it.
+For him thy voice shall bring to hand
+Salvation, and to thy torn land,
+Seen on the breakers.  Now has come
+The day when thou canst not be dumb,
+Spirit of Russia:- those who bind
+Thy limbs and iron-cap thy mind,
+Take thee for quaking flesh, misdoubt
+That thou art of the rabble rout
+Which cries and flees, with whimpering lip,
+From reckless gun and brutal whip;
+But he who has at heart the deeds
+Of thy heroic offspring reads
+In them a soul; not given to shrink
+From peril on the abyss's brink;
+With never dread of murderous power;
+With view beyond the crimson hour;
+Neither an instinct-driven might,
+Nor visionary erudite;
+A soul; that art thou.  It remains
+For thee to stay thy children's veins,
+The countertides of hate arrest,
+Give to thy sons a breathing breast,
+And Him resembling, in His sight,
+Say to thy land, Let there be Light.
+
+
+
+OCTOBER 21, 1905
+
+
+
+The hundred years have passed, and he
+Whose name appeased a nation's fears,
+As with a hand laid over sea;
+To thunder through the foeman's ears
+Defeat before his blast of fire;
+Lives in the immortality
+That poets dream and noblest souls desire.
+
+Never did nation's need evoke
+Hero like him for aid, the while
+A Continent was cannon-smoke
+Or peace in slavery:  this one Isle
+Reflecting Nature:  this one man
+Her sea-hound and her mortal stroke,
+With war-worn body aye in battle's van.
+
+And do we love him well, as well
+As he his country, we may greet,
+With hand on steel, our passing bell
+Nigh on the swing, for prelude sweet
+To the music heard when his last breath
+Hung on its ebb beside the knell,
+And VICTORY in his ear sang gracious Death.
+
+Ah, day of glory! day of tears!
+Day of a people bowed as one!
+Behold across those hundred years
+The lion flash of gun at gun:
+Our bitter pride; our love bereaved;
+What pall of cloud o'ercame our sun
+That day, to bear his wreath, the end achieved.
+
+Joy that no more with murder's frown
+The ancient rivals bark apart.
+Now Nelson to brave France is shown
+A hero after her own heart:
+And he now scanning that quick race,
+To whom through life his glove was thrown,
+Would know a sister spirit to embrace.
+
+
+
+THE CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI
+
+
+
+We who have seen Italia in the throes,
+Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now
+Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough
+All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those
+Who blew the breath of life into her frame:
+Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi:  Three:
+Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free
+From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.
+
+That aim, albeit they were of minds diverse,
+Conjoined them, not to strive without surcease;
+For them could be no babblement of peace
+While lay their country under Slavery's curse.
+
+The set of torn Italia's glorious day
+Was ever sunrise in each filial breast.
+Of eagle beaks by righteousness unblest
+They felt her pulsing body made the prey.
+
+Wherefore they struck, and had to count their dead.
+With bitter smile of resolution nerved
+To try new issues, holding faith unswerved,
+Promise they gathered from the rich blood shed.
+
+In them Italia, visible to us then
+As living, rose; for proof that huge brute Force
+Has never being from celestial source,
+And is the lord of cravens, not of men.
+
+Now breaking up the crust of temporal strife,
+Who reads their acts enshrined in History, sees
+That Tyrants were the Revolutionaries,
+The Rebels men heart-vowed to hallowed life.
+
+Pure as the Archangel's cleaving Darkness thro',
+The Sword he sees, the keen unwearied Sword,
+A single blade against a circling horde,
+And aye for Freedom and the trampled few.
+
+The cry of Liberty from dungeon cell,
+From exile, was his God's command to smite,
+As for a swim in sea he joined the fight,
+With radiant face, full sure that he did well.
+
+Behold a warrior dealing mortal strokes,
+Whose nature was a child's:  amid his foes
+A wary trickster:  at the battle's close,
+No gentler friend this leopard dashed with fox.
+
+Down the long roll of History will run
+The story of these deeds, and speed his race
+Beneath defeat more hotly to embrace
+The noble cause and trust to another sun.
+
+And lo, that sun is in Italia's skies
+This day, by grace of his good sword in part.
+It beckons her to keep a warrior heart
+For guard of beauty, all too sweet a prize.
+
+Earth gave him:  blessed be the Earth that gave.
+Earth's Master crowned his honest work on earth:
+Proudly Italia names his place of birth:
+The bosom of Humanity his grave.
+
+
+
+THE WILD ROSE
+
+
+
+High climbs June's wild rose,
+Her bush all blooms in a swarm;
+And swift from the bud she blows,
+In a day when the wooer is warm;
+Frank to receive and give,
+Her bosom is open to bee and sun:
+Pride she has none,
+Nor shame she knows;
+Happy to live.
+
+Unlike those of the garden nigh,
+Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;
+Loosening petals one by one
+To the fiery Passion's dart
+Superbly shy.
+For them in some glory of hair,
+Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,
+Or path of the bride bestrew.
+Ever are they the theme for song.
+But nought of that is her share.
+Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,
+A glance they care not to renew.
+
+And she at a word of the claims of kin
+Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:
+She is only a plain princess of the weeds,
+As an outcast witless of sin:
+Much disregarded, save by the few
+Who love her, that has not a spot of deceit,
+No promise of sweet beyond sweet,
+Often descending to sour.
+On any fair breast she would die in an hour.
+Praises she scarce could bear,
+Were any wild poet to praise.
+Her aim is to rise into light and air.
+One of the darlings of Earth, no more,
+And little it seems in the dusty ways,
+Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;
+The bird clapping wings to soar,
+The clouds of an evetide's wreath.
+
+
+
+THE CALL
+
+
+
+Under what spell are we debased
+By fears for our inviolate Isle,
+Whose record is of dangers faced
+And flung to heel with even smile?
+Is it a vaster force, a subtler guile?
+
+They say Exercitus designs
+To match the famed Salsipotent
+Where on her sceptre she reclines;
+Awake:  but were a slumber sent
+By guilty gods, more fell his foul intent.
+
+The subtler web, the vaster foe,
+Well may we meet when drilled for deeds:
+But in these days of wealth at flow,
+A word of breezy warning breeds
+The pained responses seen in lakeside reeds.
+
+We fain would stand contemplative,
+All innocent as meadow grass;
+In human goodness fain believe,
+Believe a cloud is formed to pass;
+Its shadows chase with draughts of hippocras.
+
+Others have gone; the way they went
+Sweet sunny now, and safe our nest.
+Humanity, enlightenment,
+Against the warning hum protest:
+Let the world hear that we know what is best.
+
+So do the beatific speak;
+Yet have they ears, and eyes as well;
+And if not with a paler cheek,
+They feel the shivers in them dwell,
+That something of a dubious future tell.
+
+For huge possessions render slack
+The power we need to hold them fast;
+Save when a quickened heart shall make
+Our people one, to meet what blast
+May blow from temporal heavens overcast.
+
+Our people one!  Nor they with strength
+Dependent on a single arm:
+Alert, and braced the whole land's length,
+Rejoicing in their manhood's charm
+For friend or foe; to succour, not to harm.
+
+Has ever weakness won esteem?
+Or counts it as a prized ally?
+They who have read in History deem
+It ranks among the slavish fry,
+Whose claim to live justiciary Fates deny.
+
+It can not be declared we are
+A nation till from end to end
+The land can show such front to war
+As bids a crouching foe expend
+His ire in air, and preferably be friend.
+
+We dreading him, we do him wrong;
+For fears discolour, fears invite.
+Like him, our task is to be strong;
+Unlike him, claiming not by might
+To snatch an envied treasure as a right.
+
+So may a stouter brotherhood
+At home be signalled over sea
+For righteous, and be understood,
+Nay, welcomed, when 'tis shown that we
+All duties have embraced in being free.
+
+This Britain slumbering, she is rich;
+Lies placid as a cradled child;
+At times with an uneasy twitch,
+That tells of dreams unduly wild.
+Shall she be with a foreign drug defiled?
+
+The grandeur of her deeds recall;
+Look on her face so kindly fair:
+This Britain! and were she to fall,
+Mankind would breathe a harsher air,
+The nations miss a light of leading rare.
+
+
+
+ON COMO
+
+
+
+A rainless darkness drew o'er the lake
+As we lay in our boat with oars unshipped.
+It seemed neither cloud nor water awake,
+And forth of the low black curtain slipped
+Thunderless lightning.  Scoff no more
+At angels imagined in downward flight
+For the daughters of earth as fabled of yore:
+Here was beauty might well invite
+Dark heavens to gleam with the fire of a sun
+Resurgent; here the exchanged embrace
+Worthy of heaven and earth made one.
+
+And witness it, ye of the privileged space,
+Said the flash; and the mountains, as from an abyss
+For quivering seconds leaped up to attest
+That given, received, renewed was the kiss;
+The lips to lips and the breast to breast;
+All in a glory of ecstasy, swift
+As an eagle at prey, and pure as the prayer
+Of an infant bidden joined hands uplift
+To be guarded through darkness by spirits of air,
+Ere setting the sails of sleep till day.
+Slowly the low cloud swung, and far
+It panted along its mirrored way;
+Above loose threads one sanctioning star,
+The wonder of what had been witnessed, sealed,
+And with me still as in crystal glassed
+Are the depths alight, the heavens revealed,
+Where on to the Alps the muteness passed.
+
+
+
+MILTON--DECEMBER 9, 1608:  DECEMBER 9, 1908
+
+
+
+What splendour of imperial station man,
+The Tree of Life, may reach when, rooted fast,
+His branching stem points way to upper air
+And skyward still aspires, we see in him
+Who sang for us the Archangelical host,
+Made Morning, by old Darkness urged to the abyss;
+A voice that down three centuries onward rolls;
+Onward will roll while lives our English tongue,
+In the devout of music unsurpassed
+Since Piety won Heaven's ear on Israel's harp.
+
+The face of Earth, the soul of Earth, her charm,
+Her dread austerity; the quavering fate
+Of mortals with blind hope by passion swayed,
+His mind embraced, the while on trodden soil,
+Defender of the Commonwealth, he joined
+Our temporal fray, whereof is vital fruit,
+And, choosing armoury of the Scholar, stood
+Beside his peers to raise the voice for Freedom:
+Nor has fair Liberty a champion armed
+To meet on heights or plains the Sophister
+Throughout the ages, equal to this man,
+Whose spirit breathed high Heaven, and drew thence
+The ethereal sword to smite.
+
+Were England sunk
+Beneath the shifting tides, her heart, her brain,
+The smile she wears, the faith she holds, her best,
+Would live full-toned in the grand delivery
+Of his cathedral speech:  an utterance
+Almost divine, and such as Hellespont,
+Crashing its breakers under Ida's frown,
+Inspired:  yet worthier he, whose instrument
+Was by comparison the coarse reed-pipe;
+Whereof have come the marvellous harmonies,
+Which, with his lofty theme, of infinite range,
+Abash, entrance, exalt.
+
+We need him now,
+This latest Age in repetition cries:
+For Belial, the adroit, is in our midst;
+Mammon, more swoln to squeeze the slavish sweat
+From hopeless toil:  and overshadowingly
+(Aggrandized, monstrous in his grinning mask
+Of hypocritical Peace,) inveterate Moloch
+Remains the great example.
+
+Homage to him
+His debtor band, innumerable as waves
+Running all golden from an eastern sun,
+Joyfully render, in deep reverence
+Subscribe, and as they speak their Milton's name,
+Rays of his glory on their foreheads bear.
+
+
+
+IRELAND
+
+
+
+Fire in her ashes Ireland feels
+And in her veins a glow of heat.
+To her the lost old time, appeals
+For resurrection, good to greet:
+Not as a shape with spectral eyes,
+But humanly maternal, young
+In all that quickens pride, and wise
+To speak the best her bards have sung.
+
+You read her as a land distraught,
+Where bitterest rebel passions seethe.
+Look with a core of heart in thought,
+For so is known the truth beneath.
+She came to you a loathing bride,
+And it has been no happy bed.
+Believe in her as friend, allied
+By bonds as close as those who wed.
+
+Her speech is held for hatred's cry;
+Her silence tells of treason hid:
+Were it her aim to burst the tie,
+She sees what iron laws forbid.
+Excess of heart obscures from view
+A head as keen as yours to count.
+Trust her, that she may prove her true
+In links whereof is love the fount.
+
+May she not call herself her own?
+That is her cry, and thence her spits
+Of fury, thence her graceless tone
+At justice given in bits and bits.
+The limbs once raw with gnawing chains
+Will fret at silken when God's beams
+Of Freedom beckon o'er the plains
+From mounts that show it more than dreams.
+
+She, generous, craves your generous dole;
+That will not rouse the crack of doom.
+It ends the blundering past control
+Simply to give her elbow-room.
+Her offspring feels they are a race,
+To be a nation is their claim;
+Yet stronger bound in your embrace
+Than when the tie was but a name.
+
+A nation she, and formed to charm,
+With heart for heart and hands all round.
+No longer England's broken arm,
+Would England know where strength is found.
+And strength to-day is England's need;
+To-morrow it may be for both
+Salvation:  heed the portents, heed
+The warnings; free the mind from sloth.
+
+Too long the pair have danced in mud,
+With no advance from sun to sun.
+Ah, what a bounding course of blood
+Has England with an Ireland one!
+Behold yon shadow cross the downs,
+And off away to yeasty seas.
+Lightly will fly old rancour's frowns
+When solid with high heart stand these.
+
+
+
+THE YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS' BELT
+
+
+
+The years had worn their seasons' belt,
+From bud to rosy prime,
+Since Nellie by the larch-pole knelt
+And helped the hop to climb.
+
+Most diligent of teachers then,
+But now with all to learn,
+She breathed beyond a thought of men,
+Though formed to make men burn.
+
+She dwelt where 'twixt low-beaten thorns
+Two mill-blades, like a snail,
+Enormous, with inquiring horns,
+Looked down on half the vale.
+
+You know the grey of dew on grass
+Ere with the young sun fired,
+And you know well the thirst one has
+For the coming and desired.
+
+Quick in our ring she leapt, and gave
+Her hand to left, to right.
+No claim on her had any, save
+To feed the joy of sight.
+
+For man and maid a laughing word
+She tossed, in notes as clear
+As when the February bird
+Sings out that Spring is near.
+
+Of what befell behind that scone,
+Let none who knows reveal.
+In ballad days she might have been
+A heroine rousing steel.
+
+On us did she bestow the hour,
+And fixed it firm in thought;
+Her spirit like a meadow flower
+That gives, and asks for nought.
+
+She seemed to make the sunlight stay
+And show her in its pride.
+O she was fair as a beech in May
+With the sun on the yonder side.
+
+There was more life than breath can give,
+In the looks in her fair form;
+For little can we say we live
+Until the heart is warm.
+
+
+
+FRAGMENTS
+
+
+
+Open horizons round,
+O mounting mind, to scenes unsung,
+Wherein shall walk a lusty Time:
+Our Earth is young;
+Of measure without bound;
+Infinite are the heights to climb,
+The depths to sound.
+
+
+A wilding little stubble flower
+The sickle scorned which cut for wheat,
+Such was our hope in that dark hour
+When nought save uses held the street,
+And daily pleasures, daily needs,
+With barren vision, looked ahead.
+And still the same result of seeds
+Gave likeness 'twixt the live and dead.
+
+
+From labours through the night, outworn,
+Above the hills the front of morn
+We see, whose eyes to heights are raised,
+And the world's wise may deem us crazed.
+While yet her lord lies under seas,
+She takes us as the wind the trees'
+Delighted leafage; all in song
+We mount to her, to her belong.
+
+
+This love of nature, that allures to take
+Irregularity for harmony
+Of larger scope than our hard measures make,
+Cherish it as thy school for when on thee
+The ills of life descend.
+
+
+
+IL Y A CENT ANS
+
+
+
+That march of the funereal Past behold;
+How Glory sat on Bondage for its throne;
+How men, like dazzled insects, through the mould
+Still worked their way, and bled to keep their own.
+
+We know them, as they strove and wrought and yearned;
+Their hopes, their fears; what page of Life they wist:
+At whiles their vision upon us was turned,
+Baffled by shapes limmed loosely on thick mist.
+
+Beneath the fortress bulk of Power they bent
+Blunt heads, adoring or in shackled hate,
+All save the rebel hymned him; and it meant
+A world submitting to incarnate Fate.
+
+From this he drew fresh appetite for sway,
+And of it fell:  whereat was chorus raised,
+How surely shall a mad ambition pay
+Dues to Humanity, erewhile amazed.
+
+'Twas dreamed by some the deluge would ensue,
+So trembling was the tension long constrained;
+A spirit of faith was in the chosen few,
+That steps to the millennium had been gained.
+
+But mainly the rich business of the hour,
+Their sight, made blind by urgency of blood,
+Embraced; and facts, the passing sweet or sour,
+To them were solid things that nought withstood.
+
+Their facts are going headlong on the tides,
+Like commas on a line of History's page;
+Nor that which once they took for Truth abides,
+Save in the form of youth enlarged from age.
+
+Meantime give ear to woodland notes around,
+Look on our Earth full-breasted to our sun:
+So was it when their poets heard the sound,
+Beheld the scene:  in them our days are one.
+
+What figures will be shown the century hence?
+What lands intact?  We do but know that Power
+From piety divorced, though seen immense,
+Shall sink on envy of the humblest flower.
+
+Our cry for cradled Peace, while men are still
+The three-parts brute which smothers the divine,
+Heaven answers:  Guard it with forethoughtful will,
+Or buy it; all your gains from War resign.
+
+A land, not indefensibly alarmed,
+May see, unwarned by hint of friendly gods,
+Between a hermit crab at all points armed,
+And one without a shell, decisive odds.
+
+
+
+YOUTH IN AGE
+
+
+
+Once I was part of the music I heard
+On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky,
+For joy of the beating of wings on high
+My heart shot into the breast of the bird.
+
+I hear it now and I see it fly,
+And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
+My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,
+As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.
+
+
+
+TO A FRIEND LOST (TOM TAYLOR)
+
+
+
+When I remember, friend, whom lost I call,
+Because a man beloved is taken hence,
+The tender humour and the fire of sense
+In your good eyes; how full of heart for all,
+And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,
+You bore that lamp of sane benevolence;
+Then see I round you Death his shadows dense
+Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.
+For surely are you one with the white host,
+Spirits, whose memory is our vital air,
+Through the great love of Earth they had:  lo, these,
+Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,
+Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,
+Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.
+
+
+
+M. M.
+
+
+
+Who call her Mother and who calls her Wife
+Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.
+
+
+
+THE LADY C. M.
+
+
+
+To them that knew her, there is vital flame
+In these the simple letters of her name.
+To them that knew her not, be it but said,
+So strong a spirit is not of the dead.
+
+
+
+ON THE TOMBSTONE OF
+JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON
+(d. APRIL 11, 1884)
+IN HEADLEY CHURCHYARD, SURREY
+
+
+
+Thou our beloved and light of Earth hast crossed
+The sea of darkness to the yonder shore.
+There dost thou shine a light transferred, not lost,
+Through love to kindle in our souls the more.
+
+
+
+GORDON OF KHARTOUM
+
+
+
+Of men he would have raised to light he fell:
+In soul he conquered with those nerveless hands.
+His country's pride and her abasement knell
+The Man of England circled by the sands.
+
+
+
+J. C. M.
+
+
+
+A fountain of our sweetest, quick to spring
+In fellowship abounding, here subsides:
+And never passage of a cloud on wing
+To gladden blue forgets him; near he hides.
+
+
+
+THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME
+
+
+
+With Alfred and St. Louis he doth win
+Grander than crowned head's mortuary dome:
+His gentle heroic manhood enters in
+The ever-flowering common heart for home.
+
+
+
+ISLET THE DACHS
+
+
+
+Our Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed
+From his quaint tenement, quits hates and loves.
+There lived with us a wagging humourist
+In that hound's arch dwarf-legged on boxing-gloves.
+
+
+
+ON HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE
+(THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING)
+
+
+
+Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
+And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier.
+Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:
+We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
+We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak
+Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:
+See a great Tree of Life that never sere
+Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak.
+Such ending is not Death:  such living shows
+What wide illumination brightness sheds
+From one big heart, to conquer man's old foes:
+The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
+Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
+When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.
+
+December 13, 1889.
+
+
+
+HAWARDEN
+
+
+
+When comes the lighted day for men to read
+Life's meaning, with the work before their hands
+Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
+Earth will not hear her children's wailful bands
+Deplore the chieftain fall'n in sob and dirge;
+Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.
+The sun that dropped down our horizon's verge
+Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,
+Now seen in sum, most glorious; and 'tis known
+By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.
+A splendid image built of man has flown;
+His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.
+Ours the great privilege to have had one
+Among us who celestial tasks has done.
+
+
+
+AT THE FUNERAL
+FEBRUARY 2, 1901
+
+
+
+Her sacred body bear:  the tenement
+Of that strong soul now ranked with God's Elect
+Her heart upon her people's heart she spent;
+Hence is she Royalty's lodestar to direct.
+
+The peace is hers, of whom all lands have praised
+Majestic virtues ere her day unseen.
+Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,
+And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.
+
+
+
+ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS
+
+
+
+Long with us, now she leaves us; she has rest
+Beneath our sacred sod:
+A woman vowed to Good, whom all attest,
+The daylight gift of God.
+
+
+
+THE YEAR'S SHEDDINGS
+
+
+
+The varied colours are a fitful heap:
+They pass in constant service though they sleep;
+The self gone out of them, therewith the pain:
+Read that, who still to spell our earth remain.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of Poems, by George Meredith, Volume 3
+
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