Chapter LXVII

The song-birds, are they flown away,
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
Thridding with vocal gold the hush.

All day the crows fly cawing past:
The acorns drop: the forests scowl:
At night I hear the bitter blast
Hoot with the hooting of the owl.
The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn
With leaves that clog: beneath the tree
The bird, that set its toil to tune,
And made a home for melody,
Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.

THE MOATED GRANGE

“_There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana._"--Shakespeare.

The sunset-crimson poppies are departed,
Mariana!
The purple-centered, sultry-smelling poppies,
The drowsy-hearted,
That burnt like flames along the low yew coppice;
All heavy headed,
The ruby-cupped and opium-brimming poppies,
That slumber wedded,
Mariana!
The sunset-crimson poppies are departed.

Oh, heavy, heavy are the hours that fall,
The lonesome hours of the lonely days!
No poppy strews oblivion by the wall,
Where lone the last pod sways,--
Oblivion that was hers of old that happier made her days.
Oh, weary, weary is the sky o’er all,
The days that creep, the hours that crawl,
And weary all the ways--
She leans her face against the lichened wall,
The mildewed wall, the crumbling wall,
And dreams, the long, long days,
Of one who will not come again whatever may befall.

* * * * *

All night it blew. The rain streamed down
And drowned the world in misty wet.
At morning, round the sunflower’s crown
A row of silvery drops was set;
The candytuft, heat shrivelled brown,
And beds of drought-dried mignonette,
Were beat to earth: but wearier, oh,
The rain was than the sun’s fierce glow,
That in the garth had wrought such woe.

That killed the moss-rose ere it bloomed,
And scorched the double-hollyhocks;
And bred great, poisonous weeds that doomed
The snap-dragon and standing-phlox;
’Mid which gaunt spiders wove and loomed
Their dusty webs ’twixt rows of box;
And rotted into sleepy ooze
The lilied moat, that, lined with yews,
Lay scummed with many sickly hues.

How oft she longed and prayed for rain,
To blot the hateful landscape out!
To heal her heart, so parched with pain,
With cooling sounds of broken drought;
And cure with change her stagnant brain,
And soothe to sleep all care and doubt:
At last--when many days had passed--
And she had ceased to care--at last
The longed-for rain came, falling fast.

At night, as late she lay awake,
And thought of him who had not come,
She heard the gray wind, moaning, shake
Her lattice; then the steady drum
Of rain upon the leads.... The ache
Within her heart, so burdensome,
Grew heavier with the moan of rain.
The house was still, save, at her pane,
The wind cried: hushed: then cried again.

All night she lay awake and wept:
There was no other thing to do.
At dawn she rose and, sighing, crept
Adown the stairs that led into
The dripping garth, the storm had swept
With ruin; where, of every hue,
The flowers lay rotting, stained with mould;
Where all was old, unkempt and old,
And ragged as a marigold.

She sat her down, where oft she sat,
Upon a bench of marble, where,
In lines, she oft would marvel at,
A love was carved.--She did not dare
Look on it then, remembering that
Here in past time _he_ kissed her hair,
And murmured vows while, soft above,
The full moon lit the form thereof,
The slowly crumbling form of Love.

She could but weep, remembering hours
Like these. Then in the drizzling rain,
That weighed the dead and dying flowers,
She sought the old stone dial again;
The dial, among the moss-rose bowers,
Where often she had read, in vain,
Of time and change, and love and loss,
Rude-lettered and o’ergrown with moss,
That slow the gnomon moved across.

Remembering this, she turned away,
The rain and tears upon her face.
There was no thing to do or say.--
She stood a while, a little space,
And watched the rain bead, round and gray,
Upon the cobweb’s tattered lace,
And tag the toadstool’s spongy brim
With points of mist; and, orbing, dim
With fog the sunflower’s ruined rim.--

With fog, through which the moon at night
Would glimmer like a spectre sail;
Or, sullenly, a blur of light,
Like some great glow-worm, dimly trail;
’Neath which she’d hear, wrapped deep in white,
The far sea moaning on its shale:
While in the garden, pacing slow,
And listening to its surge and flow,
She’d seem to hear her own heart’s woe.--

Now as the fog crept in from sea,
A great white darkness, like a pall,
The yews and huddled shrubbery,
That dripped along the weedy wall,
Turned phantoms; and as shadowy
She too seemed, wandering ’mid it all--
A phantom, pale and sad and strange,
And hopeless, doomed for aye to range
About the melancholy grange.

* * * * *

The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied,
Mariana!
The raven-dyed and fire-fretted pansies,
To memory married;
That from the grass, like forms in old romances,
Raised fairy faces:
All dead they lie, the violet-velvet pansies,
In many places,
Mariana!
The pansies, too, are dead, the violet-varied.

Oh, hateful, hateful are the hours that pass,
The lonely hours of the lonesome nights!
No pansy scatters heart’s-ease through the grass,
That autumn sorrow blights,
The heart’s-ease that was hers of old that happier made her nights.
Oh, barren, barren is her life, alas!
Its youth and beauty, all life has,
And barren all delights--
She lays her face against the withered grass,
The rain-wet grass, the autumn grass,
And thinks, the long, long nights,
Of one who will not come again whatever comes to pass.

CIRCE

The pillared portals of her home once rose from out the sea;
Its casements burnt with green sea-fire of ocean mystery;
And all its halls of love were full of mermaid melody.

Its battlements of beauty were a pharos from afar,
To lure the wandering seamen like a constellated star:--
Life may question: death is silent: will it answer where they are?

It is enough to know that once between the golden goals
Of dreams and deeds their vessel steered to music of citoles,
And reached the Siren island where they pledged and lost their souls.

It is enough to know that once love led them with a lute--
To taste the honey of her soul and of her flesh the fruit;
Between the soul and flesh she changed each man into a brute.

It is enough to know that love once sate them at a feast--
Her word was bread and oil to them, her kiss was wine at least;
Between the word and kiss she changed each man into a beast.

The marble now is vanished where the columned wonder rose;
The billow beats complaining there, a heart of many woes;
The sea-wind sings uncertain things of what the Siren knows.

Ah me! you know not how it is with him who once has been
A portion of such passion and the slave of such a queen;
What such possession of her love to his whole life may mean!

The world of languid attitudes that lured him to despair;
Abandonments of beauty that his heart would not beware--
A red rose suffering death to live one hour in her hair.

Yea, just to be again to her as music to the lute,
As fragrance to the senses, and to lips the blood-red fruit,
Between the soul and flesh again, unto her beauty, brute.

Her alabaster stairways and her casements filled with light,
Her corridors of melody and colonnades of night
Shall haunt his heart forever with the magic of her might!

POPPY AND MANDRAGORA

Let us go far from here!
Here there is sadness in the early year:
Here sorrow is where joy went laughing late:
The sicklied face of heaven hangs like hate
Above the woodland and the meadowland;
And Spring hath taken fire in her hand
Of frost and made a dead bloom of her face,
Which was a flower of beauty once and grace,
And musk and color and serenest glow.
Delay not; let us go.

Let us go far away
Into the sunrise of a fairer day:
Where all the nights resign them to the moon,
And drug their souls with odor and soft tune,
And tell their dreams in starlight: where the hours
Teach immortality with fadeless flowers;
And all the day the bee weighs down the bloom,
And all the night the moth shakes strange perfume
From bell and bugle of the lily intense.
Let us go far from hence.

Why should we sit and weep,
And yearn with weary eyelids still to sleep?
Forever hiding from our hearts the hate,
Death within death, life doth accumulate,
Like winter snows, along the barren leas
And sterile hills, whereon no lover sees
The crocus limn the beautiful in flame;
Or hyacinth and jonquil write the name
Of love in fire, beautiful to the eye.
Why should we sit and sigh?

We will not stay and long,
Here where our souls are wasting for a song;
Where no bird sings; and, dim beneath the stars,
No silvery water strikes melodious bars;
And in the rocks and forest-covered hills
No quick-tongued echo from her grotto fills
With eery syllables the solitude--
The vocal image of the voice that wooed--
Echo, of sound the airy looking-glass.
Our souls are sick, alas!

What should we say to her,
To Hope, who in our hearts makes no sweet stir?
Who looks not on us nor gives thought unto:
Too busy with the birth of bud and dew,
And vague gold wings within the chrysalis;
Or Love, who will not miss us; had no kiss
To give your soul or the sad soul of me,
Who gave our hearts to her in poesy,
Long since, and wear her badge of service still.
Yea, we have served our fill.

We will go far away.
Song will not care, who slays our souls each day
With the dark daggers of indignant eyes,
And lips’ sharp silence!... Had she sighed us lies,
Not passionate, yet falsely tremulous;
And lent her mouth to ours, in mockery; thus
Smiled from calm eyes a loveless negative;
Then, then our hearts had taught themselves to live
Feeding their love on her indifference.
But no!--so let us hence.

So be the Bible shut
Of Love and Beauty, and their wisdom but
A clasp of memory!--We will not seek
The light that came not when our souls were weak
With longing, and the darkness gave no sign
Of star-born comfort. Nay! why should we whine
Dull psalms of patience, or hosannas of
Old hope and dreary canticles of love?--
Leave us alone. My soul hath long supposed
For us God’s book was closed.

ROSEMARY

I

If she but breathe her wild breath in my face,
If she but shake her wild hair past mine eyes,
When life sits tearless in grief’s sunless chamber,
Then through the vasts of separating space,
Robed on with fire of hope my soul shall rise
And claim her.

II

When shall this be?--Not till within my soul
Joy’s lips are dumb, and dumb his instrument,
And love lies dead beside one withered flower,
And dark the gray walls of the home of dole,--
Whence the last flicker of hope’s taper went,--
Shall tower.

III

If she but bend her loving eyes on mine,
If she but give one loving thought to me,
When life sits sleepless in sleep’s caverned hollow,
Then in the night a sudden star shall shine,
And I shall rise, robed on with ecstasy,
And follow.

IV

When shall this be?--Not till within my heart
Hope’s voice is still, and song that suffereth,
And love lies dead beside his silent numbers,
And in the halls of silence, all apart,
Oblivion sits, crowned with the crown of death,
And slumbers.

NIGHTSHADE

I

Though she hath lifted up my face to hers,
And kissed the lips of worship she denied,
There is no mouth of verse,
Here in the shadow of the crucified,
Or voice of love; only my soul that died,
My dead soul and my curse!--
She asks me now for flowers that are ashes,
Here where the red flow’r of my life lies slain:
For love, that lashed me once and now that lashes
Her soul again.

II

Though she hath gazed into mine eyes and said,
“Belovéd, look thou in my soul and see,”
And I have looked and read
The burthen of a kindred agony,
I am grown glad that this hath come to be
Betwixt the quick and dead.--
She asks me now for songs from love’s sweet psalter,
Here where the music of my life lies hushed:
For love, that died upon the iron altar
Where hers lies crushed.