Chapter I: WOULD unto my fair restore

A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more
By Severn shore,
The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.

Ah, say how winds in flooding grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose;
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.

BY THE TRUNDLE-BED

TO M. M. R.

LOST love, be never beyond Love’s calling!
For this I claim of you, strong heart, sweet
As fontal water in Arden falling,
As first-mown hay in the April heat:

To tend from heaven, to rear, to harden,
And bring to bloom in the outer cold,
Our daffodil bud of a walled-in garden,
Our son that is like you, and six years old;

And lest his worth be the worth unreal,
To ward him not from the mortal blast,
But suffer your own, through a long ordeal,
Verily like you to be at the last,

And hear men murmur, if so he merit
In your old place with your look to arise:
“The sign of a saved soul who can inherit?--
You have earned, O King! those beautiful eyes.”

THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT

SINCE first I knew it our divine employ
To beat beyond the reach of soiling care,
As at Philippi, well of doom aware,
The Prætor called and heard the singing boy;
Since first my soul so jealous was of joy,
That any facile linden-bloom in air,
Or fall of water on a wildwood stair,
Annulled for her all dragging dull annoy;
Though word of thanks I lacked, though, dumb, I smiled
Long, long, at such august amends up-piled,
Let this the debt redeem: that when Ye drop
Death’s aloe-leaf within my honeyed cup,
On thoughtful knee your much-beholden child,
Immortals! unto You will drink it up.

ARBORICIDE

A WORD of grief to me erewhile:
_We have cut the oak down, in our isle._

And I said: “Ye have bereaven
The song-thrush and the bee,
And the fisher-boy at sea
Of his sea-mark in the even;
And gourds of cooling shade, to lie
Within the sickle’s sound;
And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eye
Of sleep on duty’s ground;
And poets of their tent
And quiet tenement.
Ah, impious! who so paid
Such fatherhood, and made
Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.”

For the hewn oak a century fair,
A wound in earth, an ache in air.

And I said: “No pillared height
With a summer daïs over,
Where a dryad fled her lover
Through the long arcade of light;
Nor ’neath Arcturus rolleth more,
Since the loud leaves are gone,
Between the shorn cliff and the shore,
Pan’s organ antiphon.
Some nameless envy fed
This blow at grandeur’s head:
Some breathed reproach o’erdue,
Degenerate men, ye drew!
Then, for his too plain heavenliness, our Socrates ye slew.”

CHARISTA MUSING

MOVELESS, on the marge of a sunny cornfield,
Rapt in sudden revery while thou standest,
Like the sheaves, in beautiful Doric yellow
Clad to the ankle,

Oft to thee with delicate hasty footstep
So I steal, and suffer because I find thee
Inly flown, and only a fallen feather
Left of my darling.

Give me back thy wakening breath, thy ringlets
Fragrant as the vine of the bean in blossom,
And those eyes of violet dusk and daylight
Under sea-water,

Eyes too far away, and too full of longing!
Yes: and go not heavenward where I lose thee,
Go not, go not whither I cannot follow,
Being but earthly.

Willing swallow poisèd upon my finger,
Little wild-wing ever from me escaping,
For the care thou art to me, I thy lover
Love thee, and fear thee.

THE PERFECT HOUR

BE it on my blazon shown
How I fought the fiends alone,
Ere I rose to this content,
Open, true, magnificent.

My heart from the underworld
Rides the bright sea-foam upcurled;
My heart suns in air between
Medlar-pear and nectarine;

Terrors run to me at dawn
Tamer than the velvet fawn;
Not to me hath Love denied
His great star of eventide.

Fate, where is thy splintered spear
Met me in the tourney year?
Once thou wert in overthrow,
Then I laughed, and let thee go.

Wouldst thou yet make sport of me,
Find me kingly, fervent, free!
Though there come the foreordained,
In thy city have I not reigned?

DEO OPTIMO MAXIMO

ALL else for use, one only for desire;
Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:
Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,
Impel thou me.

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,
Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.
Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny
These three are dear,)

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,
Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys:
O close my hand upon Beatitude!
Not on her toys.

IN TIME OF TROUBLE

BELIEVE the word our gentle augur spake:
_Sweet are the uses of adversity_,
Sweet ever; and in naught so sweet as this:
That though the heavens be barred, if we but hold
An equal, quiet, will-illumined mind,
Such greatness in us, laborless, must win
Great answers: cheer from all created things,
And interchange of love by natural right
With the high few, a kinship not of clay.
Be these thy present comfort! Like a man
Who tends a watchlight on the hills alone
At Childermas, (and through a night so cold,
The red clots of the rowan-berry twirl
Incorporate with a small stiff cone of ice,
And the wind breaks his flail, and swineherds hear
Outside, the pine-boles crack with frost i’ the heart,)
Thou shalt, ere long, upon a distant peak
Descry a doubted smoke, a likelier spark,
A shadow shot across a glare, and then
Two spurts of flame that bare the under sea;
And climb, by much and more of certitude,
To praising God some other even as thou
Beneath his natal star himself maintains,
And in salute of souls coördinate,
There, till he perish, guards his lineal fire.

AN ESTRAY

WELL we know, not ever here is a footing for thy dream:
Thou art sick for horse and spear beside an Asian stream,

For the hearth-smoke in the wild, for the goatherd’s stave,
For a beauty far exiled, a belief within its grave.

While another sky and ground orb thy strange remembering,
And no world of mortal bound is the master of thy wing,

Canst thou yet thy fate forgive, that the godhead in thy breast
Has this life at least to live as a force in rhythmic rest,

As a seed that bides the hour of obscureness and decay,
Being troth of flower to flower down the long dynastic day?

Child whom elder airs enfold, who hast greatness to maintain
Where heroic hap of old may return and shine again,

As too oft across thy heart flits the too familiar light,
How alarms of love upstart at the token quick and slight!

Lest captivity be o’er, lest thou glide away, and so
From our tents of Nevermore strike the trail of Long Ago.

BORDERLANDS

THROUGH all the evening,
All the virginal long evening,
Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone;
For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during;
And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring,
Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown?

Yet in the valley,
At a turn of the orchard alley,
When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air,
Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee,
Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee,
O hidden, O perfect, O desired! the first and the final Fair.

TO THE OUTBOUND REPUBLIC: MDCCCXCVIII

AMERICA, bride of Change!
Thy cloistral hour is done;
Thy shy and innocent foot
Is white on the stranger’s stair:
Unto what end?--Beloved!
I have heard thee sigh.

As the heliotrope in the dusk
Close under, but unespied,
Delivers one slow breath,
Pained, poignant-sweet,
Into the neutral air,
Because she inly feels
At some light shock of a bud
That would issue forth, and expand,
How coronals fall, and old
Dear purples wither away;
(While the friendly leaves o’erhead
Moan, and the redwing there
Aches in his delicate sleep;)
Even so,
Freedom’s exempted flower!
In the rhythm, the interplay
Of the terrors of budding life
Or death,
I have heard thee sigh.

As the clear mid-channel wave,
That under a Lammas dawn
Her orient lanthorn held
Steady and beautiful,
Through the trance of the sunken tide,
Sudden leaps up, and spreads
Her signal round the sea:
_Time, time!
Time to awake; to arm;
To scale the difficult shore!_
Even so,
Thou Heart of the dual deep,
Ere the plash of the onset came,
In the vortices
I have heard thee sigh.

What if now
Thou failest, our saint, our star!
Between thy Father’s tomb,
And the throne of the glittering world,
The febrile world,
Calling,
Ah, Child! (have I lived too long?)
I have heard thee sigh.

ODE FOR A MASTER MARINER ASHORE

THERE in his room, whene’er the moon looks in,
And silvers now a shell, and now a fin,
And o’er his chart glides like an argosy,
Quiet and old sits he.
Danger! he hath grown homesick for thy smile.
Where hidest thou the while, heart’s boast,
Strange face of beauty sought and lost,
Star-face that lured him out from boyhood’s isle?

Blown clear from dull indoors, his dreams behold
Night-water smoke and sparkle as of old,
The taffrail lurch, the sheets triumphant toss
Their phosphor-flowers across.
Towards ocean’s either rim the long-exiled
Wears on, till stunted cedars throw
A lace-like shadow over snow,
Or tropic fountains wash their agates wild.

Awhile, play up and down the briny spar
Odors of Surinam and Zanzibar,
Till blithely thence he ploughs, in visions new,
The Labradorian blue;
All homeless hurricanes about him break;
The purples of spent day he sees
From Samos to the Hebrides,
And drowned men dancing darkly in his wake.

Where the small deadly foam-caps, well descried,
Top, tier on tier, the hundred-mountained tide,
Away, and far away, his pride is borne,
Riding the noisy morn,
Plunges, and preens her wings, and laughs to know
The helm and tightening halyards still
Follow the urging of his will,
And scoff at sullen earth a league below.

Mischance hath barred him from his heirdom high,
And shackled him with many an inland tie,
And of his only wisdom made a jibe
Amid an alien tribe:
No wave abroad but moans his fallen state.
The trade-wind ranges now, the trade-wind roars!
Why is it on a yellowing page he pores?
Ah, why this hawser fast to a garden gate?

Thou friend so long withdrawn, so deaf, so dim,
Familiar Danger, O forget not him!
Repeat of thine evangel yet the whole
Unto his subject soul,
Who suffers no such palsy of her drouth,
Nor hath so tamely worn her chain,
But she may know that voice again,
And shake the reefs with answer of her mouth.

O give him back, before his passion fail,
The singing cordage and the hollow sail,
And level with those aged eyes let be
The bright unsteady sea;
And move like any film from off his brain
The pasture wall, the boughs that run
Their evening arches to the sun,
The hamlet spire across the sown champaign;

And on the shut space and the trivial hour,
Turn the great floods! and to thy spousal bower,
With rapt arrest and solemn loitering,
Him whom thou lovedst, bring:
That he, thy faithful one, with praising lip,
Not having, at the last, less grace
Of thee than had his roving race,
Sum up his strength to perish with a ship.

THE RECRUIT

SO much to me is imminent:
To leave Revolt that is my tent,
And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be gone,
Ere yet Creation marches on,
Obedient, jocund, glorified;

And last of things afoot, to know
How to be free is still to go
With glad concession, grave accord,

Nor longer, bond and imbecile,
Stand out against the gradual Will,
The guessed _Fall in!_ of God the Lord.

_The Martyrs’ Idyl first came out in the Christmas
number, 1898, of Harper’s Magazine. With
the exception of that, of three poems taken from
“England and Yesterday” (Grant Richards, London),
and of one other, the contents of this volume
appeared prior to 1896 in Harper’s, The
Century, The Cosmopolitan, The Independent,
The Chap-Book, etc., to
all of which thanks are due
for the courteous permission
to reprint._

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED
BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Martyrs' Idyl, by Louise Imogen Guiney