Betrayal

[Greek quotation]

I heard the trailing garments of the Night
        Sweep through her marble halls!
I saw her sable skirts all fringed with light
        From the celestial walls!

I felt her presence, by its spell of might,
        Stoop o'er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the Night,
        As of the one I love.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,
        The manifold, soft chimes,
That fill the haunted chambers of the Night
        Like some old poet's rhymes.

From the cool cisterns of the midnight air
        My spirit drank repose;
The fountain of perpetual peace flows there,--
        From those deep cisterns flows.

O holy Night! from thee I learn to bear
        What man has borne before!

They mouth love's language. Gnash
The thirteen teeth
Your lean jaws grin with. Lash
Your itch and quailing, nude greed of the flesh.
Love's breath in you is stale, worded or sung,
As sour as cat's breath,
Harsh of tongue.

This grey that stares
Lies not, stark skin and bone.
Leave greasy lips their kissing. None
Will choose her what you see to mouth upon.
Dire hunger holds his hour.
Pluck forth your heart, saltblood, a fruit of tears.
Pluck and devour!

When through the heat of some long afternoon
In blazing August, on the grass I lie,
And watch the white clouds move across the sky,
On whose azure is faintly etched the moon,
That, when the evening deepens, will be soon
The brightest figure of those hosts on high,
My heart is discontented, and I sigh,
For Autumn and its vapours; till I swoon

Upon the vision of October days
In dreaming London, when each mighty tree
Sheds daily more brown showers through the haze,
Which lends each street Romance and Mystery -
When pallid silver Sunshine only gleams
On that grey Lovers' City of Sweet Dreams.

Isle of Grain, 1916.

With a copy of Woolman's journal.



Maiden! with the fair brown tresses
Shading o'er thy dreamy eye,
Floating on thy thoughtful forehead
Cloud wreaths of its sky.

Youthful years and maiden beauty,
Joy with them should still abide,
Instinct take the place of Duty,
Love, not Reason, guide.

Ever in the New rejoicing,
Kindly beckoning back the Old,
Turning, with the gift of Midas,
All things into gold.

And the passing shades of sadness
Wearing even a welcome guise,
As, when some bright lake lies open
To the sunny skies,

Every wing of bird above it,
Every light cloud floating on,
Glitters like that flashing mirror
In the self-same sun.

But upon thy youthful forehead
Something like a ...

To E. B. B.


I
There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished!
Take them, Love, the book and me together:
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

II
Rafael made a century of sonnets,
Made and wrote them in a certain volume
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil
Else he only used to draw Madonnas:
These, the world might view, but one, the volume.
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you.
Did she live and love it all her lifetime
Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets,
Die, and let it drop beside her pillow
Where it lay in place of Rafael’s glory,
Rafael’s cheek so duteous and so loving,
Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter’s,
Rafael?s cheek, her love had turned a poet’s?

In this fair stranger’s eyes of grey
Thine eyes, my love, I see.
I shudder: for the passing day
Had borne me far from thee.

This is the curse of life: that not
A nobler calmer train
Of wiser thoughts and feelings blot
Our passions from our brain;

But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-chok’d souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.

I struggle towards the light; and ye,
Once-long’d-for storms of love!
If with the light ye cannot be,
I bear that ye remove.

I struggle towards the light; but oh,
While yet the night is chill,
Upon Time’s barren, stormy flow,
Stay with me, Marguerite, still!

The Spring's bright tints no more are seen,
And Summer's ample robe of green
Is russet-gold and brown;
When flowers fall to every breeze
And, shed reluctant from the trees,
The leaves drop down.

A sadness steals about the heart,
--And is it thus from youth we part,
And life's redundant prime?
Must friends like flowers fade away,
And life like Nature know decay,
And bow to time?

And yet such sadness meets rebuke,
From every copse in every nook
Where Autumn's colours glow;
How bright the sky! How full the sheaves!
What mellow glories gild the leaves
Before they go.

Then let us sing the jocund praise,
In this bright air, of these bright days,
When years our friendships crown;
The love that's loveliest when 'tis old--

Darkness had stretched its colour,
Deep blue across the pane:
No cloud to make night duller,
No moon with its tarnish stain;
But only here and there a star,
One sharp point of frosty fire,
Hanging infinitely far
In mockery of our life and death
And all our small desire.

Now in this hour of waking
From under brows of stone,
A new pale day is breaking
And the deep night is gone.
Sordid now, and mean and small
The daylight world is seen again,
With only the veils of mist that fall
Deaf and muffling over all
To hide its ugliness and pain.

But to-day this dawn of meanness
Shines in my eyes, as when
The new world's brightness and cleanness
Broke on the first of men.
For the light that shows the huddled things
Of this cl...

In shards the sylvan vases lie,
Their links of dance undone,
And brambles wither by thy brim,
Choked fountain of the sun!
The spider in the laurel spins,
The weed exiles the flower:
And, flung to kiln, Apollo's bust
Makes lime for Mammon's tower.

Farewell! The gold we send shall be a token
Of that which in our hearts is growing strong;
You asked our sympathy, and we have spoken,
“They wrong us who our brothers rob and wrong.”

Tell Ireland, tell her in her desolation,
That hearts within the South for her have bled,
That scalding tears of helpless indignation
By eyes that read her cruel wrongs are shed.

Helpless no more! but strong to act hereafter,
For silenced arc the “loyal subjects’” sneers,
Too long have Ireland’s wrongs been words of laughter,
Arch-mockery to tickle British ears.

Tell Ireland that they lie of us, they slander,
Who say we care not for another’s wrong;
For we are not the men to kneel and pander
To tyranny, because the tyrant’s strong.

Take back across the wave...

    We crawled about the nursery
        In tenderest years in tether,
    At six we waded in the sea
        And caught our colds together.

    At ten we practised playing at
        A kind of heathen cricket,
    A croquet mallet was the bat,
        The Squire's old hat the wicket.

    At twelve, the cricket waxing slow,
        With home-made bow and arrow
    We took to shooting--once I know
        I all but hit a sparrow.

    She took birds' nests from easy trees,
        I climbed the oaks and ashes,
    'Twas deadly work for hands and knees,
        Deplorable for sashes.

    At hide and seek one summer day
        We played in merry laughter,
    'Twas then she hid her heart away,
        I never found it after....

If a leaf rustled, she would start:
    And yet she died, a year ago.
How had so frail a thing the heart
    To journey where she trembled so?
And do they turn and turn in fright,
    Those little feet, in so much night?

The light above the poet's head
    Streamed on the page and on the cloth,
And twice and thrice there buffeted
    On the black pane a white-wing'd moth;
'Twas Annie's soul that beat outside
    And 'Open, open, open!' cried:

'I could not find the way to God;
    There were too many flaming suns
For signposts, and the fearful road
    Led over wastes where millions
Of tangled comets hissed and burned--
    I was bewilder'd and I turned.

'O, it was easy then! I knew
    Your window and no star beside.

From Swindon out to White Horse Hill
I walked, in morning rain,
And saw your shadow lying there.
As clear and plain
As lies the White Horse on the Hill
I saw your shadow lying there.

Over the wide green downs and bleak,
Unthinking, free I walked,
And saw your shadow fluttering by.
Almost it talked,
Answering what I dared not speak
While thoughts of you ran fluttering by....

So on to Baydon sauntered, teased
With that pure native air.
Sometimes the sweetness of wild thyme
The strings of care
Did pluck; sometimes my soul was eased
With more than sweetness of wild thyme.

Sometimes within a pool I caught
Your face, upturned to mine.
And where sits Chilton by the waters
Your look did shine
Wildly in the mill foam that...

The beauty of this rainy day,
All silver-green and dripping gray,
Has stolen quite my heart away
From all the tasks I meant to do,
Made me forget the resolute blue
And energetic gold of things . . .
So soft a song the rain-bird sings.

Yet am I glad to miss awhile
The sun's huge domineering smile,
The busy spaces mile on mile,
Shut in behind this shimmering screen
Of falling pearls and phantom green;
As in a cloister walled with rain,
Safe from intrusions, voices vain,
And hurry of invading feet,
Inviolate in my retreat:
Myself, my books, my pipe, my fire -
So runs my rainy-day desire.

Or I old letters may con o'er,
And dream on faces seen no more,
The buried treasure of the years,
Too visionary now for tears;
Open old ...

Next came the closing scene: but shall I paint
The scarlet column, sullen, slow, and faint,
Which marched, with "colors cased" to yonder field,
Where Britain threw down corslet, sword and shield?

Shall I depict the anguish of the brave
Who envied comrades sleeping in the grave?
Shall I exult o'er inoffensive dust
Of valiant men whose swords have turned to rust?
Shall I, like Menelaus by the coast,
O'er dead Ajaces make unmanly boast?
Shall I, in chains of an ignoble Verse,
Degrade dead Hectors, and their pangs rehearse -
Nay! such is not the mood this People feels,
Their chariots drag no foemen by the heels!
Let Ajax slumber by the sounding sea
From the fell passion of his madness free!
Let Hector's ashes unmolested sleep -
But not to-day shall any ...

Amor che meco al buon tempo ti stavi.

HE VENTS HIS SORROW TO ALL WHO WITNESSED HIS FORMER FELICITY.


    Love, that in happier days wouldst meet me here
Along these meads that nursed our kindred strains;
And that old debt to clear which still remains,
Sweet converse with the stream and me wouldst share:
Ye flowers, leaves, grass, woods, grots, rills, gentle air,
Low valleys, lofty hills, and sunny plains:
The harbour where I stored my love-sick pains,
And all my various chance, my racking care:
Ye playful inmates of the greenwood shade;
Ye nymphs, and ye that in the waves pursue
That life its cool and grassy bottom lends:--
My days were once so fair; now dark and dread
As death that makes them so. Thus the world through
On each as soon as bo...

The encircling ground, in native turf arrayed,
Is now by solemn consecration given
To social interests, and to favouring Heaven;
And where the rugged colts their gambols played,
And wild deer bounded through the forest glade,
Unchecked as when by merry Outlaw driven,
Shall hymns of praise resound at morn and even;
And soon, full soon, the lonely Sexton's spade
Shall wound the tender sod. Encincture small,
But infinite its grasp of weal and woe!
Hopes, fears, in never-ending ebb and flow;
The spousal trembling, and the "dust to dust,"
The prayers, the contrite struggle, and the trust
That to the Almighty Father looks through all.

Down through the woods, along the way
That fords the stream; by rock and tree,
Where in the bramble-bell the bee
Swings; and through twilights green and gray
The redbird flashes suddenly,
My thoughts went wandering to-day.
I found the fields where, row on row,
The blackberries hang dark with fruit;
Where, nesting at the elder's root,
The partridge whistles soft and low;
The fields, that billow to the foot
Of those old hills we used to know.
There lay the pond, all willow-bound,
On whose bright face, when noons were hot,
We marked the bubbles rise; some plot
To lure us in; while all around
Our heads, like faery fancies, shot
The dragonflies without a sound.
The pond, above which evening bent
To gaze upon her gypsy face;
Wherein the twinkling...