Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  Thy sailor, — while thy head is bow’d,

  His heavy-shotted hammock-shroud

  Drops in his vast and wandering grave.

  Ye know no more than I who wrought

  At that last hour to please him well;

  Who mused on all I had to tell,

  And something written, something thought;

  Expecting still his advent home;

  And ever met him on his way

  With wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’

  Or ‘here to-morrow will he come.’

  O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove,

  That sittest ranging golden hair;

  And glad to find thyself so fair,

  Poor child, that waitest for thy love!

  For now her father’s chimney glows

  In expectation of a guest;

  And thinking ‘this will please him best,’

  She takes a riband or a rose;

  For he will see them on to-night;

  And with the thought her colour burns;

  And, having left the glass, she turns

  Once more to set a ringlet right;

  And, even when she turn’d, the curse

  Had fallen, and her future Lord

  Was drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,

  Or kill’d in falling from his horse.

  O what to her shall be the end?

  And what to me remains of good?

  To her, perpetual maidenhood,

  And unto me no second friend.

  VII

  Dark house, by which once more I stand

  Here in the long unlovely street,

  Doors, where my heart was used to beat

  So quickly, waiting for a hand,

  A hand that can be clasp’d no more?

  Behold me, for I cannot sleep,

  And like a guilty thing I creep

  At earliest morning to the door.

  He is not here; but far away

  The noise of life begins again,

  And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain

  On the bald street breaks the blank day.

  VIII

  A happy lover who has come

  To look on her that loves him well,

  Who ‘lights and rings the gateway bell,

  And learns her gone and far from home;

  He saddens, all the magic light

  Dies off at once from bower and hall,

  And all the place is dark, and all

  The chambers emptied of delight:

  So find I every pleasant spot

  In which we two were wont to meet,

  The field, the chamber, and the street,

  For all is dark where thou art not.

  Yet as that other, wandering there

  In those deserted walks, may find

  A flower beat with rain and wind,

  Which once she foster’d up with care;

  So seems it in my deep regret,

  O my forsaken heart, with thee

  And this poor flower of poesy

  Which little cared for fades not yet.

  But since it pleased a vanish’d eye,

  I go to plant it on his tomb,

  That if it can it there may bloom,

  Or, dying, there at least may die.

  IX

  Fair ship, that from the Italian shore

  Sailest the placid ocean-plains

  With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,

  Spread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.

  So draw him home to those that mourn

  In vain; a favourable speed

  Ruffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead

  Thro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.

  All night no ruder air perplex

  Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright

  As our pure love, thro’ early light

  Shall glimmer on the dewy decks.

  Sphere all your lights around, above;

  Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;

  Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,

  My friend, the brother of my love;

  My Arthur, whom I shall not see

  Till all my widow’d race be run;

  Dear as the mother to the son,

  More than my brothers are to me.

  X

  I hear the noise about thy keel;

  I hear the bell struck in the night:

  I see the cabin-window bright;

  I see the sailor at the wheel.

  Thou bring’st the sailor to his wife,

  And travell’d men from foreign lands;

  And letters unto trembling hands;

  And, thy dark freight, a vanish’d life.

  So bring him; we have idle dreams:

  This look of quiet flatters thus

  Our home-bred fancies. O to us,

  The fools of habit, sweeter seems

  To rest beneath the clover sod,

  That takes the sunshine and the rains,

  Or where the kneeling hamlet drains

  The chalice of the grapes of God;

  Than if with thee the roaring wells

  Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine;

  And hands so often clasp’d in mine,

  Should toss with tangle and with shells.

  XI

  Calm is the morn without a sound,

  Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

  And only thro’ the faded leaf

  The chestnut pattering to the ground:

  Calm and deep peace on this high world,

  And on these dews that drench the furze,

  And all the silvery gossamers

  That twinkle into green and gold:

  Calm and still light on yon great plain

  That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

  And crowded farms and lessening towers,

  To mingle with the bounding main:

  Calm and deep peace in this wide air,

  These leaves that redden to the fall;

  And in my heart, if calm at all,

  If any calm, a calm despair:

  Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,

  And waves that sway themselves in rest,

  And dead calm in that noble breast

  Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

  XII

  Lo, as a dove when up she springs

  To bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,

  Some dolorous message knit below

  The wild pulsation of her wings;

  Like her I go; I cannot stay;

  I leave this mortal ark behind,

  A weight of nerves without a mind,

  And leave the cliffs, and haste away

  O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,

  And reach the glow of southern skies,

  And see the sails at distance rise,

  And linger weeping on the marge,

  And saying; ‘Comes he thus, my friend?

  Is this the end of all my care?’

  And circle moaning in the air:

  ‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’

  And forward dart again, and play

  About the prow, and back return

  To where the body sits, and learn

  That I have been an hour away.

  XIII

  Tears of the widower, when he sees

  A late-lost form that sleep reveals,

  And moves his doubtful arms, and feels

  Her place is empty, fall like these;

  Which weep a loss for ever new,

  A void where heart on heart reposed;

  And, where warm hands have prest and closed,

  Silence, till I be silent too.

  Which weep the comrade of my choice,

  An awful thought, a life removed,

  The human-hearted man I loved,

  A Spirit, not a breathing voice.

  Come, Time, and teach me, many years,

  I do not suffer in a dream;

  For now so strange do these things seem,


  Mine eyes have leisure for their tears;

  My fancies time to rise on wing,

  And glance about the approaching sails,

  As tho’ they brought but merchants’ bales,

  And not the burthen that they bring.

  XIV

  If one should bring me this report,

  That thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,

  And I went down unto the quay,

  And found thee lying in the port;

  And standing, muffled round with woe,

  Should see thy passengers in rank

  Come stepping lightly down the plank,

  And beckoning unto those they know;

  And if along with these should come

  The man I held as half-divine;

  Should strike a sudden hand in mine,

  And ask a thousand things of home;

  And I should tell him all my pain,

  And how my life had droop’d of late,

  And he should sorrow o’er my state

  And marvel what possess’d my brain;

  And I perceived no touch of change,

  No hint of death in all his frame,

  But found him all in all the same,

  I should not feel it to be strange.

  XV

  To-night the winds begin to rise

  And roar from yonder dropping day:

  The last red leaf is whirl’d away,

  The rooks are blown about the skies;

  The forest crack’d, the waters curl’d,

  The cattle huddled on the lea;

  And wildly dash’d on tower and tree

  The sunbeam strikes along the world:

  And but for fancies, which aver

  That all thy motions gently pass

  Athwart a plane of molten glass,

  I scarce could brook the strain and stir

  That makes the barren branches loud;

  And but for fear it is not so,

  The wild unrest that lives in woe

  Would dote and pore on yonder cloud

  That rises upward always higher,

  And onward drags a labouring breast,

  And topples round the dreary west,

  A looming bastion fringed with fire.

  XVI

  What words are these have falle’n from me?

  Can calm despair and wild unrest

  Be tenants of a single breast,

  Or sorrow such a changeling be?

  Or cloth she only seem to take

  The touch of change in calm or storm;

  But knows no more of transient form

  In her deep self, than some dead lake

  That holds the shadow of a lark

  Hung in the shadow of a heaven?

  Or has the shock, so harshly given,

  Confused me like the unhappy bark

  That strikes by night a craggy shelf,

  And staggers blindly ere she sink?

  And stunn’d me from my power to think

  And all my knowledge of myself;

  And made me that delirious man

  Whose fancy fuses old and new,

  And flashes into false and true,

  And mingles all without a plan?

  XVII

  Thou comest, much wept for: such a breeze

  Compell’d thy canvas, and my prayer

  Was as the whisper of an air

  To breathe thee over lonely seas.

  For I in spirit saw thee move

  Thro’ circles of the bounding sky,

  Week after week: the days go by:

  Come quick, thou bringest all I love.

  Henceforth, wherever thou may’st roam,

  My blessing, like a line of light,

  Is on the waters day and night,

  And like a beacon guards thee home.

  So may whatever tempest mars

  Mid-ocean, spare thee, sacred bark;

  And balmy drops in summer dark

  Slide from the bosom of the stars.

  So kind an office hath been done,

  Such precious relics brought by thee;

  The dust of him I shall not see

  Till all my widow’d race be run.

  XVIII

  ‘Tis well; ‘tis something; we may stand

  Where he in English earth is laid,

  And from his ashes may be made

  The violet of his native land.

  ‘Tis little; but it looks in truth

  As if the quiet bones were blest

  Among familiar names to rest

  And in the places of his youth.

  Come then, pure hands, and bear the head

  That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep,

  And come, whatever loves to weep,

  And hear the ritual of the dead.

  Ah yet, ev’n yet, if this might be,

  I, falling on his faithful heart,

  Would breathing thro’ his lips impart

  The life that almost dies in me;

  That dies not, but endures with pain,

  And slowly forms the firmer mind,

  Treasuring the look it cannot find,

  The words that are not heard again.

  XIX

  The Danube to the Severn gave

  The darken’d heart that beat no more;

  They laid him by the pleasant shore,

  And in the hearing of the wave.

  There twice a day the Severn fills;

  The salt sea-water passes by,

  And hushes half the babbling Wye,

  And makes a silence in the hills.

  The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,

  And hush’d my deepest grief of all,

  When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,

  I brim with sorrow drowning song.

  The tide flows down, the wave again

  Is vocal in its wooded walls;

  My deeper anguish also falls,

  And I can speak a little then.

  XX

  The lesser griefs that may be said,

  That breathe a thousand tender vows,

  Are but as servants in a house

  Where lies the master newly dead;

  Who speak their feeling as it is,

  And weep the fulness from the mind:

  ‘It will be hard,’ they say, ‘to find

  Another service such as this.’

  My lighter moods are like to these,

  That out of words a comfort win;

  But there are other griefs within,

  And tears that at their fountain freeze;

  For by the hearth the children sit

  Cold in that atmosphere of Death,

  And scarce endure to draw the breath,

  Or like to noiseless phantoms flit;

  But open converse is there none,

  So much the vital spirits sink

  To see the vacant chair, and think,

  ‘How good! how kind! and he is gone.’

  XXI

  I sing to him that rests below,

  And, since the grasses round me wave,

  I take the grasses of the grave,

  And make them pipes whereon to blow.

  The traveller hears me now and then,

  And sometimes harshly will he speak:

  ‘This fellow would make weakness weak,

  And melt the waxen hearts of men.’

  Another answers, ‘Let him be,

  He loves to make parade of pain

  That with his piping he may gain

  The praise that comes to constancy.’

  A third is wroth: ‘Is this an hour

  For private sorrow’s barren song,

  When more and more the people throng

  The chairs and thrones of civil power?

  ‘A time to sicken and to swoon,

  When Science reaches forth her arms

  To feel from world to world, and charms

  Her secret from the latest moon?’

  Behold, ye speak an idle thing:


  Ye never knew the sacred dust:

  I do but sing because I must,

  And pipe but as the linnets sing:

  And one is glad; her note is gay,

  For now her little ones have ranged;

  And one is sad; her note is changed,

  Because her brood is stol’n away.

  XXII

  The path by which we twain did go,

  Which led by tracts that pleased us well,

  Thro’ four sweet years arose and fell,

  From flower to flower, from snow to snow:

  And we with singing cheer’d the way,

  And, crown’d with all the season lent,

  From April on to April went,

  And glad at heart from May to May:

  But where the path we walk’d began

  To slant the fifth autumnal slope,

  As we descended following Hope,

  There sat the Shadow fear’d of man;

  Who broke our fair companionship,

  And spread his mantle dark and cold,

  And wrapt thee formless in the fold,

  And dull’d the murmur on thy lip,

  And bore thee where I could not see

  Nor follow, tho’ I walk in haste,

  And think, that somewhere in the waste

  The Shadow sits and waits for me.

  XXIII

  Now, sometimes in my sorrow shut,

  Or breaking into song by fits,

  Alone, alone, to where he sits,

  The Shadow cloak’d from head to foot,

  Who keeps the keys of all the creeds,

  I wander, often falling lame,

  And looking back to whence I came,

  Or on to where the pathway leads;

  And crying, How changed from where it ran

  Thro’ lands where not a leaf was dumb;

  But all the lavish hills would hum

  The murmur of a happy Pan:

  When each by turns was guide to each,

  And Fancy light from Fancy caught,

  And Thought leapt out to wed with Thought

  Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech;

  And all we met was fair and good,

  And all was good that Time could bring,

  And all the secret of the Spring

  Moved in the chambers of the blood;

  And many an old philosophy

  On Argive heights divinely sang,

  And round us all the thicket rang

  To many a flute of Arcady.

  XXIV

  And was the day of my delight

  As pure and perfect as I say?

  The very source and fount of Day

  Is dash’d with wandering isles of night.

  If all was good and fair we met,

  This earth had been the Paradise

  It never look’d to human eyes

  Since our first Sun arose and set.

  And is it that the haze of grief

  Makes former gladness loom so great?

  The lowness of the present state,

  That sets the past in this relief?

  Or that the past will always win

  A glory from its being far;

  And orb into the perfect star