Betrayal

A fog has destroyed the world so gently.
Bloodless trees dissolve in smoke.
And shadows hover where shrieks are heard.
Burning beasts evaporate like breath.

Captured flies are the gas lanterns.
And each flickers, still attempting to escape.
But to one side, high in the distance, the poisonous moon,
The fat fog-spider, lies in wait, smoldering.

We, however, loathsome, suited for death,
Trample along, crunching this desert splendor.
And silently stab the white eyes of misery
Like spears into the swollen night.

To-day the world is wide and fair
With sunny fields of lucid air,
And waters dancing everywhere;
The snow is almost gone;
The noon is builded high with light,
And over heaven's liquid height,
In steady fleets serene and white,
The happy clouds go on.

The channels run, the bare earth steams,
And every hollow rings and gleams
With jetting falls and dashing streams;
The rivers burst and fill;
The fields are full of little lakes,
And when the romping wind awakes
The water ruffles blue and shakes,
And the pines roar on the hill.

The crows go by, a noisy throng;
About the meadows all day long
The shore-lark drops his brittle song;
And up the leafless tree
The nut-hatch runs, and nods, and clings;
The bluebird dips with flashing w...

Farewell, Aziz, it was not mine to fold you
    Against my heart for any length of days.
I had no loveliness, alas, to hold you,
    No siren voice, no charm that lovers praise.

Yet, in the midst of grief and desolation,
    Solace I my despairing soul with this:
Once, for my life's eternal consolation,
    You lent my lips your loveliness to kiss.

Ah, that one night!    I think Love's very essence
    Distilled itself from out my joy and pain,
Like tropical trees, whose fervid inflorescence
    Glows, gleams, and dies, never to bloom again.

Often I marvel how I met the morning
    With living eyes after that night with you,
Ah, how I cursed the wan, white light for dawning,
    And mourned the paling stars, as each withdrew!

Yet I, eve...

How my heart yearns towards my friends at home!
Poor suffering souls, whose lives are like the trees,
Bent, crushed, and broken in the storm of life!
A whirlwind of existence seems to roam
Through some poor hearts continually. These
Have neither rest nor pause; one day is rife
With tempest, and another dashed with gloom;
And the few rays of light that might illume
Their thorny path are drenched with tearful rain.
Yet these pure souls live not their lives in vain;
For they become as spiritual guides
And lights to others; rising with the tides
Of their full being into higher spheres,
Brighter and brighter still through all the coming years.

Two roadways lead from this land to That, and one is the road of Prayer;
And one is the road of Old-time Songs, and every note is a stair.

A shabby old man with a music machine on the sordid city street;
But suddenly earth seemed Arcady, and life grew young and sweet.
For the city street fled, and the world was green, and a little house stood by the sea;
And she came singing a martial air (she who was peace itself);
She brought back with her the old, strange charm, of mingled pathos and glee -

With her eyes of a child in a woman's face, and her soul of a saint in an elf.
She had been gone for many a year.    They tell us it is not far -
That silent place where the dear ones go, but it might as well be a star.
Yes, it might as well be a distant star as a beautiful Near-by Land,<...

NORTH

We come from the gloom of the shadowy trail
Out away on the fringe of the Night,
Where no man could tell, when the darkness fell,
If his eyes would behold the light.
        To--the--Night,--
        To--the--Night,--
To the darkness and the sorrow of the Night,--
        Came--the--Light,
        Came--the--Light,
Came the Wonder and the Glory of the Light.

There are wanderers still, without ever a guide,
Out there on the fringe of the Night,
They are bond and blind,--to their darkness resigned,
With never a wish for the Light.
        To--their--Night,--
        To--their--Night,--
To the darkness and the sorrow of their Night,
        Take--the--Light!
        Take--the--Light!
Take the Wonder and the Glory of the Light...

Tis three years and a quarter since I left my own fireside
To go aboard a ship through love, and plough the ocean wide.
I crossed my native fields, where the scarlet poppies grew,
And the groundlark left his nest like a neighbour which I knew.

The pigeons from the dove cote cooed over the old lane,
The crow flocks from the oakwood went flopping oer the grain;
Like lots of dear old neighbours whom I shall see no more
They greeted me that morning I left the English shore.

The sun was just a-rising above the heath of furze,
And the shadows grow to giants; that bright ball never stirs:
There the shepherds lay with their dogs by their side,
And they started up and barked as my shadow they espied.

A maid of early morning twirled her mop upon the moor;
I wished he...

1

There is a mystic thread of life
So dearly wreath'd with mine alone,
That Destiny's relentless knife
At once must sever both, or none.


2

There is a Form on which these eyes
Have fondly gazed with such delight -
By day, that Form their joy supplies,
And Dreams restore it, through the night.


3

There is a Voice whose tones inspire
Such softened feelings in my breast,    -
I would not hear a Seraph Choir,
Unless that voice could join the rest.


4

There is a Face whose Blushes tell
Affection's tale upon the cheek,
But pallid at our fond farewell,
Proclaims more love than words can speak.


5

There is a Lip, which mine has prest,
But none had ever prest before;...

Inland, within a hollow vale, I stood;
And saw, while sea was calm and air was clear,
The coast of France, the coast of France how near!
Drawn almost into frightful neighbourhood.
I shrunk; for verily the barrier flood
Was like a lake, or river bright and fair,
A span of waters; yet what power is there!
What mightiness for evil and for good!
Even so doth God protect us if we be
Virtuous and wise. Winds blow, and waters roll,
Strength to the brave, and Power, and Deity;
Yet in themselves are nothing! One decree
Spake laws to 'them', and said that by the soul
Only, the Nations shall be great and free.

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers and tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes up spires up kingly halls
Up fanes up Babylon-like walls
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreath...

Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height:
What pleasure lives in height (the shepherd sang)
In height and cold, the splendour of the hills?
But cease to move so near the Heavens, and cease
To glide a sunbeam by the blasted Pine,
To sit a star upon the sparkling spire;
And come, for Love is of the valley, come,
For Love is of the valley, come thou down
And find him; by the happy threshold, he,
Or hand in hand with Plenty in the maize,
Or red with spirted purple of the vats,
Or foxlike in the vine; nor cares to walk
With Death and Morning on the silver horns,
Nor wilt thou snare him in the white ravine,
Nor find him dropt upon the firths of ice,
That huddling slant in furrow-cloven falls
To roll the torrent out of dusky doors:
But follow; let the torr...

'Where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.'


The time-gun rolls his nerve-destroying bray;
The toiling moon rides slowly o'er the trees;
The weary diners cast their cares away,
And seek the lawn for coolness and for ease.

Now spreads the gathering stillness like a pall,
And melancholy silence rules the scene,
Save where the bugler sounds his homing call,
And thirsty THOMAS leaves the wet canteen;

Save that from yonder lines in deepest gloom
Th' ambiguous mule does of the stick[1] bewail,
Whose dunder craft forbids him to consume
His proper blanket, or his neighbour's tail.

Beneath those jagged tiles, that low-built roof
(Whose inmost secret deeps let none divine!),
Each to his master's cry supremely proof,<...

I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.

They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman's powerful character
Could keep ...

Not 'mid the world's vain objects that enslave
The free-born Soul, that World whose vaunted skill
In selfish interest perverts the will,
Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave,
Not there; but in dark wood and rocky cave,
And hollow vale which foaming torrents fill
With omnipresent murmur as they rave
Down their steep beds, that never shall be still:
Here, mighty Nature! in this school sublime
I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain;
For her consult the auguries of time,
And through the human heart explore my way;
And look and listen, gathering, whence I may,
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The glitter of wheels far down the street
    (Ah me, and alack a day.)
And I heard the thud of his horse's feet
    Beating a roundelay.
And I felt a little song coming, coming
Over my lips as humming, humming,
    I turned my eyes that way.

Somebody passed, who was wont to pause:
    (Ah me, and alack a day.)
He bowed and smiled; yet for some cause
    The mirth went out of my lay.
A wind from the east rose, sighing, sighing,
I felt my little song dying, dying,
    She laughed as they rode away.

I
Days dawn on us that make amends for many
Sometimes,
When heaven and earth seem sweeter even than any
Man's rhymes.
Light had not all been quenched in France, or quelled
In Greece,
Had Homer sung not, or had Hugo held
His peace.
Had Sappho's self not left her word thus long
For token,
The sea round Lesbos yet in waves of song
Had spoken.

II
And yet these days of subtler air and finer
Delight,
When lovelier looks the darkness, and diviner
The light -
The gift they give of all these golden hours,
Whose urn
Pours forth reverberate rays or shadowing showers
In turn -
Clouds, beams, and winds that make the live day's track
Seem living -
What were they did no spirit give them back
Thanksgiving?

III

The eyrie clung to the shattered cliff
    That the glacier's torrent thundered under;
And the unfledged eaglet's lifted eye
Looked out on the world of peak and sky
            In silent wonder.

The mountain daisy, dainty white,
    That grew by the side of the lofty eyrie,
Saw the young wings beat on the eagle's breast,
And the restless eyes in the fagot-nest
            Grow grim and fiery.

The days went by and the wings grew strong,
    And the crag-built home was at last deserted;
But, close to the nest that her love had left,
The daisy clung to the rocky cleft,
            Half broken-hearted.

The days went by and the wan, white flower
    Waited and watched in the autumn weather;
Far down the valley, far up the height,
The for...