New Poems by Francis Thompson Part 3

FROM THE NIGHT OF FOREBEING.

An ode after Easter.

In the chaos of preordination, and night of our forebeings.--

SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

Et lux in tenebris erat, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.--

ST. JOHN.

Cast wide the folding doorways of the East, For now is light increased!

And the wind-besomed chambers of the air, See they be garnished fair; And look the ways exhale some precious odours, And set ye all about wild-breathing spice, Most fit for Paradise.

Now is no time for sober gravity, Season enough has Nature to be wise; But now distinct, with raiment glittering free, Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies With festal footing and bold joyance sweet, And let the earth be drunken and carouse!

For lo, into her house Spring is come home with her world-wandering feet, And all things are made young with young desires; And all for her is light increased In yellow stars and yellow daffodils, And East to West, and West to East, Fling answering welcome-fires, By dawn and day-fall, on the jocund hills.

And ye, winged minstrels of her fair meinie, Being newly coated in glad livery, Upon her steps attend, And round her treading dance and without end Reel your shrill lutany.

What popular breath her coming does out-tell The garrulous leaves among!

What little noises stir and pa.s.s From blade to blade along the voluble gra.s.s!

O Nature, never-done Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue!

Break, elemental children, break ye loose From the strict frosty rule Of grey-beard Winter's school.

Vault, O young winds, vault in your tricksome courses Upon the snowy steeds that reinless use In coerule pampas of the heaven to run; Foaled of the white sea-horses, Washed in the lambent waters of the sun.

Let even the slug-abed snail upon the thorn Put forth a conscious horn!

Mine elemental co-mates, joy each one; And ah, my foster-brethren, seem not sad-- No, seem not sad, That my strange heart and I should be so little glad.

Suffer me at your leafy feast To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest, And watch your mirth, Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth; Yet with a sympathy, Begot of wholly sad and half-sweet memory-- The little sweetness making grief complete; Faint wind of wings from hours that distant beat, When I, I too, Was once, O wild companions, as are you, Ran with such wilful feet.

Wraith of a recent day and dead, Risen wanly overhead, Frail, strengthless as a noon-belated moon, Or as the glazing eyes of watery heaven, When the sick night sinks into deathly swoon.

A higher and a solemn voice I heard through your gay-hearted noise; A solemn meaning and a stiller voice Sounds to me from far days when I too shall rejoice, Nor more be with your jollity at strife.

O prophecy Of things that are, and are not, and shall be!

The great-vanned Angel March Hath trumpeted His clangorous 'Sleep no more' to all the dead-- Beat his strong vans o'er earth, and air, and sea.

And they have heard; Hark to the Jubilate of the bird For them that found the dying way to life!

And they have heard, And quicken to the great precursive word; Green spray showers lightly down the cascade of the larch; The graves are riven, And the Sun comes with power amid the clouds of heaven!

Before his way Went forth the trumpet of the March; Before his way, before his way Dances the pennon of the May!

O earth, unchilded, widowed Earth, so long Lifting in patient pine and ivy-tree Mournful belief and steadfast prophecy, Behold how all things are made true!

Behold your bridegroom cometh in to you, Exceeding glad and strong.

Raise up your eyes, O raise your eyes abroad!

No more shall you sit sole and vidual, Searching, in servile pall, Upon the hieratic night the star-sealed sense of all: Rejoice, O barren, and look forth abroad!

Your children gathered back to your embrace See with a mother's face.

Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed; In very deed, Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth, Reintegrated are the heavens and earth!

From sky to sod, The world's unfolded blossom smells of G.o.d.

O imagery Of that which was the first, and is the last!

For as the dark, profound nativity, G.o.d saw the end should be, When the world's infant horoscope He cast.

Unshackled from the bright Phoebean awe, In leaf, flower, mould, and tree, Resolved into dividual liberty, Most strengthless, unpartic.i.p.ant, inane, Or suffered the ill peace of lethargy, Lo, the Earth eased of rule: Unsummered, granted to her own worst smart The dear wish of the fool-- Disintegration, merely which man's heart For freedom understands, Amid the frog-like errors from the damp And quaking swamp Of the low popular levels sp.a.w.ned in all the lands.

But thou, O Earth, dost much disdain The bondage of thy waste and futile reign, And sweetly to the great compulsion draw Of G.o.d's alone true-manumitting law, And Freedom, only which the wise intend, To work thine innate end.

Over thy vacant counterfeit of death Broods with soft urgent breath Love, that is child of Beauty and of Awe: To intercleavage of sharp warring pain, As of contending chaos come again, Thou wak'st, O Earth, And work'st from change to change and birth to birth Creation old as hope, and new as sight; For meed of toil not vain, Hearing once more the primal fiat toll:- 'Let there be light!'

And there is light!

Light flagrant, manifest; Light to the zenith, light from pole to pole; Light from the East that waxeth to the West, And with its puissant goings-forth Encroaches on the South and on the North; And with its great approaches does prevail Upon the sullen fastness of the height, And summoning its levied power Crescent and confident through the crescent hour, Goes down with laughters on the subject vale.

Light flagrant, manifest; Light to the sentient closeness of the breast, Light to the secret chambers of the brain!

And thou up-floatest, warm, and newly-bathed, Earth, through delicious air, And with thine own apparent beauties swathed, Wringing the waters from thine arborous hair; That all men's hearts, which do behold and see, Grow weak with their exceeding much desire, And turn to thee on fire, Enamoured with their utter wish of thee, Anadyomene!

What vine-outquickening life all creatures sup, Feel, for the air within its sapphire cup How it does leap, and twinkle headily!

Feel, for Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea; And round and round in baccha.n.a.l rout reel the swift spheres intemperably!

My little-worlded self! the shadows pa.s.s In this thy sister-world, as in a gla.s.s, Of all processions that revolve in thee: Not only of cyclic Man Thou here discern'st the plan, Not only of cyclic Man, but of the cyclic Me.

Not solely of Mortality's great years The reflex just appears, But thine own bosom's year, still circling round In ample and in ampler gyre Toward the far completion, wherewith crowned, Love unconsumed shall chant in his own furnace-fire.

How many trampled and deciduous joys Enrich thy soul for joys deciduous still, Before the distance shall fulfil Cyclic unrest with solemn equipoise!

Happiness is the shadow of things past, Which fools still take for that which is to be!

And not all foolishly: For all the past, read true, is prophecy, And all the firsts are hauntings of some Last, And all the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.

Then leaf, and flower, and falless fruit Shall hang together on the unyellowing bough; And silence shall be Music mute For her surcharg-ed heart. Hush thou!

These things are far too sure that thou should'st dream Thereof, lest they appear as things that seem.

Shade within shade! for deeper in the gla.s.s Now other imaged meanings pa.s.s; And as the man, the poet there is read.

Winter with me, alack!

Winter on every hand I find: Soul, brain, and pulses dead; The mind no further by the warm sense fed, The soul weak-stirring in the arid mind, More tearless-weak to flash itself abroad Than the earth's life beneath the frost-scorched sod.

My lips have drought, and crack, By laving music long unvisited.

Beneath the austere and macerating rime Draws back constricted in its icy urns The genial flame of Earth, and there With torment and with tension does prepare The lush disclosures of the vernal time.

All joys draw inward to their icy urns, Tormented by constraining rime, And there With undelight and throe prepare The bounteous efflux of the vernal time.

Nor less beneath compulsive Law Rebuk-ed draw The numb-ed musics back upon my heart; Whose yet-triumphant course I know And prevalent pulses forth shall start, Like cataracts that with thunderous hoof charge the disbanding snow.

All power is bound In quickening refusal so; And silence is the lair of sound; In act its impulse to deliver, With fluctuance and quiver The endeavouring thew grows rigid; Strong From its retracted coil strikes the resilient song.

Giver of spring, And song, and every young new thing!

Thou only seest in me, so stripped and bare, The lyric secret waiting to be born, The patient term allowed Before it stretch and flutteringly unfold Its rumpled webs of amethyst-freaked, diaphanous gold.

And what hard task abstracts me from delight, Filling with hopeless hope and dear despair The still-born day and parch-ed fields of night, That my old way of song, no longer fair, For lack of serene care, Is grown a stony and a weed-choked plot, Thou only know'st aright, Thou only know'st, for I know not.

How many songs must die that this may live!

And shall this most rash hope and fugitive, Fulfilled with beauty and with might In days whose feet are rumorous on the air, Make me forget to grieve For songs which might have been, nor ever were?

Stern the denial, the travail slow, The struggling wall will scantly grow: And though with that dread rite of sacrifice Ordained for during edifice, How long, how long ago!

Into that wall which will not thrive I build myself alive, Ah, who shall tell me will the wall uprise?

Thou wilt not tell me, who dost only know!

Yet still in mind I keep, He which observes the wind shall hardly sow, He which regards the clouds shall hardly reap.

Thine ancient way! I give, Nor wit if I receive; Risk all, who all would gain: and blindly. Be it so.

'And blindly,' said I?--No!

That saying I unsay: the wings Hear I not in praevenient winnowings Of coming songs, that lift my hair and stir it?

What winds with music wet do the sweet storm foreshow!

Utter stagnation Is the solst.i.tial slumber of the spirit, The blear and blank negation of all life: But these sharp questionings mean strife, and strife Is the negation of negation.

The thing from which I turn my troubled look Fearing the G.o.ds' rebuke; That perturbation putting glory on, As is the golden vortex in the West Over the foundered sun; That--but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis Unchild me, vaunting this-- Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss!

O youngling Joy carest!

That on my now first-mothered breast Pliest the strange wonder of thine infant lip, What this aghast surprise of keenest panging, Wherefrom I blench, and cry thy soft mouth rest?

Ah hold, withhold, and let the sweet mouth slip!

So, with such pain, recoils the woolly dam, Unused, affrighted, from her yeanling lamb: I, one with her in cruel fellows.h.i.+p, Marvel what unmaternal thing I am.

Nature, enough! within thy gla.s.s Too many and too stern the shadows pa.s.s.

In this delighted season, flaming For thy resurrection-feast, Ah, more I think the long ensepulture cold, Than stony winter rolled From the unsealed mouth of the holy East; The snowdrop's saintly stoles less heed Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed.

'Tis the weak flesh reclaiming Against the ordinance Which yet for just the accepting spirit scans.

Earth waits, and patient heaven, Self-bonded G.o.d doth wait Thrice-promulgated bans Of his fair nuptial-date.

And power is man's, With that great word of 'wait,'

To still the sea of tears, And shake the iron heart of Fate.

In that one word is strong An else, alas, much-mortal song; With sight to pa.s.s the frontier of all spheres, And voice which does my sight such wrong.

Not without fort.i.tude I wait The dark majestical ensuit Of destiny, nor peevish rate Calm-knowledged Fate.

I, that no part have in the time's bragged way, And its loud bruit I, in this house so rifted, marred, So ill to live in, hard to leave; I, so star-weary, over-warred, That have no joy in this your day-- Rather foul fume englutting, that of day Confounds all ray-- But only stand aside and grieve; I yet have sight beyond the smoke, And kiss the G.o.ds' feet, though they wreak Upon me stroke and again stroke; And this my seeing is not weak.