O foolish dreams, that you, that I, would slight our marriage oath
I held you at that moment even dearer than before;
Now God has made you leper in His loving care for both,
That we might cling together, never doubt each other more.
XXIV.
The Priest, who join’d you to the dead, has join’d our hands of old;
If man and wife be but one flesh, let mine be leprous too,
As dead from all the human race as if beneath the mould;
If you be dead, then I am dead, who only live for you.
XXV.
Would Earth tho’ hid in cloud not be follow’d by the Moon?
The leech forsake the dying bed for terror of his life?
The shadow leave the Substance in the brooding light of noon?
Or if I had been the leper would you have left the wife?
XXVI.
Not take them? Still you wave me off — poor roses — must I go —
I have worn them year by year — from the bush we both had set —
What? fling them to you? — well — that were hardly gracious. No!
Your plague but passes by the touch. A little nearer yet!
XXVII.
There, there! he buried you, the Priest; the Priest is not to blame,
He joins us once again, to his either office true:
I thank him. I am happy, happy. Kiss me. In the name
Of the everlasting God, I will live and die with You.
To Ulysses 1
I.
ULYSSES, much-experienced man,
Whose eyes have known this globe of ours,
Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,
From Corrientes to Japan,
II.
To you that bask below the Line,
I soaking here in winter wet —
The century’s three strong eights have met
To drag me down to seventy-nine
III.
In summer if I reach my day —
To you, yet young, who breathe the balm
Of summer-winters by the palm
And orange grove of Paraguay,
IV.
I tolerant of the colder time,
Who love the winter woods, to trace
On paler heavens the branching grace
Of leafless elm, or naked lime,
V.
And see my cedar green, and there
My giant ilex keeping leaf
When frost is keen and days are brief —
Or marvel how in English air
VI.
My yucca, which no winter quells,
Altho’ the months have scarce begun,
Has push’d toward our faintest sun
A spike of half-accomplish’d bells —
VII.
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,2
A name that earth will not forget
Till earth has roll’d her latest year —
VIII.
I, once half-crazed for larger light
On broader zones beyond the foam,
But chaining fancy now at home
Among the quarried downs of Wight,
IX.
Not less would yield full thanks to you
For your rich gift, your tale of lands
I know not,3 your Arabian sands;
Your cane, your palm, tree-fern, bamboo,
X.
The wealth of tropic bower and brake;
Your Oriental Eden-isles,4
Where man, nor only Nature smiles;
Your wonder of the boiling lake;5
XI.
Phra-Chai, the Shadow of the Best,6
Phra-bat7 the step; your Pontic coast;
Crag-cloister;8 Anatolian Ghost;9
Hong-Kong,10 Karnac,11 and all the rest.
XII.
Thro’ which I follow’d line by line
Your leading hand, and came, my friend,
To prize your various book, and send
A gift of slenderer value, mine.
To Mary Boyle
WITH THE FOLLOWING POEM
I.
SPRING-FLOWERS! While you still delay to take
Your leave of town,
Our elm-tree’s ruddy-hearted blossom-flake
Is fluttering down.
II.
Be truer to your promise. There! I heard
Our cuckoo call.
Be needle to the magnet of your word,
Nor wait, till all
III.
Our vernal bloom from every vale and plain
And garden pass,
And all the gold from each laburnum chain
Drop to the grass.
IV.
Is memory with your Marian gone to rest,
Dead with the dead?
For ere she left us, when we met, you prest
My hand, and said
V.
‘I come with your spring-flowers.’ You came not, my friend;
My birds would sing,
You heard not. Take then this spring-flower I send,
This song of spring,
VI.
Found yesterday — forgotten mine own rhyme
By mine old self,
As I shall be forgotten by old Time,
Laid on the shelf —
VII.
A rhyme that flower’d betwixt the whitening sloe
And kingcup blaze,
And more than half a hundred years ago,
In rick-fire days,
VIII.
When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land
In fear of worse,
And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand
Fill with his purse.
IX.
For lowly minds were madden’d to the height
By tonguester tricks,
And once — I well remember that red night
When thirty ricks,
X.
All flaming, made an English homestead hell —
These hands of mine
Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well
Along the line,
XI.
When this bare dome had not begun to gleam
Thro’ youthful curls,
And you were then a lover’s fairy dream,
His girl of girls;
XII.
And you, that now are lonely, and with Grief
Sit face to face,
Might find a flickering glimmer of relief
In change of place.
XIII.
What use to brood? This life of mingled pains
And joys to me,
Despite of every Faith and Creed, remains
The Mystery.
XIV.
Let golden youth bewail the friend, the wife,
For ever gone.
He dreams of that long walk thro’ desert life
Without the one.
XV.
The silver year should cease to mourn and sigh —
Not long to wait —
So close are we, dear Mary, you and I
To that dim gate.
XVI.
Take, read! and be the faults your Poet makes
Or many or few,
He rests content, if his young music wakes
A wish in you
XVII.
To change our dark Queen-city, all her realm
Of sound and smoke,
For his clear heaven, and these few lanes of elm
And whispering oak.
The Progress of Spring
I.
THE GROUNDFLAME of the crocus breaks the mould,
Fair Spring slides hither o’er the Southern sea,
Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold
That trembles not to kisses of the bee:
Come Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves
The spear of ice has wept itself away.
And hour by
hour unfolding woodbine leaves
O’er his uncertain shadow droops the day.
She comes! The loosen’d rivulets run;
The frost-bead melts upon her golden hair;
Her mantle, slowly greening in the Sun,
Now wraps her close, now arching leaves her bare
To breaths of balmier air;
II.
Up leaps the lark, gone wild to welcome her.
About her glance the tits, and shriek the jays,
Before her skims the jubilant woodpecker,
The linnet’s bosom blushes at her gaze,
While round her brows a woodland culver flits,
Watching her large light eyes and gracious looks,
And in her open palm a halcyon sits
Patient — the secret splendor of the brooks.
Come Spring! She comes on waste and wood,
On farm and field: but enter also here,
Diffuse thyself at will thro’ all my blood,
And, tho’ thy violet sicken into sere,
Lodge with me all the year!
III.
Once more a downy drift against the brakes,
Self-darken’d in the sky, descending slow!
But gladly see I thro’ the wavering flakes
Yon blanching apricot like snow in snow.
These will thine eyes not brook in forest-paths,
On their perpetual pine, nor round the beech;
They fuse themselves to little spicy baths,
Solved in the tender blushes of the peach;
They lose themselves and die
On that new life that gems the hawthorn line;
Thy gay lent-lillies wave and put them by,
And out once more in varnish’d glory shine
Thy stars of celandine.
IV.
She floats across the hamlet. Heaven lours,
But in the tearful splendor of her smiles
I see the slowly-thickening chestnut towers
Fill out the spaces by the barren tiles.
Now past her feet the swallow circling flies,
A clamorous cuckoo stoops to meet her hand;
Her light makes rainbows in my closing eyes,
I hear a charm of song thro’ all the land.
Come, Spring! She comes, and Earth is glad
To roll her North below thy deepening dome,
But ere thy maiden birk be wholly clad,
And these low bushes dip their twigs in foam,
Make all true hearths thy home.
V.
Across my garden! and the thicket stirs,
The fountain pulses high in sunnier jets,
The blackcap warbles, and the turtle purrs,
The starling claps his tiny castanets.
Still round her forehead wheels the woodland dove,
And scatters on her throat the sparks of dew,
The kingcup fills her footprint, and above
Broaden the glowing isles of vernal blue.
Hail, ample presence of a Queen,
Bountiful, beautiful, apparell’d gay,
Whose mantle, every shade of glancing green,
Flies back in fragrant breezes to display
A tunic white as May!
VI.
She whispers, ‘From the South I bring you balm,
For on a tropic mountain was I born,
While some dark dweller by the coco-palm
Watch’d my far meadow zoned with airy morn;
From under rose a muffled moan of floods;
I sat beneath a solitude of snow;
There no one came, the turf was fresh, the woods
Plunged gulf on gulf thro’ all their vales below.
I saw beyond their silent tops
The steaming marshes of the scarlet cranes,
The slant seas leaning on the mangrove copse,
And summer basking in the sultry plains
About a land of canes.
VII.
‘Then from my vapor-girdle soaring forth
I scaled the buoyant highway of the birds,
And drank the dews and drizzle of the North,
That I might mix with men, and hear their words
On pathway’d plains; for — while my hand exults
Within the bloodless heart of lowly flowers
To work old laws of Love to fresh results,
Thro’ manifold effect of simple powers —
I too would teach the man
Beyond the darker hour to see the bright,
That his fresh life may close as it began,
The still-fulfilling promise of a light
Narrowing the bounds of night.’
VIII.
So wed thee with my soul, that I may mark
The coming year’s great good and varied ills,
And new developments, whatever spark
Be struck from out the clash of warring wills;
Or whether, since our nature cannot rest,
The smoke of war’s volcano burst again
From hoary deeps that belt the changeful West,
Old Empires, dwellings of the kings of men;
Or should those fail that hold the helm,
While the long day of knowledge grows and warms,
And in the heart of this most ancient realm
A hateful voice be utter’d, and alarms
Sounding ‘To arms! to arms!’
IX.
A simpler, saner lesson might he learn
Who reads thy gradual process, Holy Spring.
Thy leaves possess the season in their turn,
And in their time thy warblers rise on wing.
How surely glidest thou from March to May,
And changest, breathing it, the sullen wind,
Thy scope of operation, day by day,
Larger and fuller, like the human mind!
Thy warmths from bud to bud
Accomplish that blind model in the seed,
And men have hopes, which race the restless blood,
That after many changes may succeed
Life which is Life indeed.
Merlin and The Gleam
I.
O YOUNG Mariner,
You from the haven
Under the sea-cliff,
You that are watching
The gray Magician
With eyes of wonder,
I am Merlin,
And I am dying,
I am Merlin
Who follow The Gleam.
II.
Mighty the Wizard
Who found me at sunrise
Sleeping, and woke me
And learn’d me Magic!
Great the Master,
And sweet the Magic,
When over the valley,
In early summers,
Over the mountain,
On human faces,
And all around me,
Moving to melody,
Floated The Gleam.
III.
Once at the croak of a Raven who crost it,
A barbarous people,
Blind to the magic,
And deaf to the melody,
Snarl’d at and cursed me.
A demon vext me,
The light retreated,
The landskip darken’d,
The melody deaden’d,
The Master whisper’d
‘Follow The Gleam.’
IV.
Then to the melody,
Over a wilderness
Gliding, and glancing at
Elf of the woodland,
Gnome of the cavern,
Griffin and Giant,
And dancing of Fairies
In desolate hollows,
And wraiths of the mountain,
And rolling of dragons
By warble of water,
Or cataract music
Of falling torrents,
Flitted The Gleam.
V.
Down from the mo
untain
And over the level,
And streaming and shining on
Silent river,
Silvery willow,
Pasture and plowland,
Horses and oxen,
Innocent maidens,
Garrulous children,
Homestead and harvest,
Reaper and gleaner,
And rough-ruddy faces
Of lowly labour,
Slided The Gleam. —
VI.
Then, with a melody
Stronger and statelier,
Led me at length
To the city and palace
Of Arthur the king;
Touch’d at the golden
Cross of the churches,
Flash’d on the Tournament,
Flicker’d and bicker’d
From helmet to helmet,
And last on the forehead
Of Arthur the blameless
Rested The Gleam.
VII.
Clouds and darkness
Closed upon Camelot;
Arthur had vanish’d
I knew not whither,
The king who loved me,
And cannot die;
For out of the darkness
Silent and slowly
The Gleam, that had waned to a wintry glimmer
On icy fallow
And faded forest,
Drew to the valley
Named of the shadow,
And slowly brightening
Out of the glimmer,
And slowly moving again to a melody
Yearningly tender,
Fell on the shadow,
No longer a shadow,
But clothed with The Gleam.
VIII.
And broader and brighter
The Gleam flying onward,
Wed to the melody,
Sang thro’ the world;
And slower and fainter,
Old and weary,
But eager to follow,
I saw, whenever
In passing it glanced upon
Hamlet or city,
That under the Crosses
The dead man’s garden,
The mortal hillock,
Would break into blossom;
And so to the land’s
Last limit I came ——
And can no longer,
But die rejoicing,
For thro’ the Magic
Of Him the Mighty,
Who taught me in childhood,
There on the border
Of boundless Ocean,
And all but in Heaven
Hovers The Gleam.
IX.
Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight!
O young Mariner,
Down to the haven,
Call your companions,
Launch your vessel,
And crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes
Over the margin,
After it, follow it,
Follow The Gleam.
Romney’s Remorse
‘I read Hayley’s Life of Romney the other day — Romney wanted but education and reading to make him a very fine painter; but his ideal was not high nor fixed. How touching is the close of his life! He married at nineteen, and because Sir Joshua and others had said that “marriage spoilt an artist” almost immediately left his wife in the North and scarce saw her till the end of his life; when old, nearly mad and quite desolate, he went back to her and she received him and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney’s pictures! even as a matter of Art, I am sure.’ (Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, vol. i.)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Delphi Poets Series Page 128