The Wood Fire (A Fragment)

"This is a brightsome blaze you've lit good friend, to-night!"

" --Aye, it has been the bleakest spring I have felt for years,

And nought compares with cloven logs to keep alight:

I buy them bargain-cheap of the executioners,

As I dwell near; and they wanted the crosses out of sight

By Passover, not to affront the eyes of visitors.

"Yes, they're from the crucifixions last week-ending

At Kranion.  We can sometimes use the poles again,

But they get split by the nails, and 'tis quicker work than mending

To knock together new; though the uprights now and then

Serve twice when they're let stand.  But if a feast's impending,

As lately, you've to tidy up for the corners' ken.

"Though only three were impaled, you may know it didn't pass off

So quietly as was wont?  That Galilee carpenter's son

Who boasted he was king, incensed the rabble to scoff:

I heard the noise from my garden.  This piece is the one he was on...

Yes, it blazes up well if lit with a few dry chips and shroff;

And it's worthless for much else, what with cuts and stains thereon."

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.

I Look into my Glass

I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,

And say, "Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest

By hearts grown cold to me,

Could lonely wait my endless rest

With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve;

Part steals, lets part abide;

And shakes this fragile frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide.

Seventy-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.

The Rambler

I do not see the hills around,

Nor mark the tints the copses wear;

I do not note the grassy ground

And constellated daisies there.

I hear not the contralto note

Of cuckoos hid on either hand,

The whirr that shakes the nighthawk's throat

When eve's brown awning hoods the land.

Some say each songster, tree, and mead -

All eloquent of love divine -

Receives their constant careful heed:

Such keen appraisement is not mine.

The tones around me that I hear,

The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,

Are those far back ones missed when near,

And now perceived too late by me!

The Old Gown (Song)

I have seen her in gowns the brightest,

   Of azure, green, and red,

And in the simplest, whitest,

   Muslined from heel to head;

I have watched her walking, riding,

   Shade-flecked by a leafy tree,

Or in fixed thought abiding

   By the foam-fingered sea.

In woodlands I have known her,

   When boughs were mourning loud,

In the rain-reek she has shown her

   Wild-haired and watery-browed.

And once or twice she has cast me

   As she pomped along the street

Court-clad, ere quite she had passed me,

   A glance from her chariot-seat.

But in my memoried passion

   For evermore stands she

In the gown of fading fashion

   She wore that night when we,

Doomed long to part, assembled

   In the snug small room; yea, when

She sang with lips that trembled,

   "Shall I see his face again?"

The End of the Episode

   Indulge no more may we

In this sweet-bitter pastime:

The love-light shines the last time

   Between you, Dear, and me.

   There shall remain no trace

Of what so closely tied us,

And blank as ere love eyed us

   Will be our meeting-place.

   The flowers and thymy air,

Will they now miss our coming?

The dumbles thin their humming

   To find we haunt not there?

   Though fervent was our vow,

Though ruddily ran our pleasure,

Bliss has fulfilled its measure,

   And sees its sentence now.

   Ache deep; but make no moans:

Smile out; but stilly suffer:

The paths of love are rougher

   Than thoroughfares of stones.

On a Midsummer Eve

I idly cut a parsley stalk,

And blew therein towards the moon;

I had not thought what ghosts would walk

With shivering footsteps to my tune.

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand

As if to drink, into the brook,

And a faint figure seemed to stand

Above me, with the bygone look.

I lipped rough rhymes of chance, not choice,

I thought not what my words might be;

There came into my ear a voice

That turned a tenderer verse for me.

On a discovered curl of hair

When your soft welcomings were said,

This curl was waving on your head,

And when we walked where breakers dinned

It sported in the sun and wind,

And when I had won your words of grace

It brushed and clung about my face.

Then, to abate the misery

Of absentness, you gave it me.

Where are its fellows now?  Ah, they

For brightest brown have donned a gray,

And gone into a caverned ark,

Ever unopened, always dark!

Yet this one curl, untouched of time,

Beams with live brown as in its prime,

So that it seems I even could now

Restore it to the living brow

By bearing down the western road

Till I had reached your old abode.

February 1913.

The 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?

Looking at a Picture on an Anniversary

But don't you know it, my dear,

   Don't you know it,

That this day of the year

(What rainbow-rays embow it!)

We met, strangers confessed,

   But parted--blest?

Though at this query, my dear,

   There in your frame

Unmoved you still appear,

You must be thinking the same,

But keep that look demure

   Just to allure.

And now at length a trace

   I surely vision

Upon that wistful face

Of old-time recognition,

Smiling forth, "Yes, as you say,

   It is the day."

For this one phase of you

   Now left on earth

This great date must endue

With pulsings of rebirth? -

I see them vitalize

   Those two deep eyes!

But if this face I con

   Does not declare

Consciousness living on

Still in it, little I care

To live myself, my dear,

   Lone-labouring here!

Spring 1913.

Aberdeen (April:1905)

"And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times." - Isaiah xxxiii. 6.

I looked and thought, "All is too gray and cold

To wake my place-enthusiasms of old!"

Till a voice passed:  "Behind that granite mien

Lurks the imposing beauty of a Queen."

I looked anew; and saw the radiant form

Of Her who soothes in stress, who steers in storm,

On the grave influence of whose eyes sublime

Men count for the stability of the time.

Just the same

I sat.  It all was past;

Hope never would hail again;

Fair days had ceased at a blast,

The world was a darkened den.

The beauty and dream were gone,

And the halo in which I had hied

So gaily gallantly on

Had suffered blot and died!

I went forth, heedless whither,

In a cloud too black for name:

- People frisked hither and thither;

The world was just the same.

Weathers

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,

   And so do I;

When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,

   And nestlings fly:

And the little brown nightingale bills his best,

And they sit outside at "The Travellers' Rest,"

And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,

And citizens dream of the south and west,

   And so do I.

II

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,

   And so do I;

When beeches drip in browns and duns,

   And thresh, and ply;

And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe,

And meadow rivulets overflow,

And drops on gate-bars hang in a row,

And rooks in families homeward go,

   And so do I.

The Problem

   Shall we conceal the Case, or tell it -

      We who believe the evidence?

   Here and there the watch-towers knell it

      With a sullen significance,

Heard of the few who hearken intently and carry an eagerly upstrained

sense.

   Hearts that are happiest hold not by it;

      Better we let, then, the old view reign;

   Since there is peace in it, why decry it?

      Since there is comfort, why disdain?

Note not the pigment the while that the painting determines

humanity's joy and pain!

I was not he (song)

   I was not he--the man

Who used to pilgrim to your gate,

At whose smart step you grew elate,

   And rosed, as maidens can,

      For a brief span.

   It was not I who sang

Beside the keys you touched so true

With note-bent eyes, as if with you

   It counted not whence sprang

      The voice that rang . . .

   Yet though my destiny

It was to miss your early sweet,

You still, when turned to you my feet,

   Had sweet enough to be

      A prize for me!

To a well-named dwelling

Glad old house of lichened stonework,

What I owed you in my lone work,

   Noon and night!

Whensoever faint or ailing,

Letting go my grasp and failing,

   You lent light.

How by that fair title came you?

Did some forward eye so name you

   Knowing that one,

Sauntering down his century blindly,

Would remark your sound, so kindly,

   And be won?

Smile in sunlight, sleep in moonlight,

Bask in April, May, and June-light,

   Zephyr-fanned;

Let your chambers show no sorrow,

Blanching day, or stuporing morrow,

   While they stand.

Wagtail and Baby

A baby watched a ford, whereto

   A wagtail came for drinking;

A blaring bull went wading through,

   The wagtail showed no shrinking.

A stallion splashed his way across,

   The birdie nearly sinking;

He gave his plumes a twitch and toss,

   And held his own unblinking.

Next saw the baby round the spot

   A mongrel slowly slinking;

The wagtail gazed, but faltered not

   In dip and sip and prinking.

A perfect gentleman then neared;

   The wagtail, in a winking,

With terror rose and disappeared;

   The baby fell a-thinking.

The Spring Call

Down Wessex way, when spring's a-shine,
   The blackbird's "pret-ty de-urr!"
In Wessex accents marked as mine
   Is heard afar and near.

He flutes it strong, as if in song
   No R's of feebler tone
Than his appear in "pretty dear,"
   Have blackbirds ever known.

Yet they pipe "prattie deerh!" I glean,
   Beneath a Scottish sky,
And "pehty de-aw!" amid the treen
   Of Middlesex or nigh.

While some folk say--perhaps in play -
   Who know the Irish isle,
'Tis "purrity dare!" in treeland there
   When songsters would beguile.

Well: I'll say what the listening birds
   Say, hearing "pret-ty de-urr!" -
However strangers sound such words,
   That's how we sound them here.

Yes, in this clime at pairing time,
   As soon as eyes can see her
At dawn of day, the proper way
   To call is "pret-ty de-urr!"

from "The Revisitation"

   Round about me bulged the barrows
As before, in antique silence--immemorial funeral piles -
Where the sleek herds trampled daily the remains of flint-tipt arrows
   Mid the thyme and chamomiles;

   And the Sarsen stone there, dateless,
On whose breast we had sat and told the zephyrs many a tender vow,
Held the heat of yester sun, as sank thereon one fated mateless
   From those far fond hours till now.

   Maybe flustered by my presence
Rose the peewits, just as all those years back, wailing soft and loud,
And revealing their pale pinions like a fitful phosphorescence
   Up against the cope of cloud,

   Where their dolesome exclamations
Seemed the voicings of the self-same throats I had heard when life was
green,
Though since that day uncounted frail forgotten generations
   Of their kind had flecked the scene. -

   And so, living long and longer
In a past that lived no more, my eyes discerned there, suddenly,
That a figure broke the skyline--first in vague contour, then stronger,
   And was crossing near to me.