Muriel Stuart

    There shall be a song for both of us that day
    Though fools say you have long outlived your songs,
    And when, perhaps, because your hair is grey,
    You go unsung, to whom all praise belongs,
    And no men kiss your hands - your fragile hands
    Folded like empty shells on sea-spurned sands.
    And you that were dawn whereat men shouted once
    Are sunset now, with but one worshipper,
    Then to your twilight heart this song shall be
    Sweeter than those that did your youth announce
    For your brave beautiful spirit is lovelier
    Than once your lovely body was to me.
    Your folded hands and your shut eyelids stir
    A passion that Time has crowned with sanctity.
    Young fools shall wonder why, your youth being over,
    You are so sung st...

"The Lord appeared in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush and behold, the bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed." - EXODUS III. 2.


    When to your virgin heart, unstirred, ungiven,
    Upon the quiet mountain side untrod,
    The sudden naked fire came down from heaven,
    Burning you with the very breath of God,

    Was the sun lost?    Were all the sweet stars dim
    While God raised round your head those walls of light?
    Were you locked dumbly, terribly with Him,
    Within that burning temple day and night?

    What was it to have God there like a bird -
    God like a great, gold flower upon your breast -
    While He spake things that only one man heard,
    Face down before that glory manifest?

    When that str...

    Round them a fierce, wide, crazy noon
    Heaves with crushed lips and glowing sides
    Against the huge and drowsy sun.
    Beneath them turn the glittering tides
    Where dizzy waters reel with gold,
    And strange, rich trophies sink and rise
    From decks of sunken argosies.
    With shining arms they cleave the cold
    Far reaches of the sea, and beat
    The hissing foam with flash of feet
    Into bright fangs, while breathlessly
    Curls over them the amorous sea.

    Naked they laugh and revel there.
    One shakes the sea-drops from his hair,
    Then, singing, takes the bubbles: one
    Lies couched among the shells, the sands
    Telling gold hours between his hands:
    One floats like sea-wrack in the sun.
    The gods o...

    Did he forget? ... I do not remember,
    All I had of him once I still have to-day;
    He was lovely to me as the word "amber,"
    As the taste of honey and as the smell of hay.

    What if he forget if I remember?
    What more of love have you than I to say?
    I have and hold him still in the word "amber,"
    Taste of honey brings him, he comes back with the hay.

    Are you my songs, importunate of praise?
    Be still, remember for your comforting
    That sweeter birds have had less leave to sing
    Before men piped them from their lonely ways.

    Greener leaves than yours are lost in every spring
    Rubies far redder thrust their eager rays
    Into the blindfold dark for many days
    Before men chose them for a finger-ring.

    Sing as you dare, not as men choose, receive not
    The passing fashion's prize, for dole or due -
    Men's summer-sweet unrecognition - grieve not:
    Oh, stoop not to them!    Better far that you
    Should go unsung than sing as you believe not,
    Should go uncrowned than to yourselves untrue.

    Dawn has flashed up the startled skies,
    Night has gone out beneath the hill
    Many sweet times; before our eyes
    Dawn makes and unmakes about us still
    The magic that we call the rose.
    The gentle history of the rain
    Has been unfolded, traced and lost
    By the sharp finger-tips of frost;
    Birds in the hawthorn build again;
    The hare makes soft her secret house;
    The wind at tourney comes and goes,
    Spurring the green, unharnessed boughs;
    The moon has waxed fierce and waned dim:
    He knew the beauty of all those
    Last year, and who remembers him?

    Love sometimes walks the waters still,
    Laughter throws back her radiant head;
    Utterly beauty is not gone,
    And wonder is not wholly dead.

    This Poem, Dedicated to His Mother.


    To twilight heads comes Death as comes a friend,
    As with the gentle fading of the year
    Fades rose, folds leaf, falls fruit, and to their end
    Unquestioning draw near,
    Their flowering over, and their fruiting done,
    Fulfilled and finished and going down with the sun.

    But for June's heart there is no comforting
    When her full-throated rose
    Still quick with buds, still thrilling to the air,
    By some stray wind is tossed,
    Her swelling grain that goes
    Heavy to harvesting
    In a black gale is lost,
    And her round grape that purpled to the wine
    Is pinched by some chance frost.
    Ah, then cry out for that lost, lovely rose,
    For the stricken wheat, ...

    "I thought you loved me."    "No, it was only fun."
    "When we stood there, closer than all?"    "Well, the harvest moon
    "Was shining and queer in your hair, and it turned my head."
    "That made you?"    "Yes."    "Just the moon and the light it made
    "Under the tree?"    "Well, your mouth, too."    "Yes, my mouth?"
    "And the quiet there that sang like the drum in the booth.
    "You shouldn't have danced like that."    "Like what?"    "So close,
    "With your head turned up, and the flower in your hair, a rose
    "That smelt all warm."    "I loved you.    I thought you knew
    "I wouldn't have danced like that with any but you."
    "I didn't know.    I thought you knew it was fun."
    "I thought it was love you meant."    "Well, it's done."    "Yes, it's done.<...

    Men wondered why I loved you, and none guessed
    How sweet your slow, divine stupidity,
    Your look of earth, your sense of drowsy rest,
    So rich, so strange, so all unlike my sea.
    After the temper of my sails, my lean
    Tall masts, you were the lure of harbour hours, -
    A sleepy landscape warm and very green,
    Where browsing creatures stare above still flowers.
    These salt hands holding sweetness, the leader led,
    A slave, too happy and too crazed to rule,
    Sea land-locked, brine and honey in one bed,
    And England's man your servant and your fool!
    My banqueting eyes foreswore my waiting ships;
    I was a silly landsman at your lips.

    Do you remember, Leda?


    There are those who love, to whom Love brings
    Great gladness: such thing have not I.
    Love looks and has no mercy, brings
    Long doom to others.    Such was I.
    Heart breaking hand upon the lute,
    Touching one note only ... such were you.
    Who shall play now upon that lute
    Long last made musical by you?
    Sharp bird-beak in the swelling fruit,
    Blind frost upon the eyes of flowers.
    Who shall now praise the shrivelled fruit,
    Or raise the eyelids of those flowers?

    I dare not watch that hidden pool,
    Nor see the wild bird's sudden wing
    Lifting the wide, brown, shaken pool,
    But round me falls that secret wing,
    And in that sharp, perverse, sweet pain

    Unaware of its terror,
    And but half aware
    Of the world's beauty near her -
    Of sunlight on the stones,
    And trembling birds in the square,
    Lightly went Madala -
    A rose blown suddenly
    From Spring's gay mouth; part of the Spring was she.
    Warmed to her delicate bones,
    Cool in its linen her skin,
    Her hair up-combed and curled,
    Lightly she flowered on the sin
    And pain of the Spring-struck world.
    Down the street went crazy men,
    The winter misery of their blood
    Budding in new pain
    While beggars whined beside her,
    While the streets' daughters eyed her, -
    Poor flowers that kept midsummer
    With desperate bloom, and thrust
    Stale rose at each newcomer,
    And crime a...

    1.

    I am one of the wind's stories,
    I am a fancy of the rain, -
    A memory of the high noon's glories,
    The hint the sunset had of pain.

    2.

    They dreamed me as they dreamed all other;
    Hawthorn and I, I and the grass,
    With sister shade and phantom brother
    Across their slumber glide and pass.

    3.

    Twilight is in my blood, my being
    Mingles with trees and ferns and stones;
    Thunder and stars my lips are freeing,
    And there is sea-rack in my bones.

    4.

    Those that have dreamed me shall out-wake me,
    But I go hence with flowers and weeds;
    I am no more to those who make me
    Than other drifting fruit and seeds.

    5.

    An...

    I am growing old: I have kept youth too long,
    But I dare not let them know it now.
    I have done the heart of youth a grievous wrong,
    Danced it to dust and drugged it with the rose,
    Forced its reluctant lips to one more vow.
    I have denied the lawful grey,
    So kind, so wise, to settle in my hair;
    I belong no more to April, but September has not taught me her repose.
    I wish I had let myself grow old in the quiet way
    That is so gracious....    I wish I did not care.
    My faded mouth will never flower again,
    Under the paint the wrinkles fret my eyes,
    My hair is dull beneath its henna stain,
    I have come to the last ramparts of disguise.
    And now the day draws on of my defeat.
    I shall not meet
    The swift, ...

    I will not have roses in my room again,
    Nor listen to sonnets of Michael Angelo
    To-night nor any night, nor fret my brain
    With all the trouble of things that I should know.
    I will be as other women - come and go
    Careless and free, my own self sure and sane,
    As I was once ... then suddenly you were there
    With your old power ... roses were everywhere
    And I was listening to Michael Angelo.

    I am not true, but you would pardon this
    If you could see the tortured spirit take
    Its place beside you in the dark, and break
    Your daily food of love and kindliness.
    You'd guess the bitter thing that treachery is,
    Furtive and on its guard, asleep, awake,
    Fearing to sin, yet fearing to forsake,
    And daily giving Christ the Judas kiss.

    But piteous amends I make each day
    To recompense the evil with the good;
    With double pang I play the double part
    Of all you trust and all that I betray.
    What long atonement makes my penitent blood,
    To what sad tryst goes my unfaithful heart!

            "What did she leave?" ...
    Only these hungry miser-words, poor heart!
    Not "Did she love?"    "Did she suffer?"    "Was she sad
    From this green, bright and tossing world to part?"
    No word of "Do they miss her? do they grieve?"
    Only this wolf-thought for the gold she had...
            "What did she leave?"

    Give me no coil of dæmon flowers -
    Pale Messalines that faint and brood
    Through the spent secret twilight hours
    On their strange feasts of blood.

    Give me wild things of moss and peat -
    The gipsy flower that bravely goes,
    The heather's little hard, brown feet,
    And the black eyes of sloes.

    But most of all the cloudberry
    That offers in her clean, white cup
    The melting snows - the cloudberry!
    Where the great winds go up

    To the hushed peak whose shadow fills
    The air with silence calm and wide -
    She lives, the Dian of the hills,
    And the streams course beside.

    The evening found us whom the day had fled,
    Once more in bitter anger, you and I,
    Over some small, some foolish, trivial thing
    Our anger would not decently let die.
    But dragged between us, shamed and shivering,
    Until each other's taunts we scarcely heard,
    Until we lost the sense of all we said,
    And knew not who first spoke the fatal word.
    It seemed that even every kiss we wrung
    We killed at birth with shuddering and hate,
    As if we feared a thing too passionate.
    However close we clung
    One hour, the next hour found us separate,
    Estranged, and Love most bitter on our tongue.
    To-night we quarrelled over one small head,
    Our fruit of last year's maying, the white bud
    Blown from our stormy kisses and...