Chapter X: Epilogue

Come tell us, you that travel far
With brave or shabby merchandise,
Have you saluted any star
That goes uncourtiered in the skies?

Do you remember leaf or wing
Or brook the willows leant along,
Or any small familiar thing
That passed you as you went along?

Or does the trade that is your lust
Drive you as yoke-beasts driven apace,
Making the world a road of dust
From market-place to market-place?

Your traffic in the grain, the wine,
In purple and in cloth of gold,
In treasure of the field and mine,
In fables of the poets told,--

But have you laughed the wine-cups dry
And on the loaves of plenty fed,
And walked, with all your banners high,
In gold and purple garmented?

And do you know the songs you sell
And cry them out along the way?
And is the profit that you tell
After your travel day by day

Sinew and sap of life, or husk--
Dead coffer-ware or kindled brain?
And do you gather in the dusk
To make your heroes live again?

If the grey dust is over all,
And stars and leaves and wings forgot,
And your blood holds no festival--
Go out from us; we need you not.

But if you are immoderate men,
Zealots of joy, the salt and sting
And savour of life upon you--then
We call you to our counselling.

And we will hew the holy boughs
To make us level rows of oars,
And we will set our shining prows
For strange and unadventured shores.

Where the great tideways swiftliest run
We will be stronger than the strong
And sack the cities of the sun
And spend our booty in a song.

MOONRISE

Where are you going, you pretty riders?--
To the moon’s rising, the rising of death’s moon,
Where the waters move not, and birds are still and songless,
Soon, very soon.

Where are you faring to, you proud Hectors?
Through battle, out of battle, under the grass,
Dust behind your hoof-beats rises, and into dust,
Clouded, you pass.

I’m a pretty rider, I’m a proud Hector,
I as you a little am pretty and proud;
I with you am riding, riding to the moonrise,
So sing we loud--

“Out beyond the dust lies mystery of moonrise,
We go to chiller learning than is bred in the sun,
Hectors, and riders, and a simple singer,
Riding as one.”

DEER

Shy in their herding dwell the fallow deer.
They are spirits of wild sense. Nobody near
Comes upon their pastures. There a life they live,
Of sufficient beauty, phantom, fugitive,
Treading as in jungles free leopards do,
Printless as evelight, instant as dew.
The great kine are patient, and home-coming sheep
Know our bidding. The fallow deer keep
Delicate and far their counsels wild,
Never to be folded reconciled
To the spoiling hand as the poor flocks are:
Lightfoot, and swift, and unfamiliar,
These you may not hinder, unconfined
Beautiful flocks of the mind.

TO ONE I LOVE

As I walked along the passage, in the night, beyond the stairs,
In the dark,
I was afraid,
Suddenly,
As will happen you know, my dear, it will often happen.
I knew the walls at my side,
Knew the drawings hanging there, the order of their placing,
And the door where my bed lay beyond,
And the window on the landing--
There was even a little ray of moonlight through it--
All was known, familiar, my comfortable home;
And yet I was afraid,
Suddenly,
In the dark, like a child, of nothing,
Of vastness, of eternity, of the queer pains of thought,
Such as used to trouble me when I heard,
When I was little, the people talk
On Sundays of “As it was in the Beginning,
Is Now, and Ever Shall Be....”
I am thirty-six years old,
And folk are friendly to me,
And there are no ghosts that should have reason to haunt me,
And I have tempted no magical happenings
By forsaking the clear noons of thought
For the wizardries that the credulous take
To be golden roads to revelation.
I knew all was simplicity there,
Without conspiracy, without antagonism,
And yet I was afraid,
Suddenly,
A child, in the dark, forlorn....
And then, as suddenly,
I was aware of a profound, a miraculous understanding,
Knowledge that comes to a man
But once or twice, as a bird’s note
In the still depth of the night
Striking upon the silence ...
I stood at the door, and there
Was mellow candle-light,
And companionship, and comfort,
And I knew
That it was even so,
That it must be even so
With death.
I knew
That no harm could have touched me out of my fear,
Because I had no grudge against anything,
Because I had desired
In the darkness, when fear came,
Love only, and pity, and fellowship,
And it would have been a thing monstrous,
Something defying nature
And all the simple universal fitness
For any force there to have come evilly
Upon me, who had no evil in my heart,
But only trust, and tenderness
For every presence about me in the air,
For the very shadow about me,
Being a little child for no one’s envy.
And I knew that God
Must understand that we go
To death as little children,
Desiring love so simply, and love’s defence,
And that he would be a barren God, without humour,
To cheat so little, so wistful, a desire,
That he created
In us, in our childishness ...
And I may never again be sure of this,
But there, for a moment,
In the candle-light,
Standing at the door,
I knew.

TO ALICE MEYNELL

I too have known my mutinies,
Played with improvident desires,
Gone indolently vain as these
Whose lips from undistinguished choirs
Mock at the music of our sires.

I too have erred in thought. In hours
When needy life forbade me bring
To song the brain’s unravished powers,
Then had it been a temperate thing
Loosely to pluck an easy string.

Yet thought has been, poor profligate,
Sin’s period. Through dear and long
Obedience I learn to hate
Unhappy lethargies that wrong
The larger loyalties of song.

And you upon your slender reed,
Most exquisitely tuned, have made
For every singing heart a creed.
And I have heard; and I have played
My lonely music unafraid,

Knowing that still a friendly few,
Turning aside from turbulence,
Cherish the difficult phrase, the due
Bridals of disembodied sense
With the new word’s magnificence.

PETITION

O Lord, I pray: that for each happiness
My housemate brings I may give back no less
Than all my fertile will;

That I may take from friends but as the stream
Creates again the hawthorn bloom adream
Above the river sill;

That I may see the spurge upon the wall
And hear the nesting birds give call to call,
Keeping my wonder new;

That I may have a body fit to mate
With the green fields, and stars, and streams in spate,
And clean as clover-dew;

That I may have the courage to confute
All fools with silence when they will dispute,
All fools who will deride;

That I may know all strict and sinewy art
As that in man which is the counterpart,
Lord, of Thy fiercest pride;

That somehow this beloved earth may wear
A later grace for all the love I bear,
For some song that I sing;
That, when I die, this word may stand for me--
He had a heart to praise, an eye to see,
And beauty was his king.

HARVESTING

Pale sheaves of oats, pocked by untimely rain,
Under October skies,
Teased and forlorn,
Ungathered lie where still the tardy wain
Comes not to seal
The seasons of the corn,
From prime to June, with running barns of grain.

Now time with me is at the middle year,
The register of youth
Is now to sing ...
My thoughts are ripe, my moods are in full ear;
That they should fail
Of harvesting,
Uncarried on cold fields, is all my fear.

* * * * *

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.