Chapter IV

I wander—I wander—O will she wander here
Where’er my footsteps carry me I know that she is near,
A jewelled lamp within her hand and jewels in her hair;
I lost her in a vision once and seek her everywhere.

My spirit whispers she is near, I look at you and you:
Surely she has not passed me, I sleeping as she flew.
I wander—I wander, and yet she is not here,
Although my spirit whispers to me that she is near.

ZION[3]

She stood—a hill-ensceptred Queen,
The glory streaming from her;
While Heaven flashed her rays between,
And shed eternal summer.

The gates of morning opened wide
On sunny dome and steeple;
Noon gleamed upon the mountain-side
Thronged with a happy people;

And twilight’s drowsy, half closed eyes
Beheld that virgin splendour
Whose orbs were as her darkening skies,
And as her spirit, tender.

Girt with that strength, first-born of right,
Held fast by deeds of honour,
Her robe she wove with rays more bright
Than Heaven could rain upon her.

Footnote 3:

Written at the age of sixteen.

Where is that light—that citadel?
That robe with woof of glory?
She lost her virtue and she fell,
And only left her story.

SPIRITUAL ISOLATION: A FRAGMENT

My Maker shunneth me:
Even as a wretch stricken with leprosy,
So hold I pestilent supremacy.
Yea! He hath fled far as the uttermost star,
Beyond the unperturbed fastnesses of night
And dreams that bastioned are
By fretted towers of sleep that scare His light.

Of wisdom writ, whereto
My burdened feet may haste withouten rue,
I may not spell—and I am sore to do.
Yea, all (seeing my Maker hath such dread),
Even mine own self-love, wists not but to fly
To Him, and sore besped
Leaves me, its captain, in such mutiny.

Will, deemed incorporate
With me, hath flown ere love, to expiate
Its sinful stay where He did habitate.
Ah me, if they had left a sepulchre;
But no—the light hath changed not, and in it
Of its same colour stir
Spirits I see not but phantasmed feel to flit.

Air, legioned with such, stirreth,
So that I seem to draw them with my breath,
Ghouls that devour each joy they do to death,
Strange glimmering griefs and sorrowing silences
Bearing dead flowers unseen whose charnel smell
Great awe to my sense is
Even in the rose-time when all else is well.

* * * * *

FAR AWAY

By what pale light or moon-pale shore
Drifts my soul in lonely flight?
Regions God had floated o’er
Ere He touched the world with light?

Not in Heaven and not in earth
Is this water, is this moon;
For there is no starry birth,
And no dawning and no noon.

Far away—O far away,
Mist-born—dewy vapours rise
From the dim gates of the day
Far below in earthly skies.

SPRING

I walk and I wonder
To hear the birds sing;
Without you, my lady,
How can there be Spring?
I see the pink blossoms
That slept for a year,
But who could have waked them
While you were not near?

Birds sing to the blossoms,
Blind, dreaming your pink;
These blush to the songsters,
Your music they think:
So well had you taught them
To look and to sing,
Your bloom and your music,
The ways of the Spring.

SONG

A silver rose to show
Is your sweet face;
And like the heavens’ white brow,
Sometime God’s battle-place,
Your blood is quiet now.

Your body is a star
Unto my thought;
But stars are not too far,
And can be caught—
Small pools their prisons are.

HEART’S FIRST WORD. I.

To sweeten a swift minute so
With such rare fragrance of sweet speech,
And make the after hours go
In a blank yearning each on each;
To drain the springs till they be dry,
And then in anguish thirst for drink;
So but to glimpse her robe thirst I,
And my soul hungers and I sink.

There is no word that we have said
Whereby the lips and heart are fire;
No look the linked glances read
That held the springs of deep desire.
And yet the sounds her glad lips gave
Are on my soul vibrating still;
Her eyes that swept me as a wave
Shine my soul’s worship to fulfil.

Her hair, her eyes, her throat and chin—
Sweet hair, sweet eyes, sweet throat, so sweet,
So fair because the ways of sin
Have never known her perfect feet—
By what far ways and marvellous
May I such lovely heaven reach?
What dread, dark seas and perilous
Lie ’twixt love’s silence and love’s speech?

HEARTS FIRST WORD. II.

And all her soft dark hair
Breathed for him like a prayer,
And her white lost face
Was prisoned to some far place.
Love was not denied—
Love’s ends would hide,
And flower and fruit and tree
Were under its sea.
Yea, its abundance knelt
Where the nerves felt
The springs of feeling flow
And made pain grow!
There seemed no root or sky,
But a pent infinity
Where apparitions dim
Sculptured each whim
In flame and wandering mist
Of kisses to be kist.

LADY, YOU ARE MY GOD

Lady, you are my God—
Lady, you are my Heaven.

_If I am your God
Labour for your Heaven._

Lady, you are my God,
And shall not love win Heaven?

_If love made me God
Deeds must win my Heaven._

If my love made you God,
What more can I for Heaven?

IF YOU ARE FIRE

If you are fire and I am fire,
Who blows the flame apart
So that desire eludes desire
Around one central heart?

A single root and separate bough,
And what blind hands between
That make our longing’s mutual glow
As if it had not been?

IN THE UNDERWORLD

I have lived in the underworld so long:
How can you, a creature of light,
Without terror understand the song
And unmoved hear what moves in night?

I am a spirit that yours has found,
Strange, undelightful, obscure,
Created by some other God, and bound
In terrible darkness, breathing breath impure.

Creature of light and happiness,
Deeper the darkness was when you,
With your bright terror eddying the distress,
Grazed the dark waves and shivering further flew.

O, IN A WORLD OF MEN AND WOMEN

O, in a world of men and women,
Where all things seemed so strange to me,
And speech the common world called human
For me was a vain mimicry,

I thought—O, am I one in sorrow?
Or is the world more quick to hide
Their pain with raiment that they borrow
From pleasure in the house of pride?

O joy of mine, O longed-for stranger,
How I would greet you if you came:
In the world’s joys I’ve been a ranger,
In my world sorrow is their name.

A GIRL’S THOUGHTS

Dim apprehension of a trust
Comes over me this quiet hour,
As though the silence were a flower,
And this, its perfume, dark like dust.

My individual self would cling
Through fear, through pride, unto its fears:
It strives to shut out what it hears,
The founts of being murmuring.

O! Need, whose hauntings terrorize;
Whether my maiden ways would hide,
Or lose and to that need subside,
Life shrinks and instinct dreads surprise.

A BALLAD OF WHITECHAPEL

God’s mercy shines;
And our full hearts must make record of this,
For grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.

I stood where glowed
The merry glare of golden whirring lights
Above the monstrous mass that seethed and flowed
Through one of London’s nights.

I watched the gleams
Of jagged warm lights on shrunk faces pale:
I heard mad laughter as one hears in dreams
Or Hell’s harsh lurid tale.

The traffic rolled,
A gliding chaos populous of din,
A steaming wail at doom the Lord had scrawled
For perilous loads of sin.

And my soul thought:
“What fearful land have my steps wandered to?
God’s love is everywhere, but here is naught
Save love His anger slew.”

And as I stood
Lost in promiscuous bewilderment,
Which to my mazèd soul was wonder-food,
A girl in garments rent

Peered ’neath lids shamed
And spoke to me and murmured to my blood.
My soul stopped dead, and all my horror flamed
At her forgot of God.

Her hungered eyes,
Craving and yet so sadly spiritual,
Shone like the unsmirched corner of a jewel
Where else foul blemish lies.

I walked with her
Because my heart thought, “Here the soul is clean,
The fragrance of the frankincense and myrrh
Is lost in odours mean.”

She told me how
The shadow of black death had newly come
And touched her father, mother, even now
Grim-hovering in her home,

Where fevered lay
Her wasting brother in a cold, bleak room,
Which theirs would be no longer than a day,
And then—the streets and doom.

Lord! Lord! Dear Lord!
I knew that life was bitter, but my soul
Recoiled, as anguish-smitten by sharp sword,
Grieving such body’s dole.

Then grief gave place
To a strange pulsing rapture as she spoke;
For I could catch the glimpses of God’s grace,
And a desire awoke

To take this trust
And warm and gladden it with love’s new fires,
Burning the past to ashes and to dust
Through purified desires.

We walked our way,
One way hewn for us from the birth of Time;
For we had wandered into Love’s strange clime
Through ways sin waits to slay.

Love’s euphony,
In Love’s own temple that is our glad hearts,
Makes now long music wild deliciously;
Now Grief hath used his darts.

Love infinite,
Chastened by sorrow, hallowed by pure flame—
Not all the surging world can compass it.
Love—Love—O tremulous name!

God’s mercy shines;
And my full heart hath made record of this,
Of grief that burst from out its dark confines
Into strange sunlit bliss.

TESS

The free fair life that has never been mine, the glory that might have been, If I were what you seem to be and what I may not be! I know I walk upon the earth, but a dreadful wall between My spirit and your spirit lies, your joy and my misery.

The angels that lie watching us, the little human play, What deem they of the laughter and the tears that flow apart? When a word of man is a woman’s doom do they turn and wonder and say, “Ah! Why has God made love so great that love must burst her heart?”

THE NUN

So thy soul’s meekness shrinks,
Too loth to show her face—
Why should she shun the world?
It is a holy place.

Concealèd to itself
If the flower kept its scent,
Of itself amorous,
Less rich its ornament.

Use—utmost in each kind—
Is beauty, truth in one,
While soul rays light to soul
In one God-linkèd sun.

IN PICCADILLY

Lamp-lit faces, to you
What is your starry dew?
Gold flowers of the night blue!

Deep in wet pavement’s slime
Mud-rooted is your fierce prime,
To bloom in lust’s coloured clime.

The sheen of eyes that lust,
Which dew-time made your trust,
Lights your passionless dust.

A MOOD

You are so light and gay,
So slight, sweet maid—
Your limbs like leaves in play,
Or beams that grasses braid;
O! Joys whose jewels pray
My breast to be inlaid.

Frail fairy of the streets;
Strong, dainty lure;
For all men’s eyes the sweets
Whose lack makes hearts so poor;
While your heart loveless beats,
Light, laughing, and impure.

O! Fragrant waft of flesh,
Float through me so—
My limbs are in your mesh,
My blood forgets to flow;
Ah! Lilied meadows fresh,
It knows where it would go.

FIRST FRUIT

I did not pluck at all,
And I am sorry now:
The garden is not barred
But the boughs are heavy with snow,
The flake-blossoms thickly fall
And the hid roots sigh, “How long will our flowers be marred?”

Strange as a bird were dumb,
Strange as a hueless leaf.
As one deaf hungers to hear,
Or gazes without belief,
The fruit yearned “Fingers, come!”
O, shut hands, be empty another year.

A CARELESS HEART

A little breath can make a prayer,
A little wind can take it
And turn it back again to air:
Then say, why should you make it?

An ardent thought can make a word,
A little ear can hear it,
A careless heart forget it heard:
Then why keep ever near it?

DAWN

O tender first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
O as the soft and frail lights break
Upon your eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies.

And then, as sleep lies down to sleep
And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
The iron shepherd leads his sheep
To pastures parched whose green is shed.
Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair
And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips,
The ghosts of all the dreams are there,
To fade like passing ships.

AT NIGHT

Crazed shadows, from no golden body
That I can see, embrace me warm;
All is purple and closed
Round by night’s arm.

A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,
Wild lost voices of shadows white:
See the long houses lean
To the weird flight.

Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time
(Because the sun spreads wide like a tree
With no good fruit for them)
Thrill secrecy.

Pale horses ride before the morning,
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
With hoofs shod with venom
And ageless dread;

To breathe on burning emerald grasses
And opalescent dews of the day,
And poison at the core
What smiles may stray.

CREATION

As the pregnant womb of night
Thrills with imprisoned light,
Misty, nebulous-born,
Growing deeper into her morn,
So man, with no sudden stride,
Bloomed into pride.

In the womb of the All-spirit
The universe lay; the will
Blind, an atom, lay still.
The pulse of matter
Obeyed in awe
And strove to flatter
The rhythmic law.
But the will grew; nature feared,
And cast off the child she reared,
Now her rival, instinct-led,
With her own powers impregnated.

Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers,
Creation is each act of yours.
Your roots are God, the pauseless cause,
But your boughs sway to self-windy laws.
Perception is no dreamy birth
And magnifies transfigured earth.
With each new light, our eyes receive
A larger power to perceive.

If we could unveil our eyes,
Become as wise as the All-wise,
No love would be, no mystery:
Love and joy dwell in infinity.
Love begets love; reaching highest
We find a higher still, unseen
From where we stood to reach the first;
Moses must die to live in Christ,
The seed be buried to live to green.
Perfection must begin from worst.
Christ perceives a larger reachless love,
More full, and grows to reach thereof.
The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit.
Perfection always is a root,
And joy a motion that doth feed
Itself on light of its own speed,
And round its radiant circle runs,
Creating and devouring suns.

OF ANY OLD MAN

Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness
With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,
Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride)
Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil;
Give them their withered peace, their trial grave,
Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy.
Mock them not with your ripened turbulence,
Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath,
When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers one word
(Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth,
The feigned rampart of bleak ignorance)
“Experience”—crown of naked majesties,
That tells us naught we know not, but confirms.
O think, you reverend shadowy austere,
Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died.

THE ONE LOST

I mingle with your bones;
You steal in subtle noose
This lighted dust Jehovah loans
And now I lose.

What will the Lender say
When I shall not be found,
Safe-sheltered at the Judgment Day,
Being in you bound?

He’ll hunt through wards of Heaven,
Call to uncoffined earth
“Where is this soul, unjudged, not given
Dole for good’s dearth?”

And I, lying so safe
Within you, hearing all,
To have cheated God shall laugh,
Freed by your thrall.

WEDDED

They leave their love-lorn haunts,
Their sigh-warm floating Eden;
And they are mute at once,
Mortals by God unheeden,
By their past kisses chidden.

But they have kist and known
Clear things we dim by guesses—
Spirit to spirit grown:
Heaven, born in hand-caresses.
Love, fall from sheltering tresses.

And they are dumb and strange:
Bared trees bowed from each other.
Their last green interchange
What lost dreams shall discover?
Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover.

DON JUAN’S SONG

The moon is in an ecstasy,
It wanes not nor can grow;
The heavens are in a mist of love,
And deepest knowledge know:
What things in nature seem to move
Bear love as I bear love?
And bear my pleasures so?

I bear my love as streams that bear
The sky still flow or shake:
Though deep within, too far on high.
Light blossoms kiss and wake
The waters sooner than the sky;
And if they kiss and die
God made them frail to break.

ON A LADY SINGING

She bade us listen to the singing lark
In tones far sweeter than its own:
For fear that she should cease and leave us dark
We built the bird a feignèd throne,
Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways
From sceptred hands of starred humility—
Praising herself the more in giving praise
To music less than she.

BEAUTY

As a sword in the sun—
A glory calling a glory—
Our eyes, seeing it run,
Capture its gleam for our story.

Singer, marvellous gleam
Dancing in splendid light,
Here you have brought us our dream—
Ah, but its stay is its flight!

A QUESTION

What if you shut your eyes and look,
Yea, look with all the spirit’s eyes,
While mystic unrevealèd skies
Unfold like pages of a book

Wherein new scenes of wonder rare
Are imaged, till the sense deceives
Itself, and what it sees believes—
Even what the soul has pictured there?

CHAGRIN

Caught still as Absalom,
Surely the air hangs
From the swayless cloud-boughs
Like hair of Absalom
Caught and hanging still.

From the imagined weight
Of spaces in a sky
Of mute chagrin my thoughts
Hang like branch-clung hair
To trunks of silence swung,
With the choked soul weighing down
Into thick emptiness.
Christ, end this hanging death,
For endlessness hangs therefrom!

Invisibly branches break
From invisible trees:
The cloud-woods where we rush
(Our eyes holding so much),
Which we must ride dim ages round
Ere the hands (we dream) can touch,
We ride, we ride—before the morning
The secret roots of the sun to tread—
And suddenly
We are lifted of all we know,
And hang from implacable boughs.

THE BLIND GOD

Streaked with immortal blasphemies,
Betwixt His twin eternities
The Shaper of mortal destinies
Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep,
Some nothing that hath shadows deep.

The world is only a small pool
In the meadows of Eternity,
And men like fishes lying cool;
And the wise man and the fool
In its depths like fishes lie.
When an angel drops a rod
And he draws you to the sky
Will you bear to meet your God
You have streaked with blasphemy?

THE FEMALE GOD

We curl into your eyes—
They drink our fires and have never drained;
In the fierce forest of your hair
Our desires beat blindly for their treasure.

In your eyes’ subtle pit,
Far down, glimmer our souls;
And your hair like massive forest trees
Shadows our pulses, overtired and dumb.

Like a candle lost in an electric glare
Our spirits tread your eyes’ infinities;
In the wrecking waves of your tumultuous locks
Do you not hear the moaning of our pulses?

Queen! Goddess! Animal!
In sleep do your dreams battle with our souls?
When your hair is spread like a lover on the pillow
Do not our jealous pulses wake between?

You have dethroned the ancient God,
You have usurped his Sabbath, his common days;
Yea, every moment is delivered to you,
Our Temple, our Eternal, our one God!

Our souls have passed into your eyes,
Our days into your hair;
And you, our rose-deaf prison, are very pleased with the world,
Your world.

GOD

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire,
Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned!
His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls:
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay—a bullying hulk—to crush them more;
But when one fearless turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.

Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard,
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking;
And he has made the market for your beauty
Too poor to buy although you die to sell.
Only that he has never heard of sleep,
And when the cats come out the rats are sly,
Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn.

But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots,
And in the morning some pale wonder ceases.
Things are not strange; and strange things are forgetful.
Ah! If the day were arid, somehow lost
Out of us; but it is as hair of us,
And only in the hush no wind stirs it,
And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes,
And restlessness still shadows the lost ways.
The fingers shut on voices that pass through
Where blind farewells are taken easily.

Ah, this miasma of a rotting God!

SLEEP

Godhead’s lip hangs
When our pulses have no golden tremors,
And his whips are flicked by mice
And all star-amorous things.

Drops, drops of shivering quiet
Filter under my lids.
Now only am I powerful.
What though the cunning gods outwit us here
In daytime and in playtime,
Surely they feel the gyves we lay on them
In our sleep.

O, subtle gods lying hidden!
O, gods with your oblique eyes!
Your elbows in the dawn, and wrists
Bright with the afternoon,
Do you not shake when a mortal slides
Into your own unvexed peace?

When a moving stillness breaks over your knees
(An emanation of piled æons’ pressures),
From our bodies flat and straight,
And your limbs are locked,
Futilely gods,
And shut your sinister essences?

MY DAYS

My days are but the tombs of buried hours;
Which tombs are hidden in the pilèd years;
But from the mounds there spring up many flowers,
Whose beauty well repays their cost of tears.
Time, like a sexton, pileth mould on mould,
Minutes on minutes till the tombs are high;
But from the dust there fall some grains of gold,
And the dead corpse leaves what will never die—
It may be but a thought, the nursling seed
Of many thoughts, of many a high desire;
Some little act that stirs a noble deed,
Like breath rekindling a smouldering fire:
They only live who have not lived in vain,
For in their works their life returns again.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BILLING AND SONS, LIMITED,
GUILDFORD AND ESHER

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.