Spirituality

The gallant Youth, who may have gained,
Or seeks, a “winsome Marrow,”
Was but an Infant in the lap
When first I looked on Yarrow;
Once more, by Newark’s Castle-gate
Long left without a warder,
I stood, looked, listened, and with Thee,
Great Minstrel of the Border!

Grave thoughts ruled wide on that sweet day,
Their dignity installing
In gentle bosoms, while sere leaves
Were on the bough, or falling;
But breezes played, and sunshine gleamed
The forest to embolden;
Reddened the fiery hues, and shot
Transparence through the golden.

For busy thoughts the Stream flowed on
In foamy agitation;
And slept in many a crystal pool
For quiet contemplation:
No public and no private care
The freeborn mind enthralling,
We made a day of...

    Art thou more fair
    For all the beauty gathered up in thee,
    As gold and gems within some lightless sea?
    For light of flowers, and bloom of tinted air,
    Art thou more fair?

    Art thou more strong
    For powers that turn to thee as unto sleep?
    For world and star that find thy ways more deep
    Than light may tread, too wearisome for song
    Art thou more strong?

    Nay! thou art bare
    For power and beauty on thine impotence
    Bestowed by fruitful Time's magnificence;
    For fruit of all things strong, and bloom of fair,
    Thou still art bare.

Methought last night I saw thee lowly laid,
    Thy pallid cheek yet paler, on the bier;
And scattered round thee many a lovely braid
    Of flowers, the brightest of the closing year;
Whilst on thy lips the placid smile that played,
    Proved thy soul's exit to a happier sphere,
In silent eloquence reproaching those
Who watched in agony thy last repose.

A pensive, wandering, melancholy light
    The moon's pale radiance on thy features cast,
Which, through the awful stillness of the night,
    Gleamed like some lovely vision of the past,
Recalling hopes once beautiful and bright,
    Now, like that struggling beam, receding fast,
Which o'er the scene a softening glory shed,
And kissed the brow of the unconscious dead.

Yes--it was thou!--and we we...

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

What thousands never knew the road!
What thousands hate it when ‘tis known!
None but the chosen tribes of God
Will seek or choose it for their own.


A thousand ways in ruin end,
One, only, leads to joys on high;
By that my willing steps ascend,
Pleased with a journey to the sky.


No more I ask, or hope to find,
Delight or happiness below;
Sorrow may well possess the mind
That feeds where thorns and thistles grow.


The joy that fades is not for me,
I seek immortal joys above;
There glory without end shall be
The bright reward of faith and love.


Cleave to the world, ye sordid worms,
Contented lick your native dust,
But God shall fight with all his storms
Against the idol of your trust.

It was a night of smell and dew
When very old things seemed how new;
When speech was softest in the still
Air that loitered down the hill;
When the lime's sweetness could but creep
Like music to slow ears of sleep;
When far below the lapping sea
Lisped but of tired tranquillity....
No, 'twas a night that seemed almost
Of real night the little ghost,
As though a painter painted it
Out of the shallows of his wit--
The easy air, the whispered trees,
Faint prattle of strait distant seas,
Pettiness all: but hark, hark!
Large and rich in the narrow dark
Music rose. Was music never
Braver in her pure endeavour
Against the meanness of the world.
Her purple banner she unfurled
Of stars and suns upon the night
Amazed with the strange living ligh...

Clouds of the autumn night,
Under the hunter's moon,--
Ghostly and windy white,--
Whither, like leaves wild strewn,
Take ye your stormy flight?

Out of the west, where dusk,
From her rich windowsill,
Leaned with a wand of tusk,
Witch-like, and wood and hill
Phantomed with mist and musk.

Into the east, where morn
Sleeps in a shadowy close,
Shut with a gate of horn,
'Round which the dreams she knows
Flutter with rose and thorn.

Blow from the west, oh, blow,
Clouds that the tempest steers!
And with your rain and snow
Bear of my heart the tears,
And of my soul the woe.

Into the east then pass,
Clouds that the night winds sweep!
And on her grave's sear grass,
There where she lies asleep.
There let them ...

I

My soul goes out to her who says,
"Come, follow me and cast off care!"
Then tosses back her sun-bright hair,
And like a flower before me sways
Between the green leaves and my gaze:
This creature like a girl, who smiles
Into my eyes and softly lays
Her hand in mine and leads me miles,
Long miles of haunted forest ways.

II

Sometimes she seems a faint perfume,
A fragrance that a flower exhaled
And God gave form to; now, unveiled,
A sunbeam making gold the gloom
Of vines that roof some woodland room
Of boughs; and now the silvery sound
Of streams her presence doth assume -
Music, from which, in dreaming drowned,
A crystal shape she seems to bloom.

III

Sometimes she seems the light that lies
On foam of w...

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.)
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.)
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on th...

I

Your love was like moonlight
turning harsh things to beauty,
so that little wry souls
reflecting each other obliquely
as in cracked mirrors...
beheld in your luminous spirit
their own reflection,
transfigured as in a shining stream,
and loved you for what they are not.

You are less an image in my mind
than a luster
I see you in gleams
pale as star-light on a gray wall...
evanescent as the reflection of a white swan
shimmering in broken water.

II

(To E. S.)

You inevitable,
Unwieldy with enormous births,
Lying on your back, eyes open, sucking down stars,
Or you kissing and picking over fresh deaths...
Filth... worms... flowers...
Green and succulent pods...
Tremulous gestation
Of dark w...

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!—
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.

Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

A lovely show for eyes to see
I looked upon this morning, -
A bright-hued, feathered company
Of nature's own adorning;
But ah! those minstrels would not sing
A listening ear while I lent, -
The lark sat still and preened his wing,
The nightingale was silent;
I longed for what they gave me not -
Their warblings sweet and fluty,
But grateful still for all I got
I thanked them for their beauty.

A fairer vision meets my view
Of Claras, Margarets, Marys,
In silken robes of varied hue,
Like bluebirds and canaries;
The roses blush, the jewels gleam,
The silks and satins glisten,
The black eyes flash, the blue eyes beam,
We look - and then we listen
Behold the flock we cage to-night -
Was ever such a capture?
To see them is a pure d...

"Up!" said the Spirit and ere I could pray
One hasty orison, whirled me away
To a Limbo, lying--I wist not where--
Above or below, in earth or air;
For it glimmered o'er with a doubtful light,
One couldn't say whether 'twas day or night;
And 'twas crost by many a mazy track,
One didn't know how to get on or back;
And I felt like a needle that's going astray
(With its one eye out) thro' a bundle of hay;
When the Spirit he grinned, and whispered me,
"Thou'rt now in the Court of Chancery!"

Around me flitted unnumbered swarms
Of shapeless, bodiless, tailless forms;
(Like bottled-up babes that grace the room
Of that worthy knight, Sir Everard Home)--
All of them, things half-killed in rearing;
Some were lame--some wanted hearing;

Sylvan, they say, and nymph are gone;
And yet I saw the two last night,
When overhead the moon sailed white,
And through the mists, her light made wan,
Each bush and tree doffed its disguise,
And stood revealed to mortal eyes.

The hollow, rimmed with rocks and trees,
And massed with ferns and matted vines,
Seemed an arena mid the pines,
A theatre of mysteries,
Where oread and satyr met,
And all the myths that men forget.

The rain and frost had carved the rocks
With faces that were wild and strange,
Which Protean fancy seemed to change
Each moment in the granite blocks,
That seemed slow dreaming into form
The gods grotesque of wind and storm.

Then suddenly Diana stood,
Slim as a shaft of moonlight, there,
Immortalizing eart...

A Lyrical Idyl

THALASSIUS
Pan!

PAN
O sea-stray, seed of Apollo,
What word wouldst thou have with me?
My ways thou wast fain to follow
Or ever the years hailed thee
Man.
Now
If August brood on the valleys,
If satyrs laugh on the lawns,
What part in the wildwood alleys
Hast thou with the fleet-foot fauns
Thou?
See!
Thy feet are a man's not cloven
Like these, not light as a boy's:
The tresses and tendrils inwoven
That lure us, the lure of them cloys
Thee.
Us
The joy of the wild woods never
Leaves free of the thirst it slakes:
The wild love throbs in us ever
That burns in the dense hot brakes
Thus.
Life,
Eternal, passionate, awless,
Insatiable, mutable, dear,
Makes all men's l...

I arise in the silence of the dawn hour.
And softly steal out to the garden
Under the Favrile goblet of the dawning.
And a wind moves out of the south-land,
Like a film of silver,
And thrills with a far borne message
The flowers of the garden.
Poppies untie their scarlet hoods and wave them
To the south wind as he passes.
But the zinnias and calendulas,
In a mood of calm reserve, nod faintly
As the south wind whispers the secret
Of the dawn hour!

I stand in the silence of the dawn hour
In the garden,
As the star of morning fades.
Flying from scythes of air
The hare-bells, purples and golden glow
On the sand-hill back of the orchard
Race before the feet of the wind.
But clusters of oak-leaves over the yellow sand rim
Begin to flut...

God hath laid his hand on me:
He hath taken all my glee,
And my spirit's emptied cup
Soon must give its life-blood up.

If the sun doth wake and rise,
If it sink in gilded skies,
All alike my heart doth ache,
Comfort it can never take.

From my eyelids there do flow
Tears, and I must weep e'en so
Ever, ever. Lord of Light,
Who can hide him from thy sight!

Though we shun the stormy sea,
Though from war's affray we flee,
Yet misfortune shows her face
Howsoe'er concealed our place.

Mine a life so far from fame
Few there were could know my name;
Evil hap and jealousy
Had no way of harming me.

But the Lord, who doth disdain
Flimsy safeguards raised by man,
Struck a blow more swift and sure
In that I was...