Identity

I saw a tract of ocean locked in-land
    Within a field's embrace--
The very sea! Afar it fled the strand
    And gave the seasons chase,
And met the night alone, the tempest spanned,
    Saw sunrise face to face.

O Poet, more than ocean, lonelier!
    In inaccessible rest
And storm remote, thou, sea of thoughts, dost stir,
    Scattered through east to west,--
Now, while thou closest with the kiss of her
    Who locks thee to her breast.

I have remembered beauty in the night,
Against black silences I waked to see
A shower of sunlight over Italy
And green Ravello dreaming on her height;
I have remembered music in the dark,
The clean swift brightness of a fugue of Bach's,
And running water singing on the rocks
When once in English woods I heard a lark.

But all remembered beauty is no more
Than a vague prelude to the thought of you.
You are the rarest soul I ever knew,
Lover of beauty, knightliest and best;
My thoughts seek you as waves that seek the shore,
And when I think of you, I am at rest.

The twilight o'er Italia's sky
Had spread a shadowy veil,
And one by one the solemn stars
Looked forth, serene and pale;
As quietly the waning light
Through a high casement stole,
And fell on one with silver hair,
Who shrived a passing soul.

No costly pomp or luxury
Relieved that chamber's gloom,
But glowing forms, by limner's art
Created, thronged the room:
And as the low winds carried far
The chime for evening prayer,
The dying painter's earnest tones
Fell on the languid air.

"The spectral form of Death is nigh,
The thread of life is spun:
Ave Maria! I have looked
Upon my latest sun.
And yet 't is not with pale disease
This frame is worn away;
Nor yet - nor yet with length of years; -
A child but yesterday,"

Frosty lies the winter-landscape,
    In the twilight golden-green.
Down the Park's deserted alleys,
    Naked elms stand stark and lean.


Dumb the murmur of the fountain,
    Birds have flown from lawn and hill.
But while yonder star's ascendant,
    Love triumphal reigneth still.


See the keen flame throb and tremble,
    Brightening in the darkening night,
Breathing like a thing of passion,
    In the sky's smooth chrysolite.


Not beneath the moon, oh lover,
    Thou shalt gain thy heart's desire.
Speak to-night!    The gods are with thee
    Burning with a kindred fire.

Consider them, my soul, they are a fright!
Like mannequins, vaguely ridiculous,
Peculiar, terrible somnambulists,
Beaming - who can say where - their eyes of night.

These orbs, in which a spark is never seen,
As if in looking far and wide stay raised
On high; they never seem to cast their gaze
Down to the street, head hung, as in a dream.

Thus they traverse the blackness of their days,
Kin to the silence of eternity.
o city! while you laugh and roar and play,

Mad with your lusts to point of cruelty,
Look at me! dragging, dazed more than their kind.
What in the Skies can these men hope to find?

There are haunters of the silence, ghosts that hold the heart and brain:
I have sat with them and hearkened; I have talked with them in vain:
I have shuddered from their coming, yet have run to meet them there,
And have cursed them and have blessed them and have loved them to despair.

At my door I see their shadows; in my walks I meet their ghosts;
Where I often hear them weeping or sweep by in withered hosts:
Perished dreams, gone like the roses, crumbling by like autumn leaves;
Phantoms of old joys departed, that the spirit eye perceives.

Oft at night they sit beside me, fix their eyes upon my face,
Demon eyes that burn and hold me, in whose deeps my heart can trace
All the past; and where a passion, as in Hell the ghosts go by,
Turns an anguished face toward me with a l...

The waterfall is calling me
    With its merry gleesome flow,
And the green boughs are beckoning me,
    To where the wild flowers grow:

I may not go, I may not go,
To where the sunny waters flow,
To where the wild wood flowers blow;
        I must stay here
        In prison drear,
Oh, heavy life, wear on, wear on,
Would God that thou wert done!

The busy mill-wheel round and round
Goes turning, with its reckless sound,
And o'er the dam the wafers flow
Into the foaming stream below,
And deep and dark away they glide,
To meet the broad, bright river's tide;
And all the way
They murmuring say:
"Oh, child! why art thou far away?
Come back into the sun, and stray
Upon our mossy side!"

I may not go, I may not go,

The valley rings with mirth and joy;
Among the hills the echoes play
A never never ending song,
To welcome in the May.
The magpie chatters with delight;
The mountain raven's youngling brood
Have left the mother and the nest;
And they go rambling east and west
In search of their own food;
Or through the glittering vapors dart
In very wantonness of heart.

Beneath a rock, upon the grass,
Two boys are sitting in the sun;
Their work, if any work they have,
Is out of mind, or done.
On pipes of sycamore they play
The fragments of a Christmas hymn;
Or with that plant which in our dale
We call stag-horn, or fox's tail,
Their rusty hats they trim:
And thus, as happy as the day,
Those Shepherds wear the time away.

Along the river...

    I shall make beauty out of many things:
    Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea,
    The soft unbosoming of all the springs
    Which that inscrutable hand allows to me,
    Odours of flowers, sounds of smitten strings,
    The voice of many a wind in many a tree,
    Fields, rivers, moors, swift feet and floating wings,
    Rocks, caves, and hills that stand and clouds that flee.

    Men also and women, beautiful and dear,
    Shall come and pass and leave a fragrant breath;
    And my own heart, laughter and pain and fear,
    The majesties of evil and of death;
    But never, never shall my verses trace
    The loveliness of your most lovely face.

What time I paced, at pleasant morn,
A deep and dewy wood,
I heard a mellow hunting-horn
Make dim report of Dian's lustihood
Far down a heavenly hollow.
Mine ear, though fain, had pain to follow:
`Tara!' it twanged, `tara-tara!' it blew,
Yet wavered oft, and flew
Most ficklewise about, or here, or there,
A music now from earth and now from air.
But on a sudden, lo!
I marked a blossom shiver to and fro
With dainty inward storm; and there within
A down-drawn trump of yellow jessamine
A bee
Thrust up its sad-gold body lustily,
All in a honey madness hotly bound
On blissful burglary.
    A cunning sound
In that wing-music held me: down I lay
In amber shades of many a golden spray,
Where looping low with languid arms the Vine
In wreath...

    With leaves twitching
    the autumn air
    and the burnt almond
    breath of landscape
    heaving relief,
    the afternoon heavy-footedly
    walks across
    evening's threshold.

    II
    A garment is held high
    as adrenalin in the marble
    glow of wintery air.
    Mud puddles reflect the faery shrimp
    of clouds while cone-shaped
    coniferous trees perch on lawns like
    starlings.

    III
    High above to skating and
    sugar-icing rinks in misty hues,
    a ginger-bread man
    manoeuvres past the ghost tails of a dead
    luna moth.

I have a dream, a dreadful dream,
A dream that is never done.
I watch a man go out of his mind,
And he is My Mother's Son.

They pushed him into a Mental Home,
And that is like the grave:
For they do not let you sleep upstairs,
And you aren't allowed to shave.

And it was not disease or crime
Which got him landed there,
But because They laid on My Mother's Son
More than a man could bear.

What with noise, and fear of death,
Waking, and wounds and cold,
They filled the Cup for My Mother's Son
Fuller than it could hold.

They broke his body and his mind
And yet They made him live,
And They asked more of My Mother's Son
Than any man could give.

For, just because he had not died,
Nor been discharged nor sick,

Quando 'l voler, che con duo sproni ardenti.

HER LOOKS BOTH COMFORT AND CHECK HIM.


    When, with two ardent spurs and a hard rein,
Passion, my daily life who rules and leads,
From time to time the usual law exceeds
That calm, at least in part, my spirits may gain,
It findeth her who, on my forehead plain,
The dread and daring of my deep heart reads,
And seeth Love, to punish its misdeeds,
Lighten her piercing eyes with worse disdain.
Wherefore--as one who fears the impending blow
Of angry Jove--it back in haste retires,
For great fears ever master great desires;
But the cold fire and shrinking hopes which so
Lodge in my heart, transparent as a glass,
O'er her sweet face at times make gleams of grace to pass.

MACGREGOR.

SPRING

A sudden softness in the wind;
    A glint of song, a-wing;
A fragrant sound that trails behind,
    And joy in everything.

A sudden flush upon the cheek,
    The teardrop quick to start;
A hope too delicate to speak,
    And heaven within the heart.

SUMMER

A riotous dawn and the sea's great wonder;
    The red, red heart of a rose uncurled;
And beauty tearing her veil asunder,
    In sight of a swooning world.

A call of the soul, and the senses blended;
    The Springtime lost in the glow of the sun,
And two lives rushing, as God intended,
    To meet and mingle as one.

AUTUMN

The world is out in gala dress;
    And yet it is not gay.
Its splendour hides a loneliness
    For someth...

Oh, once I walked in Heaven, all alone
Upon the sacred cliffs above the sky.
God and the angels, and the gleaming saints
Had journeyed out into the stars to die.

They had gone forth to win far citizens,
Bought at great price, bring happiness for all:
By such a harvest make a holier town
And put new life within old Zion's wall.

Each chose a far-off planet for his home,
Speaking of love and mercy, truth and right,
Envied and cursed, thorn-crowned and scourged in time,
Each tasted death on his appointed night.

Then resurrection day from sphere to sphere
Sped on, with all the POWERS arisen again,
While with them came in clouds recruited hosts
Of sun-born strangers and of earth-born men.

And on that day gray prophet saints went down
And...

    Imagining the smoke burnt
    imprint of a tatoo
    with tapers flickering,
    the bejewelled gaze a dragon's snout
    must bring
    or the serpent coil, crimson flame
    curl of dashing cobra,
    its very fangs drawing
    lifeblood from the fleshy
    perch in smooth, red scorching.

    On the pectorals of a sailor.
    Perhaps whiplash of the granite waves,
    grim trucker with a "Mother"
    grasping chains
    that see burly sandbags in place -
    hirsute biker, cords of
    hair lashing his tattooed lady
    the lavender caress of scar
    with implant that
    of the chopper itself,
    her fleshy buttocks
    careening off the road.

Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day were tampered with,
Every quality and pith
Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.

Songs that could span the earth,
When leaping thought had stirred them,
In many an hour since birth,
We heard or dreamed we heard them.

Sometimes to all their sway
We yield ourselves half fearing,
Sometimes with hearts grown grey
We curse ourselves for hearing.

We toil and but begin;
In vain our spirits fret them,
We strive, and cannot win,
Nor evermore forget them.

A light that will not stand,
That comes and goes in flashes,
Fair fruits that in the hand
Are turned to dust and ashes.

Yet still the deep thoughts ring
Around and through and through us,
Sweet mights that make us sing,
But bring no resting to us.