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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Open Water, by Arthur Stringer
+
+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: Open Water
+
+Author: Arthur Stringer
+
+Release Date: October 12, 2011 [EBook #37557]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPEN WATER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OPEN WATER
+
+
+BY
+
+ARTHUR STRINGER
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE WOMAN IN THE RAIN," "IRISH POEMS," ETC.
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK--JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+LONDON--JOHN LANE--THE BODLEY HEAD
+
+TORONTO--BELL & COCKBURN
+
+MCMXIV
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1914, by
+
+JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+
+
+Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co.
+
+New York, U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  A Foreword
+  Milkweed
+  Home Thoughts
+  Life
+  Some Day, Oh Seeker of Dreams
+  Black Hours
+  Before Renewal
+  Hill-Top Hours
+  Letters from Home
+  Chains
+  The Drums
+  Anaesthesia
+  A Summer Night
+  Sappho's Tomb
+  The Wild Swans Pass
+  At Notre Dame
+  The Pilot
+  Doors
+  Spring Floods
+  The Turn of the Year
+  If I Love You
+  What Shall I Care?
+  Hunter and Hunted
+  Apple Blossoms
+  The House of Life
+  Ultimata
+  The Life on the Table
+  You Bid Me to Sleep
+  The Last of Summer
+  At Charing Cross
+  Prescience
+  The Steel Workers
+  The Children
+  The Nocturne
+  The Wild Geese
+  The Day
+  The Revolt
+  Atavism
+  March Twilight
+  The Echo
+  Autumn
+  Faces
+  There Is Strength in the Soil
+  Life-Drunk
+  My Heart Stood Empty
+  One Night in the Northwest
+  Dreamers
+  The Question
+  The Gift of Hate
+  The Dream
+  One Room in My Heart
+  The Meaning
+  The Veil
+  The Man of Dreams
+  April on the Rialto
+  The Surrender
+  The Passing
+  Protestations
+  I Sat in the Sunlight
+
+
+
+
+A FOREWORD
+
+To even the casual reader of poetry who may chance to turn to the
+following pages it will be evident that the lyrics contained therein
+have been written without what is commonly known as end-rhyme.  It may
+also be claimed by this reader that the lyrics before him are without
+rhythm.  As such, it may at first seem that they mark an effort in
+revolt against two of the primary assets of modern versification.
+
+All art, of course, has its ancestry.  While it is the duty of poetry
+both to remember and to honour its inherited grandeurs, the paradoxical
+fact remains that even this most convention-ridden medium of emotional
+expression is a sort of warfare between the embattled soul of the
+artist, seeking articulation, and the immuring traditions with which
+time and the prosodian have surrounded him.
+
+In painting and in music, as in sculpture and the drama, there has been
+a movement of late to achieve what may be called formal emancipation, a
+struggle to break away from the restraints and the technical
+obligations imposed upon the worker by his artistic predecessors.  In
+one case this movement may be called Futurism, and in another it may be
+termed Romanticism, but the tendency is the same.  The spirit of man is
+seen in rebellion against a form that has become too intricate or too
+fixed to allow him freedom of utterance.
+
+Poetry alone, during the last century, seems to have remained stable,
+in the matter of structure.  Few new forms have been invented, and with
+one or two rare exceptions success has been achieved through
+ingeniously elaborating on an already established formula and through
+meticulously re-echoing what has already been said.  This has resulted,
+on the one hand, in a technical dexterity which often enough resembles
+the strained postures of acrobatism, and, on the other, in that
+constantly reiterated complaint as to the hollowness and aloofness of
+modern poetry.  Yet this poetry is remote and insincere, not because
+the modern spirit is incapable of feeling, but because what the singer
+of to-day has felt has not been directly and openly expressed.  His
+apparel has remained mediaeval.  He must still don mail to face Mausers,
+and wear chain-armour against machine-guns.  He must scout through the
+shadowy hinterlands of consciousness in attire that may be historic,
+yet at the same time is distressingly conspicuous.  And when he begins
+his assault on those favouring moments or inspirational moods which
+lurk in the deeper valleys and by-ways of sensibility, he must begin it
+as a marked man, pathetically resplendent in that rigid steel which is
+an anachronism and no longer an armour.
+
+Rhyme, from the first, has been imposed upon him.  His only escape from
+rhyme has been the larger utterance of blank verse.  Yet the iambic
+pentameter of his native tongue, perfected in the sweeping sonority of
+the later Shakespearean tragedies and left even more intimidatingly
+austere in the organ-like roll of Milton, has been found by the later
+singer to be ill-fitted for the utterance of those more intimate moods
+and those subjective experiences which may be described as
+characteristically modern.  Verse, in the nature of things, has become
+less epic and racial, and more and more lyric and personal.  The poet,
+consequently, has been forced back into the narrower domain so formally
+and so rigidly fenced in by rhyme.  And before touching on the
+limitations resulting from this incarceration, it may be worth while to
+venture a brief glance back over the history of what Milton himself
+denominated as "the jingling sounds of like endings" and Goldsmith
+characterized as "a vile monotony" and even Howells has spoken of as
+"the artificial trammels of verse."
+
+It has been claimed that those early poets of Palestine who affected
+the custom of beginning a number of lines or stanzas with the same
+letter of the alphabet unconsciously prepared the way for that
+latter-day ornamental fringe known as end-rhyme.  Others have claimed
+that this insistence of a consonance of terminals is a relique of the
+communal force of the chant, where the clapping of hands, the stamping
+of feet, or the twanging of bow-strings marked the period-ends of
+prehistoric recitative.  The bow-string of course, later evolved into
+the musical instrument, and when poetry became a written as well as a
+spoken language the consonantal drone of rhyming end-words took the
+place of the discarded instrument which had served to mark a secondary
+and wider rhythm in the progress of impassioned recitative.
+
+It must be admitted, however, even in the face of this ingenious
+pleading, that rhyme is a much more modern invention than it seems.
+That it is not rudimentary in the race is evidenced by the fact that
+many languages, such as the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the Scandinavian,
+are quite without it.  The Greeks, even in their melic poetry, saw no
+need for it.  The same may be said of the Romans, though with them it
+will occasionally be found that the semi-feet of the pentameter
+constitute what may be called accidental rhyme.  Rhyming Latin verse,
+indeed, does not come into existence until the end of the fourth
+century, and it is not until the time of the Conquest that end-rhyme
+becomes in any way general in English song.  Layman, in translating
+Wace's _Le Brut d'Angleterre_, found the original work written in
+rhymed lines, and in following that early model produced what is
+probably the first rhymed poem written in England.
+
+With the introduction of end-rhymes came the discovery that a
+decoration so formal could convert verse into something approaching the
+architectural.  It gave design to the lyric.  With this new
+definiteness of outline, of course, came a newer rigidity of medium.
+Form was acknowledged as the visible presentation of this particular
+art.  Formal variations became a matter of studious attention.  Efforts
+were made to leave language in itself instrumental, and in these
+efforts sound frequently comes perilously near triumphing over sense.
+The exotic formal growths of other languages were imported into
+England.  No verbal _tour de force_ of _troubadour_ or _trouvere_ or
+_jongleur_ or Ronsardist was too fantastic for imitation and adoption.
+The one-time primitive directness of English was overrun by such forms
+as the ballade, the chant royal, the rondel, the kyrielle, the rondeau
+and the rondeau redouble, the virelai and the pantoum, the sestina, the
+villanelle, and last, yet by no means least, the sonnet.  But through
+the immense tangle of our intricate lyric growths it can now be seen
+that mere mechanics do not always make poetry.  While rhyme has,
+indeed, served its limited purposes, it must be remembered that the
+highest English verse has been written without rhyme.  This verbal
+embroidery, while it presents to the workman in words a pleasingly
+decorative form, at the same time imposes on him both an adventitious
+restraint and an increased self-consciousness.  The twentieth century
+poet, singing with his scrupulously polished vocalisation, usually
+finds himself content to re-echo what has been said before.  He is
+unable to "travel light"; pioneering with so heavy a burden is out of
+the question.  Rhyme and meter have compelled him to sacrifice content
+for form.  It has left him incapable of what may be called abandonment.
+And the consciousness of his technical impedimenta has limited the
+roads along which he may adventure.  His preoccupation with formal
+exactions has implanted in him an instinctive abhorrence for anything
+beyond the control of what he calls common-sense.  Dominated by this
+emotional and intellectual timidity, he has attributed to end-rhyme and
+accentual rhythm the self-sufficiency of mystic rites, in the face of
+the fact that the fewer the obstacles between feeling and expression
+the richer the literary product must be, and forgetting, too, that
+poetry represents the extreme vanguard of consciousness both
+adventuring and pioneering along the path of future progress.
+
+For the poet to turn his back on rhythm, as at times he has been able
+to do with rhyme, is an impossibility.  For the rhythmising instinct is
+innate and persistent in man, standing for a law which permeates every
+manifestation of energy.  The great heart of Nature itself beats with a
+regular systole and diastole.  But, rhythmically, the modern versifier
+has been a Cubist without quite comprehending it.  He has been viewing
+the world mathematically.  He has been crowding his soul into a
+geometrically designed mould.  He has bowed to a rule-of-thumb order of
+speech, arbitrarily imposed on him by an ancestry which wrung its
+ingenuous pleasure out of an ingenuous regularity of stress and accent.
+To succeed under that law he must practise an adroit form of
+self-deception, solemnly pretending to fit his lines to a mould which
+he actually over-runs and occasionally ignores.  He has not been
+satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their
+manifold expressions are omnipresent but never confined to any single
+sustained pulse or any one limited movement.  It is not argued that he
+should ignore rhythm altogether.  To do so, as has already been said,
+would be impossible, since life itself is sustained by the rise and
+fall of mortal breasts and the beat and throb of mortal hearts.  Rhythm
+is in man's blood.  The ear of the world instinctively searches for
+cadences.  The poet's efforts towards symphonic phrasing have long
+since become habitual and imperative.  But that he should confine
+himself to certain man-made laws of meter, that he should be shackled
+by the prosodian of the past, is quite another matter.  His
+predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many
+accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his
+manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget
+these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is
+not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed
+mortality seeking expression.
+
+To abandon fixed rhythm, or meter, for the floating rhythm of the chant
+may not be an immediate solution of the problem.  To follow the Psalms
+of David, for example, will not suddenly conjure a new school of verse
+into the world.  But to return to the more open movement of the chant,
+which is man's natural and rudimentary form of song, may constitute a
+step towards freedom.  The mere effort towards emancipation, in fact,
+is not without its value.  It may serve to impress on certain minds the
+fact that poetry is capable of exhausting one particular form of
+expression, of incorporating and consuming one particular embodiment of
+perishable matter and passing on to its newer fields.  Being a living
+organism, it uses up what lies before it, and to find new vigour must
+forever feed on new forms.  Being the product of man's spirit, which is
+forever subject to change, verse must not be worshipped for what it has
+been, but for what it is capable of being.  No necrophilic regard for
+its established conventions must blind the lover of beautiful verse to
+the fact that the primary function of poetry is both to intellectualize
+sensation and to elucidate emotional experience.  If man must worship
+beauty only as he has known it in the past, man must be satisfied with
+worshipping that which has lived and now is dead.
+
+A. S.
+
+
+
+
+  OPEN WATER
+
+
+
+
+  MILKWEED
+
+  I
+
+  The blue, blue sea,
+  And the drone of waves,
+  And the wheeling swallows,
+  And the sun on the opal sails,
+  And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,
+  And the milkweed thick at my feet,
+  And the milkweed held in the hand of a child
+  Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,
+  Watching the fading sails
+  And the noonday blue
+  Of the lonely sea!
+
+
+  II
+
+  Was it all years ago,
+  Or was it but yesterday?
+  I only know that the scent
+  Of the milkweed brings it back,
+  Back with a strangle of tears:
+  The child and the misty headlands,
+  The drone of the dark blue sea,
+  And the opal sails
+  In the sun!
+
+
+
+
+  HOME THOUGHTS
+
+  I am tired of the dust
+  And the fever and noise
+  And the meaningless faces of men;
+  And I want to go home!
+  Oh, day after day I get thinking of home
+  Where the black firs fringe the skyline,
+  And the birds wheel down the silence,
+  And the hemlocks whisper peace,
+  And the hill-winds cool the blood,
+  And the dusk is crowned with glory,
+  And the lone horizon softens,
+  And the world's at home with God!
+  Oh, I want to go there!
+  _I want to go home!_
+
+
+
+
+  LIFE
+
+  A rind of light hangs low
+  On the rim of the world;
+  A sound of feet disturbs
+  The quiet of the cell
+  Where a rope and a beam looms high
+  At the end of the yard.
+
+  But in the dusk
+  Of that walled yard waits a woman;
+  And as the thing from its cell,
+  Still guarded and chained and bound,
+  Crosses that little space,
+  Silent, for ten brief steps,
+  A woman hangs on his neck.
+
+  _And that walk from a cell to a sleep
+  Is known as Life,
+  And those ten dark steps
+  Of tangled rapture and tears
+  Men still call Love._
+
+
+
+
+  SOME DAY, O SEEKER OF DREAMS
+
+  Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us!
+  Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and want
+  For the Ways to the Lonelier Height!
+  So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart,
+  For out of their dust they will call to us yet!
+  Let us wait, and sing, and be wise,
+  As the sea has waited and sung,
+  As the hills through the night have been wise!
+  For we are the Bringers of Light, and the Voices of Love,
+  Aye, we are the Soothers of Pain, the Appeasers of Death,
+  The Dusk and the Star and the Gleam and the Loneliest Peak!
+  And when they have found and seen, and know not whither they trend,
+  They will come to us, crying aloud like a child in the night;
+  And when they have learned of our lips,
+  Still back to our feet they will grope
+  For that ultimate essence and core of all song,
+  To usher them empty and naked, then, out to the unanswering stars,
+  Where Silence and Dreaming and Music are one!
+
+
+
+
+  BLACK HOURS
+
+  I have drunk deep
+  Of the well of bitterness.
+  Black hours have harried me,
+  Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head,
+  And on my brow the iron crown
+  Of sorrow has been crushed.
+  And being mortal, I have cried aloud
+  At anguish ineluctable.
+  But over each black hour has hung
+  Forlorn this star of knowledge:
+  The path of pain too great to be endured
+  Leads always unto peace;
+  And when the granite road of anguish mounts
+  Up and still up to its one ultimate
+  And dizzy height of torture,
+  Softly it dips and meets
+  The valley of endless rest!
+
+
+
+
+  BEFORE RENEWAL
+
+  Summer is dead.
+  And love is gone.
+  And life is glad of this.
+  For sad were both, with having given much;
+  And bowed were both, with great desires fulfilled;
+  And both were grown too sadly wise
+  Ever to live again.
+  Too aged with hours o'er-passionate,
+  Too deeply sung by throats
+  That took no thought of weariness,
+  Moving too madly toward the crest of things,
+  Giving too freely of the fountaining sap,
+  Crowding too gladly into grass and leaves,
+  Breathing too blindly into flower and song!
+  Again the lyric hope may thrill the world,
+  Again the sap may sweeten into leaves,
+  Again will grey-eyed April come
+  With all her choiring throats;
+  But not to-day--
+  For the course is run.
+  And the cruse is full,
+  And the loin ungirt,
+  And the hour ordained!
+  And now there is need of rest;
+  And need of renewal there is;
+  And need of silence,
+  And need of sleep.
+  Too clear the light
+  Now lies on hill and valley;
+  And little is left to say,
+  And nothing is left to give.
+  Summer is dead;
+  And love is gone!
+
+
+
+
+  HILL-TOP HOURS
+
+  I am through with regret.
+  No more shall I kennel with pain.
+  I have called to this whimpering soul,
+  This soul that is sodden with tears
+  And sour with the reek of the years!
+  And now we shall glory in light!
+  Like a tatter of sail in the wind,
+  Like a tangle of net on the sand,
+  Like a hound stretched out in the heat,
+  My soul shall lie in the sun,
+  And be drowsy with peace,
+  And not think of the past!
+
+
+
+
+  LETTERS FROM HOME
+
+  Letters from Home, you said.
+  Unopened they lay on the shack-sill
+  As you stared with me at the prairie
+  And the foothills bathed with light.
+  Letters from Home, you whispered,
+  And the homeland casements shone
+  Through the homeland dusk again,
+  And the sound of the birds came back,
+  And the soft green sorrowing hills,
+  And the sigh of remembered names,
+  The wine of remembered youth,--
+  Oh, these came back,
+  Back with those idle words
+  Of "Letters from Home"!
+
+  Over such desolate leagues,
+  Over such sundering seas,
+  Out of the lost dead years,
+  After the days of waiting,
+  After the ache had died,
+  After the brine of failure,
+  After the outland peace
+  Of the trail that never turns back,
+  Now that the night-wind whispers
+  How Home shall never again be home,
+  And now that the arms of the Far-away
+  Have drawn us close to its breast,
+  Out of the dead that is proved not dead,
+  To waken the sorrow that should have died,
+  To tighten the throat that never shall sing,
+  To sadden the trails that we still must ride,
+  Too late they come to us here--
+  Our Letters from Home!
+
+
+
+
+  CHAINS
+
+  I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,
+  But mostly the one man poised on a drill
+  Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him
+  White in the frosty air,
+  Where the lordly house would stand.
+
+  Majestic, muscular, high like a god,
+  He stood,
+  And controlled and stopped
+  And started his thundering drill,
+  Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,
+  Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,
+  Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.
+
+  Then out of a nearby house came a youth,
+  All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,
+  Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,
+  Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.
+  He peered at the figure that fought with the drill
+  Above the billowing steam and tumult of sound,
+  Peered up for a moment impassive,
+  With almost pitying eyes,
+  And then went pensively down the Avenue's calm,
+  In the clear white light of the noonday sun,
+  Not holding, but held by his silvery chain!
+
+
+
+
+  THE DRUMS
+
+  A village wrapped in slumber,
+  Silent between the hills,
+  Empty of moon-lit marketplace,
+  Empty of moving life--
+  Such is my quiet heart.
+  Shadowy-walled it rests,
+  Sleeping its heavy sleep;
+  But sudden across the dark
+  Tingles a sound of drums!
+  The drums, the drums, the distant drums,
+  The throb of the drums strikes up,
+  The beat of the drums awakes!
+  Then loud through the little streets,
+  And strange to the startled roofs,
+  The drums, the drums approach and pound,
+  And throb and clamour and thrill and pass,
+  And between the echoing house-walls
+  All swart and grim they go,
+  The battalions of regret,
+  After the drums, the valiant drums
+  That die away in the night!
+
+
+
+
+  ANAESTHESIA
+
+  I caught the smell of ether
+  From the glass-roofed room
+  Where the hospital stood.
+  Suddenly all about me
+  I felt a mist of anguish
+  And the old, old hour of dread
+  When Death had shambled by.
+
+  Yellow with time it is,
+  This letter on which I look;
+  But up from it comes a perfume
+  That stabs me still to the heart;
+  And suddenly, at the odour,
+  Through a ghost-like mist I know
+  Rapture and love and wild regret
+  When Life, and You, went by.
+
+
+
+
+  A SUMMER NIGHT
+
+  Mournful the summer moon
+  Rose from the quiet sea.
+  Golden and sad and full of regret
+  As though it would ask of earth
+  Where all her lovers had vanished
+  And whither had gone the rose-red lips
+  That had sighed to her light of old.
+  Then I caught a pulse of music,
+  Brokenly, out at the pier-end,
+  And I heard the voices of girls
+  Going home in the dark,
+  Laughing along the sea-wall
+  Over a lover's word!
+
+
+
+
+  SAPPHO'S TOMB
+
+  I
+
+  In an old and ashen island,
+  Beside a city grey with death,
+  They are seeking Sappho's tomb!
+
+
+  II
+
+  Beneath a vineyard ruinous
+  And a broken-columned temple
+  They are delving where she sleeps!
+  There between a lonely valley
+  Filled with noonday silences
+  And the headlands of soft violet
+  Where the sapphire seas still whisper,
+  Whisper with her sigh;
+  Through a country sad with wonder
+  Men are seeking vanished Sappho,
+  Men are searching for the tomb
+  Of muted Song!
+
+
+  III
+
+  They will find a Something there,
+  In a cavern where no sound is,
+  In a room of milky marble
+  Walled with black amphibolite
+  Over-scored with faded words
+  And stained with time!
+
+
+  IV
+
+  Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber,
+  With her phials of perfume round her,
+  In a terra-cotta coffin
+  With her image on the cover,
+  Childish echo of her beauty
+  Etched in black and gold barbaric--
+  Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers,
+  Or your search will end in dust!
+
+
+  V
+
+  With a tiny nude Astarte,
+  Bright with gilt and gravely watching
+  Over grass-green malachite,
+  Over rubies pale, and topaz,
+  And the crumbled dust of pearls!
+
+
+  VI
+
+  With her tarnished silver mirror,
+  With her rings of beaten gold,
+  With her robes of faded purple,
+  And the stylus that so often
+  Traced the azure on her eyelids,--
+  Eyelids delicate and weary,
+  Drooping, over-wise!
+  And at her head will be a plectron
+  Made of ivory, worn with time,
+  And a flute and gilded lyre
+  Will be found beside her feet,
+  And two little yellow sandals,
+  And crude serpents chased in silver
+  On her ankle rings--
+  And a cloud of drifting dust
+  All her shining hair!
+
+
+  VII
+
+  In that lost and lonely tomb
+  They may find her;
+  Find the arms that ached with rapture,
+  Softly folded on a breast
+  That for evermore is silent;
+  Find the eyes no longer wistful,
+  Find the lips no longer singing,
+  And the heart, so hot and wayward
+  When that ashen land was young,
+  Cold through all the mists of time,
+  Cold beneath the Lesbian marble
+  In the low-roofed room
+  That drips with tears!
+
+
+
+
+  THE WILD SWANS PASS
+
+  In the dead of the night
+  You turned in your troubled sleep
+  As you heard the wild swans pass;
+  And then you slept again.
+
+  You slept--
+  While a new world swam beneath
+  That army of eager wings,
+  While plainland and slough and lake
+  Lay wide to those outstretched throats,
+  While the far lone Lights allured
+  That phalanx of passionate breasts.
+
+  And I who had loved you more
+  Than a homing bird loves flight,--
+  I watched with an ache for freedom,
+  I rose with a need for life,
+  Knowing that love had passed
+  Into its unknown North!
+
+
+
+
+  AT NOTRE DAME
+
+  I
+
+  O odour of incense, pride of purple and gold,
+  Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!
+  O voices of silver o'er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!
+  O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,
+  With tremulous roll of awakened reverberant tubes, and thunder of sound!
+  And illusion of mystical song and outclangour of jubilant bell,
+  And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe--
+  If song and emotion and music were all--
+  Were it only all!
+
+
+  II
+
+  For see, dark heart of mine,
+  How the singers have ceased and gone!
+  See, how all of the music is lost and the lights are low,
+  And how, as our idle arms, these twin ineloquent towers
+  Grope up through the old inaccessible Night to His stars!
+  How in vain we have stormed on the bastions of Silence with sound!
+  How in vain with our music and song and emotion assailed the Unknown,
+  How beat with the wings of our worship on Earth's imprisoning bars!
+  For the pinions of Music have wearied, the proud loud tubes have tired,
+  Yet still grim and taciturn stand His immutable stars,
+  And, lost in the gloom, to His frontiers old I turn
+  Where glimmer those sentinel fires,
+  Beyond which, Dark Heart, we two
+  Some night must steal us forth,
+  Quite naked, and alone!
+
+
+
+
+  THE PILOT
+
+  I lounge on the deck of the river-steamer,
+  Homeward bound with its load,
+  Churning from headland to headland,
+  Through moonlight and silence and dusk.
+  And the decks are alive with laughter and music and singing,
+  And I see the forms of the sleepers
+  And the shadowy lovers that lean so close to the rail,
+  And the romping children behind,
+  And the dancers amidships.
+  But high above us there in the gloom,
+  Where the merriment breaks like a wave at his feet,
+  Unseen of lover and dancer and me,
+  Is the Pilot, impassive and stern,
+  With his grim eyes watching the course.
+
+
+
+
+  DOORS
+
+  Listen!
+  Footsteps
+  Are they,
+  That falter through the gloom,
+  That echo through the lonely chambers
+  Of our house of life?
+
+  Listen!
+  Did a door close?
+  Did a whisper waken?
+  Did a ghostly something
+  Sigh across the dusk?
+
+  From the mournful silence
+  Something, something went!
+  Far down some shadowy passage
+  Faintly closed a door--
+  And O how empty lies
+  Our house of life!
+
+
+
+
+  SPRING FLOODS
+
+  You stood alone
+  In the dusky window,
+  Watching the racing river.
+  Touched with a vague unrest,
+  And if tired of loving too much
+  More troubled at heart to find
+  That the flame of love could wither
+  And the wonder of love could pass,
+  You kneeled at the window-ledge
+  And stared through the black-topped maples
+  Where an April robin fluted,--
+  Stared idly out
+  At the flood-time sweep of the river,
+  Silver and paling gold
+  In the ghostly April twilight.
+
+  Shadowy there in the dusk
+  You watched with shadowy eyes
+  The racing, sad, unreasoning
+  Hurrying torrent of silver
+  Seeking its far-off sea.
+  Faintly I heard you sigh,
+  And faintly I heard the robin's flute,
+  And faintly from rooms remote
+  Came a broken murmur of voices.
+  And life, for a breath, stood bathed
+  In a wonder crowned with pain,
+  And immortal the moment hung;
+  And I know that the thought of you
+  There at the shadowy window,
+  And the matted black of the maples,
+  And the sunset call of a bird,
+  And the sad wide reaches of silver,
+  Will house in my haunted heart
+  Till the end of Time!
+
+
+
+
+  THE TURN OF THE YEAR
+
+  The pines shake and the winds wake,
+  And the dark waves crowd the sky-line!
+  The birds wheel out on a troubled sky;
+  The widening road runs white and long,
+  And the page is turned,
+  And the world is tired!
+
+  So I want no more of twilight sloth,
+  And I want no more of resting,
+  And of all the earth I ask no more
+  Than the green sea, the great sea,
+  The long road, the white road,
+  And a change of life to-day!
+
+
+
+
+  IF I LOVE YOU
+
+  If I love you, woman of rose
+  And warmth and wondering eyes,
+  If it so fall out
+  That you are the woman I choose,
+  Oh, what is there left to say,
+  And what should it matter to me,
+  Or what can it mean to you?
+  For under the two white breasts
+  And the womb that makes you woman
+  The call of the ages whispers
+  And the countless ghosts awaken,
+  And stronger than sighs and weeping
+  The urge that makes us one,
+  And older than hate or loving or shame
+  This want that builds the world!
+
+
+
+
+  WHAT SHALL I CARE?
+
+  What shall I care for the ways
+  Of these idle and thin-flanked women in silk
+  And the lisping men-shadows that trail at their heels?
+  What are they worth in my world
+  Or the world that I want,
+  These flabby-armed, indolent, delicate women
+  And these half-women daring to call themselves men
+  Yet afraid to get down to the earth
+  And afraid of the wind,
+  Afraid of the truth,
+  And so sadly afraid of themselves?
+  How can they help me in trouble and death?
+  How can they keep me from hating my kind?
+  Oh, I want to get out of their coffining rooms,
+  I want to walk free with a man,
+  A man who has lived and dared
+  And swung through the cycle of life!
+  God give me a man for a friend
+  To the End,
+  Give me a man with his heel on the neck of Hate,
+  With his fist in the face of Death,
+  A man not fretted with womanish things,
+  Unafraid of the light,
+  Of the worm in the lip of a corpse,
+  Unafraid of the call from the cell of his heart,--
+  God give me a man for friend!
+
+
+
+
+  HUNTER AND HUNTED
+
+  I
+
+  When the sun is high,
+  And the hills are happy with light,
+  Then virile and strong I am!
+  Then ruddy with life I fare,
+  The fighter who feels no dread,
+  The roamer who knows no bounds,
+  The hunter who makes the world his prey,
+  And shouting and swept with pride,
+  Still mounts to the lonelier height!
+
+
+  II
+
+  In the cool of the day,
+  When the huddling shadows swarm,
+  And the ominous eyes look out
+  And night slinks over the swales
+  And the silence is chill with death,
+  Then I am the croucher beside the coals,
+  The lurker within the shadowy cave,
+  Who listens and mutters a charm
+  And trembles and waits,
+  A hunted thing grown
+  Afraid of the hunt,
+  A silence enisled in silence,
+  A wonder enwrapped in awe!
+
+
+
+
+  APPLE BLOSSOMS
+
+  I saw a woman stand
+  Under the seas of bloom,
+  Under the waves of colour and light,
+  The showery snow and rose of the odorous trees
+  That made a glory of earth.
+  She stood where the petals fell,
+  And her hands were on her breast,
+  And her lips were touched with wonder,
+  And her eyes were full of pain--
+  For pure she was, and young,
+  And it was Spring!
+
+
+
+
+  THE HOUSE OF LIFE
+
+  Quietly I closed the door.
+  Then I said to my soul:
+  "I shall never come back,
+  Back to this haunted room
+  Where Sorrow and I have slept."
+  I turned from that hated door
+  And passed through the House of Life,
+  Through its ghostly rooms and glad
+  And its corridors dim with age.
+  Then lightly I crossed a threshold
+  Where the casements showed the sun
+  And I entered an unknown room,--
+  And my heart went cold,
+  For about me stood that Chamber of Pain
+  I had thought to see no more!
+
+
+
+
+  ULTIMATA
+
+  I am desolate,
+  Desolate because of a woman.
+  When at midnight walking alone
+  I look up at the slow-wheeling stars,
+  I see only the eyes of this woman.
+  In bird-haunted valleys and by-ways secluded,
+  Where once I sought peace,
+  I find now only unrest
+  And this one unaltering want.
+  When the dawn-wind stirs in the pine-tops
+  I hear only her voice's whisper.
+  When by day I gaze into the azure above me
+  I see only the face of this woman.
+  In the sunlight I cannot find comfort,
+  Nor can I find peace in the shadows.
+  Neither can I take joy in the hill-wind,
+  Nor find solace on kindlier breasts;
+  For deep in the eyes of all women I watch
+  I see only her eyes stare back.
+  Nor can I shut the thought of her out of my heart
+  And the ache for her out of my hours.
+  Ruthlessly now she invades even my dreams
+  And wounds me in sleep;
+  And my body cries out for her,
+  Early and late and forever cries out for her,
+  And her alone,--
+  _And I want this woman!_
+
+  I am sick at heart because of this woman;
+  I am lost to shame because of my want;
+  And mine own people have come to mean naught to me;
+  And with many about me still am I utterly alone,
+  And quite solitary now I take my way
+  Where men are intent on puny things
+  And phantasmal legions pace!
+  And a wearisome thing is life,
+  And forever the shadow of this one woman
+  Is falling across my path.
+  The turn in the road is a promise of her.
+  The twilight is thronged with her ghosts;
+  The grasses speak only of her,
+  The leaves whisper her name forever;
+  The odorous fields are full of her.
+  Her lips, I keep telling myself,
+  Are a cup from which I must drink;
+  Her breast is the one last pillow
+  Whereon I may ever find peace!
+  Yet she has not come to me,
+  And being denied her, everything stands denied,
+  And all men who have waited in vain for love
+  Cry out through my desolate heart;
+  And the want of the hungering world
+  Runs like fire through my veins
+  And bursts from my throat in the cry
+  _That I want this woman!_
+
+  I am possessed of a great sickness
+  And likewise possessed of a great strength,
+  And the ultimate hour has come.
+  I will arise and go unto this woman,
+  And with bent head and my arms about her knees
+  I shall say unto her: "Beloved beyond all words,
+  Others have sought your side,
+  And many have craved your kiss,
+  But none, O body of flesh and bone,
+  Has known a hunger like mine!
+  And though evil befall, or good,
+  This hunger is given to me,
+  And is now made known to you,--
+  For I must die,
+  Or you must die,
+  Or Desire must die
+  This night!"
+
+
+
+
+  THE LIFE ON THE TABLE
+
+  In the white-walled room
+  Where the white bed waits
+  Stand banks of meaningless flowers;
+  In the rain-swept street
+  Are a ghost-like row of cabs;
+  And along the corridor-dusk
+  Phantasmal feet repass.
+  Through the warm, still air
+  The odour of ether hangs;
+  And on this slenderest thread
+  Of one thin pulse
+  Hangs and swings
+  The hope of life--
+  The life of her
+  I love!
+
+
+
+
+  YOU BID ME TO SLEEP
+
+  You bid me to sleep,--
+  But why, O Daughter of Beauty,
+  Was beauty thus born in the world?
+  Since out of these shadowy eyes
+  The wonder shall pass!
+  And out of this surging and passionate breast
+  The dream shall depart!
+  And out of these delicate rivers of warmth
+  The fire shall wither and fail!
+  And youth like a bird from your body shall fly!
+  And Time like a fang on your flesh shall feed!
+  And this perilous bosom that pulses with love
+  Shall go down to the dust from which it arose,--
+  Yet Daughter of Beauty, close,
+  Close to its sumptuous warmth
+  You hold my sorrowing head,
+  And smile with shadowy eyes,
+  And bid me to sleep again!
+
+
+
+
+  THE LAST OF SUMMER
+
+  The opal afternoon
+  Is cool, and very still.
+  A wash of tawny air,
+  Sea-green that melts to gold,
+  Bathes all the skyline, hill by hill.
+  Out of the black-topped pinelands
+  A black crow calls,
+  And the year seems old!
+  A woman from a doorway sings,
+  And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,
+  And through the umber woods the echo falls.
+  Then silence on the still world lies,
+  And faint and far the birds fly south,
+  And behind the dark pines drops the sun,
+  And a small wind wakes and sighs,
+  And Summer, see, is done!
+
+
+
+
+  AT CHARING-CROSS
+
+  Alone amid the Rockies I have stood;
+  Alone across the prairie's midnight calm
+  Full often I have fared
+  And faced the hushed infinity of night;
+  Alone I have hung poised
+  Between a quietly heaving sea
+  And quieter sky,
+  Aching with isolation absolute;
+  And in Death's Valley I have walked alone
+  And sought in vain for some appeasing sign
+  Of life or movement,
+  While over-desolate my heart called out
+  For some befriending face
+  Or some assuaging voice!
+  But never on my soul has weighed
+  Such loneliness as this,
+  As here amid the seething London tides
+  I look upon these ghosts that come and go,
+  These swarming restless souls innumerable,
+  Who through their million-footed dirge of unconcern
+  Must know and nurse the thought of kindred ghosts
+  As lonely as themselves,
+  Or else go mad with it!
+
+
+
+
+  PRESCIENCE
+
+  I
+
+  "The sting of it all," you said, as you stooped low over your roses,
+  "The worst of it is, when I think of Death,
+  That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,
+  And Summer by Summer be lovely again,
+  --And I shall be gone!"
+
+
+  II
+
+  "I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
+  "If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
+  But the thought that Earth and April
+  Year by casual year
+  Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
+  Year by year when I am away,
+  --This, this breaks my heart!"
+
+
+
+
+  THE STEEL WORKERS
+
+  I watched the workers in steel,
+  The Pit-like glow of the furnace,
+  The rivers of molten metal,
+  The tremulous rumble of cranes,
+  The throb of the Thor-like hammers
+  On sullen and resonant anvils!
+  I saw the half-clad workers
+  Twisting earth's iron to their use,
+  Shaping the steel to their thoughts;
+  And, in some way, out of the fury
+  And the fires of mortal passion,
+  It seemed to me,
+  In some way, out of the torture
+  And tumult of inchoate Time,
+  The hammer of sin is shaping
+  The soul of man!
+
+
+
+
+  THE CHILDREN
+
+  The city is old in sin,
+  And children are not for cities,
+  And, wan-eyed woman, you want them not,
+  You say with a broken laugh.
+  Yet out of each wayward softness of voice,
+  And each fulness of breast,
+  And each flute-throated echo of song,
+  Each flutter of lace and quest of beautiful things,
+  Each coil of entangling hair built into its crown,
+  Each whisper and touch in the silence of night,
+  Each red unreasoning mouth that is lifted to mouth,
+  Each whiteness of brow that is furrowed no more with thought,
+  Each careless soft curve of lips that can never explain,
+  Arises the old and the inappeasable cry!
+  Every girl who leans from a tenement sill
+  And flutters a hand to a youth,
+  Every woman who waits for a man in the dusk,
+  Every harlotous arm flung up to a drunken heel
+  That would trample truth down in the dust,
+  Reaches unknowingly out for its own,
+  And blind to its heritage waits
+  For its child!
+
+
+
+
+  THE NOCTURNE
+
+  Remote, in some dim room,
+  On this dark April morning soft with rain,
+  I hear her pensive touch
+  Fall aimless on the keys,
+  And stop, and play again.
+
+  And as the music wakens
+  And the shadowy house is still,
+  How all my troubled soul cries out
+  For things I know not of!
+  Ah, keen the quick chords fall,
+  And weighted with regret,
+  Fade through the quiet rooms;
+  And warm as April rain
+  The strange tears fall,
+  And life in some way seems
+  Too deep to bear!
+
+
+
+
+  THE WILD GEESE
+
+  Over my home-sick head,
+  High in the paling light
+  And touched with the sunset's glow,
+  Soaring and strong and free,
+  The unswerving phalanx sweeps,
+  The honking wild geese go,--
+  Go with a flurry of wings
+  Home to their norland lakes
+  And the sedge-fringed tarns of peace
+  And the pinelands soft with Spring!
+
+  I cannot go as the geese go,
+  But into the steadfast North,
+  The North that is dark and tender,
+  My home-sick spirit wings,--
+  Wings with a flurry of longing thoughts
+  And nests in the tarns of youth.
+
+
+
+
+  THE DAY
+
+  I
+
+  Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
+  Is this the day she comes?
+  O wild-flower face of Morning,
+  Must you never wake?
+  Silvery, silvery sea-line,
+  Does she come to-day?
+  O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
+  Beneath your whispering shadow
+  She will surely pass;
+  And thrush beneath the black-thorn
+  And white-throat in the pine-top,
+  Sing as you have never sung,
+  For she will surely come!
+
+
+  II
+
+  The lone green of the lawn-slope,
+  The grey light on the sky-line,
+  The mournful stir of birch-leaves,
+  The thin note of the brown thrush,
+  And the call of troubled white-throats
+  Across the afternoon!--
+  Ah, Summer now is over,
+  And for us the season closed,
+  For she who came an hour ago
+  Has gone again--
+  Has gone!
+
+
+
+
+  THE REVOLT
+
+  God knows that I've tinkled and jingled and strummed,
+  That I've piped it and jigged it until I'm fair sick of the game,
+  That I've given them slag and wasted the silver of song,
+  That I've thrown them the tailings and they've taken them up content!
+  But now I want to slough off the bitterness born of it all,
+  I want to throw off the shackles and chains of time,
+  I want to sit down with my soul and talk straight out,
+  I want to make peace with myself,
+  And say what I have to say,
+  While still there is time!
+
+  Yea, I will arise and go forth, I have said,
+  To the uplands of truth, to be free as the wind,
+  Rough and unruly and open and turbulent-throated!
+  Yea, I will go forth and fling from my soul
+  The shackles and chains of song!
+
+  But, lo, on my wrists are the scars,
+  And here on my ankles the chain-galls,
+  And the cell-pallor, see, on my face!
+  And my throat seems thick with the cell-dust,
+  And for guidance I grope to the walls,
+  And after my moment of light
+
+  I want to go back to the Dark,
+  Since the Open still makes me afraid,
+  And silence seems best in the sun,
+  And song in the dusk!
+
+
+
+
+  ATAVISM
+
+  I feel all primal and savage to-day.
+  I could eat and drink deep and love strong
+  I could fight and exult and boast and be glad!
+  I could tear out the life of a wild thing and laugh at it!
+  I could crush into panting submission the breast of a woman
+  A-stray from her tribe and her smoke-stained tent-door!
+  I could glory in folly and fire and ruin,
+  And race naked-limbed with the wind,
+  And slink on the heels of my foes
+  And dabble their blood on my brows--
+  For to-day I am sick of it all,
+  This silent and orderly empty life,
+  And I feel all savage again!
+
+
+
+
+  MARCH TWILIGHT
+
+  Black with a batter of mud
+  Stippled with silvery pools
+  Stands the pavement at the street-end;
+  And the gutter snow is gone
+  From cobble and runnelling curb;
+  And no longer the ramping wind
+  Is rattling the rusty signs;
+  And moted and soft and misty
+  Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets,
+  And the home-bound crowds of the city
+  Walk in a flood of gold.
+
+  And suddenly out of the dusk
+  There comes the ancient question:
+  Can it be that I have lived
+  In earlier worlds unknown?
+  Or is it that somewhere deep
+  In this husk that men call Me
+  Are kennelled a motley kin
+  I never shall know or name,--
+  Are housed still querulous ghosts
+  That sigh and awaken and move,
+  And sleep once more?
+
+
+
+
+  THE ECHO
+
+  I
+
+  I am only a note in the chorus,
+  A leaf in the fluttering June,
+  A wave on the deep.
+  These things that I struggle to utter
+  Have all been uttered before.
+  In many another heart
+  The selfsame song was born,
+  The ancient ache endured,
+  The timeless wonder faced,
+  The unanswered question nursed,
+  The resurgent hunger felt,
+  And the eternal failure known!
+
+
+  II
+
+  But glad is the lip of its whisper;
+  The wave, of its life;
+  The leaf, of its lisp;
+  And glad for its hour is my soul
+  For its echo of godlier music,
+  Its fragment of song!
+
+
+
+
+  AUTUMN
+
+  The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
+  In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
+  A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
+  Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
+  And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
+  There are no birds,
+  And the goldenrod is gone.
+  And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
+  And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
+  And all the world seems old!
+
+
+
+
+  FACES
+
+  I tire of these empty masks,
+  These faces of city women
+  That seem so vapid and well-controlled.
+  I get tired of their guarded ways
+  And their eyes that are always empty
+  Of either passion or hate
+  Or promise or love,
+  And that seem to be old
+  And are never young!
+  I think of the homelier faces
+  That I have seen,
+  The vital and open faces
+  In the by-ways of the world:
+  A Polish girl who met
+  Her lover one wintry morning
+  Outside the gaol at Ossining;
+  A lean young Slav violinist
+  And the steerage women about him,
+  Held by the sound of his music;
+  A young and deep-bosomed Teuton
+  Suckling her shawl-wrapped child
+  On a grey stone bridge in Detmold;
+  A group of girls from Ireland,
+  Crowding the steps of a colonist-car
+  And singing half-sadly together
+  As their train rocked on and on
+  Over the sun-bathed prairie;
+  A mournful Calabrian mother
+  Standing and staring out
+  Past the mists of Ischia
+  After a fading steamer;
+  A Nautch girl held by a sailor
+  Who'd taken a knife from her fingers
+  But not the fire from her eyes;
+  And a silent Sicilian mother
+  Standing alone in the Marina
+  Awaiting her boy who had been
+  Long years away!--
+  These I remember!
+  And of these
+  I never tire!
+
+
+
+
+  THERE IS STRENGTH IN THE SOIL
+
+  There is strength in the soil;
+  In the earth there is laughter and youth.
+  There is solace and hope in the upturned loam.
+  And lo, I shall plant my soul in it here like a seed!
+  And forth it shall come to me as a flower of song;
+  For I know it is good to get back to the earth
+  That is orderly, placid, all-patient!
+  It is good to know how quiet
+  And noncommittal it breathes,
+  This ample and opulent bosom
+  That must some day nurse us all!
+
+
+
+
+  LIFE-DRUNK
+
+  On opal Aprilian mornings like this
+  I seem dizzy and drunk with life.
+  I waken and wander and laugh in the sun;
+  With some mystical knowledge enormous
+  I lift up my face to the light.
+  Drunk with a gladness stupendous I seem;
+  With some wine of Immensity god-like I reel;
+  And my arm could fling Time from His throne;
+  I could pelt the awed taciturn arch
+  Of Morning with music and mirth;
+  And I feel, should I find but a voice for my thought,
+  That the infinite orbits of all God's loneliest stars
+  That are weaving vast traceries out on the fringes of Night
+  Could never stand more than a hem on the robe of my Song!
+
+
+
+
+  MY HEART STOOD EMPTY
+
+  My heart stood empty and bare,
+  So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.
+  The remembered ways of this woman
+  Hung sweet in my heart.
+  So I followed where thought should lead,
+  And it led to her feet.
+  But the mouth of this woman was pain,
+  And the love of this woman, regret;
+  And now only the thought
+  Of all those remembered thoughts
+  Of remembered ways,
+  Is shut in my heart!
+
+
+
+
+  ONE NIGHT IN THE NORTHWEST
+
+  When they flagged our train because of a broken rail,
+  I stepped down out of the crowded car,
+  With its clamour and dust and heat and babel of broken talk.
+  I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night,
+  And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face,
+  And somewhere I heard the running of water,
+  I felt the breathing of grass,
+  And I knew, as I saw the great white stars,
+  That the world was made for good!
+
+
+
+
+  DREAMERS
+
+  There's a poet tombed in you,
+  Man of blood and iron!
+  There's a dreamer dead and buried
+  Deep beneath your cynic frown,
+  Deep beneath your toil!
+
+  And deep beneath my music,
+  There's a strong man stirs in me;
+  There's a ghost of blood and granite
+  Coffined in this madness
+  Carpentered of Song!
+
+  You live your day and drain it;
+  I weave my dream and lose it;
+  But the red blood lost in me awakens still at times,
+  At all your city's sky-line,
+  At all your roaring market-place,
+  At all its hum of power--
+  And the poet dead within you stirs
+  Still at the plaintive note or two
+  Of a dreamer's plaintive song!
+
+
+
+
+  THE QUESTION
+
+  I
+
+  Glad with the wine of life,
+  Reeling I go my way,
+  Drunk with the ache of living
+  And mouthing my drunken song!
+  Then comes the lucid moment
+  And the shadow across the lintel;
+  And I hear the ghostly whisper,
+  And I glimpse with startled eyes
+  The Door beyond the doorway,
+  And I see the small dark house
+  Where I must sleep.
+
+
+  II
+
+  Then song turns sour on my lips,
+  And the warmth goes out of my blood,
+  And I turn me back to the beaker,
+  And re-draining my cup of dream,
+  I drown the whispering voices,
+  I banish the ghostly question
+  As to which in the end is true:
+  The wine and the open road?
+  Or the waiting Door?
+
+
+
+
+  THE GIFT OF HATE
+
+  Empty it seems, at times, their cry about Love,
+  Their claim that love is the only thing that survives.
+  For I who am born of my centuries strewn with hate,
+  Who was spewed into life from a timeless tangle of sin,
+  I can hate as strong and as long as I love!
+
+  There are hours and issues I hate;
+  There are creeds and deeds and doubts I hate;
+  There are men I hate to the uttermost;
+  And although in their graves they listen and weep,
+  Earth's mothers and wistful women who cried for peace,
+  I hate this King of Evil who has crowned my heart with Hate!
+
+
+
+
+  THE DREAM
+
+  I lay by your side last night.
+  By you, in my dreams,
+  I felt the damp of the grave.
+  I was dead with you--
+  And my bones still ache with Death.
+  For my hand went out and I touched your lips,
+  And I found them fallen away,
+  Wasted and lost!
+  Those lips once warm with life
+  Were eaten and gone!
+  And my soul screamed out in the dark
+  At the intimate blackness of Death.
+  And then I arose from the dead
+  And returned to the day;
+  And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,
+  And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,
+  The crowd in the hurrying street,
+  The tumult and laughter and talk,
+  To make me forget!
+
+
+
+
+  ONE ROOM IN MY HEART
+
+  One room in my heart shall be closed, I said;
+  One chamber at least in my soul shall be secret and locked!
+  I shall hold it my holy of holies, and no one shall know it!
+  But you, calm woman predestined, with casual hands,
+  You came with this trivial key,
+  And ward by obdurate ward the surrendering lock fell back,
+  And disdainfully now you wander and brood and wait
+  In this room that I thought was my own!
+
+
+
+
+  THE MEANING
+
+  It isn't the Sea that I love,
+  But the ships
+  That must dare and endure and defy and survive it!
+  It isn't the flesh that I love,
+  But the spirit
+  That guides and derides and controls and outlives it!
+  It isn't this earth that I love,
+  But the mortals
+  Who give to it meaning and colour and passion and life!
+  For what is the Sea without ships?
+  And what is the flesh without soul?
+  And what is a world without love?
+
+
+
+
+  THE VEIL
+
+  You have said that I sold
+  My life for a song;
+  Laid bare my heart
+  That men might listen
+  And go their ways--
+  My inchoate heart
+  That I dare not plumb,
+  That goes unbridled
+  To the depths of Hell,
+  That sings in the sun
+  To the brink of Heaven!
+  I have tossed you the spindrift
+  Born of its fretting
+  On its shallowest coast,
+  But over the depths of it
+  Bastioned in wonder
+  And silent with fear
+  God sits with me!
+
+
+
+
+  THE MAN OF DREAMS
+
+  All my lean life
+  I garnered nothing but a dream or two,
+  These others gathered harvests
+  And grew fat with grain.
+  But no man lives by bread,
+  And bread alone.
+  So, forgetful of their scorn,
+  When starved, they cried for life,
+  I gave them my last dreams,
+  I bared for them my heart,
+  That they might eat!
+
+
+
+
+  APRIL ON THE RIALTO
+
+  A canyon of granite and steel,
+  A river of grim unrest,
+  And over the fever and street-dust
+  Arches the azure of dream.
+  And fretting along the tumult,
+  Threading the iron curbs,
+  Tawdry in tinsel and feather
+  Drift the daughters of pleasure,
+  The sad-eyed traders in song,
+  The makers of joy,
+  The Columbines of the city
+  Seeking their ends!
+  But under the beaded eye-lash,
+  Under the lip with its rouge,
+  Under the mask of white
+  Splashed with geranium-red,
+  As God's own arch of azure
+  Leans softly over the street,
+  Surely, this day, runs warmer
+  The blood through a wasted breast!
+
+
+
+
+  THE SURRENDER
+
+  Must I round my life to a song,
+  As the waves wear smooth the shore-stone?
+  Shall the mortal beat and throb
+  Of this heart of mine
+  Be only to crumble a dream,
+  And fashion the pebbles of fancy,
+  That the tides of time may cover,
+  Or a child may find?
+
+  Little in truth it matters;
+  But this at the most I know:
+  Infinite is the ocean
+  That thunders upon man's soul,
+  And the sooner the soul falls broken,
+  The smoother will be its song!
+
+
+
+
+  THE PASSING
+
+  Ere the thread is loosed,
+  And the sands run low,
+  And the last hope fails,
+  Wherever we fare,
+  O Fond and True,
+  May it fall that we come in the end,
+  Come back to the crimson valleys,
+  Back to the Indian Summer,
+  Back to the northern pine-lands,
+  And the grey lakes draped with silence,
+  And the sunlight thin and poignant,
+  And the leaf that flutters earthward,
+  And the skyline green and lonely,
+  And the ramparts of the dead world
+  Ruddy with wintry rose!
+  May we fare, O Fond and True,
+  Through our soft-houred Indian Summer,
+  Through the paling twilight weather,
+  And facing the lone green uplands,
+  And greeting the sun-warmed hills,
+  Step into the pineland shadows
+  And enter the sunset valley
+  And go as the glory goes
+  Out of the dreaming autumn,
+  Out of the drifting leaf
+  And the dying light!
+
+
+
+
+  PROTESTATIONS
+
+  If I tire of you, beautiful woman,
+  I know that the fault is mine;
+  Yet not all mine the failure
+  And not all mine the loss!
+  In loveliness still you walk;
+  But I have walked with sorrow!
+  I have threaded narrows,
+  And I have passed through perils
+  That you know nothing of!
+  And I in my grief have gazed
+  In eyes that were not yours;
+  And my emptier hours have known
+  The sigh of kindlier bosoms,
+  The kiss of kindlier mouths!
+  Yet the end of all is written,
+  And nothing, O rose-leaf woman,
+  You ever may dream or do
+  Henceforth can bring me anguish
+  Or crown my days with joy!
+
+      _Three tears, O stately woman,
+      You said could float your soul,
+      So little a thing it seemed!
+      Yet all that's left of life
+      I'd give to know your love,
+      I'd give to show my love,
+      And feel your kiss again!_
+
+
+
+
+  I SAT IN THE SUNLIGHT
+
+  I sat in the sunlight thinking of life;
+  I sat there, dreaming of Death.
+  And a moth alit on the sun-dial's face,
+  And the birds sang sleepily,
+  And the leaves stirred,
+  And the sun lay warm on the hills,
+  And the afternoon grew old.
+
+  So, some day I knew the birds would sing,
+  And the leaves would stir,
+  And the afternoon grow old--
+  And I would not be there.
+  And the warmth went out of the day,
+  And a wind blew out of the West where I sat,
+  And the birds were still!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Open Water, by Arthur Stringer
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