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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
+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: Poems of Emile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Emile Verhaeren
+
+Illustrator: John S. Sargent
+
+Translator: Alma Strettell
+
+Release Date: September 21, 2010 [EBook #33792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF EMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+OF
+
+EMILE VERHAEREN.
+
+
+SELECTED AND RENDERED INTO ENGLISH
+
+BY
+
+ALMA STRETTELL.
+
+
+JOHN LANE
+THE BODLEY HEAD
+LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+1915.
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"
+
+RAIN
+THE FERRYMAN
+THE SILENCE
+THE BELL-RINGER
+SNOW
+THE GRAVE-DIGGER
+THE WIND
+THE FISHERMEN
+THE ROPE-MAKER
+
+From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"
+
+I.
+VIII.
+XVII.
+XXI.
+
+From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"
+
+ST. GEORGE
+THE GARDENS
+SHE OF THE GARDEN
+
+From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"
+
+THE GLORY OF HEAVENS
+LIFE
+JOY
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
+
+
+
+Emile Verhaeren, remarkable among of the brilliant group of writers
+representing "Young Belgium," and one who has been recognized by the
+literary world of France as holding a foremost place among the lyric
+poets of the day was born at St. Amand, near Antwerp, in 1855. His
+childhood was passed on the banks of the Scheldt, in the midst of the
+wide-spreading Flemish plains, a country of mist and flood, of dykes and
+marshes, and the impressions he received from the mysterious, melancholy
+character of these surroundings, have produced a marked and lasting
+influence upon his work. Yet the other characteristics with which it is
+stamped--the wealth of imagination, the gloomy force, the wonderful
+descriptive power and sense of colour, which set the landscape before
+one as a picture, suggest rather the possibility of Spanish blood in the
+poet's veins--and again, his somewhat morbid subjectivity and tendency
+to self-analysis mark him as the child of the latter end of our
+nineteenth century.
+
+Verhaeren entered early in life upon the literary career. After some
+time spent at a college in Ghent, he became a student at the University
+of Louvain, and here he founded and edited a journal called "_La
+Semaine_," in which work he was assisted by the singer Van Dyck, and by
+his friend and present publisher, Edmond Deman. He also formed, about
+this time, a close friendship with Maeterlinck. In 1881, Verhaeren was
+called to the Bar at Brussels, but soon gave up his legal career to
+devote himself entirely to literature. In 1883 he published his first
+volume of poems, and shortly afterwards became one of the editors of
+"_L'Art Moderne_," to which, as well as to other contemporary periodicals,
+he was for many years a contributor. In 1892 he founded, with the help
+of two other friends, the "Section of Art" in the "House of the People,"
+a popular institution in Brussels, where performances of the best music,
+as well as lectures upon literary and artistic subjects, were given. In
+spite, however, of the work which all this entailed, and of the many
+interests created by his ardent appreciation of the various branches of
+art and literature, Verhaeren continued to labour unceasingly at his
+poetical work, and between 1883 and 1897 brought out successively eleven
+small volumes: _Les Flamandes, Les Moines, Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les
+Flambeaux Noirs, Les Apparus dans mes chemins, Les Campagnes
+Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires, Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les
+Heures Claires,_ and _Les Aubes_.
+
+Throughout this entire series the intellectual and spiritual development
+of the poet may be closely traced--from the materialism which pervades
+_Les Flamandes_, and the despairing pessimism and lurid emotion--the
+throes of a self-centred soul in revolt against fate--which are so
+powerfully portrayed in _Les Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, and are
+apparent even in the opening pages of _Les Apparus_ dans mes chemins--to
+the tender, hopeful mysticism which marks the latter poems in that
+volume, and the wonderful sympathy with Nature, even in her saddest
+aspects--the subtle power of endowing those aspects with a profound and
+ennobling symbolism, which characterise the most beautiful of the poems
+in Les Villages Illusoires. Les Heures Claires is the name given to a
+volume of love-songs, an exquisite record of golden hours spent in a
+garden at spring-time--spring-time in a double sense.
+
+The task of making an adequate and typical selection from a poet's work
+is always difficult, and in this case it has been decided to limit the
+field of selection, at least for the present, to the three last-named
+volumes, which embody what may, I think, be considered as Verhaeren's
+highest achievement in the realm of lyrical poetry.
+
+
+In style, Verhaeren is essentially the apostle of the "Vers libre"; and
+his handling of rhyme and rhythm, his coining of words where he finds
+the French vocabulary insufficient, have called down upon him some
+criticism from those of his French contemporaries who are sticklers for
+the older rules and more conventional forms of versification. But
+however this may be, it remains an undeniable fact that Verhaeren has at
+his command a rare and powerful poetic eloquence--a wealth of imagery, a
+depth of thought and a subtlety of expression which perhaps are not to
+be imprisoned behind the bars of a too rigid convention. English readers
+have already been accustomed by their own poets to the "vers libre," and
+it is not so much, therefore, for my adherence to this form, as for my
+failure adequately to render Verhaeren's peculiar and striking beauty of
+language, that I beg their indulgence for the following translations.
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+
+From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"
+
+
+RAIN
+
+
+Long as unending threads, the long-drawn rain
+Interminably, with its nails of grey,
+     Athwart the dull grey day,
+     Rakes the green window-pane--
+So infinitely, endlessly, the rain,
+The long, long rain.
+                           The rain.
+
+Since yesternight it keeps unravelling
+Down from the frayed and flaccid rags that cling
+     About the sullen sky.
+     The low black sky;
+Since yesternight, so slowly, patiently.
+Unravelling its threads upon the roads.
+Upon the roads and lanes, with even fall
+                           Continual.
+
+
+Along the miles
+That 'twixt the meadows and the suburbs lie,
+By roads interminably bent, the files
+Of waggons, with their awnings arched and tall.
+Struggling in sweat and steam, toil slowly by
+With outline vague as of a funeral.
+Into the ruts, unbroken, regular,
+Stretching out parallel so far
+That when night comes they seem to join the sky.
+For hours the water drips;
+And every tree and every dwelling weeps.
+Drenched as they are with it.
+With the long rain, tenaciously, with rain
+                           Indefinite.
+
+
+The rivers, through each rotten dyke that yields.
+Discharge their swollen wave upon the fields.
+         Where coils of drownèd hay
+         Float far away;
+And the wild breeze
+Buffets the alders and the walnut-trees;
+Knee-deep in water great black oxen stand,
+Lifting their bellowings sinister on high
+         To the distorted sky;
+As now the night creeps onward, all the land,
+         Thicket and plain,
+Grows cumbered with her clinging shades immense.
+And still there is the rain,
+The long, long rain.
+Like soot, so fine and dense.
+
+
+         The long, long rain.
+         Rain--and its threads identical,
+         And its nails systematical,
+Weaving the garment, mesh by mesh amain,
+Of destitution for each house and wall,
+         And fences that enfold
+         The villages, neglected, grey, and old:
+Chaplets of rags and linen shreds that fall
+In frayed-out wisps from upright poles and tall.
+Blue pigeon-houses glued against the thatch,
+And windows with a patch
+Of dingy paper on each lowering pane,
+Houses with straight-set gutters, side by side
+Across the broad stone gambles crucified,
+          Mills, uniform, forlorn.
+Each rising from its hillock like a horn,
+Steeples afar and chapels round about,
+          The rain, the long, long rain,
+Through all the winter wears and wears them out.
+
+     Rain, with its many wrinkles, the long rain
+     With its grey nails, and with its watery mane;
+     The long rain of these lands of long ago,
+     The rain, eternal in its torpid flow!
+
+
+
+
+THE FERRYMAN
+
+
+The ferryman, a green reed 'twixt his teeth,
+With hand on oar, against the current strong
+Had rowed and rowed so long.
+
+
+But she, alas! whose voice was hailing him
+Across the far waves dim.
+Still further o'er the far waves seemed to float,
+Still further backwards, 'mid the mists, remote.
+
+
+The casements with their eyes.
+The dial-faces of the towers that rise
+Upon the shore,
+Watched, as he strove and laboured more and more.
+With frantic bending of the back in two,
+And start of savage muscles strained anew.
+
+
+One oar was suddenly riven,
+And by the current driven,
+With lash of heavy breakers, out to sea.
+
+
+But she, whose voice that hailed him he could hear
+There 'mid the mist and wind, she seemed to wring
+Her hands with gestures yet more maddening
+Toward him who drew not near.
+
+
+The ferryman with his surviving oar
+Fell harder yet to work, and more and more
+He strove, till every joint did crack and start,
+And fevered terror shook his very heart.
+
+
+The rudder broke
+Beneath one sharp, rude stroke;
+That, too, the current drove relentlessly,
+A dreary shred of wreckage, out to sea.
+
+
+The casements by the pier,
+Like eyes immense and feverish open wide,
+The dials of the towers--those widows drear
+Upstanding straight from mile to mile beside
+The banks of rivers--obstinately gaze
+Upon this madman, in his headstrong craze
+Prolonging his mad voyage 'gainst the tide.
+
+
+But she, who yonder in the mist-clouds hailed
+Him still so desperately, she wailed and wailed,
+With head outstretched in fearful, straining haste
+Toward the unknown of the outstretched waste.
+
+
+Steady as one that had in bronze been cast,
+Amid the blenched, grey tempest and the blast.
+The ferryman his single oar yet plied.
+And, spite of all, still lashed and bit the tide.
+His old eyes, with hallucinated gaze,
+Saw that far distance--an illumined haze--
+Whence the voice sounded, coming toward him still.
+Beneath the cold skies, lamentable, shrill.
+
+
+The last oar broke--
+And this the current hurried at one stroke,
+Like a frail straw, towards the distant sea.
+
+
+The ferryman, with arms dropped helplessly
+Sank on his bench, forlorn.
+His loins with vain efforts broken, torn.
+
+
+Drifting, his barque struck somewhere, as by chance,
+He turned a glance
+Towards the bank behind him then--and saw
+He had not left the shore.
+
+
+The casements and the dials, one by one.
+Their huge eyes gazing in a foolish stare.
+Witnessed the ruin of his ardour there;
+But still the old, tenacious ferryman
+Firm in his teeth--for God knows when, indeed--
+Held the green reed.
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+
+
+Ever since ending of the summer weather.
+When last the thunder and the lightning broke,
+Shatt'ring themselves upon it at one stroke,
+The Silence has not stirred, there in the heather.
+
+
+All round about stand steeples straight as stakes,
+And each its bell between its fingers shakes;
+All round about, with their three-storied loads,
+     The teams prowl down the roads;
+All round about, where'er the pine woods end,
+The wheel creaks on along its rutty bed,
+But not a sound is strong enough to rend
+     That space intense and dead.
+
+
+Since summer, thunder-laden, last was heard.
+The Silence has not stirred;
+And the broad heath-land, where the nights sink down
+Beyond the sand-hills brown.
+Beyond the endless thickets closely set,
+To the far borders of the far-away.
+     Prolongs It yet.
+
+
+Even the winds disturb not as they go
+
+The boughs of those long larches, bending low
+     Where the marsh-water lies,
+In which Its vacant eyes
+Gaze at themselves unceasing, stubbornly.
+Only sometimes, as on their way they move,
+The noiseless shadows of the clouds above.
+Or of some great bird's hov'ring flight on high,
+     Brush It in passing by.
+
+
+Since the last bolt that scored the earth aslant,
+Nothing has pierced the Silence dominant.
+
+
+Of those who cross Its vast immensity,
+Whether at twilight or at dawn it be,
+There is not one but feels
+The dread of the Unknown that It instils;
+An ample force supreme, It holds Its sway
+Uninterruptedly the same for aye.
+Dark walls of blackest fir-trees bar from sight
+The outlook towards the paths of hope and light;
+     Huge, pensive junipers
+Affright from far the passing travellers;
+Long, narrow paths stretch their straight lines unbent.
+Till they fork off in curves malevolent;
+And the sun, ever shifting, ceaseless lends
+Fresh aspects to the mirage whither tends
+     Bewilderment
+
+
+Since the last bolt was forged amid the storm,
+The polar Silence at the corners four
+Of the wide heather-land has stirred no more.
+
+
+Old shepherds, whom their hundred years have worn
+To things all dislocate and out of gear,
+And their old dogs, ragged, tired-out, and torn.
+Oft watch It, on the soundless lowlands near,
+Or downs of gold beflecked with shadows' flight,
+Sit down immensely there beside the night.
+
+
+Then, at the curves and corners of the mere.
+     The waters creep with fear;
+The heather veils itself, grows wan and white;
+All the leaves listen upon all the bushes,
+And the incendiary sunset hushes
+Before Its face his cries of brandished light.
+And in the hamlets that about It lie.
+Beneath the thatches of their hovels small
+The terror dwells of feeling It is nigh.
+And, though It stirs not, dominating all.
+Broken with dull despair and helplessness,
+Beneath Its presence they crouch motionless,
+As though upon the watch--and dread to see.
+Through rifts of vapour, open suddenly
+At evening, in the moon, the argent eyes
+     Of Its mute mysteries.
+
+
+
+
+THE BELL-RINGER
+
+
+Yon, in the depths of the evening's track,
+Like a herd of blind bullocks that seek their fellows,
+Wild, as in terror, the tempest bellows.
+And suddenly, there, o'er the gables black
+That the church, in the twilight, around it raises
+All scored with lightnings the steeple blazes.
+
+
+See the old bell-ringer, frenzied with fear.
+Mouth gaping, yet speechless, draw hastening near.
+And the knell of alarm that with strokes of lead
+He rings, heaves forth in a tempest of dread
+The frantic despair that throbs in his head.
+
+
+With the cross at the height
+Of its summit brandished, the lofty steeple
+Spreads the crimson mane
+Of the fire o'er the plain
+Toward the dream-like horizons that bound the night;
+The city nocturnal is filled with light;
+The face of the swift-gathered crowds doth people
+With fears and with clamours both street and lane;
+On walls turned suddenly dazzling bright
+The dusky panes drink the crimson flood
+     Like draughts of blood.
+
+
+Yet, knell upon knell, the old ringer doth cast
+His frenzy and fear o'er the country vast.
+
+
+The steeple, it seems to be growing higher
+Against the horizon that shifts and quivers,
+And to be flying in gleams of fire
+Far o'er the lakes and the swampy rivers.
+Its slates, like wings
+Of sparks and spangles, afar it flings.
+They fly toward the forests across the night:
+And in their passage the fires exhume
+The hovels and huts from their folds of gloom,
+Setting them suddenly all alight.
+
+
+In the crashing fall of the steeple's crown
+The cross to the brazier's depth drops down,
+Where, twisted and torn in the fiery fray,
+Its Christian arms are crushed like prey.
+With might and main
+The bell-ringer sounds his knell abroad.
+As though the flames would burn his God.
+
+
+The fire
+Funnel-like hollows its way yet higher,
+'Twixt walls of stone, up the steeple's height;
+Gaining the archway and lofty stage
+Where, swinging in light, the bell bounds with rage.
+The daws and the owls, with wild, long cry
+     Pass screeching by;
+On the fast-closed casements their heads they smite,
+Burn in the smoke-drifts their pinions light,
+Then, broken with terror and bruised with flight.
+Suddenly, 'mid the surging crowd.
+Fall dead outright.
+
+
+The old man sees toward his brandished bells
+The climbing fire
+With hands of boiling gold stretch nigher.
+
+
+The steeple
+Looks like a thicket of crimson bushes,
+With here a branch of flame that rushes
+Darting the belfry boards between;
+Convulsed and savage flames, they cling,
+With curves that plant-like curl and lean.
+Round every joist, round every pulley,
+And monumental beams, whence ring
+The bells, that voice forth frenzied folly.
+
+
+His fear and anguish spent, the ringer
+Sounds his own knell
+          On his ruined bell.
+
+
+A final crash,
+All dust and plaster in one grey flash,
+Cleaves the whole steeple's height in pieces;
+And like some great cry slain, it ceases
+All on a sudden, the knell's dull rage.
+The ancient tower
+Seems sudden to lean and darkly lower;
+While with heavy thuds, as from stage to stage
+They headlong bound.
+The bells are heard
+Plunging and crashing towards the ground.
+
+
+But yet the old ringer has never stirred.
+And, scooping the moist earth out, the bell
+Was thus his coffin, and grave as well.
+
+
+
+
+THE SNOW
+
+
+Uninterruptedly falls the snow,
+Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
+Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.
+
+
+Infinite, infinite falls the snow.
+Like a moment's time.
+Monotonously, in a moment's time;
+On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.
+Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;
+It falls on the sheds and their palings below.
+And myriad-wise, it falls and lies
+        In ridgèd waves
+In the churchyard hollows between the graves.
+
+
+The apron of all inclement weather
+Is roughly unfastened, there on high;
+The apron of woes and misery
+Is shaken by wind-gusts violently
+Down on the hamlets that crouch together
+Beneath the dull horizon-sky.
+
+
+The frost creeps down to the very bones,
+And want creeps in through the walls and stones;
+Yea, snow and want round the souls creep close,
+--The heavy snow diaphanous--
+Round the stone-cold hearths and the flameless souls
+That wither away in their huts and holes.
+
+
+The hamlets bare
+White, white as Death lie yonder, where
+The crookèd roadways cross and halt;
+Like branching traceries of salt
+The trees, all crystallized with frost,
+Stretch forth their boughs, entwined and crost.
+Along the ways, as on they go
+In far procession o'er the snow.
+
+
+Then here and there, some ancient mill,
+Where light, pale mosses aggregate,
+Appears on a sudden, standing straight
+Like a snare upon its lonely hill.
+The roofs and sheds, down there below.
+Since November dawned, have been wrestling still,
+In contrary blasts, with the hurricane;
+While, thick and full, yet falls amain
+The infinite snow, with its weary weight,
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
+
+
+Thus journeys the snow afar so fleet.
+Into every cranny, on every trail;
+Always the snow and its winding-sheet,
+The mortuary snow so pale.
+The snow, unfruitful and so pale.
+In wild and vagabond tatters hurled
+Through the limitless winter of the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE GRAVE-DIGGER
+
+
+
+In the garden yonder of yews and death,
+There sojourneth
+A man who toils, and has toiled for aye.
+Digging the dried-up ground all day.
+
+
+Some willows, surviving their own dead selves.
+Weep there around him as he delves.
+And a few poor flowers, disconsolate
+Because the tempest and wind and wet
+Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.
+
+
+The ground is nothing but pits and cones,
+Deep graves in every corner yawn;
+The frost in the winter cracks the stones,
+And when the summer in June is born
+One hears, 'mid the silence that pants for breath,
+The germinating and life of Death
+Below, among the lifeless bones.
+
+
+Since ages longer than he can know,
+The grave-digger brings his human woe,
+That never wears out, and lays its head
+Slowly down in that earthy bed.
+
+
+By all the surrounding roads, each day
+They come towards him, the coffins white,
+They come in processions infinite;
+They come from the distances far away.
+From corners obscure and out-of-the-way.
+From the heart of the towns--and the wide-spreading
+     plain.
+The limitless plain, swallows up their track;
+They come with their escort of people in black.
+At every hour, till the day doth wane;
+And at early dawn the long trains forlorn
+     Begin again.
+
+
+The grave-digger hears far off the knell,
+Beneath weary skies, of the passing bell,
+Since ages longer than he can tell.
+
+
+Some grief of his each coffin carrieth--
+His wild desires toward evenings dark with death
+Are here: his mournings for he knows not what:
+Here are his tears, for ever on this spot
+Motionless in their shrouds: his memories.
+With gaze worn-out from travelling through the years
+So far, to bid him call to mind the fears
+Of which their souls are dying--and with these
+              Lies side by side
+The shattered body of his broken pride.
+His heroism, to which nought replied,
+              Is here all unavailing;
+His courage, 'neath its heavy armour failing.
+And his poor valour, gashed upon the brow.
+Silent, and crumbling in corruption now.
+The grave-digger watches them come into sight,
+              The long, slow roads.
+Marching towards him, with all their loads
+              Of coffins white.
+
+
+Here are his keenest thoughts, that one by one
+His lukewarm soul hath tainted and undone;
+And his white loves of simple days of yore,
+in lewd and tempting mirrors sullied o'er;
+The proud, mute vows that to himself he made
+Are here--for he hath scored and cancelled them,
+As one may cut and notch a diadem;
+And here, inert and prone, his will is laid,
+Whose gestures flashed like lightning keen before.
+But that he now can raise in strength no more.
+
+
+The grave-digger digs to the sound of the knell
+'Mid the yews and the deaths in yonder dell.
+Since ages longer than he can tell.
+
+
+Here is his dream--born in the radiant glow.
+Of joy and young oblivion, long ago--
+That in black fields of science he let go,
+That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright,
+--Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight--
+That he hath launched toward inaccessible
+Spaces afar, toward the distance there,
+The golden conquest of the Impossible,
+And that the limitless, refractory sky,
+Sends back to him again, or it has ere
+So much as touched the immobile mystery.
+
+
+The grave-digger turneth it round and round--
+With arms by toil so weary made,
+With arms so thin, and strokes of spade--
+Since what long times?--the dried-up ground.
+Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng
+Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong;
+And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries,
+He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.
+The insults to the gentle, and the jeer
+What time the humble bent their knees, are here;
+Gloomy denials, and a bitter store
+Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before
+Devotedness that in the shadow stands
+               With outstretched hands.
+
+
+The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.
+Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell,
+With strokes of the spade turns round and round
+The weary sods of the dried-up ground.
+
+
+Then--fear-struck dallyings with suicide;
+Delays, that conquer hours that would decide:
+Again--the terrors of dark crime and sin
+Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin:
+The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be
+The man who lives of the extremity
+              Of his own fear:
+And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.
+And madness, with its eyes of marble white,
+               These all are here.
+
+
+His head a prey to the dull knell's sound,
+In terror the grave-digger turns the ground
+With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast
+The dried-up earth upon his past.
+
+
+The slain days, and the present, he doth see,
+Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.
+And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.
+Pressing the future blood of his red heart;
+Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part
+Of that his future's body, limb by limb,
+Till there is but a carcase left to him;
+And shewing him, in coffins prisoned,
+Or ever they be born, his longings dead.
+
+
+The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell,
+More heavy yet, of the passing bell.
+That up through the mourning horizons doth swell
+What if the bells, with their haunting swing,
+Would stop on a day that heart-breaking ring!
+And the endless procession of corse after corse.
+Choke the highways no more of his long remorse
+But the biers, with the prayers and the tears,
+Immensely yet follow the biers;
+They halt by crucifix now, and by shrine,
+Then take up once more their mournful line;
+On the backs of men, upon trestles borne.
+They follow their uniform march forlorn;
+Skirting each field and each garden-wall.
+Passing beneath the sign-posts tall,
+Skirting along by the vast Unknown,
+Where terror points horns from the corner-stone.
+
+
+The old man, broken and propless quite.
+Watches them still from the infinite
+Coming towards him--and hath beside
+Nothing to do, but in earth to hide
+His multiple death, thus bit by bit,
+And, with fingers irresolute, plant on it
+Crosses so hastily, day by day,
+Since what long times--he cannot say.
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND
+
+
+Crossing the infinite length of the moorland,
+Here comes the wind,
+The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November;
+Endless and infinite, crossing the downs,
+Here comes the wind
+That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember;
+Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns,
+The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!
+
+
+Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards,
+Each bucket and pulley, it creaks and it wails;
+By cisterns of farmyards, the pulleys and pails
+They creak and they cry,
+The whole of sad death in their melancholy.
+
+
+The wind, it sends scudding dead leaves from the birches
+Along o'er the water, the wind of November,
+The savage, fierce wind;
+The boughs of the trees for the birds' nests it searches,
+To bite them and grind.
+The wind, as though rasping down iron, grates past,
+And, furious and fast, from afar combs the cold
+And white avalanches of winter the old.
+The savage wind combs them so furious and fast.
+The wind of November.
+
+
+From each miserable shed
+The patched garret-windows wave wild overhead
+Their foolish, poor tatters of paper and glass.
+As the savage, fierce wind of November doth pass!
+And there on its hill
+Of dingy and dun-coloured turf, the black mill,
+Swift up from below, through the empty air slashing,
+Swift down from above, like a lightning-stroke flashing,
+The black mill so sinister moweth the wind.
+The savage, fierce wind of November!
+
+
+The old, ragged thatches that squat round their steeple,
+Are raised on their roof-poles, and fall with a clap,
+In the wind the old thatches and pent-houses flap,
+In the wind of November, so savage and hard.
+The crosses--and they are the arms of dead people--
+The crosses that stand in the narrow churchyard
+Fall prone on the sod
+Like some great flight of black, in the acre of God.
+
+
+The wind of November!
+Have you met him, the savage wind, do you remember?
+Did he pass you so fleet,
+--Where, yon at the cross, the three hundred roads meet--
+With distressfulness panting, and wailing with cold?
+Yea, he who breeds fears and puts all things to flight,
+Did you see him, that night
+When the moon he o'erthrew--when the villages, old
+In their rot and decay, past endurance and spent,
+Cried, wailing like beasts, 'neath the hurricane bent?
+
+
+Here comes the wind howling, that heralds dark weather,
+The wind blowing infinite over the heather.
+The wind with his trumpet that heralds November!
+
+
+
+
+THE FISHERMEN
+
+
+The spot is flaked with mist, that fills,
+Thickening into rolls more dank,
+The thresholds and the window-sills,
+And smokes on every bank.
+
+
+The river stagnates, pestilent
+With carrion by the current sent
+This way and that--and yonder lies
+The moon, just like a woman dead,
+That they have smothered overhead,
+         Deep in the skies.
+
+
+In a few boats alone there gleam
+Lamps that light up and magnify
+The backs, bent over stubbornly,
+Of the old fishers of the stream,
+Who since last evening, steadily,
+--For God knows what night-fishery--
+Have let their black nets downward slow
+Into the silent water go.
+The noisome water there below.
+
+
+Down in the river's deeps, ill-fate
+And black mischances breed and hatch.
+Unseen of them, and lie in wait
+As for their prey. And these they catch
+With weary toil--believing still
+That simple, honest work is best--
+At night, beneath the shifting mist
+         Unkind and chill.
+
+
+So hard and harsh, yon clock-towers tell.
+With muffled hammers, like a knell,
+The midnight hour.
+From tower to tower
+So hard and harsh the midnights chime.
+The midnights harsh of autumn time,
+The weary midnights' bell.
+
+
+The crew
+Of fishers black have on their back
+Nought save a nameless rag or two;
+And their old hats distil withal,
+And drop by drop let crumbling fall
+Into their necks, the mist-flakes all.
+
+
+The hamlets and their wretched huts
+Are numb and drowsy, and all round
+The willows too, and walnut trees,
+'Gainst which the Easterly fierce breeze
+         Has waged its feud.
+No bayings from the forest sound,
+No cry the empty midnight cuts--
+The midnight space that grows imbrued
+With damp breaths from the ashy ground.
+
+
+The fishers hail each other not--
+Nor help--in their fraternal lot;
+Doing but that which must be done.
+Each fishes for himself alone.
+
+
+And this one gathers in his net,
+Drawing it tighter yet,
+His freight of petty misery;
+And that one drags up recklessly
+Diseases from their slimy bed;
+While others still their meshes spread
+Out to the sorrows that drift by
+         Threateningly nigh;
+And the last hauls aboard with force
+The wreckage dark of his remorse.
+
+
+
+The river, round its corners bending,
+And with the dyke-heads intertwined.
+Goes hence--since what times out of mind?--
+Toward the far horizon wending
+         Of weariness unending.
+Upon the banks, the skins of wet
+Black ooze-heaps nightly poison sweat.
+And the mists are their fleeces light
+That curl up to the houses' height.
+
+
+In their dark boats, where nothing stirs,
+Not even the red-flamed torch that blurs
+With halos huge, as if of blood.
+The thick felt of the mist's white hood,
+Death with his silence seals the sere
+Old fishermen of madness here.
+
+
+The isolated, they abide
+Deep in the mist--still side by side.
+But seeing one another never;
+Weary are both their arms--and yet
+Their work their ruin doth beget.
+
+
+Each for himself works desperately,
+He knows not why--no dreams has he;
+Long have they worked, for long, long years,
+While every instant brings its fears;
+Nor have they ever
+Quitted the borders of their river,
+Where 'mid the moonlit mists they strain
+To fish misfortune up amain.
+
+
+If but in this their night they hailed each other
+And brothers' voices might console a brother!
+
+
+But numb and sullen, on they go,
+With heavy brows and backs bent low,
+While their small lights beside them gleam,
+Flickering feebly on the stream.
+
+
+Like blocks of shadow they are there.
+Nor ever do their eyes divine
+That far away beyond the mists
+Acrid and spongy--there exists
+A firmament where 'mid the night.
+Attractive as a loadstone, bright
+Prodigious planets shine.
+
+
+The fishers black of that black plague,
+They are the lost immeasurably,
+Among the knells, the distance vague,
+The yonder of those endless plains
+That stretch more far than eye can see:
+And the damp autumn midnight rains
+Into their souls' monotony.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROPE-MAKER
+
+
+In his village grey
+At foot of the dykes, that encompass him
+With weary weaving of curves and lines
+Toward the sea outstretching dim,
+The rope-maker, visionary white.
+Stepping backwards along the way,
+Prudently 'twixt his hands combines
+The distant threads, in their twisting play.
+That come to him from the infinite.
+
+
+When day is gone.
+Through ardent, weary evenings, yon
+The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;
+Something by unseen hands is stirred.
+And parallel o'er the rakes, that trace
+An even space
+From point to point along all the way,
+The flaxen hemp still plaits its chain
+Ceaseless, for days and weeks amain.
+With his poor, tired fingers, nimble still.
+Fearing to break for want of skill
+The fragments of gold that the gliding light
+Threads through his toil so scantily--
+Passing the walls and the houses by
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of the evening's whirlpool dim,
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that stretch back afar.
+Where strife, regrets, hates, furies are:
+Tears of the silence, and the tears
+That find a voice: serenest years,
+Or years convulsed with pang and throe:
+Horizons of the long ago,
+These gestures of the Past they shew.
+
+
+Of old--as one in sleep, life, errant, strayed
+Its wondrous morns and fabled evenings through;
+When God's right hand toward far Canaan's blue
+Traced golden paths, deep in the twilight shade.
+
+
+Of old, 'twas life exasperate, huge and tense,
+Swung savage at some stallion's mane--life, fleet.
+With mighty lightnings flashing 'neath her feet,
+Upreared immensely over space immense.
+
+
+Of old, 'twas life evoking ardent will;
+And hell's red cross and Heaven's cross of white
+Each marched, with gleam of steely armours' light.
+Through streams of blood, to heavens of victory still.
+
+
+Of old--life, livid, foaming, came and went
+'Mid strokes of tocsin and assassin's knife;
+Proscribers, murderers, each with each at strife,
+While, mad and splendid. Death above them bent.
+
+
+'Twixt fields of flax and of osiers red.
+On the road where nothing doth move or tread,
+By houses and walls to left and right
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of evening's treasury dim
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that stretch yonder far.
+Where work, strifes, ardours, science are;
+Horizons that change--they pass and glide,
+               And on their way
+They shew in mirrors of eventide
+The mourning image of dark To-day.
+
+
+Here--writhing fires that never rest nor end.
+Where, in one giant effort all employed,
+Sages cast down the Gods, to change the void
+Whither the flights of human science tend.
+
+
+Here--'tis a room where thought, assertive, saith
+That there are weights exact to gauge her by,
+That inane ether, only, rounds the sky.
+And that in phials of glass men breed up death.
+
+
+Here--'tis a workship, where, all fiery bright,
+Matter intense vibrates with fierce turmoil
+In vaults where wonders new, 'mid stress and toil,
+Are forged, that can absorb space, time and night.
+
+
+--A palace--of an architecture grown
+Effete, and weary 'neath its hundred years.
+Whence voices vast invoke, instinct with fears,
+The thunder in its flights toward the Unknown.
+
+
+On the silent, even road--his eyes
+Still fixed towards the waning light
+That skirts the houses and walls as it dies--
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of the evening's halo dim
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that are there afar
+Where light, hope, wakenings, strivings are;
+Horizons that he sees defined
+As hope for some future, far and kind.
+Beyond those distant shores and faint
+That evening on the clouds doth paint.
+
+
+Yon--'mid that distance calm and musical
+Twin stairs of gold suspend their steps of blue,
+The sage doth climb them, and the seer too,
+Starting from sides opposed toward one goal.
+
+
+Yon--contradiction's lightning-shocks lose power.
+Doubt's sullen hand unclenches to the light,
+The eye sees in their essence laws unite
+Rays scattered once 'mid doctrines of an hour.
+
+
+Yon--keenest spirits pierce beyond the land
+Of seeming and of death. The heart hath ease,
+And one would say that Mildness held the keys
+Of the colossal silence in her hand.
+
+
+Up yon--the God each soul is, once again
+Creates, expands, gives, finds himself in all;
+And rises higher, the lowlier he doth fall
+Before meek tenderness and sacred pain.
+
+
+And there is ardent, living peace--its urns
+Of even bliss ranged 'mid these twilights, where
+--Embers of hope upon the ashen air--
+Each great nocturnal planet steadfast burns.
+
+
+In his village at foot of the dykes, that bend,
+Sinuous, weary, about him and wend
+Toward that distance of eddying light,
+The rope-maker, visionary white.
+Along by each house and each garden wall.
+Absorbs in himself the horizons all.
+
+
+
+
+From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Oh, splendour of our joy and our delight,
+Woven of gold amid the silken air!
+See the dear house among its gables light,
+And the green garden, and the orchard there!
+
+
+Here is the bench with apple-trees o'er head
+Whence the light spring is shed.
+With touch of petals falling slow and soft;
+Here branches luminous take flight aloft,
+Hovering, like some bounteous presage, high
+Against this landscape's clear and tender sky.
+
+
+Here lie, like kisses from the lips dropt down
+Of yon frail azur upon earth below,
+Two simple, pure, blue pools, and like a crown
+About their edge, chance flowers artless grow.
+
+
+O splendour of our joy and of our ourselves!
+Whose life doth feed, within this garden bright,
+Upon the emblems of our own delight.
+
+
+What are those forms that yonder slowly pass?
+Our two glad souls are they,
+That pastime take, and stray
+Along the terraces and woodland grass?
+
+
+Are these thy breasts, are these thine eyes, these two
+Golden-bright flowers of harmonious hue?
+These grasses, hanging like some plumage rare.
+Bathed in the stream they ruffle by their touch.
+Are they the strands of thy smooth, glossy hair?
+
+
+No shelter e'er could match yon orchard white.
+Or yonder house amid its gables light,
+And garden, that so blest a sky controls,
+Weaving the climate dear to both our souls.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+As in the guileless, golden age, my heart
+I gave thee, even like an ample flower
+That opens in the dew's bright morning hour;
+My lips have rested where the frail leaves part.
+
+
+I plucked the flower--it came
+From meadows whereon grow the flowers of flame:
+Speak to it not--'tis best that we control
+Words, since they needs are trivial 'twixt us two;
+All words are hazardous, for it is through
+The eyes that soul doth hearken unto soul.
+
+
+That flower that is my heart, and where secure
+     My heart's avowal hides.
+     Simply confides
+Unto thy lips that she is clear and pure.
+Loyal and good--and that one's trust toward
+A virgin love is like a child's in God.
+
+
+Let wit and wisdom flower upon the height,
+Along capricious paths of vanity;
+And give we welcome to sincerity,
+That holds between her fingers crystal-bright
+Our two clear hearts: for what so beautiful
+As a confession made from soul to soul.
+     When eve returns
+And the white flame of countless diamonds burns.
+Like myriads of silent eyes intent,
+Th' unfathomed silence of the firmament.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+That we may love each other through our eyes
+Let us our glances lave, and make them clear,
+Of all the thousand glances that they here
+Have met, in this base world of servile lies.
+
+
+The dawn is dressed in blossom and in dew,
+     And chequered too
+     With very tender light--it looks as though
+Frail plumes of sun and silver, through the mist,
+Glided across the garden to and fro,
+And with a soft caress the mosses kissed.
+
+
+Our wondrous ponds of blue
+Tremble and wake with golden shimmerings;
+Swift emerald flights beneath the trees dart through.
+And now the light from hedge and path anew
+Sweeps the damp dust, where yet the twilight clings.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+In hours like these, when through our dream of bliss
+So far from all things not ourselves we move,
+What lustral blood, what baptism is this
+That bathes our hearts, straining toward perfect love?
+
+
+Our hands are clasped, and yet there is no prayer,
+Our arms outstretched, and yet no cry is there;
+Adoring something, what, we cannot say.
+More pure than we are and more far away,
+With spirit fervent and most guileless grown,
+How we are mingled and dissolved in one;
+Ah, how we live each other, in the unknown!
+
+
+Oh, how absorbed and wholly lost before
+The presence of those hours supreme one lies!
+And how the soul would fain find other skies
+To seek therein new gods it might adore;
+Oh, marvellous and agonizing joy,
+Audacious hope whereon the spirit hangs,
+     Of being one day
+     Once more the prey,
+Beyond even death, of these deep, silent pangs.
+
+
+
+
+
+From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"
+
+
+
+
+ST. GEORGE
+
+
+Opening the mists on a sudden through,
+An Avenue!
+Then, all one ferment of varied gold,
+With foam of plumes where the chamfrom bends
+Round his horse's head, that no bit doth hold,
+St. George descends!
+
+
+The diamond-rayed caparison,
+Makes of his flight one declining path
+From Heaven's pity down upon
+Our waiting earth.
+
+
+Hero and Lord
+Of the joyous, helpful virtues all.
+Sonorous, pure and crystalline!
+Let his radiance fall
+On my heart nocturnal and make it shine
+In the wheeling aureole of his sword!
+
+
+Let the wind's soft silvern whispers sound
+And ring his coat of mail around,
+His battle-spurs amid the fight!
+--He--the St. George--who shines so bright
+And comes, 'mid the wailings of my desire.
+To seize and lift my poor hands higher
+Toward his dauntless valour's fire!
+
+
+Like a cry great with faith, to God
+His lance St. George upraised doth hold;
+Crossing athwart my glance he trod.
+As 'twere one tumult of haggard gold.
+The chrism's glow on his forehead shone,
+The great St. George of duty high!
+Beautiful by his heart, and by
+          Himself alone!
+
+
+Ring, all my voices of hope, ring on!
+Ring forth in me
+Beneath fresh boughs of greenery,
+Down radiant pathways, full of sun;
+Ye glints of silvery mica, be
+Bright joy amid my stones--and ye
+White pebbles that the waters strew.
+Open your eyes in my brooklets, through
+The watery lids that cover you;
+Landscape of gushing springs and sun,
+With gold that quivers on misty blue,
+Landscape that dwells in me, hold thou
+The mirror now
+To the fiery flights, that flaming roll,
+Of the great St. George toward my soul!
+
+
+'Gainst the black Dragon's teeth and claws,
+Against the armour of leprous sores,
+The miracle and sword is he;
+On his breast-plate burneth Charity,
+And his gentleness sends hurtling back.
+In dire defeat, the Instinct black.
+Fires flecked with gold, that flashing turn,
+Whirlwinds of stars, those glories meet,
+About his galloping horse's feet.
+Deep into my remembrance burn
+Their lightnings fleet!
+
+
+He comes, a fair ambassador,
+From white lands built with marble o'er.
+Where grows, in glades beside the sea,
+Upon the tree
+Of goodness, fragrant gentleness.
+That haven, too, he knows no less
+Where wondrous ships rock, calm and still.
+That freights of sleeping angels fill;
+And those vast evenings, when below
+Upon the water, 'mid the skies'
+Reflected eyes.
+Islands flash sudden forth and glow.
+That kingdom fair
+Whereof the Virgin ariseth Queen,
+Its lowly, ardent joy is he;
+And his flaming sword in the ambient air
+Vibrates like an ostensory--
+The suddenly flashing St. George! behold,
+He strikes through my soul like a fire of gold!
+
+
+He knows from what far wanderings
+I come: what mists obscure my brain;
+What dagger marks have deeply scarred
+My thought, and with black crosses marred:
+With what spent force, what anger vain.
+What petty scorn of better things,
+--Yea, and with what a mask I came,
+Folly upon the lees of shame!
+A coward was I; the world I fled
+To hide my head
+Within a huge and futile Me;
+I builded, beneath domes of Night,
+The blocks of marble, gold be-starred,
+Of a hostile science, endlessly
+Towards a height
+By oracles of blackness barred.
+For Death alone is Queen of night.
+And human effort is brightest born
+Only at dawn.
+With opening flowers would prayer fain bloom,
+And their sweet lips hold the same perfume.
+The sunbeams shimmering white that fall
+On pearly water, are for all
+Like a caress
+Upon our life: the dawn unfolds
+A counsel fair of trustfulness;
+And whoso hearkens thereto is saved
+From his slough, where never a sin was laved.
+
+
+St. George in radiant armour came
+Speeding along in leaps of flame
+'Mid the sweet morning, through my soul.
+Young, beautiful by faith was he;
+He leaned the lower down toward me
+Even as I the lowlier knelt;
+Like some pure, golden cordial
+In secret felt.
+He filled me with his soaring strength,
+And with sweet fear most tenderly.
+Before that vision's dignity,
+Into his pale, proud hand at length
+I cast the blood my pain had spent.
+Then, laying upon me as he went
+A charge of valour, and the sign
+Of the cross on my brow from his lance divine,
+He sped upon his shining road
+Straight, with my heart, towards his God.
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDENS
+
+
+The landscape now reveals a change;
+A stair--that twinèd elm-boughs hold
+Enclosed 'mid hedges mystic, strange--
+Inaugurates a green and gold
+Vision of gardens, range on range.
+
+
+Each step's a hope, that doth ascend
+Stairwise to expectation's height;
+A weary way it is to wend
+While noonday suns are burning bright.
+But rest waits at the evening's end.
+
+
+Streams, that wash white from sin, flow deep,
+And round about the fresh lawns twine;
+While there, beneath the green banks steep,
+Beside his cross, the Lamb Divine
+Lies tranquilly in peaceful sleep.
+
+
+The daisied grass is glad, and gay
+With crystal butterflies the hedge.
+Where globes of fruit shine blue; here stray
+Peacocks beside the box-trees' edge:
+A shining lion bars the way.
+
+
+Flowers, upright as the ecstasies
+And ardours of white spirits pure,
+With branches springing fountain-wise,
+Burst upward, and by impulse sure
+To their own soaring splendour rise.
+
+
+Gently and very slowly swayed.
+The wind a wordless rhapsody
+Sings--and the shimm'ring air doth braid
+An aureole of filigree
+Round every disk with emerald laid.
+
+
+Even the shade is but a flight
+Toward flickering radiances, that slip
+From space to space; and now the light
+Sleeps, with calmed rays, upon the lip
+Of lilac-blossoms golden-white.
+
+
+
+
+SHE OF THE GARDEN
+
+
+In such a spot, with radiant flowers for halo,
+I saw the Guardian Angel sit her down;
+Vine-branches fashioned a green shrine above her
+And sun-flowers rose behind her like a crown.
+
+
+Her fingers, their white slenderness encircled
+With humble, fragile rings of coral round.
+Held, ranged in couples, sprays of faithful roses.
+Sealed with a clasp, with threads of woollen bound.
+
+
+A shimmering air the golden calm was weaving,
+All filigree'd with dawn, that like a braid
+Surmounted her pure brow, which still was hidden
+Half in the shade.
+
+
+Woven of linen were her veil and sandals.
+But, twined 'mid boughs of foliage, on their hem
+The theologic Virtues Three were painted;
+Hearts set about with gold encompassed them.
+
+
+Her silken hair, slow rippling, from her shoulder
+Down to the mosses of the sward did reach;
+The childhood of her eyes disclosed a silence
+More sweet than speech.
+
+
+My arms outstretched, and all my soul upstraining.
+Then did I rise,
+With haggard yearning, toward the soul suspended
+There in her eyes.
+Those eyes, they shone so vivid with remembrance,
+That they confessed days lived alike with me:
+Oh, in the grave inviolate can it change, then,
+The Long Ago, and live in the To Be?
+
+
+Sure, she was one who, being dead, yet brought me.
+Miraculous, a strength that comforteth,
+And the Viaticum of her survival
+Guiding me from the further side of Death.
+
+
+
+
+
+From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"
+
+
+
+
+THE GLORY OF THE HEAVENS
+
+
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
+Behind the veil that the finger of radiant winter weaves
+And down on us falls the foliage of stars in glittering sheaves;
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies,
+
+
+The wingèd sea with her shadowy floods as of dappled silk
+Speeds, 'neath the golden fires, her pale immensity o'er;
+And diamond-rayed, the moonlight, shining along the shore,
+Bathes the brow of the headlands in radiance as soft as milk.
+
+
+Yonder there flow, untwining and twining their loops anew!
+The mighty, silvery rivers, through the translucent night;
+And a glint as of wondrous acids sparkles with magic light
+the cup that the lake outstretches towards the mountains blue.
+
+
+Everywhere light seems breaking forth into flower and star,
+Whether on shore in stillness, or wavering on the deep.
+The islands are nests where silence inviolate doth deep;
+An ardent nimbus hovers o'er yon horizons far.
+
+
+See, from Nadir to Zenith one aureole doth reach!
+Of yore, the souls exalted by faith's high mysteries
+Saw, in the domination of those star-clouded skies,
+Jehovah's hand resplendent and heard His silent speech.
+
+
+But now the eyes that scan them no longer may there aspire
+To we some god self-banished--not so, but the intricate
+Tangle of marvellous problems, the messengers that wait
+On Measureless Force, and veil her, there on her couch of fire.
+
+
+O cauldrons of life, where matter, adown the eternal day,
+Pours herself fruitful, seething through paths of scattering flame!
+O flux of worlds and reflux to other worlds the same!
+Unending oscillation betwixt newer and for aye!
+
+
+Tumults consumed in whirlpools of speed and sound and light--
+Violence we nought may reck of!--and yet there falls from thence
+The vast, unbroken silence, mysterious and intense
+That makes the peace, the calmness and beauty of the night!
+
+
+O spheres of flame and golden, always more far and high;
+Abyss to abyss still floating, onward from shade to shade!
+So far, so high, all reck'ning the wisdom of man has made,
+Before those giddy numbers must shrink in his hands and die!
+
+
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
+Behind the veils that the finger of radiant winter weaves;
+And down on us falls the foliage of star in glittering sheaves,
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE
+
+
+To see beauty in all, is to lift our own Soul
+Up to loftier heights than do chose who aspire
+Through culpable suffering, vanquished desire.
+Harsh Reality, dread and ineffable Whole,
+Distils her red draught, enough tonic and stern
+To intoxicate heads and to make the heart burn.
+
+
+O clean and pure grain, whence are purged all the tares!
+Clear torch, chosen out amid many whose flame;
+Though ancient in splendour, is false to its name!
+It is good to keep step, though beset with hard cares,
+With the life that is real, to the far distant goal,
+With no arm save the lucid, white pride of one's soul!
+
+
+To march, thus intrepid in confidence, straight
+On the obstacle, holding the stubborn hope
+Of conquering, thanks to firm blows of the will,
+Of intelligence prompt, or of patience to wait;
+And to feel growing stronger within us the sense,
+Day by day, of a power superb and intense!
+
+
+To love ourselves keenly those others within
+Who share a like strife with us, soar without fear
+Toward that one future, whose footsteps we hear;
+To love them, heart, brain, and because we are kin
+Because in some dark, maddened day they have known
+One anguish, one mourning, one string with our own!
+
+To be drunk with the great human battle of wills--
+--Pale, fleeting reflex of the monstrous assaults,
+Golden movements of planets in heaven's high vaults--
+Till one lives in all that which acts, struggles, and thrills,
+And avidly opens one's heart to the law
+That rules, dread and stern, the whole universe o'er!
+
+
+
+
+JOY
+
+
+O splendid, spacious day, irradiate
+With flaming dawns, when earth shows yet more fair
+Her ardent beauty, proud, without alloy;
+And wakening life breathes out her perfume rare
+So potently, that, all intoxicate,
+Our ravished being rushes upon joy!
+
+
+Be thanked, mine eyes, that now
+Ye still shine clear beneath my furrowed brow
+To see afar, the light vibrating there;
+And you my hands, that in the sun yet thrill,
+And you, my fingers, that glow golden still
+Among the golden fruit upon the wall
+        Where hollyhocks stand tall.
+
+
+Be thanked, my body, that thyself dost bear
+Yet firm and swift, and quivering to the touch
+Of the quick breezes or of winds profound;
+And you, straight frame, and lungs outbreathing wide,
+Along the shore or on the mountain-side,
+         The sharp and radiant air
+That bathes and grips the mighty worlds around!
+
+
+O festal mornings, calm in loveliness,
+Rose whose pure face the dewdrops all caress,
+Birds flying toward us, like some presage white,
+Gardens of sombre shade or frailest light!
+
+
+What time the ample summer warms the glade,
+I love you, roads, by which came hither late
+She who held hidden in her hands my fate.
+I love you, distant marshes, woods austere,
+And to its depths, I love the earth, where here
+Beneath my feet, my dead to rest are laid.
+
+
+So I exist in all that doth surround
+And penetrate me:--all this grassy ground,
+These hidden paths, and many a copse of beech:
+Clear water, that no clouding shadows reach:
+          You have become to me
+Myself, because you are my memory.
+
+
+In you my life prolonged for ever seems,
+I shape, I am, all that hath filled my dreams;
+In that horizon vast that dazzles me,
+Trees shimmering with gold, my pride are ye;
+And like the knots upon your trunk, my will
+Strengthens my power to sane, stanch labour still.
+
+
+Rose of the pearl-hued gardens, when you kiss
+My brow, a touch of living flame it is;
+        To me all seems
+One thrill of ardour, beauty, wild caress;
+And I, in this world-drunkenness,
+So multiply myself in all that gleams
+        On dazzled eyes,
+That my heart, fainting, vents itself in cries.
+
+
+O leaps of fervour, strong, profound, and sweet,
+As though some great wing swept thee off thy feet!
+If thou hast felt them upward hearing thee
+        Toward infinity,
+Complain not, man, even in the evil day;
+Whate'er disaster takes thee for her prey
+        Thou to thyself shalt say
+That once, for one short instant all supreme
+        Which time may not destroy,
+Thou yet hast tasted, with quick-beating heart,
+        Sweet, formidable joy;
+And that thy soul, beguiling thee to set
+        As in a dream,
+Hath fused thy very being's inmost part
+With the unanimous great founts of power
+And that that day supreme, that single hour,
+        Hath made a god of thee.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
+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: Poems of Emile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Emile Verhaeren
+
+Illustrator: John S. Sargent
+
+Translator: Alma Strettell
+
+Release Date: September 21, 2010 [EBook #33792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF EMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>POEMS</h1>
+
+<h3>OF</h3>
+
+<h2>EMILE VERHAEREN.</h2>
+
+<h3>SELECTED</h3>
+
+<h3>AND</h3>
+
+<h3>RENDERED INTO ENGLISH</h3>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>ALMA STRETTELL.</h2>
+
+
+
+<h4>JOHN LANE</h4>
+<h4>THE BODLEY HEAD</h4>
+<h4>LONDON &amp; NEW YORK</h4>
+<h4>1915.</h4>
+
+<hr style="width: 95%;" />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 345px;">
+<img src="images/verhaeren.jpg" width="345" alt="Emile Verhaeren" title="" />
+<span class="caption">Emile Verhaeren</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>
+<span class="caption">INDEX</span><br />
+<br />
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE<br />
+<br />
+From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"<br />
+<br />
+<a href="#RAIN">RAIN</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_FERRYMAN">THE FERRYMAN</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_SILENCE">THE SILENCE</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_BELL-RINGER">THE BELL-RINGER</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_SNOW">THE SNOW</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_GRAVE-DIGGER">THE GRAVE-DIGGER</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_WIND">THE WIND</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_FISHERMEN">THE FISHERMEN</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_ROPE-MAKER">THE ROPE-MAKER</a><br />
+<br />
+From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"<br />
+<br />
+<a href="#I">I.</a><br />
+<a href="#VIII">VIII.</a><br />
+<a href="#XVII">XVII.</a><br />
+<a href="#XXI">XXI.</a><br />
+<br />
+From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"<br />
+<br />
+<a href="#ST_GEORGE">ST. GEORGE</a><br />
+<a href="#THE_GARDENS">THE GARDENS</a><br />
+<a href="#SHE_OF_THE_GARDEN">SHE OF THE GARDEN</a><br />
+<br />
+From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"<br />
+<br />
+<a href="#THE_GLORY_OF_THE_HEAVENS">THE GLORY OF THE HEAVENS</a><br />
+<a href="#LIFE">LIFE</a><br />
+<a href="#JOY">JOY</a><br />
+</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<h3>INTRODUCTORY NOTE.</h3>
+
+
+
+<p>Emile Verhaeren, remarkable among of the brilliant group of writers
+representing "Young Belgium," and one who has been recognized by the
+literary world of France as holding a foremost place among the lyric
+poets of the day was born at St. Amand, near Antwerp, in 1855. His
+childhood was passed on the banks of the Scheldt, in the midst of the
+wide-spreading Flemish plains, a country of mist and flood, of dykes and
+marshes, and the impressions he received from the mysterious, melancholy
+character of these surroundings, have produced a marked and lasting
+influence upon his work. Yet the other characteristics with which it is
+stamped&mdash;the wealth of imagination, the gloomy force, the wonderful
+descriptive power and sense of colour, which set the landscape before
+one as a picture, suggest rather the possibility of Spanish blood in the
+poet's veins&mdash;and again, his somewhat morbid subjectivity and tendency
+to self-analysis mark him as the child of the latter end of our
+nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Verhaeren entered early in life upon the literary career. After some
+time spent at a college in Ghent, he became a student at the University
+of Louvain, and here he founded and edited a journal called "<i>La
+Semaine</i>," in which work he was assisted by the singer Van Dyck, and by
+his friend and present publisher, Edmond Deman. He also formed, about
+this time, a close friendship with Maeterlinck. In 1881, Verhaeren was
+called to the Bar at Brussels, but soon gave up his legal career to
+devote himself entirely to literature. In 1883 he published his first
+volume of poems, and shortly afterwards became one of the editors of
+"<i>L'Art Moderne</i>," to which, as well as to other contemporary periodicals,
+he was for many years a contributor. In 1892 he founded, with the help
+of two other friends, the "Section of Art" in the "House of the People,"
+a popular institution in Brussels, where performances of the best music,
+as well as lectures upon literary and artistic subjects, were given. In
+spite, however, of the work which all this entailed, and of the many
+interests created by his ardent appreciation of the various branches of
+art and literature, Verhaeren continued to labour unceasingly at his
+poetical work, and between 1883 and 1897 brought out successively eleven
+small volumes: <i>Les Flamandes, Les Moines, Les Soirs, Les Débâcles, Les
+Flambeaux Noirs, Les Apparus dans mes chemins, Les Campagnes
+Hallucinées, Les Villages Illusoires, Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les
+Heures Claires,</i> and <i>Les Aubes</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this entire series the intellectual and spiritual development
+of the poet may be closely traced&mdash;from the materialism which pervades
+<i>Les Flamandes</i>, and the despairing pessimism and lurid emotion&mdash;the
+throes of a self-centred soul in revolt against fate&mdash;which are so
+powerfully portrayed in <i>Les Débâcles</i> and <i>Les Flambeaux Noirs</i>, and are
+apparent even in the opening pages of <i>Les Apparus</i> dans mes chemins&mdash;to
+the tender, hopeful mysticism which marks the latter poems in that
+volume, and the wonderful sympathy with Nature, even in her saddest
+aspects&mdash;the subtle power of endowing those aspects with a profound and
+ennobling symbolism, which characterise the most beautiful of the poems
+in Les Villages Illusoires. Les Heures Claires is the name given to a
+volume of love-songs, an exquisite record of golden hours spent in a
+garden at spring-time&mdash;spring-time in a double sense.</p>
+
+<p>The task of making an adequate and typical selection from a poet's work
+is always difficult, and in this case it has been decided to limit the
+field of selection, at least for the present, to the three last-named
+volumes, which embody what may, I think, be considered as Verhaeren's
+highest achievement in the realm of lyrical poetry.</p>
+
+
+<p>In style, Verhaeren is essentially the apostle of the "Vers libre"; and
+his handling of rhyme and rhythm, his coining of words where he finds
+the French vocabulary insufficient, have called down upon him some
+criticism from those of his French contemporaries who are sticklers for
+the older rules and more conventional forms of versification. But
+however this may be, it remains an undeniable fact that Verhaeren has at
+his command a rare and powerful poetic eloquence&mdash;a wealth of imagery, a
+depth of thought and a subtlety of expression which perhaps are not to
+be imprisoned behind the bars of a too rigid convention. English readers
+have already been accustomed by their own poets to the "vers libre," and
+it is not so much, therefore, for my adherence to this form, as for my
+failure adequately to render Verhaeren's peculiar and striking beauty of
+language, that I beg their indulgence for the following translations.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>POEMS</h2>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="caption">From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"
+<br /></p>
+
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="RAIN" id="RAIN"></a>RAIN</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Long as unending threads, the long-drawn rain<br />
+Interminably, with its nails of grey,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Athwart the dull grey day,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rakes the green window-pane&mdash;</span><br />
+So infinitely, endlessly, the rain,<br />
+The long, long rain.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The rain.</span><br />
+<br />
+Since yesternight it keeps unravelling<br />
+Down from the frayed and flaccid rags that cling<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">About the sullen sky.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The low black sky;</span><br />
+Since yesternight, so slowly, patiently.<br />
+Unravelling its threads upon the roads.<br />
+Upon the roads and lanes, with even fall<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">Continual.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Along the miles<br />
+That 'twixt the meadows and the suburbs lie,<br />
+By roads interminably bent, the files<br />
+Of waggons, with their awnings arched and tall.<br />
+Struggling in sweat and steam, toil slowly by<br />
+With outline vague as of a funeral.<br />
+Into the ruts, unbroken, regular,<br />
+Stretching out parallel so far<br />
+That when night comes they seem to join the sky.<br />
+For hours the water drips;<br />
+And every tree and every dwelling weeps.<br />
+Drenched as they are with it.<br />
+With the long rain, tenaciously, with rain<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">Indefinite.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The rivers, through each rotten dyke that yields.<br />
+Discharge their swollen wave upon the fields.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Where coils of drownèd hay</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Float far away;</span><br />
+And the wild breeze<br />
+Buffets the alders and the walnut-trees;<br />
+Knee-deep in water great black oxen stand,<br />
+Lifting their bellowings sinister on high<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">To the distorted sky;</span><br />
+As now the night creeps onward, all the land,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Thicket and plain,</span><br />
+Grows cumbered with her clinging shades immense.<br />
+And still there is the rain,<br />
+The long, long rain.<br />
+Like soot, so fine and dense.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">The long, long rain.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Rain&mdash;and its threads identical,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">And its nails systematical,</span><br />
+Weaving the garment, mesh by mesh amain,<br />
+Of destitution for each house and wall,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">And fences that enfold</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">The villages, neglected, grey, and old:</span><br />
+Chaplets of rags and linen shreds that fall<br />
+In frayed-out wisps from upright poles and tall.<br />
+Blue pigeon-houses glued against the thatch,<br />
+And windows with a patch<br />
+Of dingy paper on each lowering pane,<br />
+Houses with straight-set gutters, side by side<br />
+Across the broad stone gambles crucified,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Mills, uniform, forlorn.</span><br />
+Each rising from its hillock like a horn,<br />
+Steeples afar and chapels round about,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">The rain, the long, long rain,</span><br />
+Through all the winter wears and wears them out.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Rain, with its many wrinkles, the long rain</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">With its grey nails, and with its watery mane;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The long rain of these lands of long ago,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The rain, eternal in its torpid flow!</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_FERRYMAN" id="THE_FERRYMAN"></a>THE FERRYMAN</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The ferryman, a green reed 'twixt his teeth,<br />
+With hand on oar, against the current strong<br />
+Had rowed and rowed so long.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But she, alas! whose voice was hailing him<br />
+Across the far waves dim.<br />
+Still further o'er the far waves seemed to float,<br />
+Still further backwards, 'mid the mists, remote.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The casements with their eyes.<br />
+The dial-faces of the towers that rise<br />
+Upon the shore,<br />
+Watched, as he strove and laboured more and more.<br />
+With frantic bending of the back in two,<br />
+And start of savage muscles strained anew.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+One oar was suddenly riven,<br />
+And by the current driven,<br />
+With lash of heavy breakers, out to sea.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But she, whose voice that hailed him he could hear<br />
+There 'mid the mist and wind, she seemed to wring<br />
+Her hands with gestures yet more maddening<br />
+Toward him who drew not near.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The ferryman with his surviving oar<br />
+Fell harder yet to work, and more and more<br />
+He strove, till every joint did crack and start,<br />
+And fevered terror shook his very heart.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The rudder broke<br />
+Beneath one sharp, rude stroke;<br />
+That, too, the current drove relentlessly,<br />
+A dreary shred of wreckage, out to sea.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The casements by the pier,<br />
+Like eyes immense and feverish open wide,<br />
+The dials of the towers&mdash;those widows drear<br />
+Upstanding straight from mile to mile beside<br />
+The banks of rivers&mdash;obstinately gaze<br />
+Upon this madman, in his headstrong craze<br />
+Prolonging his mad voyage 'gainst the tide.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But she, who yonder in the mist-clouds hailed<br />
+Him still so desperately, she wailed and wailed,<br />
+With head outstretched in fearful, straining haste<br />
+Toward the unknown of the outstretched waste.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Steady as one that had in bronze been cast,<br />
+Amid the blenched, grey tempest and the blast.<br />
+The ferryman his single oar yet plied.<br />
+And, spite of all, still lashed and bit the tide.<br />
+His old eyes, with hallucinated gaze,<br />
+Saw that far distance&mdash;an illumined haze&mdash;<br />
+Whence the voice sounded, coming toward him still.<br />
+Beneath the cold skies, lamentable, shrill.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The last oar broke&mdash;<br />
+And this the current hurried at one stroke,<br />
+Like a frail straw, towards the distant sea.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The ferryman, with arms dropped helplessly<br />
+Sank on his bench, forlorn.<br />
+His loins with vain efforts broken, torn.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Drifting, his barque struck somewhere, as by chance,<br />
+He turned a glance<br />
+Towards the bank behind him then&mdash;and saw<br />
+He had not left the shore.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The casements and the dials, one by one.<br />
+Their huge eyes gazing in a foolish stare.<br />
+Witnessed the ruin of his ardour there;<br />
+But still the old, tenacious ferryman<br />
+Firm in his teeth&mdash;for God knows when, indeed&mdash;<br />
+Held the green reed.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_SILENCE" id="THE_SILENCE"></a>THE SILENCE</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ever since ending of the summer weather.<br />
+When last the thunder and the lightning broke,<br />
+Shatt'ring themselves upon it at one stroke,<br />
+The Silence has not stirred, there in the heather.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+All round about stand steeples straight as stakes,<br />
+And each its bell between its fingers shakes;<br />
+All round about, with their three-storied loads,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The teams prowl down the roads;</span><br />
+All round about, where'er the pine woods end,<br />
+The wheel creaks on along its rutty bed,<br />
+But not a sound is strong enough to rend<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">That space intense and dead.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Since summer, thunder-laden, last was heard.<br />
+The Silence has not stirred;<br />
+And the broad heath-land, where the nights sink down<br />
+Beyond the sand-hills brown.<br />
+Beyond the endless thickets closely set,<br />
+To the far borders of the far-away.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Prolongs It yet.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Even the winds disturb not as they go<br />
+The boughs of those long larches, bending low<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Where the marsh-water lies,</span><br />
+In which Its vacant eyes<br />
+Gaze at themselves unceasing, stubbornly.<br />
+Only sometimes, as on their way they move,<br />
+The noiseless shadows of the clouds above.<br />
+Or of some great bird's hov'ring flight on high,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Brush It in passing by.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Since the last bolt that scored the earth aslant,<br />
+Nothing has pierced the Silence dominant.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Of those who cross Its vast immensity,<br />
+Whether at twilight or at dawn it be,<br />
+There is not one but feels<br />
+The dread of the Unknown that It instils;<br />
+An ample force supreme, It holds Its sway<br />
+Uninterruptedly the same for aye.<br />
+Dark walls of blackest fir-trees bar from sight<br />
+The outlook towards the paths of hope and light;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Huge, pensive junipers</span><br />
+Affright from far the passing travellers;<br />
+Long, narrow paths stretch their straight lines unbent.<br />
+Till they fork off in curves malevolent;<br />
+And the sun, ever shifting, ceaseless lends<br />
+Fresh aspects to the mirage whither tends<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Bewilderment</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Since the last bolt was forged amid the storm,<br />
+The polar Silence at the corners four<br />
+Of the wide heather-land has stirred no more.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Old shepherds, whom their hundred years have worn<br />
+To things all dislocate and out of gear,<br />
+And their old dogs, ragged, tired-out, and torn.<br />
+Oft watch It, on the soundless lowlands near,<br />
+Or downs of gold beflecked with shadows' flight,<br />
+Sit down immensely there beside the night.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Then, at the curves and corners of the mere.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">The waters creep with fear;</span><br />
+The heather veils itself, grows wan and white;<br />
+All the leaves listen upon all the bushes,<br />
+And the incendiary sunset hushes<br />
+Before Its face his cries of brandished light.<br />
+And in the hamlets that about It lie.<br />
+Beneath the thatches of their hovels small<br />
+The terror dwells of feeling It is nigh.<br />
+And, though It stirs not, dominating all.<br />
+Broken with dull despair and helplessness,<br />
+Beneath Its presence they crouch motionless,<br />
+As though upon the watch&mdash;and dread to see.<br />
+Through rifts of vapour, open suddenly<br />
+At evening, in the moon, the argent eyes<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Of Its mute mysteries.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_BELL-RINGER" id="THE_BELL-RINGER"></a>THE BELL-RINGER</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yon, in the depths of the evening's track,<br />
+Like a herd of blind bullocks that seek their fellows,<br />
+Wild, as in terror, the tempest bellows.<br />
+And suddenly, there, o'er the gables black<br />
+That the church, in the twilight, around it raises<br />
+All scored with lightnings the steeple blazes.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+See the old bell-ringer, frenzied with fear.<br />
+Mouth gaping, yet speechless, draw hastening near.<br />
+And the knell of alarm that with strokes of lead<br />
+He rings, heaves forth in a tempest of dread<br />
+The frantic despair that throbs in his head.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+With the cross at the height<br />
+Of its summit brandished, the lofty steeple<br />
+Spreads the crimson mane<br />
+Of the fire o'er the plain<br />
+Toward the dream-like horizons that bound the night;<br />
+The city nocturnal is filled with light;<br />
+The face of the swift-gathered crowds doth people<br />
+With fears and with clamours both street and lane;<br />
+On walls turned suddenly dazzling bright<br />
+The dusky panes drink the crimson flood<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Like draughts of blood.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yet, knell upon knell, the old ringer doth cast<br />
+His frenzy and fear o'er the country vast.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The steeple, it seems to be growing higher<br />
+Against the horizon that shifts and quivers,<br />
+And to be flying in gleams of fire<br />
+Far o'er the lakes and the swampy rivers.<br />
+Its slates, like wings<br />
+Of sparks and spangles, afar it flings.<br />
+They fly toward the forests across the night:<br />
+And in their passage the fires exhume<br />
+The hovels and huts from their folds of gloom,<br />
+Setting them suddenly all alight.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In the crashing fall of the steeple's crown<br />
+The cross to the brazier's depth drops down,<br />
+Where, twisted and torn in the fiery fray,<br />
+Its Christian arms are crushed like prey.<br />
+With might and main<br />
+The bell-ringer sounds his knell abroad.<br />
+As though the flames would burn his God.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The fire<br />
+Funnel-like hollows its way yet higher,<br />
+'Twixt walls of stone, up the steeple's height;<br />
+Gaining the archway and lofty stage<br />
+Where, swinging in light, the bell bounds with rage.<br />
+The daws and the owls, with wild, long cry<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Pass screeching by;</span><br />
+On the fast-closed casements their heads they smite,<br />
+Burn in the smoke-drifts their pinions light,<br />
+Then, broken with terror and bruised with flight.<br />
+Suddenly, 'mid the surging crowd.<br />
+Fall dead outright.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The old man sees toward his brandished bells<br />
+The climbing fire<br />
+With hands of boiling gold stretch nigher.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The steeple<br />
+Looks like a thicket of crimson bushes,<br />
+With here a branch of flame that rushes<br />
+Darting the belfry boards between;<br />
+Convulsed and savage flames, they cling,<br />
+With curves that plant-like curl and lean.<br />
+Round every joist, round every pulley,<br />
+And monumental beams, whence ring<br />
+The bells, that voice forth frenzied folly.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+His fear and anguish spent, the ringer<br />
+Sounds his own knell<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">On his ruined bell.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+A final crash,<br />
+All dust and plaster in one grey flash,<br />
+Cleaves the whole steeple's height in pieces;<br />
+And like some great cry slain, it ceases<br />
+All on a sudden, the knell's dull rage.<br />
+The ancient tower<br />
+Seems sudden to lean and darkly lower;<br />
+While with heavy thuds, as from stage to stage<br />
+They headlong bound.<br />
+The bells are heard<br />
+Plunging and crashing towards the ground.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But yet the old ringer has never stirred.<br />
+And, scooping the moist earth out, the bell<br />
+Was thus his coffin, and grave as well.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_SNOW" id="THE_SNOW"></a>THE SNOW</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Uninterruptedly falls the snow,<br />
+Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,<br />
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.<br />
+Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Infinite, infinite falls the snow.<br />
+Like a moment's time.<br />
+Monotonously, in a moment's time;<br />
+On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.<br />
+Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;<br />
+It falls on the sheds and their palings below.<br />
+And myriad-wise, it falls and lies<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">In ridgèd waves</span><br />
+In the churchyard hollows between the graves.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The apron of all inclement weather<br />
+Is roughly unfastened, there on high;<br />
+The apron of woes and misery<br />
+Is shaken by wind-gusts violently<br />
+Down on the hamlets that crouch together<br />
+Beneath the dull horizon-sky.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The frost creeps down to the very bones,<br />
+And want creeps in through the walls and stones;<br />
+Yea, snow and want round the souls creep close,<br />
+&mdash;The heavy snow diaphanous&mdash;<br />
+Round the stone-cold hearths and the flameless souls<br />
+That wither away in their huts and holes.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The hamlets bare<br />
+White, white as Death lie yonder, where<br />
+The crookèd roadways cross and halt;<br />
+Like branching traceries of salt<br />
+The trees, all crystallized with frost,<br />
+Stretch forth their boughs, entwined and crost.<br />
+Along the ways, as on they go<br />
+In far procession o'er the snow.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Then here and there, some ancient mill,<br />
+Where light, pale mosses aggregate,<br />
+Appears on a sudden, standing straight<br />
+Like a snare upon its lonely hill.<br />
+The roofs and sheds, down there below.<br />
+Since November dawned, have been wrestling still,<br />
+In contrary blasts, with the hurricane;<br />
+While, thick and full, yet falls amain<br />
+The infinite snow, with its weary weight,<br />
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Thus journeys the snow afar so fleet.<br />
+Into every cranny, on every trail;<br />
+Always the snow and its winding-sheet,<br />
+The mortuary snow so pale.<br />
+The snow, unfruitful and so pale.<br />
+In wild and vagabond tatters hurled<br />
+Through the limitless winter of the world.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_GRAVE-DIGGER" id="THE_GRAVE-DIGGER"></a>THE GRAVE-DIGGER</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In the garden yonder of yews and death,<br />
+There sojourneth<br />
+A man who toils, and has toiled for aye.<br />
+Digging the dried-up ground all day.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Some willows, surviving their own dead selves.<br />
+Weep there around him as he delves.<br />
+And a few poor flowers, disconsolate<br />
+Because the tempest and wind and wet<br />
+Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The ground is nothing but pits and cones,<br />
+Deep graves in every corner yawn;<br />
+The frost in the winter cracks the stones,<br />
+And when the summer in June is born<br />
+One hears, 'mid the silence that pants for breath,<br />
+The germinating and life of Death<br />
+Below, among the lifeless bones.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Since ages longer than he can know,<br />
+The grave-digger brings his human woe,<br />
+That never wears out, and lays its head<br />
+Slowly down in that earthy bed.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+By all the surrounding roads, each day<br />
+They come towards him, the coffins white,<br />
+They come in processions infinite;<br />
+They come from the distances far away.<br />
+From corners obscure and out-of-the-way.<br />
+From the heart of the towns&mdash;and the wide-spreading<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">plain.</span><br />
+The limitless plain, swallows up their track;<br />
+They come with their escort of people in black.<br />
+At every hour, till the day doth wane;<br />
+And at early dawn the long trains forlorn<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Begin again.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The grave-digger hears far off the knell,<br />
+Beneath weary skies, of the passing bell,<br />
+Since ages longer than he can tell.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Some grief of his each coffin carrieth&mdash;<br />
+His wild desires toward evenings dark with death<br />
+Are here: his mournings for he knows not what:<br />
+Here are his tears, for ever on this spot<br />
+Motionless in their shrouds: his memories.<br />
+With gaze worn-out from travelling through the years<br />
+So far, to bid him call to mind the fears<br />
+Of which their souls are dying&mdash;and with these<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">Lies side by side</span><br />
+The shattered body of his broken pride.<br />
+His heroism, to which nought replied,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">Is here all unavailing;</span><br />
+His courage, 'neath its heavy armour failing.<br />
+And his poor valour, gashed upon the brow.<br />
+Silent, and crumbling in corruption now.<br />
+The grave-digger watches them come into sight,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">The long, slow roads.</span><br />
+Marching towards him, with all their loads<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">Of coffins white.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here are his keenest thoughts, that one by one<br />
+His lukewarm soul hath tainted and undone;<br />
+And his white loves of simple days of yore,<br />
+in lewd and tempting mirrors sullied o'er;<br />
+The proud, mute vows that to himself he made<br />
+Are here&mdash;for he hath scored and cancelled them,<br />
+As one may cut and notch a diadem;<br />
+And here, inert and prone, his will is laid,<br />
+Whose gestures flashed like lightning keen before.<br />
+But that he now can raise in strength no more.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The grave-digger digs to the sound of the knell<br />
+'Mid the yews and the deaths in yonder dell.<br />
+Since ages longer than he can tell.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here is his dream&mdash;born in the radiant glow.<br />
+Of joy and young oblivion, long ago&mdash;<br />
+That in black fields of science he let go,<br />
+That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright,<br />
+&mdash;Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight&mdash;<br />
+That he hath launched toward inaccessible<br />
+Spaces afar, toward the distance there,<br />
+The golden conquest of the Impossible,<br />
+And that the limitless, refractory sky,<br />
+Sends back to him again, or it has ere<br />
+So much as touched the immobile mystery.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The grave-digger turneth it round and round&mdash;<br />
+With arms by toil so weary made,<br />
+With arms so thin, and strokes of spade&mdash;<br />
+Since what long times?&mdash;the dried-up ground.<br />
+Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng<br />
+Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong;<br />
+And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries,<br />
+He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.<br />
+The insults to the gentle, and the jeer<br />
+What time the humble bent their knees, are here;<br />
+Gloomy denials, and a bitter store<br />
+Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before<br />
+Devotedness that in the shadow stands<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 6em;">With outstretched hands.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.<br />
+Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell,<br />
+With strokes of the spade turns round and round<br />
+The weary sods of the dried-up ground.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Then&mdash;fear-struck dallyings with suicide;<br />
+Delays, that conquer hours that would decide:<br />
+Again&mdash;the terrors of dark crime and sin<br />
+Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin:<br />
+The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be<br />
+The man who lives of the extremity<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">Of his own fear:</span><br />
+And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.<br />
+And madness, with its eyes of marble white,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">These all are here.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+His head a prey to the dull knell's sound,<br />
+In terror the grave-digger turns the ground<br />
+With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast<br />
+The dried-up earth upon his past.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The slain days, and the present, he doth see,<br />
+Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.<br />
+And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.<br />
+Pressing the future blood of his red heart;<br />
+Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part<br />
+Of that his future's body, limb by limb,<br />
+Till there is but a carcase left to him;<br />
+And shewing him, in coffins prisoned,<br />
+Or ever they be born, his longings dead.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell,<br />
+More heavy yet, of the passing bell.<br />
+That up through the mourning horizons doth swell<br />
+What if the bells, with their haunting swing,<br />
+Would stop on a day that heart-breaking ring!<br />
+And the endless procession of corse after corse.<br />
+Choke the highways no more of his long remorse<br />
+But the biers, with the prayers and the tears,<br />
+Immensely yet follow the biers;<br />
+They halt by crucifix now, and by shrine,<br />
+Then take up once more their mournful line;<br />
+On the backs of men, upon trestles borne.<br />
+They follow their uniform march forlorn;<br />
+Skirting each field and each garden-wall.<br />
+Passing beneath the sign-posts tall,<br />
+Skirting along by the vast Unknown,<br />
+Where terror points horns from the corner-stone.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The old man, broken and propless quite.<br />
+Watches them still from the infinite<br />
+Coming towards him&mdash;and hath beside<br />
+Nothing to do, but in earth to hide<br />
+His multiple death, thus bit by bit,<br />
+And, with fingers irresolute, plant on it<br />
+Crosses so hastily, day by day,<br />
+Since what long times&mdash;he cannot say.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_WIND" id="THE_WIND"></a>THE WIND</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Crossing the infinite length of the moorland,<br />
+Here comes the wind,<br />
+The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November;<br />
+Endless and infinite, crossing the downs,<br />
+Here comes the wind<br />
+That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember;<br />
+Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns,<br />
+The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards,<br />
+Each bucket and pulley, it creaks and it wails;<br />
+By cisterns of farmyards, the pulleys and pails<br />
+They creak and they cry,<br />
+The whole of sad death in their melancholy.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The wind, it sends scudding dead leaves from the birches<br />
+Along o'er the water, the wind of November,<br />
+The savage, fierce wind;<br />
+The boughs of the trees for the birds' nests it searches,<br />
+To bite them and grind.<br />
+The wind, as though rasping down iron, grates past,<br />
+And, furious and fast, from afar combs the cold<br />
+And white avalanches of winter the old.<br />
+The savage wind combs them so furious and fast.<br />
+The wind of November.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+From each miserable shed<br />
+The patched garret-windows wave wild overhead<br />
+Their foolish, poor tatters of paper and glass.<br />
+As the savage, fierce wind of November doth pass!<br />
+And there on its hill<br />
+Of dingy and dun-coloured turf, the black mill,<br />
+Swift up from below, through the empty air slashing,<br />
+Swift down from above, like a lightning-stroke flashing,<br />
+The black mill so sinister moweth the wind.<br />
+The savage, fierce wind of November!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The old, ragged thatches that squat round their steeple,<br />
+Are raised on their roof-poles, and fall with a clap,<br />
+In the wind the old thatches and pent-houses flap,<br />
+In the wind of November, so savage and hard.<br />
+The crosses&mdash;and they are the arms of dead people&mdash;<br />
+The crosses that stand in the narrow churchyard<br />
+Fall prone on the sod<br />
+Like some great flight of black, in the acre of God.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The wind of November!<br />
+Have you met him, the savage wind, do you remember?<br />
+Did he pass you so fleet,<br />
+&mdash;Where, yon at the cross, the three hundred roads meet&mdash;<br />
+With distressfulness panting, and wailing with cold?<br />
+Yea, he who breeds fears and puts all things to flight,<br />
+Did you see him, that night<br />
+When the moon he o'erthrew&mdash;when the villages, old<br />
+In their rot and decay, past endurance and spent,<br />
+Cried, wailing like beasts, 'neath the hurricane bent?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here comes the wind howling, that heralds dark weather,<br />
+The wind blowing infinite over the heather.<br />
+The wind with his trumpet that heralds November!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_FISHERMEN" id="THE_FISHERMEN"></a>THE FISHERMEN</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The spot is flaked with mist, that fills,<br />
+Thickening into rolls more dank,<br />
+The thresholds and the window-sills,<br />
+And smokes on every bank.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The river stagnates, pestilent<br />
+With carrion by the current sent<br />
+This way and that&mdash;and yonder lies<br />
+The moon, just like a woman dead,<br />
+That they have smothered overhead,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Deep in the skies.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In a few boats alone there gleam<br />
+Lamps that light up and magnify<br />
+The backs, bent over stubbornly,<br />
+Of the old fishers of the stream,<br />
+Who since last evening, steadily,<br />
+&mdash;For God knows what night-fishery&mdash;<br />
+Have let their black nets downward slow<br />
+Into the silent water go.<br />
+The noisome water there below.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Down in the river's deeps, ill-fate<br />
+And black mischances breed and hatch.<br />
+Unseen of them, and lie in wait<br />
+As for their prey. And these they catch<br />
+With weary toil&mdash;believing still<br />
+That simple, honest work is best&mdash;<br />
+At night, beneath the shifting mist<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Unkind and chill.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+So hard and harsh, yon clock-towers tell.<br />
+With muffled hammers, like a knell,<br />
+The midnight hour.<br />
+From tower to tower<br />
+So hard and harsh the midnights chime.<br />
+The midnights harsh of autumn time,<br />
+The weary midnights' bell.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The crew<br />
+Of fishers black have on their back<br />
+Nought save a nameless rag or two;<br />
+And their old hats distil withal,<br />
+And drop by drop let crumbling fall<br />
+Into their necks, the mist-flakes all.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The hamlets and their wretched huts<br />
+Are numb and drowsy, and all round<br />
+The willows too, and walnut trees,<br />
+'Gainst which the Easterly fierce breeze<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Has waged its feud.</span><br />
+No bayings from the forest sound,<br />
+No cry the empty midnight cuts&mdash;<br />
+The midnight space that grows imbrued<br />
+With damp breaths from the ashy ground.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The fishers hail each other not&mdash;<br />
+Nor help&mdash;in their fraternal lot;<br />
+Doing but that which must be done.<br />
+Each fishes for himself alone.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+And this one gathers in his net,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Drawing it tighter yet,</span><br />
+His freight of petty misery;<br />
+And that one drags up recklessly<br />
+Diseases from their slimy bed;<br />
+While others still their meshes spread<br />
+Out to the sorrows that drift by<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Threateningly nigh;</span><br />
+And the last hauls aboard with force<br />
+The wreckage dark of his remorse.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The river, round its corners bending,<br />
+And with the dyke-heads intertwined.<br />
+Goes hence&mdash;since what times out of mind?&mdash;<br />
+Toward the far horizon wending<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">Of weariness unending.</span><br />
+Upon the banks, the skins of wet<br />
+Black ooze-heaps nightly poison sweat.<br />
+And the mists are their fleeces light<br />
+That curl up to the houses' height.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In their dark boats, where nothing stirs,<br />
+Not even the red-flamed torch that blurs<br />
+With halos huge, as if of blood.<br />
+The thick felt of the mist's white hood,<br />
+Death with his silence seals the sere<br />
+Old fishermen of madness here.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The isolated, they abide<br />
+Deep in the mist&mdash;still side by side.<br />
+But seeing one another never;<br />
+Weary are both their arms&mdash;and yet<br />
+Their work their ruin doth beget.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Each for himself works desperately,<br />
+He knows not why&mdash;no dreams has he;<br />
+Long have they worked, for long, long years,<br />
+While every instant brings its fears;<br />
+Nor have they ever<br />
+Quitted the borders of their river,<br />
+Where 'mid the moonlit mists they strain<br />
+To fish misfortune up amain.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+If but in this their night they hailed each other<br />
+And brothers' voices might console a brother!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But numb and sullen, on they go,<br />
+With heavy brows and backs bent low,<br />
+While their small lights beside them gleam,<br />
+Flickering feebly on the stream.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Like blocks of shadow they are there.<br />
+Nor ever do their eyes divine<br />
+That far away beyond the mists<br />
+Acrid and spongy&mdash;there exists<br />
+A firmament where 'mid the night.<br />
+Attractive as a loadstone, bright<br />
+Prodigious planets shine.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The fishers black of that black plague,<br />
+They are the lost immeasurably,<br />
+Among the knells, the distance vague,<br />
+The yonder of those endless plains<br />
+That stretch more far than eye can see:<br />
+And the damp autumn midnight rains<br />
+Into their souls' monotony.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_ROPE-MAKER" id="THE_ROPE-MAKER"></a>THE ROPE-MAKER</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In his village grey<br />
+At foot of the dykes, that encompass him<br />
+With weary weaving of curves and lines<br />
+Toward the sea outstretching dim,<br />
+The rope-maker, visionary white.<br />
+Stepping backwards along the way,<br />
+Prudently 'twixt his hands combines<br />
+The distant threads, in their twisting play.<br />
+That come to him from the infinite.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+When day is gone.<br />
+Through ardent, weary evenings, yon<br />
+The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;<br />
+Something by unseen hands is stirred.<br />
+And parallel o'er the rakes, that trace<br />
+An even space<br />
+From point to point along all the way,<br />
+The flaxen hemp still plaits its chain<br />
+Ceaseless, for days and weeks amain.<br />
+With his poor, tired fingers, nimble still.<br />
+Fearing to break for want of skill<br />
+The fragments of gold that the gliding light<br />
+Threads through his toil so scantily&mdash;<br />
+Passing the walls and the houses by<br />
+The rope-maker, visionary white,<br />
+From depths of the evening's whirlpool dim,<br />
+Draws the horizons in to him.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Horizons that stretch back afar.<br />
+Where strife, regrets, hates, furies are:<br />
+Tears of the silence, and the tears<br />
+That find a voice: serenest years,<br />
+Or years convulsed with pang and throe:<br />
+Horizons of the long ago,<br />
+These gestures of the Past they shew.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Of old&mdash;as one in sleep, life, errant, strayed<br />
+Its wondrous morns and fabled evenings through;<br />
+When God's right hand toward far Canaan's blue<br />
+Traced golden paths, deep in the twilight shade.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Of old, 'twas life exasperate, huge and tense,<br />
+Swung savage at some stallion's mane&mdash;life, fleet.<br />
+With mighty lightnings flashing 'neath her feet,<br />
+Upreared immensely over space immense.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Of old, 'twas life evoking ardent will;<br />
+And hell's red cross and Heaven's cross of white<br />
+Each marched, with gleam of steely armours' light.<br />
+Through streams of blood, to heavens of victory still.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Of old&mdash;life, livid, foaming, came and went<br />
+'Mid strokes of tocsin and assassin's knife;<br />
+Proscribers, murderers, each with each at strife,<br />
+While, mad and splendid. Death above them bent.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+'Twixt fields of flax and of osiers red.<br />
+On the road where nothing doth move or tread,<br />
+By houses and walls to left and right<br />
+The rope-maker, visionary white,<br />
+From depths of evening's treasury dim<br />
+Draws the horizons in to him.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Horizons that stretch yonder far.<br />
+Where work, strifes, ardours, science are;<br />
+Horizons that change&mdash;they pass and glide,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7.5em;">And on their way</span><br />
+They shew in mirrors of eventide<br />
+The mourning image of dark To-day.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here&mdash;writhing fires that never rest nor end.<br />
+Where, in one giant effort all employed,<br />
+Sages cast down the Gods, to change the void<br />
+Whither the flights of human science tend.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here&mdash;'tis a room where thought, assertive, saith<br />
+That there are weights exact to gauge her by,<br />
+That inane ether, only, rounds the sky.<br />
+And that in phials of glass men breed up death.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here&mdash;'tis a workship, where, all fiery bright,<br />
+Matter intense vibrates with fierce turmoil<br />
+In vaults where wonders new, 'mid stress and toil,<br />
+Are forged, that can absorb space, time and night.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+&mdash;A palace&mdash;of an architecture grown<br />
+Effete, and weary 'neath its hundred years.<br />
+Whence voices vast invoke, instinct with fears,<br />
+The thunder in its flights toward the Unknown.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+On the silent, even road&mdash;his eyes<br />
+Still fixed towards the waning light<br />
+That skirts the houses and walls as it dies&mdash;<br />
+The rope-maker, visionary white,<br />
+From depths of the evening's halo dim<br />
+Draws the horizons in to him.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Horizons that are there afar<br />
+Where light, hope, wakenings, strivings are;<br />
+Horizons that he sees defined<br />
+As hope for some future, far and kind.<br />
+Beyond those distant shores and faint<br />
+That evening on the clouds doth paint.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yon&mdash;'mid that distance calm and musical<br />
+Twin stairs of gold suspend their steps of blue,<br />
+The sage doth climb them, and the seer too,<br />
+Starting from sides opposed toward one goal.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yon&mdash;contradiction's lightning-shocks lose power.<br />
+Doubt's sullen hand unclenches to the light,<br />
+The eye sees in their essence laws unite<br />
+Rays scattered once 'mid doctrines of an hour.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yon&mdash;keenest spirits pierce beyond the land<br />
+Of seeming and of death. The heart hath ease,<br />
+And one would say that Mildness held the keys<br />
+Of the colossal silence in her hand.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Up yon&mdash;the God each soul is, once again<br />
+Creates, expands, gives, finds himself in all;<br />
+And rises higher, the lowlier he doth fall<br />
+Before meek tenderness and sacred pain.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+And there is ardent, living peace&mdash;its urns<br />
+Of even bliss ranged 'mid these twilights, where<br />
+&mdash;Embers of hope upon the ashen air&mdash;<br />
+Each great nocturnal planet steadfast burns.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In his village at foot of the dykes, that bend,<br />
+Sinuous, weary, about him and wend<br />
+Toward that distance of eddying light,<br />
+The rope-maker, visionary white.<br />
+Along by each house and each garden wall.<br />
+Absorbs in himself the horizons all.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oh, splendour of our joy and our delight,<br />
+Woven of gold amid the silken air!<br />
+See the dear house among its gables light,<br />
+And the green garden, and the orchard there!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here is the bench with apple-trees o'er head<br />
+Whence the light spring is shed.<br />
+With touch of petals falling slow and soft;<br />
+Here branches luminous take flight aloft,<br />
+Hovering, like some bounteous presage, high<br />
+Against this landscape's clear and tender sky.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Here lie, like kisses from the lips dropt down<br />
+Of yon frail azur upon earth below,<br />
+Two simple, pure, blue pools, and like a crown<br />
+About their edge, chance flowers artless grow.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O splendour of our joy and of our ourselves!<br />
+Whose life doth feed, within this garden bright,<br />
+Upon the emblems of our own delight.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+What are those forms that yonder slowly pass?<br />
+Our two glad souls are they,<br />
+That pastime take, and stray<br />
+Along the terraces and woodland grass?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Are these thy breasts, are these thine eyes, these two<br />
+Golden-bright flowers of harmonious hue?<br />
+These grasses, hanging like some plumage rare.<br />
+Bathed in the stream they ruffle by their touch.<br />
+Are they the strands of thy smooth, glossy hair?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+No shelter e'er could match yon orchard white.<br />
+Or yonder house amid its gables light,<br />
+And garden, that so blest a sky controls,<br />
+Weaving the climate dear to both our souls.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="VIII" id="VIII"></a>VIII</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+As in the guileless, golden age, my heart<br />
+I gave thee, even like an ample flower<br />
+That opens in the dew's bright morning hour;<br />
+My lips have rested where the frail leaves part.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+I plucked the flower&mdash;it came<br />
+From meadows whereon grow the flowers of flame:<br />
+Speak to it not&mdash;'tis best that we control<br />
+Words, since they needs are trivial 'twixt us two;<br />
+All words are hazardous, for it is through<br />
+The eyes that soul doth hearken unto soul.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+That flower that is my heart, and where secure<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">My heart's avowal hides.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Simply confides</span><br />
+Unto thy lips that she is clear and pure.<br />
+Loyal and good&mdash;and that one's trust toward<br />
+A virgin love is like a child's in God.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Let wit and wisdom flower upon the height,<br />
+Along capricious paths of vanity;<br />
+And give we welcome to sincerity,<br />
+That holds between her fingers crystal-bright<br />
+Our two clear hearts: for what so beautiful<br />
+As a confession made from soul to soul.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">When eve returns</span><br />
+And the white flame of countless diamonds burns.<br />
+Like myriads of silent eyes intent,<br />
+Th' unfathomed silence of the firmament.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="XVII" id="XVII"></a>XVII</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+That we may love each other through our eyes<br />
+Let us our glances lave, and make them clear,<br />
+Of all the thousand glances that they here<br />
+Have met, in this base world of servile lies.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The dawn is dressed in blossom and in dew,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">And chequered too</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">With very tender light&mdash;it looks as though</span><br />
+Frail plumes of sun and silver, through the mist,<br />
+Glided across the garden to and fro,<br />
+And with a soft caress the mosses kissed.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Our wondrous ponds of blue<br />
+Tremble and wake with golden shimmerings;<br />
+Swift emerald flights beneath the trees dart through.<br />
+And now the light from hedge and path anew<br />
+Sweeps the damp dust, where yet the twilight clings.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="XXI" id="XXI"></a>XXI</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In hours like these, when through our dream of bliss<br />
+So far from all things not ourselves we move,<br />
+What lustral blood, what baptism is this<br />
+That bathes our hearts, straining toward perfect love?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Our hands are clasped, and yet there is no prayer,<br />
+Our arms outstretched, and yet no cry is there;<br />
+Adoring something, what, we cannot say.<br />
+More pure than we are and more far away,<br />
+With spirit fervent and most guileless grown,<br />
+How we are mingled and dissolved in one;<br />
+Ah, how we live each other, in the unknown!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Oh, how absorbed and wholly lost before<br />
+The presence of those hours supreme one lies!<br />
+And how the soul would fain find other skies<br />
+To seek therein new gods it might adore;<br />
+Oh, marvellous and agonizing joy,<br />
+Audacious hope whereon the spirit hangs,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Of being one day</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Once more the prey,</span><br />
+Beyond even death, of these deep, silent pangs.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="ST_GEORGE" id="ST_GEORGE"></a>ST. GEORGE</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Opening the mists on a sudden through,<br />
+An Avenue!<br />
+Then, all one ferment of varied gold,<br />
+With foam of plumes where the chamfrom bends<br />
+Round his horse's head, that no bit doth hold,<br />
+St. George descends!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The diamond-rayed caparison,<br />
+Makes of his flight one declining path<br />
+From Heaven's pity down upon<br />
+Our waiting earth.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Hero and Lord<br />
+Of the joyous, helpful virtues all.<br />
+Sonorous, pure and crystalline!<br />
+Let his radiance fall<br />
+On my heart nocturnal and make it shine<br />
+In the wheeling aureole of his sword!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Let the wind's soft silvern whispers sound<br />
+And ring his coat of mail around,<br />
+His battle-spurs amid the fight!<br />
+&mdash;He&mdash;the St. George&mdash;who shines so bright<br />
+And comes, 'mid the wailings of my desire.<br />
+To seize and lift my poor hands higher<br />
+Toward his dauntless valour's fire!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Like a cry great with faith, to God<br />
+His lance St. George upraised doth hold;<br />
+Crossing athwart my glance he trod.<br />
+As 'twere one tumult of haggard gold.<br />
+The chrism's glow on his forehead shone,<br />
+The great St. George of duty high!<br />
+Beautiful by his heart, and by<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Himself alone!</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Ring, all my voices of hope, ring on!<br />
+Ring forth in me<br />
+Beneath fresh boughs of greenery,<br />
+Down radiant pathways, full of sun;<br />
+Ye glints of silvery mica, be<br />
+Bright joy amid my stones&mdash;and ye<br />
+White pebbles that the waters strew.<br />
+Open your eyes in my brooklets, through<br />
+The watery lids that cover you;<br />
+Landscape of gushing springs and sun,<br />
+With gold that quivers on misty blue,<br />
+Landscape that dwells in me, hold thou<br />
+The mirror now<br />
+To the fiery flights, that flaming roll,<br />
+Of the great St. George toward my soul!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+'Gainst the black Dragon's teeth and claws,<br />
+Against the armour of leprous sores,<br />
+The miracle and sword is he;<br />
+On his breast-plate burneth Charity,<br />
+And his gentleness sends hurtling back.<br />
+In dire defeat, the Instinct black.<br />
+Fires flecked with gold, that flashing turn,<br />
+Whirlwinds of stars, those glories meet,<br />
+About his galloping horse's feet.<br />
+Deep into my remembrance burn<br />
+Their lightnings fleet!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+He comes, a fair ambassador,<br />
+From white lands built with marble o'er.<br />
+Where grows, in glades beside the sea,<br />
+Upon the tree<br />
+Of goodness, fragrant gentleness.<br />
+That haven, too, he knows no less<br />
+Where wondrous ships rock, calm and still.<br />
+That freights of sleeping angels fill;<br />
+And those vast evenings, when below<br />
+Upon the water, 'mid the skies'<br />
+Reflected eyes.<br />
+Islands flash sudden forth and glow.<br />
+That kingdom fair<br />
+Whereof the Virgin ariseth Queen,<br />
+Its lowly, ardent joy is he;<br />
+And his flaming sword in the ambient air<br />
+Vibrates like an ostensory&mdash;<br />
+The suddenly flashing St. George! behold,<br />
+He strikes through my soul like a fire of gold!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+He knows from what far wanderings<br />
+I come: what mists obscure my brain;<br />
+What dagger marks have deeply scarred<br />
+My thought, and with black crosses marred:<br />
+With what spent force, what anger vain.<br />
+What petty scorn of better things,<br />
+&mdash;Yea, and with what a mask I came,<br />
+Folly upon the lees of shame!<br />
+A coward was I; the world I fled<br />
+To hide my head<br />
+Within a huge and futile Me;<br />
+I builded, beneath domes of Night,<br />
+The blocks of marble, gold be-starred,<br />
+Of a hostile science, endlessly<br />
+Towards a height<br />
+By oracles of blackness barred.<br />
+For Death alone is Queen of night.<br />
+And human effort is brightest born<br />
+Only at dawn.<br />
+With opening flowers would prayer fain bloom,<br />
+And their sweet lips hold the same perfume.<br />
+The sunbeams shimmering white that fall<br />
+On pearly water, are for all<br />
+Like a caress<br />
+Upon our life: the dawn unfolds<br />
+A counsel fair of trustfulness;<br />
+And whoso hearkens thereto is saved<br />
+From his slough, where never a sin was laved.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+St. George in radiant armour came<br />
+Speeding along in leaps of flame<br />
+'Mid the sweet morning, through my soul.<br />
+Young, beautiful by faith was he;<br />
+He leaned the lower down toward me<br />
+Even as I the lowlier knelt;<br />
+Like some pure, golden cordial<br />
+In secret felt.<br />
+He filled me with his soaring strength,<br />
+And with sweet fear most tenderly.<br />
+Before that vision's dignity,<br />
+Into his pale, proud hand at length<br />
+I cast the blood my pain had spent.<br />
+Then, laying upon me as he went<br />
+A charge of valour, and the sign<br />
+Of the cross on my brow from his lance divine,<br />
+He sped upon his shining road<br />
+Straight, with my heart, towards his God.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_GARDENS" id="THE_GARDENS"></a>THE GARDENS</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The landscape now reveals a change;<br />
+A stair&mdash;that twinèd elm-boughs hold<br />
+Enclosed 'mid hedges mystic, strange&mdash;<br />
+Inaugurates a green and gold<br />
+Vision of gardens, range on range.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Each step's a hope, that doth ascend<br />
+Stairwise to expectation's height;<br />
+A weary way it is to wend<br />
+While noonday suns are burning bright.<br />
+But rest waits at the evening's end.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Streams, that wash white from sin, flow deep,<br />
+And round about the fresh lawns twine;<br />
+While there, beneath the green banks steep,<br />
+Beside his cross, the Lamb Divine<br />
+Lies tranquilly in peaceful sleep.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The daisied grass is glad, and gay<br />
+With crystal butterflies the hedge.<br />
+Where globes of fruit shine blue; here stray<br />
+Peacocks beside the box-trees' edge:<br />
+A shining lion bars the way.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Flowers, upright as the ecstasies<br />
+And ardours of white spirits pure,<br />
+With branches springing fountain-wise,<br />
+Burst upward, and by impulse sure<br />
+To their own soaring splendour rise.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Gently and very slowly swayed.<br />
+The wind a wordless rhapsody<br />
+Sings&mdash;and the shimm'ring air doth braid<br />
+An aureole of filigree<br />
+Round every disk with emerald laid.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Even the shade is but a flight<br />
+Toward flickering radiances, that slip<br />
+From space to space; and now the light<br />
+Sleeps, with calmed rays, upon the lip<br />
+Of lilac-blossoms golden-white.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="SHE_OF_THE_GARDEN" id="SHE_OF_THE_GARDEN"></a>SHE OF THE GARDEN</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+In such a spot, with radiant flowers for halo,<br />
+I saw the Guardian Angel sit her down;<br />
+Vine-branches fashioned a green shrine above her<br />
+And sun-flowers rose behind her like a crown.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Her fingers, their white slenderness encircled<br />
+With humble, fragile rings of coral round.<br />
+Held, ranged in couples, sprays of faithful roses.<br />
+Sealed with a clasp, with threads of woollen bound.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+A shimmering air the golden calm was weaving,<br />
+All filigree'd with dawn, that like a braid<br />
+Surmounted her pure brow, which still was hidden<br />
+Half in the shade.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Woven of linen were her veil and sandals.<br />
+But, twined 'mid boughs of foliage, on their hem<br />
+The theologic Virtues Three were painted;<br />
+Hearts set about with gold encompassed them.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Her silken hair, slow rippling, from her shoulder<br />
+Down to the mosses of the sward did reach;<br />
+The childhood of her eyes disclosed a silence<br />
+More sweet than speech.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+My arms outstretched, and all my soul upstraining.<br />
+Then did I rise,<br />
+With haggard yearning, toward the soul suspended<br />
+There in her eyes.<br />
+Those eyes, they shone so vivid with remembrance,<br />
+That they confessed days lived alike with me:<br />
+Oh, in the grave inviolate can it change, then,<br />
+The Long Ago, and live in the To Be?<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Sure, she was one who, being dead, yet brought me.<br />
+Miraculous, a strength that comforteth,<br />
+And the Viaticum of her survival<br />
+Guiding me from the further side of Death.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span class="caption">From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="THE_GLORY_OF_THE_HEAVENS" id="THE_GLORY_OF_THE_HEAVENS"></a>THE GLORY OF THE HEAVENS</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies<br />
+Behind the veil that the finger of radiant winter weaves<br />
+And down on us falls the foliage of stars in glittering sheaves;<br />
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies,<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The wingèd sea with her shadowy floods as of dappled silk<br />
+Speeds, 'neath the golden fires, her pale immensity o'er;<br />
+And diamond-rayed, the moonlight, shining along the shore,<br />
+Bathes the brow of the headlands in radiance as soft as milk.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Yonder there flow, untwining and twining their loops anew!<br />
+The mighty, silvery rivers, through the translucent night;<br />
+And a glint as of wondrous acids sparkles with magic light<br />
+the cup that the lake outstretches towards the mountains blue.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Everywhere light seems breaking forth into flower and star,<br />
+Whether on shore in stillness, or wavering on the deep.<br />
+The islands are nests where silence inviolate doth deep;<br />
+An ardent nimbus hovers o'er yon horizons far.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+See, from Nadir to Zenith one aureole doth reach!<br />
+Of yore, the souls exalted by faith's high mysteries<br />
+Saw, in the domination of those star-clouded skies,<br />
+Jehovah's hand resplendent and heard His silent speech.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+But now the eyes that scan them no longer may there aspire<br />
+To we some god self-banished&mdash;not so, but the intricate<br />
+Tangle of marvellous problems, the messengers that wait<br />
+On Measureless Force, and veil her, there on her couch of fire.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O cauldrons of life, where matter, adown the eternal day,<br />
+Pours herself fruitful, seething through paths of scattering flame!<br />
+O flux of worlds and reflux to other worlds the same!<br />
+Unending oscillation betwixt newer and for aye!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Tumults consumed in whirlpools of speed and sound and light&mdash;<br />
+Violence we nought may reck of!&mdash;and yet there falls from thence<br />
+The vast, unbroken silence, mysterious and intense<br />
+That makes the peace, the calmness and beauty of the night!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O spheres of flame and golden, always more far and high;<br />
+Abyss to abyss still floating, onward from shade to shade!<br />
+So far, so high, all reck'ning the wisdom of man has made,<br />
+Before those giddy numbers must shrink in his hands and die!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies<br />
+Behind the veils that the finger of radiant winter weaves;<br />
+And down on us falls the foliage of star in glittering sheaves,<br />
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="LIFE" id="LIFE"></a>LIFE</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+To see beauty in all, is to lift our own Soul<br />
+Up to loftier heights than do chose who aspire<br />
+Through culpable suffering, vanquished desire.<br />
+Harsh Reality, dread and ineffable Whole,<br />
+Distils her red draught, enough tonic and stern<br />
+To intoxicate heads and to make the heart burn.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O clean and pure grain, whence are purged all the tares!<br />
+Clear torch, chosen out amid many whose flame;<br />
+Though ancient in splendour, is false to its name!<br />
+It is good to keep step, though beset with hard cares,<br />
+With the life that is real, to the far distant goal,<br />
+With no arm save the lucid, white pride of one's soul!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+To march, thus intrepid in confidence, straight<br />
+On the obstacle, holding the stubborn hope<br />
+Of conquering, thanks to firm blows of the will,<br />
+Of intelligence prompt, or of patience to wait;<br />
+And to feel growing stronger within us the sense,<br />
+Day by day, of a power superb and intense!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+To love ourselves keenly those others within<br />
+Who share a like strife with us, soar without fear<br />
+Toward that one future, whose footsteps we hear;<br />
+To love them, heart, brain, and because we are kin<br />
+Because in some dark, maddened day they have known<br />
+One anguish, one mourning, one string with our own!<br />
+<br />
+To be drunk with the great human battle of wills&mdash;<br />
+&mdash;Pale, fleeting reflex of the monstrous assaults,<br />
+Golden movements of planets in heaven's high vaults&mdash;<br />
+Till one lives in all that which acts, struggles, and thrills,<br />
+And avidly opens one's heart to the law<br />
+That rules, dread and stern, the whole universe o'er!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;"><b><a name="JOY" id="JOY"></a>JOY</b></span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O splendid, spacious day, irradiate<br />
+With flaming dawns, when earth shows yet more fair<br />
+Her ardent beauty, proud, without alloy;<br />
+And wakening life breathes out her perfume rare<br />
+So potently, that, all intoxicate,<br />
+Our ravished being rushes upon joy!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Be thanked, mine eyes, that now<br />
+Ye still shine clear beneath my furrowed brow<br />
+To see afar, the light vibrating there;<br />
+And you my hands, that in the sun yet thrill,<br />
+And you, my fingers, that glow golden still<br />
+Among the golden fruit upon the wall<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Where hollyhocks stand tall.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Be thanked, my body, that thyself dost bear<br />
+Yet firm and swift, and quivering to the touch<br />
+Of the quick breezes or of winds profound;<br />
+And you, straight frame, and lungs outbreathing wide,<br />
+Along the shore or on the mountain-side,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4.5em;">The sharp and radiant air</span><br />
+That bathes and grips the mighty worlds around!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O festal mornings, calm in loveliness,<br />
+Rose whose pure face the dewdrops all caress,<br />
+Birds flying toward us, like some presage white,<br />
+Gardens of sombre shade or frailest light!<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+What time the ample summer warms the glade,<br />
+I love you, roads, by which came hither late<br />
+She who held hidden in her hands my fate.<br />
+I love you, distant marshes, woods austere,<br />
+And to its depths, I love the earth, where here<br />
+Beneath my feet, my dead to rest are laid.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+So I exist in all that doth surround<br />
+And penetrate me:&mdash;all this grassy ground,<br />
+These hidden paths, and many a copse of beech:<br />
+Clear water, that no clouding shadows reach:<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">You have become to me</span><br />
+Myself, because you are my memory.<br />
+<br />
+In you my life prolonged for ever seems,<br />
+I shape, I am, all that hath filled my dreams;<br />
+In that horizon vast that dazzles me,<br />
+Trees shimmering with gold, my pride are ye;<br />
+And like the knots upon your trunk, my will<br />
+Strengthens my power to sane, stanch labour still.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+Rose of the pearl-hued gardens, when you kiss<br />
+My brow, a touch of living flame it is;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">To me all seems</span><br />
+One thrill of ardour, beauty, wild caress;<br />
+And I, in this world-drunkenness,<br />
+So multiply myself in all that gleams<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">On dazzled eyes,</span><br />
+That my heart, fainting, vents itself in cries.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+O leaps of fervour, strong, profound, and sweet,<br />
+As though some great wing swept thee off thy feet!<br />
+If thou hast felt them upward hearing thee<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Toward infinity,</span><br />
+Complain not, man, even in the evil day;<br />
+Whate'er disaster takes thee for her prey<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Thou to thyself shalt say</span><br />
+That once, for one short instant all supreme<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Which time may not destroy,</span><br />
+Thou yet hast tasted, with quick-beating heart,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Sweet, formidable joy;</span><br />
+And that thy soul, beguiling thee to set<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">As in a dream,</span><br />
+Hath fused thy very being's inmost part<br />
+With the unanimous great founts of power<br />
+And that that day supreme, that single hour,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">Hath made a god of thee.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
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+</pre>
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
+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: Poems of Emile Verhaeren
+
+Author: Emile Verhaeren
+
+Illustrator: John S. Sargent
+
+Translator: Alma Strettell
+
+Release Date: September 21, 2010 [EBook #33792]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POEMS OF EMILE VERHAEREN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+OF
+
+EMILE VERHAEREN.
+
+
+SELECTED AND RENDERED INTO ENGLISH
+
+BY
+
+ALMA STRETTELL.
+
+
+JOHN LANE
+THE BODLEY HEAD
+LONDON & NEW YORK
+
+1915.
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"
+
+RAIN
+THE FERRYMAN
+THE SILENCE
+THE BELL-RINGER
+SNOW
+THE GRAVE-DIGGER
+THE WIND
+THE FISHERMEN
+THE ROPE-MAKER
+
+From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"
+
+I.
+VIII.
+XVII.
+XXI.
+
+From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"
+
+ST. GEORGE
+THE GARDENS
+SHE OF THE GARDEN
+
+From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"
+
+THE GLORY OF HEAVENS
+LIFE
+JOY
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
+
+
+
+Emile Verhaeren, remarkable among of the brilliant group of writers
+representing "Young Belgium," and one who has been recognized by the
+literary world of France as holding a foremost place among the lyric
+poets of the day was born at St. Amand, near Antwerp, in 1855. His
+childhood was passed on the banks of the Scheldt, in the midst of the
+wide-spreading Flemish plains, a country of mist and flood, of dykes and
+marshes, and the impressions he received from the mysterious, melancholy
+character of these surroundings, have produced a marked and lasting
+influence upon his work. Yet the other characteristics with which it is
+stamped--the wealth of imagination, the gloomy force, the wonderful
+descriptive power and sense of colour, which set the landscape before
+one as a picture, suggest rather the possibility of Spanish blood in the
+poet's veins--and again, his somewhat morbid subjectivity and tendency
+to self-analysis mark him as the child of the latter end of our
+nineteenth century.
+
+Verhaeren entered early in life upon the literary career. After some
+time spent at a college in Ghent, he became a student at the University
+of Louvain, and here he founded and edited a journal called "_La
+Semaine_," in which work he was assisted by the singer Van Dyck, and by
+his friend and present publisher, Edmond Deman. He also formed, about
+this time, a close friendship with Maeterlinck. In 1881, Verhaeren was
+called to the Bar at Brussels, but soon gave up his legal career to
+devote himself entirely to literature. In 1883 he published his first
+volume of poems, and shortly afterwards became one of the editors of
+"_L'Art Moderne_," to which, as well as to other contemporary periodicals,
+he was for many years a contributor. In 1892 he founded, with the help
+of two other friends, the "Section of Art" in the "House of the People,"
+a popular institution in Brussels, where performances of the best music,
+as well as lectures upon literary and artistic subjects, were given. In
+spite, however, of the work which all this entailed, and of the many
+interests created by his ardent appreciation of the various branches of
+art and literature, Verhaeren continued to labour unceasingly at his
+poetical work, and between 1883 and 1897 brought out successively eleven
+small volumes: _Les Flamandes, Les Moines, Les Soirs, Les Debacles, Les
+Flambeaux Noirs, Les Apparus dans mes chemins, Les Campagnes
+Hallucinees, Les Villages Illusoires, Les Villes Tentaculaires, Les
+Heures Claires,_ and _Les Aubes_.
+
+Throughout this entire series the intellectual and spiritual development
+of the poet may be closely traced--from the materialism which pervades
+_Les Flamandes_, and the despairing pessimism and lurid emotion--the
+throes of a self-centred soul in revolt against fate--which are so
+powerfully portrayed in _Les Debacles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, and are
+apparent even in the opening pages of _Les Apparus_ dans mes chemins--to
+the tender, hopeful mysticism which marks the latter poems in that
+volume, and the wonderful sympathy with Nature, even in her saddest
+aspects--the subtle power of endowing those aspects with a profound and
+ennobling symbolism, which characterise the most beautiful of the poems
+in Les Villages Illusoires. Les Heures Claires is the name given to a
+volume of love-songs, an exquisite record of golden hours spent in a
+garden at spring-time--spring-time in a double sense.
+
+The task of making an adequate and typical selection from a poet's work
+is always difficult, and in this case it has been decided to limit the
+field of selection, at least for the present, to the three last-named
+volumes, which embody what may, I think, be considered as Verhaeren's
+highest achievement in the realm of lyrical poetry.
+
+
+In style, Verhaeren is essentially the apostle of the "Vers libre"; and
+his handling of rhyme and rhythm, his coining of words where he finds
+the French vocabulary insufficient, have called down upon him some
+criticism from those of his French contemporaries who are sticklers for
+the older rules and more conventional forms of versification. But
+however this may be, it remains an undeniable fact that Verhaeren has at
+his command a rare and powerful poetic eloquence--a wealth of imagery, a
+depth of thought and a subtlety of expression which perhaps are not to
+be imprisoned behind the bars of a too rigid convention. English readers
+have already been accustomed by their own poets to the "vers libre," and
+it is not so much, therefore, for my adherence to this form, as for my
+failure adequately to render Verhaeren's peculiar and striking beauty of
+language, that I beg their indulgence for the following translations.
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+
+From "LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES"
+
+
+RAIN
+
+
+Long as unending threads, the long-drawn rain
+Interminably, with its nails of grey,
+     Athwart the dull grey day,
+     Rakes the green window-pane--
+So infinitely, endlessly, the rain,
+The long, long rain.
+                           The rain.
+
+Since yesternight it keeps unravelling
+Down from the frayed and flaccid rags that cling
+     About the sullen sky.
+     The low black sky;
+Since yesternight, so slowly, patiently.
+Unravelling its threads upon the roads.
+Upon the roads and lanes, with even fall
+                           Continual.
+
+
+Along the miles
+That 'twixt the meadows and the suburbs lie,
+By roads interminably bent, the files
+Of waggons, with their awnings arched and tall.
+Struggling in sweat and steam, toil slowly by
+With outline vague as of a funeral.
+Into the ruts, unbroken, regular,
+Stretching out parallel so far
+That when night comes they seem to join the sky.
+For hours the water drips;
+And every tree and every dwelling weeps.
+Drenched as they are with it.
+With the long rain, tenaciously, with rain
+                           Indefinite.
+
+
+The rivers, through each rotten dyke that yields.
+Discharge their swollen wave upon the fields.
+         Where coils of drowned hay
+         Float far away;
+And the wild breeze
+Buffets the alders and the walnut-trees;
+Knee-deep in water great black oxen stand,
+Lifting their bellowings sinister on high
+         To the distorted sky;
+As now the night creeps onward, all the land,
+         Thicket and plain,
+Grows cumbered with her clinging shades immense.
+And still there is the rain,
+The long, long rain.
+Like soot, so fine and dense.
+
+
+         The long, long rain.
+         Rain--and its threads identical,
+         And its nails systematical,
+Weaving the garment, mesh by mesh amain,
+Of destitution for each house and wall,
+         And fences that enfold
+         The villages, neglected, grey, and old:
+Chaplets of rags and linen shreds that fall
+In frayed-out wisps from upright poles and tall.
+Blue pigeon-houses glued against the thatch,
+And windows with a patch
+Of dingy paper on each lowering pane,
+Houses with straight-set gutters, side by side
+Across the broad stone gambles crucified,
+          Mills, uniform, forlorn.
+Each rising from its hillock like a horn,
+Steeples afar and chapels round about,
+          The rain, the long, long rain,
+Through all the winter wears and wears them out.
+
+     Rain, with its many wrinkles, the long rain
+     With its grey nails, and with its watery mane;
+     The long rain of these lands of long ago,
+     The rain, eternal in its torpid flow!
+
+
+
+
+THE FERRYMAN
+
+
+The ferryman, a green reed 'twixt his teeth,
+With hand on oar, against the current strong
+Had rowed and rowed so long.
+
+
+But she, alas! whose voice was hailing him
+Across the far waves dim.
+Still further o'er the far waves seemed to float,
+Still further backwards, 'mid the mists, remote.
+
+
+The casements with their eyes.
+The dial-faces of the towers that rise
+Upon the shore,
+Watched, as he strove and laboured more and more.
+With frantic bending of the back in two,
+And start of savage muscles strained anew.
+
+
+One oar was suddenly riven,
+And by the current driven,
+With lash of heavy breakers, out to sea.
+
+
+But she, whose voice that hailed him he could hear
+There 'mid the mist and wind, she seemed to wring
+Her hands with gestures yet more maddening
+Toward him who drew not near.
+
+
+The ferryman with his surviving oar
+Fell harder yet to work, and more and more
+He strove, till every joint did crack and start,
+And fevered terror shook his very heart.
+
+
+The rudder broke
+Beneath one sharp, rude stroke;
+That, too, the current drove relentlessly,
+A dreary shred of wreckage, out to sea.
+
+
+The casements by the pier,
+Like eyes immense and feverish open wide,
+The dials of the towers--those widows drear
+Upstanding straight from mile to mile beside
+The banks of rivers--obstinately gaze
+Upon this madman, in his headstrong craze
+Prolonging his mad voyage 'gainst the tide.
+
+
+But she, who yonder in the mist-clouds hailed
+Him still so desperately, she wailed and wailed,
+With head outstretched in fearful, straining haste
+Toward the unknown of the outstretched waste.
+
+
+Steady as one that had in bronze been cast,
+Amid the blenched, grey tempest and the blast.
+The ferryman his single oar yet plied.
+And, spite of all, still lashed and bit the tide.
+His old eyes, with hallucinated gaze,
+Saw that far distance--an illumined haze--
+Whence the voice sounded, coming toward him still.
+Beneath the cold skies, lamentable, shrill.
+
+
+The last oar broke--
+And this the current hurried at one stroke,
+Like a frail straw, towards the distant sea.
+
+
+The ferryman, with arms dropped helplessly
+Sank on his bench, forlorn.
+His loins with vain efforts broken, torn.
+
+
+Drifting, his barque struck somewhere, as by chance,
+He turned a glance
+Towards the bank behind him then--and saw
+He had not left the shore.
+
+
+The casements and the dials, one by one.
+Their huge eyes gazing in a foolish stare.
+Witnessed the ruin of his ardour there;
+But still the old, tenacious ferryman
+Firm in his teeth--for God knows when, indeed--
+Held the green reed.
+
+
+
+
+THE SILENCE
+
+
+
+Ever since ending of the summer weather.
+When last the thunder and the lightning broke,
+Shatt'ring themselves upon it at one stroke,
+The Silence has not stirred, there in the heather.
+
+
+All round about stand steeples straight as stakes,
+And each its bell between its fingers shakes;
+All round about, with their three-storied loads,
+     The teams prowl down the roads;
+All round about, where'er the pine woods end,
+The wheel creaks on along its rutty bed,
+But not a sound is strong enough to rend
+     That space intense and dead.
+
+
+Since summer, thunder-laden, last was heard.
+The Silence has not stirred;
+And the broad heath-land, where the nights sink down
+Beyond the sand-hills brown.
+Beyond the endless thickets closely set,
+To the far borders of the far-away.
+     Prolongs It yet.
+
+
+Even the winds disturb not as they go
+
+The boughs of those long larches, bending low
+     Where the marsh-water lies,
+In which Its vacant eyes
+Gaze at themselves unceasing, stubbornly.
+Only sometimes, as on their way they move,
+The noiseless shadows of the clouds above.
+Or of some great bird's hov'ring flight on high,
+     Brush It in passing by.
+
+
+Since the last bolt that scored the earth aslant,
+Nothing has pierced the Silence dominant.
+
+
+Of those who cross Its vast immensity,
+Whether at twilight or at dawn it be,
+There is not one but feels
+The dread of the Unknown that It instils;
+An ample force supreme, It holds Its sway
+Uninterruptedly the same for aye.
+Dark walls of blackest fir-trees bar from sight
+The outlook towards the paths of hope and light;
+     Huge, pensive junipers
+Affright from far the passing travellers;
+Long, narrow paths stretch their straight lines unbent.
+Till they fork off in curves malevolent;
+And the sun, ever shifting, ceaseless lends
+Fresh aspects to the mirage whither tends
+     Bewilderment
+
+
+Since the last bolt was forged amid the storm,
+The polar Silence at the corners four
+Of the wide heather-land has stirred no more.
+
+
+Old shepherds, whom their hundred years have worn
+To things all dislocate and out of gear,
+And their old dogs, ragged, tired-out, and torn.
+Oft watch It, on the soundless lowlands near,
+Or downs of gold beflecked with shadows' flight,
+Sit down immensely there beside the night.
+
+
+Then, at the curves and corners of the mere.
+     The waters creep with fear;
+The heather veils itself, grows wan and white;
+All the leaves listen upon all the bushes,
+And the incendiary sunset hushes
+Before Its face his cries of brandished light.
+And in the hamlets that about It lie.
+Beneath the thatches of their hovels small
+The terror dwells of feeling It is nigh.
+And, though It stirs not, dominating all.
+Broken with dull despair and helplessness,
+Beneath Its presence they crouch motionless,
+As though upon the watch--and dread to see.
+Through rifts of vapour, open suddenly
+At evening, in the moon, the argent eyes
+     Of Its mute mysteries.
+
+
+
+
+THE BELL-RINGER
+
+
+Yon, in the depths of the evening's track,
+Like a herd of blind bullocks that seek their fellows,
+Wild, as in terror, the tempest bellows.
+And suddenly, there, o'er the gables black
+That the church, in the twilight, around it raises
+All scored with lightnings the steeple blazes.
+
+
+See the old bell-ringer, frenzied with fear.
+Mouth gaping, yet speechless, draw hastening near.
+And the knell of alarm that with strokes of lead
+He rings, heaves forth in a tempest of dread
+The frantic despair that throbs in his head.
+
+
+With the cross at the height
+Of its summit brandished, the lofty steeple
+Spreads the crimson mane
+Of the fire o'er the plain
+Toward the dream-like horizons that bound the night;
+The city nocturnal is filled with light;
+The face of the swift-gathered crowds doth people
+With fears and with clamours both street and lane;
+On walls turned suddenly dazzling bright
+The dusky panes drink the crimson flood
+     Like draughts of blood.
+
+
+Yet, knell upon knell, the old ringer doth cast
+His frenzy and fear o'er the country vast.
+
+
+The steeple, it seems to be growing higher
+Against the horizon that shifts and quivers,
+And to be flying in gleams of fire
+Far o'er the lakes and the swampy rivers.
+Its slates, like wings
+Of sparks and spangles, afar it flings.
+They fly toward the forests across the night:
+And in their passage the fires exhume
+The hovels and huts from their folds of gloom,
+Setting them suddenly all alight.
+
+
+In the crashing fall of the steeple's crown
+The cross to the brazier's depth drops down,
+Where, twisted and torn in the fiery fray,
+Its Christian arms are crushed like prey.
+With might and main
+The bell-ringer sounds his knell abroad.
+As though the flames would burn his God.
+
+
+The fire
+Funnel-like hollows its way yet higher,
+'Twixt walls of stone, up the steeple's height;
+Gaining the archway and lofty stage
+Where, swinging in light, the bell bounds with rage.
+The daws and the owls, with wild, long cry
+     Pass screeching by;
+On the fast-closed casements their heads they smite,
+Burn in the smoke-drifts their pinions light,
+Then, broken with terror and bruised with flight.
+Suddenly, 'mid the surging crowd.
+Fall dead outright.
+
+
+The old man sees toward his brandished bells
+The climbing fire
+With hands of boiling gold stretch nigher.
+
+
+The steeple
+Looks like a thicket of crimson bushes,
+With here a branch of flame that rushes
+Darting the belfry boards between;
+Convulsed and savage flames, they cling,
+With curves that plant-like curl and lean.
+Round every joist, round every pulley,
+And monumental beams, whence ring
+The bells, that voice forth frenzied folly.
+
+
+His fear and anguish spent, the ringer
+Sounds his own knell
+          On his ruined bell.
+
+
+A final crash,
+All dust and plaster in one grey flash,
+Cleaves the whole steeple's height in pieces;
+And like some great cry slain, it ceases
+All on a sudden, the knell's dull rage.
+The ancient tower
+Seems sudden to lean and darkly lower;
+While with heavy thuds, as from stage to stage
+They headlong bound.
+The bells are heard
+Plunging and crashing towards the ground.
+
+
+But yet the old ringer has never stirred.
+And, scooping the moist earth out, the bell
+Was thus his coffin, and grave as well.
+
+
+
+
+THE SNOW
+
+
+Uninterruptedly falls the snow,
+Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
+Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.
+
+
+Infinite, infinite falls the snow.
+Like a moment's time.
+Monotonously, in a moment's time;
+On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.
+Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;
+It falls on the sheds and their palings below.
+And myriad-wise, it falls and lies
+        In ridged waves
+In the churchyard hollows between the graves.
+
+
+The apron of all inclement weather
+Is roughly unfastened, there on high;
+The apron of woes and misery
+Is shaken by wind-gusts violently
+Down on the hamlets that crouch together
+Beneath the dull horizon-sky.
+
+
+The frost creeps down to the very bones,
+And want creeps in through the walls and stones;
+Yea, snow and want round the souls creep close,
+--The heavy snow diaphanous--
+Round the stone-cold hearths and the flameless souls
+That wither away in their huts and holes.
+
+
+The hamlets bare
+White, white as Death lie yonder, where
+The crooked roadways cross and halt;
+Like branching traceries of salt
+The trees, all crystallized with frost,
+Stretch forth their boughs, entwined and crost.
+Along the ways, as on they go
+In far procession o'er the snow.
+
+
+Then here and there, some ancient mill,
+Where light, pale mosses aggregate,
+Appears on a sudden, standing straight
+Like a snare upon its lonely hill.
+The roofs and sheds, down there below.
+Since November dawned, have been wrestling still,
+In contrary blasts, with the hurricane;
+While, thick and full, yet falls amain
+The infinite snow, with its weary weight,
+O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
+
+
+Thus journeys the snow afar so fleet.
+Into every cranny, on every trail;
+Always the snow and its winding-sheet,
+The mortuary snow so pale.
+The snow, unfruitful and so pale.
+In wild and vagabond tatters hurled
+Through the limitless winter of the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE GRAVE-DIGGER
+
+
+
+In the garden yonder of yews and death,
+There sojourneth
+A man who toils, and has toiled for aye.
+Digging the dried-up ground all day.
+
+
+Some willows, surviving their own dead selves.
+Weep there around him as he delves.
+And a few poor flowers, disconsolate
+Because the tempest and wind and wet
+Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.
+
+
+The ground is nothing but pits and cones,
+Deep graves in every corner yawn;
+The frost in the winter cracks the stones,
+And when the summer in June is born
+One hears, 'mid the silence that pants for breath,
+The germinating and life of Death
+Below, among the lifeless bones.
+
+
+Since ages longer than he can know,
+The grave-digger brings his human woe,
+That never wears out, and lays its head
+Slowly down in that earthy bed.
+
+
+By all the surrounding roads, each day
+They come towards him, the coffins white,
+They come in processions infinite;
+They come from the distances far away.
+From corners obscure and out-of-the-way.
+From the heart of the towns--and the wide-spreading
+     plain.
+The limitless plain, swallows up their track;
+They come with their escort of people in black.
+At every hour, till the day doth wane;
+And at early dawn the long trains forlorn
+     Begin again.
+
+
+The grave-digger hears far off the knell,
+Beneath weary skies, of the passing bell,
+Since ages longer than he can tell.
+
+
+Some grief of his each coffin carrieth--
+His wild desires toward evenings dark with death
+Are here: his mournings for he knows not what:
+Here are his tears, for ever on this spot
+Motionless in their shrouds: his memories.
+With gaze worn-out from travelling through the years
+So far, to bid him call to mind the fears
+Of which their souls are dying--and with these
+              Lies side by side
+The shattered body of his broken pride.
+His heroism, to which nought replied,
+              Is here all unavailing;
+His courage, 'neath its heavy armour failing.
+And his poor valour, gashed upon the brow.
+Silent, and crumbling in corruption now.
+The grave-digger watches them come into sight,
+              The long, slow roads.
+Marching towards him, with all their loads
+              Of coffins white.
+
+
+Here are his keenest thoughts, that one by one
+His lukewarm soul hath tainted and undone;
+And his white loves of simple days of yore,
+in lewd and tempting mirrors sullied o'er;
+The proud, mute vows that to himself he made
+Are here--for he hath scored and cancelled them,
+As one may cut and notch a diadem;
+And here, inert and prone, his will is laid,
+Whose gestures flashed like lightning keen before.
+But that he now can raise in strength no more.
+
+
+The grave-digger digs to the sound of the knell
+'Mid the yews and the deaths in yonder dell.
+Since ages longer than he can tell.
+
+
+Here is his dream--born in the radiant glow.
+Of joy and young oblivion, long ago--
+That in black fields of science he let go,
+That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright,
+--Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight--
+That he hath launched toward inaccessible
+Spaces afar, toward the distance there,
+The golden conquest of the Impossible,
+And that the limitless, refractory sky,
+Sends back to him again, or it has ere
+So much as touched the immobile mystery.
+
+
+The grave-digger turneth it round and round--
+With arms by toil so weary made,
+With arms so thin, and strokes of spade--
+Since what long times?--the dried-up ground.
+Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng
+Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong;
+And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries,
+He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.
+The insults to the gentle, and the jeer
+What time the humble bent their knees, are here;
+Gloomy denials, and a bitter store
+Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before
+Devotedness that in the shadow stands
+               With outstretched hands.
+
+
+The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.
+Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell,
+With strokes of the spade turns round and round
+The weary sods of the dried-up ground.
+
+
+Then--fear-struck dallyings with suicide;
+Delays, that conquer hours that would decide:
+Again--the terrors of dark crime and sin
+Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin:
+The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be
+The man who lives of the extremity
+              Of his own fear:
+And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.
+And madness, with its eyes of marble white,
+               These all are here.
+
+
+His head a prey to the dull knell's sound,
+In terror the grave-digger turns the ground
+With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast
+The dried-up earth upon his past.
+
+
+The slain days, and the present, he doth see,
+Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.
+And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.
+Pressing the future blood of his red heart;
+Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part
+Of that his future's body, limb by limb,
+Till there is but a carcase left to him;
+And shewing him, in coffins prisoned,
+Or ever they be born, his longings dead.
+
+
+The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell,
+More heavy yet, of the passing bell.
+That up through the mourning horizons doth swell
+What if the bells, with their haunting swing,
+Would stop on a day that heart-breaking ring!
+And the endless procession of corse after corse.
+Choke the highways no more of his long remorse
+But the biers, with the prayers and the tears,
+Immensely yet follow the biers;
+They halt by crucifix now, and by shrine,
+Then take up once more their mournful line;
+On the backs of men, upon trestles borne.
+They follow their uniform march forlorn;
+Skirting each field and each garden-wall.
+Passing beneath the sign-posts tall,
+Skirting along by the vast Unknown,
+Where terror points horns from the corner-stone.
+
+
+The old man, broken and propless quite.
+Watches them still from the infinite
+Coming towards him--and hath beside
+Nothing to do, but in earth to hide
+His multiple death, thus bit by bit,
+And, with fingers irresolute, plant on it
+Crosses so hastily, day by day,
+Since what long times--he cannot say.
+
+
+
+
+THE WIND
+
+
+Crossing the infinite length of the moorland,
+Here comes the wind,
+The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November;
+Endless and infinite, crossing the downs,
+Here comes the wind
+That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember;
+Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns,
+The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!
+
+
+Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards,
+Each bucket and pulley, it creaks and it wails;
+By cisterns of farmyards, the pulleys and pails
+They creak and they cry,
+The whole of sad death in their melancholy.
+
+
+The wind, it sends scudding dead leaves from the birches
+Along o'er the water, the wind of November,
+The savage, fierce wind;
+The boughs of the trees for the birds' nests it searches,
+To bite them and grind.
+The wind, as though rasping down iron, grates past,
+And, furious and fast, from afar combs the cold
+And white avalanches of winter the old.
+The savage wind combs them so furious and fast.
+The wind of November.
+
+
+From each miserable shed
+The patched garret-windows wave wild overhead
+Their foolish, poor tatters of paper and glass.
+As the savage, fierce wind of November doth pass!
+And there on its hill
+Of dingy and dun-coloured turf, the black mill,
+Swift up from below, through the empty air slashing,
+Swift down from above, like a lightning-stroke flashing,
+The black mill so sinister moweth the wind.
+The savage, fierce wind of November!
+
+
+The old, ragged thatches that squat round their steeple,
+Are raised on their roof-poles, and fall with a clap,
+In the wind the old thatches and pent-houses flap,
+In the wind of November, so savage and hard.
+The crosses--and they are the arms of dead people--
+The crosses that stand in the narrow churchyard
+Fall prone on the sod
+Like some great flight of black, in the acre of God.
+
+
+The wind of November!
+Have you met him, the savage wind, do you remember?
+Did he pass you so fleet,
+--Where, yon at the cross, the three hundred roads meet--
+With distressfulness panting, and wailing with cold?
+Yea, he who breeds fears and puts all things to flight,
+Did you see him, that night
+When the moon he o'erthrew--when the villages, old
+In their rot and decay, past endurance and spent,
+Cried, wailing like beasts, 'neath the hurricane bent?
+
+
+Here comes the wind howling, that heralds dark weather,
+The wind blowing infinite over the heather.
+The wind with his trumpet that heralds November!
+
+
+
+
+THE FISHERMEN
+
+
+The spot is flaked with mist, that fills,
+Thickening into rolls more dank,
+The thresholds and the window-sills,
+And smokes on every bank.
+
+
+The river stagnates, pestilent
+With carrion by the current sent
+This way and that--and yonder lies
+The moon, just like a woman dead,
+That they have smothered overhead,
+         Deep in the skies.
+
+
+In a few boats alone there gleam
+Lamps that light up and magnify
+The backs, bent over stubbornly,
+Of the old fishers of the stream,
+Who since last evening, steadily,
+--For God knows what night-fishery--
+Have let their black nets downward slow
+Into the silent water go.
+The noisome water there below.
+
+
+Down in the river's deeps, ill-fate
+And black mischances breed and hatch.
+Unseen of them, and lie in wait
+As for their prey. And these they catch
+With weary toil--believing still
+That simple, honest work is best--
+At night, beneath the shifting mist
+         Unkind and chill.
+
+
+So hard and harsh, yon clock-towers tell.
+With muffled hammers, like a knell,
+The midnight hour.
+From tower to tower
+So hard and harsh the midnights chime.
+The midnights harsh of autumn time,
+The weary midnights' bell.
+
+
+The crew
+Of fishers black have on their back
+Nought save a nameless rag or two;
+And their old hats distil withal,
+And drop by drop let crumbling fall
+Into their necks, the mist-flakes all.
+
+
+The hamlets and their wretched huts
+Are numb and drowsy, and all round
+The willows too, and walnut trees,
+'Gainst which the Easterly fierce breeze
+         Has waged its feud.
+No bayings from the forest sound,
+No cry the empty midnight cuts--
+The midnight space that grows imbrued
+With damp breaths from the ashy ground.
+
+
+The fishers hail each other not--
+Nor help--in their fraternal lot;
+Doing but that which must be done.
+Each fishes for himself alone.
+
+
+And this one gathers in his net,
+Drawing it tighter yet,
+His freight of petty misery;
+And that one drags up recklessly
+Diseases from their slimy bed;
+While others still their meshes spread
+Out to the sorrows that drift by
+         Threateningly nigh;
+And the last hauls aboard with force
+The wreckage dark of his remorse.
+
+
+
+The river, round its corners bending,
+And with the dyke-heads intertwined.
+Goes hence--since what times out of mind?--
+Toward the far horizon wending
+         Of weariness unending.
+Upon the banks, the skins of wet
+Black ooze-heaps nightly poison sweat.
+And the mists are their fleeces light
+That curl up to the houses' height.
+
+
+In their dark boats, where nothing stirs,
+Not even the red-flamed torch that blurs
+With halos huge, as if of blood.
+The thick felt of the mist's white hood,
+Death with his silence seals the sere
+Old fishermen of madness here.
+
+
+The isolated, they abide
+Deep in the mist--still side by side.
+But seeing one another never;
+Weary are both their arms--and yet
+Their work their ruin doth beget.
+
+
+Each for himself works desperately,
+He knows not why--no dreams has he;
+Long have they worked, for long, long years,
+While every instant brings its fears;
+Nor have they ever
+Quitted the borders of their river,
+Where 'mid the moonlit mists they strain
+To fish misfortune up amain.
+
+
+If but in this their night they hailed each other
+And brothers' voices might console a brother!
+
+
+But numb and sullen, on they go,
+With heavy brows and backs bent low,
+While their small lights beside them gleam,
+Flickering feebly on the stream.
+
+
+Like blocks of shadow they are there.
+Nor ever do their eyes divine
+That far away beyond the mists
+Acrid and spongy--there exists
+A firmament where 'mid the night.
+Attractive as a loadstone, bright
+Prodigious planets shine.
+
+
+The fishers black of that black plague,
+They are the lost immeasurably,
+Among the knells, the distance vague,
+The yonder of those endless plains
+That stretch more far than eye can see:
+And the damp autumn midnight rains
+Into their souls' monotony.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROPE-MAKER
+
+
+In his village grey
+At foot of the dykes, that encompass him
+With weary weaving of curves and lines
+Toward the sea outstretching dim,
+The rope-maker, visionary white.
+Stepping backwards along the way,
+Prudently 'twixt his hands combines
+The distant threads, in their twisting play.
+That come to him from the infinite.
+
+
+When day is gone.
+Through ardent, weary evenings, yon
+The whirr of a wheel can yet be heard;
+Something by unseen hands is stirred.
+And parallel o'er the rakes, that trace
+An even space
+From point to point along all the way,
+The flaxen hemp still plaits its chain
+Ceaseless, for days and weeks amain.
+With his poor, tired fingers, nimble still.
+Fearing to break for want of skill
+The fragments of gold that the gliding light
+Threads through his toil so scantily--
+Passing the walls and the houses by
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of the evening's whirlpool dim,
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that stretch back afar.
+Where strife, regrets, hates, furies are:
+Tears of the silence, and the tears
+That find a voice: serenest years,
+Or years convulsed with pang and throe:
+Horizons of the long ago,
+These gestures of the Past they shew.
+
+
+Of old--as one in sleep, life, errant, strayed
+Its wondrous morns and fabled evenings through;
+When God's right hand toward far Canaan's blue
+Traced golden paths, deep in the twilight shade.
+
+
+Of old, 'twas life exasperate, huge and tense,
+Swung savage at some stallion's mane--life, fleet.
+With mighty lightnings flashing 'neath her feet,
+Upreared immensely over space immense.
+
+
+Of old, 'twas life evoking ardent will;
+And hell's red cross and Heaven's cross of white
+Each marched, with gleam of steely armours' light.
+Through streams of blood, to heavens of victory still.
+
+
+Of old--life, livid, foaming, came and went
+'Mid strokes of tocsin and assassin's knife;
+Proscribers, murderers, each with each at strife,
+While, mad and splendid. Death above them bent.
+
+
+'Twixt fields of flax and of osiers red.
+On the road where nothing doth move or tread,
+By houses and walls to left and right
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of evening's treasury dim
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that stretch yonder far.
+Where work, strifes, ardours, science are;
+Horizons that change--they pass and glide,
+               And on their way
+They shew in mirrors of eventide
+The mourning image of dark To-day.
+
+
+Here--writhing fires that never rest nor end.
+Where, in one giant effort all employed,
+Sages cast down the Gods, to change the void
+Whither the flights of human science tend.
+
+
+Here--'tis a room where thought, assertive, saith
+That there are weights exact to gauge her by,
+That inane ether, only, rounds the sky.
+And that in phials of glass men breed up death.
+
+
+Here--'tis a workship, where, all fiery bright,
+Matter intense vibrates with fierce turmoil
+In vaults where wonders new, 'mid stress and toil,
+Are forged, that can absorb space, time and night.
+
+
+--A palace--of an architecture grown
+Effete, and weary 'neath its hundred years.
+Whence voices vast invoke, instinct with fears,
+The thunder in its flights toward the Unknown.
+
+
+On the silent, even road--his eyes
+Still fixed towards the waning light
+That skirts the houses and walls as it dies--
+The rope-maker, visionary white,
+From depths of the evening's halo dim
+Draws the horizons in to him.
+
+
+Horizons that are there afar
+Where light, hope, wakenings, strivings are;
+Horizons that he sees defined
+As hope for some future, far and kind.
+Beyond those distant shores and faint
+That evening on the clouds doth paint.
+
+
+Yon--'mid that distance calm and musical
+Twin stairs of gold suspend their steps of blue,
+The sage doth climb them, and the seer too,
+Starting from sides opposed toward one goal.
+
+
+Yon--contradiction's lightning-shocks lose power.
+Doubt's sullen hand unclenches to the light,
+The eye sees in their essence laws unite
+Rays scattered once 'mid doctrines of an hour.
+
+
+Yon--keenest spirits pierce beyond the land
+Of seeming and of death. The heart hath ease,
+And one would say that Mildness held the keys
+Of the colossal silence in her hand.
+
+
+Up yon--the God each soul is, once again
+Creates, expands, gives, finds himself in all;
+And rises higher, the lowlier he doth fall
+Before meek tenderness and sacred pain.
+
+
+And there is ardent, living peace--its urns
+Of even bliss ranged 'mid these twilights, where
+--Embers of hope upon the ashen air--
+Each great nocturnal planet steadfast burns.
+
+
+In his village at foot of the dykes, that bend,
+Sinuous, weary, about him and wend
+Toward that distance of eddying light,
+The rope-maker, visionary white.
+Along by each house and each garden wall.
+Absorbs in himself the horizons all.
+
+
+
+
+From "LES HEURES CLAIRES"
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Oh, splendour of our joy and our delight,
+Woven of gold amid the silken air!
+See the dear house among its gables light,
+And the green garden, and the orchard there!
+
+
+Here is the bench with apple-trees o'er head
+Whence the light spring is shed.
+With touch of petals falling slow and soft;
+Here branches luminous take flight aloft,
+Hovering, like some bounteous presage, high
+Against this landscape's clear and tender sky.
+
+
+Here lie, like kisses from the lips dropt down
+Of yon frail azur upon earth below,
+Two simple, pure, blue pools, and like a crown
+About their edge, chance flowers artless grow.
+
+
+O splendour of our joy and of our ourselves!
+Whose life doth feed, within this garden bright,
+Upon the emblems of our own delight.
+
+
+What are those forms that yonder slowly pass?
+Our two glad souls are they,
+That pastime take, and stray
+Along the terraces and woodland grass?
+
+
+Are these thy breasts, are these thine eyes, these two
+Golden-bright flowers of harmonious hue?
+These grasses, hanging like some plumage rare.
+Bathed in the stream they ruffle by their touch.
+Are they the strands of thy smooth, glossy hair?
+
+
+No shelter e'er could match yon orchard white.
+Or yonder house amid its gables light,
+And garden, that so blest a sky controls,
+Weaving the climate dear to both our souls.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+As in the guileless, golden age, my heart
+I gave thee, even like an ample flower
+That opens in the dew's bright morning hour;
+My lips have rested where the frail leaves part.
+
+
+I plucked the flower--it came
+From meadows whereon grow the flowers of flame:
+Speak to it not--'tis best that we control
+Words, since they needs are trivial 'twixt us two;
+All words are hazardous, for it is through
+The eyes that soul doth hearken unto soul.
+
+
+That flower that is my heart, and where secure
+     My heart's avowal hides.
+     Simply confides
+Unto thy lips that she is clear and pure.
+Loyal and good--and that one's trust toward
+A virgin love is like a child's in God.
+
+
+Let wit and wisdom flower upon the height,
+Along capricious paths of vanity;
+And give we welcome to sincerity,
+That holds between her fingers crystal-bright
+Our two clear hearts: for what so beautiful
+As a confession made from soul to soul.
+     When eve returns
+And the white flame of countless diamonds burns.
+Like myriads of silent eyes intent,
+Th' unfathomed silence of the firmament.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+That we may love each other through our eyes
+Let us our glances lave, and make them clear,
+Of all the thousand glances that they here
+Have met, in this base world of servile lies.
+
+
+The dawn is dressed in blossom and in dew,
+     And chequered too
+     With very tender light--it looks as though
+Frail plumes of sun and silver, through the mist,
+Glided across the garden to and fro,
+And with a soft caress the mosses kissed.
+
+
+Our wondrous ponds of blue
+Tremble and wake with golden shimmerings;
+Swift emerald flights beneath the trees dart through.
+And now the light from hedge and path anew
+Sweeps the damp dust, where yet the twilight clings.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+In hours like these, when through our dream of bliss
+So far from all things not ourselves we move,
+What lustral blood, what baptism is this
+That bathes our hearts, straining toward perfect love?
+
+
+Our hands are clasped, and yet there is no prayer,
+Our arms outstretched, and yet no cry is there;
+Adoring something, what, we cannot say.
+More pure than we are and more far away,
+With spirit fervent and most guileless grown,
+How we are mingled and dissolved in one;
+Ah, how we live each other, in the unknown!
+
+
+Oh, how absorbed and wholly lost before
+The presence of those hours supreme one lies!
+And how the soul would fain find other skies
+To seek therein new gods it might adore;
+Oh, marvellous and agonizing joy,
+Audacious hope whereon the spirit hangs,
+     Of being one day
+     Once more the prey,
+Beyond even death, of these deep, silent pangs.
+
+
+
+
+
+From "LES APPARUS DANS MES CHEMINS"
+
+
+
+
+ST. GEORGE
+
+
+Opening the mists on a sudden through,
+An Avenue!
+Then, all one ferment of varied gold,
+With foam of plumes where the chamfrom bends
+Round his horse's head, that no bit doth hold,
+St. George descends!
+
+
+The diamond-rayed caparison,
+Makes of his flight one declining path
+From Heaven's pity down upon
+Our waiting earth.
+
+
+Hero and Lord
+Of the joyous, helpful virtues all.
+Sonorous, pure and crystalline!
+Let his radiance fall
+On my heart nocturnal and make it shine
+In the wheeling aureole of his sword!
+
+
+Let the wind's soft silvern whispers sound
+And ring his coat of mail around,
+His battle-spurs amid the fight!
+--He--the St. George--who shines so bright
+And comes, 'mid the wailings of my desire.
+To seize and lift my poor hands higher
+Toward his dauntless valour's fire!
+
+
+Like a cry great with faith, to God
+His lance St. George upraised doth hold;
+Crossing athwart my glance he trod.
+As 'twere one tumult of haggard gold.
+The chrism's glow on his forehead shone,
+The great St. George of duty high!
+Beautiful by his heart, and by
+          Himself alone!
+
+
+Ring, all my voices of hope, ring on!
+Ring forth in me
+Beneath fresh boughs of greenery,
+Down radiant pathways, full of sun;
+Ye glints of silvery mica, be
+Bright joy amid my stones--and ye
+White pebbles that the waters strew.
+Open your eyes in my brooklets, through
+The watery lids that cover you;
+Landscape of gushing springs and sun,
+With gold that quivers on misty blue,
+Landscape that dwells in me, hold thou
+The mirror now
+To the fiery flights, that flaming roll,
+Of the great St. George toward my soul!
+
+
+'Gainst the black Dragon's teeth and claws,
+Against the armour of leprous sores,
+The miracle and sword is he;
+On his breast-plate burneth Charity,
+And his gentleness sends hurtling back.
+In dire defeat, the Instinct black.
+Fires flecked with gold, that flashing turn,
+Whirlwinds of stars, those glories meet,
+About his galloping horse's feet.
+Deep into my remembrance burn
+Their lightnings fleet!
+
+
+He comes, a fair ambassador,
+From white lands built with marble o'er.
+Where grows, in glades beside the sea,
+Upon the tree
+Of goodness, fragrant gentleness.
+That haven, too, he knows no less
+Where wondrous ships rock, calm and still.
+That freights of sleeping angels fill;
+And those vast evenings, when below
+Upon the water, 'mid the skies'
+Reflected eyes.
+Islands flash sudden forth and glow.
+That kingdom fair
+Whereof the Virgin ariseth Queen,
+Its lowly, ardent joy is he;
+And his flaming sword in the ambient air
+Vibrates like an ostensory--
+The suddenly flashing St. George! behold,
+He strikes through my soul like a fire of gold!
+
+
+He knows from what far wanderings
+I come: what mists obscure my brain;
+What dagger marks have deeply scarred
+My thought, and with black crosses marred:
+With what spent force, what anger vain.
+What petty scorn of better things,
+--Yea, and with what a mask I came,
+Folly upon the lees of shame!
+A coward was I; the world I fled
+To hide my head
+Within a huge and futile Me;
+I builded, beneath domes of Night,
+The blocks of marble, gold be-starred,
+Of a hostile science, endlessly
+Towards a height
+By oracles of blackness barred.
+For Death alone is Queen of night.
+And human effort is brightest born
+Only at dawn.
+With opening flowers would prayer fain bloom,
+And their sweet lips hold the same perfume.
+The sunbeams shimmering white that fall
+On pearly water, are for all
+Like a caress
+Upon our life: the dawn unfolds
+A counsel fair of trustfulness;
+And whoso hearkens thereto is saved
+From his slough, where never a sin was laved.
+
+
+St. George in radiant armour came
+Speeding along in leaps of flame
+'Mid the sweet morning, through my soul.
+Young, beautiful by faith was he;
+He leaned the lower down toward me
+Even as I the lowlier knelt;
+Like some pure, golden cordial
+In secret felt.
+He filled me with his soaring strength,
+And with sweet fear most tenderly.
+Before that vision's dignity,
+Into his pale, proud hand at length
+I cast the blood my pain had spent.
+Then, laying upon me as he went
+A charge of valour, and the sign
+Of the cross on my brow from his lance divine,
+He sped upon his shining road
+Straight, with my heart, towards his God.
+
+
+
+
+THE GARDENS
+
+
+The landscape now reveals a change;
+A stair--that twined elm-boughs hold
+Enclosed 'mid hedges mystic, strange--
+Inaugurates a green and gold
+Vision of gardens, range on range.
+
+
+Each step's a hope, that doth ascend
+Stairwise to expectation's height;
+A weary way it is to wend
+While noonday suns are burning bright.
+But rest waits at the evening's end.
+
+
+Streams, that wash white from sin, flow deep,
+And round about the fresh lawns twine;
+While there, beneath the green banks steep,
+Beside his cross, the Lamb Divine
+Lies tranquilly in peaceful sleep.
+
+
+The daisied grass is glad, and gay
+With crystal butterflies the hedge.
+Where globes of fruit shine blue; here stray
+Peacocks beside the box-trees' edge:
+A shining lion bars the way.
+
+
+Flowers, upright as the ecstasies
+And ardours of white spirits pure,
+With branches springing fountain-wise,
+Burst upward, and by impulse sure
+To their own soaring splendour rise.
+
+
+Gently and very slowly swayed.
+The wind a wordless rhapsody
+Sings--and the shimm'ring air doth braid
+An aureole of filigree
+Round every disk with emerald laid.
+
+
+Even the shade is but a flight
+Toward flickering radiances, that slip
+From space to space; and now the light
+Sleeps, with calmed rays, upon the lip
+Of lilac-blossoms golden-white.
+
+
+
+
+SHE OF THE GARDEN
+
+
+In such a spot, with radiant flowers for halo,
+I saw the Guardian Angel sit her down;
+Vine-branches fashioned a green shrine above her
+And sun-flowers rose behind her like a crown.
+
+
+Her fingers, their white slenderness encircled
+With humble, fragile rings of coral round.
+Held, ranged in couples, sprays of faithful roses.
+Sealed with a clasp, with threads of woollen bound.
+
+
+A shimmering air the golden calm was weaving,
+All filigree'd with dawn, that like a braid
+Surmounted her pure brow, which still was hidden
+Half in the shade.
+
+
+Woven of linen were her veil and sandals.
+But, twined 'mid boughs of foliage, on their hem
+The theologic Virtues Three were painted;
+Hearts set about with gold encompassed them.
+
+
+Her silken hair, slow rippling, from her shoulder
+Down to the mosses of the sward did reach;
+The childhood of her eyes disclosed a silence
+More sweet than speech.
+
+
+My arms outstretched, and all my soul upstraining.
+Then did I rise,
+With haggard yearning, toward the soul suspended
+There in her eyes.
+Those eyes, they shone so vivid with remembrance,
+That they confessed days lived alike with me:
+Oh, in the grave inviolate can it change, then,
+The Long Ago, and live in the To Be?
+
+
+Sure, she was one who, being dead, yet brought me.
+Miraculous, a strength that comforteth,
+And the Viaticum of her survival
+Guiding me from the further side of Death.
+
+
+
+
+
+From "LA MULTIPLE SPLENDEUR"
+
+
+
+
+THE GLORY OF THE HEAVENS
+
+
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
+Behind the veil that the finger of radiant winter weaves
+And down on us falls the foliage of stars in glittering sheaves;
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies,
+
+
+The winged sea with her shadowy floods as of dappled silk
+Speeds, 'neath the golden fires, her pale immensity o'er;
+And diamond-rayed, the moonlight, shining along the shore,
+Bathes the brow of the headlands in radiance as soft as milk.
+
+
+Yonder there flow, untwining and twining their loops anew!
+The mighty, silvery rivers, through the translucent night;
+And a glint as of wondrous acids sparkles with magic light
+the cup that the lake outstretches towards the mountains blue.
+
+
+Everywhere light seems breaking forth into flower and star,
+Whether on shore in stillness, or wavering on the deep.
+The islands are nests where silence inviolate doth deep;
+An ardent nimbus hovers o'er yon horizons far.
+
+
+See, from Nadir to Zenith one aureole doth reach!
+Of yore, the souls exalted by faith's high mysteries
+Saw, in the domination of those star-clouded skies,
+Jehovah's hand resplendent and heard His silent speech.
+
+
+But now the eyes that scan them no longer may there aspire
+To we some god self-banished--not so, but the intricate
+Tangle of marvellous problems, the messengers that wait
+On Measureless Force, and veil her, there on her couch of fire.
+
+
+O cauldrons of life, where matter, adown the eternal day,
+Pours herself fruitful, seething through paths of scattering flame!
+O flux of worlds and reflux to other worlds the same!
+Unending oscillation betwixt newer and for aye!
+
+
+Tumults consumed in whirlpools of speed and sound and light--
+Violence we nought may reck of!--and yet there falls from thence
+The vast, unbroken silence, mysterious and intense
+That makes the peace, the calmness and beauty of the night!
+
+
+O spheres of flame and golden, always more far and high;
+Abyss to abyss still floating, onward from shade to shade!
+So far, so high, all reck'ning the wisdom of man has made,
+Before those giddy numbers must shrink in his hands and die!
+
+
+Shining in dim transparence, the whole of infinity lies
+Behind the veils that the finger of radiant winter weaves;
+And down on us falls the foliage of star in glittering sheaves,
+From out the depths of the forest, the forest obscure of the skies.
+
+
+
+
+LIFE
+
+
+To see beauty in all, is to lift our own Soul
+Up to loftier heights than do chose who aspire
+Through culpable suffering, vanquished desire.
+Harsh Reality, dread and ineffable Whole,
+Distils her red draught, enough tonic and stern
+To intoxicate heads and to make the heart burn.
+
+
+O clean and pure grain, whence are purged all the tares!
+Clear torch, chosen out amid many whose flame;
+Though ancient in splendour, is false to its name!
+It is good to keep step, though beset with hard cares,
+With the life that is real, to the far distant goal,
+With no arm save the lucid, white pride of one's soul!
+
+
+To march, thus intrepid in confidence, straight
+On the obstacle, holding the stubborn hope
+Of conquering, thanks to firm blows of the will,
+Of intelligence prompt, or of patience to wait;
+And to feel growing stronger within us the sense,
+Day by day, of a power superb and intense!
+
+
+To love ourselves keenly those others within
+Who share a like strife with us, soar without fear
+Toward that one future, whose footsteps we hear;
+To love them, heart, brain, and because we are kin
+Because in some dark, maddened day they have known
+One anguish, one mourning, one string with our own!
+
+To be drunk with the great human battle of wills--
+--Pale, fleeting reflex of the monstrous assaults,
+Golden movements of planets in heaven's high vaults--
+Till one lives in all that which acts, struggles, and thrills,
+And avidly opens one's heart to the law
+That rules, dread and stern, the whole universe o'er!
+
+
+
+
+JOY
+
+
+O splendid, spacious day, irradiate
+With flaming dawns, when earth shows yet more fair
+Her ardent beauty, proud, without alloy;
+And wakening life breathes out her perfume rare
+So potently, that, all intoxicate,
+Our ravished being rushes upon joy!
+
+
+Be thanked, mine eyes, that now
+Ye still shine clear beneath my furrowed brow
+To see afar, the light vibrating there;
+And you my hands, that in the sun yet thrill,
+And you, my fingers, that glow golden still
+Among the golden fruit upon the wall
+        Where hollyhocks stand tall.
+
+
+Be thanked, my body, that thyself dost bear
+Yet firm and swift, and quivering to the touch
+Of the quick breezes or of winds profound;
+And you, straight frame, and lungs outbreathing wide,
+Along the shore or on the mountain-side,
+         The sharp and radiant air
+That bathes and grips the mighty worlds around!
+
+
+O festal mornings, calm in loveliness,
+Rose whose pure face the dewdrops all caress,
+Birds flying toward us, like some presage white,
+Gardens of sombre shade or frailest light!
+
+
+What time the ample summer warms the glade,
+I love you, roads, by which came hither late
+She who held hidden in her hands my fate.
+I love you, distant marshes, woods austere,
+And to its depths, I love the earth, where here
+Beneath my feet, my dead to rest are laid.
+
+
+So I exist in all that doth surround
+And penetrate me:--all this grassy ground,
+These hidden paths, and many a copse of beech:
+Clear water, that no clouding shadows reach:
+          You have become to me
+Myself, because you are my memory.
+
+
+In you my life prolonged for ever seems,
+I shape, I am, all that hath filled my dreams;
+In that horizon vast that dazzles me,
+Trees shimmering with gold, my pride are ye;
+And like the knots upon your trunk, my will
+Strengthens my power to sane, stanch labour still.
+
+
+Rose of the pearl-hued gardens, when you kiss
+My brow, a touch of living flame it is;
+        To me all seems
+One thrill of ardour, beauty, wild caress;
+And I, in this world-drunkenness,
+So multiply myself in all that gleams
+        On dazzled eyes,
+That my heart, fainting, vents itself in cries.
+
+
+O leaps of fervour, strong, profound, and sweet,
+As though some great wing swept thee off thy feet!
+If thou hast felt them upward hearing thee
+        Toward infinity,
+Complain not, man, even in the evil day;
+Whate'er disaster takes thee for her prey
+        Thou to thyself shalt say
+That once, for one short instant all supreme
+        Which time may not destroy,
+Thou yet hast tasted, with quick-beating heart,
+        Sweet, formidable joy;
+And that thy soul, beguiling thee to set
+        As in a dream,
+Hath fused thy very being's inmost part
+With the unanimous great founts of power
+And that that day supreme, that single hour,
+        Hath made a god of thee.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Poems of Emile Verhaeren, by Emile Verhaeren
+
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