Death

A little while, a little while,
The weary task is put away,
And I can sing and I can smile,
Alike, while I have holiday.

Why wilt thou go, my harassed heart,
What thought, what scene invites thee now?
What spot, or near or far,
Has rest for thee, my weary brow?

There is a spot, mid barren hills,
Where winter howls, and driving rain;
But if the dreary tempest chills,
There is a light that warms again.

The house is old, the trees are bare,
Moonless above bends twilight’s dome;
But what on earth is half so dear,
So longed for, as the hearth of home?

The mute bird sitting on the stone,
The dank moss dripping from the wall,
The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o’ergrown,
I love them, how I love them all!

Still, as I mus...

My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

O the old wall here! How I could pass
Life in a long midsummer day,
My feet confined to a plot of grass,
My eyes from a wall not once away!

And lush and lithe do the creepers clothe
Yon wall I watch, with a wealth of green:
Its bald red bricks draped, nothing loath,
In lappets of tangle they laugh between.

Now, what is it makes pulsate the robe?
Why tremble the sprays? What life o'erbrims
The body, the house no eye can probe,
Divined, as beneath a robe, the limbs?

And there again! But my heart may guess
Who tripped behind; and she sang, perhaps:
So the old wall throbbed, and it's life's excess
Died out and away in the leafy wraps.

Wall upon wall are between us: life
And song should away from heart to heart!
I prison-bird, with...

    Jack would laugh an' joke all day;
    Never saw a lad so gay;
    Singin' like a medder lark,
    Loaded to the Plimsoll mark
    With God's sunshine was that boy;
    Had a strangle-holt on Joy.
    Held his head 'way up in air,
    Left no callin' cards on Care;
    Breezy, buoyant, brave and true;
    Sent his sunshine out to you;
    Cheerfulest when clouds was black -
    Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!

    Sittin' in my shack alone
    I could hear him in his own,
    Singin' far into the night,
    Till it didn't seem just right
    One man should corral the fun,
    Live his life so in the sun;
    Didn't seem quite natural
    Not to have a grouch at all;
    Not a trouble, not a lack -
    Happy Jack! Oh, Happy Jack!

A wild moon riding high from cloud to cloud,
That sees and sees not, glimmering far beneath,
Hell’s children revel along the shuddering heath
With dirge-like mirth and raiment like a shroud:
A worse fair face than witchcraft’s, passion-proud,
With brows blood-flecked behind their bridal wreath
And lips that bade the assassin’s sword find sheath
Deep in the heart whereto love’s heart was vowed:
A game of close contentious crafts and creeds
Played till white England bring black Spain to shame:
A son’s bright sword and brighter soul, whose deeds
High conscience lights for mother’s love and fame:
Pure gipsy flowers, and poisonous courtly weeds:
Such tokens and such trophies crown thy name.

Eve must have wept to leave her flowers,
And plucked some roots to tell
Of Eden's happy, sinless bowers,
Where she in bliss did dwell.

Roses and lilies, pansies gay,
Violets with azure eyes,
Her favorites must have been, for they
Seem born in paradise.

And when they drooped, did she not sigh
And kiss their petals fair,
Thinking, "Alas, ye too must die
And in our sorrow share"?

And then perhaps unto her soul
This answer sweet was given,
"Like you we fade and perish here;
For you we'll bloom in heaven."

Roses and lilies are the type
Of him who from above,
The lamb of God, gave up his life,
A sacrifice of love.

He was her hope in those sad hours
Of blight and sure decay;
The sin that drove her from her f...

(1916)


I.

I found a dreadful acre of the dead,
    Marked with the only sign on earth that saves.
The wings of death were hurrying overhead,
    The loose earth shook on those unquiet graves;

For the deep gun-pits, with quick stabs of flame,
    Made their own thunders of the sunlit air;
Yet, as I read the crosses, name by name,
    Mort pour la France, it seemed that peace was there;
Sunlight and peace, a peace too deep for thought,
    The peace of tides that underlie our strife,
The peace with which the moving heavens are fraught,
    The peace that is our everlasting life.

The loose earth shook. The very hills were stirred.
The silence of the dead was all I heard.


II.

We, who lie here, have...

Dell' aureo albergo con l' Aurora innanzi.


    Behind Aurora's wheels the rising sun
His voyage from his golden shrine begun,
With such ethereal speed, as if the Hours
Had caught him slumb'ring in her rosy bowers.
With lordly eye, that reach'd the world's extreme,
Methought he look'd, when, gliding on his beam,
That wingèd power approach'd that wheels his car
In its wide annual range from star to star,
Measuring vicissitude; till, now more near,
Methought these thrilling accents met my ear:--
"New laws must be observed if mortals claim,
Spite of the lapse of time, eternal fame.
Those laws have lost their force that Heaven decreed,
And I my circle run with fruitless speed;
If fame's loud breath the slumb'ring dust inspire,
And bid to live wit...

Within this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts' full pleasure You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.

Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.

But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.

There was a curious quiet for a space
Directly following: and in the face
Of one rapt listener pulsed the flush and glow
Of the heat-lightning that pent passions throw
Long ere the crash of speech. - He broke the spell -
The host: - The Traveler's story, told so well,
He said, had wakened there within his breast
A yearning, as it were, to know the rest -
That all unwritten sequence that the Lord
Of Righteousness must write with flame and sword,
Some awful session of His patient thought -
Just then it was, his good old mother caught
His blazing eye - so that its fire became
But as an ember - though it burned the same.
It seemed to her, she said, that she had heard
It was the Heavenly Parent never erred,
And not the earthly one that had such...

If thou hast grief
And passion vex the spirit that is in thee--

There was a stony beach
Where the heat flickered and the little waves
Whispered each to each.
Dove-coloured was that stony beach,
And white birds hungering hovered over
The shining waves;
And men had kindled there
A great fierce heap of golden flame--
Spoiled grasses with dead buttercups and pale clover.
The agonising flame
Yearned in its vitals towards the quiet air
And died in a little smoke.
And on the coloured beach the black warm ash
Remained.

Then on that warm ash
Another heap of grasses was outpoured,
And instant came
Another knot of struggling yellow smoke
That burst into new agonies of flame,
Dying into a drift of smoke;
And on the coloured beach ...

Why should such gloomy silence reign,
And why is all the house so drear,
When neither danger, sickness, pain,
Nor death, nor want, have entered here?

We are as many as we were
That other night, when all were gay
And full of hope, and free from care;
Yet is there something gone away.

The moon without, as pure and calm,
Is shining as that night she shone;
But now, to us, she brings no balm,
For something from our hearts is gone.

Something whose absence leaves a void--
A cheerless want in every heart;
Each feels the bliss of all destroyed,
And mourns the change--but each apart.

The fire is burning in the grate
As redly as it used to burn;
But still the hearth is desolate,
Till mirth, and love, and PEACE return.

'T...

    Aye Charles! I knew that this would fix thine eye,
    This woodbine wreathing round the broken porch,
    Its leaves just withering, yet one autumn flower
    Still fresh and fragrant; and yon holly-hock
    That thro' the creeping weeds and nettles tall
    Peers taller, and uplifts its column'd stem
    Bright with the broad rose-blossoms. I have seen
    Many a fallen convent reverend in decay,
    And many a time have trod the castle courts
    And grass-green halls, yet never did they strike
    Home to the heart such melancholy thoughts
    As this poor cottage. Look, its little hatch
    Fleeced with that grey and wintry moss; the roof
    Part mouldered in, the rest o'ergrown with weeds,
    House-leek and long thin grass and greener moss;
    So Natur...

Night! the horrible wizard Night!
    The dumb and terrible Night
Hath drawn his circle of magic, round
Over the sky, and over the ground,
        Without a sound.
Ah me, what woeful phantoms rise,
With ice-cold hands and pitiless eyes,
As stars grow out of the summer skies,
Tangible things to mortal sight,
Under the hands of the wizard Night!

Night! the mystical prophet, Night!
    The haunted and awful Night!
With the trail of his garment's shadowy fall,
Soundless and black as a funeral pall,
Now enters his dread laboratory.
A wan, and faint, and wavering glory
Shines from a veiled lamp somewhere hidden.
        Like a lily in a grave:
And things unholy, and things forbidden,--
Hands that have long been the earth-worm's prey,
And sh...

In Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination
in Boyhood and Early Youth

Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe!
Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
And giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature; purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.
Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours rolling down ...

I have experienc'd
The worst, the World can wreak on me, the worst
That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb
With whisper'd Discontents the dying prayer,
I have beheld the whole of all, wherein
My Heart had any interest in this Life,
To be disrent and torn from off my Hopes
That nothing now is left. Why then live on?
That Hostage, which the world had in it's keeping
Given by me as a Pledge that I would live,
That Hope of Her, say rather, that pure Faith
In her fix'd Love, which held me to keep truce
With the Tyranny of Life, is gone ah! whither?
What boots it to reply? 'tis gone! and now
Well may I break this Pact, this League of Blood
That ties me to myself, and break I shall!

Time's sea hath been five years at its slow ebb,
Long hours have to and fro let creep the sand,
Since I was tangled in thy beauty's web,
And snared by the ungloving of thine hand.
And yet I never look on midnight sky,
But I behold thine eyes' well memory'd light;
I cannot look upon the rose's dye,
But to thy cheek my soul doth take its flight.
I cannot look on any budding flower,
But my fond ear, in fancy at thy lips
And hearkening for a love-sound, doth devour
Its sweets in the wrong sense: Thou dost eclipse
Every delight with sweet remembering,
And grief unto my darling joys dost bring.

How dare the robins sing,
When men and women hear
Who since they went to their account
Have settled with the year! --
Paid all that life had earned
In one consummate bill,
And now, what life or death can do
Is immaterial.
Insulting is the sun
To him whose mortal light,
Beguiled of immortality,
Bequeaths him to the night.
In deference to him
Extinct be every hum,
Whose garden wrestles with the dew,
At daybreak overcome!