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- Herausgeber: Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Francis was an English poet and Catholic mystic. He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labour, becoming addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem. During this period from 1888 – 1897, after which he turned to writing prose. Francis' poem The Hound of Heaven was called by the Bishop of London "one of the most tremendous poems ever written". In 1897, he began writing prose, drawing inspiration from life in the countryside, Wales and Storrington. Notable among his prose works are an essay on Shelley, "The Life of St. Ignatius", and "Health and Holiness". Contents: Poems on Children Sister Songs Love in Dian's Lap. The Hound of Heaven Ode to the Setting Sun A Corymbus for Autumn To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster Ecclesiastical Ballads Translations Miscellaneous Poems New Poems A Narrow Vessel Ultima An Anthem of Earth Miscellaneous Odes Sonnets Miscellaneous Poems The Prose
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The complete works of Francis Thompson
The Poems, The Prose: The Hound of Heaven and others
Illustrated
Francis was an English poet and Catholic mystic.
He spent three years on the streets of London, supporting himself with menial labour, becoming addicted to opium which he took to relieve a nervous problem.
During this period from 1888 – 1897, after which he turned to writing prose.
Francis' poem The Hound of Heaven was called by the Bishop of London "one of the most tremendous poems ever written".
In 1897, he began writing prose, drawing inspiration from life in the countryside, Wales and Storrington.
Notable among his prose works are an essay on Shelley, "The Life of St. Ignatius", and "Health and Holiness".
Poems on Children
Sister Songs
Love in Dian’s Lap.
The Hound of Heaven
Ode to the Setting Sun
A Corymbus for Autumn
To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster
Ecclesiastical Ballads
Translations
Miscellaneous Poems
New Poems
A Narrow Vessel
Ultima
An Anthem of Earth
Miscellaneous Odes
Sonnets
Miscellaneous Poems
The Prose
Poems on Children
DAISY.
Where the thistle lifts a purple crown
Six foot out of the turf,
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill —
O the breath of the distant surf! —
The hills look over on the South,
And southward dreams the sea;
And, with the sea-breeze hand in hand,
Came innocence and she.
Where ‘mid the gorse the raspberry
Red for the gatherer springs,
Two children did we stray and talk
Wise, idle, childish things.
She listened with big-lipped surprise,
Breast-deep mid flower and spine:
Her skin was like a grape, whose veins
Run snow instead of wine.
She knew not those sweet words she spake,
Nor knew her own sweet way;
But there’s never a bird, so sweet a song
Thronged in whose throat that day!
Oh, there were flowers in Storrington
On the turf and on the spray;
But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills
Was the Daisy-flower that day!
Her beauty smoothed earth’s furrowed face!
She gave me tokens three: —
A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.
A berry red, a guileless look,
A still word, — strings of sand!
And yet they made my wild, wild heart
Fly down to her little hand.
For standing artless as the air,
And candid as the skies,
She took the berries with her hand,
And the love with her sweet eyes.
The fairest things have fleetest end:
Their scent survives their close,
But the rose’s scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose!
She looked a little wistfully,
Then went her sunshine way: —
The sea’s eye had a mist on it,
And the leaves fell from the day.
She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.
She left me marvelling why my soul
Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.
Still, still I seemed to see her, still
Look up with soft replies,
And take the berries with her hand,
And the love with her lovely eyes.
Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in other’s pain,
And perish in our own.
THE MAKING OF VIOLA.
I.
The Father of Heaven.
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Twirl your wheel with silver din;
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Spin a tress for Viola.
Angels.
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola!
II.
The Father of Heaven.
Weave, hands angelical,
Weave a woof of flesh to pall —
Weave, hands angelical —
Flesh to pall our Viola.
Angels.
Weave, singing brothers, a
Velvet flesh for Viola!
III.
The Father of Heaven.
Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes,
Wood-browned pools of Paradise —
Young Jesus, for the eyes,
For the eyes of Viola.
Angels.
Tint, Prince Jesus, a
Duskèd eye for Viola!
IV.
The Father of Heaven.
Cast a star therein to drown,
Like a torch in cavern brown,
Sink a burning star to drown
Whelmed in eyes of Viola.
Angels.
Lave, Prince Jesus, a
Star in eyes of Viola!
V.
The Father of Heaven.
Breathe, Lord Paraclete,
To a bubbled crystal meet —
Breathe, Lord Paraclete —
Crystal soul for Viola.
Angels.
Breathe, Regal Spirit, a
Flashing soul for Viola!
VI.
The Father of Heaven.
Child-angels, from your wings
Fall the roseal hoverings,
Child-angels, from your wings,
On the cheeks of Viola.
Angels.
Linger, rosy reflex, a
Quenchless stain, on Viola!
VII
All things being accomplished, saith the Father of Heaven.
Bear her down, and bearing, sing,
Bear her down on spyless wing,
Bear her down, and bearing, sing,
With a sound of viola.
Angels.
Music as her name is, a
Sweet sound of Viola!
VIII.
Wheeling angels, past espial,
Danced her down with sound of viol;
Wheeling angels, past espial,
Descanting on “Viola.”
Angels.
Sing, in our footing, a
Lovely lilt of “Viola!”
IX.
Baby smiled, mother wailed,
Earthward while the sweetling sailed;
Mother smiled, baby wailed,
When to earth came Viola.
And her elders shall say: —
So soon have we taught you a
Way to weep, poor Viola!
X.
Smile, sweet baby, smile,
For you will have weeping-while;
Native in your Heaven is smile, —
But your weeping, Viola?
Whence your smiles we know, but ah?
Whence your weeping, Viola? —
Our first gift to you is a
Gift of tears, my Viola!
TO MY GODCHILD FRANCIS M. W. M.
This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon,
Riding at anchor off the orient sun,
Had broken its cable, and stood out to space
Down some frore Arctic of the aërial ways:
And now, back warping from the inclement main,
Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain,
It swung into its azure roads again;
When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you
Lit, a white halcyon auspice, ‘mid our frozen crew.
To the Sun, stranger, surely you belong,
Giver of golden days and golden song;
Nor is it by an all-unhappy plan
You bear the name of me, his constant Magian.
Yet ah! from any other that it came,
Lest fated to my fate you be, as to my name.
When at the first those tidings did they bring,
My heart turned troubled at the ominous thing:
Though well may such a title him endower,
For whom a poet’s prayer implores a poet’s power.
The Assisian, who kept plighted faith to three,
To Song, to Sanctitude, and Poverty,
(In two alone of whom most singers prove
A fatal faithfulness of during love!);
He the sweet Sales, of whom we scarcely ken
How God he could love more, he so loved men;
The crown and crowned of Laura and Italy;
And Fletcher’s fellow — from these, and not from me,
Take you your name, and take your legacy!
Or, if a right successive you declare
When worms, for ivies, intertwine my hair,
Take but this Poesy that now followeth
My clayey hest with sullen servile breath,
Made then your happy freedman by testating death.
My song I do but hold for you in trust,
I ask you but to blossom from my dust.
When you have compassed all weak I began,
Diviner poet, and ah! diviner man;
The man at feud with the perduring child
In you before song’s altar nobly reconciled;
From the wise heavens I half shall smile to see
How little a world, which owned you, needed me.
If, while you keep the vigils of the night,
For your wild tears make darkness all too bright,
Some lone orb through your lonely window peeps,
As it played lover over your sweet sleeps;
Think it a golden crevice in the sky,
Which I have pierced but to behold you by!
And when, immortal mortal, droops your head,
And you, the child of deathless song, are dead;
Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance
The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod
Among the bearded counsellors of God;
For if in Eden as on earth are we,
I sure shall keep a younger company:
Pass where beneath their rangèd gonfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridgèd spears;
Pass where majestical the eternal peers,
The stately choice of the great Saintdom, meet —
A silvern segregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet;
Pass by where wait, young poet-wayfarer,
Your cousined clusters, emulous to share
With you the roseal lightnings burning ‘mid their hair;
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven: —
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
THE POPPY.
To Monica.
Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare.
And left the flushed print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.
With burnt mouth red like a lion’s it drank
The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,
And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine
When the eastern conduits ran with wine.
Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss,
And hot as a swinked gipsy is,
And drowsed in sleepy savageries,
With mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss.
A child and man paced side by side,
Treading the skirts of eventide;
But between the clasp of his hand and hers
Lay, felt not, twenty withered years.
She turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair,
And saw the sleeping gipsy there;
And snatched and snapped it in swift child’s whim,
With— “Keep it, long as you live!” — to him.
And his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres,
Trembled up from a bath of tears;
And joy, like a mew sea-rocked apart,
Tossed on the wave of his troubled heart.
For he saw what she did not see,
That — as kindled by its own fervency —
The verge shrivelled inward smoulderingly:
And suddenly ‘twixt his hand and hers
He knew the twenty withered years —
No flower, but twenty shrivelled years.
“Was never such thing until this hour,”
Low to his heart he said; “the flower
Of sleep brings wakening to me,
And of oblivion memory.”
“Was never this thing to me,” he said,
“Though with bruisèd poppies my feet are red!”
And again to his own heart very low:
“O child! I love, for I love and know;
“But you, who love nor know at all
The diverse chambers in Love’s guest-hall,
Where some rise early, few sit long:
In how differing accents hear the throng
His great Pentecostal tongue;
“Who know not love from amity,
Nor my reported self from me;
A fair fit gift is this, meseems,
You give — this withering flower of dreams.
“O frankly fickle, and fickly true,
Do you know what the days will do to you?
To your Love and you what the days will do,
O frankly fickle, and fickly true?
“You have loved me, Fair, three lives — or days:
‘Twill pass with the passing of my face.
But where I go, your face goes too,
To watch lest I play false to you.
“I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover,
Knowing well when certain years are over
You vanish from me to another;
Yet I know, and love, like the foster-mother.
“So, frankly fickle, and fickly true!
For my brief life — while I take from you
This token, fair and fit, meseems,
For me — this withering flower of dreams.”
* * * * * * *
The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread:
The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.
I hang ‘mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper!
Love! love! your flower of withered dream
In leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem,
Sheltered and shut in a nook of rhyme,
From the reaper man, and his reaper Time.
Love! I fall into the claws of Time:
But lasts within a leavèd rhyme
All that the world of me esteems —
My withered dreams, my withered dreams.
TO MONICA THOUGHT DYING.
You, O the piteous you!
Who all the long night through
Anticipatedly
Disclose yourself to me
Already in the ways
Beyond our human comfortable days;
How can you deem what Death
Impitiably saith
To me, who listening wake
For your poor sake?
When a grown woman dies
You know we think unceasingly
What things she said, how sweet, how wise;
And these do make our misery.
But you were (you to me
The dead anticipatedly!)
You — eleven years, was’t not, or so? —
Were just a child, you know;
And so you never said
Things sweet immeditatably and wise
To interdict from closure my wet eyes:
But foolish things, my dead, my dead!
Little and laughable,
Your age that fitted well.
And was it such things all unmemorable,
Was it such things could make
Me sob all night for your implacable sake?
Yet, as you said to me,
In pretty make-believe of revelry,
So the night long said Death
With his magniloquent breath;
(And that remembered laughter
Which in our daily uses followed after,
Was all untuned to pity and to awe):
“A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw.”
How could I know, how know
Those laughing words when drenched with sobbing so?
Another voice than yours, than yours, he hath!
My dear, was’t worth his breath,
His mighty utterance? — yet he saith, and saith!
This dreadful Death to his own dreadfulness
Doth dreadful wrong,
This dreadful childish babble on his tongue!
That iron tongue made to speak sentences,
And wisdom insupportably complete,
Why should it only say the long night through,
In mimicry of you, —
“A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw!”
Oh, of all sentences,
Piercingly incomplete!
Why did you teach that fatal mouth to draw,
Child, impermissible awe,
From your old trivialness?
Why have you done me this
Most unsustainable wrong,
And into Death’s control
Betrayed the secret places of my soul?
Teaching him that his lips,
Uttering their native earthquake and eclipse,
Could never so avail
To rend from hem to hem the ultimate veil
Of this most desolate
Spirit, and leave it stripped and desecrate, —
Nay, never so have wrung
From eyes and speech weakness unmanned, unmeet;
As when his terrible dotage to repeat
Its little lesson learneth at your feet;
As when he sits among
His sepulchres, to play
With broken toys your hand has cast away,
With derelict trinkets of the darling young.
Why have you taught — that he might so complete
His awful panoply
From your cast playthings — why,
This dreadful childish babble to his tongue,
Dreadful and sweet?
TO OLIVIA
I fear to love thee, Sweet, because
Love’s the ambassador of loss;
White flake of childhood, clinging so
To my soiled raiment, thy shy snow
At tenderest touch will shrink and go.
Love me not, delightful child.
My heart, by many snares beguiled,
Has grown timorous and wild.
It would fear thee not at all,
Wert thou not so harmless-small.
Because thy arrows, not yet dire,
Are still unbarbed with destined fire,
I fear thee more than hadst thou stood
Full-panoplied in womanhood.
LITTLE JESUS
‘Ex Ore Infantium’
LITTLE Jesus, wast Thou shyOnce, and just so small as I?And what did it feel like to beOut of Heaven, and just like me?Didst Thou sometimes think of there,And ask where all the angels were?I should think that I would cryFor my house all made of sky;I would look about the air,And wonder where my angels were;And at waking ’twould distress me — Not an angel there to dress me!
Hadst Thou ever any toys,Like us little girls and boys?And didst Thou play in Heaven with allThe angels that were not too tall,With stars for marbles? Did the thingsPlay Can you see me? through their wings?And did thy Mother let Thee spoilThy robes, with playing on our soil?How nice to have them always newIn Heaven, because ’twas quite clean blue!
Didst Thou kneel at night to pray,And didst Thou join thy hands, this way?And did they tire sometimes, being young,And make the prayer seem very long?And dost Thou like it best, that weShould join our hands to pray to Thee?I used to think, before I knew,The prayer not said unless we do. And did thy Mother at the nightKiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?And didst Thou feel quite good in bed,Kiss’d, and sweet, and thy prayers said?
Thou canst not have forgotten allThat it feels like to be small:And Thou know’st I cannot prayTo Thee in my father’s way — When Thou wast so little, say,Couldst Thou talk thy Father’s way?So, a little Child, come downAnd hear a child’s tongue like thy own;Take me by the hand and walk,And listen to my baby-talk.To thy Father show my prayer(He will look, Thou art so fair),And say: ‘O Father, I, thy Son,Bring the prayer of a little one.’
And He will smile, that children’s tongueHas not changed since Thou wast young!
Sister Songs
An Offering to Two Sisters
PREFACE
This poem, though new in the sense of being now for the first time printed, was written some four years ago, about the same date as the Hound of Heaven in my former volume.
One image in the Proem was an unconscious plagiarism from the beautiful image in Mr. Patmore’s St. Valentine’s Day: —
“O baby Spring,
That flutter’st sudden ‘neath the breast of Earth,
A month before the birth!”
Finding I could not disengage it without injury to the passage in which it is embedded, I have preferred to leave it, with this acknowledgment to a Poet rich enough to lend to the poor.
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
1895.
To
Monica and Madeline (Sylvia) Meynell
SISTER SONGS: AN OFFERING TO TWO SISTERS
THE PROEM
Shrewd winds and shrill — were these the speech of May?
A ragged, slag-grey sky — invested so,
Mary’s spoilt nursling! wert thou wont to go?
Or thou, Sun-god and song-god, say
Could singer pipe one tiniest linnet-lay,
While Song did turn away his face from song?
Or who could be
In spirit or in body hale for long, —
Old Æsculap’s best Master! — lacking thee?
At length, then, thou art here!
On the earth’s lethèd ear
Thy voice of light rings out exultant, strong;
Through dreams she stirs and murmurs at that summons dear:
From its red leash my heart strains tamelessly,
For Spring leaps in the womb of the young year!
Nay, was it not brought forth before,
And we waited, to behold it,
Till the sun’s hand should unfold it,
What the year’s young bosom bore?
Even so; it came, nor knew we that it came,
In the sun’s eclipse.
Yet the birds have plighted vows,
And from the branches pipe each other’s name;
Yet the season all the boughs
Has kindled to the finger-tips, —
Mark yonder, how the long laburnum drips
Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame!
Yea, and myself put on swift quickening,
And answer to the presence of a sudden Spring.
From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret spirit
Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams;
And, like a mountain-hold when war-shouts stir it,
The mind’s recessèd fastness casts to light
Its gleaming multitudes, that from every height
Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams.
Now therefore, thou who bring’st the year to birth,
Who guid’st the bare and dabbled feet of May;
Sweet stem to that rose Christ, who from the earth
Suck’st our poor prayers, conveying them to Him;
Be aidant, tender Lady, to my lay!
Of thy two maidens somewhat must I say,
Ere shadowy twilight lashes, drooping, dim
Day’s dreamy eyes from us;
Ere eve has struck and furled
The beamy-textured tent transpicuous,
Of webbèd coerule wrought and woven calms,
Whence has paced forth the lambent-footed sun.
And Thou disclose my flower of song upcurled,
Who from Thy fair irradiant palms
Scatterest all love and loveliness as alms;
Yea, Holy One,
Who coin’st Thyself to beauty for the world!
Then, Spring’s little children, your lauds do ye upraise
To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways!
Your lovesome labours lay away,
And trick you out in holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
PART THE FIRST
The leaves dance, the leaves sing,
The leaves dance in the breath of the Spring.
I bid them dance,
I bid them sing,
For the limpid glance
Of my ladyling;
For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring,
For God’s good grace of this ladyling!
I know in the lane, by the hedgerow track,
The long, broad grasses underneath
Are warted with rain like a toad’s knobbed back;
But here May weareth a rainless wreath.
In the new-sucked milk of the sun’s bosom
Is dabbled the mouth of the daisy-blossom;
The smouldering rosebud chars through its sheath;
The lily stirs her snowy limbs,
Ere she swims
Naked up through her cloven green,
Like the wave-born Lady of Love Hellene;
And the scattered snowdrop exquisite
Twinkles and gleams,
As if the showers of the sunny beams
Were splashed from the earth in drops of light.
Everything
That is child of Spring
Casts its bud or blossoming
Upon the stream of my delight.
Their voices, that scents are, now let them upraise
To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways!
Their lovely mother them array,
And prank them out in holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
While thus I stood in mazes bound
Of vernal sorcery,
I heard a dainty dubious sound,
As of goodly melody;
Which first was faint as if in swound,
Then burst so suddenly
In warring concord all around,
That, whence this thing might be,
To see
The very marrow longed in me!
It seemed of air, it seemed of ground,
And never any witchery
Drawn from pipe, or reed, or string,
Made such dulcet ravishing.
’Twas like no earthly instrument,
Yet had something of them all
In its rise, and in its fall;
As if in one sweet consort there were blent
Those archetypes celestial
Which our endeavouring instruments recall.
So heavenly flutes made murmurous plain
To heavenly viols, that again
— Aching with music — wailed back pain;
Regals release their notes, which rise
Welling, like tears from heart to eyes;
And the harp thrills with thronging sighs.
Horns in mellow flattering
Parley with the cithern-string: —
Hark! — the floating, long-drawn note
Woos the throbbing cithern-string!
Their pretty, pretty prating those citherns sure upraise
For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways:
Those flutes do flute their vowelled lay,
Their lovely languid language say,
For lisping to Sylvia;
Those viols’ lissom bowings break the heart of May,
And harps harp their burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
3.
Now at that music and that mirth
Rose, as ‘twere, veils from earth;
And I spied
How beside
Bud, bell, bloom, an elf
Stood, or was the flower itself
‘Mid radiant air
All the fair
Frequence swayed in irised wavers.
Some against the gleaming rims
Their bosoms prest
Of the kingcups, to the brims
Filled with sun, and their white limbs
Bathèd in those golden lavers;
Some on the brown, glowing breast
Of that Indian maid, the pansy,
(Through its tenuous veils confest
Of swathing light), in a quaint fancy
Tied her knot of yellow favours;
Others dared open draw
Snapdragon’s dreadful jaw:
Some, just sprung from out the soil,
Sleeked and shook their rumpled fans
Dropt with sheen
Of moony green;
Others, not yet extricate,
On their hands leaned their weight,
And writhed them free with mickle toil,
Still folded in their veiny vans:
And all with an unsought accord
Sang together from the sward;
Whence had come, and from sprites
Yet unseen, those delights,
As of tempered musics blent,
Which had given me such content.
For haply our best instrument,
Pipe or cithern, stopped or strung,
Mimics but some spirit tongue.
Their amiable voices, I bid them upraise
To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
Their lovesome labours laid away,
To linger out this holiday
In syllabling to Sylvia;
While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
4.
Next I saw, wonder-whist,
How from the atmosphere a mist,
So it seemed, slow uprist;
And, looking from those elfin swarms,
I was ‘ware
How the air
Was all populous with forms
Of the Hours, floating down,
Like Nereids through a watery town.
Some, with languors of waved arms,
Fluctuous oared their flexile way;
Some were borne half resupine
On the aërial hyaline,
Their fluid limbs and rare array
Flickering on the wind, as quivers
Trailing weed in running rivers;
And others, in far prospect seen,
Newly loosed on this terrene,
Shot in piercing swiftness came,
With hair a-stream like pale and goblin flame.
As crystálline ice in water,
Lay in air each faint daughter;
Inseparate (or but separate dim)
Circumfused wind from wind-like vest,
Wind-like vest from wind-like limb.
But outward from each lucid breast,
When some passion left its haunt,
Radiate surge of colour came,
Diffusing blush-wise, palpitant,
Dying all the filmy frame.
With some sweet tenderness they would
Turn to an amber-clear and glossy gold;
Or a fine sorrow, lovely to behold,
Would sweep them as the sun and wind’s joined flood
Sweeps a greening-sapphire sea;
Or they would glow enamouredly
Illustrious sanguine, like a grape of blood;
Or with mantling poetry
Curd to the tincture which the opal hath,
Like rainbows thawing in a moonbeam bath.
So paled they, flushed they, swam they, sang melodiously.
Their chanting, soon fading, let them, too, upraise
For homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
Weave with suave float their wavèd way,
And colours take of holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
5.
Then, through those translucencies,
As grew my senses clearer clear,
Did I see, and did I hear,
How under an elm’s canopy
Wheeled a flight of Dryades
Murmuring measured melody.
Gyre in gyre their treading was,
Wheeling with an adverse flight,
In twi-circle o’er the grass,
These to left, and those to right;
All the band
Linkèd by each other’s hand;
Decked in raiment stainèd as
The blue-helmèd aconite.
And they advance with flutter, with grace,
To the dance
Moving on with a dainty pace,
As blossoms mince it on river swells.
Over their heads their cymbals shine,
Round each ankle gleams a twine
Of twinkling bells —
Tune twirled golden from their cells.
Every step was a tinkling sound,
As they glanced in their dancing-ground,
Clouds in cluster with such a sailing
Float o’er the light of the wasting moon,
As the cloud of their gliding veiling
Swung in the sway of the dancing-tune.
There was the clash of their cymbals clanging,
Ringing of swinging bells clinging their feet;
And the clang on wing it seemed a-hanging,
Hovering round their dancing so fleet. —
I stirred, I rustled more than meet;
Whereat they broke to the left and right,
With eddying robes like aconite
Blue of helm;
And I beheld to the foot o’ the elm.
They have not tripped those dances, betrayed to my gaze,
To glad the heart of Sylvia, beholding of their maze;
Through barky walls have slid away,
And tricked them in their holiday,
For other than for Sylvia;
While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
And bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
6.
Where its umbrage was enrooted,
Sat white-suited,
Sat green-amiced, and bare-footed,
Spring amid her minstrelsy;
There she sat amid her ladies,
Where the shade is
Sheen as Enna mead ere Hades’
Gloom fell thwart Persephone.
Dewy buds were interstrown
Through her tresses hanging down,
And her feet
Were most sweet,
Tinged like sea-stars, rosied brown.
A throng of children like to flowers were sown
About the grass beside, or clomb her knee:
I looked who were that favoured company.
And one there stood
Against the beamy flood
Of sinking day, which, pouring its abundance,
Sublimed the illuminous and volute redundance
Of locks that, half dissolving, floated round her face;
As see I might
Far off a lily-cluster poised in sun
Dispread its gracile curls of light
I knew what chosen child was there in place!
I knew there might no brows be, save of one,
With such Hesperian fulgence compassèd,
Which in her moving seemed to wheel about her head.
O Spring’s little children, more loud your lauds upraise,
For this is even Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways!
Your lovesome labours lay away,
And prank you out in holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And all you birds on branches, lave your mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen
For singing to Sylvia!
7.
Spring, goddess, is it thou, desirèd long?
And art thou girded round with this young train? —
If ever I did do thee ease in song,
Now of thy grace let me one meed obtain,
And list thou to one plain.
Oh, keep still in thy train
After the years when others therefrom fade,
This tiny, well-belovèd maid!
To whom the gate of my heart’s fortalice,
With all which in it is,
And the shy self who doth therein immew him
‘Gainst what loud leagurers battailously woo him,
I, bribèd traitor to him,
Set open for one kiss.
Then suffer, Spring, thy children, that lauds they should upraise
To Sylvia, this Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;
Their lovely labours lay away,
And trick them out in holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And that all birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
8.
A kiss? for a child’s kiss?
Aye, goddess, even for this.
Once, bright Sylviola! in days not far,
Once — in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt
My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant —
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers’ scrutiny;
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbèd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night’s slow-wheelèd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed, — O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing! —
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;
And her, through what sore ways,
And what unchildish days,
Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
Her, child! and innocency,
And spring, and all things that have gone from me,
And that shall never be;
All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss,
Came with thee to my kiss.
And ah! so long myself had strayed afar
From child, and woman, and the boon earth’s green,
And all wherewith life’s face is fair beseen;
Journeying its journey bare
Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun
Unkissed of one;
Almost I had forgot
The healing harms,
And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that
Authentic cestus of two girdling arms:
And I remembered not
The subtle sanctities which dart
From childish lips’ unvalued precious brush,
Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push
Between the loosening fibres of the heart.
Then, that thy little kiss
Should be to me all this,
Let workaday wisdom blink sage lids thereat;
Which towers a flight three hedgerows high, poor bat!
And straightway charts me out the empyreal air.
Its chart I wing not by, its canon of worth
Scorn not, nor reck though mine should breed it mirth:
And howso thou and I may be disjoint,
Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point
Over the covert where
Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!
(Soul, hush these sad numbers, too sad to upraise
In hymning bright Sylvia, unlearn’d in such ways!
Our mournful moods lay we away,
And prank our thoughts in holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
When all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with us this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia!)
9.
Then thus Spring, bounteous lady, made reply:
“O lover of me and all my progeny,
For grace to you
I take her ever to my retinue.
Over thy form, dear child, alas! my art
Cannot prevail; but mine immortalising
Touch I lay upon thy heart.
Thy soul’s fair shape
In my unfading mantle’s green I drape,
And thy white mind shall rest by my devising
A Gideon-fleece amid life’s dusty drouth.
If Even burst yon globèd yellow grape
(Which is the sun to mortals’ sealèd sight)
Against her stainèd mouth;
Or if white-handed light
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
Still lucencies and cools,
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;
Like to the sign which led the Israelite,
Thy soul, through day or dark,
A visible brightness on the chosen ark
Of thy sweet body and pure,
Shall it assure,
With auspice large and tutelary gleams,
Appointed solemn courts, and covenanted streams.”
Cease, Spring’s little children, now cease your lauds to raise;
That dream is past, and Sylvia, with her sweet, feat ways.
Our lovèd labour, laid away,
Is smoothly ended; said our say,
Our syllable to Sylvia.
Make sweet, you birds on branches! make sweet your mouths with May!
But borne is this burthen,
Sung unto Sylvia.
PART THE SECOND
And now, thou elder nursling of the nest;
Ere all the intertangled west
Be one magnificence
Of multitudinous blossoms that o’errun
The flaming brazen bowl o’ the burnished sun
Which they do flower from,
How shall I ‘stablish thy memorial?
Nay, how or with what countenance shall I come
To plead in my defence
For loving thee at all?
I who can scarcely speak my fellows’ speech,
Love their love, or mine own love to them teach;
A bastard barred from their inheritance,
Who seem, in this dim shape’s uneasy nook,
Some sun-flower’s spirit which by luckless chance
Has mournfully its tenement mistook;
When it were better in its right abode,
Heartless and happy lackeying its god.
How com’st thou, little tender thing of white,
Whose very touch full scantly me beseems,
How com’st thou resting on my vaporous dreams,
Kindling a wraith there of earth’s vernal green?
Even so as I have seen,
In night’s aërial sea with no wind blust’rous,
A ribbèd tract of cloudy malachite
Curve a shored crescent wide;
And on its slope marge shelving to the night
The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous
Medusa newly washed up from the tide,
Lay in an oozy pool of its own deliquious light.
Yet hear how my excuses may prevail,
Nor, tender white orb, be thou opposite!
Life and life’s beauty only hold their revels
In the abysmal ocean’s luminous levels.
There, like the phantasms of a poet pale,
The exquisite marvels sail:
Clarified silver; greens and azures frail
As if the colours sighed themselves away,
And blent in supersubtile interplay
As if they swooned into each other’s arms;
Repured vermilion,
Like ear-tips ‘gainst the sun;
And beings that, under night’s swart pinion,
Make every wave upon the harbour-bars
A beaten yolk of stars.
But where day’s glance turns baffled from the deeps,
Die out those lovely swarms;
And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps.
Love and love’s beauty only hold their revels
In life’s familiar, penetrable levels:
What of its ocean-floor?
I dwell there evermore.
From almost earliest youth
I raised the lids o’ the truth,
And forced her bend on me her shrinking sight;
Ever I knew me Beauty’s eremite,
In antre of this lowly body set.
Girt with a thirsty solitude of soul.
Nathless I not forget
How I have, even as the anchorite,
I too, imperishing essences that console.
Under my ruined passions, fallen and sere,
The wild dreams stir like little radiant girls,
Whom in the moulted plumage of the year
Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls.
Yet, though their dedicated amorist,
How often do I bid my visions hist,
Deaf to them, pleading all their piteous fills;
Who weep, as weep the maidens of the mist
Clinging the necks of the unheeding hills:
And their tears wash them lovelier than before,
That from grief’s self our sad delight grows more,
Fair are the soul’s uncrispèd calms, indeed,
Endiapered with many a spiritual form
Of blosmy-tinctured weed;
But scarce itself is conscious of the store
Suckled by it, and only after storm
Casts up its loosened thoughts upon the shore.
To this end my deeps are stirred;
And I deem well why life unshared
Was ordainèd me of yore.
In pairing-time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
And the tender
Voice is tenderest in its throat;
Were its love, for ever nigh it,
Never by it,
It might keep a vernal note,
The crocean and amethystine
In their pristine
Lustre linger on its coat.
Therefore must my song-bower lone be,
That my tone be
Fresh with dewy pain alway;
She, who scorns my dearest care ta’en,
An uncertain
Shadow of the sprite of May.
And is my song sweet, as they say?
’Tis sweet for one whose voice has no reply,
Save silence’s sad cry:
And are its plumes a burning bright array?
They burn for an unincarnated eye
A bubble, charioteered by the inward breath
Which, ardorous for its own invisible lure,
Urges me glittering to aërial death,
I am rapt towards that bodiless paramour;
Blindly the uncomprehended tyranny
Obeying of my heart’s impetuous might.
The earth and all its planetary kin,
Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair
That flames round the Phoebean wassailer,
Speed no more ignorant, more predestined flight,
Than I, her viewless tresses netted in.
As some most beautiful one, with lovely taunting,
Her eyes of guileless guile o’ercanopies,
Does her hid visage bow,
And miserly your covetous gaze allow,
By inchmeal, coy degrees,
Saying— “Can you see me now?”
Yet from the mouth’s reflex you guess the wanting
Smile of the coming eyes
In all their upturned grievous witcheries,
Before that sunbreak rise;
And each still hidden feature view within
Your mind, as eager scrutinies detail
The moon’s young rondure through the shamefast veil
Drawn to her gleaming chin:
After this wise,
From the enticing smile of earth and skies
I dream my unknown Fair’s refusèd gaze;
And guessingly her love’s close traits devise,
Which she with subtile coquetries
Through little human glimpses slow displays,
Cozening my mateless days
By sick, intolerable delays.
And so I keep mine uncompanioned ways;
And so my touch, to golden poesies
Turning love’s bread, is bought at hunger’s price.
So, — in the inextinguishable wars
Which roll song’s Orient on the sullen night
Whose ragged banners in their own despite
Take on the tinges of the hated light, —
So Sultan Phoebus has his Janizars.
But if mine unappeasèd cicatrices
Might get them lawful ease;
Were any gentle passion hallowed me,
Who must none other breath of passion feel
Save such as winnows to the fledgèd heel
The tremulous Paradisal plumages;
The conscious sacramental trees
Which ever be
Shaken celestially,
Consentient with enamoured wings, might know my love for thee.
Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love!
Upon the ending of my deadly night
(Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight
Is all that any mortal knows thereof),
Thou wert to me that earnest of day’s light,
When, like the back of a gold-mailèd saurian
Heaving its slow length from Nilotic slime,
The first long gleaming fissure runs Aurorian
Athwart the yet dun firmament of prime.
Stretched on the margin of the cruel sea
Whence they had rescued me,
With faint and painful pulses was I lying;
Not yet discerning well
If I had ‘scaped, or were an icicle,
Whose thawing is its dying.
Like one who sweats before a despot’s gate,
Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate,
And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait;
And all so sickened is his countenance,
The courtiers buzz, “Lo, doomed!” and look at him askance: —
At Fate’s dread portal then
Even so stood I, I ken,
Even so stood I, between a joy and fear,
And said to mine own heart, “Now if the end be here!”
They say, Earth’s beauty seems completest
To them that on their death-beds rest;
Gentle lady! she smiles sweetest
Just ere she clasp us to her breast.
And I, — now my Earth’s countenance grew bright,
Did she but smile me towards that nuptial-night?
But whileas on such dubious bed I lay,
One unforgotten day,
As a sick child waking sees
Wide-eyed daisies
Gazing on it from its hand,
Slipped there for its dear amazes;
So between thy father’s knees
I saw thee stand,
And through my hazes
Of pain and fear thine eyes’ young wonder shone.
Then, as flies scatter from a carrion,
Or rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke
Wheel, when some sound their quietude has broke,
Fled, at thy countenance, all that doubting spawn:
The heart which I had questioned spoke,
A cry impetuous from its depths was drawn, —
“I take the omen of this face of dawn!”
And with the omen to my heart cam’st thou.
Even with a spray of tears
That one light draft was fixed there for the years.
And now? —
The hours I tread ooze memories of thee, Sweet!
Beneath my casual feet.
With rainfall as the lea,
The day is drenched with thee;
In little exquisite surprises
Bubbling deliciousness of thee arises
From sudden places,
Under the common traces
Of my most lethargied and customed paces.
As an Arab journeyeth
Through a sand of Ayaman,
Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue,
Lagging by his side along;
And a rusty-wingèd Death
Grating its low flight before,
Casting ribbèd shadows o’er
The blank desert, blank and tan:
He lifts by hap toward where the morning’s roots are
His weary stare, —
Sees, although they plashless mutes are,
Set in a silver air
Fountains of gelid shoots are,
Making the daylight fairest fair;
Sees the palm and tamarind
Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind; —
A sight like innocence when one has sinned!
A green and maiden freshness smiling there,
While with unblinking glare
The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her.
’Tis a vision:
Yet the greeneries Elysian
He has known in tracts afar;
Thus the enamouring fountains flow,
Those the very palms that grow,
By rare-gummed Sava, or Herbalimar. —
Such a watered dream has tarried
Trembling on my desert arid;
Even so
Its lovely gleamings
Seemings show
Of things not seemings;
And I gaze,
Knowing that, beyond my ways,
Verily
All these are, for these are she.
Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek
On the burning brow of the sick earth,
Sick with death, and sick with birth,
Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,
Than thy shadow soothes this weak
And distempered being of mine.
In all I work, my hand includeth thine;
Thou rushest down in every stream
Whose passion frets my spirit’s deepening gorge;
Unhood’st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream;
Thou swing’st the hammers of my forge;
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
Pierce where thou wilt the springing thought in me,
And there thy pictured countenance lies enfurled,
As in the cut fern lies the imaged tree.
This poor song that sings of thee,
This fragile song, is but a curled
Shell outgathered from thy sea,
And murmurous still of its nativity.
Princess of Smiles!
Sorceress of most unlawful-lawful wiles!
Cunning pit for gazers’ senses,
Overstrewn with innocences!
Purities gleam white like statues
In the fair lakes of thine eyes,
And I watch the sparkles that use
There to rise,
Knowing these
Are bubbles from the calyces
Of the lovely thoughts that breathe
Paving, like water-flowers, thy spirit’s floor beneath.
O thou most dear!
Who art thy sex’s complex harmony
God-set more facilely;
To thee may love draw near
Without one blame or fear,
Unchidden save by his humility:
Thou Perseus’ Shield! wherein I view secure
The mirrored Woman’s fateful-fair allure!
Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity,
As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free;
With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind
The barèd limbs of the rebukeless mind.
Wild Dryad! all unconscious of thy tree,
With which indissolubly
The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole;
Whose frank arms pass unfretted through its bole:
Who wear’st thy femineity
Light as entrailèd blossoms, that shalt find
It erelong silver shackles unto thee.
Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul; —
As hoarded in the vine
Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine,
As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze: —
In whom the mystery which lures and sunders,
Grapples and thrusts apart; endears, estranges;
— The dragon to its own Hesperides —
Is gated under slow-revolving changes,
Manifold doors of heavy-hingèd years.
So once, ere Heaven’s eyes were filled with wonders
To see Laughter rise from Tears,
Lay in beauty not yet mighty,
Conchèd in translucencies,
The antenatal Aphrodite,
Caved magically under magic seas;
Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.
“Whose sex is in thy soul!”
What think we of thy soul?
Which has no parts, and cannot grow,
Unfurled not from an embryo;
Born of full stature, lineal to control;
And yet a pigmy’s yoke must undergo.
Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
Must be obsequious to the body’s powers,
Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways;
Must do obeisance to the days,
And wait the little pleasure of the hours;
Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
Captive in statuted minority!
So is all power fulfilled, as soul in thee.
So still the ruler by the ruled takes rule,
And wisdom weaves itself i’ the loom o’ the fool.
The splendent sun no splendour can display,
Till on gross things he dash his broken ray,
From cloud and tree and flower re-tossed in prismy spray.
Did not obstruction’s vessel hem it in,
Force were not force, would spill itself in vain
We know the Titan by his champèd chain.
Stay is heat’s cradle, it is rocked therein,
And by check’s hand is burnished into light;
If hate were none, would love burn lowlier bright?
God’s Fair were guessed scarce but for opposite sin;
Yea, and His Mercy, I do think it well,
Is flashed back from the brazen gates of Hell.
The heavens decree
All power fulfil itself as soul in thee.
For supreme Spirit subject was to clay,
And Law from its own servants learned a law,
And Light besought a lamp unto its way,
And Awe was reined in awe,
At one small house of Nazareth;
And Golgotha
Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath,
And Life do homage for its crown to death.
So is all power, as soul in thee increased!
But, knowing this, in knowledge’s despite
I fret against the law severe that stains
Thy spirit with eclipse;
When — as a nymph’s carven head sweet water drips,
For others oozing so the cool delight
Which cannot steep her stiffened mouth of stone —
Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains.
Memnonian lips!
Smitten with singing from thy mother’s east,
And murmurous with music not their own:
Nay, the lips flexile, while the mind alone
A passionless statue stands.
Oh, pardon, innocent one!
Pardon at thine unconscious hands!
“Murmurous with music not their own,” I say?
And in that saying how do I missay,
When from the common sands
Of poorest common speech of common day
Thine accents sift the golden musics out!
And ah, we poets, I misdoubt,
Are little more than thou!
We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
Thou canst foreshape thy word;
The poet is not lord
Of the next syllable may come
With the returning pendulum;
And what he plans to-day in song,
To-morrow sings it in another tongue.
Where the last leaf fell from his bough,
He knows not if a leaf shall grow,
Where he sows he doth not reap,
He reapeth where he did not sow;
He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep
To meet him on his waking way.
Vision will mate him not by law and vow:
Disguised in life’s most hodden-grey,
By the most beaten road of everyday
She waits him, unsuspected and unknown.
The hardest pang whereon
He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob’s stone.
In the most iron crag his foot can tread
A Dream may strew her bed,
And suddenly his limbs entwine,
And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might through brine.
But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who
In guerdon of a night the lover slew,
When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,
Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!
And, though he cherisheth
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, —
It is not she!
Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray
Before the first shafts of the sun’s onslaught
From gloom’s black harness splinter,
And Summer move on Winter
With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of the May;
As gesture outstrips thought;
So, haply, toyer with ethereal strings!
Are thy blind repetitions of high things
The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings
Reveal song’s summer in the air;
The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare,
Yet is thought’s harbinger.
These strains the way for thine own strains prepare;
We feel the music moist upon this breeze,
And hope the congregating poesies.
Sundered yet by thee from us
Wait, with wild eyes luminous,
All thy wingèd things that are to be;
They flit against thee, Gate of Ivory!
They clamour on the portress Destiny, —
“Set her wide, so we may issue through!
Our vans are quick for that they have to do!”
Suffer still your young desire;
Your plumes but bicker at the tips with fire,
Tarry their kindling; they will beat the higher.
And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat
Idly the music from thy mother caught;
Not vainly has she wrought,
Not vainly from the cloudward-jetting turret
Of her aërial mind, for thy weak feet,
Let down the silken ladder of her thought.
She bare thee with a double pain,
Of the body and the spirit;
Thou thy fleshly weeds hast ta’en,
Thy diviner weeds inherit!
