Part 8

A natural woman’s heart, not more than clad By station and bright raiment, gathers heat From nakedness in trusted hands: she had The joy of those who feel the world’s heart beat, After long doubt of it as fire or ice; Because one man had helped her to breathe free; Surprised to faith in something of a price Past the old charity in chivalry:— Our first wild step to right the loaded scales Displaying women shamefully outweighed. The wisdom of humaneness best avails For serving justice till that fraud is brayed. Her buried body fed the life she drank. And not another stripping of her wound! The startled thought on black delirium sank, While with her gentle surgeon she communed, And woman’s prospect of the yoke repelled. Her buried body gave her flowers and food; The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled; Love, the large love that folds the multitude. Soul’s chastity in honesty, and this With beauty, made the dower to men refused. And little do they know the prize they miss; Which is their happy fortune! Thus he mused

For him, the cynic in the Sage had play A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed; To think, of all alive most wedded they, Whom time disjoined! He needed her quick thirst For renovated earth: on earth she gazed, With humble aim to foot beside the wise. Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised Yet lowly over morning’s pure grey eyes.

‘LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO’

LOVE is winged for two, In the worst he weathers, When their hearts are tied; But if they divide, O too true! Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers, Feathers all the ground bestrew.

I was breast of morning sea, Rosy plume on forest dun, I the laugh in rainy fleeces, While with me She made one. Now must we pick up our pieces, For that then so winged were we.

‘ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE’

ASK, is Love divine, Voices all are, ay. Question for the sign, There’s a common sigh. Would we, through our years, Love forego, Quit of scars and tears? Ah, but no, no, no!

‘JOY IS FLEET’

JOY is fleet, Sorrow slow. Love, so sweet, Sorrow will sow. Love, that has flown Ere day’s decline, Love to have known, Sorrow, be mine!

THE LESSON OF GRIEF

Not ere the bitter herb we taste, Which ages thought of happy times, To plant us in a weeping waste, Rings with our fellows this one heart Accordant chimes.

When I had shed my glad year’s leaf, I did believe I stood alone, Till that great company of Grief Taught me to know this craving heart For not my own.

WIND ON THE LYRE

THAT was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell, And wing our green to wed our blue; But whether note of joy or knell, Not his own Father-singer knew; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through; The breast of us a sounded shell, The blood of us a lighted dew.

THE YOUTHFUL QUEST

HIS Lady queen of woods to meet, He wanders day and night: The leaves have whisperings discreet, The mossy ways invite.

Across a lustrous ring of space, By covert hoods and caves, Is promise of her secret face In film that onward waves.

For darkness is the light astrain, Astrain for light the dark. A grey moth down a larches’ lane Unwinds a ghostly spark.

Her lamp he sees, and young desire Is fed while cloaked she flies. She quivers shot of violet fire To ash at look of eyes.

THE EMPTY PURSE A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL SON

THOU, run to the dry on this wayside bank, Too plainly of all the propellers bereft! Quenched youth, and is that thy purse? Even such limp slough as the snake has left Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin, For cast-off coat of a life gone blank, In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine; And thine to crave and to curse The sweet thing once within. Accuse him: some devil committed the theft, Which leaves of the portly a skin, No more; of the weighty a whine.

Pursue him: and first, to be sure of his track, Over devious ways that have led to this, In the stream’s consecutive line, Let memory lead thee back To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys, Unflushed at the front of the roseate door Unopened yet: never shadow there Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis For souls whose cry is, alack! An ivory cradle rocks, apeep Through his eyelashes’ laugh, a breathing pearl. There the young chief of the animals wore A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap. In a dingle away from a rutted highroad, Around him the earliest throstle and merle, Our human smile between milk and sleep, Effervescent of Nature he crowed. Fair was that season; furl over furl The banners of blossom; a dancing floor This earth; very angels the clouds; and fair Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast: Careless, a centre of vigilant care. Thy mother kisses an infant curl. The room of the toys was a boundless nest, A kingdom the field of the games, Till entered the craving for more, And the worshipped small body had aims. A good little idol, as records attest, When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream By sweets and caresses: he gave but sign That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race, Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine. Almost magician, his earliest dream Was lord of the unpossessed For a look; himself and his chase, As on puffs of a wind at whirl, Made one in the wink of a gleam. She kisses a locket curl, She conjures to vision a cherub face, When her butterfly counted his day All meadow and flowers, mishap Derided, and taken for play The fling of an urchin’s cap. When her butterfly showed him an eaglet born, For preying too heedlessly bred, What a heart clapped in thee then! With what fuller colours of morn! And high to the uttermost heavens it flew, Swift as on poet’s pen. It flew to be wedded, to wed The mystery scented around: Issue of flower and dew, Issue of light and sound: Thinner than either; a thread Spun of the dream they threw To kindle, allure, evade. It ran the sea-wave, the garden’s dance, To the forest’s dark heart down a dappled glade; Led on by a perishing glance, By a twinkle’s eternal waylaid. Woman, the name was, when she took form; Sheaf of the wonders of life. She fled, Close imaged; she neared, far seen. How she made Palpitate earth of the living and dead! Did she not show thee the world designed Solely for loveliness? Nested warm, The day was the morrow in flight. And for thee, She muted the discords, tuned, refined; Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak. Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree, Sliding on radiance, winging from shade, With her witch-whisper o’er ruins, in reeds, She sang low the song of her promise delayed; Beckoned and died, as a finger of smoke Astream over woodland. And was not she History’s heroines white on storm? Remember her summons to valorous deeds. Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm, Most was her beam on the knightly: she led For the honours of manhood more than the prize; Waved her magnetical yoke Whither the warrior bled, Ere to the bower of sighs. And shy of her secrets she was; under deeps Plunged at the breath of a thirst that woke The dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.

Away over heaven the young heart flew, And caught many lustres, till some one said (Or was it the thought into hearing grew?), Not thou as commoner men! Thy stature puffed and it swayed, It stiffened to royal-erect; A brassy trumpet brayed; A whirling seized thy head; The vision of beauty was flecked. Note well the how and the when, The thing that prompted and sped. Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing, Fixed eye, and the world was prey. No simple world of thy greenblade Spring, Nor world of thy flowerful prime On the topmost Orient peak Above a yet vaporous day. Flesh was it, breast to beak: A four-walled windowless world without ray, Only darkening jets on a river of slime, Where harsh over music as woodland jay, A voice chants, Woe to the weak! And along an insatiate feast, Women and men are one In the cup transforming to beast. Magian worship they paid to their sun, Lord of the Purse! Behold him climb. Stalked ever such figure of fun For monarch in great-grin pantomime? See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend; The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat, From a life that reeks of the rotted end; While he—is he pictureable? replete, Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil, Hollow, more hollow at core. And for him did the hundreds toil Despised; in the cold and heat, This image ridiculous bore On their shoulders for morsels of meat!

Gross, with the fumes of incense full, With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt, He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull, He rolled him, a dog, in dirt. And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed; Original man, as philosophers vouch; Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed, Frightfully living and armed to devour; The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch; The bait, the line and the hook: To feed on his fellows intent. God of the Danaé shower, He had but to follow his bent. He battened on fowl not safely hutched, On sheep astray from the crook; A lure for the foolish in fold: To carrion turning what flesh he touched. And O the grace of his air, As he at the goblet sips, A centre of girdles loosed, With their grisly label, Sold! Credulous hears the fidelity swear, Which has roving eyes over yielded lips: To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced, The stuck in a treacherous slough, Because of his faith in a purchased pair, False to a vinous vow.

In his glory of banquet strip him bare, And what is the creature we view? Our pursy Apollo Apollyon’s tool; A small one, still of the crew By serpent Apollyon blest: His plea in apology, blindfold Fool. A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned; Not viler, you hear him protest: Of a popular countenance not incorrect. But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds Paint him the hooved and homed, Despite the poor pother he pleads, And his look of a nation’s elect. We have him, our quarry confessed! And scan him: the features inspect Of that bestial multiform: cry, Corroborate I, O Samian Sage! The book of thy wisdom, proved On me, its last hieroglyph page, Alive in the horned and hooved? Thou! will he make reply.

Thus has the plenary purse Done often: to do will engage Anew upon all of thy like, or worse. And now is thy deepest regret To be man, clean rescued from beast: From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold, Celestially released.

But now from his cavernous hold, Free may thy soul be set, As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn, Refreshed by some bodily sweat, The meaning of either in turn, What issue may come of the two:— A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold: A firmament passing our visible blue. To those having nought to reflect it, ’tis nought; To those who are misty, ’tis mist on the beach From the billow withdrawing; to those who see Earth, our mother, in thought, Her spirit it is, our key.

Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here, Of one significance, pricking the blind. This is thy gain now the surface is clear: To read with a soul in the mirror of mind Is man’s chief lesson.—Thou smilest! I preach! Acid smiling, my friend, reveals Abysses within; frigid preaching a street Paved unconcernedly smooth For the lecturer straight on his heels, Up and down a policeman’s beat; Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe. Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme. It is not attractive in being too chaste. The popular tale of adventure and crime Would equally sicken an overdone taste. So, then, onward. Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe, Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.