Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series
Page 118
While men shall move the lips; but if thou dare —
Thou, one of these, the race of Cadmus — then
No stone is fitted in yon marble girth
Whose echo shall not tongue thy glorious doom,
Nor in this pavement but shall ring thy name
To every hoof that clangs it, and the springs
Of Dircê laving yonder battle-plain,
Heard from the roofs by night, will murmur thee
To thine own Thebes, while Thebes thro’ thee shall stand
Firm-based with all her Gods.
The Dragon’s cave
Half hid, they tell me, now in flowing vines —
Where once he dwelt and whence he roll’d himself
At dead of night — thou knowest, and that smooth rock
Before it, altar-fashion’d, where of late
The woman-breasted Sphinx, with wings drawn back
Folded her lion paws, and look’d to Thebes.
There blanch the bones of whom she slew, and these
Mixt with her own, because the fierce beast found
A wiser than herself, and dash’d herself
Dead in her rage; but thou art wise enough
Tho’ young, to love thy wiser, blunt the curse
Of Pallas, bear, and tho’ I speak the truth
Believe I speak it, let thine own hand strike
Thy youthful pulses into rest and quench
The red God’s anger, fearing not to plunge
Thy torch of life in darkness, rather — thou
Rejoicing that the sun, the moon, the stars
Send no such light upon the ways of men
As one great deed.
Thither, my son, and there
Thou, that hast never known the embrace of love
Offer thy maiden life.
This useless hand!
I felt one warm tear fall upon it. Gone!
He will achieve his greatness.
But for me,
I would that I were gather’d to my rest,
And mingled with the famous kings of old
On whom about their ocean-islets flash
The faces of the Gods — the wise man’s word
Here trampled by the populace underfoot
There crown’d with worship — and these eyes will find
The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl
About the goal again, and hunters race
The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings
In height and prowess more than human, strive
Again for glory, while the golden lyre
Is ever sounding in heroic ears
Heroic hymns, and every way the vales
Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-fume
Of those who mix all odor to the Gods
On one far height in one far-shining fire.
“One height and one far-shining fire!”
And while I fancied that my friend
For this brief idyll would require
A less diffuse and opulent end,
And would defend his judgment well,
If I should deem it over nice —
The tolling of his funeral bell
Broke on my Pagan Paradise,
And mixt the dream of classic times,
And all the phantoms of the dream,
With present grief, and made the rhymes,
That miss’d his living welcome, seem
Like would-be guests an hour too late,
Who down the highway moving on
With easy laughter find the gate
Is bolted, and the master gone.
Gone onto darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth —
If night, what barren toil to be!
What life, so maim’d by night, were worth
Our living out? Not mine to me
Remembering all the golden hours
Now silent, and so many dead,
And him the last; and laying flowers,
This wreath, above his honour’d head,
And praying that, when I from hence
Shall fade with him into the unknown,
My close of earth’s experience
May prove as peaceful as his own.
The Wreck
I.
HIDE ME, Mother! my Fathers belong’d to the church of old,
I am driven by storm and sin and death to the ancient fold,
I cling to the Catholic Cross once more, to the Faith that saves,
My brain is full of the crash of wrecks, and the roar of waves,
My life itself is a wreck, I have sullied a noble name,
I am flung from the rushing tide of the world as a waif of shame,
I am roused by the wail of a child, and awake to a livid light,
And a ghastlier face than ever has haunted a grave by night,
I would hide from the storm without, I would flee from the storm within,
I would make my life one prayer for a soul that died in his sin,
I was the tempter, Mother, and mine was the deeper fall;
I will sit at your feet, I will hide my face, I will tell you all.
II.
He that they gave me to, Mother, a heedless and innocent bride —
I never have wrong’d his heart, I have only wounded his pride —
Spain in his blood and the Jew —— dark visaged, stately and tall —
A princelier looking man never stept thro’ a Prince’s hall.
And who, when his anger was kindled, would venture to give him the nay?
And a man men fear is a man to be loved by the women they say.
And I could have loved him too, if the blossom can doat on the blight,
Or the young green leaf rejoice in the frost that sears it at night;
He would open the books that I prized, and toss them away with a yawn,
Repell’d by the magnet of Art to the which my nature was drawn,
The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr’d,
The music that robes it in language beneath and beyond the word!
My Shelley would fall from my hands when he cast a contemptuous glance
From where he was poring over his Tables of Trade and Finance;
My hands, when I heard him coming would drop from the chords or the keys,
But ever I fail’d to please him, however I strove to please —
All day long far-off in the cloud of the city, and there
Lost, head and heart, in the chances of dividend, consol, and share —
And at home if I sought for a kindly caress, being woman and weak,
His formal kiss fell chill as a flake of snow on the cheek:
And so, when I bore him a girl, when I held it aloft in my joy,
He look’d at it coldly, and said to me ‘Pity it isn’t a boy.’
The one thing given me, to love and to live for, glanced at in scorn!
The child that I felt I could die for — as if she were basely born!
I had lived a wild-flower life, I was planted now in a tomb;
The daisy will shut to the shadow, I closed my heart to the gloom;
I threw myself all abroad — I would play my part with the young
By the low foot-lights of the world — and I caught the wreath that was flung.
III.
Mother, I have not — however their tongues may have babbled of me —
Sinn’d thro’ an animal vileness, for all but a dwarf was he,
And all but a hunchback too; and I look’d at him, first, askance,
With pity — not he the knight for an amorous girl’s romance!
Tho’ wealthy enough to have bask’d in the light of a dowerless smile,
Having lands at home and abroad in a rich West-Indian isle;
But I came on him once at a ball, the heart of a listening crowd —
Why, what a brow was there! he was seated — speaking aloud
To women, the flower of the time, and men at the helm of state —
Flowing with easy greatness and touching on all things great,
Science, philosophy, song — till I felt myself ready to weep
For I knew not what, when I heard that voice, — as mellow and deep
As a psalm by a mighty master and peal’d from an organ, — roll
Rising and falling — for, Mother, the voice was the voice of the soul;
And the sun of the soul made day in the dark of his wonderful eyes.
Here was the hand that would help me, would heal me — the heart that was wise!
And he, poor man, when he learnt that I hated the ring I wore,
He helpt me with death, and he heal’d me with sorrow for evermore.
IV.
For I broke the bond. That day my nurse had brought me the child.
The small sweet face was flush’d, but it coo’d to the Mother and smiled.
‘Anything ailing,’ I ask’d her, ‘with baby?’ She shook her head,
And the Motherless Mother kiss’d it, and turn’d in her haste and fled.
V.
Low warm winds had gently breathed us away from the land —
Ten long sweet summer days upon deck, sitting hand in hand —
When he clothed a naked mind with the wisdom and wealth of his own,
And I bow’d myself down as a slave to his intellectual throne,
When he coin’d into English gold some treasure of classical song,
When he flouted a statesman’s error, or flamed at a public wrong,
When he rose as it were on the wings of an eagle beyond me, and past
Over the range and the change of the world from the first to the last,
When lie spoke of his tropical home in the canes by the purple tide,
And the high star-crowns of his palms on the deep-wooded mountain-side,
And cliffs all robed in lianas that dropt to the brink of his bay,
And trees like the towers of a minster, the sons of a winterless day.
‘Paradise there!’ so he said, but I seem’d in Paradise then
With the first great love I had felt for the first and greatest of men;
Ten long days of summer and sin — if it must be so —
But days of a larger light than I ever again shall know —
Days that will glimmer, I fear, thro’ life to my latest breath;
‘No frost there,’ so he said, ‘as in truest Love no Death.’
VI.
Mother, one morning a bird with a warble plaintively sweet
Perch’d on the shrouds, and then fell fluttering down at my feet;
I took it, he made it a cage, we fondled it, Stephen and I,
But it died, and I thought of the child for a moment, I scarce know why.
VII.
But if sin be sin, not inherited fate, as many will say,
My sin to my desolate little one found me at sea on a day,
When her orphan wail came borne in the shriek of a growing wind,
And a voice rang out in the thunders of Ocean and Heaven ‘Thou hast sinn’d.’
And down in the cabin were we, for the towering crest of the tides
Plunged on the vessel and swept in a cataract off from her sides,
And ever the great storm grew with a howl and a hoot of the blast
In the rigging, voices of hell — then came the crash of the mast.
‘The wages of sin is death,’ and there I began to weep,
‘I am the Jonah, the crew should cast me into the deep,
For ah God, what a heart was mine to forsake her even for you.’
‘Never the heart among women,’ he said, ‘more tender and true.’
‘The heart! not a mother’s heart, when I left my darling alone.’
‘Comfort yourself, for the heart of the father will care for his own.’
‘The heart of the father will spurn her,’ I cried, ‘for the sin of the wife,
The cloud of the mother’s shame will enfold her and darken her life.’
Then his pale face twitch’d; ‘O Stephen, I love you, I love you, and yet’ —
As I lean’d away from his arms—’would God, we had never met!’
And he spoke not — only the storm; till after a little, I yearn’d
For his voice again, and he call’d to me ‘Kiss me!’ and there — as I turn’d —
‘The heart, the heart!’ I kiss’d him, I clung to the sinking form,
And the storm went roaring above us, and he — was out of the storm.
VIII.
And then, then, Mother, the ship stagger’d under a thunderous shock,
That shook us asunder, as if she had struck and crash’d on a rock;
For a huge sea smote every soul from the decks of The Falcon but one;
All of them, all but the man that was lash’d to the helm had gone;
And I fell — and the storm and the days went by, but I knew no more —
Lost myself — lay like the dead by the dead on the cabin floor,
Dead to the death beside me, and lost to the loss that was mine,
With a dim dream, now and then, of a hand giving bread and wine,
Till I woke from the trance, and the ship stood still, and the skies were blue,
But the face I had known, O Mother, was not the face that I knew.
IX.
The strange misfeaturing mask that I saw so amazed me, that I
Stumbled on deck, half mad. I would fling myself over and die!
But one — he was waving a flag — the one man left on the wreck —
‘Woman’ — he graspt at my arm—’stay there’ — I crouch’d upon deck —
‘We are sinking, and yet there’s hope look yonder,’ he cried, ‘a sail’
In a tone so rough that I broke into passionate tears, and the wail
Of a beaten babe, till I saw that a boat was nearing us — then
All on a sudden I thought, I shall look on the child again.
X.
They lower’d me down the side, and there in the boat I lay
With sad eyes fixt on the lost sea-home, as we glided away,
And I sigh’d, as the low dark hull dipt under the smiling main,
‘Had I stay’d with him, I had now — with him — been out of my pain.’
XI.
They took us aboard: the crew were gentle, the captain kind;
But I was the lonely slave of an often-wandering mind;
For whenever a rougher gust might tumble a stormier wave,
‘O Stephen,’ I moan’d, ‘I am coming to thee in thine Ocean-grave.’
And again, when a balmier breeze curl’d over a peacefuller sea,
I found myself moaning again ‘O child, I am coming to thee.’
XII.
The broad white brow of the Isle — that bay with the colour’d sand —
Rich was the rose of sunset there, as we drew to the land;
All so quiet the ripple would hardly blanch into spray
At the feet of the cliff; and I pray’d—’my child’ — for I still could pray —
‘May her life be as blissfully calm, be never gloom’d by the curse
Of a sin, not hers!’
Was it well with the child?
I wrote to the nurse
Who had borne my flower on her hireling heart; and an answer came
Not from the nurse — nor yet to the wife — to her maiden name!
I shook as I open’d the letter — I knew that hand too well —
And from it a scrap, clipt out of the ‘deaths’ in a paper, fell.
‘Ten long sweet summer days’ of fever, and want of care!
And gone — that day of the storm — O Mother, she came to me there.
Despair
A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolve to end themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.
I.
IS IT you, that preach’d in the chapel there looking over the sand?
Follow’d us too that night, and dogg’d us, and drew me to land?
II.
What did I feel that night? You are curious. How should I tell?
Does it matter so much what I felt? You rescued me — yet — was it well
That you came unwish’d for, uncall’d, between me and the deep and my doom,
Three days since, three more dark days of the Godless gloom
Of a life without sun, without health, with out hope, without any delight
In anything here upon earth? but ah God, that night, that night
When the rolling eyes of the lighthouse there on the fatal neck
Of land running out into rock — they had saved many hundreds from wreck —
Glared on our way toward death, I remember I thought, as we past,
Does it matter how many they saved? we are all of us wreck’d at last —
‘Do you fear?’ and there came thro’ the roar of the breaker a whisper, a breath,
‘Fear? am I not with you? I am frighted at life not death.’
III.
And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in the sky,
Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie —
Bright as with deathless hope — but, however they sparkled and shone,
The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own —
No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,
A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.
IV.
See, we were nursed in the drear night-fold of your fatalist creed,
And we turn’d to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed,
When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the Past,
And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would vanish at last,
And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend,
For He spoke, or it seem’d that He spoke, of a Hell without help, without end.
V.
Hoped for a dawn and it came, but the promise had faded away;
We had past from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;
He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,
The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire —
Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong,