New Poems by Francis Thompson Part 14

{2} The Ark of the Egyptian temple was sealed with clay, which the Pontiff-king broke when he entered the inner shrine to offer wors.h.i.+p.

THE HEART.

Two Sonnets.

(To my Critic, who had objected to the phrase--'The heart's burning floors.')

I

The heart you hold too small and local thing, Such s.p.a.cious terms of edifice to bear.

And yet, since Poesy first shook out her wing, The mighty Love has been impalaced there; That has she given him as his wide demesne, And for his sceptre ample empery; Against its door to knock has Beauty been Content; it has its purple canopy A dais for the sovereign lady spread Of many a lover, who the heaven would think Too low an awning for her sacred head.

The world, from star to sea, cast down its brink-- Yet shall that chasm, till He Who these did build An awful Curtius make Him, yawn unfilled.

II

O nothing, in this corporal earth of man, That to the imminent heaven of his high soul Responds with colour and with shadow, can Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph Be mighty through its mighty habitants; If G.o.d be in His Name; grave potence if The sounds unbind of hieratic chants; All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm Nature is whole in her least things exprest, Nor know we with what scope G.o.d builds the worm.

Our towns are copied fragments from our breast; And all man's Babylons strive but to impart The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

A SUNSET.

From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'.

I love the evenings, pa.s.sionless and fair, I love the evens, Whether old manor-fronts their ray with golden fulgence leavens, In numerous leaf.a.ge bosomed close; Whether the mist in reefs of fire extend its reaches sheer, Or a hundred sunbeams splinter in an azure atmosphere On cloudy archipelagos.

Oh gaze ye on the firmament! a hundred clouds in motion, Up-piled in the immense sublime beneath the winds' commotion, Their unimagined shapes accord: Under their waves at intervals flames a pale levin through, As if some giant of the air amid the vapours drew A sudden elemental sword.

The sun at bay with splendid thrusts still keeps the sullen fold; And momently at distance sets, as a cupola of gold, The thatched roof of a cot a-glance; Or on the blurred horizons joins his battle with the haze; Or pools the glooming fields about with inter-isolate blaze Great moveless meres of radiance.

Then mark you how there hangs athwart the firmament's swept track Yonder a mighty crocodile with vast irradiant back, A triple row of pointed teeth?

Under its burnished belly slips a ray of eventide, The flickerings of a hundred glowing clouds its tenebrous side With scales of golden mail ensheathe.

Then mounts a palace, then the air vibrates--the vision flees.

Confounded to its base, the fearful cloudy edifice Ruins immense in mounded wrack: Afar the fragments strew the sky, and each envermeiled cone Hangeth, peak downward, overhead, like mountains overthrown When the earthquake heaves its hugy back.

These vapours with their leaden, golden, iron, bronz-ed glows, Where the hurricane, the waterspout, thunder, and h.e.l.l repose, Muttering hoa.r.s.e dreams of destined harms, 'Tis G.o.d who hangs their mult.i.tude amid the skiey deep, As a warrior that suspendeth from the roof-tree of his keep His dreadful and resounding arms!

All vanishes! The sun, from topmost heaven precipitated, Like to a globe of iron which is tossed back fiery red Into the furnace stirred to fume, Shocking the cloudy surges, plashed from its impetuous ire, Even to the zenith spattereth in a flecking scud of fire The vaporous and inflam-ed spume.

O contemplate the heavens! whenas the vein-drawn day dies pale, In every season, every place, gaze through their every veil, With love that has not speech for need; Beneath their solemn beauty is a mystery infinite: If winter hue them like a pall; or if the summer night Fantasy them with starry brede.

HEARD ON THE MOUNTAIN.

From Hugo's 'Feuilles d'Automne'.

Have you sometimes, calm, silent, let your tread aspirant rise Up to the mountain's summit, in the presence of the skies?

Was't on the borders of the South? or on the Bretagne coast?

And at the basis of the mount had you the Ocean tossed?

And there, leaned o'er the wave and o'er the immeasurableness, Calm, silent, have you harkened what it says? Lo, what it says!

One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicens-ed to muse, Had drooped its wing above the beach-ed margent of the ooze, And, plunging from the mountain height into the immensity, Beheld upon one side the land, on the other side the sea.

I harkened, comprehended,--never, as from those abysses, No, never issued from a mouth, nor moved an ear, such voice as this is!

A sound it was, at outset, vast, immeasurable, confused, Vaguer than is the wind among the tufted trees effused, Full of magnificent accords, suave murmurs, sweet as is The evensong, and mighty as the shock of panoplies When the hoa.r.s.e melee in its arms the closing squadrons grips, And pants, in furious breathings, from the clarions' brazen lips.

Unutterable the harmony, unsearchable its deep, Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep, And through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed young, Its infinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng, Even to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre Its shattered flood englut with time, with s.p.a.ce and form and number.

Like to another atmosphere with thin o'erflowing robe, The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe: And the world, swathed about with this investuring symphony, Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the harmony.

And pensive, I attended the ethereal lutany, Lost within this containing voice as if within the sea.

Soon I distinguished, yet as tone which veils confuse and smother, Amid this voice two voices, one commingled with the other, Which did from off the land and seas even to the heavens aspire; Chanting the universal chant in simultaneous quire.

And I distinguished them amid that deep and rumorous sound, As who beholds two currents thwart amid the fluctuous profound.

The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal speech!

That was the voice o' the surges, as they parleyed each with each.

The other, which arose from our abode terranean, Was sorrowful; and that, alack! the murmur was of man; And in this mighty quire, whose chantings day and night resound, Every wave had its utterance, and every man his sound.

Now, the magnificent Ocean, as I said, unbannering A voice of joy, a voice of peace, did never stint to sing, Most like in Sion's temples to a psaltery psaltering, And to creation's beauty reared the great lauds of his song.

Upon the gale, upon the squall, his clamour borne along Unpausingly arose to G.o.d in more triumphal swell; And every one among his waves, that G.o.d alone can quell, When the other of its song made end, into the singing pressed.

Like that majestic lion whereof Daniel was the guest, At intervals the Ocean his tremendous murmur awed; And I, t'ward where the sunset fires fell s.h.a.ggily and broad, Under his golden mane, methought, that I saw pa.s.s the hand of G.o.d.

Meanwhile, and side by side with that august fan-faronnade, The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier affrayed, Like an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat, Like to a bow of iron that gnarls upon an iron rote, Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd taunt, Refusal of viatic.u.m, refusal of the font, And clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among That hurtling crowd of rumour from the diverse human tongue, Went by as who beholdeth, when the valleys thick t'ward night, The long drifts of the birds of dusk pa.s.s, blackening flight on flight.

What was this sound whose thousand echoes vibrated unsleeping?

Alas! the sound was earth's and man's, for earth and man were weeping.

Brothers! of these two voices, strange most unimaginably, Unceasingly regenerated, dying unceasingly, Harken-ed of the Eternal throughout His Eternity, The one voice uttereth: NATURE! and the other voice: HUMANITY!

Then I alit in reverie; for my ministering sprite Alack! had never yet deployed a pinion of an ampler flight, Nor ever had my shadow endured so large a day to burn: And long I rested dreaming, contemplating turn by turn Now that abyss obscure which lurked beneath the water's roll, And now that other untemptable abyss which opened in my soul.

And I made question of me, to what issues are we here, Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear; What doth the soul; to be or live if better worth it is; And why the Lord, Who, only, reads within that book of His, In fatal hymeneals hath eternally entwined The vintage-chant of nature with the dirging cry of humankind?

(The metre of the second of these two translations is an experiment.

The splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman I have treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics; with the occasional triplet, and even the occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight accents--a treatment which can well extend, I believe, the majestic resources of the metre.)

ULTIMA.