Poems of the Past and the Present by Thomas Hardy

This etext was produced from the 1919 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT

By Thomas Hardy

Contents:

V.R. 1819-1901
WAR POEMS –
EMBARCATION
DEPARTURE
THE COLONEL’S SOLILOQUY
THE GOING OF THE BATTERY
AT THE WAR OFFICE, LONDON
A CHRISTMAS GHOST-STORY
THE DEAD DRUMMER
A WIFE IN LONDON
THE SOULS OF THE SLAIN
SONG OF THE SOLDIERS’ WIVES
THE SICK GOD
POEMS OF PILGRIMAGE –
GENOA AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
SHELLEY’S SKYLARK
IN THE OLD THEATRE, FIESOLE
ROME: ON THE PALATINE
ROME: BUILDING A NEW STREET IN THE ANCIENT QUARTER ROME: THE VATICAN–SALA DELLE MUSE
ROME: AT THE PYRAMID OF CESTIUS
LAUSANNE: IN GIBBON’S OLD GARDEN
ZERMATT: TO THE MATTERHORN
THE BRIDGE OF LODI
ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES THE MOTHER MOURNS
“I SAID TO LOVE”
A COMMONPLACE DAY
AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE
THE LACKING SENSE
TO LIFE
DOOM AND SHE
THE PROBLEM
THE SUBALTERNS
THE SLEEP-WORKER
THE BULLFINCHES
GOD-FORGOTTEN
THE BEDRIDDEN PEASANT TO AN UNKNOWING GOD BY THE EARTH’S CORPSE
MUTE OPINION
TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD
TO FLOWERS FROM ITALY IN WINTER
ON A FINE MORNING
TO LIZBIE BROWNE
SONG OF HOPE
THE WELL-BELOVED
HER REPROACH
THE INCONSISTENT
A BROKEN APPOINTMENT
“BETWEEN US NOW”
“HOW GREAT MY GRIEF”
“I NEED NOT GO”
THE COQUETTE, AND AFTER
A SPOT
LONG PLIGHTED
THE WIDOW
AT A HASTY WEDDING
THE DREAM-FOLLOWER
HIS IMMORTALITY
THE TO-BE-FORGOTTEN
WIVES IN THE SERE
THE SUPERSEDED
AN AUGUST MIDNIGHT
THE CAGED THRUSH FREED AND HOME AGAIN BIRDS AT WINTER NIGHTFALL
THE PUZZLED GAME-BIRDS
WINTER IN DURNOVER FIELD
THE LAST CHRYSANTHEMUM
THE DARKLING THRUSH
THE COMET AT YALBURY OR YELL’HAM
MAD JUDY
A WASTED ILLNESS
A MAN
THE DAME OF ATHELHALL
THE SEASONS OF HER YEAR
THE MILKMAID
THE LEVELLED CHURCHYARD
THE RUINED MAID
THE RESPECTABLE BURGHER ON “THE HIGHER CRITICISM” ARCHITECTURAL MASKS
THE TENANT-FOR-LIFE
THE KING’S EXPERIMENT
THE TREE: AN OLD MAN’S STORY
HER LATE HUSBAND
THE SELF-UNSEEING
DE PROFUNDIS I.
DE PROFUNDIS II.
DE PROFUNDIS III.
THE CHURCH-BUILDER
THE LOST PYX: A MEDIAEVAL LEGEND
TESS’S LAMENT
THE SUPPLANTER: A TALE
IMITATIONS, ETC. –
SAPPHIC FRAGMENT
CATULLUS: XXXI
AFTER SCHILLER
SONG: FROM HEINE
FROM VICTOR HUGO
CARDINAL BEMBO’S EPITAPH ON RAPHAEL RETROSPECT –
“I HAVE LIVED WITH SHADES”
MEMORY AND I
[GREEK TITLE]

V.R. 1819-1901
A REVERIE

Moments the mightiest pass uncalendared, And when the Absolute
In backward Time outgave the deedful word Whereby all life is stirred:
“Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute,” No mortal knew or heard.
But in due days the purposed Life outshone – Serene, sagacious, free;
–Her waxing seasons bloomed with deeds well done, And the world’s heart was won . . .
Yet may the deed of hers most bright in eyes to be Lie hid from ours–as in the All-One’s thought lay she – Till ripening years have run.

SUNDAY NIGHT,
27th January 1901.

EMBARCATION
(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)

Here, where Vespasian’s legions struck the sands, And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,
And Henry’s army leapt afloat to win Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

Vaster battalions press for further strands, To argue in the self-same bloody mode
Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code, Still fails to mend.–Now deckward tramp the bands, Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring; And as each host draws out upon the sea
Beyond which lies the tragical To-be, None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile, As if they knew not that they weep the while.

DEPARTURE
(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)

While the far farewell music thins and fails, And the broad bottoms rip the bearing brine – All smalling slowly to the gray sea line – And each significant red smoke-shaft pales,

Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails, Which shapes the late long tramp of mounting men To seeming words that ask and ask again: “How long, O striving Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels

Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, That are as puppets in a playing hand? – When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land, And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

THE COLONEL’S SOLILOQUY
(Southampton Docks: October, 1899)

“The quay recedes. Hurrah! Ahead we go! . . . It’s true I’ve been accustomed now to home, And joints get rusty, and one’s limbs may grow More fit to rest than roam.

“But I can stand as yet fair stress and strain; There’s not a little steel beneath the rust; My years mount somewhat, but here’s to’t again! And if I fall, I must.

“God knows that for myself I’ve scanty care; Past scrimmages have proved as much to all; In Eastern lands and South I’ve had my share Both of the blade and ball.

“And where those villains ripped me in the flitch With their old iron in my early time,
I’m apt at change of wind to feel a twitch, Or at a change of clime.

“And what my mirror shows me in the morning Has more of blotch and wrinkle than of bloom; My eyes, too, heretofore all glasses scorning, Have just a touch of rheum . . .

“Now sounds ‘The Girl I’ve left behind me,’–Ah, The years, the ardours, wakened by that tune! Time was when, with the crowd’s farewell ‘Hurrah!’ ‘Twould lift me to the moon.

“But now it’s late to leave behind me one Who if, poor soul, her man goes underground, Will not recover as she might have done
In days when hopes abound.

“She’s waving from the wharfside, palely grieving, As down we draw . . . Her tears make little show, Yet now she suffers more than at my leaving Some twenty years ago.

“I pray those left at home will care for her! I shall come back; I have before; though when The Girl you leave behind you is a grandmother, Things may not be as then.”

THE GOING OF THE BATTERY
WIVES’ LAMENT
(November 2, 1899)

O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough – Light in their loving as soldiers can be – First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea! . . .

– Rain came down drenchingly; but we unblenchingly Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire, They stepping steadily–only too readily! – Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher.

III

Great guns were gleaming there, living things seeming there, Cloaked in their tar-cloths, upmouthed to the night; Wheels wet and yellow from axle to felloe, Throats blank of sound, but prophetic to sight.

Gas-glimmers drearily, blearily, eerily Lit our pale faces outstretched for one kiss, While we stood prest to them, with a last quest to them Not to court perils that honour could miss.

Sharp were those sighs of ours, blinded these eyes of ours, When at last moved away under the arch
All we loved. Aid for them each woman prayed for them, Treading back slowly the track of their march.

Someone said: “Nevermore will they come: evermore Are they now lost to us.” O it was wrong! Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways, Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

VII

– Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us, Hint in the night-time when life beats are low Other and graver things . . . Hold we to braver things, Wait we, in trust, what Time’s fulness shall show.

AT THE WAR OFFICE, LONDON
(Affixing the Lists of Killed and Wounded: December, 1899)

Last year I called this world of gain-givings The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly, So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs The tragedy of things.

Yet at that censured time no heart was rent Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter; Death waited Nature’s wont; Peace smiled unshent From Ind to Occident.

A CHRISTMAS GHOST-STORY

South of the Line, inland from far Durban, A mouldering soldier lies–your countryman. Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans Nightly to clear Canopus: “I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified, Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears In tacking ‘Anno Domini’ to the years?
Near twenty-hundred livened thus have hied, But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.”

Christmas-eve, 1899.

THE DEAD DRUMMER

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined–just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain Grow up a Southern tree.
And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally.

A WIFE IN LONDON
(December, 1899)

I–THE TRAGEDY

She sits in the tawny vapour
That the City lanes have uprolled, Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger’s knock cracks smartly,
Flashed news is in her hand
Of meaning it dazes to understand Though shaped so shortly:
He–has fallen–in the far South Land . . .

II–THE IRONY

‘Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker, The postman nears and goes:
A letter is brought whose lines disclose By the firelight flicker
His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh–firm–penned in highest feather – Page-full of his hoped return,
And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn In the summer weather,
And of new love that they would learn.

THE SOULS OF THE SLAIN

The thick lids of Night closed upon me Alone at the Bill
Of the Isle by the Race {1} –
Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face – And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me To brood and be still.

No wind fanned the flats of the ocean, Or promontory sides,
Or the ooze by the strand,
Or the bent-bearded slope of the land, Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion Of criss-crossing tides.

III

Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing A whirr, as of wings
Waved by mighty-vanned flies,
Or by night-moths of measureless size, And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing Of corporal things.

And they bore to the bluff, and alighted – A dim-discerned train
Of sprites without mould,
Frameless souls none might touch or might hold – On the ledge by the turreted lantern, farsighted By men of the main.

And I heard them say “Home!” and I knew them For souls of the felled
On the earth’s nether bord
Under Capricorn, whither they’d warred, And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them With breathings inheld.

Then, it seemed, there approached from the northward A senior soul-flame
Of the like filmy hue:
And he met them and spake: “Is it you, O my men?” Said they, “Aye! We bear homeward and hearthward To list to our fame!”

VII

“I’ve flown there before you,” he said then: “Your households are well;
But–your kin linger less
On your glory arid war-mightiness Than on dearer things.”–“Dearer?” cried these from the dead then, “Of what do they tell?”

VIII

“Some mothers muse sadly, and murmur Your doings as boys –
Recall the quaint ways
Of your babyhood’s innocent days. Some pray that, ere dying, your faith had grown firmer, And higher your joys.

“A father broods: ‘Would I had set him To some humble trade,
And so slacked his high fire,
And his passionate martial desire; Had told him no stories to woo him and whet him To this due crusade!”

“And, General, how hold out our sweethearts, Sworn loyal as doves?”
–“Many mourn; many think
It is not unattractive to prink
Them in sables for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts Have found them new loves.”

“And our wives?” quoth another resignedly, “Dwell they on our deeds?”
–“Deeds of home; that live yet
Fresh as new–deeds of fondness or fret; Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly, These, these have their heeds.”

XII

–“Alas! then it seems that our glory Weighs less in their thought
Than our old homely acts,
And the long-ago commonplace facts Of our lives–held by us as scarce part of our story, And rated as nought!”

XIII

Then bitterly some: “Was it wise now To raise the tomb-door
For such knowledge? Away!”
But the rest: “Fame we prized till to-day; Yet that hearts keep us green for old kindness we prize now A thousand times more!”

XIV

Thus speaking, the trooped apparitions Began to disband
And resolve them in two:
Those whose record was lovely and true Bore to northward for home: those of bitter traditions Again left the land,

And, towering to seaward in legions, They paused at a spot
Overbending the Race –
That engulphing, ghast, sinister place – Whither headlong they plunged, to the fathomless regions Of myriads forgot.

XVI

And the spirits of those who were homing Passed on, rushingly,
Like the Pentecost Wind;
And the whirr of their wayfaring thinned And surceased on the sky, and but left in the gloaming Sea-mutterings and me.

December 1899.

SONG OF THE SOLDIERS’ WIVES

At last! In sight of home again,
Of home again;
No more to range and roam again
As at that bygone time?
No more to go away from us
And stay from us? –
Dawn, hold not long the day from us, But quicken it to prime!

Now all the town shall ring to them,
Shall ring to them,
And we who love them cling to them
And clasp them joyfully;
And cry, “O much we’ll do for you
Anew for you,
Dear Loves!–aye, draw and hew for you, Come back from oversea.”

III

Some told us we should meet no more,
Should meet no more;
Should wait, and wish, but greet no more Your faces round our fires;
That, in a while, uncharily
And drearily
Men gave their lives–even wearily, Like those whom living tires.

And now you are nearing home again,
Dears, home again;
No more, may be, to roam again
As at that bygone time,
Which took you far away from us
To stay from us;
Dawn, hold not long the day from us, But quicken it to prime!

THE SICK GOD

In days when men had joy of war,
A God of Battles sped each mortal jar; The peoples pledged him heart and hand, From Israel’s land to isles afar.

His crimson form, with clang and chime, Flashed on each murk and murderous meeting-time, And kings invoked, for rape and raid,
His fearsome aid in rune and rhyme.

III

On bruise and blood-hole, scar and seam, On blade and bolt, he flung his fulgid beam: His haloes rayed the very gore,
And corpses wore his glory-gleam.

Often an early King or Queen,
And storied hero onward, knew his sheen; ‘Twas glimpsed by Wolfe, by Ney anon,
And Nelson on his blue demesne.

But new light spread. That god’s gold nimb And blazon have waned dimmer and more dim; Even his flushed form begins to fade,
Till but a shade is left of him.

That modern meditation broke
His spell, that penmen’s pleadings dealt a stroke, Say some; and some that crimes too dire Did much to mire his crimson cloak.

VII

Yea, seeds of crescive sympathy
Were sown by those more excellent than he, Long known, though long contemned till then – The gods of men in amity.

VIII

Souls have grown seers, and thought out-brings The mournful many-sidedness of things
With foes as friends, enfeebling ires And fury-fires by gaingivings!

He scarce impassions champions now; They do and dare, but tensely–pale of brow; And would they fain uplift the arm
Of that faint form they know not how.

Yet wars arise, though zest grows cold; Wherefore, at whiles, as ’twere in ancient mould He looms, bepatched with paint and lath; But never hath he seemed the old!

Let men rejoice, let men deplore.
The lurid Deity of heretofore
Succumbs to one of saner nod;
The Battle-god is god no more.

GENOA AND THE MEDITERRANEAN
(March, 1887)

O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea, Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee When from Torino’s track I saw thy face first flash on me.

And multimarbled Genova the Proud,
Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed, I first beheld thee clad–not as the Beauty but the Dowd.

Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit On housebacks pink, green, ochreous–where a slit Shoreward ‘twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

And thereacross waved fishwives’ high-hung smocks, Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks; Since when too oft my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

Whereat I grieve, Superba! . . . Afterhours Within Palazzo Doria’s orange bowers
Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see, Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.

SHELLEY’S SKYLARK
(The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March, 1887)

Somewhere afield here something lies
In Earth’s oblivious eyeless trust
That moved a poet to prophecies –
A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard, And made immortal through times to be; – Though it only lived like another bird,
And knew not its immortality.

Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell – A little ball of feather and bone;
And how it perished, when piped farewell, And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

Maybe it rests in the loam I view,
Maybe it throbs in a myrtle’s green, Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue
Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

Go find it, faeries, go and find
That tiny pinch of priceless dust,
And bring a casket silver-lined,
And framed of gold that gems encrust;

And we will lay it safe therein,
And consecrate it to endless time;
For it inspired a bard to win
Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

IN THE OLD THEATRE, FIESOLE
(April, 1887)

I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,
Till came a child who showed an ancient coin That bore the image of a Constantine.

She lightly passed; nor did she once opine How, better than all books, she had raised for me In swift perspective Europe’s history
Through the vast years of Caesar’s sceptred line.

For in my distant plot of English loam ‘Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find Coins of like impress. As with one half blind Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home In that mute moment to my opened mind
The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

ROME: ON THE PALATINE
(April, 1887)

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile, And passed to Livia’s rich red mural show, Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico, We gained Caligula’s dissolving pile.

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile The outer sense, and shape itself as though It wore its marble hues, its pristine glow Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh over-head, Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:
It stirred me as I stood, in Caesar’s house, Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done, Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

ROME
BUILDING A NEW STREET IN THE ANCIENT QUARTER (April, 1887)

These numbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry Outskeleton Time’s central city, Rome;
Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

And cracking frieze and rotten metope Express, as though they were an open tome Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;
“Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!”

And yet within these ruins’ very shade The singing workmen shape and set and join Their frail new mansion’s stuccoed cove and quoin With no apparent sense that years abrade, Though each rent wall their feeble works invade Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

ROME
THE VATICAN–SALA DELLE MUSE
(1887)

I sat in the Muses’ Hall at the mid of the day, And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away, And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun, Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine, But each and the whole–an essence of all the Nine; With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place, A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

“Regarded so long, we render thee sad?” said she. “Not you,” sighed I, “but my own inconstancy! I worship each and each; in the morning one, And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

“To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?” – “Be not perturbed,” said she. “Though apart in fame, As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.

– “But my loves go further–to Story, and Dance, and Hymn, The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim – Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!” – “Nay, wight, thou sway’st not. These are but phases of one;

“And that one is I; and I am projected from thee, One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be – Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall, Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!

ROME
AT THE PYRAMID OF CESTIUS
NEAR THE GRAVES OF SHELLEY AND KEATS (1887)

Who, then, was Cestius,
And what is he to me? –
Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous One thought alone brings he.

I can recall no word
Of anything he did;
For me he is a man who died and was interred To leave a pyramid

Whose purpose was exprest
Not with its first design,
Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest Two countrymen of mine.

Cestius in life, maybe,
Slew, breathed out threatening;
I know not. This I know: in death all silently He does a kindlier thing,

In beckoning pilgrim feet
With marble finger high
To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street, Those matchless singers lie . . .

–Say, then, he lived and died
That stones which bear his name
Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide; It is an ample fame.

LAUSANNE
IN GIBBON’S OLD GARDEN: 11-12 P.M.
June 27, 1897
(The 110th anniversary of the completion of the “Decline and Fall” at the same hour and place)

A spirit seems to pass,
Formal in pose, but grave and grand withal: He contemplates a volume stout and tall, And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

Anon the book is closed,
With “It is finished!” And at the alley’s end He turns, and soon on me his glances bend; And, as from earth, comes speech–small, muted, yet composed.

“How fares the Truth now?–Ill?
–Do pens but slily further her advance? May one not speed her but in phrase askance? Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

“Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton’s wormwood words were hurled: ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?”

ZERMATT
TO THE MATTERHORN
(June-July, 1897)

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun, Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight, Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height, And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done, And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight To that day’s tragic feat of manly might, As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon Thou watch’dst each night the planets lift and lower; Thou gleam’dst to Joshua’s pausing sun and moon, And brav’dst the tokening sky when Caesar’s power Approached its bloody end: yea, saw’st that Noon When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

THE BRIDGE OF LODI {2}
(Spring, 1887)

When of tender mind and body
I was moved by minstrelsy,
And that strain “The Bridge of Lodi” Brought a strange delight to me.

In the battle-breathing jingle
Of its forward-footing tune
I could see the armies mingle,
And the columns cleft and hewn

III

On that far-famed spot by Lodi
Where Napoleon clove his way
To his fame, when like a god he
Bent the nations to his sway.

Hence the tune came capering to me
While I traced the Rhone and Po;
Nor could Milan’s Marvel woo me
From the spot englamoured so.

And to-day, sunlit and smiling,
Here I stand upon the scene,
With its saffron walls, dun tiling, And its meads of maiden green,

Even as when the trackway thundered
With the charge of grenadiers,
And the blood of forty hundred
Splashed its parapets and piers . . .

VII

Any ancient crone I’d toady
Like a lass in young-eyed prime,
Could she tell some tale of Lodi
At that moving mighty time.

VIII

So, I ask the wives of Lodi
For traditions of that day;
But alas! not anybody
Seems to know of such a fray.

And they heed but transitory
Marketings in cheese and meat,
Till I judge that Lodi’s story
Is extinct in Lodi’s street.

Yet while here and there they thrid them In their zest to sell and buy,
Let me sit me down amid them
And behold those thousands die . . .

– Not a creature cares in Lodi
How Napoleon swept each arch,
Or where up and downward trod he,
Or for his memorial March!

XII

So that wherefore should I be here,
Watching Adda lip the lea,
When the whole romance to see here
Is the dream I bring with me?

XIII

And why sing “The Bridge of Lodi”
As I sit thereon and swing,
When none shows by smile or nod he
Guesses why or what I sing? . . .

XIV

Since all Lodi, low and head ones,
Seem to pass that story by,
It may be the Lodi-bred ones
Rate it truly, and not I.

Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi,
Is thy claim to glory gone?
Must I pipe a palinody,
Or be silent thereupon?

XVI

And if here, from strand to steeple,
Be no stone to fame the fight,
Must I say the Lodi people
Are but viewing crime aright?

XVII

Nay; I’ll sing “The Bridge of Lodi” – That long-loved, romantic thing,
Though none show by smile or nod he Guesses why and what I sing!

ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES

My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me, I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.

For, wonning in these ancient lands,
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,
And scored with prints of perished hands, And chronicled with dates of doom,
Though my own Being bear no bloom
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine, Give past exemplars present room,
And their experience count as mine.

THE MOTHER MOURNS

When mid-autumn’s moan shook the night-time, And sedges were horny,
And summer’s green wonderwork faltered On leaze and in lane,

I fared Yell’ham-Firs way, where dimly Came wheeling around me
Those phantoms obscure and insistent That shadows unchain.

Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me A low lamentation,
As ’twere of a tree-god disheartened, Perplexed, or in pain.

And, heeding, it awed me to gather
That Nature herself there
Was breathing in aerie accents,
With dirgeful refrain,

Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days, Had grieved her by holding
Her ancient high fame of perfection In doubt and disdain . . .

– “I had not proposed me a Creature
(She soughed) so excelling
All else of my kingdom in compass
And brightness of brain

“As to read my defects with a god-glance, Uncover each vestige
Of old inadvertence, annunciate
Each flaw and each stain!

“My purpose went not to develop
Such insight in Earthland;
Such potent appraisements affront me, And sadden my reign!

“Why loosened I olden control here
To mechanize skywards,
Undeeming great scope could outshape in A globe of such grain?

“Man’s mountings of mind-sight I checked not, Till range of his vision
Has topped my intent, and found blemish Throughout my domain.

“He holds as inept his own soul-shell – My deftest achievement –
Contemns me for fitful inventions
Ill-timed and inane:

“No more sees my sun as a Sanct-shape, My moon as the Night-queen,
My stars as august and sublime ones That influences rain:

“Reckons gross and ignoble my teaching, Immoral my story,
My love-lights a lure, that my species May gather and gain.

“‘Give me,’ he has said, ‘but the matter And means the gods lot her,
My brain could evolve a creation
More seemly, more sane.’

– “If ever a naughtiness seized me
To woo adulation
From creatures more keen than those crude ones That first formed my train –

“If inly a moment I murmured,
‘The simple praise sweetly,
But sweetlier the sage’–and did rashly Man’s vision unrein,

“I rue it! . . . His guileless forerunners, Whose brains I could blandish,
To measure the deeps of my mysteries Applied them in vain.

“From them my waste aimings and futile I subtly could cover;
‘Every best thing,’ said they, ‘to best purpose Her powers preordain.’ –

“No more such! . . . My species are dwindling, My forests grow barren,
My popinjays fail from their tappings, My larks from their strain.

“My leopardine beauties are rarer,
My tusky ones vanish,
My children have aped mine own slaughters To quicken my wane.

“Let me grow, then, but mildews and mandrakes, And slimy distortions,
Let nevermore things good and lovely To me appertain;

“For Reason is rank in my temples,
And Vision unruly,
And chivalrous laud of my cunning
Is heard not again!”

“I SAID TO LOVE”

I said to Love,
“It is not now as in old days
When men adored thee and thy ways
All else above;
Named thee the Boy, the Bright, the One Who spread a heaven beneath the sun,”
I said to Love.

I said to him,
“We now know more of thee than then; We were but weak in judgment when,
With hearts abrim,
We clamoured thee that thou would’st please Inflict on us thine agonies,”
I said to him.

I said to Love,
“Thou art not young, thou art not fair, No faery darts, no cherub air,
Nor swan, nor dove
Are thine; but features pitiless,
And iron daggers of distress,”
I said to Love.

“Depart then, Love! . . .
– Man’s race shall end, dost threaten thou? The age to come the man of now
Know nothing of? –
We fear not such a threat from thee; We are too old in apathy!
Mankind shall cease.–So let it be,” I said to Love.

A COMMONPLACE DAY

The day is turning ghost,
And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively, To join the anonymous host
Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe, To one of like degree.

I part the fire-gnawed logs,
Rake forth the embers, spoil the busy flames, and lay the ends Upon the shining dogs;
Further and further from the nooks the twilight’s stride extends, And beamless black impends.

Nothing of tiniest worth
Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise,
Since the pale corpse-like birth
Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays – Dullest of dull-hued Days!

Wanly upon the panes
The rain slides as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet
Here, while Day’s presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He wakens my regret.

Regret–though nothing dear
That I wot of, was toward in the wide world at his prime, Or bloomed elsewhere than here,
To die with his decease, and leave a memory sweet, sublime, Or mark him out in Time . . .

–Yet, maybe, in some soul,
In some spot undiscerned on sea or land, some impulse rose, Or some intent upstole
Of that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows The world’s amendment flows;

But which, benumbed at birth
By momentary chance or wile, has missed its hope to be Embodied on the earth;
And undervoicings of this loss to man’s futurity May wake regret in me.

AT A LUNAR ECLIPSE

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea, Now steals along upon the Moon’s meek shine In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry With the torn troubled form I know as thine, That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

And can immense Mortality but throw
So small a shade, and Heaven’s high human scheme Be hemmed within the coasts yon arc implies?

Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?

THE LACKING SENSE
SCENE.–A sad-coloured landscape, Waddon Vale

“O Time, whence comes the Mother’s moody look amid her labours, As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves? Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors, With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face, As of angel fallen from grace?”

– “Her look is but her story: construe not its symbols keenly: In her wonderworks yea surely has she wounded where she loves. The sense of ills misdealt for blisses blanks the mien most queenly,
Self-smitings kill self-joys; and everywhere beneath the sun Such deeds her hands have done.”

III

– “And how explains thy Ancient Mind her crimes upon her creatures, These fallings from her fair beginnings, woundings where she loves,
Into her would-be perfect motions, modes, effects, and features Admitting cramps, black humours, wan decay, and baleful blights, Distress into delights?”

– “Ah! know’st thou not her secret yet, her vainly veiled deficience, Whence it comes that all unwittingly she wounds the lives she loves?
That sightless are those orbs of hers?–which bar to her omniscience
Brings those fearful unfulfilments, that red ravage through her zones Whereat all creation groans.

“She whispers it in each pathetic strenuous slow endeavour, When in mothering she unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves; Yet her primal doom pursues her, faultful, fatal is she ever; Though so deft and nigh to vision is her facile finger-touch That the seers marvel much.

“Deal, then, her groping skill no scorn, no note of malediction; Not long on thee will press the hand that hurts the lives it loves;
And while she dares dead-reckoning on, in darkness of affliction, Assist her where thy creaturely dependence can or may, For thou art of her clay.”

TO LIFE

O life with the sad seared face,
I weary of seeing thee,
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!

I know what thou would’st tell
Of Death, Time, Destiny –
I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me.

But canst thou not array
Thyself in rare disguise,
And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?

I’ll tune me to the mood,
And mumm with thee till eve;
And maybe what as interlude
I feign, I shall believe!

DOOM AND SHE

There dwells a mighty pair –
Slow, statuesque, intense –
Amid the vague Immense:
None can their chronicle declare,
Nor why they be, nor whence.

Mother of all things made,
Matchless in artistry,
Unlit with sight is she. –
And though her ever well-obeyed
Vacant of feeling he.

III

The Matron mildly asks –
A throb in every word –
“Our clay-made creatures, lord,
How fare they in their mortal tasks Upon Earth’s bounded bord?

“The fate of those I bear,
Dear lord, pray turn and view,
And notify me true;
Shapings that eyelessly I dare
Maybe I would undo.

“Sometimes from lairs of life
Methinks I catch a groan,
Or multitudinous moan,
As though I had schemed a world of strife, Working by touch alone.”

“World-weaver!” he replies,
“I scan all thy domain;
But since nor joy nor pain
Doth my clear substance recognize,
I read thy realms in vain.

VII

“World-weaver! what IS Grief?
And what are Right, and Wrong,
And Feeling, that belong
To creatures all who owe thee fief? What worse is Weak than Strong?” . . .

VIII

–Unlightened, curious, meek,
She broods in sad surmise . . .
–Some say they have heard her sighs On Alpine height or Polar peak
When the night tempests rise.

THE PROBLEM

Shall we conceal the Case, or tell it – We who believe the evidence?
Here and there the watch-towers knell it With a sullen significance,
Heard of the few who hearken intently and carry an eagerly upstrained sense.

Hearts that are happiest hold not by it; Better we let, then, the old view reign; Since there is peace in it, why decry it? Since there is comfort, why disdain?
Note not the pigment the while that the painting determines humanity’s joy and pain!

THE SUBALTERNS

“Poor wanderer,” said the leaden sky, “I fain would lighten thee,
But there be laws in force on high
Which say it must not be.”

– “I would not freeze thee, shorn one,” cried The North, “knew I but how
To warm my breath, to slack my stride; But I am ruled as thou.”

III

– “To-morrow I attack thee, wight,”
Said Sickness. “Yet I swear
I bear thy little ark no spite,
But am bid enter there.”

– “Come hither, Son,” I heard Death say; “I did not will a grave
Should end thy pilgrimage to-day,
But I, too, am a slave!”

We smiled upon each other then,
And life to me wore less
That fell contour it wore ere when
They owned their passiveness.

THE SLEEP-WORKER

When wilt thou wake, O Mother, wake and see – As one who, held in trance, has laboured long By vacant rote and prepossession strong – The coils that thou hast wrought unwittingly;

Wherein have place, unrealized by thee, Fair growths, foul cankers, right enmeshed with wrong, Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and song, And curious blends of ache and ecstasy? –

Should that morn come, and show thy opened eyes All that Life’s palpitating tissues feel, How wilt thou bear thyself in thy surprise? –

Wilt thou destroy, in one wild shock of shame, Thy whole high heaving firmamental frame, Or patiently adjust, amend, and heal?

THE BULLFINCHES

Bother Bulleys, let us sing
From the dawn till evening! –
For we know not that we go not
When the day’s pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.

When I flew to Blackmoor Vale,
Whence the green-gowned faeries hail, Roosting near them I could hear them
Speak of queenly Nature’s ways,
Means, and moods,–well known to fays.

All we creatures, nigh and far
(Said they there), the Mother’s are: Yet she never shows endeavour
To protect from warrings wild
Bird or beast she calls her child.

Busy in her handsome house
Known as Space, she falls a-drowse; Yet, in seeming, works on dreaming,
While beneath her groping hands
Fiends make havoc in her bands.

How her hussif’ry succeeds
She unknows or she unheeds,
All things making for Death’s taking! –So the green-gowned faeries say
Living over Blackmoor way.

Come then, brethren, let us sing,
From the dawn till evening! –
For we know not that we go not
When the day’s pale pinions fold
Unto those who sang of old.

GOD-FORGOTTEN

I towered far, and lo! I stood within The presence of the Lord Most High,
Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win Some answer to their cry.

–“The Earth, say’st thou? The Human race? By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place: Such world I fashioned not.” –

–“O Lord, forgive me when I say
Thou spak’st the word, and mad’st it all.” – “The Earth of men–let me bethink me . . . Yea! I dimly do recall

“Some tiny sphere I built long back (Mid millions of such shapes of mine)
So named . . . It perished, surely–not a wrack Remaining, or a sign?

“It lost my interest from the first, My aims therefor succeeding ill;
Haply it died of doing as it durst?” – “Lord, it existeth still.” –

“Dark, then, its life! For not a cry Of aught it bears do I now hear;
Of its own act the threads were snapt whereby Its plaints had reached mine ear.

“It used to ask for gifts of good,
Till came its severance self-entailed, When sudden silence on that side ensued, And has till now prevailed.

“All other orbs have kept in touch; Their voicings reach me speedily:
Thy people took upon them overmuch
In sundering them from me!

“And it is strange–though sad enough – Earth’s race should think that one whose call Frames, daily, shining spheres of flawless stuff Must heed their tainted ball! . . .

“But say’st thou ’tis by pangs distraught, And strife, and silent suffering? –
Deep grieved am I that injury should be wrought Even on so poor a thing!

“Thou should’st have learnt that Not to Mend For Me could mean but Not to Know:
Hence, Messengers! and straightway put an end To what men undergo.” . . .

Homing at dawn, I thought to see
One of the Messengers standing by. – Oh, childish thought! . . . Yet oft it comes to me When trouble hovers nigh.

THE BEDRIDDEN PEASANT
TO AN UNKNOWING GOD

Much wonder I–here long low-laid –
That this dead wall should be
Betwixt the Maker and the made,
Between Thyself and me!

For, say one puts a child to nurse,
He eyes it now and then
To know if better ’tis, or worse,
And if it mourn, and when.

But Thou, Lord, giv’st us men our clay In helpless bondage thus
To Time and Chance, and seem’st straightway To think no more of us!

That some disaster cleft Thy scheme
And tore us wide apart,
So that no cry can cross, I deem;
For Thou art mild of heart,

And would’st not shape and shut us in Where voice can not he heard:
‘Tis plain Thou meant’st that we should win Thy succour by a word.

Might but Thy sense flash down the skies Like man’s from clime to clime,
Thou would’st not let me agonize
Through my remaining time;

But, seeing how much Thy creatures bear – Lame, starved, or maimed, or blind –
Thou’dst heal the ills with quickest care Of me and all my kind.

Then, since Thou mak’st not these things be, But these things dost not know,
I’ll praise Thee as were shown to me The mercies Thou would’st show!

BY THE EARTH’S CORPSE

“O Lord, why grievest Thou? –
Since Life has ceased to be
Upon this globe, now cold
As lunar land and sea,
And humankind, and fowl, and fur
Are gone eternally,
All is the same to Thee as ere
They knew mortality.”

“O Time,” replied the Lord,
“Thou read’st me ill, I ween;
Were all THE SAME, I should not grieve At that late earthly scene,
Now blestly past–though planned by me With interest close and keen! –
Nay, nay: things now are NOT the same As they have earlier been.

III

“Written indelibly
On my eternal mind
Are all the wrongs endured
By Earth’s poor patient kind,
Which my too oft unconscious hand
Let enter undesigned.
No god can cancel deeds foredone,
Or thy old coils unwind!

“As when, in Noe’s days,
I whelmed the plains with sea,
So at this last, when flesh
And herb but fossils be,
And, all extinct, their piteous dust Revolves obliviously,
That I made Earth, and life, and man, It still repenteth me!”

MUTE OPINION

I traversed a dominion
Whose spokesmen spake out strong
Their purpose and opinion
Through pulpit, press, and song.
I scarce had means to note there
A large-eyed few, and dumb,
Who thought not as those thought there That stirred the heat and hum.

When, grown a Shade, beholding
That land in lifetime trode,
To learn if its unfolding
Fulfilled its clamoured code,
I saw, in web unbroken,
Its history outwrought
Not as the loud had spoken,
But as the mute had thought.

TO AN UNBORN PAUPER CHILD

Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently, And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here, And Time-wraiths turn our songsingings to fear.

Hark, how the peoples surge and sigh, And laughters fail, and greetings die: Hopes dwindle; yea,
Faiths waste away,
Affections and enthusiasms numb;
Thou canst not mend these things if thou dost come.

III

Had I the ear of wombed souls
Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls, And thou wert free
To cease, or be,
Then would I tell thee all I know, And put it to thee: Wilt thou take Life so?

Vain vow! No hint of mine may hence To theeward fly: to thy locked sense
Explain none can
Life’s pending plan:
Thou wilt thy ignorant entry make Though skies spout fire and blood and nations quake.

Fain would I, dear, find some shut plot Of earth’s wide wold for thee, where not One tear, one qualm,
Should break the calm.
But I am weak as thou and bare;
No man can change the common lot to rare.

Must come and bide. And such are we – Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary –
That I can hope
Health, love, friends, scope
In full for thee; can dream thou’lt find Joys seldom yet attained by humankind!

TO FLOWERS FROM ITALY IN WINTER

Sunned in the South, and here to-day; –If all organic things
Be sentient, Flowers, as some men say, What are your ponderings?

How can you stay, nor vanish quite
From this bleak spot of thorn,
And birch, and fir, and frozen white Expanse of the forlorn?

Frail luckless exiles hither brought! Your dust will not regain
Old sunny haunts of Classic thought When you shall waste and wane;

But mix with alien earth, be lit
With frigid Boreal flame,
And not a sign remain in it
To tell men whence you came.

ON A FINE MORNING

Whence comes Solace?–Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

Thus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.

February 1899.

TO LIZBIE BROWNE

Dear Lizbie Browne,
Where are you now?
In sun, in rain? –
Or is your brow
Past joy, past pain,
Dear Lizbie Browne?

Sweet Lizbie Browne
How you could smile,
How you could sing! –
How archly wile
In glance-giving,
Sweet Lizbie Browne!

III

And, Lizbie Browne,
Who else had hair
Bay-red as yours,
Or flesh so fair
Bred out of doors,
Sweet Lizbie Browne?

When, Lizbie Browne,
You had just begun
To be endeared
By stealth to one,
You disappeared
My Lizbie Browne!

Ay, Lizbie Browne,
So swift your life,
And mine so slow,
You were a wife
Ere I could show
Love, Lizbie Browne.