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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14531 ***
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+A Book of Songs and
+Shadows
+
+
+By JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+_BOSTON_ and _NEW YORK_
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1911
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY JOSEPHINE PEABODY MARKS
+
+_Published November 1911_
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Thanks are especially due to the editors of The American Magazine,
+Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers,
+for their courteous permission to reprint certain of the poems included
+in this volume.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+We make our songs as we must, from fragments of the joy and sorrow of
+living. What Life itself may be, we cannot know till all men share the
+chance to know.
+
+Until the day of some more equal portion, there is no human brightness
+unhaunted by this black shadow: the thought of those unnumbered who pay
+all the heavier cost of life, to live and die without knowledge that
+there is any Joy of Living.
+
+No song could face such blackness, but for the will to share, and for
+hope of the day of sharing.
+
+Upon that hope and that mindfulness, the poems in this book are linked
+together.
+
+J.P.M.
+
+4 October, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN                                    3
+
+THE TREES                                         15
+
+_O, do you remember? How it came to be?_          21
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN                                23
+
+_But we did walk in Eden_                         29
+
+THE FOUNDLING                                     31
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair_      35
+
+THE FEASTER                                       37
+
+_Belovèd, if the moon could weep_                 43
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES                                  45
+
+NOON AT PÆSTUM                                    47
+
+VESTAL FLAME                                      48
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand_   51
+
+THE PROPHET                                       53
+
+THE LONG LANE                                     56
+
+_Ah but, Belovèd, men may do_                     59
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK                      61
+
+_You, Four Walls, wall not in my heart!_          65
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE                              67
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman whom I meet_           73
+
+GLADNESS                                          75
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD                           81
+
+_Envoi_                                           87
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+AN ODE OF THE PORTION OF LABOR
+
+
+'_The profit of the Earth is for all._'
+--ECCLESIASTES.
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+
+I
+
+He sang above the vineyards of the world.
+  And after him the vines with woven hands
+Clambered and clung, and everywhere unfurled
+  Triumphing green above the barren lands;
+Till high as gardens grow, he climbed, he stood,
+  Sun-crowned with life and strength, and singing toil,
+And looked upon his work; and it was good:
+        The corn, the wine, the oil.
+
+He sang above the noon. The topmost cleft
+  That grudged him footing on the mountain scars
+He planted and despaired not; till he left
+  His vines soft breathing to the host of stars.
+He wrought, he tilled; and even as he sang,
+  The creatures of his planting laughed to scorn
+The ancient threat of deserts where there sprang
+        The wine, the oil, the corn!
+
+He sang not for abundance.--Over-lords
+  Took of his tilth. Yet was there still to reap,
+The portion of his labor; dear rewards
+  Of sunlit day, and bread, and human sleep.
+He sang for strength; for glory of the light.
+  He dreamed above the furrows, 'They are mine!'
+When all he wrought stood fair before his sight
+        With corn, and oil, and wine.
+
+    _Truly, the light is sweet
+      Yea, and a pleasant thing
+        It is to see the Sun.
+    And that a man should eat
+        His bread that he hath won;--
+    (So is it sung and said),
+      That he should take and keep,
+        After his laboring,
+    The portion of his labor in his bread,
+      His bread that he hath won;
+      Yea, and in quiet sleep,
+        When all is done._
+
+He sang; above the burden and the heat,
+  Above all seasons with their fitful grace;
+Above the chance and change that led his feet
+  To this last ambush of the Market-place.
+'Enough for him,' they said--and still they say--
+  'A crust, with air to breathe, and sun to shine;
+He asks no more!'--Before they took away
+        The corn, the oil, the wine.
+
+He sang. No more he sings now, anywhere.
+  Light was enough, before he was undone.
+They knew it well, who took away the air,
+  --Who took away the sun;
+Who took, to serve their soul-devouring greed,
+  Himself, his breath, his bread--the goad of toil;--
+Who have and hold, before the eyes of Need,
+        The corn, the wine,--the oil!
+
+      _Truly, one thing is sweet
+      Of things beneath the Sun;
+This, that a man should earn his bread and eat,
+  Rejoicing in his work which he hath done.
+      What shall be sung or said
+        Of desolate deceit.
+      When others take his bread;
+      His and his children's bread?--
+      And the laborer hath none.
+This, for his portion now, of all that he hath done.
+      He earns; and others eat.
+    He starves;--they sit at meat
+      Who have taken away the Sun._
+
+
+II
+
+Seek him now, that singing Man.
+Look for him,
+Look for him
+In the mills,
+In the mines;
+Where the very daylight pines,--
+He, who once did walk the hills!
+You shall find him, if you scan
+Shapes all unbefitting Man,
+Bodies warped, and faces dim.
+In the mines; in the mills
+Where the ceaseless thunder fills
+Spaces of the human brain
+Till all thought is turned to pain.
+Where the skirl of wheel on wheel,
+Grinding him who is their tool,
+Makes the shattered senses reel
+To the numbness of the fool.
+Perisht thought, and halting tongue
+(Once it spoke;--once it sung!)
+Live to hunger, dead to song.
+Only heart-beats loud with wrong
+Hammer on,--_How long_?
+... _How long_?--_How long_?
+
+Search for him;
+Search for him;
+Where the crazy atoms swim
+Up the fiery furnace-blast.
+You shall find him, at the last,--
+He whose forehead braved the sun,--
+Wreckt and tortured and undone.
+Where no breath across the heat
+Whispers him that life was sweet;
+But the sparkles mock and flare,
+Scattering up the crooked air.
+(Blackened with that bitter mirk,--
+Would God know His handiwork?)
+
+Thought is not for such as he;
+Naught but strength, and misery;
+Since, for just the bite and sup,
+Life must needs be swallowed up.
+Only, reeling up the sky,
+Hurtling flames that hurry by,
+Gasp and flare, with _Why_--_Why_,
+... _Why_?...
+
+Why the human mind of him
+Shrinks, and falters and is dim
+When he tries to make it out:
+What the torture is about.--
+Why he breathes, a fugitive
+Whom the World forbids to live.
+Why he earned for his abode,
+Habitation of the toad!
+Why his fevered day by day
+Will not serve to drive away
+Horror that must always haunt:--
+... _Want_ ... _Want_!
+Nightmare shot with waking pangs;--
+Tightening coil, and certain fangs,
+Close and closer, always nigh ...
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+Why he labors under ban
+That denies him for a man.
+Why his utmost drop of blood
+Buys for him no human good;
+Why his utmost urge of strength
+Only lets Them starve at length;--
+Will not let him starve alone;
+He must watch, and see his own
+Fade and fail, and starve, and die.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heart-beats, in a hammering song,
+Heavy as an ox may plod,
+Goaded--goaded--faint with wrong,
+Cry unto some ghost of God
+... _How long_?... _How long_?
+.......... _How long_?
+
+
+III
+
+Seek him yet. Search for him!
+You shall find him, spent and grim;
+In the prisons, where we pen
+These unsightly shards of men.
+Sheltered fast;
+Housed at length;
+Clothed and fed, no matter how!--
+Where the householders, aghast,
+Measure in his broken strength
+Nought but power for evil, now.
+Beast-of-burden drudgeries
+Could not earn him what was his:
+He who heard the world applaud
+Glories seized by force and fraud,
+He must break,--he must take!--
+Both for hate and hunger's sake.
+He must seize by fraud and force;
+He must strike, without remorse!
+Seize he might; but never keep.
+Strike, his once!--Behold him here.
+(Human life we buy so cheap,
+Who should know we held it dear?)
+
+No denial,--no defence
+From a brain bereft of sense,
+Any more than penitence.
+But the heart-beats now, that plod
+Goaded--goaded--dumb with wrong,
+Ask not even a ghost of God
+............._How long_?
+
+    _When the Sea gives up its dead,
+    Prison caverns, yield instead
+    This, rejected and despised;
+    This, the Soiled and Sacrificed!
+    Without form or comeliness;
+    Shamed for us that did transgress;
+    Bruised, for our iniquities,
+    With the stripes that are all his!
+    Face that wreckage, you who can.
+    It was once the Singing Man._
+
+
+IV
+
+Must it be?--Must we then
+Render back to God again
+This His broken work, this thing,
+For His man that once did sing?
+Will not all our wonders do?
+Gifts we stored the ages through,
+(Trusting that He had forgot)--
+Gifts the Lord requirèd not?
+
+Would the all-but-human serve!
+Monsters made of stone and nerve;
+Towers to threaten and defy
+Curse or blessing of the sky;
+Shafts that blot the stars with smoke;
+Lightnings harnessed under yoke;
+Sea-things, air-things, wrought with steel,
+That may smite, and fly, and feel!
+Oceans calling each to each;
+Hostile hearts, with kindred speech.
+Every work that Titans can;
+Every marvel: save a man,
+Who might rule without a sword.--
+    Is a man more precious, Lord?
+
+Can it be?--Must we then
+Render back to Thee again
+Million, million wasted men?
+Men, of flickering human breath,
+Only made for life and death?
+
+Ah, but see the sovereign Few,
+Highly favored, that remain!
+These, the glorious residue,
+Of the cherished race of Cain.
+These, the magnates of the age,
+High above the human wage,
+Who have numbered and possesst
+All the portion of the rest!
+
+What are all despairs and shames,
+What the mean, forgotten names
+Of the thousand more or less,
+For one surfeit of success?
+
+For those dullest lives we spent,
+Take these Few magnificent!
+For that host of blotted ones,
+Take these glittering central suns.
+Few;--but how their lustre thrives
+On the million broken lives!
+Splendid, over dark and doubt,
+For a million souls gone out!
+These, the holders of our hoard,--
+    Wilt thou not accept them, Lord?
+
+
+V
+
+Oh, in the wakening thunders of the heart,
+--The small lost Eden, troubled through the night,
+Sounds there not now,--forboded and apart,
+        Some voice and sword of light?
+Some voice and portent of a dawn to break?--
+  Searching like God, the ruinous human shard
+Of that lost Brother-man Himself did make,
+        And Man himself hath marred?
+
+It sounds!--And may the anguish of that birth
+  Seize on the world; and may all shelters fail,
+Till we behold new Heaven and new Earth
+        Through the rent Temple-vail!
+When the high-tides that threaten near and far
+  To sweep away our guilt before the sky,--
+Flooding the waste of this dishonored Star,
+        Cleanse, and o'erwhelm, and cry!--
+
+Cry, from the deep of world-accusing waves,
+  With longing more than all since Light began,
+Above the nations,--underneath the graves,--
+        'Give back the Singing Man!'
+
+
+
+
+THE TREES
+
+
+I
+
+Now, in the thousandth year,
+When April's near,
+Now comes it that the great ones of the earth
+Take all their mirth
+Away with them, far off, to orchard-places,--
+Nor they nor Solomon arrayed like these,--
+To sun themselves at ease;
+To breathe of wind-swept spaces;
+To see some miracle of leafy graces;--
+To catch the out-flowing rapture of the trees.
+Considering the lilies.
+                       --Yes. And when
+Shall they consider Men?
+
+      (_O showering May-clad tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+II
+
+For now at last, they have beheld the trees.
+Lo, even these!--
+The men of sounding laughter and low fears;
+The women of light laughter, and no tears;
+The great ones of the town.
+And those, of most renown,
+That once sold doves,--now grown so pennywise
+To bargain with forlorner merchandise,--
+They buy and sell, they buy and sell again,
+The life-long toil of men.
+Worn with their market strife to dispossess
+The blind,--the fatherless,
+They too go forth, to breathe of budding trees,
+And woods with beckoning wonders new unfurled.
+Yes, even these:
+The money-changers and the Pharisees;
+The rulers of the darkness of this world.
+
+      (_O choiring Summer tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+III
+
+For now, behold their heart's desire is thrall
+To simpleness.--O new delight, unguessed,
+In very rest!
+And precious beyond all,
+A garden-place, a garden with a wall!
+To the green earth! All bountiful to bless
+Hearts sickening with excess.
+To the green earth, whose blithe replenishments
+Shall fresh the jaded sense!
+To the green earth, the dust-corrupted soul
+Returns to be made whole.
+For now it comes indeed,
+They will go forth, all they, to see a reed
+So shaken by the wind.
+Men are no longer blind
+To aught, save human kind.
+
+      (_O mellowing August tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+IV
+
+The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
+Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:--
+Those dullest millions, pent
+In life-long banishment
+From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
+Shut in the inner darkness of the town;
+Those blighted things you see,
+But the Sun sees not, at its going down:--
+Warped outcasts of some human forestry;
+Blind victims of the blind,
+Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
+With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
+And if you take some Old One to the fields,
+To see what Nature yields
+With fullest hands to men already free,
+It well may be,
+As on some indecipherable book
+The Guest will look,
+With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
+Too old, too old to learn;
+Or to discern--
+Before it slips away,
+The joy of such a late half-holiday!
+Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:
+They look not up.
+Too late, too late for any sky to do
+Brief kindness with its blue.
+And what behold they, then?
+In the shamed moment, when
+Old eyes bow down again?
+
+_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
+The drowned things start.
+And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
+Because of what is There.
+Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
+The human lilies, sprung
+Out of the ooze, and trodden,
+Even as they breathed and clung!
+Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;
+Lost faces, gleaming there,
+Where misery blasphemes the sacred young!
+Mute outcry, most, of those
+Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
+Faces the daylight shuns;
+Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
+Pale witness, unaware.
+Starved lips, and withering blood--
+O broken in the bud!--
+Blank eyes, and blighted hair._
+
+      (_O golden, golden tree!
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+So is it, haply, when
+Dull eyes look up, and then
+Dull eyes look down again.
+Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+
+
+V
+
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+And with what eye-shut ease
+We leave them, at the last, for company,
+The Tree,
+Whose two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
+Ever, since time began;
+Nor bloom so strange to see!--
+Behold, the Man,
+With His two arms outstretched to fold the world.
+
+
+
+_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
+Far, golden windows gazing from the shore;
+Golden ebb of daylight; heart could hold no more:
+Belovèd and Belovèd, and the sea._
+
+_Westward the sun,--low, slow and golden;
+Eastward the moon climbed, honey-pale.
+O do you remember? while our eyes were holden,
+Close, close upon us,--the Golden Sail?
+Wind-swift she came,--thing of living flame,
+Sea-breathing Glory, to make the heart afraid!
+The ripples, fold on fold
+Of coiling gold,
+Trailing a thousand ways
+Her golden maze,
+Rocked in a golden tumult, every one,
+The gondolas, the ships ..
+Westward she made .....
+A portent from the sky,--gone by, gone by,
+To golden, far eclipse; ...
+Into the Sun._
+
+_Behold, a mystery
+That shook to golden throbbing all the sea.
+Oh, and what needed one more wonder be
+For thee and me, Belovèd? thee and me?_
+
+
+
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN
+
+  '_Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief,
+  Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief._'
+
+
+I
+
+Highway, stretched along the sun,
+Highway, thronged till day is done;
+Where the drifting Face replaces
+Wave on wave on wave of faces,
+And you count them, one by one:
+    '_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief:
+    Doctor--Lawyer--Merchant--Chief._'
+Is it soothsay?--Is it fun?
+
+Young ones, like as wave and wave;
+Old ones, like as grave and grave;
+Tide on tide of human faces
+With what human undertow!
+Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief!--
+Tell me of the eddying spaces,
+Show me where the lost ones go;
+Like and lost, as leaf and leaf.
+What's your secret grim refrain
+Back and forth and back again,
+Once, and now, and always so?
+Three days since, and who was Thief?
+Three days more, and who'll be Chief?
+Oh, is that beyond belief,
+_Doctor, Lawyer--Merchant-Chief?_
+
+    (_Down, like grass before the mowing;
+    On, like wind in its mad going:--
+    Wind and dust forever blowing._)
+
+Highway, shrill with murderous pride,
+Highway, of the swarming tide!
+Why should my way lead me deeper?
+I am not my Brother's keeper.
+
+
+II
+
+Byway, ambushed with the dark,
+Byway, where the ears may hark;
+Live and fierce when day is done,
+You, that do without the Sun:--
+What's this game you bring to nought?--
+Muttering like a thing distraught,
+Reckoning like a simpleton?
+(Since the hearing must be brief,--
+Living or a dying thief!)
+Cobbled with the anguished stones
+That the thoroughfare disowns;
+Stones they gave you for your bread
+Of the disinherited!
+Where the Towers of Hunger loom,
+Crowding in the dregs of doom;
+Where the lost sky peering through
+Sees no more the grudging grass,--
+Only this mud-mirrored blue,
+Like some shattered looking-glass.
+
+    (_Under, with the sorry reaping!
+    Underneath the stones of weeping,
+    For the Dark to have in keeping._)
+
+Byway, you, so foully marred;
+You, whose sodden walls and scarred,
+See no light, but only where
+Fevered lamps are set to stare
+In the eyes of such despair!
+Tell me--as a Byway can--
+Was this Beggar once a Man?
+'_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief!_'
+Like and lost as leaf and leaf.
+Stammering out your wrongs and shames,
+Must you cry their very names?
+Must you sob your shame, your grief?
+--'_Poor man--Poor man!--Beggar--Thief._'
+
+
+III
+
+Highway, where the Sun is wide;
+Byway, where the lost ones hide,
+Byway, where the Soul must hark,
+Byway, dreadful with the Dark:
+    Can you nothing do with Man?
+Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief,
+Learns he nothing, even of grief?
+Must it still be all his wonder
+Some men soar, while some go under?
+He has heard, and he has seen:
+Make him know the thing you mean.
+He has prayed since time began,--
+He's so curious of the Plan!
+He will pray you till he die,
+For the Whence and for the Why;
+Mad for wisdom--when 'tis cheaper!
+'_Why should my way lead me deeper?
+Am I, then, my Brother's keeper?_'
+
+Show him, Byway, if you can;
+Lest he end as he began,
+Rich and poor,--this beggar, Man.
+
+
+
+_But we did walk in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God;--
+There, where no beckoning wonder
+Of all the paths we trod,
+No choiring sun-filled vineyard,
+No voice of stream or bird,
+But was some radiant oracle
+And flaming with the Word!_
+
+_Mine ears are dim with voices;
+Mine eyes yet strive to see
+The black things here to wonder at,
+The mirth,--the misery.
+Beloved, who wert with me there,
+  How came these shames to be?--
+  On what lost star are we?_
+
+_Men say: The paths of gladness
+  By men were never trod!--
+But we have walked in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God._
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDLING
+
+
+Beautiful Mother, I have toiled all day;
+    And I am wearied. And the day is done.
+    Now, while the wild brooks run
+Soft by the furrows--fading, gold to gray,
+  Their laughters turned to musing--ah, let me
+  Hide here my face at thine unheeding knee,
+    Beautiful Mother; if I be thy son.
+
+The birds fly low. Gulls, starlings, hoverers,
+    Along the meadows and the paling foam,
+    All wings of thine that roam
+Fly down, fly down. One reedy murmur blurs
+  The silence of the earth; and from the warm
+  Face of the field the upward savors swarm
+    Into the darkness. And the herds are home.
+
+All they are stalled and folded for their rest,
+    The creatures: cloud-fleece young that leap and veer;
+    Mad-mane and gentle ear;
+And breath of loving-kindness. And that best,--
+  O shaggy house-mate, watching me from far,
+  With human-aching heart, as I a star--
+    Tempest of plumèd joys, just to be near!
+
+So close, so like, so dear; and whom I love
+    More than thou lovest them, or lovest me.
+    So beautiful to see,
+Ah, and to touch! When those far lights above
+  Scorch me with farness--lights that call and call
+  To the far heart, and answer not at all;
+    Save that they will not let the darkness be.
+
+And what am I? That I alone of these
+    Make me most glad at noon? That I should mark
+    The after-glow go dark?
+This hour to sing--but never have--heart's-ease!
+  That when the sorrowing winds fly low, and croon
+  Outside our happy windows their old rune,
+    Beautiful Mother, I must wake, and hark?
+
+Who am I? Why for me this iron _Must_?
+    Burden the moon-white ox would never bear;
+    Load that he cannot share,
+He, thine imperial hostage of the dust.
+  Else should I look to see the god's surprise
+  Flow from his great unscornful, lovely eyes--
+    The ox thou gavest to partake my care.
+
+Yea, all they bear their yoke of sun-filled hours.
+    I, lord at noon, at nightfall no more free,
+    Take on more heavily
+The yoke of hid, intolerable Powers.
+  --Then pushes here, in my forgetful hand,
+  This near one's breathless plea to understand.
+    Starward I look; he, even so, at me!
+
+And she who shines within my house, my sight
+    Of the heart's eyes, my hearth-glow, and my rain,
+    My singing's one refrain--
+Are there for her no tidings from the height?
+  For her, my solace, likewise lost and far,
+  Islanded with me here, on this lone star
+    Washed by the ceaseless tides of dark and light.
+
+What shall it profit, that I built for her
+    A little wayside shelter from the stark
+    Sky that we hear, and mark?
+Lo, in her eyes all dreams that ever were!
+  And cheek-to-cheek with me she shares the quest,
+  Her heart, as mine for her, sole tented rest
+    From light to light of day; from dark--till Dark.
+
+Yea, but for her, how should I greatly care
+    Whither and whence? But that the dark should blast
+    Our bright! To hold her fast,--
+Yet feel this dread creep gray along the air.
+  To know I cannot hold her so my own,
+  But under surge of joy, the surges moan
+    That threaten us with parting at the last!
+
+Beautiful Mother, I am not thy son.
+    I know from echoes far behind the sky.
+    I know; I know not why.
+Even from thy golden, wide oblivion:
+Thy careless leave to help thy harvesting,
+  Thy leave to work a little, live, and sing;
+  Thy leave to suffer--yea, to sing and die,
+    Beautiful Mother! ...
+                 Ah, Whose child am I?
+
+
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair,
+And out into the darkness and the dew;
+And bowed myself unto the little grass,
+And the blind herbs, and the unshapen dust
+Of earth without a face. So let me be._
+
+_For as I hear, the singing makes of me
+My own desire, and momently I grow.
+Yea, all the while with hands of melody,
+The singing makes me, out of what I was,
+Even as a potter shaping Eden clay._
+
+_Ever Love sings, and saith in words that sing,
+'Beloved, thus art thou; and even so
+Lovely art thou, Beloved!'--Even so,
+As the Sea weaves her path before the light,
+I hear, I hear, and I am glorified._
+
+_Love sang to me, and I am glorified
+Because of some commandment in the stars.
+And I shall grow in favour and in shining,
+Till at the last I am all-beautiful;
+Beautiful, for the day Love sings no more._
+
+
+
+
+THE FEASTER
+
+
+Oh, who will hush that cry outside the doors,
+  While we are glad within?
+Go forth, go forth, all you my servitors;
+  (And gather close, my kin.)
+Go out to her. Tell her we keep a feast,--
+  Lost Loveliness who will not sit her down
+    Though we implore.
+It is her silence binds me unreleased,
+  It is her silence that no flute can drown,
+    It is her moonlit silence at the door,
+Wide as the whiteness, but a fire on high
+  That frights my heart with an immortal Cry,
+    Calling me evermore.
+
+Louder, you viols;--louder, O my harp;
+  Let me not hear her voice;
+And drown her keener silence, silver-sharp,
+  With waves of golden noise!
+For she is wise as Eden, even mute,
+  To search my spirit through the deep and height
+        Again, again.
+Outpierce her with your singing, dawnlike flute;
+  And you, gloom over, viols of the night
+     With colors lost in umber,--with sweet pain
+Of richest world's desire,--prevail, sing down
+  All memory with pleading, so you drown
+    Her merciless refrain!
+
+Oh, can you not with music, nor with din,
+    Save me the stress and stir
+In my lone spirit, throned among my kin,
+    From that same voice of her?--
+The never ending query she hath had
+  Only to wake my Soul, and only then
+    Wake it to weep?
+With '_Why?_' and '_Art thou happy? Art thou glad?
+  And hast thou fellowship with fellow-men?_'
+  So, through my mirth and underneath my sleep;
+Her voice,--abysmal hunger unfulfilled;--
+The calling, calling, never to be stilled,--
+    Calling of deep to deep.
+
+But I have that shall fill this wound of mine,
+    Since Loveliness must be;--
+Since Loveliness must save us, or we pine
+    And perish utterly.
+All that the years have left us, undismayed
+  Of age or death; and happier fair than truth,
+    --When truth is fair!
+Shapes of immortal sweetness, to persuade
+  Iron and fire and marble to their youth;
+Wild graces trapped from the three kingdoms' lair
+  Of wildest Beauty; shadow and smile and hush;
+    --Fleet color, of a daybreak, of a blush,
+        For my sad soul to wear!
+
+Let April fade! For me, unfading bloom!...
+      The little fruitless seed
+Deep sown of fire within the midmost gloom,
+      A sterner fire to feed:--
+The rainbow, frozen in a lasting dew;
+  Green-gazing emerald, fresh as grass beneath
+        The placid rose.
+Fair pearl, and you, fair pearl, and you and you,
+  Rained from the moon, and kissing in a wreath,
+    As moment unto eager moment goes!
+Look back at me, you sapphires blue and wise
+With farthest twilight, blue resplendent eyes
+      That never weep, nor close.
+
+O house me, glories! Give me house and home
+      Here for my homelessness.
+Set forth for me the wine, the honeycomb
+      Whereto desire saith 'Yes!'
+O Senses, weave me from all lovely dust
+  Some home-array, some fair familiar garb
+        For me, exiled.
+Charm me some rare anointment I may trust
+  Against her query, searching like a barb
+    The dumbness of a heart unreconciled.
+Clothe me with silver; fold me from dismay;
+  Save me from pity. For I hear her say,
+      'Alas, Alas, poor child!'
+
+'Alas, Alas, thou lost poor child, how long?
+      Why wilt thou suffer want?
+Why must I hear thy weeping through thy song,
+      And see thine eyes grow gaunt?
+Making sad feast upon the crumbs of light
+  Shed long ago from heavenly highways where
+        Thy brethren are!
+And thy heart smoulders in thee, to be bright,
+  Thy one sole refuge from thy one despair,
+    Fraying the thwarted body with a scar.
+How long, before thine eyelids, desolate,
+How long shall this thy dark dominion wait
+        For thee, belated Star?'
+
+
+
+_Belovèd, if the Moon could weep,
+    Or if the Sun could see
+How all these weltering alleys keep
+    Their outcast treasury!_
+
+_O bitter, bitter-sweet!--
+Beauty of babyhood,--
+Earth's wistful uttermost of good
+Flung out upon the street;
+Fouled, even as the highways would,
+With mirk and mire and bruise;
+The cheek more petal-fine
+Than rose before a shrine!
+Those hands like star-fish in the ooze,
+And fingers fain to cling
+To any stronger thing!
+And smiles, for one triumphal Gift,
+Should one lean down, and lift!
+And tendril hair;--O in such wise,
+With wild lights aureoled,
+The morning-glories twine and hold,
+In some far paradise!_
+
+_Oh well and deep, the foul ways keep
+    Lost treasure hid from day!--
+Sun may not see: but only we,
+    Who look; and look away._
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES
+
+
+The winds are lashing on the sea;
+  The roads are blind with storm.
+And it's far and far away with me;
+  So bide you there, stay warm.
+It's forth I must, and forth to-day;
+  And I have no path to choose.
+The highway hill, it is my way still.--
+  Give me my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me on that first day
+  I knew that I was young.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north;
+  And I heard the Songs unsung._
+
+This cloak is worn too threadbare thin,
+  But ah, how weatherwise!
+This girdle serves to bind it in;
+  What heed of wondering eyes?--
+And yet beside, I wear one pride
+  --Too bright, think you, to use?--
+That I must wear, and still keep fair.--
+  Give here my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me, on that first day
+  I heard the Stars all chime.
+And I looked forth far, from road to star;
+  And I knew it was far to climb._
+
+They would buy me house and hearth, no doubt,
+  And the mirth to spend and share;
+Could I sell that gift, and go without,
+  Or wear--what neighbors wear.
+But take my staff, my purse, my scrip;
+  For I have one thing to choose.
+For you,--Godspeed! May you soothe your need.
+  For me, my golden shoes!
+
+_He gave them me, that far, first day
+  When I heard all Songs unsung.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north.
+  God saw that I was young!_
+
+
+
+
+NOON AT PÆSTUM
+
+Lord of the Sea, we sun-filled creatures raise
+  Our hands among the clamorous weeds,--we too.
+  Lord of the Sun, and of the upper blue,
+Of all To-morrow, and all yesterdays,
+Here, where the thousand broken names and ways
+  Of worship are but shards we wandered through,
+  There is no gift to offer, or undo;
+There is no prayer left in us, only praise.
+
+Only to glory in this glory here,
+  Through the dead smoke of myriad sacrifice;--
+To look through these blue spaces, blind and clear
+  Even as the seaward gaze of Homer's eyes;
+And from uplifted heart, and cup, to pour
+Wine to the Unknown God.--We ask no more.
+
+
+
+
+VESTAL FLAME
+
+Light, light,--the last:
+Till the night be done,
+Keep the watch for stars and sun, and eyelids over-cast.
+
+Once there seemed a sky,
+Brooding over men.
+Now no stars have come again, since their bright good-bye!
+
+Once my dreams were wise.
+Now I nothing know;
+Fasting and the dark have so put out my heart's eyes.
+
+But thy golden breath
+Burns against my cheek.
+I can feel and love, and seek all the rune it saith.
+
+Do not thou be spent,
+Holy thing of fire,--
+Only hope of heart's desire dulled with wonderment!
+
+While there bide these two
+Hands to bar the wind;
+Though such fingers chill and thinned, shed no roses through.
+
+While this body bends
+Only for thy guard;
+Like a tower, to ward and worship all the light it sends.
+
+It is not for fear
+Lest there ring some cry
+On the midnight, 'Rise and come. Lo, the Bridegroom near!'
+
+It is not for pride,
+To be shining fair
+In a wedding-garment there, lighting home the Bride.
+
+It is not to win
+Love, for hoarded toil,
+From those poor, with their spent oil, weeping, 'Light us in!'--
+
+No; but in despite
+Of all vigils set,
+Do I bind me to thee yet,--strangest thing of Light!
+
+Only, all, for thee
+Whatsoe'er thou art,
+Smiling through the blinded heart, things it cannot see.
+
+Very Soul's Desire,
+Take my life; and live
+By the rapture thine doth give, ecstasy of fire!
+
+Hold thy golden breath!
+For I feel,--not hear--
+Spent with joy and fear to lose thee, all the song it saith.
+
+Light, light, my own:
+Do not thou disown
+Thy poor keeper-of-the-light, for Light's sake alone.
+
+
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand
+Between us two the while, with others near.
+Mine questioned thine with 'Why should I be here?'
+'Yet bide thou here,' said thine, 'and understand.'_
+
+_And mine was mute; but strove not then to go;
+And hid itself, and murmured, 'Do not hear
+The listening in my heart!' Said thine, 'My Dear,
+I will not hear it, ever. But I know.'_
+
+_Said mine to thine: 'Let be. Now will I go!--
+For you are saying,--you who do not speak,
+This hand-in-hand is one day cheek-to-cheek!'
+And said thy hand around me, 'Even so.'_
+
+_Then mine to thine.--'Yea, I have been alone;
+--Yet happy.--This is strange. This is not I!
+You hold me, but you can not tell me why.'
+And said thy hand to mine again, 'My Own.'_
+
+
+
+
+THE PROPHET
+
+
+All day long he kept the sheep:--
+  Far and early, from the crowd,
+On the hills from steep to steep,
+  Where the silence cried aloud;
+  And the shadow of the cloud
+Wrapt him in a noonday sleep.
+
+Where he dipped the water's cool,
+  Filling boyish hands from thence,
+Something breathed across the pool
+  Stir of sweet enlightenments;
+  And he drank, with thirsty sense,
+Till his heart was brimmed and full.
+
+Still, the hovering Voice unshed,
+  And the Vision unbeheld,
+And the mute sky overhead,
+  And his longing, still withheld!
+  --Even when the two tears welled,
+Salt, upon that lonely bread.
+
+Vaguely blessèd in the leaves,
+  Dim-companioned in the sun,
+Eager mornings, wistful eves,
+  Very hunger drew him on;
+  And To-morrow ever shone
+With the glow the sunset weaves.
+
+Even so, to that young heart,
+  Words and hands, and Men were dear;
+And the stir of lane and mart
+  After daylong vigil here.
+  Sunset called, and he drew near,
+Still to find his path apart.
+
+When the Bell, with gentle tongue,
+  Called the herd-bells home again,
+Through the purple shades he swung,
+  Down the mountain, through the glen;
+  Towards the sound of fellow-men,--
+Even from the light that clung.
+
+Dimly too, as cloud on cloud,
+  Came that silent flock of his:
+Thronging whiteness, in a crowd,
+  After homing twos and threes;
+  With the thronging memories
+Of all white things dreamed and vowed.
+
+Through the fragrances, alone,
+  By the sudden-silent brook,
+From the open world unknown,
+  To the close of speech and book;
+  There to find the foreign look
+In the faces of his own.
+
+Sharing was beyond his skill;
+  Shyly yet, he made essay:
+Sought to dip, and share, and fill
+  Heart's-desire, from day to day.
+  But their eyes, some foreign way,
+Looked at him; and he was still.
+
+Last, he reached his arms to sleep,
+  Where the Vision waited, dim,
+Still beyond some deep-on-deep.
+  And the darkness folded him,
+  Eager heart and weary limb.--
+All day long, he kept the sheep.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG LANE
+
+
+All through the summer night, down the long lane in flower,
+      The moon-white lane,
+All through the summer night,--dim as a shower,
+      Glimmer and fade the Twain:
+Over the cricket hosts, throbbing the hour by hour,
+      Young voices bloom and wane.
+
+Down the long lane they go, and past one window, pale
+      With visions silver-blurred;
+Stirring the heart that waits,--the eyes that fail
+      After a spring deferred.
+Query, and hush, and Ah!--dim through a moon-lit veil,
+      The same one word.
+
+Down the long lane, entwined with all the fragrance there;
+      The lane in flower somehow
+With youth, and plighted hands, and star-strewn air,
+      And muted 'Thee' and 'Thou':--
+All the wild bloom and reach of dreams that never were,
+      --Never to be, now.
+
+So, in the throbbing dark, where ebbs the old refrain,
+      A starved heart hears.
+And silver-bright, and silver-blurred again
+      With moonlight and with tears.
+All the long night they go, down the long summer lane,
+      The long, long years.
+
+
+
+_Ah but, Belovèd, men may do
+All things to music;--march, and die;
+And wear the longest vigil through,
+      ... And say good-by.
+All things to music!--Ah, but where
+Peace never falls upon the air;--
+These city-ways of dark and din
+Where greed has shut and barred them in!
+And thundering, swart against the sky,
+That whirlwind,--never to go by--
+  Of tracks and wheels, that overhead
+Beat back the senses with their roar
+And menace of undying war,--
+  War--war--for daily bread!_
+
+_All things to silence! Ah, but where
+Men dwell not, but must make a lair;--
+And Sorrow may not sit alone,
+Nor Love hear music of its own;
+And Thought that strives to breast that sea
+Must struggle even for memory.
+Day-long, night-long,--besieging din
+To thrust all pain the deeper in!--
+And drown the flutter of first-breath;
+And batter at the doors of Death.
+To lull their dearest:--watch their dead;
+While the long thunders overhead,
+Gather and break for evermore,
+Eternal tides--eternal War,
+  War--war--Bread--bread!_
+
+
+
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK
+
+
+Brook, of the listening grass,
+Brook of the sun-fleckt wings,
+Brook of the same wild way and flickering spell!
+Must you begone? Will you forever pass,
+After so many years and dear to tell?--
+Brook of all hoverings ...
+Brook that I kneel above;
+Brook of my love.
+
+Ah, but I have a charm to trouble you;
+A spell that shall subdue
+Your all-escaping heart, unheedful one
+And unremembering!
+Now, when I make my prayer
+To your wild brightness there
+That will but run and run,
+O mindless Water!--
+Hark,--now will I bring
+A grace as wild,--my little yearling daughter,
+My Alison.
+
+Heed well that threat;
+And tremble for your hill-born liberty
+So bright to see!--
+Your shadow-dappled way, unthwarted yet,
+And the high hills whence all your dearness bubbled;--
+You, never to possess!
+For let her dip but once--O fair and fleet,--
+Here in your shallows, yes,
+Here in your silverness
+Her two blithe feet,--
+O Brook of mine, how shall your heart be troubled!
+
+The heart, the bright unmothering heart of you,
+That never knew.--
+(O never, more than mine of long ago.
+How could we know?--)
+For who should guess
+The shock and smiting of that perfectness?--
+The lily-thrust of those ecstatic feet
+Unpityingly sweet?--
+Sweet beyond all the blurred blind dreams that grope
+The upward paths of hope?
+And who could guess
+The dulcet holiness,
+The lilt and gladness of those jocund feet,
+Unpityingly sweet?
+Ah, for your coolness that shall change and stir
+With every glee of her!--
+Under the fresh amaze
+That drips and glistens from her wiles and ways;
+When the endearing air
+That everywhere
+Must twine and fold and follow her, shall be
+Rippled to ring on ring of melody,--
+Music, like shadows from the joy of her,
+Small starry Reveller!--
+When from her triumphings,--
+All frolic wings--
+There soars beyond the glories of the height,
+The laugh of her delight!
+
+And it shall sound, until
+Your heart stand still;
+Shaken to human sight;
+Struck through with tears and light;
+One with the one desire
+Unto that central Fire
+Of Love the Sun, whence all we lighted are
+Even from clod to star.
+
+And all your glory, O most swift and sweet!--
+And all your exultation only this;
+To be the lowly and forgotten kiss
+Beneath those feet.
+
+You that must ever pass,--
+You of the same wild way,--
+The silver-bright good-bye without a look!--
+You that would never stay,
+For the beseeching grass ...
+Brook!--
+
+
+
+_You, Four Walls,
+  Wall not in my heart!
+When the lovely night-time falls
+  All so welcomely,
+Blinding, sweet hearth-fire,
+Light of heart's desire,
+  Blind not, blind not me!
+Unto them that weep apart,--
+While you glow, within,
+  Wreckt, despairing kin,--
+Dark with misery:
+--Do not blind my heart!_
+
+  _You, close Heart!
+    Never hide from mine
+    Worlds that I divine
+  Through thy human dearness.
+  O belovèd Nearness,
+    Hallow all I understand
+    With thy hand-in-hand;--
+  All the lights I seek,
+  With thy cheek-to-cheek;
+    All the loveliness I loved apart._
+
+    _You, heart's Home!--
+    Wall not in my heart._
+
+
+
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE
+
+
+I
+
+Over the broken world, the dark gone by,
+Horror of outcast darkness torn with wars;
+And timeless agony
+Of the white fire, heaped high by blinded Stars,
+Unfaltering, unaghast;--
+Out of the midmost Fire
+At last,--at last,--
+Cry! ...
+O darkness' one desire,--
+O darkness, have you heard?--
+Black Chaos, blindly striving towards the Word?
+--The Cry!
+
+Behold thy conqueror, Death!
+Behold, behold from whom
+It flutters forth, that triumph of First-Breath,
+Victorious one that can but breathe and cling,--
+This pulsing flower,--this weaker than a wing,
+Halcyon thing!--
+Cradled above unfathomable doom.
+
+
+II
+
+Under my feet, O Death,
+Under my trembling feet!
+Back, through the gates of hell, now give me way.
+I come.--I bring new Breath!
+Over the trampled shards of mine own clay,
+That smoulder still, and burn,
+Lo, I return!
+Hail, singing Light that floats
+Pulsing with chorused motes:--
+Hail to thee, Sun, that lookest on all lands!
+And take thou from my weak undying hands,
+A precious thing, unblemished, undefiled:--
+Here, on my heart uplift,
+Behold the Gift,--
+Thy glory and my glory, and my child!
+
+
+III
+
+(_And our eyes were opened; eyes that had been holden.
+  And I saw the world, and the fruits thereof.
+And I saw their glories, scarlet-stained and golden,
+  All a crumbled dust beneath the feet of Love.
+  And I saw their dreams, all of nothing worth;
+  But a path for Love, for Him to walk above,
+And I saw new heaven, and new earth._)
+
+
+IV
+
+    The grass is full of murmurs;
+    The sky is full of wings;
+        The earth is full of breath.
+        With voices, choir on choir
+        With tongues of fire,
+    They sing how Life out-sings--
+        Out-numbers Death.
+
+
+V
+
+Who are these that fly;
+As doves, and as doves to the windows?
+Doves, like hovering dreams round Love that slumbereth;
+Silvering clouds blown by,
+Doves and doves to the windows,--
+Warm through the radiant sky their wings beat breath.
+They are the world's new-born:
+Doves, doves to the windows!
+Lighting, as flakes of snow;
+Lighting, as flakes of flame;
+Some to the fair sown furrows;
+Some to the huts and burrows
+Choked of the mire and thorn,--
+Deep in the city's shame.
+Wind-scattered wreaths they go,
+Doves, and doves, to the windows;
+Some for worshipping arms, to shelter and fold, and shrine;
+Some to be torn and trodden,
+Withered and waste, and sodden;
+Pitiful, sacred leaves from Life's dishonored vine.
+
+
+VI
+
+O Vine of Life, that in these reaching fingers,
+Urges a sunward way!
+Hold here and climb, and halt not, that there lingers
+So far outstripped, my halting, wistful clay.
+Make here thy foothold of my rapturous heart,--
+Yea, though the tendrils start
+To hold and twine!
+I am the heart that nursed
+Thy sunward thirst.--
+A little while, a little while, O Vine,
+My own and never mine,
+Feed thy sweet roots with me
+Abundantly.
+O wonder-wildness of the pushing Bud
+With hunger at the flood,
+Climb on, and seek, and spurn.
+Let my dull spirit learn
+To follow with its longing, as it may,
+While thou seek higher day.--
+But thou, the reach of my own heart's desire,
+Be free as fire!
+Still climb and cling; and so
+Outstrip,--outgrow.
+
+O Vine of Life, my own and not my own,
+So far am I outgrown!
+High as I may, I lift thee, Soul's Desire.
+--Lift thou me higher.
+
+
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman, whom I meet
+On all the highways,--every brimming street,
+Lady Demeter, is it thou, grown gaunt
+With work and want?
+At last, and with what shamed and stricken eyes,
+I see through thy disguise
+Of drudge and Exile,--even the holy boon
+That silvers yonder in the Harvest-moon;--
+That dimly under glows
+The furrows of thy worn immortal face,
+With mother-grace._
+
+_O Queen and Burden-bearer, what of those
+To whom thou gavest the lily and the rose
+Of thy far youth?... For whom,
+Out of the wondrous loom
+Of thine enduring body, thou didst make
+Garments of beauty, cunningly adorned,
+But only for Death's sake!
+Largess of life, but to lie waste and scorned.--
+Could not such cost of pain,
+Nor daily utmost of thy toil prevail?--
+But they must fade, and pale,
+And wither from thy desolated throne?--
+And still no Summer give thee back again
+Thine own?_
+
+_Lady of Sorrows,--Mother,--Drudge august.
+Behold me in the dust._
+
+
+
+
+GLADNESS
+
+
+Unto my Gladness then I cried:
+    'I will not be denied!
+Answer me now; and tell me why
+Thou dost not fall, as a broken star
+Out of the Dark where such things are,
+  And where such bright things die.
+How canst thou, with thy fountain dance
+Shatter clear sight with radiance?--
+How canst thou reach and soar, and fling,
+Over my heart's dark shuddering,
+Unearthly lights on everything?
+What dost thou see? What dost thou know?'
+My Gladness said to me, bowed below,
+'Gladness I am: created so.'
+
+'And dare'st thou, in my mortal veins
+Sing, with the Spring's descending rains?
+While in this hour, and momently,
+Forth of myself I look, and see
+Torn treasure of my heart's Desire;
+And human glories in the mire,
+That should make glad some paradise!--
+The childhood strewn in foulest place,
+The girlhood, plundered of its grace;
+The eyelids shut upon spent eyes
+That never looked upon thy face!
+Answer me, thou, if answer be!'
+
+        My Gladness said to me:
+'Weep if thou wilt; yea, weep, and doubt.
+I may not let the Sun go out.'
+
+Then to my Gladness still I cried:
+        'And how canst thou abide?--'
+Here, where my listening heart must hark
+These sorrows rising from the Dark
+Where still they starve, and strive and die,
+Who bear each heaviest penalty
+Of humanhood;--nor grasp, nor guess,
+The garment's hem of happiness!--
+The spear-wound throbbing in my song,
+It throbs more bitterly than wrong,--
+It burns more wildly than despair,--
+The will to share,
+The will to share!
+Little I knew,--the blind-fold I,--
+Joy would become like agony,--
+Like arrows of the Sun in me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hold thee here. I have thee, now,--
+And I am human. But what art thou!'
+
+        My Gladness answered me:
+'Wayfarer, wilt thou understand?--
+Follow me on. And keep my hand.'
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD
+
+
+Yes, Nightingale, through all the summer-time
+  We followed on, from moon to golden moon;
+  From where Salerno day-dreams in the noon,
+And the far rose of Pæstum once did climb.
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,
+Through sun-shrill vines and campanile chime,
+  We listened;--from the old year to the new.
+    Brown bird, and where were you?
+
+You, that Ravello lured not, throned on high
+  And filled with singing out of sun-burned throats!
+  Nor yet Minore of the flame-sailed boats;
+Nor yet--of all bird-song should glorify--
+  Assisi, Little Portion of the blest,
+Assisi, in the bosom of the sky,
+  Where God's own singer thatched his sunward nest;
+    That little, heavenliest!
+
+And north and north, to where the hedge-rows are,
+  That beckon with white looks an endless way;
+  Where, through the fair wet silverness of May,
+A lamb shines out as sudden as a star,
+  Among the cloudy sheep; and green, and pale,
+The may-trees reach and glimmer, near or far,
+  And the red may-trees wear a shining veil.
+    --And still, no nightingale!
+
+The one vain longing,--through all journeyings,
+  The one: in every hushed and hearkening spot,--
+  All the soft-swarming dark where you were not,
+Still longed for! Yes, for sake of dreams and wings,
+  And wonders, that your own must ever make
+To bower you close, with all hearts' treasurings;
+  And for that speech toward which all hearts do ache;--
+        Even for Music's sake.
+But most, his music whose belovèd name
+  Forever writ in water of bright tears,
+  Wins to one grave-side even the Roman years,
+That kindle there the hallowed April flame
+  Of comfort-breathing violets. By that shrine
+Of Youth, Love, Death, forevermore the same,
+  Violets still!--When falls, to leave no sign,
+        The arch of Constantine.
+
+Most for his sake we dreamed. Tho' not as he,
+  From that lone spirit, brimmed with human woe,
+  Your song once shook to surging overflow.
+How was it, sovran dweller of the tree,
+  His cry, still throbbing in the flooded shell
+Of silence with remembered melody,
+  Could draw from you no answer to the spell?
+        --O Voice, O Philomel?
+
+Long time we wondered (and we knew not why):--
+  Nor dream, nor prayer, of wayside gladness born,
+  Nor vineyards waiting, nor reproachful thorn,
+Nor yet the nested hill-towns set so high
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,--
+Nor olives, gray against a golden sky,
+  Could serve to wake that rapturous voice of you!
+        But the wise silence knew.
+
+O Nightingale unheard!--Unheard alone,
+  Throughout that woven music of the days
+  From the faint sea-rim to the market-place,
+And ring of hammers on cathedral stone!--
+  So be it, better so: that there should fail
+For sun-filled ones, one blessèd thing unknown.
+  To them, be hid forever,--and all hail!
+        Sing never, Nightingale.
+
+Sing, for the others! Sing; to some pale cheek
+  Against the window, like a starving flower.
+  Loose, with your singing, one poor pilgrim hour
+Of journey, with some Heart's Desire to seek.
+  Loose, with your singing, captives such as these
+In misery and iron, hearts too meek,
+  For voyage--voyage over dreamful seas
+        To lost Hesperides.
+
+Sing not for free-men. Ah, but sing for whom
+  The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade,
+The windows take no heed of light nor shade,--
+The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom.
+  Sing near! So in that golden overflowing
+They may forget their wasted human bloom;
+  Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing.--
+        Reck not of life's bright going!
+
+Sing not for lovers, side by side that hark;
+  Nor unto parted lovers, save they be
+  Parted indeed by more than makes the Sea.
+Where never hope shall meet--like mounting lark--
+  Far Joy's uprising; and no memories
+Abide to star the music-haunted dark:
+  To them that sit in darkness, such as these,
+        Pour down, pour down heart's-ease.
+
+Not in kings' gardens. No; but where there haunt
+  The world's forgotten, both of men and birds;
+The alleys of no hope and of no words,
+The hidings where men reap not, though they plant;
+But toil and thirst--so dying and so born;--
+And toil and thirst to gather to their want,
+  From the lean waste, beyond the daylight's scorn,
+        --To gather grapes of thorn!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And for those two, your pilgrims without tears,
+  Who prayed a largess where there was no dearth,
+Forgive it to their human-happy ears:
+  Forgive it them, brown music of the Earth,
+  Unknowing,--though the wiser silence knew!
+Forgive it to the music of the spheres
+  That while they walked together so, the Two
+        Together,--heard not you.
+
+
+
+
+_ENVOI_
+
+_Belovèd, till the day break,
+  Leave wide the little door;
+And bless, to lack and longing,
+  Our brimming more-and-more._
+
+_Is love a scanted portion,
+  That we should hoard thereof?--
+Oh, call unto the deserts,
+  Belovèd and my Love!_
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14531 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14531 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14531)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The Singing Man
+       A Book of Songs and Shadows
+
+Author: Josephine Preston Peabody
+
+Release Date: December 30, 2004 [EBook #14531]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SINGING MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Amy Cunningham and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+A Book of Songs and
+Shadows
+
+
+By JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+_BOSTON_ and _NEW YORK_
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1911
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY JOSEPHINE PEABODY MARKS
+
+_Published November 1911_
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Thanks are especially due to the editors of The American Magazine,
+Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers,
+for their courteous permission to reprint certain of the poems included
+in this volume.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+We make our songs as we must, from fragments of the joy and sorrow of
+living. What Life itself may be, we cannot know till all men share the
+chance to know.
+
+Until the day of some more equal portion, there is no human brightness
+unhaunted by this black shadow: the thought of those unnumbered who pay
+all the heavier cost of life, to live and die without knowledge that
+there is any Joy of Living.
+
+No song could face such blackness, but for the will to share, and for
+hope of the day of sharing.
+
+Upon that hope and that mindfulness, the poems in this book are linked
+together.
+
+J.P.M.
+
+4 October, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN                                    3
+
+THE TREES                                         15
+
+_O, do you remember? How it came to be?_          21
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN                                23
+
+_But we did walk in Eden_                         29
+
+THE FOUNDLING                                     31
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair_      35
+
+THE FEASTER                                       37
+
+_Belovèd, if the moon could weep_                 43
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES                                  45
+
+NOON AT PÆSTUM                                    47
+
+VESTAL FLAME                                      48
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand_   51
+
+THE PROPHET                                       53
+
+THE LONG LANE                                     56
+
+_Ah but, Belovèd, men may do_                     59
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK                      61
+
+_You, Four Walls, wall not in my heart!_          65
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE                              67
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman whom I meet_           73
+
+GLADNESS                                          75
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD                           81
+
+_Envoi_                                           87
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+AN ODE OF THE PORTION OF LABOR
+
+
+'_The profit of the Earth is for all._'
+--ECCLESIASTES.
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+
+I
+
+He sang above the vineyards of the world.
+  And after him the vines with woven hands
+Clambered and clung, and everywhere unfurled
+  Triumphing green above the barren lands;
+Till high as gardens grow, he climbed, he stood,
+  Sun-crowned with life and strength, and singing toil,
+And looked upon his work; and it was good:
+        The corn, the wine, the oil.
+
+He sang above the noon. The topmost cleft
+  That grudged him footing on the mountain scars
+He planted and despaired not; till he left
+  His vines soft breathing to the host of stars.
+He wrought, he tilled; and even as he sang,
+  The creatures of his planting laughed to scorn
+The ancient threat of deserts where there sprang
+        The wine, the oil, the corn!
+
+He sang not for abundance.--Over-lords
+  Took of his tilth. Yet was there still to reap,
+The portion of his labor; dear rewards
+  Of sunlit day, and bread, and human sleep.
+He sang for strength; for glory of the light.
+  He dreamed above the furrows, 'They are mine!'
+When all he wrought stood fair before his sight
+        With corn, and oil, and wine.
+
+    _Truly, the light is sweet
+      Yea, and a pleasant thing
+        It is to see the Sun.
+    And that a man should eat
+        His bread that he hath won;--
+    (So is it sung and said),
+      That he should take and keep,
+        After his laboring,
+    The portion of his labor in his bread,
+      His bread that he hath won;
+      Yea, and in quiet sleep,
+        When all is done._
+
+He sang; above the burden and the heat,
+  Above all seasons with their fitful grace;
+Above the chance and change that led his feet
+  To this last ambush of the Market-place.
+'Enough for him,' they said--and still they say--
+  'A crust, with air to breathe, and sun to shine;
+He asks no more!'--Before they took away
+        The corn, the oil, the wine.
+
+He sang. No more he sings now, anywhere.
+  Light was enough, before he was undone.
+They knew it well, who took away the air,
+  --Who took away the sun;
+Who took, to serve their soul-devouring greed,
+  Himself, his breath, his bread--the goad of toil;--
+Who have and hold, before the eyes of Need,
+        The corn, the wine,--the oil!
+
+      _Truly, one thing is sweet
+      Of things beneath the Sun;
+This, that a man should earn his bread and eat,
+  Rejoicing in his work which he hath done.
+      What shall be sung or said
+        Of desolate deceit.
+      When others take his bread;
+      His and his children's bread?--
+      And the laborer hath none.
+This, for his portion now, of all that he hath done.
+      He earns; and others eat.
+    He starves;--they sit at meat
+      Who have taken away the Sun._
+
+
+II
+
+Seek him now, that singing Man.
+Look for him,
+Look for him
+In the mills,
+In the mines;
+Where the very daylight pines,--
+He, who once did walk the hills!
+You shall find him, if you scan
+Shapes all unbefitting Man,
+Bodies warped, and faces dim.
+In the mines; in the mills
+Where the ceaseless thunder fills
+Spaces of the human brain
+Till all thought is turned to pain.
+Where the skirl of wheel on wheel,
+Grinding him who is their tool,
+Makes the shattered senses reel
+To the numbness of the fool.
+Perisht thought, and halting tongue
+(Once it spoke;--once it sung!)
+Live to hunger, dead to song.
+Only heart-beats loud with wrong
+Hammer on,--_How long_?
+... _How long_?--_How long_?
+
+Search for him;
+Search for him;
+Where the crazy atoms swim
+Up the fiery furnace-blast.
+You shall find him, at the last,--
+He whose forehead braved the sun,--
+Wreckt and tortured and undone.
+Where no breath across the heat
+Whispers him that life was sweet;
+But the sparkles mock and flare,
+Scattering up the crooked air.
+(Blackened with that bitter mirk,--
+Would God know His handiwork?)
+
+Thought is not for such as he;
+Naught but strength, and misery;
+Since, for just the bite and sup,
+Life must needs be swallowed up.
+Only, reeling up the sky,
+Hurtling flames that hurry by,
+Gasp and flare, with _Why_--_Why_,
+... _Why_?...
+
+Why the human mind of him
+Shrinks, and falters and is dim
+When he tries to make it out:
+What the torture is about.--
+Why he breathes, a fugitive
+Whom the World forbids to live.
+Why he earned for his abode,
+Habitation of the toad!
+Why his fevered day by day
+Will not serve to drive away
+Horror that must always haunt:--
+... _Want_ ... _Want_!
+Nightmare shot with waking pangs;--
+Tightening coil, and certain fangs,
+Close and closer, always nigh ...
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+Why he labors under ban
+That denies him for a man.
+Why his utmost drop of blood
+Buys for him no human good;
+Why his utmost urge of strength
+Only lets Them starve at length;--
+Will not let him starve alone;
+He must watch, and see his own
+Fade and fail, and starve, and die.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heart-beats, in a hammering song,
+Heavy as an ox may plod,
+Goaded--goaded--faint with wrong,
+Cry unto some ghost of God
+... _How long_?... _How long_?
+.......... _How long_?
+
+
+III
+
+Seek him yet. Search for him!
+You shall find him, spent and grim;
+In the prisons, where we pen
+These unsightly shards of men.
+Sheltered fast;
+Housed at length;
+Clothed and fed, no matter how!--
+Where the householders, aghast,
+Measure in his broken strength
+Nought but power for evil, now.
+Beast-of-burden drudgeries
+Could not earn him what was his:
+He who heard the world applaud
+Glories seized by force and fraud,
+He must break,--he must take!--
+Both for hate and hunger's sake.
+He must seize by fraud and force;
+He must strike, without remorse!
+Seize he might; but never keep.
+Strike, his once!--Behold him here.
+(Human life we buy so cheap,
+Who should know we held it dear?)
+
+No denial,--no defence
+From a brain bereft of sense,
+Any more than penitence.
+But the heart-beats now, that plod
+Goaded--goaded--dumb with wrong,
+Ask not even a ghost of God
+............._How long_?
+
+    _When the Sea gives up its dead,
+    Prison caverns, yield instead
+    This, rejected and despised;
+    This, the Soiled and Sacrificed!
+    Without form or comeliness;
+    Shamed for us that did transgress;
+    Bruised, for our iniquities,
+    With the stripes that are all his!
+    Face that wreckage, you who can.
+    It was once the Singing Man._
+
+
+IV
+
+Must it be?--Must we then
+Render back to God again
+This His broken work, this thing,
+For His man that once did sing?
+Will not all our wonders do?
+Gifts we stored the ages through,
+(Trusting that He had forgot)--
+Gifts the Lord requirèd not?
+
+Would the all-but-human serve!
+Monsters made of stone and nerve;
+Towers to threaten and defy
+Curse or blessing of the sky;
+Shafts that blot the stars with smoke;
+Lightnings harnessed under yoke;
+Sea-things, air-things, wrought with steel,
+That may smite, and fly, and feel!
+Oceans calling each to each;
+Hostile hearts, with kindred speech.
+Every work that Titans can;
+Every marvel: save a man,
+Who might rule without a sword.--
+    Is a man more precious, Lord?
+
+Can it be?--Must we then
+Render back to Thee again
+Million, million wasted men?
+Men, of flickering human breath,
+Only made for life and death?
+
+Ah, but see the sovereign Few,
+Highly favored, that remain!
+These, the glorious residue,
+Of the cherished race of Cain.
+These, the magnates of the age,
+High above the human wage,
+Who have numbered and possesst
+All the portion of the rest!
+
+What are all despairs and shames,
+What the mean, forgotten names
+Of the thousand more or less,
+For one surfeit of success?
+
+For those dullest lives we spent,
+Take these Few magnificent!
+For that host of blotted ones,
+Take these glittering central suns.
+Few;--but how their lustre thrives
+On the million broken lives!
+Splendid, over dark and doubt,
+For a million souls gone out!
+These, the holders of our hoard,--
+    Wilt thou not accept them, Lord?
+
+
+V
+
+Oh, in the wakening thunders of the heart,
+--The small lost Eden, troubled through the night,
+Sounds there not now,--forboded and apart,
+        Some voice and sword of light?
+Some voice and portent of a dawn to break?--
+  Searching like God, the ruinous human shard
+Of that lost Brother-man Himself did make,
+        And Man himself hath marred?
+
+It sounds!--And may the anguish of that birth
+  Seize on the world; and may all shelters fail,
+Till we behold new Heaven and new Earth
+        Through the rent Temple-vail!
+When the high-tides that threaten near and far
+  To sweep away our guilt before the sky,--
+Flooding the waste of this dishonored Star,
+        Cleanse, and o'erwhelm, and cry!--
+
+Cry, from the deep of world-accusing waves,
+  With longing more than all since Light began,
+Above the nations,--underneath the graves,--
+        'Give back the Singing Man!'
+
+
+
+
+THE TREES
+
+
+I
+
+Now, in the thousandth year,
+When April's near,
+Now comes it that the great ones of the earth
+Take all their mirth
+Away with them, far off, to orchard-places,--
+Nor they nor Solomon arrayed like these,--
+To sun themselves at ease;
+To breathe of wind-swept spaces;
+To see some miracle of leafy graces;--
+To catch the out-flowing rapture of the trees.
+Considering the lilies.
+                       --Yes. And when
+Shall they consider Men?
+
+      (_O showering May-clad tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+II
+
+For now at last, they have beheld the trees.
+Lo, even these!--
+The men of sounding laughter and low fears;
+The women of light laughter, and no tears;
+The great ones of the town.
+And those, of most renown,
+That once sold doves,--now grown so pennywise
+To bargain with forlorner merchandise,--
+They buy and sell, they buy and sell again,
+The life-long toil of men.
+Worn with their market strife to dispossess
+The blind,--the fatherless,
+They too go forth, to breathe of budding trees,
+And woods with beckoning wonders new unfurled.
+Yes, even these:
+The money-changers and the Pharisees;
+The rulers of the darkness of this world.
+
+      (_O choiring Summer tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+III
+
+For now, behold their heart's desire is thrall
+To simpleness.--O new delight, unguessed,
+In very rest!
+And precious beyond all,
+A garden-place, a garden with a wall!
+To the green earth! All bountiful to bless
+Hearts sickening with excess.
+To the green earth, whose blithe replenishments
+Shall fresh the jaded sense!
+To the green earth, the dust-corrupted soul
+Returns to be made whole.
+For now it comes indeed,
+They will go forth, all they, to see a reed
+So shaken by the wind.
+Men are no longer blind
+To aught, save human kind.
+
+      (_O mellowing August tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+IV
+
+The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
+Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:--
+Those dullest millions, pent
+In life-long banishment
+From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
+Shut in the inner darkness of the town;
+Those blighted things you see,
+But the Sun sees not, at its going down:--
+Warped outcasts of some human forestry;
+Blind victims of the blind,
+Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
+With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
+And if you take some Old One to the fields,
+To see what Nature yields
+With fullest hands to men already free,
+It well may be,
+As on some indecipherable book
+The Guest will look,
+With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
+Too old, too old to learn;
+Or to discern--
+Before it slips away,
+The joy of such a late half-holiday!
+Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:
+They look not up.
+Too late, too late for any sky to do
+Brief kindness with its blue.
+And what behold they, then?
+In the shamed moment, when
+Old eyes bow down again?
+
+_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
+The drowned things start.
+And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
+Because of what is There.
+Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
+The human lilies, sprung
+Out of the ooze, and trodden,
+Even as they breathed and clung!
+Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;
+Lost faces, gleaming there,
+Where misery blasphemes the sacred young!
+Mute outcry, most, of those
+Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
+Faces the daylight shuns;
+Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
+Pale witness, unaware.
+Starved lips, and withering blood--
+O broken in the bud!--
+Blank eyes, and blighted hair._
+
+      (_O golden, golden tree!
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+So is it, haply, when
+Dull eyes look up, and then
+Dull eyes look down again.
+Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+
+
+V
+
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+And with what eye-shut ease
+We leave them, at the last, for company,
+The Tree,
+Whose two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
+Ever, since time began;
+Nor bloom so strange to see!--
+Behold, the Man,
+With His two arms outstretched to fold the world.
+
+
+
+_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
+Far, golden windows gazing from the shore;
+Golden ebb of daylight; heart could hold no more:
+Belovèd and Belovèd, and the sea._
+
+_Westward the sun,--low, slow and golden;
+Eastward the moon climbed, honey-pale.
+O do you remember? while our eyes were holden,
+Close, close upon us,--the Golden Sail?
+Wind-swift she came,--thing of living flame,
+Sea-breathing Glory, to make the heart afraid!
+The ripples, fold on fold
+Of coiling gold,
+Trailing a thousand ways
+Her golden maze,
+Rocked in a golden tumult, every one,
+The gondolas, the ships ..
+Westward she made .....
+A portent from the sky,--gone by, gone by,
+To golden, far eclipse; ...
+Into the Sun._
+
+_Behold, a mystery
+That shook to golden throbbing all the sea.
+Oh, and what needed one more wonder be
+For thee and me, Belovèd? thee and me?_
+
+
+
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN
+
+  '_Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief,
+  Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief._'
+
+
+I
+
+Highway, stretched along the sun,
+Highway, thronged till day is done;
+Where the drifting Face replaces
+Wave on wave on wave of faces,
+And you count them, one by one:
+    '_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief:
+    Doctor--Lawyer--Merchant--Chief._'
+Is it soothsay?--Is it fun?
+
+Young ones, like as wave and wave;
+Old ones, like as grave and grave;
+Tide on tide of human faces
+With what human undertow!
+Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief!--
+Tell me of the eddying spaces,
+Show me where the lost ones go;
+Like and lost, as leaf and leaf.
+What's your secret grim refrain
+Back and forth and back again,
+Once, and now, and always so?
+Three days since, and who was Thief?
+Three days more, and who'll be Chief?
+Oh, is that beyond belief,
+_Doctor, Lawyer--Merchant-Chief?_
+
+    (_Down, like grass before the mowing;
+    On, like wind in its mad going:--
+    Wind and dust forever blowing._)
+
+Highway, shrill with murderous pride,
+Highway, of the swarming tide!
+Why should my way lead me deeper?
+I am not my Brother's keeper.
+
+
+II
+
+Byway, ambushed with the dark,
+Byway, where the ears may hark;
+Live and fierce when day is done,
+You, that do without the Sun:--
+What's this game you bring to nought?--
+Muttering like a thing distraught,
+Reckoning like a simpleton?
+(Since the hearing must be brief,--
+Living or a dying thief!)
+Cobbled with the anguished stones
+That the thoroughfare disowns;
+Stones they gave you for your bread
+Of the disinherited!
+Where the Towers of Hunger loom,
+Crowding in the dregs of doom;
+Where the lost sky peering through
+Sees no more the grudging grass,--
+Only this mud-mirrored blue,
+Like some shattered looking-glass.
+
+    (_Under, with the sorry reaping!
+    Underneath the stones of weeping,
+    For the Dark to have in keeping._)
+
+Byway, you, so foully marred;
+You, whose sodden walls and scarred,
+See no light, but only where
+Fevered lamps are set to stare
+In the eyes of such despair!
+Tell me--as a Byway can--
+Was this Beggar once a Man?
+'_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief!_'
+Like and lost as leaf and leaf.
+Stammering out your wrongs and shames,
+Must you cry their very names?
+Must you sob your shame, your grief?
+--'_Poor man--Poor man!--Beggar--Thief._'
+
+
+III
+
+Highway, where the Sun is wide;
+Byway, where the lost ones hide,
+Byway, where the Soul must hark,
+Byway, dreadful with the Dark:
+    Can you nothing do with Man?
+Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief,
+Learns he nothing, even of grief?
+Must it still be all his wonder
+Some men soar, while some go under?
+He has heard, and he has seen:
+Make him know the thing you mean.
+He has prayed since time began,--
+He's so curious of the Plan!
+He will pray you till he die,
+For the Whence and for the Why;
+Mad for wisdom--when 'tis cheaper!
+'_Why should my way lead me deeper?
+Am I, then, my Brother's keeper?_'
+
+Show him, Byway, if you can;
+Lest he end as he began,
+Rich and poor,--this beggar, Man.
+
+
+
+_But we did walk in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God;--
+There, where no beckoning wonder
+Of all the paths we trod,
+No choiring sun-filled vineyard,
+No voice of stream or bird,
+But was some radiant oracle
+And flaming with the Word!_
+
+_Mine ears are dim with voices;
+Mine eyes yet strive to see
+The black things here to wonder at,
+The mirth,--the misery.
+Beloved, who wert with me there,
+  How came these shames to be?--
+  On what lost star are we?_
+
+_Men say: The paths of gladness
+  By men were never trod!--
+But we have walked in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God._
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDLING
+
+
+Beautiful Mother, I have toiled all day;
+    And I am wearied. And the day is done.
+    Now, while the wild brooks run
+Soft by the furrows--fading, gold to gray,
+  Their laughters turned to musing--ah, let me
+  Hide here my face at thine unheeding knee,
+    Beautiful Mother; if I be thy son.
+
+The birds fly low. Gulls, starlings, hoverers,
+    Along the meadows and the paling foam,
+    All wings of thine that roam
+Fly down, fly down. One reedy murmur blurs
+  The silence of the earth; and from the warm
+  Face of the field the upward savors swarm
+    Into the darkness. And the herds are home.
+
+All they are stalled and folded for their rest,
+    The creatures: cloud-fleece young that leap and veer;
+    Mad-mane and gentle ear;
+And breath of loving-kindness. And that best,--
+  O shaggy house-mate, watching me from far,
+  With human-aching heart, as I a star--
+    Tempest of plumèd joys, just to be near!
+
+So close, so like, so dear; and whom I love
+    More than thou lovest them, or lovest me.
+    So beautiful to see,
+Ah, and to touch! When those far lights above
+  Scorch me with farness--lights that call and call
+  To the far heart, and answer not at all;
+    Save that they will not let the darkness be.
+
+And what am I? That I alone of these
+    Make me most glad at noon? That I should mark
+    The after-glow go dark?
+This hour to sing--but never have--heart's-ease!
+  That when the sorrowing winds fly low, and croon
+  Outside our happy windows their old rune,
+    Beautiful Mother, I must wake, and hark?
+
+Who am I? Why for me this iron _Must_?
+    Burden the moon-white ox would never bear;
+    Load that he cannot share,
+He, thine imperial hostage of the dust.
+  Else should I look to see the god's surprise
+  Flow from his great unscornful, lovely eyes--
+    The ox thou gavest to partake my care.
+
+Yea, all they bear their yoke of sun-filled hours.
+    I, lord at noon, at nightfall no more free,
+    Take on more heavily
+The yoke of hid, intolerable Powers.
+  --Then pushes here, in my forgetful hand,
+  This near one's breathless plea to understand.
+    Starward I look; he, even so, at me!
+
+And she who shines within my house, my sight
+    Of the heart's eyes, my hearth-glow, and my rain,
+    My singing's one refrain--
+Are there for her no tidings from the height?
+  For her, my solace, likewise lost and far,
+  Islanded with me here, on this lone star
+    Washed by the ceaseless tides of dark and light.
+
+What shall it profit, that I built for her
+    A little wayside shelter from the stark
+    Sky that we hear, and mark?
+Lo, in her eyes all dreams that ever were!
+  And cheek-to-cheek with me she shares the quest,
+  Her heart, as mine for her, sole tented rest
+    From light to light of day; from dark--till Dark.
+
+Yea, but for her, how should I greatly care
+    Whither and whence? But that the dark should blast
+    Our bright! To hold her fast,--
+Yet feel this dread creep gray along the air.
+  To know I cannot hold her so my own,
+  But under surge of joy, the surges moan
+    That threaten us with parting at the last!
+
+Beautiful Mother, I am not thy son.
+    I know from echoes far behind the sky.
+    I know; I know not why.
+Even from thy golden, wide oblivion:
+Thy careless leave to help thy harvesting,
+  Thy leave to work a little, live, and sing;
+  Thy leave to suffer--yea, to sing and die,
+    Beautiful Mother! ...
+                 Ah, Whose child am I?
+
+
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair,
+And out into the darkness and the dew;
+And bowed myself unto the little grass,
+And the blind herbs, and the unshapen dust
+Of earth without a face. So let me be._
+
+_For as I hear, the singing makes of me
+My own desire, and momently I grow.
+Yea, all the while with hands of melody,
+The singing makes me, out of what I was,
+Even as a potter shaping Eden clay._
+
+_Ever Love sings, and saith in words that sing,
+'Beloved, thus art thou; and even so
+Lovely art thou, Beloved!'--Even so,
+As the Sea weaves her path before the light,
+I hear, I hear, and I am glorified._
+
+_Love sang to me, and I am glorified
+Because of some commandment in the stars.
+And I shall grow in favour and in shining,
+Till at the last I am all-beautiful;
+Beautiful, for the day Love sings no more._
+
+
+
+
+THE FEASTER
+
+
+Oh, who will hush that cry outside the doors,
+  While we are glad within?
+Go forth, go forth, all you my servitors;
+  (And gather close, my kin.)
+Go out to her. Tell her we keep a feast,--
+  Lost Loveliness who will not sit her down
+    Though we implore.
+It is her silence binds me unreleased,
+  It is her silence that no flute can drown,
+    It is her moonlit silence at the door,
+Wide as the whiteness, but a fire on high
+  That frights my heart with an immortal Cry,
+    Calling me evermore.
+
+Louder, you viols;--louder, O my harp;
+  Let me not hear her voice;
+And drown her keener silence, silver-sharp,
+  With waves of golden noise!
+For she is wise as Eden, even mute,
+  To search my spirit through the deep and height
+        Again, again.
+Outpierce her with your singing, dawnlike flute;
+  And you, gloom over, viols of the night
+     With colors lost in umber,--with sweet pain
+Of richest world's desire,--prevail, sing down
+  All memory with pleading, so you drown
+    Her merciless refrain!
+
+Oh, can you not with music, nor with din,
+    Save me the stress and stir
+In my lone spirit, throned among my kin,
+    From that same voice of her?--
+The never ending query she hath had
+  Only to wake my Soul, and only then
+    Wake it to weep?
+With '_Why?_' and '_Art thou happy? Art thou glad?
+  And hast thou fellowship with fellow-men?_'
+  So, through my mirth and underneath my sleep;
+Her voice,--abysmal hunger unfulfilled;--
+The calling, calling, never to be stilled,--
+    Calling of deep to deep.
+
+But I have that shall fill this wound of mine,
+    Since Loveliness must be;--
+Since Loveliness must save us, or we pine
+    And perish utterly.
+All that the years have left us, undismayed
+  Of age or death; and happier fair than truth,
+    --When truth is fair!
+Shapes of immortal sweetness, to persuade
+  Iron and fire and marble to their youth;
+Wild graces trapped from the three kingdoms' lair
+  Of wildest Beauty; shadow and smile and hush;
+    --Fleet color, of a daybreak, of a blush,
+        For my sad soul to wear!
+
+Let April fade! For me, unfading bloom!...
+      The little fruitless seed
+Deep sown of fire within the midmost gloom,
+      A sterner fire to feed:--
+The rainbow, frozen in a lasting dew;
+  Green-gazing emerald, fresh as grass beneath
+        The placid rose.
+Fair pearl, and you, fair pearl, and you and you,
+  Rained from the moon, and kissing in a wreath,
+    As moment unto eager moment goes!
+Look back at me, you sapphires blue and wise
+With farthest twilight, blue resplendent eyes
+      That never weep, nor close.
+
+O house me, glories! Give me house and home
+      Here for my homelessness.
+Set forth for me the wine, the honeycomb
+      Whereto desire saith 'Yes!'
+O Senses, weave me from all lovely dust
+  Some home-array, some fair familiar garb
+        For me, exiled.
+Charm me some rare anointment I may trust
+  Against her query, searching like a barb
+    The dumbness of a heart unreconciled.
+Clothe me with silver; fold me from dismay;
+  Save me from pity. For I hear her say,
+      'Alas, Alas, poor child!'
+
+'Alas, Alas, thou lost poor child, how long?
+      Why wilt thou suffer want?
+Why must I hear thy weeping through thy song,
+      And see thine eyes grow gaunt?
+Making sad feast upon the crumbs of light
+  Shed long ago from heavenly highways where
+        Thy brethren are!
+And thy heart smoulders in thee, to be bright,
+  Thy one sole refuge from thy one despair,
+    Fraying the thwarted body with a scar.
+How long, before thine eyelids, desolate,
+How long shall this thy dark dominion wait
+        For thee, belated Star?'
+
+
+
+_Belovèd, if the Moon could weep,
+    Or if the Sun could see
+How all these weltering alleys keep
+    Their outcast treasury!_
+
+_O bitter, bitter-sweet!--
+Beauty of babyhood,--
+Earth's wistful uttermost of good
+Flung out upon the street;
+Fouled, even as the highways would,
+With mirk and mire and bruise;
+The cheek more petal-fine
+Than rose before a shrine!
+Those hands like star-fish in the ooze,
+And fingers fain to cling
+To any stronger thing!
+And smiles, for one triumphal Gift,
+Should one lean down, and lift!
+And tendril hair;--O in such wise,
+With wild lights aureoled,
+The morning-glories twine and hold,
+In some far paradise!_
+
+_Oh well and deep, the foul ways keep
+    Lost treasure hid from day!--
+Sun may not see: but only we,
+    Who look; and look away._
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES
+
+
+The winds are lashing on the sea;
+  The roads are blind with storm.
+And it's far and far away with me;
+  So bide you there, stay warm.
+It's forth I must, and forth to-day;
+  And I have no path to choose.
+The highway hill, it is my way still.--
+  Give me my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me on that first day
+  I knew that I was young.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north;
+  And I heard the Songs unsung._
+
+This cloak is worn too threadbare thin,
+  But ah, how weatherwise!
+This girdle serves to bind it in;
+  What heed of wondering eyes?--
+And yet beside, I wear one pride
+  --Too bright, think you, to use?--
+That I must wear, and still keep fair.--
+  Give here my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me, on that first day
+  I heard the Stars all chime.
+And I looked forth far, from road to star;
+  And I knew it was far to climb._
+
+They would buy me house and hearth, no doubt,
+  And the mirth to spend and share;
+Could I sell that gift, and go without,
+  Or wear--what neighbors wear.
+But take my staff, my purse, my scrip;
+  For I have one thing to choose.
+For you,--Godspeed! May you soothe your need.
+  For me, my golden shoes!
+
+_He gave them me, that far, first day
+  When I heard all Songs unsung.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north.
+  God saw that I was young!_
+
+
+
+
+NOON AT PÆSTUM
+
+Lord of the Sea, we sun-filled creatures raise
+  Our hands among the clamorous weeds,--we too.
+  Lord of the Sun, and of the upper blue,
+Of all To-morrow, and all yesterdays,
+Here, where the thousand broken names and ways
+  Of worship are but shards we wandered through,
+  There is no gift to offer, or undo;
+There is no prayer left in us, only praise.
+
+Only to glory in this glory here,
+  Through the dead smoke of myriad sacrifice;--
+To look through these blue spaces, blind and clear
+  Even as the seaward gaze of Homer's eyes;
+And from uplifted heart, and cup, to pour
+Wine to the Unknown God.--We ask no more.
+
+
+
+
+VESTAL FLAME
+
+Light, light,--the last:
+Till the night be done,
+Keep the watch for stars and sun, and eyelids over-cast.
+
+Once there seemed a sky,
+Brooding over men.
+Now no stars have come again, since their bright good-bye!
+
+Once my dreams were wise.
+Now I nothing know;
+Fasting and the dark have so put out my heart's eyes.
+
+But thy golden breath
+Burns against my cheek.
+I can feel and love, and seek all the rune it saith.
+
+Do not thou be spent,
+Holy thing of fire,--
+Only hope of heart's desire dulled with wonderment!
+
+While there bide these two
+Hands to bar the wind;
+Though such fingers chill and thinned, shed no roses through.
+
+While this body bends
+Only for thy guard;
+Like a tower, to ward and worship all the light it sends.
+
+It is not for fear
+Lest there ring some cry
+On the midnight, 'Rise and come. Lo, the Bridegroom near!'
+
+It is not for pride,
+To be shining fair
+In a wedding-garment there, lighting home the Bride.
+
+It is not to win
+Love, for hoarded toil,
+From those poor, with their spent oil, weeping, 'Light us in!'--
+
+No; but in despite
+Of all vigils set,
+Do I bind me to thee yet,--strangest thing of Light!
+
+Only, all, for thee
+Whatsoe'er thou art,
+Smiling through the blinded heart, things it cannot see.
+
+Very Soul's Desire,
+Take my life; and live
+By the rapture thine doth give, ecstasy of fire!
+
+Hold thy golden breath!
+For I feel,--not hear--
+Spent with joy and fear to lose thee, all the song it saith.
+
+Light, light, my own:
+Do not thou disown
+Thy poor keeper-of-the-light, for Light's sake alone.
+
+
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand
+Between us two the while, with others near.
+Mine questioned thine with 'Why should I be here?'
+'Yet bide thou here,' said thine, 'and understand.'_
+
+_And mine was mute; but strove not then to go;
+And hid itself, and murmured, 'Do not hear
+The listening in my heart!' Said thine, 'My Dear,
+I will not hear it, ever. But I know.'_
+
+_Said mine to thine: 'Let be. Now will I go!--
+For you are saying,--you who do not speak,
+This hand-in-hand is one day cheek-to-cheek!'
+And said thy hand around me, 'Even so.'_
+
+_Then mine to thine.--'Yea, I have been alone;
+--Yet happy.--This is strange. This is not I!
+You hold me, but you can not tell me why.'
+And said thy hand to mine again, 'My Own.'_
+
+
+
+
+THE PROPHET
+
+
+All day long he kept the sheep:--
+  Far and early, from the crowd,
+On the hills from steep to steep,
+  Where the silence cried aloud;
+  And the shadow of the cloud
+Wrapt him in a noonday sleep.
+
+Where he dipped the water's cool,
+  Filling boyish hands from thence,
+Something breathed across the pool
+  Stir of sweet enlightenments;
+  And he drank, with thirsty sense,
+Till his heart was brimmed and full.
+
+Still, the hovering Voice unshed,
+  And the Vision unbeheld,
+And the mute sky overhead,
+  And his longing, still withheld!
+  --Even when the two tears welled,
+Salt, upon that lonely bread.
+
+Vaguely blessèd in the leaves,
+  Dim-companioned in the sun,
+Eager mornings, wistful eves,
+  Very hunger drew him on;
+  And To-morrow ever shone
+With the glow the sunset weaves.
+
+Even so, to that young heart,
+  Words and hands, and Men were dear;
+And the stir of lane and mart
+  After daylong vigil here.
+  Sunset called, and he drew near,
+Still to find his path apart.
+
+When the Bell, with gentle tongue,
+  Called the herd-bells home again,
+Through the purple shades he swung,
+  Down the mountain, through the glen;
+  Towards the sound of fellow-men,--
+Even from the light that clung.
+
+Dimly too, as cloud on cloud,
+  Came that silent flock of his:
+Thronging whiteness, in a crowd,
+  After homing twos and threes;
+  With the thronging memories
+Of all white things dreamed and vowed.
+
+Through the fragrances, alone,
+  By the sudden-silent brook,
+From the open world unknown,
+  To the close of speech and book;
+  There to find the foreign look
+In the faces of his own.
+
+Sharing was beyond his skill;
+  Shyly yet, he made essay:
+Sought to dip, and share, and fill
+  Heart's-desire, from day to day.
+  But their eyes, some foreign way,
+Looked at him; and he was still.
+
+Last, he reached his arms to sleep,
+  Where the Vision waited, dim,
+Still beyond some deep-on-deep.
+  And the darkness folded him,
+  Eager heart and weary limb.--
+All day long, he kept the sheep.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG LANE
+
+
+All through the summer night, down the long lane in flower,
+      The moon-white lane,
+All through the summer night,--dim as a shower,
+      Glimmer and fade the Twain:
+Over the cricket hosts, throbbing the hour by hour,
+      Young voices bloom and wane.
+
+Down the long lane they go, and past one window, pale
+      With visions silver-blurred;
+Stirring the heart that waits,--the eyes that fail
+      After a spring deferred.
+Query, and hush, and Ah!--dim through a moon-lit veil,
+      The same one word.
+
+Down the long lane, entwined with all the fragrance there;
+      The lane in flower somehow
+With youth, and plighted hands, and star-strewn air,
+      And muted 'Thee' and 'Thou':--
+All the wild bloom and reach of dreams that never were,
+      --Never to be, now.
+
+So, in the throbbing dark, where ebbs the old refrain,
+      A starved heart hears.
+And silver-bright, and silver-blurred again
+      With moonlight and with tears.
+All the long night they go, down the long summer lane,
+      The long, long years.
+
+
+
+_Ah but, Belovèd, men may do
+All things to music;--march, and die;
+And wear the longest vigil through,
+      ... And say good-by.
+All things to music!--Ah, but where
+Peace never falls upon the air;--
+These city-ways of dark and din
+Where greed has shut and barred them in!
+And thundering, swart against the sky,
+That whirlwind,--never to go by--
+  Of tracks and wheels, that overhead
+Beat back the senses with their roar
+And menace of undying war,--
+  War--war--for daily bread!_
+
+_All things to silence! Ah, but where
+Men dwell not, but must make a lair;--
+And Sorrow may not sit alone,
+Nor Love hear music of its own;
+And Thought that strives to breast that sea
+Must struggle even for memory.
+Day-long, night-long,--besieging din
+To thrust all pain the deeper in!--
+And drown the flutter of first-breath;
+And batter at the doors of Death.
+To lull their dearest:--watch their dead;
+While the long thunders overhead,
+Gather and break for evermore,
+Eternal tides--eternal War,
+  War--war--Bread--bread!_
+
+
+
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK
+
+
+Brook, of the listening grass,
+Brook of the sun-fleckt wings,
+Brook of the same wild way and flickering spell!
+Must you begone? Will you forever pass,
+After so many years and dear to tell?--
+Brook of all hoverings ...
+Brook that I kneel above;
+Brook of my love.
+
+Ah, but I have a charm to trouble you;
+A spell that shall subdue
+Your all-escaping heart, unheedful one
+And unremembering!
+Now, when I make my prayer
+To your wild brightness there
+That will but run and run,
+O mindless Water!--
+Hark,--now will I bring
+A grace as wild,--my little yearling daughter,
+My Alison.
+
+Heed well that threat;
+And tremble for your hill-born liberty
+So bright to see!--
+Your shadow-dappled way, unthwarted yet,
+And the high hills whence all your dearness bubbled;--
+You, never to possess!
+For let her dip but once--O fair and fleet,--
+Here in your shallows, yes,
+Here in your silverness
+Her two blithe feet,--
+O Brook of mine, how shall your heart be troubled!
+
+The heart, the bright unmothering heart of you,
+That never knew.--
+(O never, more than mine of long ago.
+How could we know?--)
+For who should guess
+The shock and smiting of that perfectness?--
+The lily-thrust of those ecstatic feet
+Unpityingly sweet?--
+Sweet beyond all the blurred blind dreams that grope
+The upward paths of hope?
+And who could guess
+The dulcet holiness,
+The lilt and gladness of those jocund feet,
+Unpityingly sweet?
+Ah, for your coolness that shall change and stir
+With every glee of her!--
+Under the fresh amaze
+That drips and glistens from her wiles and ways;
+When the endearing air
+That everywhere
+Must twine and fold and follow her, shall be
+Rippled to ring on ring of melody,--
+Music, like shadows from the joy of her,
+Small starry Reveller!--
+When from her triumphings,--
+All frolic wings--
+There soars beyond the glories of the height,
+The laugh of her delight!
+
+And it shall sound, until
+Your heart stand still;
+Shaken to human sight;
+Struck through with tears and light;
+One with the one desire
+Unto that central Fire
+Of Love the Sun, whence all we lighted are
+Even from clod to star.
+
+And all your glory, O most swift and sweet!--
+And all your exultation only this;
+To be the lowly and forgotten kiss
+Beneath those feet.
+
+You that must ever pass,--
+You of the same wild way,--
+The silver-bright good-bye without a look!--
+You that would never stay,
+For the beseeching grass ...
+Brook!--
+
+
+
+_You, Four Walls,
+  Wall not in my heart!
+When the lovely night-time falls
+  All so welcomely,
+Blinding, sweet hearth-fire,
+Light of heart's desire,
+  Blind not, blind not me!
+Unto them that weep apart,--
+While you glow, within,
+  Wreckt, despairing kin,--
+Dark with misery:
+--Do not blind my heart!_
+
+  _You, close Heart!
+    Never hide from mine
+    Worlds that I divine
+  Through thy human dearness.
+  O belovèd Nearness,
+    Hallow all I understand
+    With thy hand-in-hand;--
+  All the lights I seek,
+  With thy cheek-to-cheek;
+    All the loveliness I loved apart._
+
+    _You, heart's Home!--
+    Wall not in my heart._
+
+
+
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE
+
+
+I
+
+Over the broken world, the dark gone by,
+Horror of outcast darkness torn with wars;
+And timeless agony
+Of the white fire, heaped high by blinded Stars,
+Unfaltering, unaghast;--
+Out of the midmost Fire
+At last,--at last,--
+Cry! ...
+O darkness' one desire,--
+O darkness, have you heard?--
+Black Chaos, blindly striving towards the Word?
+--The Cry!
+
+Behold thy conqueror, Death!
+Behold, behold from whom
+It flutters forth, that triumph of First-Breath,
+Victorious one that can but breathe and cling,--
+This pulsing flower,--this weaker than a wing,
+Halcyon thing!--
+Cradled above unfathomable doom.
+
+
+II
+
+Under my feet, O Death,
+Under my trembling feet!
+Back, through the gates of hell, now give me way.
+I come.--I bring new Breath!
+Over the trampled shards of mine own clay,
+That smoulder still, and burn,
+Lo, I return!
+Hail, singing Light that floats
+Pulsing with chorused motes:--
+Hail to thee, Sun, that lookest on all lands!
+And take thou from my weak undying hands,
+A precious thing, unblemished, undefiled:--
+Here, on my heart uplift,
+Behold the Gift,--
+Thy glory and my glory, and my child!
+
+
+III
+
+(_And our eyes were opened; eyes that had been holden.
+  And I saw the world, and the fruits thereof.
+And I saw their glories, scarlet-stained and golden,
+  All a crumbled dust beneath the feet of Love.
+  And I saw their dreams, all of nothing worth;
+  But a path for Love, for Him to walk above,
+And I saw new heaven, and new earth._)
+
+
+IV
+
+    The grass is full of murmurs;
+    The sky is full of wings;
+        The earth is full of breath.
+        With voices, choir on choir
+        With tongues of fire,
+    They sing how Life out-sings--
+        Out-numbers Death.
+
+
+V
+
+Who are these that fly;
+As doves, and as doves to the windows?
+Doves, like hovering dreams round Love that slumbereth;
+Silvering clouds blown by,
+Doves and doves to the windows,--
+Warm through the radiant sky their wings beat breath.
+They are the world's new-born:
+Doves, doves to the windows!
+Lighting, as flakes of snow;
+Lighting, as flakes of flame;
+Some to the fair sown furrows;
+Some to the huts and burrows
+Choked of the mire and thorn,--
+Deep in the city's shame.
+Wind-scattered wreaths they go,
+Doves, and doves, to the windows;
+Some for worshipping arms, to shelter and fold, and shrine;
+Some to be torn and trodden,
+Withered and waste, and sodden;
+Pitiful, sacred leaves from Life's dishonored vine.
+
+
+VI
+
+O Vine of Life, that in these reaching fingers,
+Urges a sunward way!
+Hold here and climb, and halt not, that there lingers
+So far outstripped, my halting, wistful clay.
+Make here thy foothold of my rapturous heart,--
+Yea, though the tendrils start
+To hold and twine!
+I am the heart that nursed
+Thy sunward thirst.--
+A little while, a little while, O Vine,
+My own and never mine,
+Feed thy sweet roots with me
+Abundantly.
+O wonder-wildness of the pushing Bud
+With hunger at the flood,
+Climb on, and seek, and spurn.
+Let my dull spirit learn
+To follow with its longing, as it may,
+While thou seek higher day.--
+But thou, the reach of my own heart's desire,
+Be free as fire!
+Still climb and cling; and so
+Outstrip,--outgrow.
+
+O Vine of Life, my own and not my own,
+So far am I outgrown!
+High as I may, I lift thee, Soul's Desire.
+--Lift thou me higher.
+
+
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman, whom I meet
+On all the highways,--every brimming street,
+Lady Demeter, is it thou, grown gaunt
+With work and want?
+At last, and with what shamed and stricken eyes,
+I see through thy disguise
+Of drudge and Exile,--even the holy boon
+That silvers yonder in the Harvest-moon;--
+That dimly under glows
+The furrows of thy worn immortal face,
+With mother-grace._
+
+_O Queen and Burden-bearer, what of those
+To whom thou gavest the lily and the rose
+Of thy far youth?... For whom,
+Out of the wondrous loom
+Of thine enduring body, thou didst make
+Garments of beauty, cunningly adorned,
+But only for Death's sake!
+Largess of life, but to lie waste and scorned.--
+Could not such cost of pain,
+Nor daily utmost of thy toil prevail?--
+But they must fade, and pale,
+And wither from thy desolated throne?--
+And still no Summer give thee back again
+Thine own?_
+
+_Lady of Sorrows,--Mother,--Drudge august.
+Behold me in the dust._
+
+
+
+
+GLADNESS
+
+
+Unto my Gladness then I cried:
+    'I will not be denied!
+Answer me now; and tell me why
+Thou dost not fall, as a broken star
+Out of the Dark where such things are,
+  And where such bright things die.
+How canst thou, with thy fountain dance
+Shatter clear sight with radiance?--
+How canst thou reach and soar, and fling,
+Over my heart's dark shuddering,
+Unearthly lights on everything?
+What dost thou see? What dost thou know?'
+My Gladness said to me, bowed below,
+'Gladness I am: created so.'
+
+'And dare'st thou, in my mortal veins
+Sing, with the Spring's descending rains?
+While in this hour, and momently,
+Forth of myself I look, and see
+Torn treasure of my heart's Desire;
+And human glories in the mire,
+That should make glad some paradise!--
+The childhood strewn in foulest place,
+The girlhood, plundered of its grace;
+The eyelids shut upon spent eyes
+That never looked upon thy face!
+Answer me, thou, if answer be!'
+
+        My Gladness said to me:
+'Weep if thou wilt; yea, weep, and doubt.
+I may not let the Sun go out.'
+
+Then to my Gladness still I cried:
+        'And how canst thou abide?--'
+Here, where my listening heart must hark
+These sorrows rising from the Dark
+Where still they starve, and strive and die,
+Who bear each heaviest penalty
+Of humanhood;--nor grasp, nor guess,
+The garment's hem of happiness!--
+The spear-wound throbbing in my song,
+It throbs more bitterly than wrong,--
+It burns more wildly than despair,--
+The will to share,
+The will to share!
+Little I knew,--the blind-fold I,--
+Joy would become like agony,--
+Like arrows of the Sun in me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hold thee here. I have thee, now,--
+And I am human. But what art thou!'
+
+        My Gladness answered me:
+'Wayfarer, wilt thou understand?--
+Follow me on. And keep my hand.'
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD
+
+
+Yes, Nightingale, through all the summer-time
+  We followed on, from moon to golden moon;
+  From where Salerno day-dreams in the noon,
+And the far rose of Pæstum once did climb.
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,
+Through sun-shrill vines and campanile chime,
+  We listened;--from the old year to the new.
+    Brown bird, and where were you?
+
+You, that Ravello lured not, throned on high
+  And filled with singing out of sun-burned throats!
+  Nor yet Minore of the flame-sailed boats;
+Nor yet--of all bird-song should glorify--
+  Assisi, Little Portion of the blest,
+Assisi, in the bosom of the sky,
+  Where God's own singer thatched his sunward nest;
+    That little, heavenliest!
+
+And north and north, to where the hedge-rows are,
+  That beckon with white looks an endless way;
+  Where, through the fair wet silverness of May,
+A lamb shines out as sudden as a star,
+  Among the cloudy sheep; and green, and pale,
+The may-trees reach and glimmer, near or far,
+  And the red may-trees wear a shining veil.
+    --And still, no nightingale!
+
+The one vain longing,--through all journeyings,
+  The one: in every hushed and hearkening spot,--
+  All the soft-swarming dark where you were not,
+Still longed for! Yes, for sake of dreams and wings,
+  And wonders, that your own must ever make
+To bower you close, with all hearts' treasurings;
+  And for that speech toward which all hearts do ache;--
+        Even for Music's sake.
+But most, his music whose belovèd name
+  Forever writ in water of bright tears,
+  Wins to one grave-side even the Roman years,
+That kindle there the hallowed April flame
+  Of comfort-breathing violets. By that shrine
+Of Youth, Love, Death, forevermore the same,
+  Violets still!--When falls, to leave no sign,
+        The arch of Constantine.
+
+Most for his sake we dreamed. Tho' not as he,
+  From that lone spirit, brimmed with human woe,
+  Your song once shook to surging overflow.
+How was it, sovran dweller of the tree,
+  His cry, still throbbing in the flooded shell
+Of silence with remembered melody,
+  Could draw from you no answer to the spell?
+        --O Voice, O Philomel?
+
+Long time we wondered (and we knew not why):--
+  Nor dream, nor prayer, of wayside gladness born,
+  Nor vineyards waiting, nor reproachful thorn,
+Nor yet the nested hill-towns set so high
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,--
+Nor olives, gray against a golden sky,
+  Could serve to wake that rapturous voice of you!
+        But the wise silence knew.
+
+O Nightingale unheard!--Unheard alone,
+  Throughout that woven music of the days
+  From the faint sea-rim to the market-place,
+And ring of hammers on cathedral stone!--
+  So be it, better so: that there should fail
+For sun-filled ones, one blessèd thing unknown.
+  To them, be hid forever,--and all hail!
+        Sing never, Nightingale.
+
+Sing, for the others! Sing; to some pale cheek
+  Against the window, like a starving flower.
+  Loose, with your singing, one poor pilgrim hour
+Of journey, with some Heart's Desire to seek.
+  Loose, with your singing, captives such as these
+In misery and iron, hearts too meek,
+  For voyage--voyage over dreamful seas
+        To lost Hesperides.
+
+Sing not for free-men. Ah, but sing for whom
+  The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade,
+The windows take no heed of light nor shade,--
+The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom.
+  Sing near! So in that golden overflowing
+They may forget their wasted human bloom;
+  Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing.--
+        Reck not of life's bright going!
+
+Sing not for lovers, side by side that hark;
+  Nor unto parted lovers, save they be
+  Parted indeed by more than makes the Sea.
+Where never hope shall meet--like mounting lark--
+  Far Joy's uprising; and no memories
+Abide to star the music-haunted dark:
+  To them that sit in darkness, such as these,
+        Pour down, pour down heart's-ease.
+
+Not in kings' gardens. No; but where there haunt
+  The world's forgotten, both of men and birds;
+The alleys of no hope and of no words,
+The hidings where men reap not, though they plant;
+But toil and thirst--so dying and so born;--
+And toil and thirst to gather to their want,
+  From the lean waste, beyond the daylight's scorn,
+        --To gather grapes of thorn!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And for those two, your pilgrims without tears,
+  Who prayed a largess where there was no dearth,
+Forgive it to their human-happy ears:
+  Forgive it them, brown music of the Earth,
+  Unknowing,--though the wiser silence knew!
+Forgive it to the music of the spheres
+  That while they walked together so, the Two
+        Together,--heard not you.
+
+
+
+
+_ENVOI_
+
+_Belovèd, till the day break,
+  Leave wide the little door;
+And bless, to lack and longing,
+  Our brimming more-and-more._
+
+_Is love a scanted portion,
+  That we should hoard thereof?--
+Oh, call unto the deserts,
+  Belovèd and my Love!_
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: The Singing Man
+
+Author: Josephine Preston Peabody
+        A Book of Songs and Shadows
+
+Release Date: December 30, 2004 [EBook #14531]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SINGING MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Amy Cunningham and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+A Book of Songs and
+Shadows
+
+
+By JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+_BOSTON_ and _NEW YORK_
+
+HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press Cambridge
+
+1911
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY JOSEPHINE PEABODY MARKS
+
+_Published November 1911_
+
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+
+Thanks are especially due to the editors of The American Magazine,
+Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers,
+for their courteous permission to reprint certain of the poems included
+in this volume.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+We make our songs as we must, from fragments of the joy and sorrow of
+living. What Life itself may be, we cannot know till all men share the
+chance to know.
+
+Until the day of some more equal portion, there is no human brightness
+unhaunted by this black shadow: the thought of those unnumbered who pay
+all the heavier cost of life, to live and die without knowledge that
+there is any Joy of Living.
+
+No song could face such blackness, but for the will to share, and for
+hope of the day of sharing.
+
+Upon that hope and that mindfulness, the poems in this book are linked
+together.
+
+J.P.M.
+
+4 October, 1911.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN                                    3
+
+THE TREES                                         15
+
+_O, do you remember? How it came to be?_          21
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN                                23
+
+_But we did walk in Eden_                         29
+
+THE FOUNDLING                                     31
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair_      35
+
+THE FEASTER                                       37
+
+_Beloved, if the moon could weep_                 43
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES                                  45
+
+NOON AT PAESTUM                                    47
+
+VESTAL FLAME                                      48
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand_   51
+
+THE PROPHET                                       53
+
+THE LONG LANE                                     56
+
+_Ah but, Beloved, men may do_                     59
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK                      61
+
+_You, Four Walls, wall not in my heart!_          65
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE                              67
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman whom I meet_           73
+
+GLADNESS                                          75
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD                           81
+
+_Envoi_                                           87
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+AN ODE OF THE PORTION OF LABOR
+
+
+'_The profit of the Earth is for all._'
+--ECCLESIASTES.
+
+
+
+
+THE SINGING MAN
+
+
+I
+
+He sang above the vineyards of the world.
+  And after him the vines with woven hands
+Clambered and clung, and everywhere unfurled
+  Triumphing green above the barren lands;
+Till high as gardens grow, he climbed, he stood,
+  Sun-crowned with life and strength, and singing toil,
+And looked upon his work; and it was good:
+        The corn, the wine, the oil.
+
+He sang above the noon. The topmost cleft
+  That grudged him footing on the mountain scars
+He planted and despaired not; till he left
+  His vines soft breathing to the host of stars.
+He wrought, he tilled; and even as he sang,
+  The creatures of his planting laughed to scorn
+The ancient threat of deserts where there sprang
+        The wine, the oil, the corn!
+
+He sang not for abundance.--Over-lords
+  Took of his tilth. Yet was there still to reap,
+The portion of his labor; dear rewards
+  Of sunlit day, and bread, and human sleep.
+He sang for strength; for glory of the light.
+  He dreamed above the furrows, 'They are mine!'
+When all he wrought stood fair before his sight
+        With corn, and oil, and wine.
+
+    _Truly, the light is sweet
+      Yea, and a pleasant thing
+        It is to see the Sun.
+    And that a man should eat
+        His bread that he hath won;--
+    (So is it sung and said),
+      That he should take and keep,
+        After his laboring,
+    The portion of his labor in his bread,
+      His bread that he hath won;
+      Yea, and in quiet sleep,
+        When all is done._
+
+He sang; above the burden and the heat,
+  Above all seasons with their fitful grace;
+Above the chance and change that led his feet
+  To this last ambush of the Market-place.
+'Enough for him,' they said--and still they say--
+  'A crust, with air to breathe, and sun to shine;
+He asks no more!'--Before they took away
+        The corn, the oil, the wine.
+
+He sang. No more he sings now, anywhere.
+  Light was enough, before he was undone.
+They knew it well, who took away the air,
+  --Who took away the sun;
+Who took, to serve their soul-devouring greed,
+  Himself, his breath, his bread--the goad of toil;--
+Who have and hold, before the eyes of Need,
+        The corn, the wine,--the oil!
+
+      _Truly, one thing is sweet
+      Of things beneath the Sun;
+This, that a man should earn his bread and eat,
+  Rejoicing in his work which he hath done.
+      What shall be sung or said
+        Of desolate deceit.
+      When others take his bread;
+      His and his children's bread?--
+      And the laborer hath none.
+This, for his portion now, of all that he hath done.
+      He earns; and others eat.
+    He starves;--they sit at meat
+      Who have taken away the Sun._
+
+
+II
+
+Seek him now, that singing Man.
+Look for him,
+Look for him
+In the mills,
+In the mines;
+Where the very daylight pines,--
+He, who once did walk the hills!
+You shall find him, if you scan
+Shapes all unbefitting Man,
+Bodies warped, and faces dim.
+In the mines; in the mills
+Where the ceaseless thunder fills
+Spaces of the human brain
+Till all thought is turned to pain.
+Where the skirl of wheel on wheel,
+Grinding him who is their tool,
+Makes the shattered senses reel
+To the numbness of the fool.
+Perisht thought, and halting tongue
+(Once it spoke;--once it sung!)
+Live to hunger, dead to song.
+Only heart-beats loud with wrong
+Hammer on,--_How long_?
+... _How long_?--_How long_?
+
+Search for him;
+Search for him;
+Where the crazy atoms swim
+Up the fiery furnace-blast.
+You shall find him, at the last,--
+He whose forehead braved the sun,--
+Wreckt and tortured and undone.
+Where no breath across the heat
+Whispers him that life was sweet;
+But the sparkles mock and flare,
+Scattering up the crooked air.
+(Blackened with that bitter mirk,--
+Would God know His handiwork?)
+
+Thought is not for such as he;
+Naught but strength, and misery;
+Since, for just the bite and sup,
+Life must needs be swallowed up.
+Only, reeling up the sky,
+Hurtling flames that hurry by,
+Gasp and flare, with _Why_--_Why_,
+... _Why_?...
+
+Why the human mind of him
+Shrinks, and falters and is dim
+When he tries to make it out:
+What the torture is about.--
+Why he breathes, a fugitive
+Whom the World forbids to live.
+Why he earned for his abode,
+Habitation of the toad!
+Why his fevered day by day
+Will not serve to drive away
+Horror that must always haunt:--
+... _Want_ ... _Want_!
+Nightmare shot with waking pangs;--
+Tightening coil, and certain fangs,
+Close and closer, always nigh ...
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+Why he labors under ban
+That denies him for a man.
+Why his utmost drop of blood
+Buys for him no human good;
+Why his utmost urge of strength
+Only lets Them starve at length;--
+Will not let him starve alone;
+He must watch, and see his own
+Fade and fail, and starve, and die.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+... _Why_?... _Why_?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Heart-beats, in a hammering song,
+Heavy as an ox may plod,
+Goaded--goaded--faint with wrong,
+Cry unto some ghost of God
+... _How long_?... _How long_?
+.......... _How long_?
+
+
+III
+
+Seek him yet. Search for him!
+You shall find him, spent and grim;
+In the prisons, where we pen
+These unsightly shards of men.
+Sheltered fast;
+Housed at length;
+Clothed and fed, no matter how!--
+Where the householders, aghast,
+Measure in his broken strength
+Nought but power for evil, now.
+Beast-of-burden drudgeries
+Could not earn him what was his:
+He who heard the world applaud
+Glories seized by force and fraud,
+He must break,--he must take!--
+Both for hate and hunger's sake.
+He must seize by fraud and force;
+He must strike, without remorse!
+Seize he might; but never keep.
+Strike, his once!--Behold him here.
+(Human life we buy so cheap,
+Who should know we held it dear?)
+
+No denial,--no defence
+From a brain bereft of sense,
+Any more than penitence.
+But the heart-beats now, that plod
+Goaded--goaded--dumb with wrong,
+Ask not even a ghost of God
+............._How long_?
+
+    _When the Sea gives up its dead,
+    Prison caverns, yield instead
+    This, rejected and despised;
+    This, the Soiled and Sacrificed!
+    Without form or comeliness;
+    Shamed for us that did transgress;
+    Bruised, for our iniquities,
+    With the stripes that are all his!
+    Face that wreckage, you who can.
+    It was once the Singing Man._
+
+
+IV
+
+Must it be?--Must we then
+Render back to God again
+This His broken work, this thing,
+For His man that once did sing?
+Will not all our wonders do?
+Gifts we stored the ages through,
+(Trusting that He had forgot)--
+Gifts the Lord required not?
+
+Would the all-but-human serve!
+Monsters made of stone and nerve;
+Towers to threaten and defy
+Curse or blessing of the sky;
+Shafts that blot the stars with smoke;
+Lightnings harnessed under yoke;
+Sea-things, air-things, wrought with steel,
+That may smite, and fly, and feel!
+Oceans calling each to each;
+Hostile hearts, with kindred speech.
+Every work that Titans can;
+Every marvel: save a man,
+Who might rule without a sword.--
+    Is a man more precious, Lord?
+
+Can it be?--Must we then
+Render back to Thee again
+Million, million wasted men?
+Men, of flickering human breath,
+Only made for life and death?
+
+Ah, but see the sovereign Few,
+Highly favored, that remain!
+These, the glorious residue,
+Of the cherished race of Cain.
+These, the magnates of the age,
+High above the human wage,
+Who have numbered and possesst
+All the portion of the rest!
+
+What are all despairs and shames,
+What the mean, forgotten names
+Of the thousand more or less,
+For one surfeit of success?
+
+For those dullest lives we spent,
+Take these Few magnificent!
+For that host of blotted ones,
+Take these glittering central suns.
+Few;--but how their lustre thrives
+On the million broken lives!
+Splendid, over dark and doubt,
+For a million souls gone out!
+These, the holders of our hoard,--
+    Wilt thou not accept them, Lord?
+
+
+V
+
+Oh, in the wakening thunders of the heart,
+--The small lost Eden, troubled through the night,
+Sounds there not now,--forboded and apart,
+        Some voice and sword of light?
+Some voice and portent of a dawn to break?--
+  Searching like God, the ruinous human shard
+Of that lost Brother-man Himself did make,
+        And Man himself hath marred?
+
+It sounds!--And may the anguish of that birth
+  Seize on the world; and may all shelters fail,
+Till we behold new Heaven and new Earth
+        Through the rent Temple-vail!
+When the high-tides that threaten near and far
+  To sweep away our guilt before the sky,--
+Flooding the waste of this dishonored Star,
+        Cleanse, and o'erwhelm, and cry!--
+
+Cry, from the deep of world-accusing waves,
+  With longing more than all since Light began,
+Above the nations,--underneath the graves,--
+        'Give back the Singing Man!'
+
+
+
+
+THE TREES
+
+
+I
+
+Now, in the thousandth year,
+When April's near,
+Now comes it that the great ones of the earth
+Take all their mirth
+Away with them, far off, to orchard-places,--
+Nor they nor Solomon arrayed like these,--
+To sun themselves at ease;
+To breathe of wind-swept spaces;
+To see some miracle of leafy graces;--
+To catch the out-flowing rapture of the trees.
+Considering the lilies.
+                       --Yes. And when
+Shall they consider Men?
+
+      (_O showering May-clad tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+II
+
+For now at last, they have beheld the trees.
+Lo, even these!--
+The men of sounding laughter and low fears;
+The women of light laughter, and no tears;
+The great ones of the town.
+And those, of most renown,
+That once sold doves,--now grown so pennywise
+To bargain with forlorner merchandise,--
+They buy and sell, they buy and sell again,
+The life-long toil of men.
+Worn with their market strife to dispossess
+The blind,--the fatherless,
+They too go forth, to breathe of budding trees,
+And woods with beckoning wonders new unfurled.
+Yes, even these:
+The money-changers and the Pharisees;
+The rulers of the darkness of this world.
+
+      (_O choiring Summer tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+III
+
+For now, behold their heart's desire is thrall
+To simpleness.--O new delight, unguessed,
+In very rest!
+And precious beyond all,
+A garden-place, a garden with a wall!
+To the green earth! All bountiful to bless
+Hearts sickening with excess.
+To the green earth, whose blithe replenishments
+Shall fresh the jaded sense!
+To the green earth, the dust-corrupted soul
+Returns to be made whole.
+For now it comes indeed,
+They will go forth, all they, to see a reed
+So shaken by the wind.
+Men are no longer blind
+To aught, save human kind.
+
+      (_O mellowing August tree,
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+
+IV
+
+The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
+Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:--
+Those dullest millions, pent
+In life-long banishment
+From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
+Shut in the inner darkness of the town;
+Those blighted things you see,
+But the Sun sees not, at its going down:--
+Warped outcasts of some human forestry;
+Blind victims of the blind,
+Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
+With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
+And if you take some Old One to the fields,
+To see what Nature yields
+With fullest hands to men already free,
+It well may be,
+As on some indecipherable book
+The Guest will look,
+With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
+Too old, too old to learn;
+Or to discern--
+Before it slips away,
+The joy of such a late half-holiday!
+Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:
+They look not up.
+Too late, too late for any sky to do
+Brief kindness with its blue.
+And what behold they, then?
+In the shamed moment, when
+Old eyes bow down again?
+
+_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
+The drowned things start.
+And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
+Because of what is There.
+Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
+The human lilies, sprung
+Out of the ooze, and trodden,
+Even as they breathed and clung!
+Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;
+Lost faces, gleaming there,
+Where misery blasphemes the sacred young!
+Mute outcry, most, of those
+Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
+Faces the daylight shuns;
+Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
+Pale witness, unaware.
+Starved lips, and withering blood--
+O broken in the bud!--
+Blank eyes, and blighted hair._
+
+      (_O golden, golden tree!
+      Bear yet awhile with me._)
+
+So is it, haply, when
+Dull eyes look up, and then
+Dull eyes look down again.
+Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+
+
+V
+
+For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
+And with what eye-shut ease
+We leave them, at the last, for company,
+The Tree,
+Whose two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
+Ever, since time began;
+Nor bloom so strange to see!--
+Behold, the Man,
+With His two arms outstretched to fold the world.
+
+
+
+_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
+Far, golden windows gazing from the shore;
+Golden ebb of daylight; heart could hold no more:
+Beloved and Beloved, and the sea._
+
+_Westward the sun,--low, slow and golden;
+Eastward the moon climbed, honey-pale.
+O do you remember? while our eyes were holden,
+Close, close upon us,--the Golden Sail?
+Wind-swift she came,--thing of living flame,
+Sea-breathing Glory, to make the heart afraid!
+The ripples, fold on fold
+Of coiling gold,
+Trailing a thousand ways
+Her golden maze,
+Rocked in a golden tumult, every one,
+The gondolas, the ships ..
+Westward she made .....
+A portent from the sky,--gone by, gone by,
+To golden, far eclipse; ...
+Into the Sun._
+
+_Behold, a mystery
+That shook to golden throbbing all the sea.
+Oh, and what needed one more wonder be
+For thee and me, Beloved? thee and me?_
+
+
+
+
+RICH MAN, POOR MAN
+
+  '_Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief,
+  Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief._'
+
+
+I
+
+Highway, stretched along the sun,
+Highway, thronged till day is done;
+Where the drifting Face replaces
+Wave on wave on wave of faces,
+And you count them, one by one:
+    '_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief:
+    Doctor--Lawyer--Merchant--Chief._'
+Is it soothsay?--Is it fun?
+
+Young ones, like as wave and wave;
+Old ones, like as grave and grave;
+Tide on tide of human faces
+With what human undertow!
+Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief!--
+Tell me of the eddying spaces,
+Show me where the lost ones go;
+Like and lost, as leaf and leaf.
+What's your secret grim refrain
+Back and forth and back again,
+Once, and now, and always so?
+Three days since, and who was Thief?
+Three days more, and who'll be Chief?
+Oh, is that beyond belief,
+_Doctor, Lawyer--Merchant-Chief?_
+
+    (_Down, like grass before the mowing;
+    On, like wind in its mad going:--
+    Wind and dust forever blowing._)
+
+Highway, shrill with murderous pride,
+Highway, of the swarming tide!
+Why should my way lead me deeper?
+I am not my Brother's keeper.
+
+
+II
+
+Byway, ambushed with the dark,
+Byway, where the ears may hark;
+Live and fierce when day is done,
+You, that do without the Sun:--
+What's this game you bring to nought?--
+Muttering like a thing distraught,
+Reckoning like a simpleton?
+(Since the hearing must be brief,--
+Living or a dying thief!)
+Cobbled with the anguished stones
+That the thoroughfare disowns;
+Stones they gave you for your bread
+Of the disinherited!
+Where the Towers of Hunger loom,
+Crowding in the dregs of doom;
+Where the lost sky peering through
+Sees no more the grudging grass,--
+Only this mud-mirrored blue,
+Like some shattered looking-glass.
+
+    (_Under, with the sorry reaping!
+    Underneath the stones of weeping,
+    For the Dark to have in keeping._)
+
+Byway, you, so foully marred;
+You, whose sodden walls and scarred,
+See no light, but only where
+Fevered lamps are set to stare
+In the eyes of such despair!
+Tell me--as a Byway can--
+Was this Beggar once a Man?
+'_Rich man--Poor man--Beggar man--Thief!_'
+Like and lost as leaf and leaf.
+Stammering out your wrongs and shames,
+Must you cry their very names?
+Must you sob your shame, your grief?
+--'_Poor man--Poor man!--Beggar--Thief._'
+
+
+III
+
+Highway, where the Sun is wide;
+Byway, where the lost ones hide,
+Byway, where the Soul must hark,
+Byway, dreadful with the Dark:
+    Can you nothing do with Man?
+Doctor, Lawyer, Merchant, Chief,
+Learns he nothing, even of grief?
+Must it still be all his wonder
+Some men soar, while some go under?
+He has heard, and he has seen:
+Make him know the thing you mean.
+He has prayed since time began,--
+He's so curious of the Plan!
+He will pray you till he die,
+For the Whence and for the Why;
+Mad for wisdom--when 'tis cheaper!
+'_Why should my way lead me deeper?
+Am I, then, my Brother's keeper?_'
+
+Show him, Byway, if you can;
+Lest he end as he began,
+Rich and poor,--this beggar, Man.
+
+
+
+_But we did walk in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God;--
+There, where no beckoning wonder
+Of all the paths we trod,
+No choiring sun-filled vineyard,
+No voice of stream or bird,
+But was some radiant oracle
+And flaming with the Word!_
+
+_Mine ears are dim with voices;
+Mine eyes yet strive to see
+The black things here to wonder at,
+The mirth,--the misery.
+Beloved, who wert with me there,
+  How came these shames to be?--
+  On what lost star are we?_
+
+_Men say: The paths of gladness
+  By men were never trod!--
+But we have walked in Eden,
+  Eden, the garden of God._
+
+
+
+
+THE FOUNDLING
+
+
+Beautiful Mother, I have toiled all day;
+    And I am wearied. And the day is done.
+    Now, while the wild brooks run
+Soft by the furrows--fading, gold to gray,
+  Their laughters turned to musing--ah, let me
+  Hide here my face at thine unheeding knee,
+    Beautiful Mother; if I be thy son.
+
+The birds fly low. Gulls, starlings, hoverers,
+    Along the meadows and the paling foam,
+    All wings of thine that roam
+Fly down, fly down. One reedy murmur blurs
+  The silence of the earth; and from the warm
+  Face of the field the upward savors swarm
+    Into the darkness. And the herds are home.
+
+All they are stalled and folded for their rest,
+    The creatures: cloud-fleece young that leap and veer;
+    Mad-mane and gentle ear;
+And breath of loving-kindness. And that best,--
+  O shaggy house-mate, watching me from far,
+  With human-aching heart, as I a star--
+    Tempest of plumed joys, just to be near!
+
+So close, so like, so dear; and whom I love
+    More than thou lovest them, or lovest me.
+    So beautiful to see,
+Ah, and to touch! When those far lights above
+  Scorch me with farness--lights that call and call
+  To the far heart, and answer not at all;
+    Save that they will not let the darkness be.
+
+And what am I? That I alone of these
+    Make me most glad at noon? That I should mark
+    The after-glow go dark?
+This hour to sing--but never have--heart's-ease!
+  That when the sorrowing winds fly low, and croon
+  Outside our happy windows their old rune,
+    Beautiful Mother, I must wake, and hark?
+
+Who am I? Why for me this iron _Must_?
+    Burden the moon-white ox would never bear;
+    Load that he cannot share,
+He, thine imperial hostage of the dust.
+  Else should I look to see the god's surprise
+  Flow from his great unscornful, lovely eyes--
+    The ox thou gavest to partake my care.
+
+Yea, all they bear their yoke of sun-filled hours.
+    I, lord at noon, at nightfall no more free,
+    Take on more heavily
+The yoke of hid, intolerable Powers.
+  --Then pushes here, in my forgetful hand,
+  This near one's breathless plea to understand.
+    Starward I look; he, even so, at me!
+
+And she who shines within my house, my sight
+    Of the heart's eyes, my hearth-glow, and my rain,
+    My singing's one refrain--
+Are there for her no tidings from the height?
+  For her, my solace, likewise lost and far,
+  Islanded with me here, on this lone star
+    Washed by the ceaseless tides of dark and light.
+
+What shall it profit, that I built for her
+    A little wayside shelter from the stark
+    Sky that we hear, and mark?
+Lo, in her eyes all dreams that ever were!
+  And cheek-to-cheek with me she shares the quest,
+  Her heart, as mine for her, sole tented rest
+    From light to light of day; from dark--till Dark.
+
+Yea, but for her, how should I greatly care
+    Whither and whence? But that the dark should blast
+    Our bright! To hold her fast,--
+Yet feel this dread creep gray along the air.
+  To know I cannot hold her so my own,
+  But under surge of joy, the surges moan
+    That threaten us with parting at the last!
+
+Beautiful Mother, I am not thy son.
+    I know from echoes far behind the sky.
+    I know; I know not why.
+Even from thy golden, wide oblivion:
+Thy careless leave to help thy harvesting,
+  Thy leave to work a little, live, and sing;
+  Thy leave to suffer--yea, to sing and die,
+    Beautiful Mother! ...
+                 Ah, Whose child am I?
+
+
+
+_Love sang to me. And I went down the stair,
+And out into the darkness and the dew;
+And bowed myself unto the little grass,
+And the blind herbs, and the unshapen dust
+Of earth without a face. So let me be._
+
+_For as I hear, the singing makes of me
+My own desire, and momently I grow.
+Yea, all the while with hands of melody,
+The singing makes me, out of what I was,
+Even as a potter shaping Eden clay._
+
+_Ever Love sings, and saith in words that sing,
+'Beloved, thus art thou; and even so
+Lovely art thou, Beloved!'--Even so,
+As the Sea weaves her path before the light,
+I hear, I hear, and I am glorified._
+
+_Love sang to me, and I am glorified
+Because of some commandment in the stars.
+And I shall grow in favour and in shining,
+Till at the last I am all-beautiful;
+Beautiful, for the day Love sings no more._
+
+
+
+
+THE FEASTER
+
+
+Oh, who will hush that cry outside the doors,
+  While we are glad within?
+Go forth, go forth, all you my servitors;
+  (And gather close, my kin.)
+Go out to her. Tell her we keep a feast,--
+  Lost Loveliness who will not sit her down
+    Though we implore.
+It is her silence binds me unreleased,
+  It is her silence that no flute can drown,
+    It is her moonlit silence at the door,
+Wide as the whiteness, but a fire on high
+  That frights my heart with an immortal Cry,
+    Calling me evermore.
+
+Louder, you viols;--louder, O my harp;
+  Let me not hear her voice;
+And drown her keener silence, silver-sharp,
+  With waves of golden noise!
+For she is wise as Eden, even mute,
+  To search my spirit through the deep and height
+        Again, again.
+Outpierce her with your singing, dawnlike flute;
+  And you, gloom over, viols of the night
+     With colors lost in umber,--with sweet pain
+Of richest world's desire,--prevail, sing down
+  All memory with pleading, so you drown
+    Her merciless refrain!
+
+Oh, can you not with music, nor with din,
+    Save me the stress and stir
+In my lone spirit, throned among my kin,
+    From that same voice of her?--
+The never ending query she hath had
+  Only to wake my Soul, and only then
+    Wake it to weep?
+With '_Why?_' and '_Art thou happy? Art thou glad?
+  And hast thou fellowship with fellow-men?_'
+  So, through my mirth and underneath my sleep;
+Her voice,--abysmal hunger unfulfilled;--
+The calling, calling, never to be stilled,--
+    Calling of deep to deep.
+
+But I have that shall fill this wound of mine,
+    Since Loveliness must be;--
+Since Loveliness must save us, or we pine
+    And perish utterly.
+All that the years have left us, undismayed
+  Of age or death; and happier fair than truth,
+    --When truth is fair!
+Shapes of immortal sweetness, to persuade
+  Iron and fire and marble to their youth;
+Wild graces trapped from the three kingdoms' lair
+  Of wildest Beauty; shadow and smile and hush;
+    --Fleet color, of a daybreak, of a blush,
+        For my sad soul to wear!
+
+Let April fade! For me, unfading bloom!...
+      The little fruitless seed
+Deep sown of fire within the midmost gloom,
+      A sterner fire to feed:--
+The rainbow, frozen in a lasting dew;
+  Green-gazing emerald, fresh as grass beneath
+        The placid rose.
+Fair pearl, and you, fair pearl, and you and you,
+  Rained from the moon, and kissing in a wreath,
+    As moment unto eager moment goes!
+Look back at me, you sapphires blue and wise
+With farthest twilight, blue resplendent eyes
+      That never weep, nor close.
+
+O house me, glories! Give me house and home
+      Here for my homelessness.
+Set forth for me the wine, the honeycomb
+      Whereto desire saith 'Yes!'
+O Senses, weave me from all lovely dust
+  Some home-array, some fair familiar garb
+        For me, exiled.
+Charm me some rare anointment I may trust
+  Against her query, searching like a barb
+    The dumbness of a heart unreconciled.
+Clothe me with silver; fold me from dismay;
+  Save me from pity. For I hear her say,
+      'Alas, Alas, poor child!'
+
+'Alas, Alas, thou lost poor child, how long?
+      Why wilt thou suffer want?
+Why must I hear thy weeping through thy song,
+      And see thine eyes grow gaunt?
+Making sad feast upon the crumbs of light
+  Shed long ago from heavenly highways where
+        Thy brethren are!
+And thy heart smoulders in thee, to be bright,
+  Thy one sole refuge from thy one despair,
+    Fraying the thwarted body with a scar.
+How long, before thine eyelids, desolate,
+How long shall this thy dark dominion wait
+        For thee, belated Star?'
+
+
+
+_Beloved, if the Moon could weep,
+    Or if the Sun could see
+How all these weltering alleys keep
+    Their outcast treasury!_
+
+_O bitter, bitter-sweet!--
+Beauty of babyhood,--
+Earth's wistful uttermost of good
+Flung out upon the street;
+Fouled, even as the highways would,
+With mirk and mire and bruise;
+The cheek more petal-fine
+Than rose before a shrine!
+Those hands like star-fish in the ooze,
+And fingers fain to cling
+To any stronger thing!
+And smiles, for one triumphal Gift,
+Should one lean down, and lift!
+And tendril hair;--O in such wise,
+With wild lights aureoled,
+The morning-glories twine and hold,
+In some far paradise!_
+
+_Oh well and deep, the foul ways keep
+    Lost treasure hid from day!--
+Sun may not see: but only we,
+    Who look; and look away._
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN SHOES
+
+
+The winds are lashing on the sea;
+  The roads are blind with storm.
+And it's far and far away with me;
+  So bide you there, stay warm.
+It's forth I must, and forth to-day;
+  And I have no path to choose.
+The highway hill, it is my way still.--
+  Give me my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me on that first day
+  I knew that I was young.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north;
+  And I heard the Songs unsung._
+
+This cloak is worn too threadbare thin,
+  But ah, how weatherwise!
+This girdle serves to bind it in;
+  What heed of wondering eyes?--
+And yet beside, I wear one pride
+  --Too bright, think you, to use?--
+That I must wear, and still keep fair.--
+  Give here my golden shoes.
+
+_God gave them me, on that first day
+  I heard the Stars all chime.
+And I looked forth far, from road to star;
+  And I knew it was far to climb._
+
+They would buy me house and hearth, no doubt,
+  And the mirth to spend and share;
+Could I sell that gift, and go without,
+  Or wear--what neighbors wear.
+But take my staff, my purse, my scrip;
+  For I have one thing to choose.
+For you,--Godspeed! May you soothe your need.
+  For me, my golden shoes!
+
+_He gave them me, that far, first day
+  When I heard all Songs unsung.
+And I looked far forth, from west to north.
+  God saw that I was young!_
+
+
+
+
+NOON AT PAESTUM
+
+Lord of the Sea, we sun-filled creatures raise
+  Our hands among the clamorous weeds,--we too.
+  Lord of the Sun, and of the upper blue,
+Of all To-morrow, and all yesterdays,
+Here, where the thousand broken names and ways
+  Of worship are but shards we wandered through,
+  There is no gift to offer, or undo;
+There is no prayer left in us, only praise.
+
+Only to glory in this glory here,
+  Through the dead smoke of myriad sacrifice;--
+To look through these blue spaces, blind and clear
+  Even as the seaward gaze of Homer's eyes;
+And from uplifted heart, and cup, to pour
+Wine to the Unknown God.--We ask no more.
+
+
+
+
+VESTAL FLAME
+
+Light, light,--the last:
+Till the night be done,
+Keep the watch for stars and sun, and eyelids over-cast.
+
+Once there seemed a sky,
+Brooding over men.
+Now no stars have come again, since their bright good-bye!
+
+Once my dreams were wise.
+Now I nothing know;
+Fasting and the dark have so put out my heart's eyes.
+
+But thy golden breath
+Burns against my cheek.
+I can feel and love, and seek all the rune it saith.
+
+Do not thou be spent,
+Holy thing of fire,--
+Only hope of heart's desire dulled with wonderment!
+
+While there bide these two
+Hands to bar the wind;
+Though such fingers chill and thinned, shed no roses through.
+
+While this body bends
+Only for thy guard;
+Like a tower, to ward and worship all the light it sends.
+
+It is not for fear
+Lest there ring some cry
+On the midnight, 'Rise and come. Lo, the Bridegroom near!'
+
+It is not for pride,
+To be shining fair
+In a wedding-garment there, lighting home the Bride.
+
+It is not to win
+Love, for hoarded toil,
+From those poor, with their spent oil, weeping, 'Light us in!'--
+
+No; but in despite
+Of all vigils set,
+Do I bind me to thee yet,--strangest thing of Light!
+
+Only, all, for thee
+Whatsoe'er thou art,
+Smiling through the blinded heart, things it cannot see.
+
+Very Soul's Desire,
+Take my life; and live
+By the rapture thine doth give, ecstasy of fire!
+
+Hold thy golden breath!
+For I feel,--not hear--
+Spent with joy and fear to lose thee, all the song it saith.
+
+Light, light, my own:
+Do not thou disown
+Thy poor keeper-of-the-light, for Light's sake alone.
+
+
+
+_The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand
+Between us two the while, with others near.
+Mine questioned thine with 'Why should I be here?'
+'Yet bide thou here,' said thine, 'and understand.'_
+
+_And mine was mute; but strove not then to go;
+And hid itself, and murmured, 'Do not hear
+The listening in my heart!' Said thine, 'My Dear,
+I will not hear it, ever. But I know.'_
+
+_Said mine to thine: 'Let be. Now will I go!--
+For you are saying,--you who do not speak,
+This hand-in-hand is one day cheek-to-cheek!'
+And said thy hand around me, 'Even so.'_
+
+_Then mine to thine.--'Yea, I have been alone;
+--Yet happy.--This is strange. This is not I!
+You hold me, but you can not tell me why.'
+And said thy hand to mine again, 'My Own.'_
+
+
+
+
+THE PROPHET
+
+
+All day long he kept the sheep:--
+  Far and early, from the crowd,
+On the hills from steep to steep,
+  Where the silence cried aloud;
+  And the shadow of the cloud
+Wrapt him in a noonday sleep.
+
+Where he dipped the water's cool,
+  Filling boyish hands from thence,
+Something breathed across the pool
+  Stir of sweet enlightenments;
+  And he drank, with thirsty sense,
+Till his heart was brimmed and full.
+
+Still, the hovering Voice unshed,
+  And the Vision unbeheld,
+And the mute sky overhead,
+  And his longing, still withheld!
+  --Even when the two tears welled,
+Salt, upon that lonely bread.
+
+Vaguely blessed in the leaves,
+  Dim-companioned in the sun,
+Eager mornings, wistful eves,
+  Very hunger drew him on;
+  And To-morrow ever shone
+With the glow the sunset weaves.
+
+Even so, to that young heart,
+  Words and hands, and Men were dear;
+And the stir of lane and mart
+  After daylong vigil here.
+  Sunset called, and he drew near,
+Still to find his path apart.
+
+When the Bell, with gentle tongue,
+  Called the herd-bells home again,
+Through the purple shades he swung,
+  Down the mountain, through the glen;
+  Towards the sound of fellow-men,--
+Even from the light that clung.
+
+Dimly too, as cloud on cloud,
+  Came that silent flock of his:
+Thronging whiteness, in a crowd,
+  After homing twos and threes;
+  With the thronging memories
+Of all white things dreamed and vowed.
+
+Through the fragrances, alone,
+  By the sudden-silent brook,
+From the open world unknown,
+  To the close of speech and book;
+  There to find the foreign look
+In the faces of his own.
+
+Sharing was beyond his skill;
+  Shyly yet, he made essay:
+Sought to dip, and share, and fill
+  Heart's-desire, from day to day.
+  But their eyes, some foreign way,
+Looked at him; and he was still.
+
+Last, he reached his arms to sleep,
+  Where the Vision waited, dim,
+Still beyond some deep-on-deep.
+  And the darkness folded him,
+  Eager heart and weary limb.--
+All day long, he kept the sheep.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONG LANE
+
+
+All through the summer night, down the long lane in flower,
+      The moon-white lane,
+All through the summer night,--dim as a shower,
+      Glimmer and fade the Twain:
+Over the cricket hosts, throbbing the hour by hour,
+      Young voices bloom and wane.
+
+Down the long lane they go, and past one window, pale
+      With visions silver-blurred;
+Stirring the heart that waits,--the eyes that fail
+      After a spring deferred.
+Query, and hush, and Ah!--dim through a moon-lit veil,
+      The same one word.
+
+Down the long lane, entwined with all the fragrance there;
+      The lane in flower somehow
+With youth, and plighted hands, and star-strewn air,
+      And muted 'Thee' and 'Thou':--
+All the wild bloom and reach of dreams that never were,
+      --Never to be, now.
+
+So, in the throbbing dark, where ebbs the old refrain,
+      A starved heart hears.
+And silver-bright, and silver-blurred again
+      With moonlight and with tears.
+All the long night they go, down the long summer lane,
+      The long, long years.
+
+
+
+_Ah but, Beloved, men may do
+All things to music;--march, and die;
+And wear the longest vigil through,
+      ... And say good-by.
+All things to music!--Ah, but where
+Peace never falls upon the air;--
+These city-ways of dark and din
+Where greed has shut and barred them in!
+And thundering, swart against the sky,
+That whirlwind,--never to go by--
+  Of tracks and wheels, that overhead
+Beat back the senses with their roar
+And menace of undying war,--
+  War--war--for daily bread!_
+
+_All things to silence! Ah, but where
+Men dwell not, but must make a lair;--
+And Sorrow may not sit alone,
+Nor Love hear music of its own;
+And Thought that strives to breast that sea
+Must struggle even for memory.
+Day-long, night-long,--besieging din
+To thrust all pain the deeper in!--
+And drown the flutter of first-breath;
+And batter at the doors of Death.
+To lull their dearest:--watch their dead;
+While the long thunders overhead,
+Gather and break for evermore,
+Eternal tides--eternal War,
+  War--war--Bread--bread!_
+
+
+
+
+ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK
+
+
+Brook, of the listening grass,
+Brook of the sun-fleckt wings,
+Brook of the same wild way and flickering spell!
+Must you begone? Will you forever pass,
+After so many years and dear to tell?--
+Brook of all hoverings ...
+Brook that I kneel above;
+Brook of my love.
+
+Ah, but I have a charm to trouble you;
+A spell that shall subdue
+Your all-escaping heart, unheedful one
+And unremembering!
+Now, when I make my prayer
+To your wild brightness there
+That will but run and run,
+O mindless Water!--
+Hark,--now will I bring
+A grace as wild,--my little yearling daughter,
+My Alison.
+
+Heed well that threat;
+And tremble for your hill-born liberty
+So bright to see!--
+Your shadow-dappled way, unthwarted yet,
+And the high hills whence all your dearness bubbled;--
+You, never to possess!
+For let her dip but once--O fair and fleet,--
+Here in your shallows, yes,
+Here in your silverness
+Her two blithe feet,--
+O Brook of mine, how shall your heart be troubled!
+
+The heart, the bright unmothering heart of you,
+That never knew.--
+(O never, more than mine of long ago.
+How could we know?--)
+For who should guess
+The shock and smiting of that perfectness?--
+The lily-thrust of those ecstatic feet
+Unpityingly sweet?--
+Sweet beyond all the blurred blind dreams that grope
+The upward paths of hope?
+And who could guess
+The dulcet holiness,
+The lilt and gladness of those jocund feet,
+Unpityingly sweet?
+Ah, for your coolness that shall change and stir
+With every glee of her!--
+Under the fresh amaze
+That drips and glistens from her wiles and ways;
+When the endearing air
+That everywhere
+Must twine and fold and follow her, shall be
+Rippled to ring on ring of melody,--
+Music, like shadows from the joy of her,
+Small starry Reveller!--
+When from her triumphings,--
+All frolic wings--
+There soars beyond the glories of the height,
+The laugh of her delight!
+
+And it shall sound, until
+Your heart stand still;
+Shaken to human sight;
+Struck through with tears and light;
+One with the one desire
+Unto that central Fire
+Of Love the Sun, whence all we lighted are
+Even from clod to star.
+
+And all your glory, O most swift and sweet!--
+And all your exultation only this;
+To be the lowly and forgotten kiss
+Beneath those feet.
+
+You that must ever pass,--
+You of the same wild way,--
+The silver-bright good-bye without a look!--
+You that would never stay,
+For the beseeching grass ...
+Brook!--
+
+
+
+_You, Four Walls,
+  Wall not in my heart!
+When the lovely night-time falls
+  All so welcomely,
+Blinding, sweet hearth-fire,
+Light of heart's desire,
+  Blind not, blind not me!
+Unto them that weep apart,--
+While you glow, within,
+  Wreckt, despairing kin,--
+Dark with misery:
+--Do not blind my heart!_
+
+  _You, close Heart!
+    Never hide from mine
+    Worlds that I divine
+  Through thy human dearness.
+  O beloved Nearness,
+    Hallow all I understand
+    With thy hand-in-hand;--
+  All the lights I seek,
+  With thy cheek-to-cheek;
+    All the loveliness I loved apart._
+
+    _You, heart's Home!--
+    Wall not in my heart._
+
+
+
+
+CANTICLE OF THE BABE
+
+
+I
+
+Over the broken world, the dark gone by,
+Horror of outcast darkness torn with wars;
+And timeless agony
+Of the white fire, heaped high by blinded Stars,
+Unfaltering, unaghast;--
+Out of the midmost Fire
+At last,--at last,--
+Cry! ...
+O darkness' one desire,--
+O darkness, have you heard?--
+Black Chaos, blindly striving towards the Word?
+--The Cry!
+
+Behold thy conqueror, Death!
+Behold, behold from whom
+It flutters forth, that triumph of First-Breath,
+Victorious one that can but breathe and cling,--
+This pulsing flower,--this weaker than a wing,
+Halcyon thing!--
+Cradled above unfathomable doom.
+
+
+II
+
+Under my feet, O Death,
+Under my trembling feet!
+Back, through the gates of hell, now give me way.
+I come.--I bring new Breath!
+Over the trampled shards of mine own clay,
+That smoulder still, and burn,
+Lo, I return!
+Hail, singing Light that floats
+Pulsing with chorused motes:--
+Hail to thee, Sun, that lookest on all lands!
+And take thou from my weak undying hands,
+A precious thing, unblemished, undefiled:--
+Here, on my heart uplift,
+Behold the Gift,--
+Thy glory and my glory, and my child!
+
+
+III
+
+(_And our eyes were opened; eyes that had been holden.
+  And I saw the world, and the fruits thereof.
+And I saw their glories, scarlet-stained and golden,
+  All a crumbled dust beneath the feet of Love.
+  And I saw their dreams, all of nothing worth;
+  But a path for Love, for Him to walk above,
+And I saw new heaven, and new earth._)
+
+
+IV
+
+    The grass is full of murmurs;
+    The sky is full of wings;
+        The earth is full of breath.
+        With voices, choir on choir
+        With tongues of fire,
+    They sing how Life out-sings--
+        Out-numbers Death.
+
+
+V
+
+Who are these that fly;
+As doves, and as doves to the windows?
+Doves, like hovering dreams round Love that slumbereth;
+Silvering clouds blown by,
+Doves and doves to the windows,--
+Warm through the radiant sky their wings beat breath.
+They are the world's new-born:
+Doves, doves to the windows!
+Lighting, as flakes of snow;
+Lighting, as flakes of flame;
+Some to the fair sown furrows;
+Some to the huts and burrows
+Choked of the mire and thorn,--
+Deep in the city's shame.
+Wind-scattered wreaths they go,
+Doves, and doves, to the windows;
+Some for worshipping arms, to shelter and fold, and shrine;
+Some to be torn and trodden,
+Withered and waste, and sodden;
+Pitiful, sacred leaves from Life's dishonored vine.
+
+
+VI
+
+O Vine of Life, that in these reaching fingers,
+Urges a sunward way!
+Hold here and climb, and halt not, that there lingers
+So far outstripped, my halting, wistful clay.
+Make here thy foothold of my rapturous heart,--
+Yea, though the tendrils start
+To hold and twine!
+I am the heart that nursed
+Thy sunward thirst.--
+A little while, a little while, O Vine,
+My own and never mine,
+Feed thy sweet roots with me
+Abundantly.
+O wonder-wildness of the pushing Bud
+With hunger at the flood,
+Climb on, and seek, and spurn.
+Let my dull spirit learn
+To follow with its longing, as it may,
+While thou seek higher day.--
+But thou, the reach of my own heart's desire,
+Be free as fire!
+Still climb and cling; and so
+Outstrip,--outgrow.
+
+O Vine of Life, my own and not my own,
+So far am I outgrown!
+High as I may, I lift thee, Soul's Desire.
+--Lift thou me higher.
+
+
+
+_And thou, Wayfaring Woman, whom I meet
+On all the highways,--every brimming street,
+Lady Demeter, is it thou, grown gaunt
+With work and want?
+At last, and with what shamed and stricken eyes,
+I see through thy disguise
+Of drudge and Exile,--even the holy boon
+That silvers yonder in the Harvest-moon;--
+That dimly under glows
+The furrows of thy worn immortal face,
+With mother-grace._
+
+_O Queen and Burden-bearer, what of those
+To whom thou gavest the lily and the rose
+Of thy far youth?... For whom,
+Out of the wondrous loom
+Of thine enduring body, thou didst make
+Garments of beauty, cunningly adorned,
+But only for Death's sake!
+Largess of life, but to lie waste and scorned.--
+Could not such cost of pain,
+Nor daily utmost of thy toil prevail?--
+But they must fade, and pale,
+And wither from thy desolated throne?--
+And still no Summer give thee back again
+Thine own?_
+
+_Lady of Sorrows,--Mother,--Drudge august.
+Behold me in the dust._
+
+
+
+
+GLADNESS
+
+
+Unto my Gladness then I cried:
+    'I will not be denied!
+Answer me now; and tell me why
+Thou dost not fall, as a broken star
+Out of the Dark where such things are,
+  And where such bright things die.
+How canst thou, with thy fountain dance
+Shatter clear sight with radiance?--
+How canst thou reach and soar, and fling,
+Over my heart's dark shuddering,
+Unearthly lights on everything?
+What dost thou see? What dost thou know?'
+My Gladness said to me, bowed below,
+'Gladness I am: created so.'
+
+'And dare'st thou, in my mortal veins
+Sing, with the Spring's descending rains?
+While in this hour, and momently,
+Forth of myself I look, and see
+Torn treasure of my heart's Desire;
+And human glories in the mire,
+That should make glad some paradise!--
+The childhood strewn in foulest place,
+The girlhood, plundered of its grace;
+The eyelids shut upon spent eyes
+That never looked upon thy face!
+Answer me, thou, if answer be!'
+
+        My Gladness said to me:
+'Weep if thou wilt; yea, weep, and doubt.
+I may not let the Sun go out.'
+
+Then to my Gladness still I cried:
+        'And how canst thou abide?--'
+Here, where my listening heart must hark
+These sorrows rising from the Dark
+Where still they starve, and strive and die,
+Who bear each heaviest penalty
+Of humanhood;--nor grasp, nor guess,
+The garment's hem of happiness!--
+The spear-wound throbbing in my song,
+It throbs more bitterly than wrong,--
+It burns more wildly than despair,--
+The will to share,
+The will to share!
+Little I knew,--the blind-fold I,--
+Joy would become like agony,--
+Like arrows of the Sun in me!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I hold thee here. I have thee, now,--
+And I am human. But what art thou!'
+
+        My Gladness answered me:
+'Wayfarer, wilt thou understand?--
+Follow me on. And keep my hand.'
+
+
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD
+
+
+Yes, Nightingale, through all the summer-time
+  We followed on, from moon to golden moon;
+  From where Salerno day-dreams in the noon,
+And the far rose of Paestum once did climb.
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,
+Through sun-shrill vines and campanile chime,
+  We listened;--from the old year to the new.
+    Brown bird, and where were you?
+
+You, that Ravello lured not, throned on high
+  And filled with singing out of sun-burned throats!
+  Nor yet Minore of the flame-sailed boats;
+Nor yet--of all bird-song should glorify--
+  Assisi, Little Portion of the blest,
+Assisi, in the bosom of the sky,
+  Where God's own singer thatched his sunward nest;
+    That little, heavenliest!
+
+And north and north, to where the hedge-rows are,
+  That beckon with white looks an endless way;
+  Where, through the fair wet silverness of May,
+A lamb shines out as sudden as a star,
+  Among the cloudy sheep; and green, and pale,
+The may-trees reach and glimmer, near or far,
+  And the red may-trees wear a shining veil.
+    --And still, no nightingale!
+
+The one vain longing,--through all journeyings,
+  The one: in every hushed and hearkening spot,--
+  All the soft-swarming dark where you were not,
+Still longed for! Yes, for sake of dreams and wings,
+  And wonders, that your own must ever make
+To bower you close, with all hearts' treasurings;
+  And for that speech toward which all hearts do ache;--
+        Even for Music's sake.
+But most, his music whose beloved name
+  Forever writ in water of bright tears,
+  Wins to one grave-side even the Roman years,
+That kindle there the hallowed April flame
+  Of comfort-breathing violets. By that shrine
+Of Youth, Love, Death, forevermore the same,
+  Violets still!--When falls, to leave no sign,
+        The arch of Constantine.
+
+Most for his sake we dreamed. Tho' not as he,
+  From that lone spirit, brimmed with human woe,
+  Your song once shook to surging overflow.
+How was it, sovran dweller of the tree,
+  His cry, still throbbing in the flooded shell
+Of silence with remembered melody,
+  Could draw from you no answer to the spell?
+        --O Voice, O Philomel?
+
+Long time we wondered (and we knew not why):--
+  Nor dream, nor prayer, of wayside gladness born,
+  Nor vineyards waiting, nor reproachful thorn,
+Nor yet the nested hill-towns set so high
+  All the white way beside the girdling blue,--
+Nor olives, gray against a golden sky,
+  Could serve to wake that rapturous voice of you!
+        But the wise silence knew.
+
+O Nightingale unheard!--Unheard alone,
+  Throughout that woven music of the days
+  From the faint sea-rim to the market-place,
+And ring of hammers on cathedral stone!--
+  So be it, better so: that there should fail
+For sun-filled ones, one blessed thing unknown.
+  To them, be hid forever,--and all hail!
+        Sing never, Nightingale.
+
+Sing, for the others! Sing; to some pale cheek
+  Against the window, like a starving flower.
+  Loose, with your singing, one poor pilgrim hour
+Of journey, with some Heart's Desire to seek.
+  Loose, with your singing, captives such as these
+In misery and iron, hearts too meek,
+  For voyage--voyage over dreamful seas
+        To lost Hesperides.
+
+Sing not for free-men. Ah, but sing for whom
+  The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade,
+The windows take no heed of light nor shade,--
+The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom.
+  Sing near! So in that golden overflowing
+They may forget their wasted human bloom;
+  Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing.--
+        Reck not of life's bright going!
+
+Sing not for lovers, side by side that hark;
+  Nor unto parted lovers, save they be
+  Parted indeed by more than makes the Sea.
+Where never hope shall meet--like mounting lark--
+  Far Joy's uprising; and no memories
+Abide to star the music-haunted dark:
+  To them that sit in darkness, such as these,
+        Pour down, pour down heart's-ease.
+
+Not in kings' gardens. No; but where there haunt
+  The world's forgotten, both of men and birds;
+The alleys of no hope and of no words,
+The hidings where men reap not, though they plant;
+But toil and thirst--so dying and so born;--
+And toil and thirst to gather to their want,
+  From the lean waste, beyond the daylight's scorn,
+        --To gather grapes of thorn!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And for those two, your pilgrims without tears,
+  Who prayed a largess where there was no dearth,
+Forgive it to their human-happy ears:
+  Forgive it them, brown music of the Earth,
+  Unknowing,--though the wiser silence knew!
+Forgive it to the music of the spheres
+  That while they walked together so, the Two
+        Together,--heard not you.
+
+
+
+
+_ENVOI_
+
+_Beloved, till the day break,
+  Leave wide the little door;
+And bless, to lack and longing,
+  Our brimming more-and-more._
+
+_Is love a scanted portion,
+  That we should hoard thereof?--
+Oh, call unto the deserts,
+  Beloved and my Love!_
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody
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