Chapter II

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From throes of pain they buried me low,
For death had finished a mother's woe.

But under the sod, in the grave's dread doom,
I dreamed of my baby in glimmer and gloom.

I dreamed of my babe, and I kenned that his rest
Was broken in wailings on my dead breast.

I dreamed that a rose-leaf hand did cling:
Oh, you cannot bury a mother in spring!

When the winds are soft and the blossoms are red
She could not sleep in her cold earth-bed.

I dreamed of my babe for a day and a night,
And then I rose in my graveclothes white.

I rose like a flower from my damp earth-bed
To the world of sorrowing overhead.

Men would have called me a thing of harm,
But dreams of my babe made me rosy and warm.

I felt my breasts swell under my shroud;
No star shone white, no winds were loud;

But I stole me past the graveyard wall,
For the voice of my baby seemed to call;

And I kenned me a voice, though my lips were dumb:
Hush, baby, hush! for mother is come.

I passed the streets to my husband's home;
The chamber stairs in a dream I clomb.

I heard the sound of each sleeper's breath,
Light waves that break on the shores of death.

I listened a space at my chamber door,
Then stole like a moon-ray over its floor.

My babe was asleep on a stranger arm.
"O baby, my baby, the grave is so warm,

"Though dark and so deep, for mother is there!
O come with me from the pain and care!

"O come with me from the anguish of earth,
Where the bed is banked with a blossoming girth,

"Where the pillow is soft and the rest is long,
And mother will croon you a slumber-song,

"A slumber-song that will charm your eyes
To a sleep that never in earth-song lies!

"The loves of earth your being can spare,
But never the grave, for mother is there."

I nestled him soft to my throbbing breast,
And stole me back to my long, long rest.

And here I lie with him under the stars,
Dead to earth, its peace and its wars;

Dead to its hates, its hopes, and its harms,
So long as he cradles up soft in my arms.

And heaven may open its shimmering doors,
And saints make music on pearly floors,

And hell may yawn to its infinite sea,
But they never can take my baby from me.

For so much a part of my soul he hath grown
That God doth know of it high on his throne.

And here I lie with him under the flowers
That sun-winds rock through the billowy hours,

With the night-airs that steal from the murmuring sea,
Bringing sweet peace to my baby and me.

[1] This poem was suggested by the following passage in Tyler's _Animism_: "The pathetic German superstition that the dead mother's coming back in the night to suckle the baby she had left on earth may be known by the hollow pressed down in the bed where she lay."

Dusk

Down by the shore at even, when the waves
Lap lightly on the reedy rims, and soft,
One trembling star, a blossom, flames aloft,
Where the sunk sun the western heaven laves
With lowest tides of day; the tired world craves
For the great night that cometh brooding in,
With draught of healing over earth's far din,
And blessed rest that recreates and saves.

Far in the breathing woods the whip-poor-will
Reiterates his plaintive note; and hark!
A dusky night-hawk whirrs athwart the dark,
Haunting the shadows, till in silvern swoon,
Hunted by her own spirit, strange and still,
Over the waters comes the wan, white moon.

The Last Prayer

Master of life, the day is done;
My sun of life is sinking low;
I watch the hours slip one by one
And hark the night-wind and the snow.

And must thou shut the morning out,
And dim the eye that loved to see;
Silence the melody and rout,
And seal the joys of earth for me?

And must thou banish all the hope--
The large horizon's eagle-swim,
The splendor of the far-off slope
That ran about the world's great rim,

That rose with morning's crimson rays
And grew to noonday's gloried dome,
Melting to even's purple haze
When all the hopes of earth went home?

Yea, Master of this ruined house,
The mortgage closed, outruns the lease;
Long since is hushed the gay carouse
And now the windowed lights must cease.

The doors all barred, the shutters up,
Dismantled, empty, wall and floor,
And now for one grim eve to sup
With death the bailiff at the door.

Yea, I will take the gloomward road
Where fast the Arctic nights set in,
To reach the bourne of that abode
Which thou hast kept for all my kin.

And all life's splendid joys forego,
Walled in with night and senseless stone,
If at the last my heart might know
Through all the dark one joy alone.

Yea, thou mayst quench the latest spark
Of life's weird day's expectancy,
Roll down the thunders of the dark
And close the light of life for me.

Melt all the splendid blue above
And let these magic wonders die,
If thou wilt only leave me Love
And Love's heart-brother Memory.

Though all the hopes of every race
Crumbled in one red crucible,
And melted mingled into space,
Yet, Master, thou wert merciful.

Pan the Fallen

He wandered into the market
With pipes and goatish hoof;
He wandered in a grotesque shape,
And no one stood aloof.
For the children crowded round him,
The wives and graybeards, too,
To crack their jokes and have their mirth,
And see what Pan would do.

The Pan he was they knew him,
Part man, but mostly beast,
Who drank, and lied, and snatched what bones
Men threw him from their feast;
Who seemed in sin so merry,
So careless in his woe,
That men despised, scarce pitied him,
And still would have it so.

He swelled his pipes and thrilled them,
And drew the silent tear;
He made the gravest clack with mirth
By his sardonic leer.
He blew his pipes full sweetly
At their amused demands,
And caught the scornful earth-flung pence
That fell from careless hands.

He saw the mob's derision,
And took it kindly, too,
And when an epithet was flung,
A coarser back he threw;
But under all the masking
Of a brute, unseemly part,
I looked, and saw a wounded soul,
And a god-like, breaking heart.

And back of the elfin music,
The burlesque, clownish play,
I knew a wail that the weird pipes made,
A look that was far away,--
A gaze into some far heaven
Whence a soul had fallen down;
But the mob only saw the grotesque beast
And the antics of the clown.

For scant-flung pence he paid them
With mirth and elfin play,
Till, tired for a time of his antics queer,
They passed and went their way;
Then there in the empty market
He ate his scanty crust,
And, tired face turned to heaven, down
He laid him in the dust.

And over his wild, strange features
A softer light there fell,
And on his worn, earth-driven heart
A peace ineffable.
And the moon rose over the market,
But Pan the beast was dead;
While Pan the god lay silent there,
With his strange, distorted head.

And the people, when they found him,
Stood still with awesome fear.
No more they saw the beast's rude hoof,
The furtive, clownish leer;
But the lightest spirit in that throng
Went silent from the place,
For they knew the look of a god released
That shone from his dead face.

The Vengeance of Saki

When the moon is red in the heaven, and under the night
Is heard on the winds the thunder of shadowy horses,
Then out of the night I arise, and again am a woman;
And leap to the back of an ebon steed that knows me,
And hound him on in the wake of hoofs that thunder,
Of smoking nostrils, and gleaming eyes, and foam-flecked
Flanks that glow and flash in the flow of the moonlight;
While under the mirk and the moon, out into the blackness,
Round the world's edge with an eerie, mad, echoing laughter,
Leaps the long cry of the hate of the wild snake-woman.

I was a girl of the South, with eyes as tender
And dreamy and soft and true as the skies of my people;
But I was a slave and an alien captured in battle,
And brought to the North by a people ruder and stronger,
Who held me as naught but a toy, to be played with and broken,
Then thrown aside like a bow that is snapped asunder.
Lithe and supple my limbs as the sinuous serpent,
And quick as the eye and the tongue of the serpent mine anger
That flashed out the fire of my hate on the scorn of my scorners.
But hate soon softened to love, as fire into sunlight,
When my eyes met the eyes of the chieftain, my lord, and my master.

Sweet as the flowers that bloom on the blossoming prairie,
Gladder than voices of fountains that dance in the sunlight,
Were the new and tremulous fancies that dwelt in my bosom;
For he was my king and my sun, and the power of his glance
To me as at springtime the returning sun to the landscape,
And his touch and the sound of his voice that set my heart throbbing.

Sweet were the days of the summer I dwelt in his tent,
And glad and loving the nights that I lay on his bosom.
But woe, woe, woe, to the summer that fades into autumn,
And woe upon woe is the love that dwindles and dies,
And ere my hot heart was abrim with its summer of loving
I knew that its autumn had come, that his love was another's--
A blue-eyed haughty captive they brought from the East,
Her hair like moving sunlight that rippled and ran
With the golden flow of a brook from her brow to her girdle.
He saw her, he looked on her face, and I was forgotten--
Yea, I and the love that fed on my soul in its anguish!

I bowed my head with its woe to him in my anguish;
I veiled my face in my hair like the night of my sorrow;
And I plead with him there by the love that was true and forgiving:
Oh! my lord and my love, by the days that are past of our loving,
Oh! slay thy poor Saki, but send her not forth in her anguish!
And I fell to the earth with my face, like the moon hid in heaven,
In the folds of my hair. But he sate there and uttered no answer;
And the white woman sate there, and scorned at the woe of my sorrow.

Then I bit my tongue through that had prayed for the pity ungiven,
And I rose with my hate in my eyes, like the lightning in heaven
That leaps red to kill with a hiss like the snake that they called me;
And I looked on them there, and I cursed them, the man, and the woman--
The man whose lips had kissed my love into being,
And the woman whose beauty had withered that love into ashes--
With curses so dread and so deep that he rose up and smote me,
And hounded me forth like a dog to die in the desert.

Then wandered I forth an outcast hounded and beaten;
Careless whither I went or living or dying,
With that load of despair at my heartstrings wearing to madness.
Long and loud I laughed at the heaven that mocked me
With its beautiful sounds and its sights and the joy of its being,
For I longed but to die and to go to that region of darkness
Where I might shroud me and curse in my madness for ever.
Far, oh far I fled till my feet were wounded
And bruised and cut by the ways unkindly and cruel.
Then all the world grew red and the sun as a furnace,
And I raved till I knew no more for a horrible season.
Then I arose, and stood like one in a dream
Who, after long years of forgetting, sudden remembers
The dread wild cry of a wrong that clamors for righting;
Then sending a curse to the heart of the night sky, I turned me
And fled like the wind of the winter, the sound of whose
footstep is vengeance.
Late, when the moon had lowered, I entered his village,
And threading the silent streets came to the well-known tent-door,
And, dragging aside the skins, with serpentine motion
Entered now as a thief where once I had entered as mistress.
And there in the gleam of the moon, with the flame of her
hair on his bosom,
Lay the woman I hated like hell with the man I loved clasped
to her heart.

Ha! Ha! it is joy for the hearts that we crush as we thunder!
Ho! Ho! for the hate of the winds that laugh to my laughter!
Ha! Ha! it is well for the shriekings that pass into silence,
As under the night, out into the blackness forever,
Rides the wild hate of Saki, the mad snake-woman!
If hate could have slain they'd have shrivelled up there in
the moonlight;
But theirs was a sin too deep for the kiss of a knife-blade.
Long did I stand like a poisoned wind in a desert,
Gray and sad and despairing, and nursing my hate;
When out of the night, like one voice that calls to another,
Came the far-off neigh of a horse, and a mad joy leaped to my veins,
And a thought curled into my heart as a serpent coils into a flower;
And I turned me, and left them there in their foolish love
and their slumber
That my hot heart hissed was their last.
Then hurrying out of the door that flapped in the night-wind I fled,
With a pent-up hunger of hate that maddened to burst from its sluices,
And came to a place on the plain far up and out from the village,
Where tethered in rows of hurdles, champing and restless and neighing,
Half a thousand horses were herded under the night.

Ha! Ha! I live it anew, I dream it again in my madness.
I see that moving ocean of shimmering flanks in the moonlight:
I snatch a brand from a watchfire that smoulders and dwindles:
I creep around to the side of the herd remote from the village:
I cry, a low call, that is answered by a neigh and a whinny:
Then I leap to the back of an ebon stallion that knows me.
'Tis but the cut of a thong, a cry in the night,
A fiery waving brand like lightning to thunder,
A terrified moaning and neighing, a heaving of necks and of haunches;
A bound, a rush, a crack of a thong, then a whirlwind of hoofs!
Like a sweep of a wave on a beach we are thundering onwards,
Neck and neck in the wake of my hate, that ever before us
Clamors from heaven to hell in its terrible vengeance!
With neck outstretched and mad eyes agleam in the moonlight,
I see on ahead the sleeping huts in the moonlight.

Ha! Ha! they will rest well under the sleep that we bring them!
See, see, we are nearing them now; the first wild thundering hoof-beats
Have ridden them down, 'mid the shriekings and groanings of anguish,
Blotting them out with their loves and their hates into blackness.
Ha! Ha! ride, ride, my beauties, my terrible tramplers!
Pound, pound into dust the mother, the child, and the husband!
Pound, pound to the pulse of my hate that exults in your thunders!
Ha! Over the little ones nestled to suckle the bosom,
Over the man that I loved, we thunder, we thunder!
Over the woman I hate with the flame of her hair on his bosom;
Trampling, treading them down out into silence and blackness,
Like the swirl of a merciless storm we sweep on to darkness forever!
And now, when the moon is in heaven, and under the night
Is heard on the winds the thunder of shadowy horses,
Then out of the dark I arise, and again am a woman;
And leap to the back of an ebon steed that knows me,
And hound him on in the wake of hoofs that thunder;
While under the mirk and the moon, out into the blackness,
Round the world's edge with an eerie, mad, echoing laughter,
Leaps the long cry of the hate of the wild snake-woman.

Love

Love came at dawn when all the world was fair,
When crimson glories, bloom, and song were rife;
Love came at dawn when hope's wings fanned the air,
And murmured, "I am life."

Love came at even when the day was done,
When heart and brain were tired, and slumber pressed;
Love came at eve, shut out the sinking sun,
And whispered, "I am rest."

Victoria

JUBILEE ODE, A. D. 1897

With thunder of cannon and far-off roll of drum,
And martial music blaring forth her glory,
'Mid miles of thronging millions down each street
Where all the earth is bound in one heart-beat
The world's great Empire's greatest Queen doth come,
Borne on one mighty, rocking earthquake voice
Wherein all peoples of wide earth rejoice--
She comes, she comes, to beat of martial drums,
And pageants blazoning England's ancient story;
The good, gray Queen, whose majesty and worth
Have lent their radiance to remotest earth;
While the splendor and might and power of her mighty empire bound her;
And the serried millions, mad with joy, are near her,
All to love her, none to fear her,
But nearer far than power, than splendor dearer,
The surging love of her loved people round her.
She comes, she comes, encircled by her people,
While praise to Heaven peals out from tower and steeple,
Into the great cathedral, hushed and dim,
With thankful heart and humble queenly head
Over the sleep of England's mighty dead,
To render up her heart's best thoughts to Him
The King of Kings--'mid hush of priestly tread,
And gloried anthem's solemn pealing hymn.

The mighty millions, awed, now bow the head,
Thank Heaven for her simple, noble life,
Earth's queenliest empress, mother, daughter, wife!
Thank Heaven for all she held her dearest own!
Forgiveness for the weakness she hath known!
Blessings on her wise old widowed head,
For what her life is now, and what her life hath been,
Noble mother, wife and Queen!

Let the mighty organs roll, and the mighty throng disperse!
She is ours, and we are hers,
And both are Britain's. Both to Britain's God
Lift up the heart-felt praise for the might of splendid days,
For the glory that hath been.
Let the cannon thunder out, and the miles of voices shout--Victoria!
Let the bells peal out afar, till the rocket tells the star,
And the ocean shouts its pæan to the thunder-answering bar;
England's glory, Britain's pride,
Revered of half a world beside,
O good gray Queen, Victoria!

Daughter of monarchs, mother of kings;
All her sorrows we have shared,
All her triumphs they are ours.
Kind Heaven, that virtue still endowers,
Be with her, may her path be flowers;
Be with her, may her days be spared,
Death aloof with shadowing wings,
Unto nature's latest hours!
Daughter of monarchs, mother of kings,
O good gray Queen, Victoria!

Let all feuds of faction die,
Let the blaring party bugles cease to blow,
Let insincere and base detraction lie,
With sore defeat and bitterness, her carping sisters, low,
In this one supremest hour,
Day of Britain's ancient power,
Day of all her golden dower,
Of victory-towering centuries, tower on tower.
Let all our hatreds be forgot,
All bitterness be swept away,
Remembering only the glory of our lot
In this century-honoring day!
Celt and Scot and Saxon, let us only know,
A mighty Queen comes to her own at last,
Her people's love and reverence--as the glow
Of some splendid western heaven,
Deepening into richer even,
Ere it purples to the vast.

Past the mailèd gates of fears,
The hooded menace of the years,
Where rang the iron voices rolling on her ears,
Of royal dreams the requiem and pall,
And awful fates of thrones foredoomed to fall;
Our aged Queen, on this glad day she stands
Amid the throbbings of her land's great love,
Firm in her rule, her faith in God above,
Earth's golden keys of happiness in her hands.

O splendid life of Britain's splendid days!
O noble soul, above all blame or praise!
O fame that will outlast our little fame!
O long-enduring honor greater than time or death!
O name that will outlive even that immortal name,
England's more ancient glory, the great Elizabeth!

And we, thy loyal subjects far away,
In these new lands that own thy sceptre's sway,
Betwixt thy Royal Isle and far Cathay--
Across the thunder of the western foam,
O good gray Queen, our hearts go home, go home,
To thine and thee!
We are thine own while empires rise and wane,
We are thine own for blessing or for bane,
And, come the shock of thundering war again,
For death or victory!

Not that we hate our brothers to the south,
They are our fellows in the speech of mouth,
They are our wedded kindred, our own blood,
The same world-evils we and they withstood,
Our aims are theirs, one common future good--
Not that we hate them, but that there doth lie
Within our hearts a golden fealty
To Britain, Britain, Britain, till the world doth die.

And him we send thee as our greatest son,
The people's choice, to whose firm hand is given
The welfare of our country under heaven;
No truer son hast thou in all thy coasts,
No wiser, kindlier, stronger, Britain boasts;
Our knightly leader, Norman in his blood,
But truest Briton in heart and speech and mind,
Belovèd well of all his fellow-kind,
In statesmanship our nation's highest mood,
Our silver-tongued and golden-hearted one,
In every inch and every thought a man,
Our noblest type, ideal Canadian!
Receive him 'mid those, greatest, thou dost own,
Thy mighty empire-builders, bastioning round thy throne.

O England's latest, greatest Queen,
Greatness more great than all her greatness that hath been,
Under thy sceptre the outmost continents hang,
And trackless oceans thunder out their surges.
These are thy realms. Never in earth's old story
Hath queen of earthly realm owned such resplendent glory.
Not golden Homer such wondrous kingdoms sang.
Round earth's wide girdle thy mighty empire verges,
Out-splendoring all prophecy of olden days;
Thou, latest and greatest on that throne whose base
Withstood the shock of centuries, still withstands
The lowering hate of Europe's iron bands;
In thy true keeping shall that sceptre be
A golden wand of happiness to the free
Who call thee Queen from outmost sea to sea.
That throne to them a mighty lighthouse tower,
A truth-compelling majesty of light,
Blinding the mists of ignorance and night,
Where round its base throughout the centuries' flight,
Thunder in vain earth's hosts upon its iron power.

England

England, England, England,
Girdled by ocean and skies,
And the power of a world and the heart of a race,
And a hope that never dies.

England, England, England,
Wherever a true heart beats,
Wherever the rivers of commerce flow,
Wherever the bugles of conquest blow,
Wherever the glories of liberty grow,
'Tis the name that the world repeats.

And ye who dwell in the shadow
Of the century's sculptured piles,
Where sleep our century-honored dead
While the great world thunders overhead,
And far out miles on miles,
Beyond the smoke of the mighty town,
The blue Thames dimples and smiles;
Not yours alone the glory of old,
Of the splendid thousand years,
Of Britain's might and Britain's right
And the brunt of British spears.
Not yours alone, for the great world round
Ready to dare and do,
Scot and Celt and Norman and Dane,
With the Northman's sinew and heart and brain,
And the Northman's courage for blessing or bane
Are England's heroes too.

North and South and East and West,
Wherever their triumphs be,
Their glory goes home to the ocean-girt isle
Where the heather blooms and the roses smile
With the green isle under her lee;
And if ever the smoke of an alien gun
Should threaten her iron repose,
Shoulder to shoulder against the world,
Face to face with her foes,
Scot and Celt and Saxon are one
Where the glory of England goes.
And we of the newer and vaster West,
Where the great war banners are furled,
And commerce hurries her teeming hosts,
And the cannon are silent along our coasts,
Saxon and Gaul, Canadians claim
A part in the glory and pride and aim
Of the Empire that girdles the world.

England, England, England,
Wherever the daring heart
By Arctic floe or torrid strand
Thy heroes play their part;
For as long as conquest holds the earth,
Or commerce sweeps the sea,
By Orient jungle or Western plain,
Will the Saxon spirit be.
And whatever the people that dwell beneath,
Or whatever the alien tongue,
Over the freedom and peace of the world
Is the flag of England flung.
Till the last great freedom is found,
And the last great truth be taught,
Till the last great deed be done
And the last great battle is fought;
Till the last great fighter is slain in the last great fight
And the war-wolf is dead in his den,
England, breeder of hope and valor and might,
Iron mother of men.

Yea, England, England, England,
Till honor and valor are dead,
Till the world's great cannons rust,
Till the world's great hopes are dust,
Till faith and freedom be fled,
Till wisdom and justice have passed
To sleep with those who sleep in the many-chambered vast,
Till glory and knowledge are charnelled dust in dust,
To all that is best in the world's unrest,
In heart and mind you are wed.
While out from the Indian jungle
To the far Canadian snows,
Over the east and over the west,
Over the worst and over the best,
The flag of the world to its winds unfurled,
The blood-red ensign blows.

Sebastian Cabot

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Beyond the Hills of DreamChapter II

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