Reconciled by death's mild hand, that giving
Peace gives wisdom, not more strong than mild,
Love beholds them, each without misgiving
Reconciled.

Each on earth alike of earth reviled,
Hated, feared, derided, and forgiving,
Each alike had heaven at heart, and smiled.

Both bright names, clothed round with man's thanksgiving,
Shine, twin stars above the storm-drifts piled,
Dead and deathless, whom we saw not living
Reconciled.

I' pur ascolto, e non odo novella.

HEARING NO TIDINGS OF HER, HE BEGINS TO DESPAIR.


    Still do I wait to hear, in vain still wait,
Of that sweet enemy I love so well:
What now to think or say I cannot tell,
'Twixt hope and fear my feelings fluctuate:
The beautiful are still the marks of fate;
And sure her worth and beauty most excel:
What if her God have call'd her hence, to dwell
Where virtue finds a more congenial state?
If so, she will illuminate that sphere
Even as a sun: but I--'tis done with me!
I then am nothing, have no business here!
O cruel absence! why not let me see
The worst? my little tale is told, I fear,
My scene is closed ere it accomplish'd be.

MOREHEAD.


    No tidings yet--I listen, but in va...

...    And all the streets lie smooth and shining there.
Only occasionally does a solid citizen hurry along them.
A swell girl argues violently with Papa.
A baker happens to be looking at the lovely sky.
The dead sun, wide and thick, hangs on the houses.
Four fat wives screech in front of a bar.
A carriage driver falls and breaks his neck.
And everything is boringly bright, healthy and clear.
A gentleman with wise eyes hovers, confused, in the dark,
A failing god... in this picture, that he forgot,
Perhaps did not notice - he mutters this and that.    Dies.    And laughs.
Dreams of a stroke, paralysis, osteoporosis.

    No martyr-blood hath ever flowed in vain! -
No patriot bled, that proved not freedom's gain!
Those tones, which despots heard with fear and dread
From living lips, ring sterner from the dead;
And he who dies, lives, oft, more truly so
Than had he never felt the untimely blow.

    And so with him thus, in an instant, hurled
From earthly hopes and converse with the world.
Each trickling blood-drop shall, with sudden power
Achieve the work of years in one short hour,
And his faint death-sigh more strong arms unite
In stern defence of Freedom and of Right,
Than all he could have said by word or pen,
In a whole life of threescore years and ten!

    Dead! fell assassin! did you think him dead,
When, with unmurmuring lips, he bowed his head,
Wh...

Seven long years has the desert rain
Dropped on the clods that hide thy face;
Seven long years of sorrow and pain
I have thought of thy burial-place.

Thought of thy fate in the distant west,
Dying with none that loved thee near;
They who flung the earth on thy breast
Turned from the spot williout a tear.

There, I think, on that lonely grave,
Violets spring in the soft May shower;
There, in the summer breezes, wave
Crimson phlox and moccasin flower.

There the turtles alight, and there
Feeds with her fawn the timid doe;
There, when the winter woods are bare,
Walks the wolf on the crackling snow.

Soon wilt thou wipe my tears away;
All my task upon earth is done;
My poor father, old and gray,
Slumbers beneath the churchyard s...

I'm dead.
Officially I'm dead. Their hope is past.
How long I stood as missing! Now, at last
        I'm dead.
Look in my face - no likeness can you see,
No tiny trace of him they knew as "me".
How terrible the change!
Even my eyes are strange.
So keyed are they to pain,
That if I chanced to meet
My mother in the street
She'd look at me in vain.

When she got home I think she'd say:
"I saw the saddest sight to-day -
A poilu with no face at all.
Far better in the fight to fall
Than go through life like that, I think.
Poor fellow! how he made me shrink.
No face. Just eyes that seemed to stare
At me with anguish and despair.
This ghastly war! I'm almost cheered
To think my son who disappeared,
My boy so handsome an...

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.

("Dors-tu? mère de notre mère.")

[III., 1823.]

"To die - to sleep." - SHAKESPEARE.


Still asleep! We have been since the noon thus alone.
Oh, the hours we have ceased to number!
Wake, grandmother! - speechless say why thou art grown.
Then, thy lips are so cold! - the Madonna of stone
Is like thee in thy holy slumber.
We have watched thee in sleep, we have watched thee at prayer,
But what can now betide thee?
Like thy hours of repose all thy orisons were,
And thy lips would still murmur a blessing whene'er
Thy children stood beside thee.

Now thine eye is unclosed, and thy forehead is bent
O'er the hearth, where ashes smoulder;
And behold, the watch-lamp will be speedily spent.
Art thou vexed? have we done aught amiss? Oh, rel...

They sunk a post into the ground
Where their leaders bade them stop;
It was a man’s height, and they spiked
A crosspiece to the top.
They bound it well with thongs of hide,
To make it firm and good;
Then roughly, with His back to this,
Their enemy they stood.
They held His hands upon the piece,
And they spiked them to the wood.

They mocked Him then, the while He rocked
In agony His head,
With things that He had never done,
And He had never said,
With that which He had never been,
And in His face they spat.
They placed a plank beside the post,
And they spiked His feet to that.

They pelted Him, but not with stones,
Lest He should die too soon;
They stayed to mock His agony
All through the blazing noon.
They did not pelt ...

    Say, sages, what's the charm on earth
        Can turn Death's dart aside?
    It is not purity and worth,
        Else Jessy had not died.

R. B.

Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,
Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing
And lay ghost hands on everything,
But leave the noonday's warm sunshine
To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,
Strangers assume your phantom faces,
You grin at me from daylight places,
Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet
Dead men down the morning street.

When Juan sought the subterranean flood,
And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore,
Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood
With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar.

With open robes and bodies agonised,
Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky;
There were sounds as of victims sacrificed:
Behind him all the dark was one long cry.

And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge;
Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air,
Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge
The evil son who scorned his hoary hair.

Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while,
Near him untrue to all but her till now,
Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile
Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow.

And clad in armour, a tall man of stone
H...

Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.
Shall that of me that now contains the stars
Be by the very contained stars survived?
Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars
An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?
Conjecture cannot fit to the seen world
A garment of its thought untorn or covering,
Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld
Without itself its dead deceit discovering;
    So, all being possible, an idle thought may
    Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.

I looked into the night and saw
GOD writing with tumultuous flame
Upon the thunder's front of awe, -
As on sonorous brass, - the Law,
Terrific, of HIS judgement name.

Weary of all life's best and worst,
With hands of hate, I - who had pled,
I, who had prayed for death at first
And had not died - now stood and cursed
GOD, yet he would not strike me dead.

From the cities where from caves,
Like the dead from putrid graves,
Troops of starvelings gliding come,
Living Tenants of a tomb.

I saw them sitting in the shade;
    The long green vines hung over,
But could not hide the gold-haired maid
    And Earl, my dark-eyed lover.
His arm was clasped so close, so close,
    Her eyes were softly lifted,
While his eyes drank the cheek of rose
    And breasts like snowflakes drifted.

A strange noise sounded in my brain;
    I was a guest unbidden.
I stole away, but came again
    With two knives snugly hidden.
I stood behind them.    Close they kissed,
    While eye to eye was speaking;
I aimed my steels, and neither missed
    The heart I sent it seeking.

There were two death-shrieks mingled so
    It seemed like one voice crying,
I laughed - it was such bliss, you know,
    To hear and see them dying.
I laughed and ...

If some day this body of mine were burned
(It found no favour alas! with you)
And the ashes scattered abroad, unurned,
Would Love die also, would Thought die too?
    But who can answer, or who can trust,
    No dreams would harry the windblown dust?

Were I laid away in the furrows deep
Secure from jackal and passing plough,
Would your eyes not follow me still through sleep
Torment me then as they torture now?
    Would you ever have loved me, Golden Eyes,
    Had I done aught better or otherwise?

Was I overspeechful, or did you yearn
When I sat silent, for songs or speech?
Ah, Beloved, I had been so apt to learn,
So apt, had you only cared to teach.
    But time for silence and song is done,
    You wanted nothing, my Golden Sun!

W...

[* Eleven of these Visions of Bellay (all except the 6th, 8th, 13th, and 14th) differ only by a few changes necessary for rhyme from blank-verse translations found in Van der Noodt's Theatre of Worldlings, printed in 1569; and the six first of the Visions of Petrarch (here said to have been "formerly translated") occur almost word for word in the same publication, where the authorship appears to be claimed by one Theodore Roest. The Complaints were collected, not by Spenser, but by Ponsonby, his bookseller, and he may have erred in ascribing these Visions to our poet. C.]


I.

It was the time when rest, soft sliding downe
From heavens hight into mens heavy eyes,
In the forgetfulnes of sleepe doth drowne
The carefull thoughts of mortall miseries.
Then did a ghost before mine eyes appeare...