Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  He look’d upon my crown and smiled:

  He reach’d the glory of a hand,

  That seem’d to touch it into leaf:

  The voice was not the voice of grief,

  The words were hard to understand.

  LXX

  I cannot see the features right,

  When on the gloom I strive to paint

  The face I know; the hues are faint

  And mix with hollow masks of night;

  Cloud-towers by ghostly masons wrought,

  A gulf that ever shuts and gapes,

  A hand that points, and palled shapes

  In shadowy thoroughfares of thought;

  And crowds that stream from yawning doors,

  And shoals of pucker’d faces drive;

  Dark bulks that tumble half alive,

  And lazy lengths on boundless shores;

  Till all at once beyond the will

  I hear a wizard music roll,

  And thro’ a lattice on the soul

  Looks thy fair face and makes it still.

  LXXI

  Sleep, kinsman thou to death and trance

  And madness, thou hast forged at last

  A night-long Present of the Past

  In which we went thro’ summer France.

  Hadst thou such credit with the soul?

  Then bring an opiate trebly strong,

  Drug down the blindfold sense of wrong

  That so my pleasure may be whole;

  While now we talk as once we talk’d

  Of men and minds, the dust of change,

  The days that grow to something strange,

  In walking as of old we walk’d

  Beside the river’s wooded reach,

  The fortress, and the mountain ridge,

  The cataract flashing from the bridge,

  The breaker breaking on the beach.

  LXXII

  Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,

  And howlest, issuing out of night,

  With blasts that blow the poplar white,

  And lash with storm the streaming pane?

  Day, when my crown’d estate begun

  To pine in that reverse of doom,

  Which sicken’d every living bloom,

  And blurr’d the splendour of the sun;

  Who usherest in the dolorous hour

  With thy quick tears that make the rose

  Pull sideways, and the daisy close

  Her crimson fringes to the shower;

  Who might’st have heaved a windless flame

  Up the deep East, or, whispering, play’d

  A chequer-work of beam and shade

  Along the hills, yet look’d the same.

  As wan, as chill, as wild as now;

  Day, mark’d as with some hideous crime,

  When the dark hand struck down thro’ time,

  And cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,

  Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows

  Thro’ clouds that drench the morning star,

  And whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar,

  And sow the sky with flying boughs,

  And up thy vault with roaring sound

  Climb thy thick noon, disastrous day;

  Touch thy dull goal of joyless gray,

  And hide thy shame beneath the ground.

  LXXIII

  So many worlds, so much to do,

  So little done, such things to be,

  How know I what had need of thee,

  For thou wert strong as thou wert true?

  The fame is quench’d that I foresaw,

  The head hath miss’d an earthly wreath:

  I curse not Nature, no, nor Death;

  For nothing is that errs from law.

  We pass; the path that each man trod

  Is dim, or will be dim, with weeds:

  What fame is left for human deeds

  In endless age? It rests with God.

  O hollow wraith of dying fame,

  Fade wholly, while the soul exults,

  And self-infolds the large results

  Of force that would have forged a name.

  LXXIV

  As sometimes in a dead man’s face,

  To those that watch it more and more,

  A likeness, hardly seen before,

  Comes out — to some one of his race:

  So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,

  I see thee what thou art, and know

  Thy likeness to the wise below,

  Thy kindred with the great of old.

  But there is more than I can see,

  And what I see I leave unsaid,

  Nor speak it, knowing Death has made

  His darkness beautiful with thee.

  LXXV

  I leave thy praises unexpress’d

  In verse that brings myself relief,

  And by the measure of my grief

  I leave thy greatness to be guess’d;

  What practice howsoe’er expert

  In fitting aptest words to things,

  Or voice the richest-toned that sings,

  Hath power to give thee as thou wert?

  I care not in these fading days

  To raise a cry that lasts not long,

  And round thee with the breeze of song

  To stir a little dust of praise.

  Thy leaf has perish’d in the green,

  And, while we breathe beneath the sun,

  The world which credits what is done

  Is cold to all that might have been.

  So here shall silence guard thy fame;

  But somewhere, out of human view,

  Whate’er thy hands are set to do

  Is wrought with tumult of acclaim.

  LXXVI

  Take wings of fancy, and ascend,

  And in a moment set thy face

  Where all the starry heavens of space

  Are sharpen’d to a needle’s end;

  Take wings of foresight; lighten thro’

  The secular abyss to come,

  And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb

  Before the mouldering of a yew;

  And if the matin songs, that woke

  The darkness of our planet, last,

  Thine own shall wither in the vast,

  Ere half the lifetime of an oak.

  Ere these have clothed their branchy bowers

  With fifty Mays, thy songs are vain;

  And what are they when these remain

  The ruin’d shells of hollow towers?

  LXXVII

  What hope is here for modern rhyme

  To him, who turns a musing eye

  On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie

  Foreshorten’d in the tract of time?

  These mortal lullabies of pain

  May bind a book, may line a box,

  May serve to curl a maiden’s locks;

  Or when a thousand moons shall wane

  A man upon a stall may find,

  And, passing, turn the page that tells

  A grief, then changed to something else,

  Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

  But what of that? My darken’d ways

  Shall ring with music all the same;

  To breathe my loss is more than fame,

  To utter love more sweet than praise.

  LXXVIII

  Again at Christmas did we weave

  The holly round the Christmas hearth;

  The silent snow possess’d the earth,

  And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:

  The yule-clog sparkled keen with frost,

  No wing of wind the region swept,

  But over all things brooding slept

  The quiet sense of something lost.

  As in the winters left behind,

  Again our ancient games had place,

  The mimic picture’s breathing grace,

  And dance and song and hoodman-blind.

  Who show’d a token of distress?

  No si
ngle tear, no mark of pain:

  O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?

  O grief, can grief be changed to less?

  O last regret, regret can die!

  No — mixt with all this mystic frame,

  Her deep relations are the same,

  But with long use her tears are dry.

  LXXIX

  ‘More than my brothers are to me,’?

  Let this not vex thee, noble heart!

  I know thee of what force thou art

  To hold the costliest love in fee.

  But thou and I are one in kind,

  As moulded like in Nature’s mint;

  And hill and wood and field did print

  The same sweet forms in either mind.

  For us the same cold streamlet curl’d

  Thro’ all his eddying coves, the same

  All winds that roam the twilight came

  In whispers of the beauteous world.

  At one dear knee we proffer’d vows,

  One lesson from one book we learn’d,

  Ere childhood’s flaxen ringlet turn’d

  To black and brown on kindred brows.

  And so my wealth resembles thine,

  But he was rich where I was poor,

  And he supplied my want the more

  As his unlikeness fitted mine.

  LXXX

  If any vague desire should rise,

  That holy Death ere Arthur died

  Had moved me kindly from his side,

  And dropt the dust on tearless eyes;

  Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,

  The grief my loss in him had wrought,

  A grief as deep as life or thought,

  But stay’d in peace with God and man.

  I make a picture in the brain;

  I hear the sentence that he speaks;

  He bears the burthen of the weeks

  But turns his burthen into gain.

  His credit thus shall set me free;

  And, influence-rich to soothe and save,

  Unused example from the grave

  Reach out dead hands to comfort me.

  LXXXI

  Could I have said while he was here,

  ‘My love shall now no further range;

  There cannot come a mellower change,

  For now is love mature in ear’?

  Love, then, had hope of richer store:

  What end is here to my complaint?

  This haunting whisper makes me faint,

  ‘More years had made me love thee more.’

  But Death returns an answer sweet:

  ‘My sudden frost was sudden gain,

  And gave all ripeness to the grain,

  It might have drawn from after-heat.’

  LXXXII

  I wage not any feud with Death

  For changes wrought on form and face;

  No lower life that earth’s embrace

  May breed with him, can fright my faith.

  Eternal process moving on,

  From state to state the spirit walks;

  And these are but the shatter’d stalks,

  Or ruin’d chrysalis of one.

  Nor blame I Death, because he bare

  The use of virtue out of earth:

  I know transplanted human worth

  Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.

  For this alone on Death I wreak

  The wrath that garners in my heart;

  He put our lives so far apart

  We cannot hear each other speak.

  LXXXIII

  Dip down upon the northern shore,

  O sweet new-year delaying long;

  Thou doest expectant nature wrong;

  Delaying long, delay no more.

  What stays thee from the clouded noons,

  Thy sweetness from its proper place?

  Can trouble live with April days,

  Or sadness in the summer moons?

  Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,

  The little speedwell’s darling blue,

  Deep tulips dash’d with fiery dew,

  Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.

  O thou, new-year, delaying long,

  Delayest the sorrow in my blood,

  That longs to burst a frozen bud

  And flood a fresher throat with song.

  LXXXIV

  When I contemplate all alone

  The life that had been thine below,

  And fix my thoughts on all the glow

  To which thy crescent would have grown;

  I see thee sitting crown’d with good,

  A central warmth diffusing bliss

  In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,

  On all the branches of thy blood;

  Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;

  For now the day was drawing on,

  When thou should’st link thy life with one

  Of mine own house, and boys of thine

  Had babbled ‘Uncle’ on my knee;

  But that remorseless iron hour

  Made cypress of her orange flower,

  Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.

  I seem to meet their least desire,

  To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.

  I see their unborn faces shine

  Beside the never-lighted fire.

  I see myself an honor’d guest,

  Thy partner in the flowery walk

  Of letters, genial table-talk,

  Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;

  While now thy prosperous labor fills

  The lips of men with honest praise,

  And sun by sun the happy days

  Descend below the golden hills

  With promise of a morn as fair;

  And all the train of bounteous hours

  Conduct by paths of growing powers,

  To reverence and the silver hair;

  Till slowly worn her earthly robe,

  Her lavish mission richly wrought,

  Leaving great legacies of thought,

  Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;

  What time mine own might also flee,

  As link’d with thine in love and fate,

  And, hovering o’er the dolorous strait

  To the other shore, involved in thee,

  Arrive at last the blessed goal,

  And He that died in Holy Land

  Would reach us out the shining hand,

  And take us as a single soul.

  What reed was that on which I leant?

  Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake

  The old bitterness again, and break

  The low beginnings of content.

  LXXXV

  This truth came borne with bier and pall,

  I felt it, when I sorrow’d most,

  ‘Tis better to have loved and lost,

  Than never to have loved at all —

  O true in word, and tried in deed,

  Demanding, so to bring relief

  To this which is our common grief,

  What kind of life is that I lead;

  And whether trust in things above

  Be dimm’d of sorrow, or sustain’d;

  And whether love for him have drain’d

  My capabilities of love;

  Your words have virtue such as draws

  A faithful answer from the breast,

  Thro’ light reproaches, half exprest,

  And loyal unto kindly laws.

  My blood an even tenor kept,

  Till on mine ear this message falls,

  That in Vienna’s fatal walls

  God’s finger touch’d him, and he slept.

  The great Intelligences fair

  That range above our mortal state,

  In circle round the blessed gate,

  Received and gave him welcome there;

  And led him thro’ the blissful climes,

  And show’d him in the fountain fresh

  All knowledge that the sons of flesh

  Sha
ll gather in the cycled times.

  But I remain’d, whose hopes were dim,

  Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,

  To wander on a darken’d earth,

  Where all things round me breathed of him.’

  O friendship, equal-poised control,

  O heart, with kindliest motion warm,

  O sacred essence, other form,

  O solemn ghost, O crowned soul!

  Yet none could better know than I,

  How much of act at human hands

  The sense of human will demands

  By which we dare to live or die.

  Whatever way my days decline,

  I felt and feel, tho’ left alone,

  His being working in mine own,

  The footsteps of his life in mine;

  A life that all the Muses deck’d

  With gifts of grace, that might express

  All-comprehensive tenderness,

  All-subtilising intellect:

  And so my passion hath not swerved

  To works of weakness, but I find

  An image comforting the mind,

  And in my grief a strength reserved.

  Likewise the imaginative woe,

  That loved to handle spiritual strife

  Diffused the shock thro’ all my life,

  But in the present broke the blow.

  My pulses therefore beat again

  For other friends that once I met;

  Nor can it suit me to forget

  The mighty hopes that make us men.

  I woo your love: I count it crime

  To mourn for any overmuch;

  I, the divided half of such

  A friendship as had master’d Time;

  Which masters Time indeed, and is

  Eternal, separate from fears:

  The all-assuming months and years

  Can take no part away from this:

  But Summer on the steaming floods,

  And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,

  And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,

  That gather in the waning woods,

  And every pulse of wind and wave

  Recalls, in change of light or gloom,

  My old affection of the tomb,

  And my prime passion in the grave:

  My old affection of the tomb,

  A part of stillness, yearns to speak:

  ‘Arise, and get thee forth and seek

  A friendship for the years to come.

  ‘I watch thee from the quiet shore;

  Thy spirit up to mine can reach;

  But in dear words of human speech

  We two communicate no more.’

  And I, ‘Can clouds of nature stain

  The starry clearness of the free?

  How is it? Canst thou feel for me

  Some painless sympathy with pain?’

  And lightly does the whisper fall:

  ‘Tis hard for thee to fathom this;

  I triumph in conclusive bliss,

  And that serene result of all.’

  So hold I commerce with the dead;

  Or so methinks the dead would say;

  Or so shall grief with symbols play