Part 43

CLOSE Echo hears the woodman’s axe, To double on it, as in glee, With clap of hands, and little lacks Of meaning in her repartee. For all shall fall, As one has done, The tree of me, Of thee the tree; And unto all The fate we wait Reveals the wheels Whereon we run: We tower to flower, We spread the shade, We drop for crop, At length are laid; Are rolled in mould, From chop and lop: And are we thick in woodland tracks, Or tempting of our stature we, The end is one, we do but wax For service over land and sea. So, strike! the like Shall thus of us, My brawny woodman, claim the tax. Nor foe thy blow, Though wood be good, And shriekingly the timber cracks: The ground we crowned Shall speed the seed Of younger into swelling sacks.

For use he hews, To make awake The spirit of what stuff we be: Our earth of mirth And tears he clears For braver, let our minds agree; And then will men Within them win An Echo clapping harmony.

THE WISDOM OF ELD

WE spend our lives in learning pilotage, And grow good steersmen when the vessel’s crank! Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age. It is the sentence which completes that stage; A testament of wisdom reading blank. The seniors of the race, on their last plank, Pass mumbling it as nature’s final page. These, bent by such experience, are the band Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain What things we view, and Earth’s decree withstand, Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay, Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain, And ancients musical at close of day.

EARTH’S PREFERENCE

EARTH loves her young: a preference manifest: She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds; Their beauty with her choicest interthreads, And makes her revel of their merry zest; As in our East much were it in our West, If men had risen to do the work of heads. Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed. How wrought they in their zenith? ’Tis not writ; Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read: Have they but held her laws and nature dear, They mouth no sentence of inverted wit. More prizes she her beasts than this high breed Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.

SOCIETY

HISTORIC be the survey of our kind, And how their brave Society took shape. Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape, The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find, Who, with some jars in harmony, combined, Their primal instincts taming, to escape The brawl indecent, and hot passions drape. Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind. Thus entered they the field of milder beasts, Which in some sort of civil order graze, And do half-homage to the God of Laws. But are they still for their old ravenous feasts, Earth gives the edifice they build no base: They spring another flood of fangs and claws.

WINTER HEAVENS

SHARP is the night, but stars with frost alive Leap off the rim of earth across the dome. It is a night to make the heavens our home More than the nest whereto apace we strive. Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, In swarms outrushing from the golden comb. They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: The living throb in me, the dead revive. Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, Life glistens on the river of the death. It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs Of radiance, the radiance enrings: And this is the soul’s haven to have felt.

NOTES

PHAETHON The Galliambic Measure

Hermann (Elementa Doctrinae Metricae), after citing lines from the Tragic poet Phrynichus and from the Comic, observes:

Dixi supra, Phrynichorum versus videri puros Ionicos esse. Id si verum est, Galliambi non alia re ab his differunt, quam quod anaclasin, contractionesque et solutiones recipiunt. Itaque versus Galliambicus ex duobus versibus Anacreonteis constat, quorum secundus catalecticus est, hac forma:

The wonderful Attis of Catullus is the one classic example. A few lines have been gathered elsewhere. Lord Tennyson’s Boadicea rides over many difficulties and is a noble poem. Catullus makes general use of the variant second of the above metrical forms:

Mihi januae frequentes, mihi limina tepida:

With stress on the emotion;

Jam, jam dolet quod egi, jam jamque poenitet.

A perfect conquest of the measure is not possible in our tongue. For the sake of an occasional success in the velocity, sweep, volume of the line, it seems worth an effort; and, if to some degree serviceable for narrative verse, it is one of the exercises of a writer which readers may be invited to share.

THEODOLINDA

The legend of the Iron Crown of Lombardy, formed of a nail of the true Cross by order of the devout Queen Theodolinda, is well known. In this dramatic song she is seen passing through one of the higher temptations of the believing Christian.

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