Chapter II

There where they part, the porch's steps are strewn
With wind-blown petals of the purple vine;
Athwart the porch the shadow of a pine
Cleaves the white moonlight; and like some calm rune
Heaven says to Earth, shines the majestic moon;
And now a meteor draws a lilac line
Across the welkin, as if God would sign
The perfect poem of this night of June.
The wood-wind stirs the flowering chestnut-tree,
Whose curving blossoms strew the glimmering grass
Like crescents that wind-wrinkled waters glass;
And, like a moonstone in a frill of flame,
The dewdrop trembles on the peony,
As in a lover's heart his sweetheart's name.

THE DREAMER

Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,
And mark the loafing sunlight's lazy laugh;
Or, on each season, spell the epitaph
Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;
Or list the music of the strolling showers,
Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,
Or read the day's delivered monograph
Through all the chapters of its daedal hours.
Still with the same child-faith and child regard
He looks on Nature, hearing at her heart,
The Beautiful beat out the time and place,
Through which no lesson of this life is hard,
No struggle vain of science or of art,
That dies with failure written on its face.

WINTER

The flute, whence Summer's dreamy finger-tips
Drew music,--ripening the pinched kernels in
The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,--
Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips,
And surly songs whistle around his chin;
Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
Which unto Winter's masculine airs doth give
Thy own creative qualities of tune,
Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.

MID-WINTER

All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
Harsh as an iron landscape of wan hell
The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
My window wailing: now a little child
Crying outside my door; and now the long
Howl of some starved beast down the flue. I sat
And knew 'twas Winter with his madman song
Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.

SPRING

First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips;
A pursuivant who heralded a prince:
And dawn put on her livery of tints,
And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips:
And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came,
A knight, who bade the winter let him pass;
And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as
The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame.
And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness,
Across the hills; and heav'n bent down to bless:
Above her head the birds were as a lyre;
And at her feet, like some strong worshipper,
The shouting water paean'd praise of her
Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire.

TRANSFORMATION

It is the time when, by the forest falls,
The touch-me-nots hang fairy folly-caps;
When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps
Of rocks with colour, rich as orient shawls:
And in my heart I hear a voice that calls
Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps
Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps,
Sings the sweet Greek of Pan's old madrigals:
There is a gleam that lures me up the stream--
A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light?
Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream--
An Oread's footprints fragrant with her flight?
And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again,
Part of the myths that I pursue in vain.

RESPONSE

There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,--
And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling
To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above,
White-hearts and mandrake blooms--that look enough
Like the elves' washing--white with laundering
Of May-moon dews; and all pale-opening
Wild-flowers of the woods are born thereof.
There is no sod Spring's white foot brushes but
Must feel the music that vibrates within,
And thrill to the communicated touch
Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
The heart of Beauty for Song's concrete kin,
Emotions--that are flowers--born of such.

THE SWASHBUCKLER

Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
Aggression marches armies in his words;
And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-a-pie;
His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
And in his carriage camp all wars to be:--
With him of battles there shall be no lack
While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.

SIMULACRA

Dark in the west the sunset's sombre wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
With Conflagration glaring at each crack.--
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.

CAVERNS

WRITTEN OF COLOSSAL CAVE, KENTUCKY

Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores,
Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips
Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.--
Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits
Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,--
Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,--
An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.

THE BLUE BIRD

From morn till noon upon the window-pane
The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
And all the afternoon the blustering gales
Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
The rose, near which the lily bloom lay slain,
Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
On which the sullen slug left slimy trails--
Meseemed the sun would never shine again.
Then in the drench, long, loud and full of cheer,--
A skyey herald tabarded in blue,--
A bluebird bugled ... and at once a bow
Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
God's sapphire spaces crystallising through
The strata'd clouds in azure tremolo.

QUATRAINS

POETRY

Who hath beheld the goddess face to face,
Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go
Climbing lone mountains towards her temple's place,
Weighed with song's sweet, inexorable woe.

THE UNIMAGINATIVE

Each form of beauty's but the new disguise
Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be;
Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,
Never the Earth's wild fairy-dance shall see.

MUSIC

God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled,
With awful symphonies of flood and fire,
God's name on rocking Chaos--world by world
Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre.

THE THREE ELEMENTS

They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet
Sonorous-sandalled with majestic awe;
In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat,
Blowing the trumpets of God's wrath and law.

ROME

Above the circus of the world she sat,
Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride:
Fierce nations, upon whom she sneered and spat,
Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died.

ON READING THE LIFE OF HAROUN ER RESHID

Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth
He steals, with golden justice for the poor:
Within his palace--you shall know the truth!--
A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door.

MNEMOSYNE

In classic beauty, cold, immaculate,
A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands,
Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate,
That sorrow o'er dead roses in her hands.

BEAUTY

High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
Unknown she takes her unassuming place
At Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour
Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face.

THE STARS

These--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame,
In which he reads his blessing or his curse--
Are syllables with which God speaks his name
In the vast utterance of the universe.

ECHO

Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.

ADVENTURERS

Seemingly over the hill-tops,
Possibly under the hills,
A tireless wing that never drops,
And a song that never stills.

Epics heard on the stars' lips?
Lyrics read in the dew?--
To sing the song at our finger-tips,
And live the world anew!

Cavaliers of the Cortes kind,
Bold and stern and strong,--
And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind
To sing a new-world's song!

Sailing seas of the silver morn,
Winds of the balm and spice,
To put the old-world art to scorn
At the price of any price!

Danger, death, but the hope high!
God's, if the purpose fail!
Into the deeds of a vaster sky
Sailing a dauntless sail.