Ah me,
A mystery!
"Can it be his alone,
To find when all is known,
That what
He
solely sought
"Is lost, and
thereto lost
All that its seeking cost?
That he
Must finally,
"Through sacrificial tears,
And anchoretic years,
Tryst
With the sensualist?"
So ask; and if they tell
The secret terrible,
Good friend,
I pray thee send
Some high gold embassage
To teach my unripe age.
Tell!
Lest my feet walk hell.
A FALLEN YEW
It seemed corrival of the world's great prime,
Made to un-edge the
scythe of Time,
And last with stateliest rhyme.
No tender Dryad ever did indue
That rigid chiton of rough yew,
To fret her white flesh through:
But some god like to those grim Asgard lords,
Who walk the fables of the hordes
From Scandinavian fjords,
Upheaved its
stubborn girth, and raised unriven,
Against the whirl-blast and the levin,
Defiant arms to Heaven.
When doom puffed out the stars, we might have said,
It would decline its heavy head,
And see the world to bed.
For this firm yew did from the
vassal leas,
And rain and air, its tributaries,
Its revenues increase,
And levy impost on the golden sun,
Take the blind years as they might run,
And no fate seek or shun.
But now our yew is strook, is fallen--yea
Hacked like dull wood of every day
To this and that, men say.
Never! -To Hades'
shadowy shipyards gone,
Dim barge of Dis, down Acheron
It drops, or Lethe wan.
Stirred by its fall--poor destined bark of Dis! -
Along my soul a bruit there is
Of echoing images,
Reverberations of mortality:
Spelt
backward from its death, to me
Its life reads saddenedly.
Its breast was hollowed as the tooth of eld;
And boys, their creeping unbeheld,
A laughing moment dwelled.
Yet they, within its very heart so crept,
Reached not the heart that courage kept
With winds and years beswept.
And in its boughs did close and kindly nest
The birds, as they within its breast,
By all its leaves caressed.
But bird nor child might touch by any art
Each other's or the tree's hid heart,
A whole God's
breadth apart;
The
breadth of God, he
breadth of death and life!
Even so, even so, in undreamed strife
With pulseless Law, the wife, -
The sweetest wife on sweetest marriage-day, -
Their souls at
grapple in mid-way,
Sweet to her sweet may say:
"I take you to my inmost heart, my true!"
Ah, fool! but there is one heart you
Shall never take him to!
The hold that falls not when the town is got,
The heart's heart, whose immured plot
Hath keys yourself keep not!
Its ports you cannot burst--you are withstood -
For him that to your listening blood
Sends precepts as he would.
Its gates are deaf to Love, high summoner;
Yea, Love's great
warrant runs not there:
You are your prisoner.
Yourself are with yourself the sole consortress
In that unleaguerable fortress;
It knows you not for portress
Its keys are at the cincture hung of God;
Its gates are trepidant to His nod;
By Him its floors are trod.
And if His feet shall rock those floors in wrath,
Or blest aspersion sleek His path,
Is only choice it hath.
Yea, in that
ultimate heart's occult abode
To lie as in an oubliette of God,
Or as a bower untrod,
Built by a secret Lover for His Spouse; -
Sole choice is this your life allows,
Sad tree, whose perishing boughs
So few birds house!
DREAM-TRYST
The breaths of kissing night and day
Were mingled in the eastern Heaven:
Throbbing with unheard melody
Shook Lyra all its star-chord seven:
When dusk shrunk cold, and light trod shy,
And dawn's grey eyes were troubled grey;
And souls went palely up the sky,
And mine to Lucide.
There was no change in her sweet eyes
Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine;
There was no change in her deep heart
Since last that deep heart knocked at mine.
Her eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope's,
Wherein did ever come and go
The
sparkle of the fountain-drops
From her sweet soul below.
The chambers in the house of dreams
Are fed with so
divine an air,
That Time's hoar wings grow young therein,
And they who walk there are most fair.
I joyed for me, I joyed for her,
Who with the Past meet girt about:
Where our last kiss still warms the air,
Nor can her eyes go out.
A CORYMBUS FOR AUTUMN
Hearken my chant, 'tis
As a Bacchante's,
A grape-spurt, a vine-splash, a tossed tress, flown vaunt 'tis!
Suffer my singing,
Gipsy of Seasons, ere thou go winging;
Ere Winter throws
His slaking snows
In thy feasting-flagon's impurpurate glows!
The sopped sun--toper as ever drank hard -
Stares foolish, hazed,
Rubicund, dazed,
Totty with thine October tankard.
Tanned maiden! with cheeks like apples russet,
And breast a brown agaric faint-flushing at tip,
And a mouth too red for the moon to buss it,
But her cheek unvow its vestalship;
Thy mists enclip
Her steel-clear
circuit illuminous,
Until it crust
Rubiginous
With the
glorious gules of a glowing rust.
Far other saw we, other indeed,
The
crescent moon, in the May-days dead,
Fly up with its
slender white wings spread
Out of its nest in the sea's waved mead!
How are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden?
Umbered juices,
And pulped oozes
Pappy out of the cherry-bruises,
Froth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden!
With hair that musters
In globed clusters,
In tumbling clusters, like
swarthy grapes,
Round thy brow and thine ears o'ershaden;
With the burning darkness of eyes like pansies,
Like
velvet pansies
Wherethrough escapes
The splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies;
With robe gold-tawny not hiding the shapes
Of the feet whereunto it falleth down,
Thy naked feet unsandalled;
With robe gold-tawny that does not veil
Feet where the red
Is meshed in the brown,
Like a rubied sun in a Venice-sail.
The wassailous heart of the Year is thine!
His Bacchic fingers disentwine
His coronal
At thy festival;
His revelling fingers disentwine
Leaf, flower, and all,
And let them fall
Blossom and all in thy wavering wine.
The Summer looks out from her
brazen tower,
Through the flashing bars of July,
Waiting thy ripened golden shower;
Whereof there cometh, with sandals fleet,
The North-west flying viewlessly,
With a sword to sheer, and untameable feet,
And the gorgon-head of the Winter shown
To
stiffen the gazing earth as stone.
In
crystal Heaven's magic sphere
Poised in the palm of thy fervid hand,
Thou seest the enchanted shows appear
That stain Favonian firmament;
Richer than ever the Occident
Gave up to bygone Summer's wand.
Day's dying
dragon lies drooping his crest,
Panting red pants into the West.
Or the
butterflysunset claps its wings
With flitter alit on the swinging
blossom,
The gusty
blossom, that tosses and swings,
Of the sea with its blown and ruffled bosom;