Chapter IV

Sometimes when I think of love
I remember how you stooped down from heaven,
Because they had told you I was unforgiven,
To take half of the storm, and share the stripe
An angel in hell with her guttersnipe.
I am thinking then of your lighted face
And your hands and the way your fingers lace
As you sit quietly reading a book.
Perhaps I move and you suddenly look
Across the room and the soul in your eyes
Is bright as it looks with the old surprise
Changing for ever, for ever the same
And you break my heart as you speak my name.
You must not wonder, you will not reprove
If sometimes I dare not think of love.

OLD.

So old, so changed, and odd
Even as God,
I am, so odd and old,
That I am bitter cold
In heart and limb
Like him.

I might in heaven be,
Even as He.
So lonely and so rare
Beyond the utmost prayer
My spirit weighs,
Dead days.

Or I might work in hell
His miracle.
Changing from joy to tears,
To quiet all the years,
With icy rod,
Like God.

I might immortal be
Even as He.
Saying, as heaven saith,
What Victory, Oh death,
What sting can save,
Oh grave?

As I, alone and dumb,
What doth not come
Ever, He waits to see
And surely, waiting, he
Must pray ah pray! to die
Even as I.

THE SONG OF THE GAMBUCINOS.

The little houses in the street
And the warm blinds at night,
Outside the copper on his beat
And the moon so white, so white.

They know what we shall never know,
See what we cannot see,
The steady lamplit ways that go
To the quiet cemetery.

They have not any fear at all
Of life and of its end.
They hear church bells, their children call,
Their wife and death their friend.

But for us the moon is white, so white
It drowns us and it stings,
And we must fly throughout the night
Because of dangerous things.

FEBRUARY 14.

Let’s be done with talking,
Words are half a snare,
That fools use for stalking
What was never there.

Let’s be done with weeping,
Tears are but a sign
That a doom is creeping
On what was divine.

Why be broken-hearted?
Time to break the heart
If we should be parted
And not care we part.

Dear, the wind is over
In the world outside.
I was once your lover,
You were once my bride.

Let’s go out together.
In the quiet air,
We may find each other
Waiting as we were.

PIERROT.

My friend Pierrot your sleeves are far too long.
Look! I can hardly find at all your hands.
And all your cotton tunic is cut wrong,
And what your eyes mean no one understands.

Ah yes, Pierrette, my sleeves are far too long.
Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot find my hands,
But better so than Pierrot did you wrong
By telling you what no one understands.

My friend Pierrot you fear to take the light,
Look! I can hardly see at all your face.
And what I see, Pierrot is very white.
Are you afraid? Ashamed? or in disgrace?

Ah yes, Pierrette, I dare not take the light.
Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot see my face.
My candle died with love, and in the night
Oh! Harlequin, Pierrette, is my disgrace.

My friend Pierrot it seems that things go ill
With you. Look! I can hardly hear your word,
And the dark shadow round grows darker still,
And a new voice which is not yours is heard.

Ah yes, Pierrette, it seems that things go ill.
Ah yes, Pierrette, you cannot hear my word.
And the dark shadow which grows darker still
Is death, Pierrette, of which you have not heard.

THE DEAD MAN IN THE POOL.

Only a glance it was,
Only a word!
What a romance it was
All but absurd!

All but absurd, you see,
Yes but not quite.
There’s one more word you see
“Death” we must write!

She had the knack of it
--Less than a kiss,
And for the lack of it
Look he is this.

O what a king he was
(Drowned in a pool),
What a brave thing he was
O what a fool!

While all the rest of us
Struggle to fame,
Here is the best of us
Dead with his shame.

Shame? Oh I wonder now.
What do you say?
If you should blunder now
Choose me your way!

If you’d thrown hope away;
Well would you care
Through life to grope a way?
Or would you dare

Take up the lot of it
Life, love and fame,
Make a clean shot of it
Into the flame?

Ah it was brave of him
Let them cry “shame.”
Life made no slave of him!
But you’ll exclaim,

Was she worth trying for?
He thought her so.
Was she worth dying for?
Yes, and then no.

“No,” for a wiser man.
“No,” for a less.
But the heart cries “Amen,”
When he says “yes.”

There in the pool he was
Just a dead thing.
O what a fool he was,
O what a king!

DEAD LOVER.

Tell me, dead lover, you who broke my heart
(O dead indeed, since love himself is dead).
Need I remember that we came to part,
May I forget to whom and why you fled?

Tell me, dead lover, since the grave is strong,
And those who sleep are cured of joy and pain,
And now no love may reach you, do I wrong
If I begin to love you all again?

And see, dead lover, since the shadows fall
And nothing now is false and nothing true.
Might I not dream (you would not know at all)
That I, O love, was loved once more by you.

And since, dead lover, death defeats your pride,
And ere it dreamed of pride my love awoke,
O let me think, it was because you died,
And not because you left me, my heart broke.

THE GODS OF THE COPY-BOOK HEADINGS.

A REPLY.

Fenris the wolf, and Jörmungand the snake
In the slime and the swamp remorseless wait.
For not the years nor human hopes can break
Valhalla’s sentence thus pronounced by Fate.

“These gods that are the children of men’s dreams--
Virtue and honour, courage and the songs
Men sing about their hearthstones--stolen gleams
In the poor heart unbroken by its wrongs,

“These gods, of man’s refusal of the beast
The half pathetic, wholly fleeting sign
Who in that tenderness are gods the least
Where human weakness finds them most divine,

“These pitiful gods, fabric of mankind’s tears
A dream of what all human hearts have wanted
The vision at the end of all the years
The holy ghost that half the world has haunted,

“These gods are mortal as the heart that shaped them
And in that hour when mankind’s heart must break
These gods who only by that heart escaped them
Fall to the wolf and Jörmungand the snake.”

Fate pauses, but from Hela’s halls is heard
A voice is young when all the gods are dead.
Balder the beautiful has one more word
The word that even Fate must leave unsaid.

“True they depart the half-gods, and the snake
And Fenris come. But in the heart’s defection
I, Balder, bound in Hell for that heart’s sake
I am the life and I the resurrection.

“I, love, being loosed, will take my harp up--so--
Singing what all the world at last will learn
‘The devils come because the half-gods go
But in the end the gods, the gods return.’”

WHEELS 1919.

Why d’you write about Frascati’s
You who from the balcony leaning
’Neath the lure that was Astarte’s
Find a negroid devil grinning.

Changed indeed and almost stupid
Yielding to analysis
Now a Piccadilly cupid
Hanging on a painted kiss.

Now a toy in two dimensions
Operated by a string
In your hand, whose interventions
Set the object capering.

You who at the higher level
Know love as he truly is
Not the fair Assyrian devil,
Not the poor idolatries,

Of the savage, not the crazes
Say of Shelley, and his set:
But you find him (as your phrase is)
Palm to palm in quiet sweat.

That’s a way, O brother brother
A new way for verse to move
There’s an older and another
Will you listen? way of love.

I from that same terrace waiting
For the music to begin
“Amoureuse” anticipating
Watched a boy who blundered in.

Slim he was, a little stooping
At the shoulders as it seemed,
Eyes on which the lids were drooping
Seeing only what he dreamed.

Where he came was noise and clatter,
But the pandemonium
Either didn’t seem to matter
Where he stood or else grew dumb.

And the waltz the band was creaking,
Like a cluster, round his head
Changed to cry “What’s music seeking
Save what he has left unsaid.”

And like flowers, bourgeois faces
Overtaken by the tune,
Pilfered unimagined graces
From an unimagined June.

And, when once again the Babel
Rose, though we had never stirred,
There between us at the table
At Frascati’s was the third.

What’s the good of all this antic
You’ll impatiently exclaim,
Still incurably romantic
Still incurably the same.

Only this--that at Frascati’s
If one does not wash one’s hands
That old magic was Astarte’s
Goes, before one understands.

THE WELL.

At full afternoon slowly the branches
Stirred as of old and fragrant with flowers
Touched with a breath of wind look down and wonder
To where--far below--is the delicate water.

Here should be peace as was peace and splendour
Of hearts’ first stirrings, the eye to the hills
Turned, the call of the perilous margins
Life just beginning, but life well begun.
Here by the well we played (you remember)
(Then too the grasses grew at the edges
Tempting small hands but tempt now no longer)
Here by the well we dreamed after playing.

Have you forgotten (or has death no mercy)
How bright the days were and how the evening
Softer than sleep laid her mysterious
Hands on the garden soothing and changing.
Here at the well side we loved after dreaming
Since we had played by it, since we had dreamed.
Here at the well side love that was wakened
Sank like a stone, but leaving no ripple.

Here are our shapes that play dream love quarrel,
Here are our dreams (and if there were dreamers,
If we were not like our visions a dream)
All is not over--is all then over?

Here is the well and the delicate water
Far below gleaming, the starred white branches
Fragrant with flowers. Here is the noontide,
Even the grasses grow at the edges.
What then is gone? If we were the dreamers
(And not a dream) then all must be over.
I an old man cold, fruitless and lonely,
Watch by the water, which you cannot see.

But if we two are dreams of a dreamer,
All is not over, and here together
Age falls from me, and from you the mantle
Death seemed to cast, and here by the well side
Lifted again is the voice of your singing,
Golden again are the perilous margins,
Sweet are your eyes and young and immortal
Our hearts are set to the day and the hills.

JUDAS.

Not I, oh Christ, not I betrayed thee
But He was traitor, He who made thee
Born of a village carpenter
With such immortal longings stir
As stretched beyond the world and found
In God himself the final wound.
Through me thou wast by soldiers taken
By Him, by Him on the Cross forsaken.

THE NIGHT.

Be quiet bird
Be silent all
That e’er were heard
And cease to call.

Drop perfume rose
And flowers white
Put off your shows
For see ’tis night.

Soft creatures slow
Begin to pass,
And thousands grow
From out the grass.

With deep low whirr
The air is full
And through the fir
The moon shines cool.

There is no pain
Sorrow is dead
Slow Charles’ wain
Wheels overhead.

There is no grief
All things have ease
No bough or leaf
Stirs on the trees.

OTHER SONNETS.

THREE SONNETS OF LOVE.