New Poems by Francis Thompson Part 9

Thou sway'st thy sceptred beam O'er all delight and dream, Beauty is beautiful but in thy glance: And like a jocund maid In garland-flowers arrayed, Before thy ark Earth keeps her sacred dance.

And now, O shaken from thine antique throne, And sunken from thy coerule empery, Now that the red glare of thy fall is blown In smoke and flame about the windy sky, Where are the wailing voices that should meet From hill, stream, grove, and all of mortal shape Who tread thy gifts, in vineyards as stray feet Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape?

Where is the threne o' the sea?

And why not dirges thee The wind, that sings to himself as he makes stride Lonely and terrible on the Andean height?

Where is the Naiad 'mid her sworded sedge?

The Nymph wan-glimmering by her wan fount's verge?

The Dryad at timid gaze by the wood-side?

The Oread jutting light On one up-strain-ed sole from the rock-ledge?

The Nereid tip-toe on the scud o' the surge, With whistling tresses dank athwart her face, And all her figure poised in lithe Circean grace?

Why withers their lament?

Their tresses tear-besprent, Have they sighed hence with trailing garment-gem?

O sweet, O sad, O fair!

I catch your flying hair, Draw your eyes down to me, and dream on them!

A s.p.a.ce, and they fleet from me. Must ye fade-- O old, essential candours, ye who made The earth a living and a radiant thing-- And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms?

Lo ever thus, when Song with chorded charms Draws from dull death his lost Eurydice, Lo ever thus, even at consummating, Even in the swooning minute that claims her his, Even as he trembles to the impa.s.sioned kiss Of reincarnate Beauty, his control Clasps the cold body, and foregoes the soul!

Whatso looks lovelily Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.

Why have we longings of immortal pain, And all we long for mortal? Woe is me, And all our chants but chaplet some decay, As mine this vanis.h.i.+ng--nay, vanished Day.

The low sky-line dusks to a leaden hue, No rift disturbs the heavy shade and chill, Save one, where the charred firmament lets through The scorching dazzle of Heaven; 'gainst which the hill, Out-flattened sombrely, Stands black as life against eternity.

Against eternity?

A rifting light in me Burns through the leaden broodings of the mind: O bless-ed Sun, thy state Uprisen or derogate Dafts me no more with doubt; I seek and find.

If with exultant tread Thou foot the Eastern sea, Or like a golden bee Sting the West to angry red, Thou dost image, thou dost follow That King-Maker of Creation, Who, ere h.e.l.las hailed Apollo, Gave thee, angel-G.o.d, thy station; Thou art of Him a type memorial.

Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood Upon thy Western rood; And His stained brow did veil like thine to night, Yet lift once more Its light, And, risen, again departed from our ball, But when It set on earth arose in Heaven.

Thus hath He unto death His beauty given: And so of all which form inheriteth The fall doth pa.s.s the rise in worth; For birth hath in itself the germ of death, But death hath in itself the germ of birth.

It is the falling acorn buds the tree, The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise.

For there is nothing lives but something dies, And there is nothing dies but something lives.

Till skies be fugitives, Till Time, the hidden root of change, updries, Are Birth and Death inseparable on earth; For they are twain yet one, and Death is Birth.

AFTER-STRAIN.

Now with wan ray that other sun of Song Sets in the bleakening waters of my soul: One step, and lo! the Cross stands gaunt and long 'Twixt me and yet bright skies, a presaged dole.

Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory.

Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields; Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee, Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields.

Of reap-ed joys thou art the heavy sheaf Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan; Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf, But we must bear thee, and must bear alone.

Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes Our night not borrows the superfluous day.

Yet woe to him that from his burden flees!

Crushed in the fall of what he cast away.

Therefore, O tender Lady, Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity, Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape.

'Lo, though suns rise and set, but crosses stay, I leave thee ever,' saith she, 'light of cheer.'

'Tis so: yon sky still thinks upon the Day, And showers aerial blossoms on his bier.

Yon cloud with wrinkled fire is edg-ed sharp; And once more welling through the air, ah me!

How the sweet viol plains him to the harp, Whose pang-ed sobbings throng tumultuously.

Oh, this Medusa-pleasure with her stings!

This essence of all suffering, which is joy!

I am not thankless for the spell it brings, Though tears must be told down for the charmed toy.

No; while soul, sky, and music bleed together, Let me give thanks even for those griefs in me, The restless windward stirrings of whose feather Prove them the brood of immortality.

My soul is quitted of death-neighbouring swoon, Who shall not slake her immitigable scars Until she hear 'My sister!' from the moon, And take the kindred kisses of the stars.

A CAPTAIN OF SONG.

(On a portrait of Coventry Patmore by J. S. Sargent, R.A.)

Look on him. This is he whose works ye know; Ye have adored, thanked, loved him,--no, not him!

But that of him which proud portentous woe To its own grim Presentment was not potent to subdue, Nor all the reek of Erebus to dim.

This, and not him, ye knew.

Look on him now. Love, wors.h.i.+p if ye can, The very man.

Ye may not. He has trod the ways afar, The fatal ways of parting and farewell, Where all the paths of pain-ed greatness are; Where round and always round The abhorr-ed words resound, The words accursed of comfortable men,-- 'For ever'; and infinite glooms intolerable With s.p.a.cious replication give again, And hollow jar, The words abhorred of comfortable men.

You the stern pities of the G.o.ds debar To drink where he has drunk The moonless mere of sighs, And pace the places infamous to tell, Where G.o.d wipes not the tears from any eyes, Where-through the ways of dreadful greatness are He knows the perilous rout That all those ways about Sink into doom, and sinking, still are sunk.

And if his sole and solemn term thereout He has attained, to love ye shall not dare One who has journeyed there; Ye shall mark well The mighty cruelties which arm and mar That countenance of control, With minatory warnings of a soul That hath to its own selfhood been most fell, And is not weak to spare: And lo, that hair Is blanch-ed with the travel-heats of h.e.l.l.

If any be That shall with rites of reverent piety Approach this strong Sad soul of sovereign Song, Nor fail and falter with the intimidate throng; If such there be, These, these are only they Have trod the self-same way; The never-twice-revolving portals heard Behind them clang infernal, and that word Abhorr-ed sighed of kind mortality, As he-- Ah, even as he!

AGAINST URANIA.

Lo I, Song's most true lover, plain me sore That worse than other women she can deceive, For she being G.o.ddess, I have given her more Than mortal ladies from their loves receive; And first of her embrace She was not coy, and gracious were her ways, That I forgot all virgins to adore; Nor did I greatly grieve To bear through arid days The pretty foil of her divine delays; And one by one to cast Life, love, and health, Content, and wealth, Before her, thinking ever on her praise, Until at last Nought had I left she would be gracious for.

Now of her cozening I complain me sore, Seeing her uses, That still, more constantly she is pursued, And straitlier wooed, Her only-ador-ed favour more refuses, And leaves me to implore Remembered boon in bitterness of blood.

From mortal woman thou may'st know full well, O poet, that dost deem the fair and tall Urania of her ways not mutable, When things shall thee befall What thou art toil-ed in her sweet, wild spell.

Do they strow for thy feet A little tender favour and deceit Over the sudden mouth of hidden h.e.l.l?-- As more intolerable Her pit, as her first kiss is heavenlier-sweet.

Are they, the more thou sigh, Still the more watchful-cruel to deny?-- Know this, that in her service thou shalt learn How harder than the heart of woman is The immortal cruelty Of the high G.o.ddesses.

True is his witness who doth witness this, Whose gaze too early fell-- Nor thence shall turn, Nor in those fires shall cease to weep and burn-- Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible.

AN ANTHEM OF EARTH.

Proemion.

Immeasurable Earth!

Through the loud vast and populacy of Heaven, Tempested with gold schools of ponderous...o...b.., That cleav'st with deep-revolting harmonies Pa.s.sage perpetual, and behind thee draw'st A furrow sweet, a cometary wake Of trailing music! What large effluence, Not sole the cloudy sighing of thy seas, Nor thy blue-coifing air, encases thee From prying of the stars, and the broad shafts Of thrusting sunlight tempers? For, dropped near From my remov-ed tour in the serene Of utmost contemplation, I scent lives.

This is the efflux of thy rocks and fields, And wind-cuffed forestage, and the souls of men, And aura of all treaders over thee; A sentient exhalation, wherein close The odorous lives of many-throated flowers, And each thing's mettle effused; that so thou wear'st, Even like a breather on a frosty morn, Thy proper suspiration. For I know, Albeit, with custom-dulled perceivingness, Nestled against thy breast, my sense not take The breathings of thy nostrils, there's no tree, No grain of dust, nor no cold-seeming stone, But wears a fume of its circ.u.mfluous self.

Thine own life and the lives of all that live, The issue of thy loins, Is this thy gaberdine, Wherein thou walkest through thy large demesne And sphery pleasances,-- Amazing the unstal-ed eyes of Heaven, And us that still a precious seeing have Behind this dim and mortal jelly.