Identity

The sloe was lost in flower,
The April elm was dim;
That was the lover’s hour,
The hour for lies and him.

If thorns are all the bower,
If north winds freeze the fir,
Why, ‘tis another’s hour,
The hour for truth and her.

Though her eye seek other forms
And a glad delight below,
Yet the love the world that warms
Bids for me her bosom glow.

She must love me till she find
Another heart as large and true.
Her soul is frank as the ocean wind,
And the world has only two.

If Nature hold another heart
That knows a purer flame than me,
I too therein could challenge part
And learn of love a new degree.

All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,
Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder'd seas.
Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,
And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.
Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,
They wander in the dusk with chanting streams;
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,
To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.

Before me grew the human soul,
And after I am dead and gone,
Through grades of effort and control
The marvellous work shall still go on.

Each mortal in his little span
Hath only lived, if he have shown
What greatness there can be in man
Above the measured and the known;

How through the ancient layers of night,
In gradual victory secure,
Grows ever with increasing light
The Energy serene and pure:

The Soul, that from a monstrous past,
From age to age, from hour to hour,
Feels upward to some height at last
Of unimagined grace and power.

Though yet the sacred fire be dull,
In folds of thwarting matter furled,
Ere death be nigh, while life is full,
O Master Spirit of the world,

Grant me to know, to seek, to find,

    If I have given myself to you and you,
    And if these pale hands are not virginal,
    Nor these bright lips beneath your own lips true,
    What matters it?    I do not stand nor fall
    By your old foolish judgments of desire:
    If this were Helen's way it is not mine;
    I bring you beauty, but no Troys to fire:
    The cup I hold brims not with Borgia's wine.
    You, so soon snared of sudden brows and breasts,
    Lightly you think upon these lips, this hair.
    My thoughts are kinder: you are pity's guests:
    Compassion's bed you share.

    It was not lust delivered me to you;
    I gave my wondering mouth for pity's sake,
    For your strange, sighing lips I did but break
    Many times this bread, and poured this wine anew.
    My bo...

PART FIRST

ALL by the moonlight river side
Groaned the poor Beast alas! in vain;
The staff was raised to loftier height,
And the blows fell with heavier weight
As Peter struck and struck again.

"Hold!" cried the Squire, "against the rules
Of common sense you're surely sinning;
This leap is for us all too bold;
Who Peter was, let that be told,
And start from the beginning."

"A Potter, Sir, he was by trade,"
Said I, becoming quite collected;
"And wheresoever he appeared,
Full twenty times was Peter feared
For once that Peter was respected.

"He, two-and-thirty years or more,
Had been a wild and woodland rover;
Had heard the Atlantic surges roar
On farthest Cornwall's rocky shore,
And trod the cliffs of Dover.

I had not found the road too short,
As once I had in days of youth,
In that old forest of long ruth,
Where my young knighthood broke its heart,
Ere love and it had come to part,
And lies made mockery of truth.
I had not found the road too short.

A blind man, by the nightmare way,
Had set me right when I was wrong.
I had been blind my whole life long
What wonder then that on this day
The blind should show me how astray
My strength had gone, my heart once strong.

A blind man pointed me the way.
The road had been a heartbreak one,
Of roots and rocks and tortured trees,
And pools, above my horse's knees,
And wandering paths, where spiders spun
'Twixt boughs that never saw the sun,
And silence of lost centuries.

The road had be...

I stood on the top of Pitz Languard,
    And heard three voices whispering low,
Where the Alpine birds in their circling ward
    Made swift dark shadows upon the snow.

First Voice.

I loved a girl with truth and pain,
    She loved me not.    When she said good-bye
She gave me a kiss to sting and stain
    My broken life to a rosy dye.

Second Voice.

I loved a woman with love well tried, -
    And I swear I believe she loves me still.
But it was not I who stood by her side
    When she answered the priest and said "I will."

Third Voice.

I loved two girls, one fond, one shy,
    And I never divined which one loved me.
One married, and now, though I can't tell why,
    Of the four in the story I count but three.
...

Oh Life! I breathe thee in the breeze,
I feel thee bounding in my veins,
I see thee in these stretching trees,
These flowers, this still rock's mossy stains.

This stream of odours flowing by
From clover-field and clumps of pine,
This music, thrilling all the sky,
From all the morning birds, are thine.

Thou fill'st with joy this little one,
That leaps and shouts beside me here,
Where Isar's clay-white rivulets run
Through the dark woods like frighted deer.

Ah! must thy mighty breath, that wakes
Insect and bird, and flower and tree,
From the low trodden dust, and makes
Their daily gladness, pass from me,

Pass, pulse by pulse, till o'er the ground
These limbs, now strong, shall creep with pain,
And this fair world of sight and so...

(Expanded from an Epigram of Piron.)


Stella, 'tis not your dainty head,
Your artless look, I own;
'Tis not your dear coquettish tread,
Or this, or that, alone;

Nor is it all your gifts combined;
'Tis something in your face,--
The untranslated, undefined,
Uncertainty of grace,

That taught the Boy on Ida's hill
To whom the meed was due;
All three have equal charms--but still
This one I give it to!

Strophe I

My two-fold Book! single in show
    But double in Contents,
Neat, but not curiously adorn'd
    Which in his early youth,
A poet gave, no lofty one in truth
Although an earnest wooer of the Muse--
Say, while in cool Ausonian[2] shades
    Or British wilds he roam'd,
Striking by turns his native lyre,
    By turns the Daunian lute
    And stepp'd almost in air,--

Antistrophe

Say, little book, what furtive hand
Thee from thy fellow books convey'd,
What time, at the repeated suit
        Of my most learned Friend,
I sent thee forth an honour'd traveller
From our great city to the source of Thames,
                    Caerulean sire!
Where rise the fountains and the raptures ring,
        Of the Aoni...

Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn,
Blushing into life new-born!
Lend me violets for my hair,
And thy russet robe to wear,
And thy ring of rosiest hue
Set in drops of diamond dew!

Kiss my cheek, thou noontide ray,
From my Love so far away
Let thy splendor streaming down
Turn its pallid lilies brown,
Till its darkening shades reveal
Where his passion pressed its seal!

Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light,
Kiss my lips a soft good-night!
Westward sinks thy golden car;
Leave me but the evening star,
And my solace that shall be,
Borrowing all its light from thee!

Sophia tempts me to her social walls,
    That 'mid the vast Metropolis arise,
    Where Splendor dazzles, and each Pleasure vies
    In soft allurement; and each Science calls
To philosophic Domes, harmonious Halls,
    And [1]storied Galleries. With duteous sighs,
    Filial and kind, and with averted eyes,
    I meet the gay temptation, as it falls
From a seducing pen. - Here - here I stay,
    Fix'd by Affection's power; nor entertain
    One latent wish, that might persuade to stray
From my ag'd Nurseling, in his life's dim wane;
    But, like the needle, by the magnet's sway,
    My constant, trembling residence maintain.

1: "And storied windows richly dight." - IL PENSEROSO.

(For the Rev. John J. Burke, C. S. P.)



There was a murkier tinge in London's air
As if the honest fog blushed black for shame.
Fools sang of sin, for other fools' acclaim,
And Milton's wreath was tossed to Baudelaire.
The flowers of evil blossomed everywhere,
But in their midst a radiant lily came
Candescent, pure, a cup of living flame,
Bloomed for a day, and left the earth more fair.

And was it Charles, thy "fair and fatal King",
Who bade thee welcome to the lovely land?
Or did Lord David cease to harp and sing
To take in his thine emulative hand?
Or did Our Lady's smile shine forth, to bring
Her lyric Knight within her choir to stand?

Underneath the growing grass,
    Underneath the living flowers,
    Deeper than the sound of showers:
    There we shall not count the hours
By the shadows as they pass.

Youth and health will be but vain,
    Beauty reckoned of no worth:
    There a very little girth
    Can hold round what once the earth
Seemed too narrow to contain.

We know not what lies in us, till we seek;
    Men dive for pearls - they are not found on shore,
The hillsides most unpromising and bleak
    Do sometimes hide the ore.

Go, dive in the vast ocean of thy mind,
    O man! far down below the noisy waves,
Down in the depths and silence thou mayst find
    Rare pearls and coral caves.

Sink thou a shaft into the mine of thought;
    Be patient, like the seekers after gold;
Under the rocks and rubbish lieth what
    May bring thee wealth untold.

Reflected from the vasty Infinite,
    However dulled by earth, each human mind
Holds somewhere gems of beauty and of light
    Which, seeking, thou shalt find.

I said, "My youth is gone
Like a fire beaten out by the rain,
That will never sway and sing
Or play with the wind again."

I said, "It is no great sorrow
That quenched my youth in me,
But only little sorrows
Beating ceaselessly."

I thought my youth was gone,
But you returned,
Like a flame at the call of the wind
It leaped and burned;

Threw off its ashen cloak,
And gowned anew
Gave itself like a bride
Once more to you.

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.

The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken,
To the low last edge of the long lone land.
If a step should sound or a word be spoken,
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest's hand?
So long have the grey bare walks lain guestless,
Through branches and briars if a man make way,
He shall find no life but the sea-wind's, restless
Night and day.

The dense hard passage is blind and stifled
That crawls b...