Chapter III

Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?
Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass?
But, once deceived, poor mortals, hasten hither
To watch the world in Fancy’s magic glass.

Truly your city, O men, hath no abiding!
Built on the sand it crumbles, as it must;
And as you build, above your praise and chiding,
The columns fall to crush you to the dust.

But fashion’d in the mirage of a dream,
Having nor life nor sense, a bubble of nought,
The enchanted City of the Things that Seem
Keeps till the end of time the eternal Thought.

Forswear to-day, forswearing joy and sorrow,
Forswear to-day, O man, and take to-morrow.

_In Affliction._

I watch the happier people of the house
Come in and out, and talk, and go their ways;
I sit and gaze at them; I cannot rouse
My heavy mind to share their busy days.

I watch them glide, like skaters on a stream,
Across the brilliant surface of the world.
But I am underneath: they do not dream
How deep below the eddying flood is whirl’d.

They cannot come to me, nor I to them;
But, if a mightier arm could reach and save,
Should I forget the tide I had to stem?
Should I, like these, ignore the abysmal wave?

Yes! in the radiant air how could I know
How black it is, how fast it is, below.

_Remembrance._

O night of Death, O night that bringest all!
Night full of dreams and large with promises,
O night that holdest on thy shadowy knees
Sleep for all fevers, hope for every thrall;

Bring thou to my belovèd, when I die,
The memory of our enchanted past;
So let her turn, remembering me at last,
And I shall hear and triumph where I lie.

Then let my face, pale as a waning moon,
Rise on thy dark and be again as dear;
Let my dead voice find its forgotten tune
And strike again as sweetly on her ear
As when, upon my lips, one far-off June,
Thy name, O Death! she could not brook to hear.

_Art and Life._

(A SONNET.)

When autumn comes, my orchard trees alone
Shall bear no fruit to deck the reddening year—
When apple gatherers climb the branches sere
Only on mine no harvest shall be grown.
For when the pearly blossom first was blown,
I filled my hands with delicate buds and dear,
I dipped them in thine icy waters clear,
O well of Art! and turned them all to stone.

Therefore, when winter comes, I shall not eat
Of mellow apples such as others prize:
I shall go hungry in a magic spring!—
All round my head and bright before mine eyes
The barren, strange, eternal blossoms meet,
While I, not less an-hungered, gaze and sing.

_Temple Garlands._

There is a temple in my heart
Where moth or rust can never come,
A temple swept and set apart
To make my soul a home;

And round about the doors of it
Hang garlands that for ever last,
That gathered once are always sweet;
The roses of the Past!

_Pallor._

The great white lilies in the grass
Are pallid as the smile of death;
For they remember still—alas!—
The graves they sprang from underneath.

The angels up in heaven are pale—
For all have died, when all is said;
Nor shall the lutes of Eden avail
To let them dream they are not dead.

_Song._

I have lost my singing-voice;
My heyday’s over.
No more I lilt my cares and joys,
But keep them under cover.
My heyday’s gone:
I sit and look on.
Life rushes past with a sob and a moan.

Wherefore should I care to tell
The pang that rends me?
If it leave me all is well;
And if it last it ends me.
The tears that rise
To my entrancèd eyes
Drop for a world full of hunger and sighs.

_Personality._

(A SESTINA.)

As one who goes between high garden walls,
Along a road that never has an end,
With still the empty way behind, in front,
Which he must pace for evermore alone—
So, even so, is Life to every soul,
Walled in with barriers that no Love can break.

And yet, ah me! how often would we break
Through every fence, and overleap the walls,
And link ourselves to some belovèd soul,
Hearing her answering voice until the end,
Going her chosen way, no more alone,
But happy comrades, seeing Heaven in front.

But, ah, the barrier’s high! and still my front
I dash against the stones in vain, nor break
A passage through, but still remain alone:
Hearing sometimes across the garden walls
A voice the wind brings over, or an end
Of song that sinks like dew into my soul.

Since others sing, let me forget, my Soul,
How dreary-long the road goes on in front,
And tow’rds how flat, inevitable an end.
Come, let me look for daisies, let me break
The gillyflowers that shelter in the walls—
But, ah! it is so sad to be alone!

For ever, irremediably alone,
Not only I or thou, but every soul,
Each cased and fastened with invisible walls.
Shall we go mad with it? or bear a front
Of desperate courage doomed to fail and break?
Or trudge in sullen patience till the end?

Ah, hope of every heart, there _is_ an end!
An end when each shall be no more alone,
But either dead, or strong enough to break
This prisoning self and find that larger Soul
(Neither of thee nor me) enthroned in front
Of Time, beyond the world’s remotest walls!

I trust the end and sing within my walls,
Sing all alone, to bid some listening soul
Wait till the day break, watch for me in front!

“_Sois par le cœur à ce qui passe et par
la pensée à ce qui demeure._”

LA LÉGENDE DIVINE.

Stars.

_The Stars._

(To J. D.)

SESTINA.

Stars in the sky, fold upon fold of stars!
And still beyond the stars those gulfs of air
Flecked soft and pale with milkier stars beyond,
Millions of miles above our dusky world:
Pale stars, whose light down the unplumbed abyss
Falls, ere it reach us, through a thousand years.

There was a God in the unwritten years
Who lit the flaming order of the stars:
Let there be Light! He said, and lo! the abyss
Grew live and tremulous with rustling air,
Grew bright with stars and moons, and each a world
Shining, a light to other worlds beyond.

O were you even as we, bright orbs beyond
Who shine and shed your glory all these years,
Not light, but smoke would fall from every world;
Smoke, black with human evil, black, O stars
With His neglect who lit the sparkling air;
But left within—unformed and void—the Abyss.

O stars that dance indifferent in the Abyss,
Our Earth may seem as bright to you beyond;
Yourselves, to them that breathe your delicate air,
As desolate; Life in the Lunar years
As long; and the straight rivers of the stars
And primal snows divide as drear a world.

And men, perchance, as we, in every world
Fill with their dreams the bright and vast abyss:
A Christ has died in vain on all the stars,
And each, unhappy, seeks a star beyond
Where God rewards the dead through endless years....
And so we circle, dumb, in the silent air.

What shall we find more holy in all the air?
Lo, when the first huge, incandescent world
Burst out of Chaos and flamed a million years,
Until, with too much flaming, thro’ the abyss
Flake after flake dropped off and flamed beyond:—
That was the God who lit the host of stars!

For Light, the stars; for breath, the realms of air;
For Hope, beyond this dark and suffering world,
Nought in the Abyss, nor ought in the endless years.

_Etruscan Tombs._

I.

To think the face we love shall ever die,
And be the indifferent earth, and know us not!
To think that one of us shall live to cry
On one long buried in a distant spot!

O wise Etruscans, faded in the night
Yourselves, with scarce a rose-leaf on your trace;
You kept the ashes of the dead in sight,
And shaped the vase to seem the vanished face.

But, O my Love, my life is such an urn
That tender memories mould with constant touch,
Until the dust and earth of it they turn
To your dear image that I love so much:

A sacred urn, filled with the sacred past,
That shall recall you while the clay shall last.

II.

These cinerary urns with human head
And human arms that dangle at their sides,
The earliest potters made them for their dead,
To keep the mother’s ashes or the bride’s.

O rude attempt of some long-spent despair—
With symbol and with emblem discontent—
To keep the dead alive and as they were,
The actual features and the glance that went!

The anguish of your art was not in vain,
For lo, upon these alien shelves removed
The sad immortal images remain,
And show that once they lived and once you loved.

But oh, when I am dead may none for me
Invoke so drear an immortality!

III.

Beneath the branches of the olive yard
Are roots where cyclamen and violet grow
Beneath the roots the earth is deep and hard
And there a king was buried long ago.

The peasants digging deeply in the mould
Cast up the autumn soil about the place,
And saw a gleam of unexpected gold,
And underneath the earth a living face.

With sleeping lids and rosy lips he lay
Among the wreaths and gems that mark the king
One moment; then a little dust and clay
Fell shrivelled over wreath and urn and ring.

A carven slab recalls his name and deeds,
Writ in a language no man living reads.