New Poems by Francis Thompson Part 10

Ah!

If not in all too late and frozen a day I come in rearward of the throats of song, Unto the deaf sense of the ag-ed year Singing with doom upon me; yet give heed!

One poet with sick pinion, that still feels Breath through the Orient gateways closing fast, Fast closing t'ward the undelighted night!

Anthem.

In nescientness, in nescientness, Mother, we put these fleshly lendings on Thou yield'st to thy poor children; took thy gift Of life, which must, in all the after-days, Be craved again with tears,-- With fresh and still-pet.i.tionary tears.

Being once bound thine almsmen for that gift, We are bound to beggary, nor our own can call The journal dole of customary life, But after suit obsequious for't to thee.

Indeed this flesh, O Mother, A beggar's gown, a client's badging, We find, which from thy hands we simply took, Nought dreaming of the after penury, In nescientness.

In a little joy, in a little joy, We wear awhile thy sore insignia, Nor know thy heel o' the neck. O Mother! Mother!

Then what use knew I of thy solemn robes, But as a child, to play with them? I bade thee Leave thy great husbandries, thy grave designs, Thy tedious state which irked my ignorant years, Thy winter-watches, suckling of the grain, Severe premeditation taciturn Upon the brooded Summer, thy chill cares, And all thy ministries majestical, To sport with me, thy darling. Thought I not Thou set'st thy seasons forth processional To pamper me with pageant,--thou thyself My fellow-gamester, appanage of mine arms?

Then what wild Dionysia I, young Baccha.n.a.l, Danced in thy lap! Ah for thy gravity!

Then, O Earth, thou rang'st beneath me, Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward, Even with the s.h.i.+fted Poise and footing of my thought!

I brake through thy doors of sunset, Ran before the hooves of sunrise, Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies Wild and wilful As a poet's hand could twine them; Caught in my fantasy's crystal chalice The Bow, as its cataract of colours Plashed to thee downward; Then when thy circuit swung to nightward, Night the abhorr-ed, night was a new dawning, Celestial dawning Over the ultimate marges of the soul; Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me, And like a windy arras waved with dreams.

Sleep I took not for my bedfellow, Who could waken To a revel, an inexhaustible Wa.s.sail of orgiac imageries; Then while I wore thy sore insignia In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy; Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee, Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman; Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot, But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe New from their mother's morning bosom. So I, Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven, Most Hermes-like, did keep My vital and resilient path, and felt The play of wings about my fledg-ed heel-- Sure on the verges of precipitous dream, Swift in its springing From jut to jut of inaccessible fancies, In a little joy.

In a little thought, in a little thought, We stand and eye thee in a grave dismay, With sad and doubtful questioning, when first Thou speak'st to us as men: like sons who hear Newly their mother's history, unthought Before, and say--'She is not as we dreamed: Ah me! we are beguiled!' What art thou, then, That art not our conceiving? Art thou not Too old for thy young children? Or perchance, Keep'st thou a youth perpetual-burnishable Beyond thy sons decrepit? It is long Since Time was first a fledgling; Yet thou may'st be but as a pendant bulla Against his stripling bosom swung. Alack!

For that we seem indeed To have slipped the world's great leaping-time, and come Upon thy pinched and dozing days: these weeds, These corporal leavings, thou not cast'st us new, Fresh from thy crafts.h.i.+p, like the lilies' coats, But foist'st us off With hasty tarnished piecings negligent, Snippets and waste From old ancestral wearings, That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh After our father's surfeits; nay with c.h.i.n.ks, Some of us, that if speech may have free leave Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad With more than our sires' heaviness, and with More than their weakness weak; we shall not be Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not Rejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother!

What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed, Thou l.u.s.tingly engender'st, To sweat, and make his brag, and rot, Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?

From nightly towers He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens, Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust, And yet is he successive unto nothing But patrimony of a little mould, And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth Avid of all dominion and all mightiness, All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs, All beauty, and all starry majesties, And dim transtellar things;--even that it may, Filled in the ending with a puff of dust, Confess--'It is enough.' The world left empty What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded For pride, for potency, infinity, All heights, all deeps, and all immensities, Arrased with purple like the house of kings,-- To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!

Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues, Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark As we ourselves, thy darkest! We the young, In a little thought, in a little thought, At last confront thee, and ourselves in thee, And wake disgarmented of glory: as one On a mount standing, and against him stands, On the mount adverse, crowned with westering rays, The golden sun, and they two brotherly Gaze each on each; He faring down To the dull vale, his G.o.dhead peels from him Till he can scarcely spurn the pebble-- For nothingness of new-found mortality-- That mutinies against his gall-ed foot.

Littly he sets him to the daily way, With all around the valleys growing grave, And known things changed and strange; but he holds on, Though all the land of light be widow-ed, In a little thought.

In a little strength, in a little strength, We affront thy unveiled face intolerable, Which yet we do sustain.

Though I the Orient never more shall feel Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart Clang through my shaken body like a gong; Nor ever more with spurted feet shall tread I' the winepresses of song; nought's truly lost That moulds to sprout forth gain: now I have on me The high Phoebean priesthood, and that craves An unrash utterance; not with flaunted hem May the Muse enter in behind the veil, Nor, though we hold the sacred dances good, Shall the holy Virgins maenadize: ruled lips Befit a votaress Muse.

Thence with no mutable, nor no gelid love, I keep, O Earth, thy wors.h.i.+p, Though life slow, and the sobering Genius change To a lamp his gusty torch. What though no more Athwart its roseal glow Thy face look forth triumphal? Thou put'st on Strange sanct.i.ties of pathos; like this knoll Made derelict of day, Couchant and shadow-ed Under dim Vesper's overloosened hair: This, where emboss-ed with the half-blown seed The solemn purple thistle stands in gra.s.s Grey as an exhalation, when the bank Holds mist for water in the nights of Fall.

Not to the boy, although his eyes be pure As the prime snowdrop is, Ere the rash Phoebus break her cloister Of sanctimonious snow; Or Winter fasting sole on Himalay Since those dove-nuncioed days When Asia rose from bathing; Not to such eyes, Uneuphrasied with tears, the hierarchical Vision lies unoccult, rank under rank Through all create down-wheeling, from the Throne Even to the bases of the pregnant ooze.

This is the enchantment, this the exaltation, The all-compensating wonder, Giving to common things wild kindred With the gold-tesserate floors of Jove; Linking such heights and such humilities Hand in hand in ordinal dances, That I do think my tread, Stirring the blossoms in the meadow-gra.s.s, Flickers the unwithering stars.

This to the shunless fardel of the world Nerves my uncurb-ed back; that I endure, The monstrous Temple's moveless caryatid, With wide eyes calm upon the whole of things, In a little strength.

In a little sight, in a little sight, We learn from what in thee is credible The incredible, with b.l.o.o.d.y clutch and feet Clinging the painful juts of jagg-ed faith.

Science, old noser in its prideful straw, That with anatomising scalpel tents Its three-inch of thy skin, and brags--'All's bare,'

The eyeless worm, that boring works the soil, Making it capable for the crops of G.o.d; Against its own dull will Ministers poppies to our troublous thought, A Balaam come to prophecy,--parables, Nor of its parable itself is ware, Grossly unwotting; all things has expounded Reflux and influx, counts the sepulchre The seminary of being, and extinction The Ceres of existence: it discovers Life in putridity, vigour in decay; Dissolution even, and disintegration, Which in our dull thoughts symbolise disorder, Finds in G.o.d's thoughts irrefragable order, And admirable the manner of our corruption As of our health. It grafts upon the cypress The tree of Life--Death dies on his own dart Promising to our ashes perpetuity, And to our perishable elements Their proper imperishability; extracting Medicaments from out mortality Against too mortal cogitation; till Even of the caput mortuum we do thus Make a memento vivere. To such uses I put the blinding knowledge of the fool, Who in no order seeth ordinance; Nor thrust my arm in nature shoulder-high, And cry--'There's nought beyond!' How should I so, That cannot with these arms of mine engirdle All which I am; that am a foreigner In mine own region? Who the chart shall draw Of the strange courts and vaulty labyrinths, The s.p.a.cious tenements and wide pleasances, Innumerable corridors far-withdrawn, Where I wander darkling, of myself?

Darkling I wander, nor I dare explore The long arcane of those dim catacombs, Where the rat memory does its burrows make, Close-seal them as I may, and my stolen tread Starts populace, a gens lucifuga; That too strait seems my mind my mind to hold, And I myself incontinent of me.

Then go I, my foul-venting ignorance With scabby sapience plastered, aye forsooth!

Clap my wise foot-rule to the walls o' the world, And vow--A goodly house, but something ancient, And I can find no Master? Rather, nay, By baffled seeing, something I divine Which baffles, and a seeing set beyond; And so with strenuous gazes sounding down, Like to the day-long porer on a stream, Whose last look is his deepest, I beside This slow perpetual Time stand patiently, In a little sight.

In a little dust, in a little dust, Earth, thou reclaim'st us, who do all our lives Find of thee but Egyptian villeinage.

Thou dost this body, this enhavocked realm, Subject to ancient and ancestral shadows; Descended pa.s.sions sway it; it is distraught With ghostly usurpation, dinned and fretted With the still-tyrannous dead; a haunted tenement, Peopled from barrows and outworn ossuaries.

Thou giv'st us life not half so willingly As thou undost thy giving; thou that teem'st The stealthy terror of the sinuous pard, The lion maned with curl-ed puissance, The serpent, and all fair strong beasts of ravin, Thyself most fair and potent beast of ravin; And thy great eaters thou, the greatest, eat'st.

Thou hast devoured mammoth and mastodon, And many a floating bank of fangs, The scaly scourges of thy primal brine, And the tower-crested plesiosaure.

Thou fill'st thy mouth with nations, gorgest slow On purple aeons of kings; man's hulking towers Are carcase for thee, and to modern sun Disglutt'st their splintered bones.

Rabble of Pharaohs and Arsacidae Keep their cold house within thee; thou hast sucked down How many Ninevehs and Hecatompyloi, And perished cities whose great phantasmata O'erbrow the silent citizens of Dis:- Hast not thy fill?

Tarry awhile, lean Earth, for thou shalt drink, Even till thy dull throat sicken, The draught thou grow'st most fat on; hear'st thou not The world's knives bickering in their sheaths? O patience!

Much offal of a foul world comes thy way, And man's superfluous cloud shall soon be laid In a little blood.

In a little peace, in a little peace, Thou dost rebate thy rigid purposes Of imposed being, and relenting, mend'st Too much, with nought. The westering Phoebus' horse Paws i' the lucent dust as when he shocked The East with rising; O how may I trace In this decline that morning when we did Sport 'twixt the claws of newly-whelped existence, Which had not yet learned rending? we did then Divinely stand, not knowing yet against us Sentence had pa.s.sed of life, nor commutation Pet.i.tioning into death. What's he that of The Free State argues? Tellus! bid him stoop, Even where the low hic jacet answers him; Thus low, O Man! there's freedom's seignory, Tellus' most reverend sole free commonweal, And model deeply-policied: there none Stands on precedence, nor ambitiously Woos the impartial worm, whose favours kiss With liberal largesse all; there each is free To be e'en what he must, which here did strive So much to be he could not; there all do Their uses just, with no flown questioning.

To be took by the hand of equal earth They doff her livery, slip to the worm, Which lacqueys them, their suits of maintenance, And that soiled workaday apparel cast, Put on condition: Death's ungentle buffet Alone makes ceremonial manumission; So are the heavenly statutes set, and those Uranian tables of the primal Law.

In a little peace, in a little peace, Like fierce beasts that a common thirst makes brothers, We draw together to one hid dark lake; In a little peace, in a little peace, We drain with all our burthens of dishonour Into the cleansing sands o' the thirsty grave.

The fiery pomps, brave exhalations, And all the glistering shows o' the seeming world, Which the sight aches at, we unwinking see Through the smoked gla.s.s of Death; Death, wherewith's fined The muddy wine of life; that earth doth purge Of her plethora of man; Death, that doth flush The c.u.mbered gutters of humanity; Nothing, of nothing king, with front uncrowned, Whose hand holds crownets; playmate swart o' the strong; Tenebrous moon that flux and refluence draws Of the high-tided man; skull-hous-ed asp That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth, Where he that dips is deathless; being's drone-pipe; Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars, And thicks the l.u.s.ty breathing of the sun; Pontifical Death, that doth the creva.s.se bridge To the steep and trifid G.o.d; one mortal birth That broker is of immortality.

Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike, To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing, And break the tomb of life; here I shake off The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun, And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows: my cell is set Here in thy bosom; my little trouble is ended In a little peace.

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS.

'EX ORE INFANTIUM'.

Little Jesus, wast Thou shy Once, and just so small as I?

And what did it feel like to be Out of Heaven, and just like me?

Didst Thou sometimes think of THERE, And ask where all the angels were?

I should think that I would cry For my house all made of sky; I would look about the air, And wonder where my angels were; And at waking 'twould distress me-- Not an angel there to dress me!

Hadst Thou ever any toys, Like us little girls and boys?

And didst Thou play in Heaven with all The angels that were not too tall, With stars for marbles? Did the things Play Can you see me? through their wings?

And did Thy Mother let Thee spoil Thy robes, with playing on OUR soil?

How nice to have them always new In Heaven, because 'twas quite clean blue!

Didst Thou kneel at night to pray, And didst Thou join Thy hands, this way?

And did they tire sometimes, being young, And make the prayer seem very long?

And dost Thou like it best, that we Should join our hands to pray to Thee?

I used to think, before I knew, The prayer not said unless we do.

And did Thy Mother at the night Kiss Thee, and fold the clothes in right?

And didst Thou feel quite good in bed, Kissed, and sweet, and thy prayers said?

Thou canst not have forgotten all That it feels like to be small: And Thou know'st I cannot pray To Thee in my father's way-- When Thou wast so little, say, Couldst Thou talk Thy Father's way?-- So, a little Child, come down And hear a child's tongue like Thy own; Take me by the hand and walk, And listen to my baby-talk.

To Thy Father show my prayer (He will look, Thou art so fair), And say: 'O Father, I, Thy Son, Bring the prayer of a little one.'

And He will smile, that children's tongue Has not changed since Thou wast young!

A QUESTION.

O bird with heart of wa.s.sail, That toss the Bacchic branch, And slip your shaken music, An elfin avalanche;

Come tell me, O tell me, My poet of the blue!

What's YOUR thought of me, Sweet?-- Here's MY thought of you.

A small thing, a wee thing, A brown fleck of nought; With winging and singing That who could have thought?