Chapter XXVI: Sonnets

OXFORD

I. _The Tow-Path_

FURROW to furrow, oar to oar succeeds,
Each length away, more bright, more exquisite;
The sister shells that hither, thither, flit
Strew the long stream like scattered maple-seeds.
A comrade on the marge now lags, now leads,
Who with short calls his pace doth intermit:
An angry Pan, afoot; but if he sits,
Auspicious Pan among the river reeds.

West of the glowing hayricks, tawny black
Where waters by their warm escarpments run,
Two lovers, newly crossed from Kennington,
Print in the early dew a married track,
And drain the aroma'd eve, and spend the sun,
Ere in laborious health the crews come back.

II. _Ad Antiquarium_

MY gentle Aubrey, who in everything
Hadst of thy city's youth so lovely lust,
Yet never lineal to her towers august
Thy spirit could fix, or perfectly upbring,
Sleep, sleep! I ope, not unremembering,
Thy comely manuscript, and interthrust
Find delicate hueless leaves more sad than dust,
Two centuries unkissed of any Spring.

Filling a homesick page beneath a lime,
Thy mood beheld, as mine thy debtor's now,
The endless terraces of ended Time
Vague in green twilight. Goodly was release
Into that Past where these poor leaves, and thou,
Do freshen in the air of eldest peace.

III. _Martyrs' Memorial_

SUCH natural debts of love our Oxford knows,
So many ancient dues undesecrate,
I marvel how the landmark of a hate
For witness unto future time she chose;
How 'gainst her own corroborate ranks arose
The Three, in great denial only great,
For Art's enshrining! Thus, averted straight,
My soul to seek a holier captain goes:

That sweet adventurer whom Truth befell
Whenas the synagogues were watching not;
Whose crystal name on royal Oriel
Hangs like a shield; who to an outland spot
Led hence, beholds his Star, and counts it well
To live of all his dear domain forgot.

IV. _Parks Road_

VIEWED yesterday, in sad elusive light,
These everlasting heptarchs, tree by tree,
Seemed filing off to exile, lingeringly,
Each with his giant falchion, kinless quite.
All the wild winter day and flooded night
They feigned to march far as the eye could see,
Through transient oceans plunging to the knee
Their centuried greaves, ebon and malachite.

To-day, accustomed bole and branch all bare
Stand with old gems inlaid. Like coloured snow
Or vista'd flame along the drowsy air,
Their gold-green lichens stir and cling and glow.
What secret craftsmen painted them so fair?
Angels of Moisture and the Long Ago.

V. _Tom_

HARK! the king bell, loud in his vesper choir.
As in between each golden roar doth come
That solemn, plangent, unregarded hum
Chiding the truant with archaic ire,
On Worcester mere far off, in elfin gyre
The wavelets laugh, and laughter showereth from
May's chestnut like a lampadarium
By Brasenose, with every point afire.

Yet over all roofs to the uttermost,
Call, Shepherd dear, from thy dream-haunted ground:
For some there be, on whatsoever coast,
In midst of any morrow's ordered round,
Hear as of old (in earth and heaven an host!)
And like young lambs, leap homeward at the sound.

VI. _On the Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford_

I

IMPERIAL Iffley, Cumnor bowered in green,
And Templar Sandford in the boatman's call,
And sweet-belled Appleton, and Elsfield wall
That dost upon adoring ivies lean;
Meek Binsey; Dorchester, where streams convene
Bidding on graves thy solemn shadow fall;
Clear Cassington, soaring perpetual,
Holton, and Hampton Poyle, and fanes between:

If one of all in your sad courts that come
Belovèd and disparted! be your own,
Kin to the souls ye had, while yet endures
Some memory of a great communion known
At home in quarries of old Christendom,--
Ah, mark him: he will lay his cheek to yours.

II

IS this the end? Is this the pilgrim's day
For dread, for dereliction, and for tears?
Rather, from grass and air and many spheres
In prophecy his heart is called away;
And under English eaves, more still than they,
Far-off, incoming, wonderful, he hears
The long-arrested, the believing years
Carry the sea-wall! Shall he, sighing, say:

"Farewell to Faith, for she is dead at best
Who had such beauty"? or, with spirit fain
To watch beside her darkened doors, go by
With a new psalm: "O banished Light so nigh!
Of them was I, who bore thee and who blest:
Even here remember me when thou shalt reign."

VII. _A December Walk_

WHITHERSOEVER cold and fair ye flow,
Take me, O gentle moon and gentler wind,
Past Wyatt's cumbering portal, frost-entwined,
And Merton 'neath that huge tiara's glow,
And groves in bridal gossamer below
Saint Mary's armoured spire; and whence aligned
In altered eminence for dawn to find
Sleep the droll Cæsars, hooded with the snow.

White sacraments of weather, shine on me!
Upbear my footfall and my fancy sift,
Lest either blemish an ensainted ground
Spread so with childhood. Bid with me, outbound,
On recollected wing mine angel drift
Across new spheres of immortality.

VIII. _The Old Dial of Corpus_

WARDEN of hours and ages, here I dwell,
Who saw young Keble pass, with sighing shook
For good unborn; and towards a willow nook,
Pole, princely in the senate and the cell;
And doubting the near boom of Osney bell,
Turning on me that sweetly subtile look,
Erasmus, in his breast an Attic book:
Peacemakers all, their dreams to ashes fell.

Naught steadfast may I image nor attain
Save steadfast labour; futile must I grope
After my god, like him, inconstant bright:
But sun and shade will unto you remain
Alternately a symbol and a hope,
Men, spirits! of Emmanuel your Light.

IX. _Rooks: New College Gardens_

THROUGH rosy cloud and over thorny towers,
Their wings with darkling autumn distance filled,
From Isis' valley border, many-hilled,
The rooks are crowding home as evening lowers:
Not for men only, and their musing hours
By battled walls did gracious Wykeham build
These dewy spaces early sown and stilled,
These dearest inland melancholy bowers.

Blest birds! A book held open on the knee
Below, is all they guess of Adam's blight:
With surer art the while, and simpler rite,
They gather power in some monastic tree
Where breathe against their docile breasts by night
The scholar's star, the star of sanctity.

X. _Above Port Meadow_

THE plain gives freedom. Hither from the town
How oft a dreamer and a book of yore
Escaped the lamplit Square, and heard no more
Inroll from Cowley turf the game's renown,
But bade the vernal sky with spices drown
His head by Plato's in the grass, before
Yon oar that's never old, the sunset oar,
At Medley Lock was laid reluctant down!

So seeming far the confines and the crowd,
The gross routine, the cares that vex and tire,
From this large light, sad thoughts in it, high-driven,
Go happier than the inly-moving cloud
Who lets her vesture fall, a floss of fire,
Abstracted, on the ivory hills of heaven.

XI. _Undertones at Magdalen_

FAIR are the finer creature-sounds; of these
Is Magdalen full: her bees, the while they drop
Susurrant to the garth from weeds atop;
And round the priestless Pulpit, auguries
Of wrens in council from an hundred leas;
And merry fish of Cherwell, fain to stop
The water-plantain's way; and deer that crop
Delicious herbage under choral trees.

The cry for silver and gold in Christendom
Without, threads not her silence and her dark.
Only against the isolate Tower there break
Low rhythmic murmurs of good men to come:
Invasive seas of hushed approach that make
Memorial music, would the ear but hark.

XII. _A Last View_

I

WHERE down the hill, across the hidden ford
Stretches the open aisle from scene to scene,
By halted horses silently we lean,
Gazing enchanted from our steeper sward.
How yon low loving skies of April hoard
A plot of pinnacles! and how with sheen
Of spike and ball her languid clouds between
Grey Oxford grandly rises riverward!

Sweet on those dim long-dedicated walls
Silver as rain the frugal sunshine falls;
Slowly sad eyes resign them, bound afar.
Dear Beauty, dear Tradition, fare you well,
And powers that aye aglow in you, impel
Our quickening spirits from the slime we are.

II

STARS in the bosom of thy braided tide,
Soft air and ivy on thy gracile stone,
O Glory of the West, as thou wert sown,
Stand perfect: O miraculous, abide!
And still, for greatness flickering from thy side,
Eternal alchemist, evoke, enthrone
True heirs in true succession, later blown
From that same seed of fire which never died.

Nor Love shall lack her solace, to behold
Ranged to the morrow's melancholy verge,
Thy lights uprisen in Thought's disclosing spaces;
And round some beacon-spirit, stable, old,
In radiant broad tumultuary surge
For ever, the young voices, the young faces.

LONDON

I. _On First Entering Westminster Abbey_

HOLY of England! since my light is short
And faint, Oh, rather by the sun anew
Of timeless passion set my dial true,
That with thy saints and thee I may consort;
And wafted in the cool enshadowed port
Of poets, seem a little sail long due,
And be as one the call of memory drew
Unto the saddle void since Agincourt.

Not now for secular love's unquiet lease
Receive my soul, who rapt in thee erewhile
Hath broken tryst with transitory things;
But seal with her a marriage and a peace
Eternal, on thine Edward's altar isle,
Above the storm-spent sea of ended Kings.

II. _Fog_

LIKE bodiless water passing in a sigh,
Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,
And in their sharp disastrous undertow
Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.
The towery vista sinks upon the eye,
As if it heard the horns of Jericho,
Black and dissolved; nor could the founder, know
How what was built so bright should daily die.

Thy mood with man's is broken and blent in,
City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown
The natural light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, though the dark visor's down.

III. _St. Peter-ad-Vincula_

TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe,
Three Queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
More in his halo, Monmouth's mocking eye,
The eagle Essex in a harpy's claw;
Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
Sundown of Scotland; how with treasons lie
White martyrdoms: rank in a company
Breaker and builder of the eternal Law.

Oft as I come, the piteous garden-row
Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,
Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,
Infects me: suddenly must I depart,
Ere thought of man's injustice then and now
Add to these aisles one other broken heart.

IV. _Strikers in Hyde Park_

A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave,
How slow! but never once they slip the thread.
Hither, upon the Georgian idlers' tread,
Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,
Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange
Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
The clear Republic waits the general throe,
Along her noonday mountains' open range.
God be with both! for one is young to know
The other's rote of evil and of change.

V. _Changes in the Temple_

THE cry is at thy gates, long-lovèd ground,
Again: for oft ere now thy children went
Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent
Some old red alley with a dial crowned;
Some house of honour, in a glory bound
With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;
Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent
Hard by a little fountain's friendly sound.

Oh, for Virginius' hand, if only that
Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!
Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,
Her walled oasis, and where once it was
All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat
Echo and ivy, and the loitering moon.

VI. _The Lights of London_

THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot
Far down into the valley's cold extreme,
Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream
Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.
The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot
Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,
From chaos climb with many a hasty gleam,
London, one moment fallen and forgot.

Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright
Prick door and window; every street obscure
Sparkles and swarms with nothing true nor sure,
Full as a marsh of mist and winking light:
Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure
Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.

VII. _Doves_

AH, if man's boast and man's advance be vain,
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
And the lone Tree, foreknow it, and the Dome,
That monstrous island of the middle main;
If each inheritor must sink again
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam?--
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's
Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
"God keeps," I said, "our little flock of years."

VIII. _In the Reading-Room of the British Museum_

PRAISED be the moon of books! that doth above
A world of men, the sunken Past behold,
And colour spaces else too void and cold
To make a very heaven again thereof;
As when the sun is set behind a grove,
And faintly unto nether ether rolled,
All night his whiter image and his mould
Grows beautiful with looking on her love.

Thou, therefore, moon of so divine a ray,
Lend to our steps both fortitude and light!
Feebly along a venerable way
They climb the infinite, or perish quite:
Nothing are days and deeds to such as they,
While in this liberal house thy face is bright.

IX. _Sunday Chimes in the City_

ACROSS the bridge, where in the morning blow
The wrinkled tide turns homeward, and is fain
Homeward to drag the black sea-goer's chain,
And the long yards by Dowgate dipping low;
Across dispeopled ways, patient and slow,
Saint Magnus and Saint Dunstan call in vain:
From Wren's forgotten belfries, in the rain,
Down the blank wharves the dropping octaves go.

Forbid not these! Though no man heed, they shower
A subtle beauty on the empty hour,
From all their dark throats aching and outblown;
Aye in the prayerless places welcome most,
Like the last gull that up some naked coast
Deploys her white and steady wing, alone.

X. _A Porch in Belgravia_

WHEN, after dawn, the lordly houses hide
Till you fall foul of it, some piteous guest
(Some girl the damp stones gather to their breast,
Her gold hair rough, her rebel garment wide,
Who sleeps, with all that luck and life denied
Camped round, and dreams how, seaward and southwest,
Blue over Devon farms the smoke-rings rest,
And sheep and lambs ascend the lit hillside),

Dear, of your charity, speak low, step soft,
Pray for a sinner. Planet-like and still,
Best hearts of all are sometimes set aloft
Only to see and pass, nor yet deplore
Even Wrong itself, crowned Wrong inscrutable,
Which cannot but have been, for evermore.

XI. _York Stairs_

MANY a musing eye returns to thee,
Against the formal street disconsolate,
Who kept in green domains thy bridal state,
With young tide-waters leaping at thy knee;
And lest the ravening smoke, and enmity,
Corrode thee quite, thy lover sighs, and straight
Desires thee safe afar, too graceful gate;
Throned on a terrace of the Boboli.

Nay, nay, thy use is here. Stand queenly thus
Till the next fury; teach the time and us
Leisure and will to draw a serious breath:
Not wholly where thou art the soul is cowed,
Nor the fooled capital proclaims aloud
Barter is god, while Beauty perisheth.

XII. _In the Docks_

WHERE the bales thunder till the day is done,
And the wild sounds with wilder odours cope;
Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,
Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;
Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,
A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;
Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,
I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!

O thou good guest! So oft as, young and warm,
To the home-wind thy hoisted colours bound,
Away, away from this too thoughtful ground,
Sodden with human trespass and despair,
Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,
A sick mind follows into Eden air.

NOTES

_The Kings_: P. 3.

II Kings, VI, 15, 16, 17.

_His Angel to his Mother_: P. 21.

One line of the refrain is taken from an old love song,
"Sweet, if you Love me, Let me Go," set to a charming
melody in D major, and to be found in Chappell's Popular
Music of the Olden Time.

_Beside Hazlitt's Grave_: P. 47.

St. Anne's, Soho, boasts the "sorry steeple," one of
London's architectural absurdities. Hazlitt's grave is
grassed over and unmarked, but the epitaph which has now
for some years stood in place of the interesting original
one, may be read on the headstone set against the outer
west wall of the church.

_The Vigil-at-Arms_: P. 48.

Suggested by the very simple but soldierly melody in
Mendelssohn's Lied ohne Worte in A, Book I, Opus 19, No. 4,
the last two lines coming in for repetitions.

_A Friend's Song for Simoisius_: P. 49.

Having to do with Iliad IV, 473-489.

_The Inner Fate_: P. 64.

It is perhaps too daring to force into Greek forms any
sentiment so dead against the Greek spirit of determinism.

_The Acknowledgment_: P. 66.

"The Prætor." Brutus in Shakespeare, if not the historical
Brutus.

_The Cherry Bough_: P. 70.

"Si quis adhuc isthic meminit Nasonis adempti,
Et superest sine me nomen in urbe meum."
_Tristia_, Lib. III, El. X.

"Atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto,
Deponat lacrymis pocula mista suis."
_Idem_, Lib. V, El. IV.

_A Talisman_: P. 87.

Many years after these lines were in print, it was pointed
out to the author by a friend, a student of St. Bernard,
how they have managed to echo in part a saying of that
great Doctor, in his _De Consideratione_, Lib. I, Cap.
VIII, Sec. 9:

"Prudentia item est quae inter voluptates et necessitates
media, quasi quaedam arbitra sedens ... disterminat fines
... ex alterutris tertiam formans virtutem quam dicunt
Temperantiam."

_Fifteen Epitaphs_: P. 91.

It may be well to state (as these have often been taken for
translations), that they are only pseudo-Alexandrian.

_A Footpath Morality_: P. 121.

A sort of floral log-book of a walk from Oxford to Appleton
in Berkshire, May, 1908.

OXFORD

_Ad Antiquarium_: P. 146.

This is Wood's disinterested helper, John Aubrey, F.R.S.,
1626-1697. Never was a truer lover of what he calls "that
most ingeniose Place!"

_Martyrs' Memorial_: P. 147.

The only monument in the streets of Oxford was put up by
the local Low Church party in 1841, not really so much to
commemorate Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, all Cambridge
men, as to register a protest against Hurrell Froude (then
dead), Newman, and Keble, who all showed frank disrespect
to the heroes of the Reformation in England. The reference
in the sestet is of course to Cardinal Newman, and was
written barely a month before his rather sudden death on
August 11, 1890.

_Tom_: P. 149.

The College is a century and a half older than the upper
part of its chief entrance gate, and the once monastic bell
is much older than either. "The Tom Tower [was] finished
in November, 1682. In this was hung the bell called Great
Tom of Christ Church, which had originally belonged to
Osney Abbey.... From that time to this, it has rung its one
hundred and one strokes every night at nine, as a signal
that all students should be within their College walls. It
need hardly be said that the signal is not obeyed!"

J. WELLS, M.A., 1901. _Oxford and its Colleges_:
Christ Church, pp. 205-206.

_The Old Dial of Corpus_: P. 153.

The great Dial in the quadrangle of Corpus Christi
College was not put up until 1605,--too late to have been
contemporary with either Erasmus or Pole. The author
discovered the error several years ago, but has never known
how to correct it except by this caution. "Osney Bell"
is Great Tom (see just above): Christ Church being next
neighbour to Corpus; but Tom may or may not have been in
place and condition to ring for curfew in the second year
of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The closing line is meant to
refer to the motto of the University, _Dominus illuminatio
mea_, taken from the opening of Psalm XXVII.

_Undertones at Magdalen_: P. 156.

"The priestless Pulpit" was an accurate description when
this sonnet was written (1895), though it is so no longer.
From the open-air Pulpit of Magdalen, disused since the
Reformation, a Sermon is once again delivered annually on
St. John Baptist's Day.

LONDON

_St. Peter-ad-Vincula_: P. 161.

St. Peter-ad-Vincula is the ancient and sadly appropriate
dedication of the Church near the Beauchamp Tower and the
site of the scaffold. The vaults are under the chancel.

_York Stairs_: P. 169.

Inigo Jones' Water Gate, standing on the Embankment at
the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, now a long way
from the river, is still called York Stairs. It is the
sole surviving appanage of the great town-house of the
seventeenth-century Dukes of Buckingham.

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