Chapter M: A. 1822-1888 13

W. H. 1778-1830 14

The Vigil-at-Arms 14

A Madonna of Domenico Ghirlandajo 15

Spring Nightfall 15

A Friend’s Song for Simoisius 16

Athassel Abbey 17

Florentin 18

Friendship Broken 19

A Song of the Lilac 20

In a Ruin, after a Thunder-Storm 21

The Cherry Bough 21

Two Irish Peasant Songs 23

The Japanese Anemone 25

Tryste Noel 26

A Talisman 27

Heathenesse 27

For Izaak Walton 28

Sherman: “An Horatian Ode” 29

When on the Marge of Evening 32

Rooks in New College Gardens 32

Open, Time 33

The Knight Errant (Donatello’s Saint George) 34

To a Dog’s Memory 35

A Seventeenth-Century Song 36

On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford 37

The Still of the Year 38

A Foot-note to a Famous Lyric 39

T. W. P. 1819-1892 41

Summum Bonum 41

Saint Florent-le-Vieil 42

Hylas 42

Nocturne 43

The Kings 44

Alexandriana 47

London: Twelve Sonnets.

On First Entering Westminster Abbey 55

Fog 55

St. Peter-ad-Vincula 56

Strikers in Hyde Park 56

Changes in the Temple 57

The Lights of London 58

Doves 58

In the Reading-Room of the British Museum 59

Sunday Chimes in the City 59

A Porch in Belgravia 60

York Stairs 61

In the Docks 61

A ROADSIDE HARP.

POEMS BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

_Peter Rugg the Bostonian_

I

THE mare is pawing by the oak,
The chaise is cool and wide
For Peter Rugg the Bostonian
With his little son beside;
The women loiter at the wheels
In the pleasant summer-tide.

“And when wilt thou be home, Father?”
“And when, good husband, say:
The cloud hangs heavy on the house
What time thou art away.”
He answers straight, he answers short,
“At noon of the seventh day.”

“Fail not to come, if God so will,
And the weather be kind and clear.”
“Farewell, farewell! But who am I
A blockhead rain to fear?
God willing or God unwilling,
I have said it, I will be here.”

He gathers up the sunburnt boy
And from the gate is sped;
He shakes the spark from the stones below,
The bloom from overhead,
Till the last roofs of his own town
Pass in the morning-red.

Upon a homely mission
North unto York he goes,
Through the long highway broidered thick
With elder-blow and rose;
And sleeps in sound of breakers
At every twilight’s close.

Intense upon his heedless head
Frowns Agamenticus,
Knowing of Heaven’s challenger
The answer: even thus
The Patience that is hid on high
Doth stoop to master us.

II

Full light are all his parting dreams;
Desire is in his brain;
He tightens at the tavern-post
The fiery creature’s rein:
“Now eat thine apple, six years’ child!
We face for home again.”

They had not gone a many mile
With nimble heart and tongue,
When the lone thrush grew silent
The walnut woods among;
And on the lulled horizon
A premonition hung.

The babes at Hampton schoolhouse,
The wife with lads at sea,
Search with a level-lifted hand
The distance bodingly;
And farmer folk bid pilgrims in
Under a safe roof-tree.

The mowers mark by Newbury
How low the swallows fly,
They glance across the southern roads
All white and fever-dry,
And the river, anxious at the bend,
Beneath a thinking sky.

But there is one abroad was born
To disbelieve and dare:
Along the highway furiously
He cuts the purple air.
The wind leaps on the startled world
As hounds upon a hare;

With brawl and glare and shudder ope
The sluices of the storm;
The woods break down, the sand upblows
In blinding volleys warm;
The yellow floods in frantic surge
Familiar fields deform.

From evening until morning
His skill will not avail,
And as he cheers his youngest born,
His cheek is spectre-pale;
For the bonnie mare from courses known
Has drifted like a sail!

III

On some wild crag he sees the dawn
Unsheathe her scimitar.
“Oh, if it be my mother-earth,
And not a foreign star,
Tell me the way to Boston,
And is it near or far?”

One watchman lifts his lamp and laughs:
“Ye’ve many a league to wend.”
The next doth bless the sleeping boy
From his mad father’s end;
A third upon a drawbridge growls:
“Bear ye to larboard, friend.”

Forward and backward, like a stone
The tides have in their hold,
He dashes east, and then distraught
Darts west as he is told,
(Peter Rugg the Bostonian,
That knew the land of old!)

And journeying, and resting scarce
A melancholy space,
Turns to and fro, and round and round,
The frenzy in his face,
And ends alway in angrier mood,
And in a stranger place,

Lost! lost in bayberry thickets
Where Plymouth plovers run,
And where the masts of Salem
Look lordly in the sun;
Lost in the Concord vale, and lost
By rocky Wollaston!

Small thanks have they that guide him,
Awed and aware of blight;
To hear him shriek denial
It sickens them with fright:
“They lied to me a month ago
With thy same lie to-night!”

To-night, to-night, as nights succeed,
He swears at home to bide,
Until, pursued with laughter
Or fled as soon as spied,
The weather-drenchèd man is known
Over the country side!

IV

The seventh noon ’s a memory,
And autumn ’s closing in;
The quince is fragrant on the bough,
And barley chokes the bin.
“O Boston, Boston, Boston!
And O my kith and kin!”

The snow climbs o’er the pasture wall,
It crackles ’neath the moon;
And now the rustic sows the seed,
Damp in his heavy shoon;
And now the building jays are loud
In canopies of June.

For season after season
The three are whirled along,
Misled by every instinct
Of light, or scent, or song;
Yea, put them on the surest trail,
The trail is in the wrong.

Upon those wheels in any path
The rain will follow loud,
And he who meets that ghostly man
Will meet a thunder-cloud,
And whosoever speaks with him
May next bespeak his shroud.

Tho’ nigh two hundred years have gone,
Doth Peter Rugg the more
A gentle answer and a true
Of living lips implore:
“Oh, show me to my own town,
And to my open door!”

V

Where shall he see his own town
Once dear unto his feet?
The psalms, the tankard to the King,
The beacon’s cliffy seat,
The gabled neighborhood, the stocks
Set in the middle street?

How shall he know his own town
If now he clatters thro’?
Much men and cities change that have
Another love to woo;
And things occult, incredible,
They find to think and do.

With such new wonders since he went
A broader gossip copes,
Across the crowded triple hills,
And up the harbor slopes,
Tradition’s self for him no more
Remembers, watches, hopes.

But ye, O unborn children!
(For many a race must thrive
And drip away like icicles
Ere Peter Rugg arrive,)
If of a sudden to your ears
His plaint is blown alive;

If nigh the city, folding in
A little lad that cries,
A wet and weary traveller
Shall fix you with his eyes,
And from the crazy carriage lean
To spend his heart in sighs:--

“That I may enter Boston,
Oh, help it to befall!
There would no fear encompass me,
No evil craft appall;
Ah, but to be in Boston,
GOD WILLING, after all!”--

Ye children, tremble not, but go
And lift his bridle brave
In the one Name, the dread Name,
That doth forgive and save,
And lead him home to Copp’s Hill ground,
And to his fathers’ grave.

_A Ballad of Kenelm_

“In Clent cow-batch, Kenelm King born Lieth under a thorn.”

IT was a goodly child,
Sweet as the gusty May;
It was a knight that broke
On his play,
A fair and coaxing knight:
“O little liege!” said he,
“Thy sister bids thee come
After me.

“A pasture rolling west
Lies open to the sun,
Bright-shod with primroses
Doth it run;
And forty oaks be nigh,
Apart, and face to face,
And cow-bells all the morn
In the space.

“And there the sloethorn bush
Beside the water grows,
And hides her mocking head
Under snows;
Black stalks afoam with bloom,
And never a leaf hath she:
Thou crystal of the realm,
Follow me!”

Uplooked the undefiled:
“All things, ere I was born
My sister found; now find
Me the thorn.”
They travelled down the lane,
An hour’s dust they made:
The belted breast of one
Bore a blade.

The primroses were out,
The aislèd oaks were green,
The cow-bells pleasantly
Tinked between;
The brook was beaded gold,
The thorn was burgeoning,
Where evil Ascobert
Slew the King.

He hid him in the ground,
Nor washed away the dyes,
Nor smoothed the fallen curls
From his eyes.
No father had the babe
To bless his bed forlorn;
No mother now to weep
By the thorn.

There fell upon that place
A shaft of heavenly light;
The thorn in Mercia spake
Ere the night:
“Beyond, a sister sees
Her crownèd period,
But at my root a lamb
Seeth God.”

Unto each, even so.
As dew before the cloud,
The guilty glory passed
Of the proud.
Boy Kenelm has the song,
Saint Kenelm has the bower;
His thorn a thousand years
Is in flower!

_Vergniaud in the Tumbril_

I

THE wheels are silent, the cords are slack,
The terrible faces are surging back.
France, they too love thee! bid that keep plain;

The wrath and carnage I stayed afar
Colleagues of my white conscience are:
Accept my slayers, accept me slain!

Shed for days, in its olden guise
The quiet delicate snake-skin lies
To cheat a boy on his woodland stroll:

What if he crush it? Others see
Beauty’s miracle under a tree
Supple in mail, and adroit, and whole;

The shaper rid of a shape, and thence
(Growth of an outgrown excellence),
Mounted with infinite might and speed,

Freed like a soul to the heaven it dreamed;
Over life that was, and death that seemed
A victory and a revenge indeed!

As the serpent moves to the open spring,
The while a mock, a delusive thing
Sole in sight of the crowd may be,

So ye, my martyrs, arise, advance!
For what is left at the feet of France
It is our failure, it is not we.

II

Not to ourselves our strength we brought:
Inexpiable the Hand that wrought
In us the ruin of no redress,

The storm, the effort, the pang, the fire,
The premonition, the vast desire,
The primal passion of righteousness!

Scarce by the pitiful thwarted plan,
The haste, or the studious fears of man
Drawing a discord from best delight,

The measure is meted of God most wise;
Nor the future, with her adjusted eyes,
Shall speak us false in our dying fight.

But e’en to me now some use is clear
In the builded truth down-beaten here
For any along the way to spurn,

Since ever our broken task may stand
Disaster’s college in one saved land,
Whence many a stripling state shall learn.

Out of the human shoots the divine:
Be the Republic our only sign,
For whose life’s glory our lives have been

Ambassadors on a noble way
Tempest-driven, and sent astray
The first and the final good between.

Close to the vision undestroyed,
The hope not compassed and yet not void,
We perish so; but the world shall mark

On the hilltop of our work we died,
With joy of the groom before the bride,
With a dawn-cry thro’ the battle’s dark.

III

O last save me on the scaffold’s round!
Take heart, that after a thirst profound
The cup of delicious death is near,

And whoso hold it, or whence it flow,
O drink it to France, to France! and know
For the gift thou givest, thou hast her tear.

True seed thou wert of the sunnier hour,
Honorable, and burst to flower
Late in a hell-pit poison-walled:

Farewell, mortality lopped and pale,
Thou body that wast my friend! and Hail,
Dear spirit already!... My name is called.

_Winter Boughs_

HOW tender and how slow, in sunset’s cheer,
Far on the hill, our quiet treetops fade!
A broidery of northern seaweed, laid
Long in a book, were scarce more fine and clear.
Frost, and sad light, and windless atmosphere
Have breathed on them, and of their frailties made
Beauty more sweet than summer’s builded shade,
Whose green domes fall, to bring this wonder here.
O ye forgetting and outliving boughs,
With not a plume, gay in the jousts before,
Left for the Archer! so, in evening’s eye,
So stilled, so lifted, let your lover die,
Set in the upper calm no voices rouse,
Stript, meek, withdrawn, against the heavenly door.

_M. A. 1822-1888_

GOOD oars, for Arnold’s sake
By Laleham lightly bound,
And near the bank, O soft,
Darling swan!
Let not the o’erweary wake
From this his natal ground,
But where he slumbered oft,
Slumber on.

_W. H. 1778-1830_

BETWEEN the wet trees and the sorry steeple,
Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;

Beauty ’s a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.

Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
Some one love worth the ages and the nations!

Nothing falls under to thine eyes eternal.
Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,
Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches.

_The Vigil-at-Arms_

KEEP holy watch with silence, prayer, and fasting
Till morning break, and all the bugles play;
Unto the One aware from everlasting
Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.

Forth from this peace on manhood’s way thou goest,
Flushed with resolve, and radiant in mail;
Blessing supreme for men unborn thou sowest,
O knight elect! O soul ordained to fail!

_A Madonna of Domenico Ghirlandajo_

LET thoughts go hence as from a mountain spring,
Of the great dust of battle clean and whole,
And the wild birds that have no nest nor goal
Fold in a young man’s breast their trancèd wing;
For thou art made of purest Light, a thing
Art gave, beyond her own devout control;
And Light upon thy seeing, suffering soul
Hath wrought a sign for many journeying;
Our sign. As up a wayside, after rain,
When the blown beeches purple all the height
And clouds sink to the sea-marge, suddenly
The autumn sun (how soft, how solemn-bright!)
Moves to the vacant dial, so is lain
God’s meaning Hand, thou chosen, upon thee.

_Spring Nightfall_

APRIL is sad, as if the end she knew.
The maple’s misty red, the willow’s gold
Face-deep in nimble water, seem to hold
In hope’s own weather their autumnal hue.
There is no wind, no star, no sense of dew,
But the thin vapors gird the mountain old,
And the moon, risen before the west is cold,
Pale with compassion slopes into the blue.
Under the shining dark the day hath passed
Shining; so even of thee was home bereaved,
Thou dear and pensive spirit! overcast
Hardly at all, but drawn from light to light,
Who in the doubtful hour, and unperceived,
Rebuked adoring hearts with change and flight.

_A Friend’s Song for Simoisius_

THE breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,
Be on the lonely battle-place;
And to so young, so kind a face,
The long, protecting grasses cling!
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,
The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;
The early moon from Ida’s steep
Comes to the empty wrestling-ring.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recede
No echoes of the shepherd’s reed,
And children without laughter lead
The war-horse to the watering.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger Ajax Telamon!
What to the loveliest hast thou done,
That ne’er with him a maid may run
Across the marigolds in spring?
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

With footstep separate and slow
The father and the mother go,
Not now upon an urn they know
To mingle tears for comforting.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

The world to me has nothing dear
Beyond the namesake river here:
O Simois is wild and clear!
And to his brink my heart I bring;
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

My heart no more, if that might be,
Would stay his waters from the sea,
To cover Troy, to cover me,
To save us from the perishing.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

_Athassel Abbey_

FOLLY and Time have fashioned
Of thee a songless reed;
O not-of-earth-impassioned!
Thy music ’s mute indeed.

Red from the chantry crannies
The orchids burn and swing,
And where the arch began is
Rest for a raven’s wing;

And up the bossy column
Quick tails of squirrels wave,
And black, prodigious, solemn,
A forest fills the nave.

Still faithfuller, still faster,
To ruin give thy heart:
Perfect before the Master
Aye as thou wert, thou art.

But I am wind that passes
In ignorant wild tears,
Uplifted from the grasses,
Blown to the void of years,

Blown to the void, yet sighing
In thee to merge and cease,
Last breath of beauty’s dying,
Of sanctity, of peace!

Tho’ use nor place forever
Unto my soul befall,
By no belovèd river
Set in a saintly wall,

Do thou by builders given
Speech of the dumb to be,
Beneath thine open heaven,
Athassel! pray for me.

_Florentin_

HEART all full of heavenly haste, too like the bubble bright
On loud little water floating half of an April night,
Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light,
Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be
Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea;
Whither, thro’ troubled valleys, we also follow thee.

_Friendship Broken_

I

WE chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,
Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,
Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke
Strange things and deep as any poet penned,
Such truth as never truth again can mend,
Whatever arts we win, what gods invoke;
It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke:
Be what it may, it had a solemn end.
Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne
Are foeman vassals; pale astrologers,
Each a wise sceptic of the other’s star.
Silently, as we went our ways alone,
The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters,
Drew high between us his majestic bar.

II

Mine was the mood that shows the dearest face
Thro’ a long avenue, and voices kind
Idle, and indeterminate, and blind
As rumors from a very distant place;
Yet, even so, it gathered the first chase
Of the first swallows where the lane ’s inclined,
An ebb of wavy wings to serve my mind
For round Spring’s vision. Ah, some equal grace
(The calm sense of seen beauty without sight)
Befell thee, honorable heart! no less
In patient stupor walking from the dawn;
Albeit thou too wert loser of life’s light,
Like fallen Adam in the wilderness,
Aware of naught but of the thing withdrawn.

_A Song of the Lilac_

ABOVE the wall that ’s broken,
And from the coppice thinned,
So sacred and so sweet
The lilac in the wind!
And when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.

In tears it long was buried,
And trances wrapt it round;
O how they wake it now,
The fragrance and the sound!
For when by night the May wind blows
The lilac-blooms apart,
The memory of his first love
Is shaken on his heart.

_In a Ruin, after a Thunder-Storm_

KEEP of the Norman, old to flood and cloud!
Thou dost reproach me with thy sunset look,
That in our common menace, I forsook
Hope, the last fear, and stood impartial proud:
Almost, almost, while ether spake aloud,
Death from the smoking stones my spirit shook
Into thy hollow as leaves into a brook,
No more than they by heaven’s assassins cowed.

But now thy thousand-scarrèd steep is flecked
With the calm kisses of the light delayed,
Breathe on me better valor: to subject
My soul to greed of life, and grow afraid
Lest, ere her fight’s full term, the Architect
See downfall of the stronghold that He made.

_The Cherry Bough_

IN a new poet’s and a new friend’s honor,
Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting,
Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome
Here in my garden,

Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses,
And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting,
One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries.
O naught is absent,

O naught but you, kind head that far in prison
Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god’s pity
Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels
Were once so plenty,

Nor dreams, from revels and strange faces turning,
How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you,
I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden
With your rich verses!

Since, long ago, in other gentler weather
Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it,
(Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother,
Glad with your gladness,)

What has befallen in the world of wonder,
That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet color,
And you, and you that burst our eyes with beauty,
Are sapped and rotten?

Alas! When my young guests have done with singing,
I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden’s glory,
And hold it high among them, and say after:
“O my poor Ovid,

“Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember
For the clear time when we were boys together,
These tears at home are shed; and with you also
Your bough is dying.”

_Two Irish Peasant Songs_

I