Chapter VI: Act IV (2)

Whatever dark may shroud thee
And hide thy stars away,
With vigil sweet his wings shall beat
About thee till the day.

VI.

AS YOU ARE

Dark hair--dark eyes--
But heart of sun,
Pity and hope
That rill and run
With flowing fleet
To heal the defeat
Of all Life has undone.

Dark hair--dark eyes--
But soul as clear,
Trusty and fair
As e'er drew near
To clasp its mate
And enter the gate
Of Love that casts out fear.

Dark hair--dark eyes--
But, there is seen
In them the most
That earth can mean;
The most that death
Can bring--or breath
_There_--in the bright Unseen!

VII.

AT AMALFI

Come to the window, you who are mine.
Waken! the night is calling.
Sit by me here--with the moon's fair shine
Into your deep eyes falling.

The sea afar is a fearful gloom;
Lean from the casement, listen!
Anear, it breaks with a faery spume,
Spraying the moon-path's glisten.

The little white town below lies deep
As eternity in slumber.
O, you who are mine, how a glance can reap
Beauties beyond all number!

"Amalfi!" say it--as the stars set
O'er yon far promontory.
"Amalfi!" ... Shall we ever forget
Even Above this glory?

No; as twin sails at anchor ride,
Our spirits rock together
On a sea of love--lit as this tide
With tenderest star-weather!

And the quick ecstasy within
Your breast is against me beating.
Amalfi!... Never a night shall win
From God again such fleeting.

Ah--but the dawn is redd'ning up
Over the moon low-dying.
Come, come away--we have drunk the cup:
Ours is the dream undying!

VIII.

ON THE PACIFIC

A storm broods far on the foam of the deep;
The moon-path gleams before.
A day and a night, a night and a day,
And the way, love, will be o'er.

Six thousand wandering miles we have come
And never a sail have seen.
The sky above and the sea below
And the drifting clouds between.

Yet in our hearts unheaving hope
And light and joy have slept.
Nor ever lonely has seemed the wave
Tho' heaving wild it leapt.

For there is talismanic might
Within our vows of love
To breathe us over all seas of life--
On to that Port above

Where the great Captain of all ships
Shall anchor them or send
Them forth on a vaster Voyage, yea,
On one that shall not end.

And upon _that_ we two, I think,
Together still shall sail.
O may it be, my own, or may
We perish in death's gale!

THE WINDS

The East Wind is a Bedouin,
And Nimbus is his steed;
Out of the dusk with the lightning's thin
Blue scimitar he flies afar,
Whither his rovings lead.
The Dead Sea waves
And Egypt caves
Of mummied silence laugh
When he mounts to quench the Siroc's stench,
And to wrench
From his clutch the tyrant's staff.

The West Wind is an Indian brave
Who scours the Autumn's crest.
Dashing the forest down as a slave
He tears the leaves from its limbs and weaves
A maelstrom for his breast.
Out of the night
Crying to fright
The earth he swoops to spoil--
There is furious scathe in the whirl of his wrath,
In his path
There is misery and moil.

The North Wind is a Viking--cold
And cruel, armed with death!
Born in the doomful deep of the old
Ice Sea that froze ere Ymir rose
From Niflheim's ebon breath.
And with him sail
Snow, Frost, and Hail,
Thanes mighty as their lord,
To plunder the shores of Summer's stores--
And his roar's
Like the sound of Chaos' horde.

The South Wind is a Troubadour;
The Spring, his serenade.
Over the mountain, over the moor,
He blows to bloom from the winter's tomb
Blossom and leaf and blade.
He ripples the throat
Of the lark with a note
Of lilting love and bliss,
And the sun and the moon, the night and the noon,
Are a-swoon--
When he woos them with his kiss.

THE DAY-MOON

So wan, so unavailing,
Across the vacant day-blue dimly trailing!

Last night, sphered in thy shining,
A Circe--mystic destinies divining;

To-day but as a feather
Torn from a seraph's wing in sinful weather,

Down-drifting from the portals
Of Paradise, unto the land of mortals.

Yet do I feel thee awing
My heart with mystery, as thy updrawing

Moves thro' the tides of Ocean
And leaves lorn beaches barren of its motion;

Or strands upon near shallows
The wreck whose weirded form at night unhallows

The fisher maiden's prayers--
"For _him_!--that storms may take not unawares!"

So wan, so unavailing,
Across the vacant day-blue dimly trailing!

But Night shall come atoning
Thy phantom life thro' day, and high enthroning

Thee in her chambers arrassed
With star-hieroglyphs, leave thee unharassed

To glide with silvery passion,
Till in earth's shadow swept thy glowings ashen.

TO A SINGING WARBLER

"Beauty! all--all--is beauty?"
Was ever a bird so wrong!
"No young in the nest, no mate, no duty?"
Ribald! is this your song?

"Glad it is ended," are you?
The Spring and its nuptial fear?
"Freedom is better than love?" beware you
There will be May next year!

"Beauty!" again? still "beauty"?
Wait till the winter comes!
Till kestrel and hungry kite seek booty
And there are so few crumbs!

Wait? nay, fling it unbidden,
The false little song you prate!
Too sweet are its fancies to be chidden,
E'en of the rudest fate!

TO THE SEA

Art thou enraged, O sea, with the blue peace
Of heaven, so to uplift thine armèd waves,
Thy billowing rebellion 'gainst its ease,
And with Tartarean mutter from cold caves,
From shuddering profundities where shapes
Of awe glide through entangled leagues of ooze,
To hoot thy watery omens evermore,
And evermore thy moanings interfuse
With seething necromancy and mad lore?

Or, dost thou labour with the drifting bones
Of countless dead, thou mighty Alchemist,
Within whose stormy crucible the stones
Of sunk primordial shores, granite and schist,
Are crumbled by thine all-abrasive beat?
With immemorial chanting to the moon,
And cosmic incantation dost thou crave
Rest to be found not till thy wild be strewn
Frigid and desert over earth's last grave?

Thou seemest with immensity mad, blind--
With raving deaf, with wandering forlorn;
Parent of Demogorgon whose dire mind
Is night and earthquake, shapeless shame and scorn
Of the o'ermounting birth of Harmony.
Bound in thy briny bed and gnawing earth
With foamy writhing and fierce-panted tides,
Thou art as Fate in torment of a dearth
Of black disaster and destruction's strides.

And how thou dost drive silence from the world,
Incarnate Motion of all mystery!
Whose waves are fury-wings, whose winds are hurled
Whither thy Ghost tempestuous can see
A desolate apocalypse of death.
Oh, how thou dost drive silence from the world,
With emerald overflowing, waste on waste
Of flashing susurration, dashed and swirled
'Gainst isles and continents and airs o'erspaced!

Nay, frustrate Hope art thou of the Unknown,
Gathered from primal mist and firmament;
A surging shape of Life's unfathomed moan,
Whelming humanity with fears unmeant.
Yet do I love thee, O, above all fear,
And loving thee unconquerably trust
The runes that from thy ageless surfing start
Would read, were they revealed, gust upon gust,
That Immortality is might of heart!

THE DEAD GODS

I thought I plunged into that dire Abyss
Which is Oblivion, the house of Death.
I thought there blew upon my soul the breath
Of time that was but never more can be.

Ten thousand years I thought I lay within
Its Void, blind, deaf, and motionless, until--
Though with no eye nor ear--I felt the thrill
Of seeing, heard its phantoms move and sigh.

First one beside me spoke, in tones that told
He once had been a god,--"Persephone,
Tear from thy brow its withered crown, for we
Are king and queen of Tartarus no more;

And that wan, shrivelled sceptre in thy hand,
Why dost thou clasp it still? Cast it away,
For now it hath no virtue that can sway
Dull shades or drive the Furies to their spoil.

Cast it away, and give thy palm to mine:
Perchance some unobliterated spark
Of memory shall warm this dismal Dark.
Perchance--vain! vain! love could not light such gloom."

He sank.... Then in great ruin by him moved
Another as in travail of some thought
Near unto birth; and soon from lips distraught
By aged silence, fell, with hollow woe:

"Ah, Pluto, dost thou, one time lord of Styx
And Acheron make moan of night and cold?
Were we upon Olympus as of old
Laughter of thee would rock its festal height.

But think, think thee of me, to whom or gloom
Or cold were more unknown than impotence!
See the unhurlèd thunderbolt brought hence
To mock me when I dream I still am Jove!"

Too much it was: I withered in the breath;
And lay again ten thousand lifeless years;
And then my soul shook, woke--and saw three biers
Chiselled of solid night majestically.

The forms outlaid upon them were unwound
As with the silence of eternity.
Numbing repose dwelt o'er them like a sea,
That long hath lost tide, wave and roar, in death.

"Ptah, Ammon, and Osiris are their names,"
A spirit hieroglyphed unto my soul,
"Ptah, Ammon, and Osiris--they who stole
The heart of Egypt from the God of gods:

"Aye, they! and these;" pointing to many wraiths
That stood around--Baal, Ormuzd, Indra, all
Whom frightened ignorance and sin's appall
Had given birth, close-huddled in despair.

Their eyes were fixed upon a cloven slope
Down whose descent still other forms a-fresh
From earth were drawn, by the unceasing mesh
Of Time to their irrevocable end.

"They are the gods," one said--"the gods whom men
Still taunt with wails for help."--Then a deep light
Upbore me from the Gulf, and thro' its might
I heard the worlds cry, "God alone is God!"

AT WINTER'S END

The weedy fallows winter-worn,
Where cattle shiver under sodden hay.
The plough-lands long and lorn--
The fading day.

The sullen shudder of the brook,
And winds that wring the writhen trees in vain
For drearier sound or look--
The lonely rain.

The crows that train o'er desert skies
In endless caravans that have no goal
But flight--where darkness flies--
From Pole to Pole.

The sombre zone of hills around
That shrink in misty mournfulness from sight,
With sunset aureoles crowned--
Before the night.

APRIL

A laughter of wind and a leaping of cloud,
And April, oh, out under the blue!
The brook is awake and the blackbird loud
In the dew!

But how does the robin high in the beech,
Beside the wood with its shake and toss,
Know it--the frenzy of bluets to reach
Thro' the moss!

And where did the lark ever learn his speech?
Up wildly sweet he's over the mead!
Is more than the rapture of earth can teach
In its creed?

I never shall know--I never shall care!
'Tis, oh, enough to live and to love!
To laugh and warble and dream and dare
Are to prove!

AUGUST GUESTS

The wind slipt over the hill
And down the valley.
He dimpled the cheek of the rill
With a cooling kiss.
Then hid on the bank a-glee
And began to rally
The rushes--Oh,
I love the wind for this!

A cloud blew out of the west
And spilt his shower
Upon the lily-bud crest
And the clematis.
Then over the virgin corn
Besprinkled a dower
Of dew-gems--And,
I love the cloud for this!

AUTUMN

I know her not by fallen leaves
Or resting heaps of hay;
Or by the sheathing mists of mauve
That soothe the fiery day.

I know her not by plumping nuts,
By redded hips and haws,
Or by the silence hanging sad
Under the wind's sere pause.

But by her sighs I know her well--
They are like Sorrow's breath;
And by this longing, strangely still,
For something after death.

THE WORLD

_Vox desperans._

The World is a wind--on which are blown
All mysteries that are.
Out of a Void it sprang--and to
A Void shall spring, afar.

_Vox sperans._

The World is Visible God--who is
Its Soul invisible.
There is no Void beyond that He
Abiding fills not full.

TO THE DOVE

1

Thy mellow passioning amid the leaves
Trembles around me in the summer dusk
That falls along the oatlands' sallow sheaves
And haunts above the runnel's voice a-husk
With plashy willow and bold-wading reed.
The solitude's dim spell it breaketh not,
But softer mourns unto me from the mead
Than airs within the dead primrose's heart,
Or breath of silences in dells begot
To soothe some grief-wan maid with love a-mort.

2

On many sylvan eves of childhood thou
Didst woo my homeward path with tenderness,
Woo till the awing owlet ceased to cow
With his chill screech of quavering distress.
At phantom midnight wakened I have heard
Thy mated dreams from the wind-eerie elm,
And as a potion medicined and myrrhed,
As an enchantment's runic utterance,
It would draw sleep back to her lulling realm
Over my lids till day should disentrance.

3

A priestess art thou of Simplicity,
Who hath one fane--the heaven above thy nest;
One incense--love; one stealing litany
Of peace from rivered vale and upland crest.
Yea, thou art Hers, who makes prayer of the breeze,
Hope of the cool upwelling from sweet soils,
Faith of the dark'ning distance, charities
Of vesper scents, and of the glow-worm's throb
Joy whose first leaping rends the care-wound coils
That would earth of its heavenliness rob.

4

But few, how few her worshippers! For we
Cast at a myriad shrines our souls, to rise
Beliefless, unanointed, bound not free,
To sacrificing a vain sacrifice!
Let thy lone innocence then quickly null
Within our veins doubt-led and wrong desire
Or drugging knowledge that but fills o'erfull
Of feverous mystery the days we drain!
Be thy warm notes like an Orphean lyre
To lead us to life's Arcady again!

AT TINTERN ABBEY

(JUNE, 1903)

O Tintern, Tintern! evermore my dreams
Troubled of thy grave beauty shall be born;
Thy crumbling loveliness and ivy streams
Shall speak to me for ever, from this morn;
The wind-wild daws about thy arches drifting,
Clouds sweeping o'er thy ruin to the sea,
Gray Tintern, all the hills about thee, lifting
Their misty waving woodland verdancy!

The centuries that draw thee to the earth
In envy of thy desolated charm,
The summers and the winters, the sky's girth
Of sunny blue or bleakness, seek thy harm.
But would that I were Time, then only tender
Touch upon thee should fall as on I sped;
Of every pillar would I be defender,
Of every mossy window--of thy dead!

Thy dead beneath obliterated stones
Upon the sod that is at last thy floor,
Who list the Wye not as it lonely moans
Nor heed thy Gothic shadows grieving o'er.
O Tintern, Tintern! trysting-place, where never
Is wanting mysteries that move the breast,
I'll hear thy beauty calling, ah, for ever--
Till sinks within me the last voice to rest!

THE VICTORY

See, see!--the blows at his breast,
Abyss at his back,
The peril of dark that pressed,
The doubts in a pack,
That hunted to drag him down
Have triumphed? and now
He sinks who climbed for the crown
To the Summit's brow?

No!--though at the foot he lies,
Fallen and vain,
With gaze to the peak whose skies,
He could not attain,
The victory is, with strength--
No matter the past!--
He'd dare it again, the dark length,
And the fall at last!

SEARCHING DEATH'S DARK

When Autumn's melancholy robes the land
With silence and sad fadings mystical
Of other years move thro' the mellow fields,
I turn unto this meadow of the dead
Strewn with the leaves stormed from October trees,
And wonder if my resting shall be dug
Here by this cedar's moan or under the sway
Of yonder cypress--lair of winds that rove
As Valkyries from Valhalla's court
In search of worthy slain.
And sundry times with questioning I tease
The entombed of their estate--seeking to know
Whether 'tis sweeter in the grave to feel
The oblivion of Nature's flow, or here
Wander as gleam and shadow flit her face.
Whether the harvesting of pain and joy
Ends with the ivied slab, or whether death
Pours the warm chrism of Immortality
Into each human heart whose glow is spent.
Nor do my askings fall on the chill voids
Of unavailing silence. For a voice
Of sighing wind may answer, or it leaps,
Though wordless, from a marble seraph's face.
Or sometimes from unspeakable deeps of gold
That ebb along the west revealings wing
And tremor, like etherial swift tongues
Unskilled of human speech, about my heart--
Till, youth, age, death ... even earth's all, it seems,
Are but wild moments wakened in that Soul,
To whom infinities are as a span,
Eternities as bird-flights o'er the sun,
And worlds as sands blown from Sahara's wilds
Into the sea....

Then twilight bells ring back
My wandered spirit from the wilderness
Of Mystery, whence none may find a path
To the Unknown, and like one who upborne
Has steered the unmeasured summer skies until
Their calm seems God, I turn transfigured home.

SERENITY

And could I love it more--this simple scene
Of cot-strewn hills and fields long-harvested,
That lie as if forgotten were all green,
So bare, so dead?

Or could my gaze more tenderly entwine
Each pallid beech or silvery sycamore,
Outreaching arms in patience to divine
If winter's o'er?

Ah no, the wind has blown into my veins
The blue infinity of sky, the sense
Of meadows free to-day from icy pains--
From wintry vents.

And sunny peace more virgin than the glow
Falling from eve's first star into the night,
Brings hope believing what it ne'er can know
With mortal sight.

TO THE SPRING WIND

Ah, what a changeling!
Yester you dashed from the west,
Altho' it is Spring,
And scattered the hail with maniac zest
Thro' the shivering corn--in scorn
For the labour of God and man.
And now from the plentiful South you haste,
With lovingest fingers,
To ruefully lift and wooingly fan
The lily that lingers a-faint on the stalk:
As if the chill waste
Of the earth's May-dreams,
The flowers so full of her joy,
Were not--as it seems--
A wanton attempt to destroy.

THE RAMBLE

Down the road
Which asters tangle,
Thro' the gap
Where green-briar twines,
By the path
Where dry leaves dangle
Down from the ivy vines,

We go--
By sedgy fallows
And along
The stifled brook,
Till it stops
In lushy mallows
Just at the bridge's crook.

Then, again,
O'er fence, thro' thicket,
To the mouth
Of the rough ravine--
Where the weird
Leaf-hidden cricket
Chirrs thro' the weirder green--

There's a way
O'er rocks--but quicker
Is the best
Of heart and foot,
As the beams
Above us flicker
Sun upon moss and root!

And we leap--
As wildness tingles
From the air
Into our blood--
With a cry
Thro' golden dingles
Hid in the heart of the wood.

Oh, the wood
With winds a-wrestle!
With the nut
And acorn strown!
Oh, the wood
Where creepers trestle,
Tree unto tree o'ergrown!

With a climb
The ledging summit
Of the hill
Is reached in glee.
For an hour
We gaze off from it
Into the sky's blue sea.

But a bell
And sunset's crimson
Soon recall
The homeward path.
And we turn
As the glory dims on
The hay-fields' mounded math.

Thro' the soft
And silent twilight
We come,
To the stile at last,
As the clear
Undying eyelight
Of the stars tells day is past.

RETURN

Ah, it was here--September
And silence filled the air--
I came last year to remember,
And muse, hid away from care.
It was here I came--the thistle
Was trusting her seed to the wind;
The quail in the croft gave whistle
As now--and the fields lay thinned.

I know how the hay was steeping,
Brown mows under mellow haze;
How a frail cloud-flock was creeping
As now over lone sky-ways.
Just there where the cat-bird's calling
Her mock-hurt note by the shed,
The use-worn wain was stalling
In the weedy brook's dry bed.

And the cricket, lone little chimer
Of day-long dreams in the vines,
Chirred on like a doting rhymer
O'er-vain of his firstling lines.
He's near me now by the aster,
Beneath whose shadowy spray
A sultry bee seeps faster
As the sun slips down the day.

And there are the tall primroses
Like maidens waiting to dance.
They stood in the same shy poses
Last year, as if to entrance
The stately mulleins to waken
From death and lead them around:
And still they will stand untaken,
Till drops their gold to the ground.

Yes, it was here--September
And silence round me yearned.
Again I've come to remember,
Again for musing returned
To the searing fields assuaging,
And the falling leaves' sad balm:
Away from the world's keen waging--
To harvest and hills and calm.

THE EMPTY CROSS

The eve of Golgotha had come,
And Christ lay shrouded in the garden's tomb:
Among the olives, Oh, how dumb,
How sad the sun incarnadined the gloom!

The hill grew dim--the pleading cross
Reached empty arms toward the closing gate.
Jerusalem, oh, count thy loss!
Oh, hear ye! hear ye! ere it be too late!

Reached bleeding arms--but how in vain!
The murmurous multitude within the wall
Already had forgot His pain--
To-morrow would forget the cross--and all!

They knew not Rome before its sign,
Bending her brow bound with the nations' threne,
Would sweep all lands from Nile to Rhine
In servitude unto the Nazarene.

Nor knew that millions would forsake
Ancestral shrines great with the glow of time,
And lifting up its token shake
Aeons with thrill of love or battle's crime.

With empty arms aloft it stood:
Ah, Scribe and Pharisee, ye builded well!
The cross emblotted with His blood
Mounts, highest Hope of men against earth's hell!

SUNSET-LOVERS

Upon how many a hill,
Across how many a field,
Beside how many a river's whispery flowing,
They stand, with eyes a-thrill,
And hearts of day-rue healed,
Gazing, O wistful sun, upon thy going!

They have forgotten life,
Forgotten sunless death;
Desire is gone--is it not gone for ever?
No memory of strife
Have they, or pain-sick breath,
No hopes to fear or fears hope cannot sever.

Silent the gold steals down
The west, and mystery
Moves deeper in their hearts and settles darker.
'Tis faded--the day's crown;
But strange and shadowy
They see the Unseen as night falls stark and starker.

Like priests whose altar fires
Are spent, immovable
They stand, in awful ecstasy uplifted.
Zephyrs awake tree-lyres,
The starry deeps are full,
Earth with a mystic majesty is gifted.

Ah, sunset-lovers, though
Time were but pulsing pain,
And death no more than its eternal ceasing,
Would you not choose the throe,
Hold the oblivion vain,
To have beheld so many days releasing?

TO A ROSE

(IN A HOSPITAL)

Why do I love thee?--
Not because thy wak'ning lips
Were wooed to bloom by minstrel wind
Of Araby or Ind.

Not because thy fragrance slips
Into my soul--as if thou must
Be sprung of a mother's dust.

Not because _she_ gave her breast
To thee for one long night--she whose
Pure heart I ne'er shall lose.

But when I lay in sick unrest
Afar from those who are my own,
Thou camest from hands unknown:
Therefore I love thee!

UNBURTHENED

Not pain nor the sunny wine
Of gladness steepeth my still spirit as
I lift my gaze across the winter meads
Engarmented in stubble robes of brown.
For, as those solitary trees afar
Have reached unbudding boughs
To the dim warmth of the February sun,
And melted on the infinite calm of space,
So I have reached--and am no more distraught
With the quivering pangs of memory's yesterday.
But the boon of blue skies deeper than despair,
Of rests that rise
As tides of sleep,
And care borne on the plumes
Of swan-swift clouds away to the sullen shades
Of quelled snow-storms low-lying in the west,
Have lulled my soul with soft infinitude.
And now ... down sinks the sun,
Until, half-arched above the marge of earth,
It hangs, a golden door,
Through which effulgent Paradise beyond
Burns seeming forth along the path of those
Who, crowned by Death with Life, pass to its portal.
How soon 'tis closed--how soon! The trumpetings
Of seraphs whose gold blasts of light break o'er
Purplescent passing battlements of cloud,
Sound clear ... then comes the dusk!

WHERE PEACE IS DUTY

Dimming in sunniness, aerily distant,
Valley and hillside float;
Up to me wavering, softly insistent,
Wanders the wood-brook's note.

Anchored beyond in azure unending
Cloud-sails await wind-tide.
Oh, for the skylands where soon they'll be wending--
And, unabiding, bide.

Where Time aflow thro' infinite spaces
Stays for no throttle of pain!
Where the stars go at eve to their places;
Where silence never shall wane!

Where there's no sense but of beauty's wild sweetness,
Thought but of sweetening beauty!
Where wanting's stilled in unwanting's completeness--
Where peace is duty!

WANTON JUNE

I knew she would come!
Sarcastic November
Laughed cold and glum
On the last red ember
Of forest leaves.
He was laughing, the scorner,
At me forlorner
Than any that grieves--
Because I asked him if June would come!

But I knew she would come!
When snow-hearted winter
Gripped river and loam,
And the wind sped flinter
On icy heel,
I was chafing my sorrow
And yearning to borrow
A hope that would steal
Across the hours--till June should come.

And now she is here.--
The wanton!--I follow
Her steps, ever near,
To the shade of the hollow
Where violets blow:
And chide her for leaving,
Tho' half, still, believing
She taunted me so,
To make her abided return more dear.

AUTUMN AT THE BRIDGE

Brown dropping of leaves,
Soft rush of the wind,
Slow searing of sheaves
On the hill;
Green plunging of frogs,
Cool lisp of the brook,
Far barking of dogs
At the mill;
Hot hanging of clouds,
High poise of the hawk,
Flush laughter of crowds
From the Ridge;
Nut-falling, quail-calling,
Wheel-rumbling, bee-mumbling--
Oh, sadness, gladness, madness,
Of an autumn day at the bridge!

SONG

Her voice is vibrant beauty dipt
In dreams of infinite sorrow and delight.
Thro' an awaiting soul 'tis slipt
And lo, words spring that breathe immortal might.

TO HER WHO SHALL COME

1

Out of the night of lovelessness I call
Thee, as, in a chill chamber where no ray
Of unbelievable light and freedom fall,
Might cry one manacled! And tho' the way
Thou'lt come I cannot see; tho' my heart's sore
With emptiness when morning's silent gray
Wakes me to long aloneness; yet I know
Thou hast been with me, who like dawn wilt go
Beside me, when I have found thee, evermore!

2

So in the garden of my heart each day
I plant thee a flower. Now the pansy, peace,
And now the lily, faith--or now a spray
Of the climbing ivy, hope. And they ne'er cease
Around the still unblossoming rose of love
To bend in fragrant tribute to her sway.
Then--for thy shelter from life's sultrier suns,
The oak of strength I set o'er joy that runs
With brooklet glee from winds that grieve above.

3

But where now art thou? Watching with love's eye
The eve-star wander? Listening through dim trees
Some thrilled muezzin of the forest cry
From his leafy minaret? Or by the sea's
Blue brim, while the spectral moon half o'er it hangs
Like the faery isle of Avalon, do these
My yearnings speak to thee of days thy feet
Have never trod?--Sweet, sweet, oh, sealing sweet,
My own, must be our meeting's mystic pangs.

4

And will be soon! For last night near to day,
Dreaming, God called me thro' the space-built sphere
Of heaven and said, "Come, waiting one, and lay
Thine ear unto my Heart--there thou shall hear
The secrets of this world where evils war."
Such things I heard as must rend mortal clay
To tell, and trembled--till God, pitying,
Said, "Listen" ... Oh, my love, I heard thee sing
Out of thy window to the morning star!

AVOWAL TO THE NIGHTINGALE

Though thou hast ne'er unpent thy pain's delight
Upon these airs, bird of the poet's love,
Yet must I sing thy singing! for the Night
Has poured her jewels o'er the lap of heaven
As they who've heard thee say thou dost above
The wood such ecstasies as were not given
By nestling breasts of Venus to the dove.

Oft I have watched the moon orb her fair gold,
Still clung to by the tattered mists of day
And look for thee. Then has my hope grown bold
Till almost I could see how the near laurels
Would tremble with thy trembling: but the sway
Of bards who've wreathed thee with unfading chorals
Has held my longing lips from this poor lay.

None but the sky-hid lark whose spirit is
Too high for earth may vie for praise with thee
In aery rhapsody. And since 'tis his
To sing of day and joy as thou of sorrow
And night o'erhovering singest, thou'lt e'er be
More dear than he--till hearts shall cease to borrow
From grief the healing for life's mystery.

Then loose thy song! Though no grave ear may list
Its lyric trouble, still 'tis soothing sweet
To know that songs unheard and graces missed
By every eye melt on the skies that nourish
Us with immortal blue; and, changed, repeat
Their protean loveliness in all we cherish.
For beauty cannot die, howe'er 'tmay fleet.

STORM-EBB

Dusking amber dimly creeps
Over the vale,
Lit by the kildee's silver sweeps,
Sad with his wail.

Eastward swing the silent clouds
Into the night.
Burdens of day they seem--in crowds
Hurled from earth's sight.

Tilting gulls whip whitely far
Over the lake,
Tirelessly on o'er buoy and spar
Till they o'ertake

Shadow and mingled mist--and then
Vanish to wing
Still the bewildering night-fen,
Where the waves ring.

Dusking amber dimly dies
Out of the vale.
Dead from the dunes the winds arise--
Ghosts of the gale.

SLAVES

A host of bloody centuries lie prone
Upon the fields of Time--but still the wake
Of Progress loud is haunted with the groan
Of myriads, from whose peaceful veins, to slake
His scarlet thirst, has War, fierce Polypheme
Of fate, insatiately drunk Life's stream.
We bid the courier lightning leap along
Its metal path with spaceless speed--command
Stars lost in night-eternity to throng
Before the magnet eye of Science--stand
On Glory's peak and triumphingly cry
Out mastery of earth and sea and air.
But unto War's necessity we bare
Our piteous breasts--and impotently die.

WAKING

Oh, the long dawn, the weary, endless dawn,
When sleep's oblivion is torn away
From love that died with dying yesterday
But still unburied in the heart lies on!

Oh, the sick gray, the twitter in the trees,
The sense of human waking o'er the earth!
The quivering memories of love's fair birth
Now strown as deathless flowers o'er its decease!

Oh, the regret, and oh, regretlessness,
Striving for sovranty within the soul!
Oh, fear that life shall never more be whole,
And immortality but make it less!

FAUN-CALL

Oh, who is he will follow me
With a singing,
Down sunny roads where windy odes
Of the woods are ringing?

Where leaves are tossed from branches lost
In a tangle
Of vines that vie to clamber high--
But to vault and dangle!

Oh, who is he?--His eye must be
As a lover's
To leap and woo the chicory's hue
In the hazel-hovers!

His hope must dance like radiance
O'er the shadows
Of clouds that fling their threatening
On the stubbly meadows!

And he must see that Autumn's glee
And her laughter
From his lips and heart will quell all smart--
Of before and after!

LINGERING

I lingered still when you were gone,
When tryst and trust were o'er,
While memory like a wounded swan
In sorrow sung love's lore.

I lingered till the whippoorwill
Had cried delicious pain
Over the wild-wood--in its thrill
I heard your voice again.

I lingered and the mellow breeze
Blew to me sweetly dewed--
Its touch awoke the sorceries
Your last caresses brewed.

But when the night with silent start
Had sown her starry seed,
The harvest which sprang in my heart
Was loneliness and need.

STORM-TWILIGHT

Tossing, swirling, swept by the wind,
Beaten abaft by the rain,
The swallows high in the sodden sky
Circle oft and again.

They rise and sink and drift and swing,
Twitterless in the chill;
A-haste, for stark is the coming dark
Over the wet of the hill.

Wildly, swiftly, at last they stream
Into their chimney home.
A livid gash in the west, a crash--
Then silence, sadness, gloam.

WILDNESS

To drift with the drifting clouds,
And blow with the blow of breezes,
To ripple with waves and murmur with caves,
To soar, as the sea-mew pleases!

To dip with the dipping sails,
And burn with the burning heaven--
My life! my soul! for the infinite roll
Of a day to wildness given!

BEFORE AUTUMN

Summer's last moon has waned--
Waned
As amber fires
Of an Aztec shrine.
The invisible breath of coming death has stained
The withering leaves with its nepenthean wine--
Autumn's near.

Winds in the woodland moan--
Moan
As memories
Of a chilling yore.
Magnolia seeds like Indian beads are strewn
From crimson pods along the earth's sere floor--
Autumn's near.

Solitude slowly steals,
Steals
Her silent way
By the songless brook.
At the gnarly yoke of a solemn oak she kneels,
The musing joy of sadness in her look--
Autumn's near.

Yes, with her golden days--
Days
When hope and toil
Are at peace and rest--
Autumn is near, and the tired year 'mid praise
Lies down with leaf and blossom on her breast--
Autumn's near.

FULFILMENT

A-bask in the mellow beauty of the ripening sun,
Sad with the lingering sense of summer's purpose done,
The cut and searing fields stretch from me one by one
Along the creek.

The corn-stooks drop their shadows down the fallow hill;
Wearing autumnal warmth the farm sleeps by the mill,
Around each heavy eave low smoke hangs blue and still--
Life's flow is weak.

Along the weedy roads and lanes I walk--or pause--
Ponder a fallen nut or quirking crow whose caws
Seem with prehuman hintings fraught or ancient awes
Of forest-deeps.

Of forest deeps the pale-face hunter never trod,
Nor Indian, with the silent stealth of Nature shod;
Deeps tense with the timelessness and solitude of God
Who never sleeps.

And many times has Autumn, on her harvest way,
Gathered again into the earth leaf, fruit, and spray;
Here many times dwelt rueful as she dwells to-day,
The while she reaps.

TO THE FALLEN LEAVES

I hear the moaning rains beat on your rest
In the long nights of Winter and his wind--
And Death, the woeful, guilty of your fall,
Crying that he has sinned.

MAYA

(HIROSHIMA, JAPAN, 1905)

Pale sampans up the river glide
With set sails vanishing and slow;
In the blue west the mountains hide
As visions that too soon will go.

Across the rice-lands flooded deep
The peasant peacefully wades on--
As in unfurrowed vales of sleep,
A phantom out of voidness drawn.

Over the temple cawing flies
The crow with carrion in his beak.
Buddha within lifts not his eyes
In pity or reproval meek;

Nor, in the bamboos, where they bow
A respite from the blinding sun,
The old priest--dreaming painless how
Nirvana's calm will come when won.

"All is allusion, _Maya_, all
The world of will," the spent East seems
Whispering in me, "And the call
Of Life is but a call of dreams."

SPIRIT OF RAIN

(MIYANOSHITA, JAPAN, 1905)

Spirit of rain--
With all thy ghosts of mist about the mountain, lonely
As a gray train
Of souls newly discarnate seeking new life only!

Spirit of rain!
Leading them thro' dim torii, up fane-ways onward
Till not in vain
They tremble upon the peaks and plunge rejoicing dawnward.

Spirit of rain!
So would I lead my dead thoughts high and higher,
Till they regain
Birth and the beauty of a new life's fire.

THE NYMPH AND THE GOD

She lay by the river dead,
A broken reed in her hand,
The nymph whom an idle god had wed
And led from her maidenland.

The god was the great god, Jove.
Two notes would the bent reed blow,
The one was sorrow, the other love,
Enwove with a woman's woe.

She lay by the river dead,
And he at feasting forgot.
The gods, shall they be disquieted
By dread of a mortal's lot?

A SEA-GHOST

Oh, fisher-fleet, go in from the sea
And furl your wings.
The bay is gray with the twilit spray
And the loud surf springs.

The chill buoy-bell is rung by the hands
Of all the drowned,
Who know the woe of the wind and tow
Of the tides around.

Go in, go in! O haste from the sea,
And let them rest--
A son and one who was wed and one
Who went down unblest.

Aye, even as I whose hands at the bell
Now labour most.
The tomb has gloom, but O the doom
Of the drear sea-ghost!

He evermore must wander the ooze
Beneath the wave,
Forlorn--to warn of the tempest born,
And to save--to save!

Then go, go in! and leave us the sea,
For only so
Can peace release us and give us ease
Of our salty woe.

LAST SIGHT OF LAND

The clouds in woe hang far and dim:
I look again and lo
Only a faint and shadow line
Of shore--I watch it go.

The gulls have left the ship and wheel
Back to the cliff's gray wraith.
Will it be so of all our thoughts
When we set sail on Death?

And what will the last sight be of life
As lone we fare and fast?
Grief and the face we love in mist--
Then night and awe too vast?

Or the dear light of Hope--like that,
O see, from the lost shore
Kindling and calling "Onward, you
Shall reach the Evermore!"

SILENCE

Silence is song unheard,
Is beauty never born,
Is light forgotten--left unstirred
Upon Creation's morn.

DAVID

CHARACTERS

SAUL _King of Israel._
JONATHAN _Heir to the throne._
ISHUI _His brother._
SAMUEL _The Prophet of Israel._
ABNER _Captain of the Host of Israel._
DOEG _An Edomite; chief servant of Saul, and suitor for
Michal._
ADRIEL _A Lord of Meholah, suitor for Merab._
DAVID _A shepherd, secretly anointed King._
ABISHAI _A follower of David._
ABIATHAR _A priest and follower of David._
A PHILISTINE SPY.
AHINOAM _The Queen._
MERAB }
MICHAL } _Daughters of Saul and Ahinoam._
MIRIAM _A blind prophetess, and later the "Witch of Endor."_
JUDITH }
LEAH } _Timbrel-players of the King._
ZILLA }
ADAH _Handmaiden to Merab._

_A Chorus of Women. A Band of Priests. Followers of David.
Soldiers of Saul. People of the Court, &c._

DAVID