SATIRES

OF CIRCUMSTANCE

LYRICS AND REVERIES

WITH MISCELLANEOUS PIECES

BY

THOMAS HARDY

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1919

COPYRIGHT

First Edition 1914

Reprinted 1915, 1919

Pocket Edition 1919

p. vCONTENTS

LYRICS AND REVERIES--

PAGE

In Front of the Landscape

3

Channel Firing

7

The Convergence of the Twain

9

The Ghost of the Past

12

After the Visit

14

To Meet, or Otherwise

16

The Difference

18

The Sun on the Bookcase

19

"When I set out for Lyonnesse"

20

A Thunderstorm in Town

21

The Torn Letter

22

Beyond the Last Lamp

25

The Face at the Casement

27

Lost Love

30

"My spirit will not haunt the mound"

31

Wessex Heights

32

In Death divided

35

p. viThe Place on the Map

37

Where the Picnic was

39

The Schreckhorn

41

A Singer asleep

42

A Plaint to Man

45

God's Funeral

47

Spectres that grieve

52

"Ah, are you digging on my grave?"

54

SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE--

I.

At Tea

59

II.

In Church

60

III.

By her Aunt's Grave

61

IV.

In the Room of the Bride-elect

62

V.

At the Watering-place

63

VI.

In the Cemetery

64

VII.

Outside the Window

65

VIII.

In the Study

66

IX.

At the Altar-rail

67

X.

In the Nuptial Chamber

68

XI.

In the Restaurant

69

XII.

At the Draper's

70

XIII.

On the Death-bed

71

XIV.

Over the Coffin

72

XV.

In the Moonlight

73

p. viiLYRICS AND REVERIES (continued)--

Self-unconscious

77

The Discovery

80

Tolerance

81

Before and after Summer

82

At Day-close in November

83

The Year's Awakening

84

Under the Waterfall

85

The Spell of the Rose

88

St. Launce's revisited

90

POEMS OF 1912-13-

The Going

95

Your Last Drive

97

The Walk

99

Rain on a Grace

100

"I found her out there"

102

Without Ceremony

104

Lament

105

The Haunter

107

The Voice

109

His Visitor

110

A Circular

112

A Dream or No

113

After a Journey

115

A Death-ray recalled

117

p. viiiBeeny Cliff

119

At Castle Boterel

121

Places

123

The Phantom Horsewoman

125

MISCELLANEOUS PIECES--

The Wistful Lady

129

The Woman in the Rye

131

The Cheval-Glass

132

The Re-enactment

134

Her Secret

140

"She charged me"

141

The Newcomer's Wife

142

A Conversation at Dawn

143

A King's Soliloquy

152

The Coronation

154

Aquae Sulis

157

Seventy-four and Twenty

160

The Elopement

161

"I rose up as my custom is"

163

A Week

165

Had you wept

167

Bereft, she thinks she dreams

169

In the British Museum

170

In the Servants' Quarters

172

The Obliterate Tomb

175

p. ix"Regret not me"

183

The Recalcitrants

185

Starlings on the Roof

186

The Moon looks in

187

The Sweet Hussy

188

The Telegram

189

The Moth-signal

191

Seen by the Waits

193

The Two Soldiers

194

The Death of Regret

195

In the Days of Crinoline

197

The Roman Gravemounds

199

The Workbox

201

The Sacrilege

203

The Abbey Mason

210

The Jubilee of a Magazine

222

The Satin Shoes

224

Exeunt Omnes

227

A Poet

228

POSTSCRIPT--

"Men who march away"

229

p. 1LYRICS AND REVERIES

p. 3IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE

PLUNGING and labouring on in a tide of visions,

Dolorous and dear,

Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters

Stretching around,

Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape

Yonder and near,

Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland

Foliage-crowned,

Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat

Stroked by the light,

Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial

Meadow or mound.

What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost

Under my sight,

p. 4Hindering me to discern my paced advancement

Lengthening to miles;

What were the re-creations killing the daytime

As by the night?

O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,

Some as with smiles,

Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled

Over the wrecked

Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,

Harrowed by wiles.

Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them--

Halo-bedecked--

And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,

Rigid in hate,

Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,

Dreaded, suspect.

Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons

Further in date;

Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion

Vibrant, beside

p. 5Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth's crust

Now corporate.

Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect

Gnawed by the tide,

Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there

Guilelessly glad--

Wherefore they knew not--touched by the fringe of an ecstasy

Scantly descried.

Later images too did the day unfurl me,

Shadowed and sad,

Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,

Laid now at ease,

Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow

Sepulture-clad.

So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,

Over the leaze,

Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;

--Yea, as the rhyme

Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness

Captured me these.

p. 6For, their lost revisiting manifestations

In their own time

Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,

Seeing behind

Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling

Sweet, sad, sublime.

Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser

Stare of the mind

As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast

Body-borne eyes,

Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them

As living kind.

Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying

In their surmise,

"Ah--whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought

Round him that looms

Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,

Save a few tombs?"

p. 7CHANNEL FIRING

THAT night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome

Arose the howl of wakened hounds:

The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,

The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;

It's gunnery practice out at sea

Just as before you went below;

The world is as it used to be:

"All nations striving strong to make

Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters

They do no more for Christes sake

Than you who are helpless in such matters.

p. 8"That this is not the judgment-hour

For some of them's a blessed thing,

For if it were they'd have to scour

Hell's floor for so much threatening . . .

"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when

I blow the trumpet (if indeed

I ever do; for you are men,

And rest eternal sorely need)."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,

Will the world ever saner be,"

Said one, "than when He sent us under

In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.

"Instead of preaching forty year,"

My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,

"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

April 1914.

p. 9THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I

IN a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

p. 10IV

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" . . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her--so gaily great--

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

p. 11IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said "Now!" And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

p. 12THE GHOST OF THE PAST

WE two kept house, the Past and I,

The Past and I;

I tended while it hovered nigh,

Leaving me never alone.

It was a spectral housekeeping

Where fell no jarring tone,

As strange, as still a housekeeping

As ever has been known.

As daily I went up the stair

And down the stair,

I did not mind the Bygone there--

The Present once to me;

Its moving meek companionship

I wished might ever be,

There was in that companionship

Something of ecstasy.

It dwelt with me just as it was,

Just as it was

When first its prospects gave me pause

In wayward wanderings,

p. 13Before the years had torn old troths

As they tear all sweet things,

Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths

And dulled old rapturings.

And then its form began to fade,

Began to fade,

Its gentle echoes faintlier played

At eves upon my ear

Than when the autumn's look embrowned

The lonely chambers here,

The autumn's settling shades embrowned

Nooks that it haunted near.

And so with time my vision less,

Yea, less and less

Makes of that Past my housemistress,

It dwindles in my eye;

It looms a far-off skeleton

And not a comrade nigh,

A fitful far-off skeleton

Dimming as days draw by.

p. 14AFTER THE VISIT

(To F. E. D.)

COME again to the place

Where your presence was as a leaf that skims

Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims

The bloom on the farer's face.

Come again, with the feet

That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,

And those mute ministrations to one and to all

Beyond a man's saying sweet.

Until then the faint scent

Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,

And I marked not the charm in the changes of day

As the cloud-colours came and went.

Through the dark corridors

Your walk was so soundless I did not know

Your form from a phantom's of long ago

Said to pass on the ancient floors,

p. 15Till you drew from the shade,

And I saw the large luminous living eyes

Regard me in fixed inquiring-wise

As those of a soul that weighed,

Scarce consciously,

The eternal question of what Life was,

And why we were there, and by whose strange laws

That which mattered most could not be.

p. 16TO MEET, OR OTHERWISE

WHETHER to sally and see thee, girl of my dreams,

Or whether to stay

And see thee not! How vast the difference seems

Of Yea from Nay

Just now. Yet this same sun will slant its beams

At no far day

On our two mounds, and then what will the difference weigh!

Yet I will see thee, maiden dear, and make

The most I can

Of what remains to us amid this brake Cimmerian

Through which we grope, and from whose thorns we ache,

While still we scan

Round our frail faltering progress for some path or plan.

p. 17By briefest meeting something sure is won;

It will have been:

Nor God nor Daemon can undo the done,

Unsight the seen,

Make muted music be as unbegun,

Though things terrene

Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.

So, to the one long-sweeping symphony

From times remote

Till now, of human tenderness, shall we

Supply one note,

Small and untraced, yet that will ever be

Somewhere afloat

Amid the spheres, as part of sick Life's antidote.

p. 18THE DIFFERENCE

I

SINKING down by the gate I discern the thin moon,

And a blackbird tries over old airs in the pine,

But the moon is a sorry one, sad the bird's tune,

For this spot is unknown to that Heartmate of mine.

II

Did my Heartmate but haunt here at times such as now,

The song would be joyous and cheerful the moon;

But she will see never this gate, path, or bough,

Nor I find a joy in the scene or the tune.

p. 19THE SUN ON THE BOOKCASE

(Student's Love-song)

ONCE more the cauldron of the sun

Smears the bookcase with winy red,

And here my page is, and there my bed,

And the apple-tree shadows travel along.

Soon their intangible track will be run,

And dusk grow strong

And they be fled.

Yes: now the boiling ball is gone,

And I have wasted another day . . .

But wasted--wasted, do I say?

Is it a waste to have imaged one

Beyond the hills there, who, anon,

My great deeds done

Will be mine alway?

p. 20"WHEN I SET OUT FOR LYONNESSE"

WHEN I set out for Lyonnesse,

A hundred miles away,

The rime was on the spray,

And starlight lit my lonesomeness

When I set out for Lyonnesse

A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

While I should sojourn there

No prophet durst declare,

Nor did the wisest wizard guess

What would bechance at Lyonnesse

While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse

With magic in my eyes,

None managed to surmise

What meant my godlike gloriousness,

When I came back from Lyonnesse

With magic in my eyes.

p. 21A THUNDERSTORM IN TOWN

(A Reminiscence)

SHE wore a new "terra-cotta" dress,

And we stayed, because of the pelting storm,

Within the hansom's dry recess,

Though the horse had stopped; yea, motionless

We sat on, snug and warm.

Then the downpour ceased, to my sharp sad pain,

And the glass that had screened our forms before

Flew up, and out she sprang to her door:

I should have kissed her if the rain

Had lasted a minute more.

p. 22THE TORN LETTER

I

I tore your letter into strips

No bigger than the airy feathers

That ducks preen out in changing weathers

Upon the shifting ripple-tips.

II

In darkness on my bed alone

I seemed to see you in a vision,

And hear you say: "Why this derision

Of one drawn to you, though unknown?"

III

Yes, eve's quick mood had run its course,

The night had cooled my hasty madness;

I suffered a regretful sadness

Which deepened into real remorse.

p. 23IV

I thought what pensive patient days

A soul must know of grain so tender,

How much of good must grace the sender

Of such sweet words in such bright phrase.

V

Uprising then, as things unpriced

I sought each fragment, patched and mended;

The midnight whitened ere I had ended

And gathered words I had sacrificed.

VI

But some, alas, of those I threw

Were past my search, destroyed for ever:

They were your name and place; and never

Did I regain those clues to you.

VII

I learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,

My track; that, so the Will decided,

In life, death, we should be divided,

And at the sense I ached indeed.

p. 24VIII

That ache for you, born long ago,

Throbs on; I never could outgrow it.

What a revenge, did you but know it!

But that, thank God, you do not know.

p. 25BEYOND THE LAST LAMP

(Near Tooting Common)

I

WHILE rain, with eve in partnership,

Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip,

Beyond the last lone lamp I passed

Walking slowly, whispering sadly,

Two linked loiterers, wan, downcast:

Some heavy thought constrained each face,

And blinded them to time and place.

II

The pair seemed lovers, yet absorbed

In mental scenes no longer orbed

By love's young rays. Each countenance

As it slowly, as it sadly

Caught the lamplight's yellow glance

Held in suspense a misery

At things which had been or might be.

p. 26III

When I retrod that watery way

Some hours beyond the droop of day,

Still I found pacing there the twain

Just as slowly, just as sadly,

Heedless of the night and rain.

One could but wonder who they were

And what wild woe detained them there.

IV

Though thirty years of blur and blot

Have slid since I beheld that spot,

And saw in curious converse there

Moving slowly, moving sadly

That mysterious tragic pair,

Its olden look may linger on--

All but the couple; they have gone.

V

Whither? Who knows, indeed . . . And yet

To me, when nights are weird and wet,

Without those comrades there at tryst

Creeping slowly, creeping sadly,

That lone lane does not exist.

There they seem brooding on their pain,

And will, while such a lane remain.

p. 27THE FACE AT THE CASEMENT

IF ever joy leave

An abiding sting of sorrow,

So befell it on the morrow

Of that May eve . . .

The travelled sun dropped

To the north-west, low and lower,

The pony's trot grew slower,

And then we stopped.

"This cosy house just by

I must call at for a minute,

A sick man lies within it

Who soon will die.

"He wished to marry me,

So I am bound, when I drive near him,

To inquire, if but to cheer him,

How he may be."

p. 28A message was sent in,

And wordlessly we waited,

Till some one came and stated

The bulletin.

And that the sufferer said,

For her call no words could thank her;

As his angel he must rank her

Till life's spark fled.

Slowly we drove away,

When I turned my head, although not

Called; why so I turned I know not

Even to this day.

And lo, there in my view

Pressed against an upper lattice

Was a white face, gazing at us

As we withdrew.

And well did I divine

It to be the man's there dying,

Who but lately had been sighing

For her pledged mine.

Then I deigned a deed of hell;

It was done before I knew it;

What devil made me do it

I cannot tell!

p. 29Yes, while he gazed above,

I put my arm about her

That he might see, nor doubt her

My plighted Love.

The pale face vanished quick,

As if blasted, from the casement,

And my shame and self-abasement

Began their prick.

And they prick on, ceaselessly,

For that stab in Love's fierce fashion

Which, unfired by lover's passion,

Was foreign to me.

She smiled at my caress,

But why came the soft embowment

Of her shoulder at that moment

She did not guess.

Long long years has he lain

In thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather:

What tears there, bared to weather,

Will cleanse that stain!

Love is long-suffering, brave,

Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel;

But O, too, Love is cruel,

Cruel as the grave.

p. 30LOST LOVE

I PLAY my sweet old airs--

The airs he knew

When our love was true--

But he does not balk

His determined walk,

And passes up the stairs.

I sing my songs once more,

And presently hear

His footstep near

As if it would stay;

But he goes his way,

And shuts a distant door.

So I wait for another morn

And another night

In this soul-sick blight;

And I wonder much

As I sit, why such

A woman as I was born!

p. 31"MY SPIRIT WILL NOT HAUNT THE MOUND"

MY spirit will not haunt the mound

Above my breast,

But travel, memory-possessed,

To where my tremulous being found

Life largest, best.

My phantom-footed shape will go

When nightfall grays

Hither and thither along the ways

I and another used to know

In backward days.

And there you'll find me, if a jot

You still should care

For me, and for my curious air;

If otherwise, then I shall not,

For you, be there.

p. 32WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

THERE are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand

For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,

Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,

I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend--

Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:

Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,

But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways--

Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:

p. 33They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things--

Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,

And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause

Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,

Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,

Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;

I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed

For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,

There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,

There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near,

I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

p. 34As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,

I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;

Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;

Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,

Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,

Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,

And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

p. 35IN DEATH DIVIDED

I

I SHALL rot here, with those whom in their day

You never knew,

And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,

Met not my view,

Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

II

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,

While earth endures,

Will fall on my mound and within the hour

Steal on to yours;

One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

III

Some organ may resound on Sunday noons

By where you lie,

Some other thrill the panes with other tunes

Where moulder I;

No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

p. 36IV

The simply-cut memorial at my head

Perhaps may take

A Gothic form, and that above your bed

Be Greek in make;

No linking symbol show thereon for our tale's sake.

V

And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run

Humanity,

The eternal tie which binds us twain in one

No eye will see

Stretching across the miles that sever you from me.

p. 37THE PLACE ON THE MAP

I

I LOOK upon the map that hangs by me--

Its shires and towns and rivers lined in varnished artistry--

And I mark a jutting height

Coloured purple, with a margin of blue sea.

II

--'Twas a day of latter summer, hot and dry;

Ay, even the waves seemed drying as we walked on, she and I,

By this spot where, calmly quite,

She informed me what would happen by and by.

III

This hanging map depicts the coast and place,

And resuscitates therewith our unexpected troublous case

All distinctly to my sight,

And her tension, and the aspect of her face.

p. 38IV

Weeks and weeks we had loved beneath that blazing blue,

Which had lost the art of raining, as her eyes to-day had too,

While she told what, as by sleight,

Shot our firmament with rays of ruddy hue.

V

For the wonder and the wormwood of the whole

Was that what in realms of reason would have joyed our double soul

Wore a torrid tragic light

Under order-keeping's rigorous control.

VI

So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time,

And the thing we found we had to face before the next year's prime;

The charted coast stares bright,

And its episode comes back in pantomime.

p. 39WHERE THE PICNIC WAS

WHERE we made the fire,

In the summer time,

Of branch and briar

On the hill to the sea

I slowly climb

Through winter mire,

And scan and trace

The forsaken place

Quite readily.

Now a cold wind blows,

And the grass is gray,

But the spot still shows

As a burnt circle--aye,

And stick-ends, charred,

Still strew the sward

Whereon I stand,

Last relic of the band

Who came that day!

p. 40Yes, I am here

Just as last year,

And the sea breathes brine

From its strange straight line

Up hither, the same

As when we four came.

--But two have wandered far

From this grassy rise

Into urban roar

Where no picnics are,

And one--has shut her eyes

For evermore.

p. 41THE SCHRECKHORN

(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)

(June 1897)

ALOOF, as if a thing of mood and whim;

Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams

Upon my nearing vision, less it seems

A looming Alp-height than a guise of him

Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,

Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,

Of semblance to his personality

In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,

Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,

And the eternal essence of his mind

Enter this silent adamantine shape,

And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows

When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

p. 42A SINGER ASLEEP

(Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909)

I

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,

That sentrys up and down all night, all day,

From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,

The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.

II

--It was as though a garland of red roses

Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun

When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun,

In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes,

Upon Victoria's formal middle time

His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

III

O that far morning of a summer day

When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay

p. 43Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,

I walked and read with a quick glad surprise

New words, in classic guise,--

IV

The passionate pages of his earlier years,

Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears;

Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who

Blew them not naively, but as one who knew

Full well why thus he blew.

V

I still can hear the brabble and the roar

At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through

That fitful fire of tongues then entered new!

Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;

Thine swells yet more and more.

VI

--His singing-mistress verily was no other

Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother

Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;

Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep

Into the rambling world-encircling deep

Which hides her where none sees.

p. 44VII

And one can hold in thought that nightly here

His phantom may draw down to the water's brim,

And hers come up to meet it, as a dim

Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,

And mariners wonder as they traverse near,

Unknowing of her and him.

VIII

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:

"O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;

Where are those songs, O poetess divine

Whose very arts are love incarnadine?"

And her smile back: "Disciple true and warm,

Sufficient now are thine." . . .

IX

So here, beneath the waking constellations,

Where the waves peal their everlasting strains,

And their dull subterrene reverberations

Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains--

Him once their peer in sad improvisations,

And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes--

I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines

Upon the capes and chines.

BONCHURCH, 1910.

p. 45A PLAINT TO MAN

WHEN you slowly emerged from the den of Time,

And gained percipience as you grew,

And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,

Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you

The unhappy need of creating me--

A form like your own--for praying to?

My virtue, power, utility,

Within my maker must all abide,

Since none in myself can ever be,

One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide

Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,

And by none but its showman vivified.

"Such a forced device," you may say, "is meet

For easing a loaded heart at whiles:

Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

p. 46Somewhere above the gloomy aisles

Of this wailful world, or he could not bear

The irk no local hope beguiles."

--But since I was framed in your first despair

The doing without me has had no play

In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day

Beneath the deicide eyes of seers

In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,

The truth should be told, and the fact be faced

That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed

On the human heart's resource alone,

In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,

And visioned help unsought, unknown.

1909-10.

p. 47GOD'S FUNERAL

I

I saw a slowly-stepping train--

Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar--

Following in files across a twilit plain

A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

II

And by contagious throbs of thought

Or latent knowledge that within me lay

And had already stirred me, I was wrought

To consciousness of sorrow even as they.

III

The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,

At first seemed man-like, and anon to change

To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,

At times endowed with wings of glorious range.

p. 48IV

And this phantasmal variousness

Ever possessed it as they drew along:

Yet throughout all it symboled none the less

Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.

V

Almost before I knew I bent

Towards the moving columns without a word;

They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went,

Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard:--

VI

"O man-projected Figure, of late

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?

Whence came it we were tempted to create

One whom we can no longer keep alive?

VII

"Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,

We gave him justice as the ages rolled,

Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,

And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

p. 49VIII

"And, tricked by our own early dream

And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,

Our making soon our maker did we deem,

And what we had imagined we believed.

IX

"Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing,

Uncompromising rude reality

Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,

Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

X

"So, toward our myth's oblivion,

Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope

Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,

Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

XI

"How sweet it was in years far hied

To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,

To lie down liegely at the eventide

And feel a blest assurance he was there!

p. 50XII

"And who or what shall fill his place?

Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes

For some fixed star to stimulate their pace

Towards the goal of their enterprise?" . . .

XIII

Some in the background then I saw,

Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,

Who chimed as one: "This figure is of straw,

This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!"

XIV

I could not prop their faith: and yet

Many I had known: with all I sympathized;

And though struck speechless, I did not forget

That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

XV

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed

The insistent question for each animate mind,

And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed

A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

p. 51XVI

Whereof to lift the general night,

A certain few who stood aloof had said,

"See you upon the horizon that small light--

Swelling somewhat?" Each mourner shook his head.

XVII

And they composed a crowd of whom

Some were right good, and many nigh the best . . .

Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom

Mechanically I followed with the rest.

1908-10.

p. 52SPECTRES THAT GRIEVE

"IT is not death that harrows us," they lipped,

"The soundless cell is in itself relief,

For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped

At unawares, and at its best but brief."

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone,

Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye,

As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone

From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead,

They should not, like the many, be at rest,

But stray as apparitions; hence I said,

"Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

"We are among the few death sets not free,

The hurt, misrepresented names, who come

p. 53At each year's brink, and cry to History

To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

"We are stript of rights; our shames lie unredressed,

Our deeds in full anatomy are not shown,

Our words in morsels merely are expressed

On the scriptured page, our motives blurred, unknown."

Then all these shaken slighted visitants sped

Into the vague, and left me musing there

On fames that well might instance what they had said,

Until the New-Year's dawn strode up the air.

p. 54"AH, ARE YOU DIGGING ON MY GRAVE?"

"AH, are you digging on my grave

My loved one?--planting rue?"

--"No: yesterday he went to wed

One of the brightest wealth has bred.

'It cannot hurt her now,' he said,

'That I should not be true.'"

"Then who is digging on my grave?

My nearest dearest kin?"

--"Ah, no; they sit and think, 'What use!

What good will planting flowers produce?

No tendance of her mound can loose

Her spirit from Death's gin.'"

"But some one digs upon my grave?

My enemy?--prodding sly?"

--"Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate

That shuts on all flesh soon or late,

She thought you no more worth her hate,

And cares not where you lie."

p. 55"Then, who is digging on my grave?

Say--since I have not guessed!"

--"O it is I, my mistress dear,

Your little dog, who still lives near,

And much I hope my movements here

Have not disturbed your rest?"

"Ah, yes! You dig upon my grave . . .

Why flashed it not on me

That one true heart was left behind!

What feeling do we ever find

To equal among human kind

A dog's fidelity!"

"Mistress, I dug upon your grave

To bury a bone, in case

I should be hungry near this spot

When passing on my daily trot.

I am sorry, but I quite forgot

It was your resting-place."

p. 57SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCES

IN FIFTEEN GLIMPSES

p. 59I

AT TEA

THE kettle descants in a cozy drone,

And the young wife looks in her husband's face,

And then at her guest's, and shows in her own

Her sense that she fills an envied place;

And the visiting lady is all abloom,

And says there was never so sweet a room.

And the happy young housewife does not know

That the woman beside her was first his choice,

Till the fates ordained it could not be so . . .

Betraying nothing in look or voice

The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,

And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.

p. 60II

IN CHURCH

"AND now to God the Father," he ends,

And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles:

Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,

And emotion pervades the crowded aisles.

Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door,

And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more.

The door swings softly ajar meanwhile,

And a pupil of his in the Bible class,

Who adores him as one without gloss or guile,

Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile

And re-enact at the vestry-glass

Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show

That had moved the congregation so.

p. 61III

BY HER AUNT'S GRAVE

"SIXPENCE a week," says the girl to her lover,

"Aunt used to bring me, for she could confide

In me alone, she vowed. 'Twas to cover

The cost of her headstone when she died.

And that was a year ago last June;

I've not yet fixed it. But I must soon."

"And where is the money now, my dear?"

"O, snug in my purse . . . Aunt was so slow

In saving it--eighty weeks, or near." . . .

"Let's spend it," he hints. "For she won't know.

There's a dance to-night at the Load of Hay."

She passively nods. And they go that way.

p. 62IV

IN THE ROOM OF THE BRIDE-ELECT

"WOULD it had been the man of our wish!"

Sighs her mother. To whom with vehemence she

In the wedding-dress--the wife to be--

"Then why were you so mollyish

As not to insist on him for me!"

The mother, amazed: "Why, dearest one,

Because you pleaded for this or none!"

"But Father and you should have stood out strong!

Since then, to my cost, I have lived to find

That you were right and that I was wrong;

This man is a dolt to the one declined . . .

Ah!--here he comes with his button-hole rose.

Good God--I must marry him I suppose!"

p. 63V

AT A WATERING-PLACE

THEY sit and smoke on the esplanade,

The man and his friend, and regard the bay

Where the far chalk cliffs, to the left displayed,

Smile sallowly in the decline of day.

And saunterers pass with laugh and jest--

A handsome couple among the rest.

"That smart proud pair," says the man to his friend,

"Are to marry next week . . . How little he thinks

That dozens of days and nights on end

I have stroked her neck, unhooked the links

Of her sleeve to get at her upper arm . . .

Well, bliss is in ignorance: what's the harm!"

p. 64VI

IN THE CEMETERY

"YOU see those mothers squabbling there?"

Remarks the man of the cemetery.

One says in tears, ''Tis mine lies here!'

Another, 'Nay, mine, you Pharisee!'

Another, 'How dare you move my flowers

And put your own on this grave of ours!'

But all their children were laid therein

At different times, like sprats in a tin.

"And then the main drain had to cross,

And we moved the lot some nights ago,

And packed them away in the general foss

With hundreds more. But their folks don't know,

And as well cry over a new-laid drain

As anything else, to ease your pain!"

p. 65VII

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW

"MY stick!" he says, and turns in the lane

To the house just left, whence a vixen voice

Comes out with the firelight through the pane,

And he sees within that the girl of his choice

Stands rating her mother with eyes aglare

For something said while he was there.

"At last I behold her soul undraped!"

Thinks the man who had loved her more than himself;

"My God--'tis but narrowly I have escaped.--

My precious porcelain proves it delf."

His face has reddened like one ashamed,

And he steals off, leaving his stick unclaimed.

p. 66VIII

IN THE STUDY

HE enters, and mute on the edge of a chair

Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,

A type of decayed gentility;

And by some small signs he well can guess

That she comes to him almost breakfastless.

"I have called--I hope I do not err--

I am looking for a purchaser

Of some score volumes of the works

Of eminent divines I own,--

Left by my father--though it irks

My patience to offer them." And she smiles

As if necessity were unknown;

"But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles

I have wished, as I am fond of art,

To make my rooms a little smart."

And lightly still she laughs to him,

As if to sell were a mere gay whim,

And that, to be frank, Life were indeed

To her not vinegar and gall,

But fresh and honey-like; and Need

No household skeleton at all.

p. 67IX

AT THE ALTAR-RAIL

"MY bride is not coming, alas!" says the groom,

And the telegram shakes in his hand. "I own

It was hurried! We met at a dancing-room

When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,

And then, next night, where the Fountain leaps,

And the Street of the Quarter-Circle sweeps.

"Ay, she won me to ask her to be my wife--

'Twas foolish perhaps!--to forsake the ways

Of the flaring town for a farmer's life.

She agreed. And we fixed it. Now she says:

'It's sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest,

But a swift, short, gay life suits me best.

What I really am you have never gleaned;

I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned.'"

p. 68X

IN THE NUPTIAL CHAMBER

"O THAT mastering tune?" And up in the bed

Like a lace-robed phantom springs the bride;

"And why?" asks the man she had that day wed,

With a start, as the band plays on outside.

"It's the townsfolks' cheery compliment

Because of our marriage, my Innocent."

"O but you don't know! 'Tis the passionate air

To which my old Love waltzed with me,

And I swore as we spun that none should share

My home, my kisses, till death, save he!

And he dominates me and thrills me through,

And it's he I embrace while embracing you!"

p. 69XI

IN THE RESTAURANT

"BUT hear. If you stay, and the child be born,

It will pass as your husband's with the rest,

While, if we fly, the teeth of scorn

Will be gleaming at us from east to west;

And the child will come as a life despised;

I feel an elopement is ill-advised!"

"O you realize not what it is, my dear,

To a woman! Daily and hourly alarms

Lest the truth should out. How can I stay here,

And nightly take him into my arms!

Come to the child no name or fame,

Let us go, and face it, and bear the shame."

p. 70XII

AT THE DRAPER'S

"I STOOD at the back of the shop, my dear,

But you did not perceive me.

Well, when they deliver what you were shown

I shall know nothing of it, believe me!"

And he coughed and coughed as she paled and said,

"O, I didn't see you come in there--

Why couldn't you speak?"--"Well, I didn't. I left

That you should not notice I'd been there.

"You were viewing some lovely things. 'Soon required

For a widow, of latest fashion';

And I knew 'twould upset you to meet the man

Who had to be cold and ashen

"And screwed in a box before they could dress you

'In the last new note in mourning,'

As they defined it. So, not to distress you,

I left you to your adorning."

p. 71XIII

ON THE DEATH-BED

"I'LL tell--being past all praying for--

Then promptly die . . . He was out at the war,

And got some scent of the intimacy

That was under way between her and me;

And he stole back home, and appeared like a ghost

One night, at the very time almost

That I reached her house. Well, I shot him dead,

And secretly buried him. Nothing was said.

"The news of the battle came next day;

He was scheduled missing. I hurried away,

Got out there, visited the field,

And sent home word that a search revealed

He was one of the slain; though, lying alone

And stript, his body had not been known.

"But she suspected. I lost her love,

Yea, my hope of earth, and of Heaven above;

And my time's now come, and I'll pay the score,

Though it be burning for evermore."

p. 72XIV

OVER THE COFFIN

THEY stand confronting, the coffin between,

His wife of old, and his wife of late,

And the dead man whose they both had been

Seems listening aloof, as to things past date.

--"I have called," says the first. "Do you marvel or not?"

"In truth," says the second, "I do--somewhat."

"Well, there was a word to be said by me! . . .

I divorced that man because of you--

It seemed I must do it, boundenly;

But now I am older, and tell you true,

For life is little, and dead lies he;

I would I had let alone you two!

And both of us, scorning parochial ways,

Had lived like the wives in the patriarchs' days."

p. 73XV

IN THE MOONLIGHT

"O LONELY workman, standing there

In a dream, why do you stare and stare

At her grave, as no other grave there were?

"If your great gaunt eyes so importune

Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,

Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"

"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see

Than all the living folk there be;

But alas, there is no such joy for me!"

"Ah--she was one you loved, no doubt,

Through good and evil, through rain and drought,

And when she passed, all your sun went out?"

"Nay: she was the woman I did not love,

Whom all the others were ranked above,

Whom during her life I thought nothing of."

p. 75LYRICS AND REVERIES

(continued)

p. 77SELF-UNCONSCIOUS

ALONG the way

He walked that day,

Watching shapes that reveries limn,

And seldom he

Had eyes to see

The moment that encompassed him.

Bright yellowhammers

Made mirthful clamours,

And billed long straws with a bustling air,

And bearing their load

Flew up the road

That he followed, alone, without interest there.

From bank to ground

And over and round

They sidled along the adjoining hedge;

Sometimes to the gutter

Their yellow flutter

Would dip from the nearest slatestone ledge.

p. 78The smooth sea-line

With a metal shine,

And flashes of white, and a sail thereon,

He would also descry

With a half-wrapt eye

Between the projects he mused upon.

Yes, round him were these

Earth's artistries,

But specious plans that came to his call

Did most engage

His pilgrimage,

While himself he did not see at all.

Dead now as sherds

Are the yellow birds,

And all that mattered has passed away;

Yet God, the Elf,

Now shows him that self

As he was, and should have been shown, that day.

O it would have been good

Could he then have stood

At a focussed distance, and conned the whole,

But now such vision

Is mere derision,

Nor soothes his body nor saves his soul.

p. 79Not much, some may

Incline to say,

To see therein, had it all been seen.

Nay! he is aware

A thing was there

That loomed with an immortal mien.

p. 80THE DISCOVERY

I WANDERED to a crude coast

Like a ghost;

Upon the hills I saw fires--

Funeral pyres

Seemingly--and heard breaking

Waves like distant cannonades that set the land shaking.

And so I never once guessed

A Love-nest,

Bowered and candle-lit, lay

In my way,

Till I found a hid hollow,

Where I burst on her my heart could not but follow.

p. 81TOLERANCE

"IT is a foolish thing," said I,

"To bear with such, and pass it by;

Yet so I do, I know not why!"

And at each clash I would surmise

That if I had acted otherwise

I might have saved me many sighs.

But now the only happiness

In looking back that I possess--

Whose lack would leave me comfortless--

Is to remember I refrained

From masteries I might have gained,

And for my tolerance was disdained;

For see, a tomb. And if it were

I had bent and broke, I should not dare

To linger in the shadows there.

p. 82BEFORE AND AFTER SUMMER

I

LOOKING forward to the spring

One puts up with anything.

On this February day,

Though the winds leap down the street,

Wintry scourgings seem but play,

And these later shafts of sleet

--Sharper pointed than the first--

And these later snows--the worst--

Are as a half-transparent blind

Riddled by rays from sun behind.

II

Shadows of the October pine

Reach into this room of mine:

On the pine there stands a bird;

He is shadowed with the tree.

Mutely perched he bills no word;

Blank as I am even is he.

For those happy suns are past,

Fore-discerned in winter last.

When went by their pleasure, then?

I, alas, perceived not when.

p. 83AT DAY-CLOSE IN NOVEMBER

THE ten hours' light is abating,

And a late bird flies across,

Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,

Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,

Float past like specks in the eye;

I set every tree in my June time,

And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here

Conceive that there never has been

A time when no tall trees grew here,

A time when none will be seen.

p. 84THE YEAR'S AWAKENING

HOW do you know that the pilgrim track

Along the belting zodiac

Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds

Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds

And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud

Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,

And never as yet a tinct of spring

Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;

O vespering bird, how do you know,

How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,

Hid in your bed from sight and sound,

Without a turn in temperature,

With weather life can scarce endure,

That light has won a fraction's strength,

And day put on some moments' length,

Whereof in merest rote will come,

Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;

O crocus root, how do you know,

How do you know?

February 1910.

p. 85UNDER THE WATERFALL

"WHENEVER I plunge my arm, like this,

In a basin of water, I never miss

The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day

Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.

Hence the only prime

And real love-rhyme

That I know by heart,

And that leaves no smart,

Is the purl of a little valley fall

About three spans wide and two spans tall

Over a table of solid rock,

And into a scoop of the self-same block;

The purl of a runlet that never ceases

In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;

With a hollow boiling voice it speaks

And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks."

"And why gives this the only prime

Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?

And why does plunging your arm in a bowl

Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?"

p. 86"Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,

Though where precisely none ever has known,

Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,

And by now with its smoothness opalized,

Is a drinking-glass:

For, down that pass

My lover and I

Walked under a sky

Of blue with a leaf-woven awning of green,

In the burn of August, to paint the scene,

And we placed our basket of fruit and wine

By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;

And when we had drunk from the glass together,

Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,

I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,

Where it slipped, and sank, and was past recall,

Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss

With long bared arms. There the glass still is.

And, as said, if I thrust my arm below

Cold water in basin or bowl, a throe

From the past awakens a sense of that time,

And the glass both used, and the cascade's rhyme.

The basin seems the pool, and its edge

The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,

And the leafy pattern of china-ware

The hanging plants that were bathing there.

p. 87By night, by day, when it shines or lours,

There lies intact that chalice of ours,

And its presence adds to the rhyme of love

Persistently sung by the fall above.

No lip has touched it since his and mine

In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine."

p. 88THE SPELL OF THE ROSE

"I MEAN to build a hall anon,

And shape two turrets there,

And a broad newelled stair,

And a cool well for crystal water;

Yes; I will build a hall anon,

Plant roses love shall feed upon,

And apple trees and pear."

He set to build the manor-hall,

And shaped the turrets there,

And the broad newelled stair,

And the cool well for crystal water;

He built for me that manor-hall,

And planted many trees withal,

But no rose anywhere.

And as he planted never a rose

That bears the flower of love,

Though other flowers throve

A frost-wind moved our souls to sever

Since he had planted never a rose;

And misconceits raised horrid shows,

And agonies came thereof.

p. 89"I'll mend these miseries," then said I,

And so, at dead of night,

I went and, screened from sight,

That nought should keep our souls in severance,

I set a rose-bush. "This," said I,

"May end divisions dire and wry,

And long-drawn days of blight."

But I was called from earth--yea, called

Before my rose-bush grew;

And would that now I knew

What feels he of the tree I planted,

And whether, after I was called

To be a ghost, he, as of old,

Gave me his heart anew!

Perhaps now blooms that queen of trees

I set but saw not grow,

And he, beside its glow--

Eyes couched of the mis-vision that blurred me--

Ay, there beside that queen of trees

He sees me as I was, though sees

Too late to tell me so!

p. 90ST. LAUNCE'S REVISITED

SLIP back, Time!

Yet again I am nearing

Castle and keep, uprearing

Gray, as in my prime.

At the inn

Smiling close, why is it

Not as on my visit

When hope and I were twin?

Groom and jade

Whom I found here, moulder;

Strange the tavern-holder,

Strange the tap-maid.

Here I hired

Horse and man for bearing

Me on my wayfaring

To the door desired.

Evening gloomed

As I journeyed forward

To the faces shoreward,

Till their dwelling loomed.

p. 91If again

Towards the Atlantic sea there

I should speed, they'd be there

Surely now as then? . . .

Why waste thought,

When I know them vanished

Under earth; yea, banished

Ever into nought.

p. 93POEMS OF 1912-13

Veteris vestigia flammae

p. 95THE GOING

WHY did you give no hint that night

That quickly after the morrow's dawn,

And calmly, as if indifferent quite,

You would close your term here, up and be gone

Where I could not follow

With wing of swallow

To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

Never to bid good-bye,

Or give me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house

And think for a breath it is you I see

At the end of the alley of bending boughs

Where so often at dusk you used to be;

Till in darkening dankness

The yawning blankness

Of the perspective sickens me!

p. 96You were she who abode

By those red-veined rocks far West,

You were the swan-necked one who rode

Along the beetling Beeny Crest,

And, reining nigh me,

Would muse and eye me,

While Life unrolled us its very best.

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,

Did we not think of those days long dead,

And ere your vanishing strive to seek

That time's renewal? We might have said,

"In this bright spring weather

We'll visit together

Those places that once we visited."

Well, well! All's past amend,

Unchangeable. It must go.

I seem but a dead man held on end

To sink down soon . . . O you could not know

That such swift fleeing

No soul foreseeing--

Not even I--would undo me so!

December 1912.

p. 97YOUR LAST DRIVE

HERE by the moorway you returned,

And saw the borough lights ahead

That lit your face--all undiscerned

To be in a week the face of the dead,

And you told of the charm of that haloed view

That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot

Where eight days later you were to lie,

And be spoken of as one who was not;

Beholding it with a cursory eye

As alien from you, though under its tree

You soon would halt everlastingly.

I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat

At your side that eve I should not have seen

That the countenance I was glancing at

Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,

Nor have read the writing upon your face,

"I go hence soon to my resting-place;

p. 98"You may miss me then. But I shall not know

How many times you visit me there,

Or what your thoughts are, or if you go

There never at all. And I shall not care.

Should you censure me I shall take no heed

And even your praises I shall not need."

True: never you'll know. And you will not mind.

But shall I then slight you because of such?

Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find

The thought "What profit?" move me much

Yet the fact indeed remains the same,

You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

December 1912.

p. 99THE WALK

YOU did not walk with me

Of late to the hill-top tree

By the gated ways,

As in earlier days;

You were weak and lame,

So you never came,

And I went alone, and I did not mind,

Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day

Just in the former way:

Surveyed around

The familiar ground

By myself again:

What difference, then?

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

p. 100RAIN ON A GRAVE

CLOUDS spout upon her

Their waters amain

In ruthless disdain,--

Her who but lately

Had shivered with pain

As at touch of dishonour

If there had lit on her

So coldly, so straightly

Such arrows of rain.

She who to shelter

Her delicate head

Would quicken and quicken

Each tentative tread

If drops chanced to pelt her

That summertime spills

In dust-paven rills

When thunder-clouds thicken

And birds close their bills.

Would that I lay there

And she were housed here!

p. 101Or better, together

Were folded away there

Exposed to one weather

We both,--who would stray there

When sunny the day there,

Or evening was clear

At the prime of the year.

Soon will be growing

Green blades from her mound,

And daises be showing

Like stars on the ground,

Till she form part of them--

Ay--the sweet heart of them,

Loved beyond measure

With a child's pleasure

All her life's round.

Jan. 31, 1913.

p. 102"I FOUND HER OUT THERE"

I FOUND her out there

On a slope few see,

That falls westwardly

To the salt-edged air,

Where the ocean breaks

On the purple strand,

And the hurricane shakes

The solid land.

I brought her here,

And have laid her to rest

In a noiseless nest

No sea beats near.

She will never be stirred

In her loamy cell

By the waves long heard

And loved so well.

So she does not sleep

By those haunted heights

The Atlantic smites

And the blind gales sweep,

p. 103Whence she often would gaze

At Dundagel's far head,

While the dipping blaze

Dyed her face fire-red;

And would sigh at the tale

Of sunk Lyonnesse,

As a wind-tugged tress

Flapped her cheek like a flail;

Or listen at whiles

With a thought-bound brow

To the murmuring miles

She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe,

Will creep underground

Till it catch the sound

Of that western sea

As it swells and sobs

Where she once domiciled,

And joy in its throbs

With the heart of a child.

p. 104WITHOUT CEREMONY

IT was your way, my dear,

To be gone without a word

When callers, friends, or kin

Had left, and I hastened in

To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you'd a mind to career

Off anywhere--say to town--

You were all on a sudden gone

Before I had thought thereon,

Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear

For ever in that swift style,

Your meaning seems to me

Just as it used to be:

"Good-bye is not worth while!"

p. 105LAMENT

HOW she would have loved

A party to-day!--

Bright-hatted and gloved,

With table and tray

And chairs on the lawn

Her smiles would have shone

With welcomings . . . But

She is shut, she is shut

From friendship's spell

In the jailing shell

Of her tiny cell.

Or she would have reigned

At a dinner to-night

With ardours unfeigned,

And a generous delight;

All in her abode

She'd have freely bestowed

On her guests . . . But alas,

She is shut under grass

Where no cups flow,

Powerless to know

That it might be so.

p. 106And she would have sought

With a child's eager glance

The shy snowdrops brought

By the new year's advance,

And peered in the rime

Of Candlemas-time

For crocuses . . . chanced

It that she were not tranced

From sights she loved best;

Wholly possessed

By an infinite rest!

And we are here staying

Amid these stale things

Who care not for gaying,

And those junketings

That used so to joy her,

And never to cloy her

As us they cloy! . . . But

She is shut, she is shut

From the cheer of them, dead

To all done and said

In a yew-arched bed.

p. 107THE HAUNTER

HE does not think that I haunt here nightly:

How shall I let him know

That whither his fancy sets him wandering

I, too, alertly go?--

Hover and hover a few feet from him

Just as I used to do,

But cannot answer his words addressed me--

Only listen thereto!

When I could answer he did not say them:

When I could let him know

How I would like to join in his journeys

Seldom he wished to go.

Now that he goes and wants me with him

More than he used to do,

Never he sees my faithful phantom

Though he speaks thereto.

Yes, I accompany him to places

Only dreamers know,

Where the shy hares limp long paces,

Where the night rooks go;

p. 108Into old aisles where the past is all to him,

Close as his shade can do,

Always lacking the power to call to him,

Near as I reach thereto!

What a good haunter I am, O tell him,

Quickly make him know

If he but sigh since my loss befell him

Straight to his side I go.

Tell him a faithful one is doing

All that love can do

Still that his path may be worth pursuing,

And to bring peace thereto.

p. 109THE VOICE

WOMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever consigned to existlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward

And the woman calling.

December 1912.

p. 110HIS VISITOR

I COME across from Mellstock while the moon wastes weaker

To behold where I lived with you for twenty years and more:

I shall go in the gray, at the passing of the mail-train,

And need no setting open of the long familiar door

As before.

The change I notice in my once own quarters!

A brilliant budded border where the daisies used to be,

The rooms new painted, and the pictures altered,

And other cups and saucers, and no cozy nook for tea

As with me.

I discern the dim faces of the sleep-wrapt servants;

They are not those who tended me through feeble hours and strong,

p. 111But strangers quite, who never knew my rule here,

Who never saw me painting, never heard my softling song

Float along.

So I don't want to linger in this re-decked dwelling,

I feel too uneasy at the contrasts I behold,

And I make again for Mellstock to return here never,

And rejoin the roomy silence, and the mute and manifold

Souls of old.

1913.

p. 112A CIRCULAR

AS "legal representative"

I read a missive not my own,

On new designs the senders give

For clothes, in tints as shown.

Here figure blouses, gowns for tea,

And presentation-trains of state,

Charming ball-dresses, millinery,

Warranted up to date.

And this gay-pictured, spring-time shout

Of Fashion, hails what lady proud?

Her who before last year was out

Was costumed in a shroud.

p. 113A DREAM OR NO

WHY go to Saint-Juliot? What's Juliot to me?

I was but made fancy

By some necromancy

That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,

And a maiden abiding

Thereat as in hiding;

Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,

There lonely I found her,

The sea-birds around her,

And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

p. 114So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)

That quickly she drew me

To take her unto me,

And lodge her long years with me. Such have I dreamed.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;

Can she ever have been here,

And shed her life's sheen here,

The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?

Or a Vallency Valley

With stream and leafed alley,

Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

February 1913.

p. 115AFTER A JOURNEY

HERETO I come to interview a ghost;

Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?

Up the cliff, down, till I'm lonely, lost,

And the unseen waters' ejaculations awe me.

Where you will next be there's no knowing,

Facing round about me everywhere,

With your nut-coloured hair,

And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;

Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;

What have you now found to say of our past--

Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?

Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?

Things were not lastly as firstly well

With us twain, you tell?

But all's closed now, despite Time's derision.

p. 116I see what you are doing: you are leading me on

To the spots we knew when we haunted here together,

The waterfall, above which the mist-bow shone

At the then fair hour in the then fair weather,

And the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow

That it seems to call out to me from forty years ago,

When you were all aglow,

And not the thin ghost that I now frailly follow!

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,

The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,

Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,

For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.

Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,

The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!

I am just the same as when

Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

PENTARGAN BAY.

p. 117A DEATH-DAY RECALLED

BEENY did not quiver,

Juliot grew not gray,

Thin Valency's river

Held its wonted way.

Bos seemed not to utter

Dimmest note of dirge,

Targan mouth a mutter

To its creamy surge.

Yet though these, unheeding,

Listless, passed the hour

Of her spirit's speeding,

She had, in her flower,

Sought and loved the places--

Much and often pined

For their lonely faces

When in towns confined.

Why did not Valency

In his purl deplore

One whose haunts were whence he

Drew his limpid store?

p. 118Why did Bos not thunder,

Targan apprehend

Body and breath were sunder

Of their former friend?

p. 119BEENY CLIFF

March 1870--March 1913

I

O THE opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,

And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free--

The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

II

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away

In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,

As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

p. 120III

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,

And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,

And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

IV

--Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,

And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,

And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

V

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,

The woman now is--elsewhere--whom the ambling pony bore,

And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.

p. 121AT CASTLE BOTEREL

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,

And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,

I look behind at the fading byway,

And see on its slope, now glistening wet,

Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted

In dry March weather. We climb the road

Beside a chaise. We had just alighted

To ease the sturdy pony's load

When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of

Matters not much, nor to what it led,--

Something that life will not be balked of

Without rude reason till hope is dead,

And feeling fled.

p. 122It filled but a minute. But was there ever

A time of such quality, since or before,

In that hill's story? To one mind never,

Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,

By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,

And much have they faced there, first and last,

Of the transitory in Earth's long order;

But what they record in colour and cast

Is--that we two passed.

And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,

In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

The substance now, one phantom figure

Remains on the slope, as when that night

Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

I look back at it amid the rain

For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,

And I shall traverse old love's domain

Never again.

March 1913.

p. 123PLACES

NOBODY says: Ah, that is the place

Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago,

What none of the Three Towns cared to know--

The birth of a little girl of grace--

The sweetest the house saw, first or last;

Yet it was so

On that day long past.

Nobody thinks: There, there she lay

In a room by the Hoe, like the bud of a flower,

And listened, just after the bedtime hour,

To the stammering chimes that used to play

The quaint Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth tune

In Saint Andrew's tower

Night, morn, and noon.

Nobody calls to mind that here

Upon Boterel Hill, where the carters skid,

p. 124With cheeks whose airy flush outbid

Fresh fruit in bloom, and free of fear,

She cantered down, as if she must fall

(Though she never did),

To the charm of all.

Nay: one there is to whom these things,

That nobody else's mind calls back,

Have a savour that scenes in being lack,

And a presence more than the actual brings;

To whom to-day is beneaped and stale,

And its urgent clack

But a vapid tale.

PLYMOUTH, March 1913.

p. 125THE PHANTOM HORSEWOMAN

I

QUEER are the ways of a man I know:

He comes and stands

In a careworn craze,

And looks at the sands

And the seaward haze,

With moveless hands

And face and gaze,

Then turns to go . . .

And what does he see when he gazes so?

II

They say he sees as an instant thing

More clear than to-day,

A sweet soft scene

That once was in play

By that briny green;

Yes, notes alway

Warm, real, and keen,

What his back years bring--

A phantom of his own figuring.

p. 126III

Of this vision of his they might say more:

Not only there

Does he see this sight,

But everywhere

In his brain--day, night,

As if on the air

It were drawn rose bright--

Yea, far from that shore

Does he carry this vision of heretofore:

IV

A ghost-girl-rider. And though, toil-tried,

He withers daily,

Time touches her not,

But she still rides gaily

In his rapt thought

On that shagged and shaly

Atlantic spot,

And as when first eyed

Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.

p. 127MISCELLANEOUS PIECES

p. 129THE WISTFUL LADY

"LOVE, while you were away there came to me--

From whence I cannot tell--

A plaintive lady pale and passionless,

Who bent her eyes upon me critically,

And weighed me with a wearing wistfulness,

As if she knew me well."

"I saw no lady of that wistful sort

As I came riding home.

Perhaps she was some dame the Fates constrain

By memories sadder than she can support,

Or by unhappy vacancy of brain,

To leave her roof and roam?"

"Ah, but she knew me. And before this time

I have seen her, lending ear

To my light outdoor words, and pondering each,

Her frail white finger swayed in pantomime,

As if she fain would close with me in speech,

And yet would not come near.

p. 130"And once I saw her beckoning with her hand

As I came into sight

At an upper window. And I at last went out;

But when I reached where she had seemed to stand,

And wandered up and down and searched about,

I found she had vanished quite."

Then thought I how my dead Love used to say,

With a small smile, when she

Was waning wan, that she would hover round

And show herself after her passing day

To any newer Love I might have found,

But show her not to me.

p. 131THE WOMAN IN THE RYE

"WHY do you stand in the dripping rye,

Cold-lipped, unconscious, wet to the knee,

When there are firesides near?" said I.

"I told him I wished him dead," said she.

"Yea, cried it in my haste to one

Whom I had loved, whom I well loved still;

And die he did. And I hate the sun,

And stand here lonely, aching, chill;

"Stand waiting, waiting under skies

That blow reproach, the while I see

The rooks sheer off to where he lies

Wrapt in a peace withheld from me."

p. 132THE CHEVAL-GLASS

WHY do you harbour that great cheval-glass

Filling up your narrow room?

You never preen or plume,

Or look in a week at your full-length figure--

Picture of bachelor gloom!

"Well, when I dwelt in ancient England,

Renting the valley farm,

Thoughtless of all heart-harm,

I used to gaze at the parson's daughter,

A creature of nameless charm.

"Thither there came a lover and won her,

Carried her off from my view.

O it was then I knew

Misery of a cast undreamt of--

More than, indeed, my due!

"Then far rumours of her ill-usage

Came, like a chilling breath

When a man languisheth;

Followed by news that her mind lost balance,

And, in a space, of her death.

p. 133"Soon sank her father; and next was the auction--

Everything to be sold:

Mid things new and old

Stood this glass in her former chamber,

Long in her use, I was told.

"Well, I awaited the sale and bought it . . .

There by my bed it stands,

And as the dawn expands

Often I see her pale-faced form there

Brushing her hair's bright bands.

"There, too, at pallid midnight moments

Quick she will come to my call,

Smile from the frame withal

Ponderingly, as she used to regard me

Passing her father's wall.

"So that it was for its revelations

I brought it oversea,

And drag it about with me . . .

Anon I shall break it and bury its fragments

Where my grave is to be."

p. 134THE RE-ENACTMENT

BETWEEN the folding sea-downs,

In the gloom

Of a wailful wintry nightfall,

When the boom

Of the ocean, like a hammering in a hollow tomb,

Throbbed up the copse-clothed valley

From the shore

To the chamber where I darkled,

Sunk and sore

With gray ponderings why my Loved one had not come before

To salute me in the dwelling

That of late

I had hired to waste a while in--

Vague of date,

Quaint, and remote--wherein I now expectant sate;

p. 135On the solitude, unsignalled,

Broke a man

Who, in air as if at home there,

Seemed to scan

Every fire-flecked nook of the apartment span by span.

A stranger's and no lover's

Eyes were these,

Eyes of a man who measures

What he sees

But vaguely, as if wrapt in filmy phantasies.

Yea, his bearing was so absent

As he stood,

It bespoke a chord so plaintive

In his mood,

That soon I judged he would not wrong my quietude.

"Ah--the supper is just ready,"

Then he said,

"And the years'-long binned Madeira

Flashes red!"

(There was no wine, no food, no supper-table spread.)

"You will forgive my coming,

Lady fair?

I see you as at that time

Rising there,

The self-same curious querying in your eyes and air.

p. 136"Yet no. How so? You wear not

The same gown,

Your locks show woful difference,

Are not brown:

What, is it not as when I hither came from town?

"And the place . . . But you seem other--

Can it be?

What's this that Time is doing

Unto me?

You dwell here, unknown woman? . . . Whereabouts, then, is she?

"And the house--things are much shifted.--

Put them where

They stood on this night's fellow;

Shift her chair:

Here was the couch: and the piano should be there."

I indulged him, verily nerve-strained

Being alone,

And I moved the things as bidden,

One by one,

And feigned to push the old piano where he had shown.

p. 137"Aha--now I can see her!

Stand aside:

Don't thrust her from the table

Where, meek-eyed,

She makes attempt with matron-manners to preside.

"She serves me: now she rises,

Goes to play . . .

But you obstruct her, fill her

With dismay,

And embarrassed, scared, she vanishes away!"

And, as 'twere useless longer

To persist,

He sighed, and sought the entry

Ere I wist,

And retreated, disappearing soundless in the mist.

That here some mighty passion

Once had burned,

Which still the walls enghosted,

I discerned,

And that by its strong spell mine might be overturned.

I sat depressed; till, later,

My Love came;

p. 138But something in the chamber

Dimmed our flame,--

An emanation, making our due words fall tame,

As if the intenser drama

Shown me there

Of what the walls had witnessed

Filled the air,

And left no room for later passion anywhere.

So came it that our fervours

Did quite fail

Of future consummation--

Being made quail

By the weird witchery of the parlour's hidden tale,

Which I, as years passed, faintly

Learnt to trace,--

One of sad love, born full-winged

In that place

Where the predestined sorrowers first stood face to face.

And as that month of winter

Circles round,

And the evening of the date-day

Grows embrowned,

I am conscious of those presences, and sit spellbound.

p. 139There, often--lone, forsaken--

Queries breed

Within me; whether a phantom

Had my heed

On that strange night, or was it some wrecked heart indeed?

p. 140HER SECRET

THAT love's dull smart distressed my heart

He shrewdly learnt to see,

But that I was in love with a dead man

Never suspected he.

He searched for the trace of a pictured face,

He watched each missive come,

And a note that seemed like a love-line

Made him look frozen and glum.

He dogged my feet to the city street,

He followed me to the sea,

But not to the neighbouring churchyard

Did he dream of following me.

p. 141"SHE CHARGED ME"

SHE charged me with having said this and that

To another woman long years before,

In the very parlour where we sat,--

Sat on a night when the endless pour

Of rain on the roof and the road below

Bent the spring of the spirit more and more . . .

--So charged she me; and the Cupid's bow

Of her mouth was hard, and her eyes, and her face,

And her white forefinger lifted slow.

Had she done it gently, or shown a trace

That not too curiously would she view

A folly passed ere her reign had place,

A kiss might have ended it. But I knew

From the fall of each word, and the pause between,

That the curtain would drop upon us two

Ere long, in our play of slave and queen.

p. 142THE NEWCOMER'S WIFE

HE paused on the sill of a door ajar

That screened a lively liquor-bar,

For the name had reached him through the door

Of her he had married the week before.

"We called her the Hack of the Parade;

But she was discreet in the games she played;

If slightly worn, she's pretty yet,

And gossips, after all, forget.

"And he knows nothing of her past;

I am glad the girl's in luck at last;

Such ones, though stale to native eyes,

Newcomers snatch at as a prize."

"Yes, being a stranger he sees her blent

Of all that's fresh and innocent,

Nor dreams how many a love-campaign

She had enjoyed before his reign!"

That night there was the splash of a fall

Over the slimy harbour-wall:

They searched, and at the deepest place

Found him with crabs upon his face.

p. 143A CONVERSATION AT DAWN

HE lay awake, with a harassed air,

And she, in her cloud of loose lank hair,

Seemed trouble-tried

As the dawn drew in on their faces there.

The chamber looked far over the sea

From a white hotel on a white-stoned quay,

And stepping a stride

He parted the window-drapery.

Above the level horizon spread

The sunrise, firing them foot to head

From its smouldering lair,

And painting their pillows with dyes of red.

"What strange disquiets have stirred you, dear,

This dragging night, with starts in fear

Of me, as it were,

Or of something evil hovering near?"

p. 144"My husband, can I have fear of you?

What should one fear from a man whom few,

Or none, had matched

In that late long spell of delays undue!"

He watched her eyes in the heaving sun:

"Then what has kept, O reticent one,

Those lids unlatched--

Anything promised I've not yet done?"

"O it's not a broken promise of yours

(For what quite lightly your lip assures

The due time brings)

That has troubled my sleep, and no waking cures!" . . .

"I have shaped my will; 'tis at hand," said he;

"I subscribe it to-day, that no risk there be

In the hap of things

Of my leaving you menaced by poverty."

"That a boon provision I'm safe to get,

Signed, sealed by my lord as it were a debt,

I cannot doubt,

Or ever this peering sun be set."

"But you flung my arms away from your side,

And faced the wall. No month-old bride

Ere the tour be out

In an air so loth can be justified?

p. 145"Ah--had you a male friend once loved well,

Upon whose suit disaster fell

And frustrance swift?

Honest you are, and may care to tell."

She lay impassive, and nothing broke

The stillness other than, stroke by stroke,

The lazy lift

Of the tide below them; till she spoke:

"I once had a friend--a Love, if you will--

Whose wife forsook him, and sank until

She was made a thrall

In a prison-cell for a deed of ill . . .

"He remained alone; and we met--to love,

But barring legitimate joy thereof

Stood a doorless wall,

Though we prized each other all else above.

"And this was why, though I'd touched my prime,

I put off suitors from time to time--

Yourself with the rest--

Till friends, who approved you, called it crime,

"And when misgivings weighed on me

In my lover's absence, hurriedly,

And much distrest,

I took you . . . Ah, that such could be! . . .

p. 146"Now, saw you when crossing from yonder shore

At yesternoon, that the packet bore

On a white-wreathed bier

A coffined body towards the fore?

"Well, while you stood at the other end,

The loungers talked, and I could but lend

A listening ear,

For they named the dead. 'Twas the wife of my friend.

"He was there, but did not note me, veiled,

Yet I saw that a joy, as of one unjailed,

Now shone in his gaze;

He knew not his hope of me just had failed!

"They had brought her home: she was born in this isle;

And he will return to his domicile,

And pass his days

Alone, and not as he dreamt erstwhile!"

"--So you've lost a sprucer spouse than I!"

She held her peace, as if fain deny

She would indeed

For his pleasure's sake, but could lip no lie.

"One far less formal and plain and slow!"

She let the laconic assertion go

As if of need

She held the conviction that it was so.

p. 147"Regard me as his he always should,

He had said, and wed me he vowed he would

In his prime or sere

Most verily do, if ever he could.

"And this fulfilment is now his aim,

For a letter, addressed in my maiden name,

Has dogged me here,

Reminding me faithfully of his claim.

"And it started a hope like a lightning-streak

That I might go to him--say for a week--

And afford you right

To put me away, and your vows unspeak.

"To be sure you have said, as of dim intent,

That marriage is a plain event

Of black and white,

Without any ghost of sentiment,

"And my heart has quailed.--But deny it true

That you will never this lock undo!

No God intends

To thwart the yearning He's father to!"

The husband hemmed, then blandly bowed

In the light of the angry morning cloud.

"So my idyll ends,

And a drama opens!" he mused aloud;

p. 148And his features froze. "You may take it as true

That I will never this lock undo

For so depraved

A passion as that which kindles you."

Said she: "I am sorry you see it so;

I had hoped you might have let me go,

And thus been saved

The pain of learning there's more to know."

"More? What may that be? Gad, I think

You have told me enough to make me blink!

Yet if more remain

Then own it to me. I will not shrink!"

"Well, it is this. As we could not see

That a legal marriage could ever be,

To end our pain

We united ourselves informally;

"And vowed at a chancel-altar nigh,

With book and ring, a lifelong tie;

A contract vain

To the world, but real to Him on High."

"And you became as his wife?"--"I did."--

He stood as stiff as a caryatid,

And said, "Indeed! . . .

No matter. You're mine, whatever you ye hid!"

p. 149"But is it right! When I only gave

My hand to you in a sweat to save,

Through desperate need

(As I thought), my fame, for I was not brave!"

"To save your fame? Your meaning is dim,

For nobody knew of your altar-whim?"

"I mean--I feared

There might be fruit of my tie with him;

"And to cloak it by marriage I'm not the first,

Though, maybe, morally most accurst

Through your unpeered

And strict uprightness. That's the worst!

"While yesterday his worn contours

Convinced me that love like his endures,

And that my troth-plight

Had been his, in fact, and not truly yours."

"So, my lady, you raise the veil by degrees . . .

I own this last is enough to freeze

The warmest wight!

Now hear the other side, if you please:

"I did say once, though without intent,

That marriage is a plain event

Of black and white,

Whatever may be its sentiment.

p. 150"I'll act accordingly, none the less

That you soiled the contract in time of stress,

Thereto induced

By the feared results of your wantonness.

"But the thing is over, and no one knows,

And it's nought to the future what you disclose.

That you'll be loosed

For such an episode, don't suppose!

"No: I'll not free you. And if it appear

There was too good ground for your first fear

From your amorous tricks,

I'll father the child. Yes, by God, my dear.

"Even should you fly to his arms, I'll damn

Opinion, and fetch you; treat as sham

Your mutinous kicks,

And whip you home. That's the sort I am!"

She whitened. "Enough . . . Since you disapprove

I'll yield in silence, and never move

Till my last pulse ticks

A footstep from the domestic groove."

"Then swear it," he said, "and your king uncrown."

He drew her forth in her long white gown,

And she knelt and swore.

"Good. Now you may go and again lie down

p. 151"Since you've played these pranks and given no sign,

You shall crave this man of yours; pine and pine

With sighings sore,

'Till I've starved your love for him; nailed you mine.

"I'm a practical man, and want no tears;

You've made a fool of me, it appears;

That you don't again

Is a lesson I'll teach you in future years."

She answered not, but lay listlessly

With her dark dry eyes on the coppery sea,

That now and then

Flung its lazy flounce at the neighbouring quay.

1910.

p. 152A KING'S SOLILOQUY

ON THE NIGHT OF HIS FUNERAL

FROM the slow march and muffled drum

And crowds distrest,

And book and bell, at length I have come

To my full rest.

A ten years' rule beneath the sun

Is wound up here,

And what I have done, what left undone,

Figures out clear.

Yet in the estimate of such

It grieves me more

That I by some was loved so much

Than that I bore,

From others, judgment of that hue

Which over-hope

Breeds from a theoretic view

Of regal scope.

For kingly opportunities

Right many have sighed;

How best to bear its devilries

Those learn who have tried!

p. 153I have eaten the fat and drunk the sweet,

Lived the life out

From the first greeting glad drum-beat

To the last shout.

What pleasure earth affords to kings

I have enjoyed

Through its long vivid pulse-stirrings

Even till it cloyed.

What days of drudgery, nights of stress

Can cark a throne,

Even one maintained in peacefulness,

I too have known.

And so, I think, could I step back

To life again,

I should prefer the average track

Of average men,

Since, as with them, what kingship would

It cannot do,

Nor to first thoughts however good

Hold itself true.

Something binds hard the royal hand,

As all that be,

And it is That has shaped, has planned

My acts and me.

May 1910.

p. 154THE CORONATION

AT Westminster, hid from the light of day,

Many who once had shone as monarchs lay.

Edward the Pious, and two Edwards more,

The second Richard, Henrys three or four;

That is to say, those who were called the Third,

Fifth, Seventh, and Eighth (the much self-widowered),

And James the Scot, and near him Charles the Second,

And, too, the second George could there be reckoned.

Of women, Mary and Queen Elizabeth,

And Anne, all silent in a musing death;

And William's Mary, and Mary, Queen of Scots,

And consort-queens whose names oblivion blots;

And several more whose chronicle one sees

Adorning ancient royal pedigrees.

p. 155--Now, as they drowsed on, freed from Life's old thrall,

And heedless, save of things exceptional,

Said one: "What means this throbbing thudding sound

That reaches to us here from overground;

"A sound of chisels, augers, planes, and saws,

Infringing all ecclesiastic laws?

"And these tons-weight of timber on us pressed,

Unfelt here since we entered into rest?

"Surely, at least to us, being corpses royal,

A meet repose is owing by the loyal?"

"--Perhaps a scaffold!" Mary Stuart sighed,

"If such still be. It was that way I died."

"--Ods! Far more like," said he the many-wived,

"That for a wedding 'tis this work's contrived.

"Ha-ha! I never would bow down to Rimmon,

But I had a rare time with those six women!"

"Not all at once?" gasped he who loved confession.

p. 156"Nay, nay!" said Hal. "That would have been transgression."

"--They build a catafalque here, black and tall,

Perhaps," mused Richard, "for some funeral?"

And Anne chimed in: "Ah, yes: it maybe so!"

"Nay!" squeaked Eliza. "Little you seem to know--

"Clearly 'tis for some crowning here in state,

As they crowned us at our long bygone date;

"Though we'd no such a power of carpentry,

But let the ancient architecture be;

"If I were up there where the parsons sit,

In one of my gold robes, I'd see to it!"

"But you are not," Charles chuckled. "You are here,

And never will know the sun again, my dear!"

"Yea," whispered those whom no one had addressed;

"With slow, sad march, amid a folk distressed,

We were brought here, to take our dusty rest.

"And here, alas, in darkness laid below,

We'll wait and listen, and endure the show . . .

Clamour dogs kingship; afterwards not so!"

1911.

p. 157AQUAE SULIS

THE chimes called midnight, just at interlune,

And the daytime talk of the Roman investigations

Was checked by silence, save for the husky tune

The bubbling waters played near the excavations.

And a warm air came up from underground,

And a flutter, as of a filmy shape unsepulchred,

That collected itself, and waited, and looked around:

Nothing was seen, but utterances could be heard:

Those of the goddess whose shrine was beneath the pile

Of the God with the baldachined altar overhead:

"And what did you get by raising this nave and aisle

Close on the site of the temple I tenanted?

p. 158"The notes of your organ have thrilled down out of view

To the earth-clogged wrecks of my edifice many a year,

Though stately and shining once--ay, long ere you

Had set up crucifix and candle here.

"Your priests have trampled the dust of mine without rueing,

Despising the joys of man whom I so much loved,

Though my springs boil on by your Gothic arcades and pewing,

And sculptures crude . . . Would Jove they could be removed!"

"--Repress, O lady proud, your traditional ires;

You know not by what a frail thread we equally hang;

It is said we are images both--twitched by people's desires;

And that I, like you, fail as a song men yesterday sang!"

* * * * *

And the olden dark hid the cavities late laid bare,

And all was suspended and soundless as before,

p. 159Except for a gossamery noise fading off in the air,

And the boiling voice of the waters' medicinal pour.

BATH.

p. 160SEVENTY-FOUR AND TWENTY

HERE goes a man of seventy-four,

Who sees not what life means for him,

And here another in years a score

Who reads its very figure and trim.

The one who shall walk to-day with me

Is not the youth who gazes far,

But the breezy wight who cannot see

What Earth's ingrained conditions are.

p. 161THE ELOPEMENT

"A WOMAN never agreed to it!" said my knowing friend to me.

"That one thing she'd refuse to do for Solomon's mines in fee:

No woman ever will make herself look older than she is."

I did not answer; but I thought, "you err there, ancient Quiz."

It took a rare one, true, to do it; for she was surely rare--

As rare a soul at that sweet time of her life as she was fair.

And urging motives, too, were strong, for ours was a passionate case,

Yea, passionate enough to lead to freaking with that young face.

I have told no one about it, should perhaps make few believe,

But I think it over now that life looms dull and years bereave,

p. 162How blank we stood at our bright wits' end, two frail barks in distress,

How self-regard in her was slain by her large tenderness.

I said: "The only chance for us in a crisis of this kind

Is going it thorough!"--"Yes," she calmly breathed. "Well, I don't mind."

And we blanched her dark locks ruthlessly: set wrinkles on her brow;

Ay--she was a right rare woman then, whatever she may be now.

That night we heard a coach drive up, and questions asked below.

"A gent with an elderly wife, sir," was returned from the bureau.

And the wheels went rattling on, and free at last from public ken

We washed all off in her chamber and restored her youth again.

How many years ago it was! Some fifty can it be

Since that adventure held us, and she played old wife to me?

But in time convention won her, as it wins all women at last,

And now she is rich and respectable, and time has buried the past.

p. 163"I ROSE UP AS MY CUSTOM IS"

I ROSE up as my custom is

On the eve of All-Souls' day,

And left my grave for an hour or so

To call on those I used to know

Before I passed away.

I visited my former Love

As she lay by her husband's side;

I asked her if life pleased her, now

She was rid of a poet wrung in brow,

And crazed with the ills he eyed;

Who used to drag her here and there

Wherever his fancies led,

And point out pale phantasmal things,

And talk of vain vague purposings

That she discredited.

She was quite civil, and replied,

"Old comrade, is that you?

Well, on the whole, I like my life.--

I know I swore I'd be no wife,

But what was I to do?

p. 164"You see, of all men for my sex

A poet is the worst;

Women are practical, and they

Crave the wherewith to pay their way,

And slake their social thirst.

"You were a poet--quite the ideal

That we all love awhile:

But look at this man snoring here--

He's no romantic chanticleer,

Yet keeps me in good style.

"He makes no quest into my thoughts,

But a poet wants to know

What one has felt from earliest days,

Why one thought not in other ways,

And one's Loves of long ago."

Her words benumbed my fond frail ghost;

The nightmares neighed from their stalls

The vampires screeched, the harpies flew,

And under the dim dawn I withdrew

To Death's inviolate halls.

p. 165A WEEK

ON Monday night I closed my door,

And thought you were not as heretofore,

And little cared if we met no more.

I seemed on Tuesday night to trace

Something beyond mere commonplace

In your ideas, and heart, and face.

On Wednesday I did not opine

Your life would ever be one with mine,

Though if it were we should well combine.

On Thursday noon I liked you well,

And fondly felt that we must dwell

Not far apart, whatever befell.

On Friday it was with a thrill

In gazing towards your distant vill

I owned you were my dear one still.

p. 166I saw you wholly to my mind

On Saturday--even one who shrined

All that was best of womankind.

As wing-clipt sea-gull for the sea

On Sunday night I longed for thee,

Without whom life were waste to me!

p. 167HAD YOU WEPT

HAD you wept; had you but neared me with a frail uncertain ray,

Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large and luminous eye,

Then would have come back all the joys the tidings had slain that day,

And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven, have smoothed the things awry.

But you were less feebly human, and no passionate need for clinging

Possessed your soul to overthrow reserve when I came near;

Ay, though you suffer as much as I from storms the hours are bringing

Upon your heart and mine, I never see you shed a tear.

The deep strong woman is weakest, the weak one is the strong;

The weapon of all weapons best for winning, you have not used;

p. 168Have you never been able, or would you not, through the evil times and long?

Has not the gift been given you, or such gift have you refused?

When I bade me not absolve you on that evening or the morrow,

Why did you not make war on me with those who weep like rain?

You felt too much, so gained no balm for all your torrid sorrow,

And hence our deep division, and our dark undying pain.

p. 169BEREFT, SHE THINKS SHE DREAMS

I DREAM that the dearest I ever knew

Has died and been entombed.

I am sure it's a dream that cannot be true,

But I am so overgloomed

By its persistence, that I would gladly

Have quick death take me,

Rather than longer think thus sadly;

So wake me, wake me!

It has lasted days, but minute and hour

I expect to get aroused

And find him as usual in the bower

Where we so happily housed.

Yet stays this nightmare too appalling,

And like a web shakes me,

And piteously I keep on calling,

And no one wakes me!

p. 170IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM

"WHAT do you see in that time-touched stone,

When nothing is there

But ashen blankness, although you give it

A rigid stare?

"You look not quite as if you saw,

But as if you heard,

Parting your lips, and treading softly

As mouse or bird.

"It is only the base of a pillar, they'll tell you,

That came to us

From a far old hill men used to name

Areopagus."

--"I know no art, and I only view

A stone from a wall,

But I am thinking that stone has echoed

The voice of Paul,

p. 171"Paul as he stood and preached beside it

Facing the crowd,

A small gaunt figure with wasted features,

Calling out loud

"Words that in all their intimate accents

Pattered upon

That marble front, and were far reflected,

And then were gone.

"I'm a labouring man, and know but little,

Or nothing at all;

But I can't help thinking that stone once echoed

The voice of Paul."

p. 172IN THE SERVANTS' QUARTERS

"MAN, you too, aren't you, one of these rough followers of the criminal?

All hanging hereabout to gather how he's going to bear

Examination in the hall." She flung disdainful glances on

The shabby figure standing at the fire with others there,

Who warmed them by its flare.

"No indeed, my skipping maiden: I know nothing of the trial here,

Or criminal, if so he be.--I chanced to come this way,

And the fire shone out into the dawn, and morning airs are cold now;

I, too, was drawn in part by charms I see before me play,

That I see not every day."

p. 173"Ha, ha!" then laughed the constables who also stood to warm themselves,

The while another maiden scrutinized his features hard,

As the blaze threw into contrast every line and knot that wrinkled them,

Exclaiming, "Why, last night when he was brought in by the guard,

You were with him in the yard!"

"Nay, nay, you teasing wench, I say! You know you speak mistakenly.

Cannot a tired pedestrian who has footed it afar

Here on his way from northern parts, engrossed in humble marketings,

Come in and rest awhile, although judicial doings are

Afoot by morning star?"

"O, come, come!" laughed the constables. "Why, man, you speak the dialect

He uses in his answers; you can hear him up the stairs.

So own it. We sha'n't hurt ye. There he's speaking now! His syllables

Are those you sound yourself when you are talking unawares,

As this pretty girl declares."

p. 174"And you shudder when his chain clinks!" she rejoined. "O yes, I noticed it.

And you winced, too, when those cuffs they gave him echoed to us here.

They'll soon be coming down, and you may then have to defend yourself

Unless you hold your tongue, or go away and keep you clear

When he's led to judgment near!"

"No! I'll be damned in hell if I know anything about the man!

No single thing about him more than everybody knows!

Must not I even warm my hands but I am charged with blasphemies?" . . .

--His face convulses as the morning cock that moment crows,

And he stops, and turns, and goes.

p. 175THE OBLITERATE TOMB

"MORE than half my life long

Did they weigh me falsely, to my bitter wrong,

But they all have shrunk away into the silence

Like a lost song.

"And the day has dawned and come

For forgiveness, when the past may hold it dumb

On the once reverberate words of hatred uttered

Half in delirium . . .

"With folded lips and hands

They lie and wait what next the Will commands,

And doubtless think, if think they can: 'Let discord

Sink with Life's sands!'

"By these late years their names,

Their virtues, their hereditary claims,

May be as near defacement at their grave-place

As are their fames."

p. 176--Such thoughts bechanced to seize

A traveller's mind--a man of memories--

As he set foot within the western city

Where had died these

Who in their lifetime deemed

Him their chief enemy--one whose brain had schemed

To get their dingy greatness deeplier dingied

And disesteemed.

So, sojourning in their town,

He mused on them and on their once renown,

And said, "I'll seek their resting-place to-morrow

Ere I lie down,

"And end, lest I forget,

Those ires of many years that I regret,

Renew their names, that men may see some liegeness

Is left them yet."

Duly next day he went

And sought the church he had known them to frequent,

And wandered in the precincts, set on eyeing

Where they lay pent,

Till by remembrance led

He stood at length beside their slighted bed,

Above which, truly, scarce a line or letter

Could now be read.

p. 177"Thus years obliterate

Their graven worth, their chronicle, their date!

At once I'll garnish and revive the record

Of their past state,

"That still the sage may say

In pensive progress here where they decay,

'This stone records a luminous line whose talents

Told in their day.'"

While speaking thus he turned,

For a form shadowed where they lay inurned,

And he beheld a stranger in foreign vesture,

And tropic-burned.

"Sir, I am right pleased to view

That ancestors of mine should interest you,

For I have come of purpose here to trace them . . .

They are time-worn, true,

"But that's a fault, at most,

Sculptors can cure. On the Pacific coast

I have vowed for long that relics of my forbears

I'd trace ere lost,

p. 178"And hitherward I come,

Before this same old Time shall strike me numb,

To carry it out."--"Strange, this is!" said the other;

"What mind shall plumb

"Coincident design!

Though these my father's enemies were and mine,

I nourished a like purpose--to restore them

Each letter and line."

"Such magnanimity

Is now not needed, sir; for you will see

That since I am here, a thing like this is, plainly,

Best done by me."

The other bowed, and left,

Crestfallen in sentiment, as one bereft

Of some fair object he had been moved to cherish,

By hands more deft.

And as he slept that night

The phantoms of the ensepulchred stood up-right

Before him, trembling that he had set him seeking

Their charnel-site.

p. 179And, as unknowing his ruth,

Asked as with terrors founded not on truth

Why he should want them. "Ha," they hollowly hackered,

"You come, forsooth,

"By stealth to obliterate

Our graven worth, our chronicle, our date,

That our descendant may not gild the record

Of our past state,

"And that no sage may say

In pensive progress near where we decay:

'This stone records a luminous line whose talents

Told in their day.'"

Upon the morrow he went

And to that town and churchyard never bent

His ageing footsteps till, some twelvemonths onward,

An accident

Once more detained him there;

And, stirred by hauntings, he must needs repair

To where the tomb was. Lo, it stood still wasting

In no man's care.

p. 180"The travelled man you met

The last time," said the sexton, "has not yet

Appeared again, though wealth he had in plenty.

--Can he forget?

"The architect was hired

And came here on smart summons as desired,

But never the descendant came to tell him

What he required."

And so the tomb remained

Untouched, untended, crumbling, weather-stained,

And though the one-time foe was fain to right it

He still refrained.

"I'll set about it when

I am sure he'll come no more. Best wait till then."

But so it was that never the stranger entered

That city again.

And the well-meaner died

While waiting tremulously unsatisfied

That no return of the family's foreign scion

Would still betide.

p. 181And many years slid by,

And active church-restorers cast their eye

Upon the ancient garth and hoary building

The tomb stood nigh.

And when they had scraped each wall,

Pulled out the stately pews, and smartened all,

"It will be well," declared the spruce church-warden,

"To overhaul

"And broaden this path where shown;

Nothing prevents it but an old tombstone

Pertaining to a family forgotten,

Of deeds unknown.

"Their names can scarce be read,

Depend on't, all who care for them are dead."

So went the tomb, whose shards were as path-paving

Distributed.

Over it and about

Men's footsteps beat, and wind and water-spout,

Until the names, aforetime gnawed by weathers,

Were quite worn out.

p. 182So that no sage can say

In pensive progress near where they decay,

"This stone records a luminous line whose talents

Told in their day."

p. 183"REGRET NOT ME"

REGRET not me;

Beneath the sunny tree

I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

Swift as the light

I flew my faery flight;

Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

I did not know

That heydays fade and go,

But deemed that what was would be always so.

I skipped at morn

Between the yellowing corn,

Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

I ran at eves

Among the piled-up sheaves,

Dreaming, "I grieve not, therefore nothing grieves."

p. 184Now soon will come

The apple, pear, and plum

And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

Again you will fare

To cider-makings rare,

And junketings; but I shall not be there.

Yet gaily sing

Until the pewter ring

Those songs we sang when we went gipsying.

And lightly dance

Some triple-timed romance

In coupled figures, and forget mischance;

And mourn not me

Beneath the yellowing tree;

For I shall mind not, slumbering peacefully.

p. 185THE RECALCITRANTS

LET us off and search, and find a place

Where yours and mine can be natural lives,

Where no one comes who dissects and dives

And proclaims that ours is a curious case,

That its touch of romance can scarcely grace.

You would think it strange at first, but then

Everything has been strange in its time.

When some one said on a day of the prime

He would bow to no brazen god again

He doubtless dazed the mass of men.

None will recognize us as a pair whose claims

To righteous judgment we care not making;

Who have doubted if breath be worth the taking,

And have no respect for the current fames

Whence the savour has flown while abide the names.

We have found us already shunned, disdained,

And for re-acceptance have not once striven;

Whatever offence our course has given

The brunt thereof we have long sustained.

Well, let us away, scorned unexplained.

p. 186STARLINGS ON THE ROOF

"NO smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,

The people who lived here have left the spot,

And others are coming who knew them not.

"If you listen anon, with an ear intent,

The voices, you'll find, will be different

From the well-known ones of those who went."

"Why did they go? Their tones so bland

Were quite familiar to our band;

The comers we shall not understand."

"They look for a new life, rich and strange;

They do not know that, let them range

Wherever they may, they will get no change.

"They will drag their house-gear ever so far

In their search for a home no miseries mar;

They will find that as they were they are,

"That every hearth has a ghost, alack,

And can be but the scene of a bivouac

Till they move perforce--no time to pack!"

p. 187THE MOON LOOKS IN

I

I have risen again,

And awhile survey

By my chilly ray

Through your window-pane

Your upturned face,

As you think, "Ah-she

Now dreams of me

In her distant place!"

II

I pierce her blind

In her far-off home:

She fixes a comb,

And says in her mind,

"I start in an hour;

Whom shall I meet?

Won't the men be sweet,

And the women sour!"

p. 188THE SWEET HUSSY

IN his early days he was quite surprised

When she told him she was compromised

By meetings and lingerings at his whim,

And thinking not of herself but him;

While she lifted orbs aggrieved and round

That scandal should so soon abound,

(As she had raised them to nine or ten

Of antecedent nice young men)

And in remorse he thought with a sigh,

How good she is, and how bad am I!--

It was years before he understood

That she was the wicked one--he the good.

p. 189THE TELEGRAM

"O HE'S suffering--maybe dying--and I not there to aid,

And smooth his bed and whisper to him! Can I nohow go?

Only the nurse's brief twelve words thus hurriedly conveyed,

As by stealth, to let me know.

"He was the best and brightest!--candour shone upon his brow,

And I shall never meet again a soldier such as he,

And I loved him ere I knew it, and perhaps he's sinking now,

Far, far removed from me!"

--The yachts ride mute at anchor and the fulling moon is fair,

And the giddy folk are strutting up and down the smooth parade,

And in her wild distraction she seems not to be aware

That she lives no more a maid,

p. 190But has vowed and wived herself to one who blessed the ground she trod

To and from his scene of ministry, and thought her history known

In its last particular to him--aye, almost as to God,

And believed her quite his own.

So great her absentmindedness she droops as in a swoon,

And a movement of aversion mars her recent spousal grace,

And in silence we two sit here in our waning honeymoon

At this idle watering-place . . .

What now I see before me is a long lane overhung

With lovelessness, and stretching from the present to the grave.

And I would I were away from this, with friends I knew when young,

Ere a woman held me slave.

p. 191THE MOTH-SIGNAL

(On Egdon Heath)

"WHAT are you still, still thinking,"

He asked in vague surmise,

"That stare at the wick unblinking

With those great lost luminous eyes?"

"O, I see a poor moth burning

In the candle-flame," said she,

"Its wings and legs are turning

To a cinder rapidly."

"Moths fly in from the heather,"

He said, "now the days decline."

"I know," said she. "The weather,

I hope, will at last be fine.

"I think," she added lightly,

"I'll look out at the door.

The ring the moon wears nightly

May be visible now no more."

p. 192She rose, and, little heeding,

Her husband then went on

With his attentive reading

In the annals of ages gone.

Outside the house a figure

Came from the tumulus near,

And speedily waxed bigger,

And clasped and called her Dear.

"I saw the pale-winged token

You sent through the crack," sighed she.

"That moth is burnt and broken

With which you lured out me.

"And were I as the moth is

It might be better far

For one whose marriage troth is

Shattered as potsherds are!"

Then grinned the Ancient Briton

From the tumulus treed with pine:

"So, hearts are thwartly smitten

In these days as in mine!"

p. 193SEEN BY THE WAITS

THROUGH snowy woods and shady

We went to play a tune

To the lonely manor-lady

By the light of the Christmas moon.

We violed till, upward glancing

To where a mirror leaned,

We saw her airily dancing,

Deeming her movements screened;

Dancing alone in the room there,

Thin-draped in her robe of night;

Her postures, glassed in the gloom there,

Were a strange phantasmal sight.

She had learnt (we heard when homing)

That her roving spouse was dead;

Why she had danced in the gloaming

We thought, but never said.

p. 194THE TWO SOLDIERS

JUST at the corner of the wall

We met--yes, he and I--

Who had not faced in camp or hall

Since we bade home good-bye,

And what once happened came back--all--

Out of those years gone by.

And that strange woman whom we knew

And loved--long dead and gone,

Whose poor half-perished residue,

Tombless and trod, lay yon!

But at this moment to our view

Rose like a phantom wan.

And in his fixed face I could see,

Lit by a lurid shine,

The drama re-enact which she

Had dyed incarnadine

For us, and more. And doubtless he

Beheld it too in mine.

A start, as at one slightly known,

And with an indifferent air

We passed, without a sign being shown

That, as it real were,

A memory-acted scene had thrown

Its tragic shadow there.

p. 195THE DEATH OF REGRET

I OPENED my shutter at sunrise,

And looked at the hill hard by,

And I heartily grieved for the comrade

Who wandered up there to die.

I let in the morn on the morrow,

And failed not to think of him then,

As he trod up that rise in the twilight,

And never came down again.

I undid the shutter a week thence,

But not until after I'd turned

Did I call back his last departure

By the upland there discerned.

Uncovering the casement long later,

I bent to my toil till the gray,

When I said to myself, "Ah--what ails me,

To forget him all the day!"

As daily I flung back the shutter

In the same blank bald routine,

He scarcely once rose to remembrance

Through a month of my facing the scene.

p. 196And ah, seldom now do I ponder

At the window as heretofore

On the long valued one who died yonder,

And wastes by the sycamore.

p. 197IN THE DAYS OF CRINOLINE

A PLAIN tilt-bonnet on her head

She took the path across the leaze.

--Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said,

"Too dowdy that, for coquetries,

So I can hoe at ease."

But when she had passed into the heath,

And gained the wood beyond the flat,

She raised her skirts, and from beneath

Unpinned and drew as from a sheath

An ostrich-feathered hat.

And where the hat had hung she now

Concealed and pinned the dowdy hood,

And set the hat upon her brow,

And thus emerging from the wood

Tripped on in jaunty mood.

The sun was low and crimson-faced

As two came that way from the town,

And plunged into the wood untraced . . .

When separately therefrom they paced

The sun had quite gone down.

p. 198The hat and feather disappeared,

The dowdy hood again was donned,

And in the gloom the fair one neared

Her home and husband dour, who conned

Calmly his blue-eyed blonde.

"To-day," he said, "you have shown good sense,

A dress so modest and so meek

Should always deck your goings hence

Alone." And as a recompense

He kissed her on the cheek.

p. 199THE ROMAN GRAVEMOUNDS

BY Rome's dim relics there walks a man,

Eyes bent; and he carries a basket and spade;

I guess what impels him to scrape and scan;

Yea, his dreams of that Empire long decayed.

"Vast was Rome," he must muse, "in the world's regard,

Vast it looms there still, vast it ever will be;"

And he stoops as to dig and unmine some shard

Left by those who are held in such memory.

But no; in his basket, see, he has brought

A little white furred thing, stiff of limb,

Whose life never won from the world a thought;

It is this, and not Rome, that is moving him.

And to make it a grave he has come to the spot,

And he delves in the ancient dead's long home;

p. 200Their fames, their achievements, the man knows not;

The furred thing is all to him--nothing Rome!

"Here say you that Caesar's warriors lie?--

But my little white cat was my only friend!

Could she but live, might the record die

Of Caesar, his legions, his aims, his end!"

Well, Rome's long rule here is oft and again

A theme for the sages of history,

And the small furred life was worth no one's pen;

Yet its mourner's mood has a charm for me.

November 1910.

p. 201THE WORKBOX

"SEE, here's the workbox, little wife,

That I made of polished oak."

He was a joiner, of village life;

She came of borough folk.

He holds the present up to her

As with a smile she nears

And answers to the profferer,

"'Twill last all my sewing years!"

"I warrant it will. And longer too.

'Tis a scantling that I got

Off poor John Wayward's coffin, who

Died of they knew not what.

"The shingled pattern that seems to cease

Against your box's rim

Continues right on in the piece

That's underground with him.

p. 202"And while I worked it made me think

Of timber's varied doom;

One inch where people eat and drink,

The next inch in a tomb.

"But why do you look so white, my dear,

And turn aside your face?

You knew not that good lad, I fear,

Though he came from your native place?"

"How could I know that good young man,

Though he came from my native town,

When he must have left there earlier than

I was a woman grown?"

"Ah no. I should have understood!

It shocked you that I gave

To you one end of a piece of wood

Whose other is in a grave?"

"Don't, dear, despise my intellect,

Mere accidental things

Of that sort never have effect

On my imaginings."

Yet still her lips were limp and wan,

Her face still held aside,

As if she had known not only John,

But known of what he died.

p. 203THE SACRILEGE

A BALLAD-TRAGEDY

(Circa 182-)

PART I

"I HAVE a Love I love too well

Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor;

I have a Love I love too well,

To whom, ere she was mine,

'Such is my love for you,' I said,

'That you shall have to hood your head

A silken kerchief crimson-red,

Wove finest of the fine.'

"And since this Love, for one mad moon,

On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor,

Since this my Love for one mad moon

Did clasp me as her king,

I snatched a silk-piece red and rare

From off a stall at Priddy Fair,

For handkerchief to hood her hair

When we went gallanting.

p. 204"Full soon the four weeks neared their end

Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor;

And when the four weeks neared their end,

And their swift sweets outwore,

I said, 'What shall I do to own

Those beauties bright as tulips blown,

And keep you here with me alone

As mine for evermore?'

"And as she drowsed within my van

On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor--

And as she drowsed within my van,

And dawning turned to day,

She heavily raised her sloe-black eyes

And murmured back in softest wise,

'One more thing, and the charms you prize

Are yours henceforth for aye.

"'And swear I will I'll never go

While Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor

To meet the Cornish Wrestler Joe

For dance and dallyings.

If you'll to yon cathedral shrine,

And finger from the chest divine

Treasure to buy me ear-drops fine,

And richly jewelled rings.'

"I said: 'I am one who has gathered gear

From Marlbury Downs to Dunkery Tor,

Who has gathered gear for many a year

From mansion, mart and fair;

p. 205But at God's house I've stayed my hand,

Hearing within me some command--

Curbed by a law not of the land

From doing damage there.'

"Whereat she pouts, this Love of mine,

As Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor,

And still she pouts, this Love of mine,

So cityward I go.

But ere I start to do the thing,

And speed my soul's imperilling

For one who is my ravishing

And all the joy I know,

"I come to lay this charge on thee--

On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor--

I come to lay this charge on thee

With solemn speech and sign:

Should things go ill, and my life pay

For botchery in this rash assay,

You are to take hers likewise--yea,

The month the law takes mine.

"For should my rival, Wrestler Joe,

Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor--

My reckless rival, Wrestler Joe,

My Love's possessor be,

My tortured spirit would not rest,

But wander weary and distrest

Throughout the world in wild protest:

The thought nigh maddens me!"

p. 206PART II

Thus did he speak--this brother of mine--

On Exon Wild by Dunkery Tor,

Born at my birth of mother of mine,

And forthwith went his way

To dare the deed some coming night . . .

I kept the watch with shaking sight,

The moon at moments breaking bright,

At others glooming gray.

For three full days I heard no sound

Where Dunkery frowns on Exon Moor,

I heard no sound at all around

Whether his fay prevailed,

Or one malign the master were,

Till some afoot did tidings bear

How that, for all his practised care,

He had been caught and jailed.

They had heard a crash when twelve had chimed

By Mendip east of Dunkery Tor,

When twelve had chimed and moonlight climbed;

They watched, and he was tracked

By arch and aisle and saint and knight

Of sculptured stonework sheeted white

In the cathedral's ghostly light,

And captured in the act.

p. 207Yes; for this Love he loved too well

Where Dunkery sights the Severn shore,

All for this Love he loved too well

He burst the holy bars,

Seized golden vessels from the chest

To buy her ornaments of the best,

At her ill-witchery's request

And lure of eyes like stars . . .

When blustering March confused the sky

In Toneborough Town by Exon Moor,

When blustering March confused the sky

They stretched him; and he died.

Down in the crowd where I, to see

The end of him, stood silently,

With a set face he lipped to me--

"Remember." "Ay!" I cried.

By night and day I shadowed her

From Toneborough Deane to Dunkery Tor,

I shadowed her asleep, astir,

And yet I could not bear--

Till Wrestler Joe anon began

To figure as her chosen man,

And took her to his shining van--

To doom a form so fair!

He made it handsome for her sake--

And Dunkery smiled to Exon Moor--

He made it handsome for her sake,

Painting it out and in;

p. 208And on the door of apple-green

A bright brass knocker soon was seen,

And window-curtains white and clean

For her to sit within.

And all could see she clave to him

As cleaves a cloud to Dunkery Tor,

Yea, all could see she clave to him,

And every day I said,

"A pity it seems to part those two

That hourly grow to love more true:

Yet she's the wanton woman who

Sent one to swing till dead!"

That blew to blazing all my hate,

While Dunkery frowned on Exon Moor,

And when the river swelled, her fate

Came to her pitilessly . . .

I dogged her, crying: "Across that plank

They use as bridge to reach yon bank

A coat and hat lie limp and dank;

Your goodman's, can they be?"

She paled, and went, I close behind--

And Exon frowned to Dunkery Tor,

She went, and I came up behind

And tipped the plank that bore

Her, fleetly flitting across to eye

What such might bode. She slid awry;

And from the current came a cry,

A gurgle; and no more.

p. 209How that befell no mortal knew

From Marlbury Downs to Exon Moor;

No mortal knew that deed undue

But he who schemed the crime,

Which night still covers . . . But in dream

Those ropes of hair upon the stream

He sees, and he will hear that scream

Until his judgment-time.

p. 210THE ABBEY MASON

(Inventor of the "Perpendicular" Style of Gothic Architecture)

THE new-vamped Abbey shaped apace

In the fourteenth century of grace;

(The church which, at an after date,

Acquired cathedral rank and state.)

Panel and circumscribing wall

Of latest feature, trim and tall,

Rose roundabout the Norman core

In prouder pose than theretofore,

Encasing magically the old

With parpend ashlars manifold.

The trowels rang out, and tracery

Appeared where blanks had used to be.

p. 211Men toiled for pleasure more than pay,

And all went smoothly day by day,

Till, in due course, the transept part

Engrossed the master-mason's art.

--Home-coming thence he tossed and turned

Throughout the night till the new sun burned.

"What fearful visions have inspired

These gaingivings?" his wife inquired;

"As if your tools were in your hand

You have hammered, fitted, muttered, planned;

"You have thumped as you were working hard:

I might have found me bruised and scarred.

"What then's amiss. What eating care

Looms nigh, whereof I am unaware?"

He answered not, but churchward went,

Viewing his draughts with discontent;

And fumbled there the livelong day

Till, hollow-eyed, he came away.

--'Twas said, "The master-mason's ill!"

And all the abbey works stood still.

p. 212Quoth Abbot Wygmore: "Why, O why

Distress yourself? You'll surely die!"

The mason answered, trouble-torn,

"This long-vogued style is quite outworn!

"The upper archmould nohow serves

To meet the lower tracery curves:

"The ogees bend too far away

To give the flexures interplay.

"This it is causes my distress . . .

So it will ever be unless

"New forms be found to supersede

The circle when occasions need.

"To carry it out I have tried and toiled,

And now perforce must own me foiled!

"Jeerers will say: 'Here was a man

Who could not end what he began!'"

--So passed that day, the next, the next;

The abbot scanned the task, perplexed;

The townsmen mustered all their wit

To fathom how to compass it,

p. 213But no raw artistries availed

Where practice in the craft had failed . . .

--One night he tossed, all open-eyed,

And early left his helpmeet's side.

Scattering the rushes of the floor

He wandered from the chamber door

And sought the sizing pile, whereon

Struck dimly a cadaverous dawn

Through freezing rain, that drenched the board

Of diagram-lines he last had scored--

Chalked phantasies in vain begot

To knife the architectural knot--

In front of which he dully stood,

Regarding them in hopeless mood.

He closelier looked; then looked again:

The chalk-scratched draught-board faced the rain,

Whose icicled drops deformed the lines

Innumerous of his lame designs,

So that they streamed in small white threads

From the upper segments to the heads

p. 214Of arcs below, uniting them

Each by a stalactitic stem.

--At once, with eyes that struck out sparks,

He adds accessory cusping-marks,

Then laughs aloud. The thing was done

So long assayed from sun to sun . . .

--Now in his joy he grew aware

Of one behind him standing there,

And, turning, saw the abbot, who

The weather's whim was watching too.

Onward to Prime the abbot went,

Tacit upon the incident.

--Men now discerned as days revolved

The ogive riddle had been solved;

Templates were cut, fresh lines were chalked

Where lines had been defaced and balked,

And the work swelled and mounted higher,

Achievement distancing desire;

Here jambs with transoms fixed between,

Where never the like before had been--

p. 215There little mullions thinly sawn

Where meeting circles once were drawn.

"We knew," men said, "the thing would go

After his craft-wit got aglow,

"And, once fulfilled what he has designed,

We'll honour him and his great mind!"

When matters stood thus poised awhile,

And all surroundings shed a smile,

The master-mason on an eve

Homed to his wife and seemed to grieve . . .

--"The abbot spoke to me to-day:

He hangs about the works alway.

"He knows the source as well as I

Of the new style men magnify.

"He said: 'You pride yourself too much

On your creation. Is it such?

"'Surely the hand of God it is

That conjured so, and only His!--

"'Disclosing by the frost and rain

Forms your invention chased in vain;

p. 216"'Hence the devices deemed so great

You copied, and did not create.'

"I feel the abbot's words are just,

And that all thanks renounce I must.

"Can a man welcome praise and pelf

For hatching art that hatched itself? . . .

"So, I shall own the deft design

Is Heaven's outshaping, and not mine."

"What!" said she. "Praise your works ensure

To throw away, and quite obscure

"Your beaming and beneficent star?

Better you leave things as they are!

"Why, think awhile. Had not your zest

In your loved craft curtailed your rest--

"Had you not gone there ere the day

The sun had melted all away!"

--But, though his good wife argued so,

The mason let the people know

That not unaided sprang the thought

Whereby the glorious fane was wrought,

p. 217But that by frost when dawn was dim

The method was disclosed to him.

"Yet," said the townspeople thereat,

"'Tis your own doing, even with that!"

But he--chafed, childlike, in extremes--

The temperament of men of dreams--

Aloofly scrupled to admit

That he did aught but borrow it,

And diffidently made request

That with the abbot all should rest.

--As none could doubt the abbot's word,

Or question what the church averred,

The mason was at length believed

Of no more count than he conceived,

And soon began to lose the fame

That late had gathered round his name . . .

--Time passed, and like a living thing

The pile went on embodying,

And workmen died, and young ones grew,

And the old mason sank from view

p. 218And Abbots Wygmore and Staunton went

And Horton sped the embellishment.

But not till years had far progressed

Chanced it that, one day, much impressed,

Standing within the well-graced aisle,

He asked who first conceived the style;

And some decrepit sage detailed

How, when invention nought availed,

The cloud-cast waters in their whim

Came down, and gave the hint to him

Who struck each arc, and made each mould;

And how the abbot would not hold

As sole begetter him who applied

Forms the Almighty sent as guide;

And how the master lost renown,

And wore in death no artist's crown.

--Then Horton, who in inner thought

Had more perceptions than he taught,

Replied: "Nay; art can but transmute;

Invention is not absolute;

p. 219"Things fail to spring from nought at call,

And art-beginnings most of all.

"He did but what all artists do,

Wait upon Nature for his cue."

--"Had you been here to tell them so

Lord Abbot, sixty years ago,

"The mason, now long underground,

Doubtless a different fate had found.

"He passed into oblivion dim,

And none knew what became of him!

"His name? 'Twas of some common kind

And now has faded out of mind."

The Abbot: "It shall not be hid!

I'll trace it." . . . But he never did.

--When longer yet dank death had wormed

The brain wherein the style had germed

From Gloucester church it flew afar--

The style called Perpendicular.--

To Winton and to Westminster

It ranged, and grew still beautifuller:

p. 220From Solway Frith to Dover Strand

Its fascinations starred the land,

Not only on cathedral walls

But upon courts and castle halls,

Till every edifice in the isle

Was patterned to no other style,

And till, long having played its part,

The curtain fell on Gothic art.

--Well: when in Wessex on your rounds,

Take a brief step beyond its bounds,

And enter Gloucester: seek the quoin

Where choir and transept interjoin,

And, gazing at the forms there flung

Against the sky by one unsung--

The ogee arches transom-topped,

The tracery-stalks by spandrels stopped,

Petrified lacework--lightly lined

On ancient massiveness behind--

Muse that some minds so modest be

As to renounce fame's fairest fee,

p. 221(Like him who crystallized on this spot

His visionings, but lies forgot,

And many a mediaeval one

Whose symmetries salute the sun)

While others boom a baseless claim,

And upon nothing rear a name.

p. 222THE JUBILEE OF A MAGAZINE

(To the Editor)

YES; your up-dated modern page--

All flower-fresh, as it appears--

Can claim a time-tried lineage,

That reaches backward fifty years

(Which, if but short for sleepy squires,

Is much in magazines' careers).

--Here, on your cover, never tires

The sower, reaper, thresher, while

As through the seasons of our sires

Each wills to work in ancient style

With seedlip, sickle, share and flail,

Though modes have since moved many a mile!

The steel-roped plough now rips the vale,

With cog and tooth the sheaves are won,

Wired wheels drum out the wheat like hail;

p. 223But if we ask, what has been done

To unify the mortal lot

Since your bright leaves first saw the sun,

Beyond mechanic furtherance--what

Advance can rightness, candour, claim?

Truth bends abashed, and answers not.

Despite your volumes' gentle aim

To straighten visions wry and wrong,

Events jar onward much the same!

--Had custom tended to prolong,

As on your golden page engrained,

Old processes of blade and prong,

And best invention been retained

For high crusades to lessen tears

Throughout the race, the world had gained! . . .

But too much, this, for fifty years.

p. 224THE SATIN SHOES

"IF ever I walk to church to wed,

As other maidens use,

And face the gathered eyes," she said,

"I'll go in satin shoes!"

She was as fair as early day

Shining on meads unmown,

And her sweet syllables seemed to play

Like flute-notes softly blown.

The time arrived when it was meet

That she should be a bride;

The satin shoes were on her feet,

Her father was at her side.

They stood within the dairy door,

And gazed across the green;

The church loomed on the distant moor,

But rain was thick between.

p. 225"The grass-path hardly can be stepped,

The lane is like a pool!"--

Her dream is shown to be inept,

Her wish they overrule.

"To go forth shod in satin soft

A coach would be required!"

For thickest boots the shoes were doffed--

Those shoes her soul desired . . .

All day the bride, as overborne,

Was seen to brood apart,

And that the shoes had not been worn

Sat heavy on her heart.

From her wrecked dream, as months flew on,

Her thought seemed not to range.

"What ails the wife?" they said anon,

"That she should be so strange?" . . .

Ah--what coach comes with furtive glide--

A coach of closed-up kind?

It comes to fetch the last year's bride,

Who wanders in her mind.

She strove with them, and fearfully ran

Stairward with one low scream:

"Nay--coax her," said the madhouse man,

"With some old household theme."

p. 226"If you will go, dear, you must fain

Put on those shoes--the pair

Meant for your marriage, which the rain

Forbade you then to wear."

She clapped her hands, flushed joyous hues;

"O yes--I'll up and ride

If I am to wear my satin shoes

And be a proper bride!"

Out then her little foot held she,

As to depart with speed;

The madhouse man smiled pleasantly

To see the wile succeed.

She turned to him when all was done,

And gave him her thin hand,

Exclaiming like an enraptured one,

"This time it will be grand!"

She mounted with a face elate,

Shut was the carriage door;

They drove her to the madhouse gate,

And she was seen no more . . .

Yet she was fair as early day

Shining on meads unmown,

And her sweet syllables seemed to play

Like flute-notes softly blown.

p. 227EXEUNT OMNES

I

EVERYBODY else, then, going,

And I still left where the fair was? . . .

Much have I seen of neighbour loungers

Making a lusty showing,

Each now past all knowing.

II

There is an air of blankness

In the street and the littered spaces;

Thoroughfare, steeple, bridge and highway

Wizen themselves to lankness;

Kennels dribble dankness.

III

Folk all fade. And whither,

As I wait alone where the fair was?

Into the clammy and numbing night-fog

Whence they entered hither.

Soon do I follow thither!

June 2, 1913.

p. 228A POET

ATTENTIVE eyes, fantastic heed,

Assessing minds, he does not need,

Nor urgent writs to sup or dine,

Nor pledges in the roseate wine.

For loud acclaim he does not care

By the august or rich or fair,

Nor for smart pilgrims from afar,

Curious on where his hauntings are.

But soon or later, when you hear

That he has doffed this wrinkled gear,

Some evening, at the first star-ray,

Come to his graveside, pause and say:

"Whatever the message his to tell,

Two bright-souled women loved him well."

Stand and say that amid the dim:

It will be praise enough for him.

July 1914.

p. 229POSTSCRIPT

"MEN WHO MARCH AWAY"

(SONG OF THE SOLDIERS)

WHAT of the faith and fire within us

Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,

To hazards whence no tears can win us;

What of the faith and fire within us

Men who march away?

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

Friend with the musing eye,

Who watch us stepping by

With doubt and dolorous sigh?

Can much pondering so hoodwink you!

Is it a purblind prank, O think you,

Friend with the musing eye?

p. 230Nay. We well see what we are doing,

Though some may not see--

Dalliers as they be--

England's need are we;

Her distress would leave us rueing:

Nay. We well see what we are doing,

Though some may not see!

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just,

And that braggarts must

Surely bite the dust,

Press we to the field ungrieving,

In our heart of hearts believing

Victory crowns the just.

Hence the faith and fire within us

Men who march away

Ere the barn-cocks say

Night is growing gray,

To hazards whence no tears can win us:

Hence the faith and fire within us

Men who march away.

September 5, 1914.

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