Part 8

The Ballade of the Subconscious Self.

WHO suddenly calls to our ken The knowledge that should not be there; Who charms Mr. Stead with the pen, Of the Prince of the Powers of the Air; Who makes Physiologists stare— Is he ghost, is he demon, or elf, Who fashions the dream of the fair? It is just the Subconscious Self.

He’s the ally of Medicine Men Who consult the Australian bear, And ’tis he, with his lights on the fen, Who helps Jack o’ Lanthorn to snare The peasants of Devon, who swear Under Commonwealth, Stuart, or Guelph, That they never had half such a scare— It is just the Subconscious Self.

It is he, from his cerebral den, Who raps upon table and chair, Who frightens the housemaid, and then Slinks back, like a thief, to his lair: ’Tis the Brownie (according to Mair) Who rattles the pots on the shelf, But the Psychical sages declare “It is just the Subconscious Self.”

Prince, each of us all is a pair— The Conscious, who labours for pelf, And the other, who charmed Mr. Blair, It is just the Subconscious Self.

Ballade of the Optimist.

HEED not the folk who sing or say In sonnet sad or sermon chill, “Alas, alack, and well-a-day, This round world’s but a bitter pill.” Poor porcupines of fretful quill! Sometimes we quarrel with our lot: We, too, are sad and careful; still We’d rather be alive than not.

What though we wish the cats at play Would some one else’s garden till; Though Sophonisba drop the tray And all our worshipped Worcester spill, Though neighbours “practise” loud and shrill, Though May be cold and June be hot, Though April freeze and August grill, We’d rather be alive than not.

And, sometimes on a summer’s day To self and every mortal ill We give the slip, we steal away, To walk beside some sedgy rill: The darkening years, the cares that kill, A little while are well forgot; When deep in broom upon the hill, We’d rather be alive than not.

Pistol, with oaths didst thou fulfil The task thy braggart tongue begot, We eat our leek with better will, We’d rather be alive than not.

Zimbabwe.

(The ruined Gold Cities of Rhodesia. The Ophir of Scripture.)

INTO the darkness whence they came, They passed, their country knoweth none, They and their gods without a name Partake the same oblivion. Their work they did, their work is done, Whose gold, it may be, shone like fire About the brows of Solomon, And in the House of God’s Desire.

Hence came the altar all of gold, The hinges of the Holy Place, The censer with the fragrance rolled Skyward to seek Jehovah’s face; The golden Ark that did encase The Law within Jerusalem, The lilies and the rings to grace The High Priest’s robe and diadem.

The pestilence, the desert spear, Smote them; they passed, with none to tell The names of them who laboured here: Stark walls and crumbling crucible, Strait gates, and graves, and ruined well, Abide, dumb monuments of old, We know but that men fought and fell, Like us, like us, for love of Gold.

Love’s Cryptogram.

ELLE.

I CANNOT write, I may not write, I dare not write to thee, But look on the face of the moon by night, And my letters shalt thou see. For every letter that lovers write, By their loves on the moon is seen, If they pen their thought on the paper white, With the magic juice of the bean!

LUI.

Oh, I had written this many a year, And my letters you had read. Had you only told me the spell, my dear, Ere ever we twain were wed! But I have a lady and you have a lord, And their eyes are of the green, And we dared not trust to the written word, Lest our long, long love be seen!

ELLE.

“Oh, every thought that your heart has thought, Since the world came us between, The birds of the air to my heart have brought, With no word heard or seen.” ’Twas thus in a dream we spoke and said Myself and my love unseen, But I woke and sighed on my weary bed, For the spell of the juice of the bean!

Tusitala.

WE spoke of a rest in a fairy knowe of the North, but he, Far from the firths of the East, and the racing tides of the West, Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite Southern Sea, Weary and well content in his grave on the Vaëa crest.

Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales, Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world’s delight, Looks o’er the labours of men in the plain and the hill; and the sails Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.

Winds of the West and the East in the rainy season blow Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet, Winds of the East and West as they wander to and fro, Bear him the love of the land he loved, and the long regret.

Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea Flowed between us, but now that no wash of the wandering tides Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be, Whom only the unbridged stream of the river of Death divides.

Disdainful Diaphenia.