Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series

by Lord Tennyson Alfred

  By shores that darken with the gathering wolf,

  Runs in a river of blood to the sick sea.

  Is this a time to madden madness then?

  Was this a time for these to flaunt their pride?

  May Pharaoh’s darkness, folds as dense as those

  Which hid the Holiest from the people’s eyes

  Ere the great death, shroud this great sin from all:

  Doubtless our narrow world must canvass it:

  O rather pray for those and pity them,

  Who thro’ their own desire accomplish’d bring

  Their own gray hairs with sorrow to the grave —

  Who broke the bond which they desired to break,

  Which else had link’d their race with times to come —

  Who wove coarse webs to snare her purity,

  Grossly contriving their dear daughter’s good —

  Poor souls, and knew not what they did, but sat

  Ignorant, devising their own daughter’s death!

  May not that earthly chastisement suffice?

  Have not our love and reverence left them bare?

  Will not another take their heritage?

  Will there be children’s laughter in their hall

  For ever and for ever, or one stone

  Left on another, or is it a light thing

  That I their guest, their host, their ancient friend,

  I made by these the last of all my race

  Must cry to these the last of theirs, as cried

  Christ ere His agony to those that swore

  Not by the temple but the gold, and made

  Their own traditions God, and slew the Lord,

  And left their memories a world’s curse—”Behold,

  Your house is left unto you desolate?”’

  Ended he had not, but she brook’d no more:

  Long since her heart had beat remorselessly,

  Her crampt-up sorrow pain’d her, and a sense

  Of meanness in her unresisting life.

  Then their eyes vext her; for on entering

  He had cast the curtains of their seat aside —

  Black velvet of the costliest — she herself

  Had seen to that: fain had she closed them now,

  Yet dared not stir to do it, only near’d

  Her husband inch by inch, but when she laid,

  Wifelike, her hand in one of his, he veil’d

  His face with the other, and at once, as falls

  A creeper when the prop is broken, fell

  The woman shrieking at his feet, and swoon’d.

  Then her own people bore along the nave

  Her pendent hands, and narrow meagre face

  Seam’d with the shallow cares of fifty years:

  And here the Lord of all the landscape round

  Ev’n to its last horizon, and of all

  Who peer’d at him so keenly, follow’d out

  Tall and erect, but in the middle aisle

  Reel’d, as a footsore ox in crowded ways

  Stumbling across the market to his death,

  Unpitied; for he groped as blind, and seem’d

  Always about to fall, grasping the pews

  And oaken finials till he touch’d the door;

  Yet to the lychgate, where his chariot stood,

  Strode from the porch, tall and erect again.

  But nevermore did either pass the gate

  Save under pall with bearers. In one month,

  Thro’ weary and yet wearier hours,

  The childless mother went to seek her child;

  And when he felt the silence of his house

  About him, and the change and not the change,

  And those fixt eyes of painted ancestors

  Staring for ever from their gilded walls

  On him their last descendant, his own head

  Began to droop, to fall; the man became

  Imbecile; his one word was ‘desolate’;

  Dead for two years before his death was he;

  But when the second Christmas came, escaped

  His keepers, and the silence which he felt,

  To find a deeper in the narrow gloom

  By wife and child; nor wanted at his end

  The dark retinue reverencing death

  At golden thresholds; nor from tender hearts,

  And those who sorrow’d o’er a vanish’d race,

  Pity, the violet on the tyrant’s grave.

  Then the great Hall was wholly broken down,

  And the broad woodland parcell’d into farms;

  And where the two contrived their daughter’s good,

  Lies the hawk’s cast, the mole has made his run,

  The hedgehog underneath the plaintain bores,

  The rabbit fondles his own harmless face,

  The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there

  Follows the mouse, and all is open field.

  Sea Dreams

  A CITY clerk, but gently born and bred;

  His wife, an unknown artist’s orphan child —

  One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:

  They, thinking that her clear germander eye

  Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,

  Came, with a month’s leave given them, to the sea:

  For which his gains were dock’d, however small:

  Small were his gains, and hard his work; besides,

  Their slender household fortunes (for the man

  Had risk’d his little) like the little thrift,

  Trembled in perilous places o’er a deep:

  And oft, when sitting all alone, his face

  Would darken, as he cursed his credulousness,

  And that one unctuous mount which lured him, rogue,

  To buy strange shares in some Peruvian mine.

  Now seaward-bound for health they gain’d a coast,

  All sand and cliff and deep-inrunning cave,

  At close of day; slept, woke, and went the next,

  The Sabbath, pious variers from the church,

  To chapel; where a heated pulpiteer,

  Not preaching simple Christ to simple men,

  Announced the coming doom, and fulminated

  Against the scarlet woman and her creed:

  For sideways up he swung his arms, and shriek’d

  ‘Thus, thus with violence,’ ev’n as if he held

  The Apocalyptic millstone, and himself

  Were that great Angel; ‘Thus with violence

  Shall Babylon be cast into the sea;

  Then comes the close.’ The gentle-hearted wife

  Sat shuddering at the ruin of a world;

  He at his own: but when the wordy storm

  Had ended, forth they came and paced the shore,

  Ran in and out the long sea-framing caves,

  Drank the large air, and saw, but scarce believed

  (The sootflake of so many a summer still

  Clung to their fancies) that they saw, the sea.

  So now on sand they walk’d, and now on cliff,

  Lingering about the thymy promontories,

  Till all the sails were darken’d in the west,

  And rosed in the east: then homeward and to bed:

  Where she, who kept a tender Christian hope

  Haunting a holy text, and still to that

  Returning, as the bird returns, at night,

  ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,’

  Said, ‘Love, forgive him:’ but he did not speak;

  And silenced by that silence lay the wife,

  Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,

  And musing on the little lives of men,

  And how they mar this little by their feuds.

  But while the two were sleeping, a full tide

  Rose with ground-swell, which, on the foremost rocks

  Touching, upjetted in spirts of wild sea-smoke,

  And scaled in sheets of wasteful foam, and fell

&nbs
p; In vast sea-cataracts — ever and anon

  Dead claps of thunder from within the cliffs

  Heard thro’ the living roar. At this the babe,

  Their Margaret cradled near them, wail’d and woke

  The mother, and the father suddenly cried,

  ‘A wreck, a wreck!’ then turn’d, and groaning said,

  ‘Forgive! How many will say, “forgive,” and find

  A sort of absolution in the sound

  To hate a little longer! No; the sin

  That neither God nor man can well forgive,

  Hypocrisy, I saw it in him at once.

  Is it so true that second thoughts are best?

  Not first, and third, which are a riper first?

  Too ripe, too late! they come too late for use.

  Ah love, there surely lives in man and beast

  Something divine to warn them of their foes:

  And such a sense, when first I fronted him,

  Said, “trust him not;” but after, when I came

  To know him more, I lost it, knew him less;

  Fought with what seem’d my own uncharity;

  Sat at his table; drank his costly wines;

  Made more and more allowance for his talk;

  Went further, fool! and trusted him with all,

  All my poor scrapings from a dozen years

  Of dust and deskwork: there is no such mine,

  None; but a gulf of ruin, swallowing gold,

  Not making. Ruin’d! ruin’d! the sea roars

  Ruin: a fearful night!’

  ‘Not fearful; fair,’

  Said the good wife, ‘if every star in heaven

  Can make it fair: you do but bear the tide.

  Had you ill dreams?’

  ‘O yes,’ he said, ‘I dream’d

  Of such a tide swelling toward the land,

  And I from out the boundless outer deep

  Swept with it to the shore, and enter’d one

  Of those dark caves that run beneath the cliffs.

  I thought the motion of the boundless deep

  Bore through the cave, and I was heaved upon it

  In darkness: then I saw one lovely star

  Larger and larger. “What a world,” I thought,

  “To live in!” but in moving I found

  Only the landward exit of the cave,

  Bright with the sun upon the stream beyond:

  And near the light a giant woman sat,

  All over earthy, like a piece of earth,

  A pickaxe in her hand: then out I slipt

  Into a land all of sun and blossom, trees

  As high as heaven, and every bird that sings:

  And here the night-light flickering in my eyes

  Awoke me.’

  ‘That was then your dream,’ she said,

  ‘Not sad, but sweet.’

  ‘So sweet, I lay,’ said he,

  ‘And mused upon it, drifting up the stream

  In fancy, till I slept again, and pieced

  The broken vision; for I dream’d that still

  The motion of the great deep bore me on,

  And that the woman walk’d upon the brink:

  I wonder’d at her strength, and ask’d her of it:

  “It came,” she said, “by working in the mines:”

  O then to ask her of my shares, I thought;

  And ask’d; but not a word; she shook her head.

  And then the motion of the current ceased,

  And there was rolling thunder; and we reach’d

  A mountain, like a wall of burs and thorns;

  But she with her strong feet up the steep hill

  Trod out a path: I follow’d; and at top

  She pointed seaward: there a fleet of glass,

  That seem’d a fleet of jewels under me,

  Sailing along before a gloomy cloud

  That not one moment ceased to thunder, past

  In sunshine: right across its track there lay,

  Down in the water, a long reef of gold,

  Or what seem’d gold: and I was glad at first

  To think that in our often-ransack’d world

  Still so much gold was left; and then I fear’d

  Lest the gay navy there should splinter on it,

  And fearing waved my arm to warn them off;

  An idle signal, for the brittle fleet

  (I thought I could have died to save it) near’d,

  Touch’d, clink’d, and clash’d, and vanish’d, and I woke,

  I heard the clash so clearly. Now I see

  My dream was Life; the woman honest Work;

  And my poor venture but a fleet of glass

  Wreck’d on a reef of visionary gold.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the kindly wife to comfort him,

  ‘You raised your arm, you tumbled down and broke

  The glass with little Margaret’s medicine it it;

  And, breaking that, you made and broke your dream:

  A trifle makes a dream, a trifle breaks.’

  ‘No trifle,’ groan’d the husband; ‘yesterday

  I met him suddenly in the street, and ask’d

  That which I ask’d the woman in my dream.

  Like her, he shook his head. “Show me the books!”

  He dodged me with a long and loose account.

  “The books, the books!” but he, he could not wait,

  Bound on a matter he of life and death:

  When the great Books (see Daniel seven and ten)

  Were open’d, I should find he meant me well;

  And then began to bloat himself, and ooze

  All over with the fat affectionate smile

  That makes the widow lean. “My dearest friend,

  Have faith, have faith! We live by faith,” said he;

  “And all things work together for the good

  Of those” — it makes me sick to quote him — last

  Gript my hand hard, and with God-bless-you went.

  I stood like one that had received a blow:

  I found a hard friend in his loose accounts,

  A loose one in the hard grip of his hand,

  A curse in his God-bless-you: then my eyes

  Pursued him down the street, and far away,

  Among the honest shoulders of the crowd,

  Read rascal in the motions of his back,

  And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee.’

  ‘Was he so bound, poor soul?’ said the good wife;

  ‘So are we all: but do not call him, love,

  Before you prove him, rogue, and proved, forgive.

  His gain is loss; for he that wrongs his friend

  Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about

  A silent court of justice in his breast,

  Himself the judge and jury, and himself

  The prisoner at the bar, ever condemn’d:

  And that drags down his life: then comes what comes

  Hereafter: and he meant, he said he meant,

  Perhaps he meant, or partly meant, you well.’

  ‘“With all his conscience and one eye askew” —

  Love, let me quote these lines, that you may learn

  A man is likewise counsel for himself,

  Too often, in that silent court of yours —

  “With all his conscience and one eye askew,

  So false, he partly took himself for true;

  Whose pious talk, when most his heart was dry,

  Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye;

  Who, never naming God except for gain,

  So never took that useful name in vain;

  Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool,

  And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool;

  Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged,

  And snakelike slimed his victim ere he gorged;

  And oft at Bible meetings, o’er the rest

  Arising, did his holy oily best,

  Dropping the too rough H
in Hell and Heaven,

  To spread the Word by which himself had thriven.”

  How like you this old satire?’

  ‘Nay,’ she said

  ‘I loathe it: he had never kindly heart,

  Nor ever cared to better his own kind,

  Who first wrote satire, with no pity in it.

  But will you hear my dream, for I had one

  That altogether went to music? Still

  It awed me.’

  Then she told it, having dream’d

  Of that same coast.

  — But round the North, a light,

  A belt, it seem’d, of luminous vapor, lay,

  And ever in it a low musical note

  Swell’d up and died; and, as it swell’d, a ridge

  Of breaker issued from the belt, and still

  Grew with the growing note, and when the note

  Had reach’d a thunderous fullness, on those cliffs

  Broke, mixt with awful light (the same as that

  Living within the belt) whereby she saw

  That all those lines of cliffs were cliffs no more,

  But huge cathedral fronts of every age,

  Grave, florid, stern, as far as eye could see.

  One after one: and then the great ridge drew,

  Lessening to the lessening music, back,

  And past into the belt and swell’d again

  Slowly to music: ever when it broke

  The statues, king or saint, or founder fell;

  Then from the gaps and chasms of ruin left

  Came men and women in dark clusters round,

  Some crying, “Set them up! they shall not fall!”

  And others “Let them lie, for they have fall’n.”

  And still they strove and wrangled: and she grieved

  In her strange dream, she knew not why, to find

  Their wildest wailings never out of tune

  With that sweet note; and ever as their shrieks

  Ran highest up the gamut, that great wave

  Returning, while none mark’d it, on the crowd

  Broke, mixt with awful light, and show’d their eyes

  Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away

  The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone,

  To the waste deeps together.

  ‘Then I fixt

  My wistful eyes on two fair images,

  Both crown’d with stars and high among the stars, —

  The Virgin Mother standing with her child

  High up on one of those dark minster-fronts —

  Till she began to totter, and the child

  Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry

  Which mixt with little Margaret’s, and I woke,

  And my dream awed me: — well — but what are dreams?

  Yours came but from the breaking of a glass,

  And mine but from the crying of a child.’

  ‘Child? No!’ said he, ‘but this tide’s roar, and his,