Chapter III

They lie at peace, the darkness fills
The hollow of their empty gaze.
The dust falls in their ears and stills
The echo of our fruitless days;

The earth takes back their baser part;
The brain no longer bounds the dream;
The broken vial of the heart
Lets out its passion in a stream.

And in this silence that they have
One inner vision grows more bright;
The Dead remember in the grave
As I remember here to-night.
(_1890._)

_Sonnet._

Since childhood have I dragged my life along
The dusty purlieus and approach of Death,
Hoping the years would bring me easier breath,
And turn my painful sighing to a song;
But, ah, the years have done me cruel wrong,
For they have robbed me of that happy faith;
Still in the world of men I move a wraith,
Who to the shadow-world not yet belong.

Too long, indeed, I linger here and take
The room of others but to droop and sigh;
Wherefore, O spinning sisters, for my sake,
No more the little tangled knots untie;
But all the skein, I do beseech you, break,
And spin a stronger thread more perfectly.

_Song._

Oh for the wings of a dove,
To fly far away from my own soul,
Reach and be merged in the vast whole
Heaven of infinite Love!

Oh that I were as the rain,
To fall and be lost in the great sea,
One with the waves, till the drowned Me
Might not be severed again!

Infinite arms of the air,
Surrounding the stars and without strife
Blending our life with their large life,
Lift me and carry me there!

_A Classic Landscape._

This wood might be some Grecian heritage
Of the antique world, this hoary ilex wood;
So broad the shade, so deep the solitude,
So grey the air where Oread fancies brood.

Beyond, the fields are tall with purple sage;
The sky bends downward like a purple sheet—
A purple wind-filled sail—i’ the noonday heat;
And past the river shine the fields of wheat.

O tender wheat, O starry saxifrage,
O deep-red tulips, how the fields are fair!
Far off the mountains pierce the quivering air,
Ash-coloured, mystical, remote, and bare.

How far they look, the Mountains of Mirage
Or northern Hills of Heaven, how far away!
In front the long paulonia-blossoms sway
From leafless boughs across that dreamy grey.

O world, how worthy of a golden age!
How might Theocritus have sung and found
The Oreads here, the Naiads gathering round,
Their pallid locks still dripping to the ground!

For me, O world, thou art how mere a stage,
Whereon the human soul must act alone,
In a dead language, with the plot unknown,
Nor learn what happens when the play is done.

_Old Songs._

This song I wrote—ah me, how long ago!
When up the stair of Heaven and down again
(For even then I did not long remain),
With happy feet I used to come and go.

This ode I sang beneath a laurel-bough
Where I had sought for Truth among the dead;
This little verse (and still the page is red),
To soothe some easier pang forgotten now.

I took the dew of lilies grown apart;
The scanty wine of Amphoras; and, bright
And clear, the blood that flows from trivial scars;

But with the bitter ink of mine own heart
I have not written and I must not write,
Let rust and acid dim the eternal stars.

_Versailles._

“_Le monde est l’œuvre d’un grand Architecte qui est mort avant de
l’avoir achevé._”

B. CONSTANT.

The king is dead who planned these terraces;
The turf has grown to meadow-grass again;
The lake is rank beneath the untended trees,
And down the mouldering statues drips the rain.

The king is dead. Ay, he, with all his kind,
Is absolutely vanished, lost, and gone,
And not a trace of him remains behind;
But the forsaken palace lingers on.

How desolate! The weary waters drowned
In mist, the empty alleys chill and frore,
The vast and melancholy pleasure-ground
Where the forgotten monarch comes no more.

How like an older Folly, planned no less
For beauty, where a greater monarch trod,
And now, grown old, in its extreme distress
Abandoned by the long-departed God!

_Oct. 1888._

_Melancholia._

(_For an engraving by Albrecht Dürer._)

So many years I toiled like Caliban
To fetch the stones and earth to build my fane;
So many years I thought before the brain
Reluctant would divulge the final plan.

Years upon years to forge the invented tools
Novel, as all my temple should be new;
Years upon years to fashion and to hew
The stones that should astound a world of fools.

Now shall I build? _Cui bono?_—lo, the salt
Hath lost its savour and I have no will:
What reck I now of gate or dome or vault?

Among the ruins of the thing undone
I sit and ask myself _Cui bono?_ till
The sun sets, and a bat flies past the sun.

_Under the Trees._

I lay full length near lonely trees
Heart-full of sighing silences;
So far as eyes could see all round
There was no life, no stir, no sound.

I thought no more down in the grass
Of all that must be or that was;
My weary brain forgot to ache,
My heart was still and did not break.

So close I lay to earth’s large breast
I could have dreamed myself at rest;
Only that then the grass must be
Above instead of under me.

Wherefore, I thought, should I regain
My anxious life that is so vain?
Here will I lie, forgetting strife,
Till death shall end this death-in-life.

Ah, no: because, O coward will,
Thy destined work thou must fulfil,
Because no soul, be it great or small,
Can rise alone or lonely fall.

Therefore the old war must not cease,
The hard old inner war of peace,
With heart and body and mind and soul
Each striving for a different goal.

Therefore I will arise and bear
The burden all men everywhere
Have borne and must bear, and bear yet,
Till the end come when we forget.

_Fire-flies._

I.

To-night I watch the fire-flies rise
And shine along the air;
They float beneath the starry skies,
As mystical and fair,
Over the hedge where dimly glows
The deep gold of the Persian rose.

I watch the fire-flies drift and float
Each is a dreamy flame,
Star-coloured each, a starry mote,
Like stars not all the same;
But whiter some, or faintly green,
Or wannest blue was ever seen.

They cross and cross and disappear,
And then again they glow;
Still drifting faintly there and here,
Still crossing to and fro,
As though in all their wandering
They wove a wide and shining thing.

II.

O fire-flies, would I knew the weft
You have the weaving of!
For, as I watch you move, bereft
Of thought or will or love,
I fear, O listless flames, you weave
The fates of men who strive and grieve.

The web of life, the weft of dreams,
You weave it ceaselessly;
A strange and filmy thing it seems,
And made in mystery
Of wind and darkness threaded through
With light these heavens never knew.

O pale, mysterious, wandering fire,
Born of the earth, alive
With the same breath that I respire,
Who know and think and strive;
You circle round me, stranger far
Than any charm of any star!