Chapter I: Front Matter

Transcriber’s Notes:

Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs.
Old or antiquated spellings have been preserved.
Typographical errors have been silently corrected but other variations
in spelling and punctuation remain unaltered.
Some poems in the original had a full page identifying the poem as
well as a heading at the beginning of the poem. The full page poem
headings have been removed from this edition as being redundant.

THE DREAD VOYAGE

POEMS

BY
WILLIAM WILFRED CAMPBELL.
AUTHOR OF “LAKE LYRICS”

Toronto
WILLIAM BRIGGS
MONTREAL: C. W. COATES HALIFAX: S. F. HUESTIS
1893

Entered, according to the Act of the Parliament of
Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and
ninety three, by WILLIAM WILFRED CAMPBELL,
Ottawa, in the office of the Minister of
Agriculture, at Ottawa.

TO
ALEXANDER MCNEILL, ESQ.,
AND
R. C. WELDON, PH.D.,
THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.

OTTAWA, MARCH, 1893.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
THE DREAD VOYAGE 11
WINTER 14
THE LAST RIDE 17
THE CONFESSION OF TAMA THE WISE 24
STORM 37
SIR LANCELOT 39
IN AUTUMN 52
UNABSOLVED 55
THE DREAMERS 71
THE MOTHER 79
DUSK 86
OUT OF POMPEII 87
MORNING ON THE SHORE 90
PAN THE FALLEN 91
THE CLOUD MAIDEN 95
THE WERE-WOLVES 98
BELATED 103
AN AUGUST REVERIE 109
IN THE SPRING FIELDS 114
IN A JUNE NIGHT 115
HARVEST SLUMBER SONG 120
AUTUMN 122
TO THE RIDEAU RIVER 126
IN THE AUGUST FIELDS 134
IN THE STRENGTH OF THE MORNING 135
AN OCTOBER EVENING 141
DECEMBER 143
PREMONITIONS 146
LOVE 150
A DECEMBER MORNING 151
IN THE FREEDOM OF THE SPRING 152
THE CHILDREN OF THE FOAM 159
HOW ONE WINTER CAME IN THE LAKE REGION 164
MIDWINTER STORM IN THE LAKE REGION 167
TO THE LAKES 169
MOONLIGHT 173
ON A SUMMER SHORE 174
ON THE SHORE 177
TO MIGHTY DEATH CONCERNING ROBERT BROWNING 181
THE DEAD LEADER 187

THE DREAD VOYAGE.

Trim the sails the weird stars under—
Past the iron hail and thunder,
Past the mystery and the wonder,
Sails our fated bark;
Past the myriad voices hailing,
Past the moaning and the wailing,
The far voices failing, failing,
Drive we to the dark.

Past the headlands grim and sombre,
Past the shores of mist and slumber,
Leagues on leagues no man may number,
Soundings none can mark;

While the olden voices calling,
One by one behind are falling;
Into silence dread, appalling,
Drift we to the dark.

Far behind, the sad eyes yearning,
Hands that wring for our returning,
Lamps of love yet vainly burning:
Past the headlands stark!
Through the wintry snows and sleeting,
On our pallid faces beating,
Through the phantom twilight fleeting.
Drive we to the dark.

Without knowledge, without warning,
Drive we to no lands of morning;
Far ahead no signals horning
Hail our nightward bark.

Hopeless, helpless, weird, outdriven,
Fateless, friendless, dread, unshriven,
For some race-doom unforgiven,
Drive we to the dark.

Not one craven or unseemly;
In the flare-light gleaming dimly,
Each ghost-face is watching grimly:
Past the headlands stark!
Hearts wherein no hope may waken,
Like the clouds of night wind-shaken,
Chartless, anchorless, forsaken,
Drift we to the dark.

WINTER.

Over these wastes, these endless wastes of white,
Rounding about far, lonely regions of sky,
Winter the wild-tongued cometh with clamorous might;
Deep-sounding and surgent, his armies of storm sweep by,
Wracking the skeleton woods and opens that lie
Far to the seaward reaches that thunder and moan,
Where barrens and mists and beaches forever are lone.

Morning shrinks closer to night, and nebulous noon
Hangs, a dull lanthorn, over the windings of snows;
And like a pale beech-leaf fluttering upward, the moon
Out of the short day, wakens and blossoms and grows,
And builds her wan beauty like to the ghost of a rose
Over the soundless silences, shrunken, that dream
Their prisoned deathliness under the gold of her beam.

Wide is the arch of the night, blue spangled with fire,
From wizened edge to edge of the shrivelled-up earth,
Where the chords of the dark are as tense as the strings of a lyre
Strung by the fingers of silence ere sound had birth,
With far-off, alien echoes of morning and mirth,
That reach the tuned ear of the spirit, beaten upon
By the soundless tides of the wonder and glory of dawn.

The stars have faded and blurred in the spaces of night,
And over the snow-fringed edges wakens the morn,
Pallid and heatless, lifting its lustreless light
Over the skeleton woodlands and stretches forlorn,
Touching with pallor the forests, storm-haggard and torn;
Till out of the earth’s edge the winter-god rises acold,
And strikes on the iron of the month with finger of gold.

Then down the whole harp of the morning a vibration rings,
Thrilling the heart of the dull earth with throbbings and dreams
Of far-blown odours and music of long-vanished Springs;
Till the lean, stalled cattle low for the lapping of streams,
And the clamorous cock, to the south, where his dunghill steams,
Looks the sun in the eye, and prophesies, hopeful and clear,
The stir in the breast of the wrinkled, bleak rime of the year.

THE LAST RIDE.

[Sidenote: It seems his soul had lived that moment before, when he should come to the dread place.]

I knew of it ages before,
Yea, it seemed that the years knew it too;
That I should come to that shore,
Where the foam and the wild waters flew-
Where the winds and the bleak night blew;—
And the name of that place, No More.

[Sidenote: That he and she and death should ride together.]

I knew of it ages ago,
That I should thunder that ride,
With her and the night for my woe—
With her and death by my side—
Her and her pitiful pride;—
And the long hours whose shudd’ring flow

[Sidenote: Where the black was as Eblis, and the sounds as worms moving in a grave.]

Grew, while the black grew thick
As the close, hot air of a cave
In Eblis, where death-watches tick,
Like the moving of worms in a grave;—
Grew, till the dawn outdrave
The black night, shudd’ring and sick.

[Sidenote: The mimes chant their despair to the night.]

Who were the mimes in the air
That wept for the woe of our flight,
That chanted a bitter despair,
To the dark, haunted heart of the night—
That knew not of wrong or of right,
Save but of the moments that were?

[Sidenote: He sees the past, as ruined sunsets, and the early morning of life.]

The ruins of sunsets that hung
On the far, reeling edge of the world;—
The long-uttered thoughts that upsprung
Like the ghosts of a past that was furled,
Where the dreams of a life were impearled,
In a morning forevermore young!

[Sidenote: She also knew the demons that haunted.]

And she; she knew even as I,
Of the phantoms that haunted us there;
Of the demons that never could die,
While the world’s heart pulsed our despair;
And out where the mad waters fare,
The ghostly, wan shorelands should lie.

[Sidenote: They ride by the hoarse sea, and the bitter winds and hell with them.]

O, that night, and that terrible ride—
With the bitter, sharp wind in the face,
And the hoarse, great tongues of the tide,
As it beat on the black of that place;
Till all hell joined in the race,
With death and despair for a guide!

[Sidenote: He slays the foes of his guilty thoughts, while the demons trouble him.]

Many the foes that I slew,
With the sword of my guilt, red as blood—
Many the demons that blew
Their mad, flame-horns through my mood,
As I thundered that horrible wood,
To the place where a world went through.

[Sidenote: Now he hates the morrows to come]

White, meagre, the days yet to come
Seemed wintry and hateful to me:
Would mornings wake, pitiless, dumb,
With horror and dread agony—
And the moan of that terrible sea
Beat the dead-march of life like a drum,

[Sidenote: with the remorse for his wrecked days.]

In the hands of some hideous mime—
Some strange, inextinguishable flame
That would burn at my heart for all time—
Some horror too dread to have name,
As of one who had played for a game,
Then slipped and was lost in the slime?

[Sidenote: He knows the end cometh.]

(I am but the poor wreck of a man,)
When I came to that horrible place,
(Love was never a part of God’s plan,)
And looked her and death in the face,
And knew me unworthy and base,
And the shores where the black waters ran;—

[Sidenote: They come to the outer shore and look each on each through the mists, and read the ancient curse there,]

When we came to that lone, outer shore,
Where the world sundered, parting us two;
(God and the dread nevermore!)
When we came where the thick mists blew,
So face could scarce on face, through,
Read the woe-rune of earth’s ancient lore;—

[Sidenote: and feel the dread agony of parting. Their souls feel for one another as the seas for the land.]

When hand stretched longing for hand,
And that strange, wild cry of the soul;
As the feeble sea feels for the land,
Or a racer far, far from the goal;—
So we, ere we drank of death’s dole,
Knew the black night that hope never spanned.

[Sidenote: But he knows the hour has come,]

Then I knew as I looked on her face,
(Black, black is the night and the rain,)
Sweet as a flower in that place,
And heard the hoarse roar of the main;
That this was the hour for us twain,
The last, bitter end of the race.

[Sidenote: and the anguish at the gate of the nevermore.]

And I gripped her as man only grips
The last gift that God has for him,
And lived with my lips on her lips
An age that was anguished and dim;
And time was as bubbles that swim,
Or the hailing of out-faring ships.

[Sidenote: They plead in vain with time while their doom waits.]

We pleaded and haggled with time,
With time who was haggard and hoar;
And met the dread hell of our crime,
While fate stood there at the door;—
With our doom in his hand he upbore,
Till I heard each second’s beat chime.

[Sidenote: He feels that they died there. He is but a lost wreck on the coast of the ages ere the evil had power.]

And I know now we died in that hour:—
I am all but the ghost of a man,
A mariner stranded ashore
On some continent out of God’s plan,
Made before misery began,
Or evil got men in its power.

[Sidenote: And dreams a dead life with but one thing real for him which he liveth over and over forever, that night and the woe that her face held.]

In dreams my imaginings trace,
I feel I lived somewhere before,
Ere life was, in some phantom place,
Some land of the haunted No More;—
But, O God, that night and that shore,
And that ride, and the woe of her face!

THE CONFESSION OF TAMA THE WISE.

When all his days were ended and the time
Had come when he should ease his troubled breath,
And leave this world and all its joy and woe;
Tama the wise lay pondering on his bed,
Thinking of the silences to be;
And weary of the burden of his age
He breathed him hard and fained to be at rest.

Then came there to him Augur the patriarch,
Who held the office of the national priest,
And kept the holy temple lamps alit,
And made himself a power athwart the land,
In good repute with people and with king,
And spake to Tama:—
“Now that thou art passing
Out to the place of peace the gods have given,
To those who did them honour here on earth,
And have lived justly with their fellowmen,
’Tis meet that I who am their herald here,
Should read to thee from out the holy scrolls,
And hear from thee wherein thy heart hath sinned,
And make with thee libation to the Name.
And give thee hope that now thy toil is done,
Thou wilt go hence to dwell with the high gods,
Not with the flaming ones who sink in Hell,
But, recreate, in gardens of the light.”

Then spake old Tama:—
“Shame not the Eternal
With mouth of empty words of what thou knowest
No more than do the hollow winds that blow
From the four corners of the vacuous heaven;
Nor think to bribe the darkness with thy gifts,
Nor fill with fancied flame the senseless void;
For that old law that rules all from the first
Hath given each thing its place: and what is life,
But the quick flame that leaps up from the hearth,
Until the brand it feeds on is consumed?
And what art thou, O Augur, what am I,
That thou shouldst play the god and I the fool,
And dream that thou canst hold the keys of being,
And in some fabled existence yet to be,
Canst lease me joy or sorrow at thy will?

“O Augur, knowest thou not me, Tama of old time,
That I am not the man to act the dupe;
Or dost thou think that lying on my bed
In mine old age, like some slow-crumbling tree,
That I may chance grow credulous like a child
Or woman or weakling, and at fear of death
In my dark hour of dissolution’s throe,
Accept a dream I never knew in life,
And mock the Eternal, man and mine own self,
With some weird vision born of fear and doubt,
But never dreamed of wisdom or of strength?

“O Augur, from the cradle to the tomb,
All things about us teach us we must pass.
The joys we knew as children, the long years,
That slowly closed about us like a prison,
The summer grasses underneath our feet,
The winter snows, the joyous spring-tide hours,
All spake the awful future in my heart,
And whispered, all is passing, thou must go,
Even as these: and I have felt a joy,
Even as a child, in all this mighty world,
And the weird, awful mystery it held;
And taught me softly I were like the trees
And winds and flowers that come a season and die.

“O Augur, dost thou not know I am old,
With wrinkled winter writ about my face,
A trembling at the fingers and the knees,
Like some old, cunning instrument whose force
Is rattled out, fit only to be stored
Within the dusty chambers of the past,
Where wintry key-hole moanings tune in vain
The coffined mem’ries from their dusty sleep,
Where chance a heatless ray may fall at morn,
Nor startle the wainscot-gnawing, nor the dull,
Eternal presence of that lifeless past.

“O Augur, this is death, and I am fain
For the long slumber ’neath the greening grass.
For as a winter-brook beneath its ice,
My channel of life is shrunken low in me,
And life’s great voices dwindle and sink afar;
And time’s musician charms mine ears in vain:
For like some tree amid the forest wide,
I reared my trunk and built my tent of green,
And spread my boughs to gusty storm and sun,
And knew spring’s joy and autumn’s leafy pride;
And now the winter of all my days has come,
When, leafless, budless, I must lie me low;
And be a senseless mound where life will climb,
In springs to come, unconscious of my sleep.

“Nor, Augur, am I sad, nor hold desire
To lengthen out my days beyond their time;
For when the timbers of the house are rotten
The roof-tree sinks, and the old walls refuse
To keep the winters out; then comes the time
When the householder packs his goods to go.
So I will wend me where I know me not,
But down the twilight roads of easeful death,
Perchance an inn where I may find me rest.

“Yea, Augur, I had sadness in my days,
Mine evil hours as other men have had,
When night was night with scarce a morn to come,
And all the alley-ways of hope seemed stayed
With some vague stumblings, where I fained to crawl
And moan and grope and plead and feel my way.
Yea, I have had mine hours of glory too,
When life seemed all a morning stretching on
Out into sunny haze, and earth was filled
With youth and joy, and every path held hope,
Veiling the future in a glamorous mist.

“And I must say, O Augur, even now,
When I lie here upon this edge of life,
That slopes far downward to the soundless dark,
That I here feel me even as when a child
I wandered on the sunny slopes of morn,
And heard the elfin horns of faery blown
About the confines of my vision’s scope.
For I hold happiness for the crumbling trunk,
Skirting the evening when the Autumn wind
Moans, querulous, along the gathering dark;
As well as for the shooting sprout that feels,
Within, the upward golden wells of Spring,
When young Pan’s piping down the rosy ways
Wakens the tremulous daughters of the year.

If down some golden majesty of stairs
From some high, heart-dreamed heaven there should come
Flame-messengers, archangel-trumpeted,
And bid me fare by folds of rosy dawns,
Up to those lights eterne the angels ken;
Though down the ladders of celestial light,
Immortal invitation sought mine ears,
And beat tumultuous music in my brain,
From far-off choirs of angel harmonies;
Yet my poor heart would lean on human thoughts,
And sweetest mem’ries breed on human love,
And all my visions be of fields and flowers,
And summer brooks and winds and voices sweet,
Welling up from dreams of far-off days,
Of olden homes and faces, sweet ones loved,
Haunting from out the golden shores of youth.
Thus ever it is with age when men must die,
The phantom rivers of life must childward run,
The roads be peopled whence our hearts have come,
Who fare the ways of lonely, withered age,
The ways that lead down to the dusks of death.

“The morning roads, the golden roads of youth,
When all the future cast a majesty,
A presence as of God on field and tree,
A splendour spirit-felt, that brooded there—
The days that were, the days that are no more.

“For hearken, Augur, though a glory lies
In visions great, the human heart may build,
From out the restless longings of this life;
Not all the harpings of celestial throngs,
Tuning with spirit-songs the halls of joy,
Fabled of saints, where immortality
Hungers no more, nor dwelleth pain nor death,
Hath power to blot from out the heart of age,
Those memories divine of love and youth.
For, Augur, we are human, fleshly knit,
Aflame with all the instincts of old earth,
And she is ours and we were made for her.
We sported as babes upon her swards at morn,
Conquered her glories in our manhood’s prime,
And now the even comes we backward creep
Unto her breast, like babes, to sleep at last,
Or children who assoilèd in their play;
The battles and the fears and the mad joys,
The pageants of life all hushed and overthrown,
The clamour stilled of trumpet and of drum,
The doors all sealed, the tapers flickered out,
By some black gust athwart the moors of death.

“In this dim, twilight hour of mine old age,
Your heavenly harpings reach mine ears in vain—
I, who am but a wreck of what life was—
For stronger call the voices of my youth,
And backward surge in shoals the olden loves,
The noonday struggles and the glorious hopes;
The olden spirits haunt about my bed
From out the rosy sunrise lands of eld.

“There comes the wife, belovèd, of my youth,
Making me heaven with her sainted eyes,
Within whose depths earth’s love will ever shine.
Hath heaven a joy to match those memories,
Of long-gone summer nights astir with bloom,
When earth seemed new create, and life divine;
Those nights I held her first and knew her mine?
There come the babes of my maturer youth,
Their voices clamour all about my bed,
Making a music sweeter than April brooks.
Hath heaven a choir to match those earthly sounds,
That long have wandered like a morning dream,
Back to our mother-earth, where I go too?
I, who am left like some old withered tree,
The last of some dead woodland swept of time!

“I know not of the ways that lie before,
The doors of dark are sealed upon my sight,
Save that a splendour floods great heaven’s floor,
Across the shapeless shadows of the night;
And all the past grows luminous and bright:
I know not of the ways that lie before,
The Eternal guides me down to nature’s night.

“And, Augur, human, human to the last,
Clothed on with memories glad of love and youth,
Old Tama wanders to the dreamless dead;
Knowing no glory greater than this earth,
To sleep amid the ruins of old kings
And mighty peoples who have gone before.

“Deep in the brown earth, under the flowers and grass,
Beneath the boughs of some old spreading oak,
Beside the washings of some mighty stream,
To sleep for ever where the great hills dream;
And let the maddened march of time go by,
While over all broods the eternal sky,
Majestic, restful, as the ages pass.”

STORM.

Black trees wind-shaken against the wild night sky,
Deep in your glooms you cradle the voice of storms;
While far to west and south the night blows by,
With shadowy, fleeting forms.

Under the stars with turbid, sullen mood,
Hid in a dream of dark the river sweeps;
Where all the world by frozen field and wood,
Chilled into numbness, sleeps.

Here dwell no pallid spirits of the day,
But out across the icy, desolate dream,
The world of night is all storm-blown one way,
In a loud, gusty gleam.

Soon, soon from arctic cave and bastion strong,
With elves of frost and wrinkled, sleep-eyed ghosts,
Out of the north with hornings loud and long,
Will come the grim storm-hosts.

And faster and faster on the shadowy air,
Across the phantom glimmerings of the moon,
Will fold the silences, far, chilled and bare,
In one white, mantling swoon;

And howl and shriek and moan and pass away,
Leaving the world one whited death forlorn,
When stir the slim-cold-fingered ghosts of grey
The curtains of the morn.

SIR LANCELOT.

He rode, a king, amid the armoured knights,
The glory of day tossing on helm and shield,
And all the glory of his youth and joy,
In the strong, wine-like splendour of his face.
He rode among them, the one man of men,
Their lordliest, loveliest, he who might have been,
Because of very human breadth of love,
And his glad, winning sympathy for earth,
Greater than even Arthur under heaven.

Kindlier than the morning was his face,
Swift, like the lightning, was his eagle glance,
No bit of beauty earth had ever held,
Of child or flower or dream of woman’s face,
Or noble, passing godliness of mood,
In man toward man, but garnered in his eye,
As in some mere that gathereth all earth’s face,
And foldeth it in beauty to its breast.

He rode among them, Arthur’s own right hand,
Arthur, whom he loved as John loved Christ,
And watched each day with joy that lofty brow
Lift up its lonely splendour, isolate,
Half god-like, o’er that serried host of spears,
And knew his love the kingliest, holiest thing,
’Twixt man and man upon this glowing earth.

So passed those days of splendour and of peace,
When all men loved his majesty and strength
And kindliness of spirit which the king,
Great Arthur, with his lofty coldness lacked.
’Twas Lancelot fought the mightiest in the lists,
And beat with thunders back the brazen shields,
And stormed the fastness of the farthest isles,
Slaying the grizzly warriors of the meres,
And winning all men’s fealty and love,
And worship of fair women in the towers,
Who laid their distaffs down to watch him pass;
And made the hot blood mantle each fair cheek,
With sweet sense of his presence, till all men
Called Arthur half a god, and Lancelot
The greatest heart that beat in his great realm.

Then came that fatal day that brake his life,
When he, being sent of Arthur, all unknowing,
Saw Guinevere, like some fair flower of heaven,
As men may only see in dreams the gods
Do send to kill the common ways of earth,
And make all else but drear and dull and bleak;
Such magic she did work upon his soul,
Till Arthur, God and all the Table Round,
Were but a nebulous mist before his eyes,
In which the splendour of her beauty shone.

Henceforth the years would rise and wane and die,
And glory come and glory pass away,
And battles pass as in a troubled dream,
And Arthur be a ghost, and his knights ghosts;—
The castles and the lists and the mad fights,
Sacking of cities, scourging of country-sides,
All dreams before his eyes;—all, save her love.

So girded she her magic round his heart,
And meshed him in a golden mesh of love,
And marred his sense of all earth’s splendour there.

But in the after-days when brake the end,
And she had fled to Glastonbury’s cells,
With all the world one clamour at her sin;
And Arthur like a storm-smit pine-tree stood,
Alone amid his kingdom’s blackened ruins;—
Then Lancelot knew his life an evil dream,
And thought him of the friendship of their youth,
And all the days that they had been together,
And “Arthur, Arthur,” spake from all the meres,
And “Arthur, Arthur,” moaned from days afar.
And Lancelot grieved him of his woeful sin:—
“And this the hand that smote mine Arthur down,
That brake his glory, ruined his great hope
Of one vast kingdom built on noble deeds,
And truth and peace for many days to be.
This hand that should have been his truest strength,
Next to that high honour which he held.”
And all the torrents of his sorrow brake
For his own Arthur, Arthur standing lone,
Like some unriven pine that towers alone
Amid the awful ruins of a world.
And then a woeful longing smote him there,
To ride by murk and moon, by mere and waste,
To where the king made battle with his foes,
And look, unknown, upon his face, and die.

So thinking this he fled, and the queen’s wraith,
A memory, in the moonlight fled with him.
But stronger with him fled his gladder youth
And all the memories of the splendid past,
Until his heart yearned for the days that were,
And that great, noble soul who fought alone.

Then coming by cock-crow and the glimmering dawn,
He reached the grey-walled castle of the land,
Where the king tarried ere he went to fight
The last dread battle of the Table Round.
And the grim sentinels who guarded there,
Thinking only of him as Arthur’s friend,
And knowing not the Lancelot scandal named,
And judging by the sorrow of his face,
Deemed him some knight who came to aid the king,
And pointing past the waning beacon fires,
Said, “There he sleeps as one who hath no woes.”

And Lancelot passing silent left them there,
And entering the old abbey, (’twas some ruin
Of piety and worship of past days,)
Saw in the flicker of a dying hearth,
Mingled with faint glimmering of the dawn,
The great king sleeping, where a mighty cross
Threw its dread shadow o’er his moving breast.

And Lancelot knew the same strong, god-like face
That he had worshipped in the days no more,
And all their olden gladness smote him now,
And he had wept, but that his awful sin,
That made a wall of flame betwixt them there,
Had seared the very fountains of his soul.
Whereat he moaned, “O, noble, saintly heart,
Couldst thou but know amidst thine innocent sleep,
Save for the awful sin that flames between,
That here doth stand the Lancelot of old days,
The one of all the world who loved thee most,
The joyous friend of all thy glorious youth;
O noble! god-like! Lancelot, who hath sinned
As none hath sinned against thee, now hath come
To gaze upon thy majesty and die.
O Arthur! thou great Arthur of my youth,
My sun, my joy, my glory!”
Here the king
Stirred in his sleep, and murmured, “Guinevere!”

And Lancelot feeling that an age of ages,
Hoary with all anguish of old crime
And hideous bloodshed, were now builded up
Betwixt him and the king at that one name,
Clothed with the mad despairings of his shame,
Stole like some shrunken ghost-life from that place,
To look no more upon great Arthur’s face.

Then it did smite upon him he must die;
And in him the old ghost of honour woke
That he must die in battle, and go out
Where no dread sorrow could gnaw at his heart,
But all forgetting and eternal sleep.

Whereat the madness of old battle woke,
For his dread sin now burned all softness out,
And the glad kindliness of the Table Round,
And left him, shorn of all the Christian knight,
The gentle lord who only smote to save,
Or shield the helpless from the brutal stroke;
And flamed his heart there with the lust to slay,
And slaying be slain as his grim sires went out.

Then some far trumpet startled all the morn,
Trembling westward from its dewy sleep.
And with the day new battle woke the meres,
And as a wood-wolf scents the prey afar,
The noise of coming battle smote his ears,
And woke in him the fierceness of his race,
And the old pagan, joyous lust of fight.
And crying, “Farewell, Arthur, mine old youth,
Farewell, Lancelot, mine old kinder self,
Lancelot, Arthur’s brother, lie there low,
Slain with the glory wherewithal you fell,
While this new Lancelot, new-bred of old time,
Before the new hope of the loftier day,
Before the reign of mercy and glad law,
Thunders in old madness forth to war.”
And as in some bleak ruin of a house
Where all the sweet, home joys are ravaged out,
And some grim, evil pack hath entered in
To tear and snarl, so the old Lancelot passed.

And where he closed the battle’s fiercest shock
Did hem him round, till as a mighty surf,
That clamours, thundering round some seaward tower,
Toward him the battle roared, and clanged his shield,
And fast his blade went circling in the sun,
Like some red, flaming wheel, where’er he went;
Nor cared for friend or foe, so that he slew,
And drank his cup of madness to the death.
Till those he fought with dreamed a giant earl
Of grim old days had come once more to earth,
To fight anew the battles of his youth.

But some huge islesmen of the west were there:
And they were fain to hew him down, and came
Like swift, loud storm of autumn at him there.
Then there grew clamour of the reddest fight
That ever man beheld, and all outside
Were stayed in awe to see that one man fight
With that dread host of wilding warriors there.
Nor stayed his awful brand, but left and right
Whirled he its bloody flamings in the sun,
And men went down as in October woods
Do crash the mighty trunks before the blast,
Till all were slain but one grim islesman left.
But Lancelot by this was all one stream
Of ruddy wounds, and like some fire his brain.
And, with one awful shout of battle joy,
He sent his sword-blade wheeling in the sun,
And cleft that mighty islesman to the neck;
And crying, “Arthur!” smote the earth, and died.

Then spread such terror over all the foe,
That gods did fight with them there, that they fled.
And all that day the battle moved afar,
Out to the west by distant copse and mere,
Till died the tumult, and the night came in,
With mighty hush far over all that waste.
And one by one the lonely stars came out,
And over the meres the wintry moon looked down,
Unmindful of poor Lancelot and his wounds,
His dead, lost youth, the stillness of his face,
And all that awful carnage silent there.

IN AUTUMN.

Season of the languorous gold,
Season of the hazy drouth;
When the nights are nipt and cold,
And the birds go calling south,
Over lakes and still lagoons,
Through the long-tranced afternoons.

Out in frosty, crimsoning woods,
When the afternoons are sunny,
In sweet open solitudes
Where the wild bee stores her honey,
And the bright wood-carpenter
Hammers at some dead old fir.

There the world forgets its woe,
And the heart releases trouble,
Where the drumming partridge go,
Trailing underneath the stubble;
While the golden afternoon
Slopes and slants and sinks too soon.

Where broad rivers, brimmed with rains,
Wind in sinuous blue for miles
Through low, grassy meadow plains,
Where the warm sun sifts and smiles,
And great tented elms throw
Shadows in cool depths below;—

Spirit in blue hazes clad,
Maiden of the sunny mouth,
When the airs grow still and sad,
And the birds are calling south,
And the far-off hills are blue,
Here I love to dream with you;

Dream the olden days of yore,
While the wind some haunted tune
Flutes in gold-green leafy core
Of the long-tranced afternoon;
And my heart grows still and vast
With long memories of the past.

UNABSOLVED.

A DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE.

(This poem is founded on the confession of a man
who went with one of the expeditions to save Sir
John Franklin’s party, and who, being sent ahead,
saw signs of them, but, through cowardice, was
afraid to tell.)

O Father, hear my tale, then pity me,
For even God His pity hath withdrawn.
O death was dread and awful in those days!
You prate of hell and punishment to come,
And endless torments made for those who sin;
Stern priest, put down your cross and hearken me;—
I see forever a white glinting plain,
From night to night across the twinkling dark,
A world of cold and fear and dread and death,
And poor lost ones who starve and pinch and die;—
I could have saved them—I—yes, even I.
You talk of hell! Is hell to see poor frames,
Wan, leathery cheeks, and dull, despairing eyes,
From whence a low-flamed madness ebbing out,
Goes slowly deathward, through the eerie hours,
To hear forever pitiless, icy winds
Feel in the shivering canvas of the tent,
With idle, brute curiosity nature hath,
While out around, one universe of death,
Stretches the loveless, hearthless arctic night?

This is my doom, it sitteth by my side,
And never leaves me through the desolate years.
Go, take your hell to men who never lived,
Save as, the slow world wendeth, sluggish, dull.

Even they must suffer also, poor bleak ones,
Then is your feeble comfort nothing worth.
You tell me to have hope, God will forgive,
O priest, can God forgive a sin like mine?
You say He is all-loving, did He lie
With me that night amid the eyeless dark,
And writhe with me, and whisper, “Save thyself,
That way to north lies cold and age and death,
And awful failure on men’s awèd tongues,
To linger years hereafter; Southward lies
Home heat and love and sweet, blood-pulsing life—
Life, with its morns and eves and glad to-morrow,
And joy and hope for many days to be?”

Did He, I say, lie with me there that night,
And know that awful tragedy beyond,
And my poor tragedy enacted there?
Then must He feel Him since as I have felt,
And live that hideous misery in His heart.
And knowing this, I say unto thee, priest,
He could not be a God and say, forgive.
You plead my soul’s salvation the one end
And aim of all my thought, then hearken, priest,
For this my sin hath made me more than wise;—
That seems to me the one great sin I sinned
In selling all to save mine evil self.

Stay, hearken, priest, and haunt me not with hopes,
As futile as those icy-fingered winds
That stirred the canvas there that arctic night.
I bid thee hark and mumble not thy prayers
Like August bees heard in a summer room,
That drone afar, but keep them for the dead,
The dull-eared dead who sleep and heed them not.

Then hearken, priest, and learn thee of my woe,
For I have lain afar on northern nights,
By star-filled wastes, and conned it o’er and o’er,
And thought on God, and life, and many things,
And all the baffling mystery of the dark.
And I have held that awful rendezvous
Of naked self with self alone and bare,
And knew myself as men have never known;—
Have fought the duel, flashing hilt to hilt,
And blade to blade, of flesh and spirit there,
Until I lay a weak and wounded thing,
Like some poor, mangled bird the sportsman leaves,
Writhing and twisting there amid the dark.

You talk of ladders leading up to light,
Of windows bursting on the perfect day,
Of dawns grown ruddy on the blackest night,
Yea, I have groped about the muffled walls,
And beat my spirit’s prison all in vain,
Only to find them shrouded fold on fold;
And still the cruel, icy stars look down,
And my dread memory stayeth with me still.
It was a strange, mad quest we went upon
To seek the living in the lifeless north.
For days and days, and long, lone, loveless nights,
We set our faces toward the arctic sky,
And threaded wastes of that lone wilderness,
Beyond the lands of summer and glad spring,
Beyond the regions kind of flower and bird,
Past glint horizons of auroral gleams,
A haunted world of winter’s wizened sleep,
Where death, a giant, aged, and stark and wan,
Kept fast the entrance of those sunless caves,
Where hides the day beyond the icy seas.

Long day by day a desolation went
Where our wan faces fared, o’er all that waste;
And I was young and filled with love of life,
And fear of ugly death as some weird black,
The enemy of love and youth and joy;—
A lonely, ruined bridge at edge of night,
Fading in blackness at the outer end.
And those were cold, stern men I went with there,
Who held their lives as men do hold a gift
Not worth the keeping; men who told dread tales,
That made a madness in me of that waste
And all its hellish, lonely solitude,
And set my heart abeating for the south,
Until that awful desolation ringed
My reason round, and shrunk my fearful heart.
Yea, Father, I had saved them but for this;—
Why did they send me on alone, ahead,
Poor me, the only weak one of that band,
Who was too much of coward to show my fear?
Why did life give me that mad fear of death,
To make me selfish at the very last?
Why did God give those men into my hand,
And leave them victim to a craven fear
That walked those lonely wastes in form of man?

No, Father, take your cross, mine is a pain
That only distant ages can out-burn.
Forgiveness! No, you know not what you say;
You churchmen mumble words as charmers do,
And talk of God and love so glib and pat,
And think you reach men’s souls and give them light,
When all the time my spirit is to you
A land unfound, a region far-removed,
Where walk dim ghosts of thoughts and fears and pains
You never dreamed of. What know you of souls
Like this of mine that hath girt misery’s sum,
And found the black with which God veils His face.
You say the church absolves, you speak of peace,
You talk of what not even God can do
Be He but what you make Him. In my light,
And mine is light of one who knows the case,
The facts, the reasons, and hath weighed them too,
There is but one absolver, the absolved.
For I, since that far, fatal, arctic night,
Have been alone in some dread, shadowy court,
Where I was judge and guilty prisoner too.
Words, words are empty,—were life built on words,
How rich the poor would grow, the weak be strong,
The hateful loving, and the scornful weak,
The king would be a peasant, and the poor
A king in his own right; the murderer, red
From his foul guilt, would pass to God’s own breast,
And all damned things, long damned of earth’s consent,
And some dread law, much older far than we,
Would blossom righteous under heaven’s face.

Ofttimes I think you churchmen do not feel;
You wear a mask and mumble petty hopes,
And show a righteous patronage of scorn
Toward all poor creatures who have shown life’s sting;
And all the while, you of you who are men,
And not mere walking, feeding, lusting swine,
Mere mocks of human that do play a part,
Are but behind the mask a living death,
A muffled night that murmurs of the light,
A dread despair where lips have muttered hope.

Still fared we north across that frozen waste
Of icy horror ringed with awful night,
To seek the living in a world of death;
And as we fared a terror grew and grew
About my heart like madness, till I dreamed
A vague desire to flee by night and creep,
By steel-blue, windless plain and haunted wood,
And wizened shore and headland, once more south.

There as we went the days grew wan and shrunk,
And nights grew vast and weird and beautiful,
Walled with flame-glories of auroral light,
Ringing the frozen world with myriad spears
Of awful splendour there across the night.
And ever anon a shadowy, spectral pack
Of gleaming eyes and panting, lurid tongues
Haunted the lone horizon toward the south.

Then life ebbed lower in the bravest heart,
And spake the leader, “If in ten more days
We chance on nothing, then will we return,
And set our faces once more to the south.”
For that dread land began to close us in,
With cold and hunger, bit at our poor limbs,
Till life grew there a feeble, flickering flame,
Amid the snows and ice-floes of that land.
Then ten days crept out shrunk and grey and wan,
With nothing but the lonely, haunted waste.
Then spake the leader, “If in five more days!”
Then parcelled out those five grey, haggard days,
While life to me grew like an ebbing tide,
That surged far out from some dread death-like strand.
And horror came upon me like the night,
That seemed to gird the world in desolate walls.
Then spake the leader, “If in three more days!”

But when the third day waned we came, at last,
Unto the shores of some dread, lonely sea,
That gloomed to north and night, and far beyond,
Where ruined straits and headlands loomed and sank,
There seemed the awful endings of the world.

Then spake the leader, “Let us go not yet,
But stay a little ere we turn us south,
Perchance, poor souls, they might be somewhere here.”
And then to me, “You go, for you are young
And strong, and life throbs quickest in your veins,
And you have eyes more strong to see, for ours
Are dimmed by the dread frost-mists of this land;
And creep out there beyond yon gleaming ledge,
And bring me word of what you there may see.
And if you meet no sign of mast or sail,
Or hull or wreck, or mark of living soul,
Then we will turn our faces to the south;
For this great ocean’s vastness hems us in,
And death here nightly creeps from strand to strand,
And binds with girth of black the gleaming world.”

Then whispering “Madness, madness,” to the dark,
I crept me fearful o’er that gleaming ledge,
And saw but night and awful gulfs of dark,
And weird ice-mountains looming desolate there,
And far beyond the vastness of that sea.
And then—O God, why died I not that hour?
Amid the gleaming floes far up that shore,
So far it seemed that man’s foot scarce could go,
The certain, tapering outline of a mast,
And one small patch of rag; and then I felt
No man could ever live to reach that place,
And horror seized me of that haunted world,
That I should die there and be froze for aye,
Amid the ice-core of its awful heart.

Then crept I back the weak ghost of a life,
A miserable, shaking, coffined fear,
And spake, “I saw but ice and winds and dark,
And the dread vastness of that desolate sea.”
Again he spake, “Creep out once more and look,
Perchance your sight was misled by the gleam.”
And then once more I crept out on that ledge,
And saw again the night and awful dark,
And that poor beckoning mast that haunts me yet;
And as I lay those moments seemed to grow,
As men have felt in looking down long years,
And there I chose “’twixt evil and the good,”
And took the evil; then began my hell,
And back I crept with that black lie on lips,
And spake again, “I only saw the night,
And those weird mountains and the awful deep.”

At that he moaned and spake, “Poor souls! Poor souls!
Then they are doomed if ever men were doomed.”
Whereat a sudden, great auroral flame
Filled all the heaven, lighting wastes and sea,
And came a wondrous shock across the world,
Like sounds of far-off battle where hosts die,
As if God thundered back mine awful lie,
And I fell in a heap where all was black.

When next I lived we were full three days south,
And two had died upon that dreadful march;
Then memory came, and I went laughing mad,
But kept mine awful secret to this hour.

No, priest, you can do nothing, pain like mine
Must smoulder out in its own agony,
Till there be nought but ashes at the last.

But something ’mid the pauses of the dark
Doth teach me that I am not all alone,
For I have dreamed in my dread, maddest hour,
An awful shadow, blacker than my black,
Went ever with me. Hearken to me now:
I never felt a hand or saw a face,
I never knew a comfort more than sleep,
The winters they are only barren snows,
And age is hard, and death waits at the last.

But I have felt in some dim, shapeless way,
As memories long remembered after youth,
That back of all there is some mighty will,
Beyond the little dreams that we are here,
Beyond the misery of our days and years,
Beyond the outmost system’s outmost rim,
Where wrinkled suns in awful blackness swim,
A wondrous mercy that is working still.

THE DREAMERS.

They lingered on the middle heights,
Betwixt the brown earth and the heaven;
They whispered, “We are not the night’s,
But pallid children of the even.”

They muttered, “We are not the day’s,
For the old struggle and endeavor,
The rugged and unquiet ways,
Are dead and driven past for ever.”

They dreamed upon the cricket’s tune,
The winds that stirred the withered grasses:
But never saw the blood-red moon,
That lit the spectre mountain-passes.

They sat and marked the brooklet steal
In smoke-mist o’er its silvered surges:
But marked not, with its peal on peal,
The storm that swept the granite gorges.

They dreamed the shimmer and the shade,
And sought in pools for haunted faces:
Nor heard again the cannonade,
In dreams from earth’s old battle-places.

They spake, “The ages all are dead,
The strife, the struggle and the glory;
We are the silences that wed,
Betwixt the story and the story.

“We are the little winds that moan
Between the woodlands and the meadows,
We are the ghosted leaves, wind-blown
Across the gust-light and the shadows.”

Then came a soul across those lands,
Whose face was all one glad, rapt wonder;
And spake: “The skies are ribbed with bands
Of fire, and heaven all racked with thunder.

“Climb up and see the glory spread,
High over cliff and ’scarpment yawning:
The night is past, the dark is dead,
Behold the triumph of the dawning!”

Then laughed they with a wistful scorn,
“You are a ghost, a long-dead vision;
You passed by ages ere was born
This twilight of the days elysian.

“There is no hope, there is no strife,
But only haunted hearts that hunger,
About a dead, scarce dreamed-of life,
Old ages when the earth was younger.”

Then came by one in mad distress,
“Haste, haste, below where strong arms weaken,
The fighting ones grow less and less!
Great cities of the world are taken!

“Dread evil rolls by like a flood,
Men’s bones beneath his surges whiten,
Go where the ages mark in blood
The footsteps that their days enlighten.”

Still they but heard, discordant mirth,
The thin winds through the dead stalks rattle;
While out from far-off haunts of earth,
There smote the mighty sound of battle.

Now there was heard an awful cry,
Despair that rended heaven asunder,
White pauses when a cause would die,
Where love was lost and souls went under.

The while these feebly dreamed and talked,
Betwixt the brown earth and the heaven,
Faint ghosts of men who breathed and walked,
But deader than the dead ones even.

And out there on the middle height,
They sought in pools for haunted faces,
Nor heard the cry across the night,
That swept from earth’s dread battle-places.

THE MOTHER.