Part 6

O, the wonder, the spell of the streets! The stature and strength of the horses, The rustle and echo of footfalls, The flat roar and rattle of wheels! A swift tram floats huge on us . . . It’s a dream? The smell of the mud in my nostrils Blows brave—like a breath of the sea!

As of old, Ambulant, undulant drapery, Vaguery and strangely provocative, Fluttersd and beckons. O, yonder— Is it?—the gleam of a stocking! Sudden, a spire Wedged in the mist! O, the houses, The long lines of lofty, grey houses, Cross-hatched with shadow and light! These are the streets . . . Each is an avenue leading Whither I will!

Free . . . ! Dizzy, hysterical, faint, I sit, and the carriage rolls on with me Into the wonderful world.

THE OLD INFIRMARY, EDINBURGH, 1873–75

ENVOY To CHARLES BAXTER

DO you remember That afternoon—that Sunday afternoon!— When, as the kirks were ringing in, And the grey city teemed With Sabbath feelings and aspects, LEWIS—our LEWIS then, Now the whole world’s—and you, Young, yet in shape most like an elder, came, Laden with BALZACS (Big, yellow books, quite impudently French), The first of many times To that transformed back-kitchen where I lay So long, so many centuries— Or years is it!—ago?

Dear CHARLES, since then We have been friends, LEWIS and you and I, (How good it sounds, ‘LEWIS and you and I!’): Such friends, I like to think, That in us three, LEWIS and me and you, Is something of that gallant dream Which old DUMAS—the generous, the humane, The seven-and-seventy times to be forgiven!— Dreamed for a blessing to the race, The immortal Musketeers.

Our ATHOS rests—the wise, the kind, The liberal and august, his fault atoned, Rests in the crowded yard There at the west of Princes Street. We three— You, I, and LEWIS!—still afoot, Are still together, and our lives, In chime so long, may keep (God bless the thought!) Unjangled till the end.

W. E. H.

CHISWICK, March 1888

THE SONG OF THE SWORD

(To Rudyard Kipling)

1890

The Sword Singing— The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword Clanging imperious Forth from Time’s battlements His ancient and triumphing Song.

In the beginning, Ere God inspired Himself Into the clay thing Thumbed to His image, The vacant, the naked shell Soon to be Man: Thoughtful He pondered it, Prone there and impotent, Fragile, inviting Attack and discomfiture; Then, with a smile— As He heard in the Thunder That laughed over Eden The voice of the Trumpet, The iron Beneficence, Calling his dooms To the Winds of the world— Stooping, He drew On the sand with His finger A shape for a sign Of his way to the eyes That in wonder should waken, For a proof of His will To the breaking intelligence. That was the birth of me: I am the Sword.

Bleak and lean, grey and cruel, Short-hilted, long shafted, I froze into steel; And the blood of my elder, His hand on the hafts of me, Sprang like a wave In the wind, as the sense Of his strength grew to ecstasy; Glowed like a coal In the throat of the furnace; As he knew me and named me The War-Thing, the Comrade, Father of honour And giver of kingship, The fame-smith, the song-master, Bringer of women On fire at his hands For the pride of fulfilment, Priest (saith the Lord) Of his marriage with victory Ho! then, the Trumpet, Handmaid of heroes, Calling the peers To the place of espousals! Ho! then, the splendour And glare of my ministry, Clothing the earth With a livery of lightnings! Ho! then, the music Of battles in onset, And ruining armours, And God’s gift returning In fury to God! Thrilling and keen As the song of the winter stars, Ho! then, the sound Of my voice, the implacable Angel of Destiny!— I am the Sword.

Heroes, my children, Follow, O, follow me! Follow, exulting In the great light that breaks From the sacred Companionship! Thrust through the fatuous, Thrust through the fungous brood, Spawned in my shadow And gross with my gift! Thrust through, and hearken O, hark, to the Trumpet, The Virgin of Battles, Calling, still calling you Into the Presence, Sons of the Judgment, Pure wafts of the Will! Edged to annihilate, Hilted with government, Follow, O, follow me, Till the waste places All the grey globe over Ooze, as the honeycomb Drips, with the sweetness Distilled of my strength, And, teeming in peace Through the wrath of my coming, They give back in beauty The dread and the anguish They had of me visitant! Follow, O follow, then, Heroes, my harvesters! Where the tall grain is ripe Thrust in your sickles! Stripped and adust In a stubble of empire, Scything and binding The full sheaves of sovranty: Thus, O, thus gloriously, Shall you fulfil yourselves! Thus, O, thus mightily, Show yourselves sons of mine— Yea, and win grace of me: I am the Sword!

I am the feast-maker: Hark, through a noise Of the screaming of eagles, Hark how the Trumpet, The mistress of mistresses, Calls, silver-throated And stern, where the tables Are spread, and the meal Of the Lord is in hand! Driving the darkness, Even as the banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master— Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable Grisliness Prone down the nethermost Chasms of the Void!— Clear singing, clean slicing; Sweet spoken, soft finishing; Making death beautiful, Life but a coin To be staked in the pastime Whose playing is more Than the transfer of being; Arch-anarch, chief builder, Prince and evangelist, I am the Will of God: I am the Sword.

The Sword Singing— The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword Clanging majestical, As from the starry-staired Courts of the primal Supremacy, His high, irresistible song.

ARABIAN NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS

(To Elizabeth Robins Pennell)

1893

‘O mes chères Mille et Une Nuits!’—Fantasio.

ONCE on a time There was a little boy: a master-mage By virtue of a Book Of magic—O, so magical it filled His life with visionary pomps Processional! And Powers Passed with him where he passed. And Thrones And Dominations, glaived and plumed and mailed, Thronged in the criss-cross streets, The palaces pell-mell with playing-fields, Domes, cloisters, dungeons, caverns, tents, arcades, Of the unseen, silent City, in his soul Pavilioned jealously, and hid As in the dusk, profound, Green stillnesses of some enchanted mere.—

I shut mine eyes . . . And lo! A flickering snatch of memory that floats Upon the face of a pool of darkness five And thirty dead years deep, Antic in girlish broideries And skirts and silly shoes with straps And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks Plain in the shadow of a church (St. Michael’s: in whose brazen call To curfew his first wails of wrath were whelmed), Sedate for all his haste To be at home; and, nestled in his arm, Inciting still to quiet and solitude, Boarded in sober drab, With small, square, agitating cuts Let in a-top of the double-columned, close, Quakerlike print, a Book! . . . What but that blessed brief Of what is gallantest and best In all the full-shelved Libraries of Romance? The Book of rocs, Sandalwood, ivory, turbans, ambergris, Cream-tarts, and lettered apes, and calendars, And ghouls, and genies—O, so huge They might have overed the tall Minster Tower Hands down, as schoolboys take a post! In truth, the Book of Camaralzaman, Schemselnihar and Sindbad, Scheherezade The peerless, Bedreddin, Badroulbadour, Cairo and Serendib and Candahar, And Caspian, and the dim, terrific bulk— Ice-ribbed, fiend-visited, isled in spells and storms— Of Kaf! . . . That centre of miracles, The sole, unparalleled Arabian Nights!

Old friends I had a-many—kindly and grim Familiars, cronies quaint And goblin! Never a Wood but housed Some morrice of dainty dapperlings. No Brook But had his nunnery Of green-haired, silvry-curving sprites, To cabin in his grots, and pace His lilied margents. Every lone Hillside Might open upon Elf-Land. Every Stalk That curled about a Bean-stick was of the breed Of that live ladder by whose delicate rungs You climbed beyond the clouds, and found The Farm-House where the Ogre, gorged And drowsy, from his great oak chair, Among the flitches and pewters at the fire, Called for his Faëry Harp. And in it flew, And, perching on the kitchen table, sang Jocund and jubilant, with a sound Of those gay, golden-vowered madrigals The shy thrush at mid-May Flutes from wet orchards flushed with the triumphing dawn; Or blackbirds rioting as they listened still, In old-world woodlands rapt with an old-world spring, For Pan’s own whistle, savage and rich and lewd, And mocked him call for call!

I could not pass The half-door where the cobbler sat in view Nor figure me the wizen Leprechaun, In square-cut, faded reds and buckle-shoes, Bent at his work in the hedge-side, and know Just how he tapped his brogue, and twitched His wax-end this and that way, both with wrists And elbows. In the rich June fields, Where the ripe clover drew the bees, And the tall quakers trembled, and the West Wind Lolled his half-holiday away Beside me lolling and lounging through my own, ’Twas good to follow the Miller’s Youngest Son On his white horse along the leafy lanes; For at his stirrup linked and ran, Not cynical and trapesing, as he loped From wall to wall above the espaliers, But in the bravest tops That market-town, a town of tops, could show: Bold, subtle, adventurous, his tail A banner flaunted in disdain Of human stratagems and shifts: King over All the Catlands, present and past And future, that moustached Artificer of fortunes, Puss-in-Boots! Or Bluebeard’s Closet, with its plenishing Of meat-hooks, sawdust, blood, And wives that hung like fresh-dressed carcases— Odd-fangled, most a butcher’s, part A faëry chamber hazily seen And hazily figured—on dark afternoons And windy nights was visiting of the best. Then, too, the pelt of hoofs Out in the roaring darkness told Of Herne the Hunter in his antlered helm Galloping, as with despatches from the Pit, Between his hell-born Hounds. And Rip Van Winkle . . . often I lurked to hear, Outside the long, low timbered, tarry wall, The mutter and rumble of the trolling bowls Down the lean plank, before they fluttered the pins; For, listening, I could help him play His wonderful game, In those blue, booming hills, with Mariners Refreshed from kegs not coopered in this our world.

But what were these so near, So neighbourly fancies to the spell that brought The run of Ali Baba’s Cave Just for the saying ‘Open Sesame,’ With gold to measure, peck by peck, In round, brown wooden stoups You borrowed at the chandler’s? . . . Or one time Made you Aladdin’s friend at school, Free of his Garden of Jewels, Ring and Lamp In perfect trim? . . . Or Ladies, fair For all the embrowning scars in their white breasts Went labouring under some dread ordinance, Which made them whip, and bitterly cry the while, Strange Curs that cried as they, Till there was never a Black Bitch of all Your consorting but might have gone Spell-driven miserably for crimes Done in the pride of womanhood and desire . . . Or at the ghostliest altitudes of night, While you lay wondering and acold, Your sense was fearfully purged; and soon Queen Labé, abominable and dear, Rose from your side, opened the Box of Doom, Scattered the yellow powder (which I saw Like sulphur at the Docks in bulk), And muttered certain words you could not hear; And there! a living stream, The brook you bathed in, with its weeds and flags And cresses, glittered and sang Out of the hearthrug over the nakedness, Fair-scrubbed and decent, of your bedroom floor! . . .