Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces

LYRICS AND REVERIES

IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

 
Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,
   Dolorous and dear,
Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters
   Stretching around,
Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape
   Yonder and near,
 
 
Blotted to feeble mist.  And the coomb and the upland
   Foliage-crowned,
Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat
   Stroked by the light,
Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial
   Meadow or mound.
 
 
What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost
   Under my sight,
Hindering me to discern my paced advancement
   Lengthening to miles;
What were the re-creations killing the daytime
   As by the night?
 
 
O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,
   Some as with smiles,
Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled
   Over the wrecked
Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,
   Harrowed by wiles.
 
 
Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them —
   Halo-bedecked —
And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,
   Rigid in hate,
Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,
   Dreaded, suspect.
 
 
Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons
   Further in date;
Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion
   Vibrant, beside
Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crust
   Now corporate.
 
 
Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect
   Gnawed by the tide,
Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there
   Guilelessly glad —
Wherefore they knew not – touched by the fringe of an ecstasy
   Scantly descried.
 
 
Later images too did the day unfurl me,
   Shadowed and sad,
Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,
   Laid now at ease,
Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow
   Sepulture-clad.
 
 
So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,
   Over the leaze,
Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;
   – Yea, as the rhyme
Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness
   Captured me these.
 
 
For, their lost revisiting manifestations
   In their own time
Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,
   Seeing behind
Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling
   Sweet, sad, sublime.
 
 
Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser
   Stare of the mind
As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast
   Body-borne eyes,
Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them
   As living kind.
 
 
Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying
   In their surmise,
“Ah – whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought
   Round him that looms
Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,
   Save a few tombs?”
 

CHANNEL FIRING

 
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day
 
 
And sat upright.  While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,
 
 
The glebe cow drooled.  Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:
 
 
“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder.  Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.
 
 
“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening.
 
 
“Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”
 
 
So down we lay again.  “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, “than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”
 
 
And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”
 
 
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
 

April 1914.

THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

I

 
   In a solitude of the sea
   Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
 

II

 
   Steel chambers, late the pyres
   Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
 

III

 
   Over the mirrors meant
   To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
 

IV

 
   Jewels in joy designed
   To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
 

V

 
   Dim moon-eyed fishes near
   Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: “What does this vaingloriousness down here?”.
 

VI

 
   Well: while was fashioning
   This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
 

VII

 
   Prepared a sinister mate
   For her – so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
 

VIII

 
   And as the smart ship grew
   In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
 

IX

 
   Alien they seemed to be:
   No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
 

X

 
   Or sign that they were bent
   By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
 

XI

 
   Till the Spinner of the Years
   Said “Now!”  And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
 

THE GHOST OF THE PAST

 
We two kept house, the Past and I,
   The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
   Leaving me never alone.
It was a spectral housekeeping
   Where fell no jarring tone,
As strange, as still a housekeeping
   As ever has been known.
 
 
As daily I went up the stair
   And down the stair,
I did not mind the Bygone there —
   The Present once to me;
Its moving meek companionship
   I wished might ever be,
There was in that companionship
   Something of ecstasy.
 
 
It dwelt with me just as it was,
   Just as it was
When first its prospects gave me pause
   In wayward wanderings,
Before the years had torn old troths
   As they tear all sweet things,
Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths
   And dulled old rapturings.
 
 
And then its form began to fade,
   Began to fade,
Its gentle echoes faintlier played
   At eves upon my ear
Than when the autumn’s look embrowned
   The lonely chambers here,
The autumn’s settling shades embrowned
   Nooks that it haunted near.
 
 
And so with time my vision less,
   Yea, less and less
Makes of that Past my housemistress,
   It dwindles in my eye;
It looms a far-off skeleton
   And not a comrade nigh,
A fitful far-off skeleton
   Dimming as days draw by.
 

AFTER THE VISIT
(To F. E. D.)

 
   Come again to the place
Where your presence was as a leaf that skims
Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims
   The bloom on the farer’s face.
 
 
   Come again, with the feet
That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,
And those mute ministrations to one and to all
   Beyond a man’s saying sweet.
 
 
   Until then the faint scent
Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,
And I marked not the charm in the changes of day
   As the cloud-colours came and went.
 
 
   Through the dark corridors
Your walk was so soundless I did not know
Your form from a phantom’s of long ago
   Said to pass on the ancient floors,
 
 
   Till you drew from the shade,
And I saw the large luminous living eyes
Regard me in fixed inquiring-wise
   As those of a soul that weighed,
 
 
   Scarce consciously,
The eternal question of what Life was,
And why we were there, and by whose strange laws
   That which mattered most could not be.
 

TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

 
Whether to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams,
   Or whether to stay
And see thee not!  How vast the difference seems
   Of Yea from Nay
Just now.  Yet this same sun will slant its beams
   At no far day
On our two mounds, and then what will the difference weigh!
 
 
Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make
   The most I can
Of what remains to us amid this brake Cimmerian
Through which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache,
   While still we scan
Round our frail faltering progress for some path or plan.
 
 
By briefest meeting something sure is won;
   It will have been:
Nor God nor Daemon can undo the done,
   Unsight the seen,
Make muted music be as unbegun,
   Though things terrene
Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.
 
 
So, to the one long-sweeping symphony
   From times remote
Till now, of human tenderness, shall we
   Supply one note,
Small and untraced, yet that will ever be
   Somewhere afloat
Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life’s antidote.
 

THE DIFFERENCE

I

 
Sinking down by the gate I discern the thin moon,
And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,
But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird’s tune,
For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.
 

II

 
Did my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,
The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;
But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,
Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.
 

THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE
(Student’s Love-song)

 
Once more the cauldron of the sun
Smears the bookcase with winy red,
And here my page is, and there my bed,
And the apple-tree shadows travel along.
Soon their intangible track will be run,
   And dusk grow strong
   And they be fled.
 
 
Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,
And I have wasted another day.
But wasted —wasted, do I say?
Is it a waste to have imaged one
Beyond the hills there, who, anon,
   My great deeds done
   Will be mine alway?
 

“WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE”

 
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
   A hundred miles away,
   The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
   A hundred miles away.
 
 
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
   While I should sojourn there
   No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
   While I should sojourn there.
 
 
When I came back from Lyonnesse
   With magic in my eyes,
   None managed to surmise
What meant my godlike gloriousness,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
   With magic in my eyes.
 

A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN
(A Reminiscence)

 
She wore a new “terra-cotta” dress,
And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,
Within the hansom’s dry recess,
Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless
   We sat on, snug and warm.
 
 
Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,
And the glass that had screened our forms before
Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:
I should have kissed her if the rain
   Had lasted a minute more.
 

THE TORN LETTER

I

 
I tore your letter into strips
   No bigger than the airy feathers
   That ducks preen out in changing weathers
Upon the shifting ripple-tips.
 

II

 
In darkness on my bed alone
   I seemed to see you in a vision,
   And hear you say: “Why this derision
Of one drawn to you, though unknown?”
 

III

 
Yes, eve’s quick mood had run its course,
   The night had cooled my hasty madness;
   I suffered a regretful sadness
Which deepened into real remorse.
 

IV

 
I thought what pensive patient days
   A soul must know of grain so tender,
   How much of good must grace the sender
Of such sweet words in such bright phrase.
 

V

 
Uprising then, as things unpriced
   I sought each fragment, patched and mended;
   The midnight whitened ere I had ended
And gathered words I had sacrificed.
 

VI

 
But some, alas, of those I threw
   Were past my search, destroyed for ever:
   They were your name and place; and never
Did I regain those clues to you.
 

VII

 
I learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,
   My track; that, so the Will decided,
   In life, death, we should be divided,
And at the sense I ached indeed.
 

VIII

 
That ache for you, born long ago,
   Throbs on; I never could outgrow it.
   What a revenge, did you but know it!
But that, thank God, you do not know.
 

BEYOND THE LAST LAMP
(Near Tooting Common)

I

 
While rain, with eve in partnership,
Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,
Beyond the last lone lamp I passed
   Walking slowly, whispering sadly,
   Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:
Some heavy thought constrained each face,
And blinded them to time and place.
 

II

 
The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed
In mental scenes no longer orbed
By love’s young rays.  Each countenance
   As it slowly, as it sadly
   Caught the lamplight’s yellow glance
Held in suspense a misery
At things which had been or might be.
 

III

 
When I retrod that watery way
Some hours beyond the droop of day,
Still I found pacing there the twain
   Just as slowly, just as sadly,
   Heedless of the night and rain.
One could but wonder who they were
And what wild woe detained them there.
 

IV

 
Though thirty years of blur and blot
Have slid since I beheld that spot,
And saw in curious converse there
   Moving slowly, moving sadly
   That mysterious tragic pair,
Its olden look may linger on —
All but the couple; they have gone.
 

V

 
Whither?  Who knows, indeed.. And yet
To me, when nights are weird and wet,
Without those comrades there at tryst
   Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,
   That lone lane does not exist.
There they seem brooding on their pain,
And will, while such a lane remain.
 

THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

 
   If ever joy leave
An abiding sting of sorrow,
So befell it on the morrow
   Of that May eve.
 
 
   The travelled sun dropped
To the north-west, low and lower,
The pony’s trot grew slower,
   And then we stopped.
 
 
   “This cosy house just by
I must call at for a minute,
A sick man lies within it
   Who soon will die.
 
 
   “He wished to marry me,
So I am bound, when I drive near him,
To inquire, if but to cheer him,
   How he may be.”
 
 
   A message was sent in,
And wordlessly we waited,
Till some one came and stated
   The bulletin.
 
 
   And that the sufferer said,
For her call no words could thank her;
As his angel he must rank her
   Till life’s spark fled.
 
 
   Slowly we drove away,
When I turned my head, although not
Called; why so I turned I know not
   Even to this day.
 
 
   And lo, there in my view
Pressed against an upper lattice
Was a white face, gazing at us
   As we withdrew.
 
 
   And well did I divine
It to be the man’s there dying,
Who but lately had been sighing
   For her pledged mine.
 
 
   Then I deigned a deed of hell;
It was done before I knew it;
What devil made me do it
   I cannot tell!
 
 
   Yes, while he gazed above,
I put my arm about her
That he might see, nor doubt her
   My plighted Love.
 
 
   The pale face vanished quick,
As if blasted, from the casement,
And my shame and self-abasement
   Began their prick.
 
 
   And they prick on, ceaselessly,
For that stab in Love’s fierce fashion
Which, unfired by lover’s passion,
   Was foreign to me.
 
 
   She smiled at my caress,
But why came the soft embowment
Of her shoulder at that moment
   She did not guess.
 
 
   Long long years has he lain
In thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather:
What tears there, bared to weather,
   Will cleanse that stain!
 
 
   Love is long-suffering, brave,
Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel;
But O, too, Love is cruel,
   Cruel as the grave.
 

LOST LOVE

 
I play my sweet old airs —
   The airs he knew
   When our love was true —
   But he does not balk
   His determined walk,
And passes up the stairs.
 
 
I sing my songs once more,
   And presently hear
   His footstep near
   As if it would stay;
   But he goes his way,
And shuts a distant door.
 
 
So I wait for another morn
   And another night
   In this soul-sick blight;
   And I wonder much
   As I sit, why such
A woman as I was born!
 

“MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND”

 
My spirit will not haunt the mound
   Above my breast,
But travel, memory-possessed,
To where my tremulous being found
   Life largest, best.
 
 
My phantom-footed shape will go
   When nightfall grays
Hither and thither along the ways
I and another used to know
   In backward days.
 
 
And there you’ll find me, if a jot
   You still should care
For me, and for my curious air;
If otherwise, then I shall not,
   For you, be there.
 

WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

 
There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.
 
 
In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend —
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.
 
 
In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways —
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things —
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.
 
 
Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.
 
 
I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.
 
 
There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,
There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.
 
 
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
 
 
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.