Death

Chess playing Death
-    no, the reverse
Death sitting decked out and self-satisfied
in black no mandatory top hat but a shroud
shouldering a cowl.

There stereotypes end    -
appearances have to be kept up
tho' hardly any cinematic gnarled fingers
of Baron Samedi fame
rather pudgy digitals reflecting
gentile prosperity
(after all, Winners do take all
his fellow satanists bank on it).

Of course, such things are fictitious.
Death plays no favourites (and waits
for no man when rivalling Time).
Still, parlour games are one indulgence.
Hardly comforting to know human beings
function at one purpose
when this Hallow of Hallows puts on the smirk.

Dalliance with the victim is the upshot    -
the chess motif again.
Sift th...

The Sky Line.

Like black fangs in a cruel ogre's jaw
    The grim piles lift against the sunset sky;
Down drops the night, and shuts the horrid maw--
    I listen, breathless, but there comes no cry.


Defeat.

He sits and looks into the west
    Where twilight gathers, wan and gray,
A knight who quit the Golden Quest,
    And flung Excalibur away.


To an Amazon.

O! twain in spirit, we shall know
    Thy like no more, so fierce, so mild,
One breast shorn clean to rest the bow,
    One milk-full for thy warrior child.


The Old Mother.

Life is like an old mother whom trouble and toil
Have sufficed the best part of her nature to spoil,
Whom her children, the Passions, so ...

His mission soon accomplished,
His race on earth soon run,
He passed to realms of glory,
Above the rising sun.

So beautiful that infant,
When in death's arms he lay;
It seemed like peaceful slumber,
That morn might chase away.

But morning light was powerless,
Those eyelids to unclose;
And sunshine saw and left him,
In undisturbed repose.

The light of those blue orbs
That drank the sunbeams in,
Now yields to night, and darkness
Holds undisputed reign.

That little form so graceful,
The light brown chestnut hair;
Those half formed words when uttered,
That face so sweet and fair;

All, all his ways so winning,
Were impotent to save
His life, when called to yield it
By Him that life who gave.

CHARACTERS

The Father. The Child. Death. Angels.
        Two Travellers.

    *    *    *    *    *

The even settles still and deep,
In the cold sky the last gold burns,
Across the colour snow flakes creep.
Each one from grey to glory turns
Then flutters into nothingness;
The frost down falls with mighty stress
Through the swift cloud that parts on high;
The great stars shrivel into less
In the hard depth of the iron sky.

    *    *    *    *    *

The Child:

What is that light, dear father,
That light in the dark, dark sky?


The Father:

Those are the lights of the city
And the villages thereby.


The Child:

There must be fire in the city

Rid of the world's injustice, and his pain,
He rests at last beneath God's veil of blue:
Taken from life when life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.
No cypress shades his grave, no funeral yew,
But gentle violets weeping with the dew
Weave on his bones an ever-blossoming chain.
O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!
O poet-painter of our English Land!
Thy name was writ in water it shall stand:
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green,
As Isabella did her Basil-tree.

ROME.

Into the darkness and the deeps
    My thoughts have strayed, where silence dwells,
Where the old world encrypted sleeps,--
    Myriads of forms, in myriad cells,
Of dead and inorganic things,
    That neither live, nor move, nor grow,
    Nor any change of atoms know;
That have neither legs, nor arms, nor wings,
That have neither heads, nor mouths, nor stings,
That have neither roots, nor leaves, nor stems,
To hold up flowers like diadems,
    Growing out of the ground below:
    But which hold instead
    The cycles dead,
And out of their stony and gloomy folds
Shape out new moulds
    For a new race begun;
Shutting within dark pages, furled
    As in a vast herbarium,
    The flowers and balms,
    The pines and palms,
    The ferns...

I. Spirit's House

From naked stones of agony
I will build a house for me;
As a mason all alone
I will raise it, stone by stone,
And every stone where I have bled
Will show a sign of dusky red.
I have not gone the way in vain,
For I have good of all my pain;
My spirit's quiet house will be
Built of naked stones I trod
On roads where I lost sight of God.

II. Mastery

I would not have a god come in
To shield me suddenly from sin,
And set my house of life to rights;
Nor angels with bright burning wings
Ordering my earthly thoughts and things;
Rather my own frail guttering lights
Wind blown and nearly beaten out;
Rather the terror of the nights
And long, sick groping after doubt;
Rather be lost than let my soul
Sl...

Dead he lay among his books!
The peace of God was in his looks.

As the statues in the gloom
Watch o'er Maximilian's tomb,

So those volumes from their shelves
Watched him, silent as themselves.

Ah! his hand will nevermore
Turn their storied pages o'er;

Nevermore his lips repeat
Songs of theirs, however sweet.

Let the lifeless body rest!
He is gone, who was its guest;

Gone, as travellers haste to leave
An inn, nor tarry until eve.

Traveller! in what realms afar,
In what planet, in what star,

In what vast, aerial space,
Shines the light upon thy face?

In what gardens of delight
Rest thy weary feet to-night?

Poet! thou, whose latest verse
Was a garland on thy hearse;

Th...

In the dewy depths of the graveyard
    I lie in the tangled grass,
And watch, in the sea of azure,
    The white cloud-islands pass.

The birds in the rustling branches
    Sing gaily overhead;
Grey stones like sentinel spectres
    Are guarding the silent dead.

The early flowers sleep shaded
    In the cool green noonday glooms;
The broken light falls shuddering
    On the cold white face of the tombs.

Without, the world is smiling
    In the infinite love of God,
But the sunlight fails and falters
    When it falls on the churchyard sod.

On me the joyous rapture
    Of a heart's first love is shed,
But it falls on my heart as coldly
    As sunlight on the dead.

I.

The last rose falls, wrecked of the wind and rain;
Where once it bloomed the thorns alone remain:
Dead in the wet the slow rain strews the rose.
The day was dim; now eve comes on again,
Grave as a life weighed down by many woes, -
So is the joy dead, and alive the pain.

The brown leaf flutters where the green leaf died;
Bare are the boughs, and bleak the forest side:
The wind is whirling with the last wild leaf.
The eve was strange; now dusk comes weird and wide,
Gaunt as a life that lives alone with grief, -
So doth the hope go and despair abide.

An empty nest hangs where the wood-bird pled;
Along the west the dusk dies, stormy red:
The frost is subtle as a serpent's breath.
The dusk was sad; now night is overhead,
Grim as a soul bro...

1.
Swifter far than summer's flight -
Swifter far than youth's delight -
Swifter far than happy night,
Art thou come and gone -
As the earth when leaves are dead,
As the night when sleep is sped,
As the heart when joy is fled,
I am left lone, alone.

2.
The swallow summer comes again -
The owlet night resumes her reign -
But the wild-swan youth is fain
To fly with thee, false as thou. -
My heart each day desires the morrow;
Sleep itself is turned to sorrow;
Vainly would my winter borrow
Sunny leaves from any bough.

3.
Lilies for a bridal bed -
Roses for a matron's head -
Violets for a maiden dead -
Pansies let MY flowers be:
On the living grave I bear
Scatter them without a tear -
Let no friend, however d...

The west builds high a sepulcher
Of cloudy granite and of gold,
Where twilight's priestly hours inter
The Day like some great king of old.

A censer, rimmed with silver fire,
The new moon swings above his tomb;
While, organ-stops of God's own choir,
Star after star throbs in the gloom.

And Night draws near, the sadly sweet -
A nun whose face is calm and fair -
And kneeling at the dead Day's feet
Her soul goes up in mists like prayer.

In prayer, we feel through dewy gleam
And flowery fragrance, and - above
All earth - the ecstasy and dream
That haunt the mystic heart of love.

For G. H.



Say, does that stupid earth
Where they have laid her,
Bind still her sullen mirth,
Mirth which betrayed her?
Do the lush grasses hold,
Greenly and glad,
That brittle-perfect gold
She alone had?

Smugly the common crew,
Over their knitting,
Mourn her -- as butchers do
Sheep-throats they're slitting!
She was my enemy,
One of the best of them.
Would she come back to me,
God damn the rest of them!

Damn them, the flabby, fat,
Sleek little darlings!
We gave them tit for tat,
Snarlings for snarlings!
Squashy pomposities,
Shocked at our violence,
Let not one tactful hiss
Break her new silence!

Maids of antiquity,
Look well upon her;
Ice was her chastity,
Spotless h...

1. Through cycles of darkness the diamond sleeps in its coal-black prison.

2. Purely incrusted in its scaly casket, the breath-tarnished pearl slumbers in mud and ooze.

3. Buried in the bowels of earth, rugged and obscure, lies the ingot of gold.

4. Long hast thou been buried, O Israel, in the bowels of earth; long hast thou slumbered beneath the overwhelming waves; long hast thou slept in the rayless house of darkness.

5. Rejoice and sing, for only thus couldst thou rightly guard the golden knowledge, Truth, the delicate pearl and the adamantine jewel of the Law.

O Poesy is on the wane,
For Fancy's visions all unfitting;
I hardly know her face again,
Nature herself seems on the flitting.
The fields grow old and common things,
The grass, the sky, the winds a-blowing;
And spots, where still a beauty clings,
Are sighing "going! all a-going!"
O Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

The bank with brambles overspread,
And little molehills round about it,
Was more to me than laurel shades,
With paths of gravel finely clouted;
And streaking here and streaking there,
Through shaven grass and many a border,
With rutty lanes had no compare,
And heaths were in a richer order.
But Poesy is on the wane,
I hardly know her face again.

I sat beside the pasture stream,
When Beauty's sel...

Since there is no escape, since at the end
My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
And hours alone too still and sure for prayer,
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
In pride; and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover, I shall leave the dead
If there is any way to baffle death.

He trod the earth but yesterday,
And now he treads the stars.
He left us in the April time
He praised so often in his rhyme,
He left the singing and the lyre and went his way.

He drew new music from our tongue,
A music subtly wrought,
And moulded words to his desire,
As wind doth mould a wave of fire;
From strangely fashioned harps slow golden tones he wrung.

I think the singing understands
That he who sang is still,
And Iseult cries that he is dead,
Does not Dolores bow her head
And Fragoletta weep and wring her little hands?

New singing now the singer hears
To lyre and lute and harp;
Catullus waits to welcome him,
And thro’ the twilight sweet and dim,
Sappho’s forgotten songs are falling on his ears.

There is a charm in footing slow across a silent plain,
Where patriot battle has been fought, where glory had the gain;
There is a pleasure on the heath where Druids old have been,
Where mantles grey have rustled by and swept the nettles green;
There is a joy in every spot made known by times of old,
New to the feet, although each tale a hundred times be told;
There is a deeper joy than all, more solemn in the heart,
More parching to the tongue than all, of more divine a smart,
When weary steps forget themselves upon a pleasant turf,
Upon hot sand, or flinty road, or sea-shore iron scurf,
Toward the castle or the cot, where long ago was born
One who was great through mortal days, and died of fame unshorn.
Light heather-bells may tremble then, but they are far away;
Wood-lark...