Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  We saw not, when we moved therein?

  XXV

  I know that this was Life, the track

  Whereon with equal feet we fared;

  And then, as now, the day prepared

  The daily burden for the back.

  But this it was that made me move

  As light as carrier-birds in air;

  I loved the weight I had to bear,

  Because it needed help of Love:

  Nor could I weary, heart or limb,

  When mighty Love would cleave in twain

  The lading of a single pain,

  And part it, giving half to him.

  XXVI

  Still onward winds the dreary way;

  I with it; for I long to prove

  No lapse of moons can canker Love,

  Whatever fickle tongues may say.

  And if that eye which watches guilt

  And goodness, and hath power to see

  Within the green the moulder’d tree,

  And towers fall’n as soon as built?

  Oh, if indeed that eye foresee

  Or see (in Him is no before)

  In more of life true life no more

  And Love the indifference to be,

  Then might I find, ere yet the morn

  Breaks hither over Indian seas,

  That Shadow waiting with the keys,

  To shroud me from my proper scorn.

  XXVII

  I envy not in any moods

  The captive void of noble rage,

  The linnet born within the cage,

  That never knew the summer woods:

  I envy not the beast that takes

  His license in the field of time,

  Unfetter’d by the sense of crime,

  To whom a conscience never wakes;

  Nor, what may count itself as blest,

  The heart that never plighted troth

  But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

  Nor any want-begotten rest.

  I hold it true, whate’er befall;

  I feel it, when I sorrow most;

  ‘Tis better to have loved and lost

  Than never to have loved at all.

  XXVIII

  The time draws near the birth of Christ:

  The moon is hid; the night is still;

  The Christmas bells from hill to hill

  Answer each other in the mist.

  Four voices of four hamlets round,

  From far and near, on mead and moor,

  Swell out and fail, as if a door

  Were shut between me and the sound:

  Each voice four changes on the wind,

  That now dilate, and now decrease,

  Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,

  Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.

  This year I slept and woke with pain,

  I almost wish’d no more to wake,

  And that my hold on life would break

  Before I heard those bells again:

  But they my troubled spirit rule,

  For they controll’d me when a boy;

  They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,

  The merry merry bells of Yule.

  XXIX

  With such compelling cause to grieve

  As daily vexes household peace,

  And chains regret to his decease,

  How dare we keep our Christmas-eve;

  Which brings no more a welcome guest

  To enrich the threshold of the night

  With shower’d largess of delight

  In dance and song and game and jest?

  Yet go, and while the holly boughs

  Entwine the cold baptismal font,

  Make one wreath more for Use and Wont,

  That guard the portals of the house;

  Old sisters of a day gone by,

  Gray nurses, loving nothing new;

  Why should they miss their yearly due

  Before their time? They too will die.

  XXX

  With trembling fingers did we weave

  The holly round the Chrismas hearth;

  A rainy cloud possess’d the earth,

  And sadly fell our Christmas-eve.

  At our old pastimes in the hall

  We gambol’d, making vain pretence

  Of gladness, with an awful sense

  Of one mute Shadow watching all.

  We paused: the winds were in the beech:

  We heard them sweep the winter land;

  And in a circle hand-in-hand

  Sat silent, looking each at each.

  Then echo-like our voices rang;

  We sung, tho’ every eye was dim,

  A merry song we sang with him

  Last year: impetuously we sang:

  We ceased:a gentler feeling crept

  Upon us: surely rest is meet:

  ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet,’

  And silence follow’d, and we wept.

  Our voices took a higher range;

  Once more we sang: ‘They do not die

  Nor lose their mortal sympathy,

  Nor change to us, although they change;

  ‘Rapt from the fickle and the frail

  With gather’d power, yet the same,

  Pierces the keen seraphic flame

  From orb to orb, from veil to veil.’

  Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,

  Draw forth the cheerful day from night:

  O Father, touch the east, and light

  The light that shone when Hope was born.

  XXXI

  When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,

  And home to Mary’s house return’d,

  Was this demanded — if he yearn’d

  To hear her weeping by his grave?

  ‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’

  There lives no record of reply,

  Which telling what it is to die

  Had surely added praise to praise.

  From every house the neighbours met,

  The streets were fill’d with joyful sound,

  A solemn gladness even crown’d

  The purple brows of Olivet.

  Behold a man raised up by Christ!

  The rest remaineth unreveal’d;

  He told it not; or something seal’d

  The lips of that Evangelist.

  XXXII

  Her eyes are homes of silent prayer,

  Nor other thought her mind admits

  But, he was dead, and there he sits,

  And he that brought him back is there.

  Then one deep love doth supersede

  All other, when her ardent gaze

  Roves from the living brother’s face,

  And rests upon the Life indeed.

  All subtle thought, all curious fears,

  Borne down by gladness so complete,

  She bows, she bathes the Saviour’s feet

  With costly spikenard and with tears.

  Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,

  Whose loves in higher love endure;

  What souls possess themselves so pure,

  Or is there blessedness like theirs?

  XXXIII

  O thou that after toil and storm

  Mayst seem to have reach’d a purer air,

  Whose faith has centre everywhere,

  Nor cares to fix itself to form,

  Leave thou thy sister when she prays,

  Her early Heaven, her happy views;

  Nor thou with shadow’d hint confuse

  A life that leads melodious days.

  Her faith thro’ form is pure as thine,

  Her hands are quicker unto good:

  Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood

  To which she links a truth divine!

  See thou, that countess reason ripe

  In holding by the law within,

  Thou fail not in a world of sin,

  And ev’n for want of such a type.

  XXXIV
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  My own dim life should teach me this,

  That life shall live for evermore,

  Else earth is darkness at the core,

  And dust and ashes all that is;

  This round of green, this orb of flame,

  Fantastic beauty such as lurks

  In some wild Poet, when he works

  Without a conscience or an aim.

  What then were God to such as I?

  ‘Twere hardly worth my while to choose

  Of things all mortal, or to use

  A tattle patience ere I die;

  ‘Twere best at once to sink to peace,

  Like birds the charming serpent draws,

  To drop head-foremost in the jaws

  Of vacant darkness and to cease.

  XXXV

  Yet if some voice that man could trust

  Should murmur from the narrow house,

  ‘The cheeks drop in; the body bows;

  Man dies: nor is there hope in dust:’

  Might I not say? ‘Yet even here,

  But for one hour, O Love, I strive

  To keep so sweet a thing alive:’

  But I should turn mine ears and hear

  The moanings of the homeless sea,

  The sound of streams that swift or slow

  Draw down Æonian hills, and sow

  The dust of continents to be;

  And Love would answer with a sigh,

  ‘The sound of that forgetful shore

  Will change my sweetness more and more,

  Half-dead to know that I shall die.’

  O me, what profits it to put

  An idle case? If Death were seen

  At first as Death, Love had not been,

  Or been in narrowest working shut,

  Mere fellowship of sluggish moods,

  Or in his coarsest Satyr-shape

  Had bruised the herb and crush’d the grape,

  And bask’d and batten’d in the woods.

  XXXVI

  Tho’ truths in manhood darkly join,

  Deep-seated in our mystic frame,

  We yield all blessing to the name

  Of Him that made them current coin;

  For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers,

  Where truth in closest words shall fail,

  When truth embodied in a tale

  Shall enter in at lowly doors.

  And so the Word had breath, and wrought

  With human hands the creed of creeds

  In loveliness of perfect deeds,

  More strong than all poetic thought;

  Which he may read that binds the sheaf,

  Or builds the house, or digs the grave,

  And those wild eyes that watch the wave

  In roarings round the coral reef.

  XXXVII

  Urania speaks with darken’d brow:

  ‘Thou pratest here where thou art least;

  This faith has many a purer priest,

  And many an abler voice than thou.

  ‘Go down beside thy native rill,

  On thy Parnassus set thy feet,

  And hear thy laurel whisper sweet

  About the ledges of the hill.’

  And my Melpomene replies,

  A touch of shame upon her cheek:

  ‘I am not worthy ev’n to speak

  Of thy prevailing mysteries;

  ‘For I am but an earthly Muse,

  And owning but a little art

  To lull with song an aching heart,

  And render human love his dues;

  ‘But brooding on the dear one dead,

  And all he said of things divine,

  (And dear to me as sacred wine

  To dying lips is all he said),

  ‘I murmur’d, as I came along,

  Of comfort clasp’d in truth reveal’d;

  And loiter’d in the master’s field,

  And darken’d sanctities with song.’

  XXXVIII

  With weary steps I loiter on,

  Tho’ always under alter’d skies

  The purple from the distance dies,

  My prospect and horizon gone.

  No joy the blowing season gives,

  The herald melodies of spring,

  But in the songs I love to sing

  A doubtful gleam of solace lives.

  If any care for what is here

  Survive in spirits render’d free,

  Then are these songs I sing of thee

  Not all ungrateful to thine ear.

  XXXIX

  Old warder of these buried bones,

  And answering now my random stroke

  With fruitful cloud and living smoke,

  Dark yew, that graspest at the stones

  And dippest toward the dreamless head,

  To thee too comes the golden hour

  When flower is feeling after flower;

  But Sorrow?fixt upon the dead,

  And darkening the dark graves of men,?

  What whisper’d from her lying lips?

  Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,

  And passes into gloom again.

  XL

  Could we forget the widow’d hour

  And look on Spirits breathed away,

  As on a maiden in the day

  When first she wears her orange-flower!

  When crown’d with blessing she doth rise

  To take her latest leave of home,

  And hopes and light regrets that come

  Make April of her tender eyes;

  And doubtful joys the father move,

  And tears are on the mother’s face,

  As parting with a long embrace

  She enters other realms of love;

  Her office there to rear, to teach,

  Becoming as is meet and fit

  A link among the days, to knit

  The generations each with each;

  And, doubtless, unto thee is given

  A life that bears immortal fruit

  In those great offices that suit

  The full-grown energies of heaven.

  Ay me, the difference I discern!

  How often shall her old fireside

  Be cheer’d with tidings of the bride,

  How often she herself return,

  And tell them all they would have told,

  And bring her babe, and make her boast,

  Till even those that miss’d her most

  Shall count new things as dear as old:

  But thou and I have shaken hands,

  Till growing winters lay me low;

  My paths are in the fields I know.

  And thine in undiscover’d lands.

  XLI

  Thy spirit ere our fatal loss

  Did ever rise from high to higher;

  As mounts the heavenward altar-fire,

  As flies the lighter thro’ the gross.

  But thou art turn’d to something strange,

  And I have lost the links that bound

  Thy changes; here upon the ground,

  No more partaker of thy change.

  Deep folly! yet that this could be?

  That I could wing my will with might

  To leap the grades of life and light,

  And flash at once, my friend, to thee.

  For tho’ my nature rarely yields

  To that vague fear implied in death;

  Nor shudders at the gulfs beneath,

  The howlings from forgotten fields;

  Yet oft when sundown skirts the moor

  An inner trouble I behold,

  A spectral doubt which makes me cold,

  That I shall be thy mate no more,

  Tho’ following with an upward mind

  The wonders that have come to thee,

  Thro’ all the secular to-be,

  But evermore a life behind.

  XLII

  I vex my heart with fancies dim:

  He still outstript me in the race;

  It was but unity of pla
ce

  That made me dream I rank’d with him.

  And so may Place retain us still,

  And he the much-beloved again,

  A lord of large experience, train

  To riper growth the mind and will:

  And what delights can equal those

  That stir the spirit’s inner deeps,

  When one that loves but knows not, reaps

  A truth from one that loves and knows?

  XLIII

  If Sleep and Death be truly one,

  And every spirit’s folded bloom

  Thro’ all its intervital gloom

  In some long trance should slumber on;

  Unconscious of the sliding hour,

  Bare of the body, might it last,

  And silent traces of the past

  Be all the colour of the flower:

  So then were nothing lost to man;

  So that still garden of the souls

  In many a figured leaf enrolls

  The total world since life began;

  And love will last as pure and whole

  As when he loved me here in Time,

  And at the spiritual prime

  Rewaken with the dawning soul.

  XLIV

  How fares it with the happy dead?

  For here the man is more and more;

  But he forgets the days before

  God shut the doorways of his head.

  The days have vanish’d, tone and tint,

  And yet perhaps the hoarding sense

  Gives out at times (he knows not whence)

  A little flash, a mystic hint;

  And in the long harmonious years

  (If Death so taste Lethean springs

  May some dim touch of earthly things)

  Surprise thee ranging with thy peers.

  If such a dreamy touch should fall,

  O, turn thee round, resolve the doubt;

  My guardian angel will speak out

  In that high place, and tell thee all.

  XLV

  The baby new to earth and sky,

  What time his tender palm is prest

  Against the circle of the breast,

  Has never thought that ‘this is I:’

  But as he grows he gathers much,

  And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’

  And finds ‘I am not what I see,

  And other than the things I touch.’

  So rounds he to a separate mind

  From whence clear memory may begin,

  As thro’ the frame that binds him in

  His isolation grows defined.

  This use may lie in blood and breath,

  Which else were fruitless of their due,

  Had man to learn himself anew

  Beyond the second birth of Death.

  XLVI

  We ranging down this lower track,

  The path we came by, thorn and flower,

  Is shadow’d by the growing hour,

  Lest life should fail in looking back.

  So be it: there no shade can last

  In that deep dawn behind the tomb,

  But clear from marge to marge shall bloom

  The eternal landscape of the past;