by Dinah Roe
And we were blithe; yet memory
40 Saddens those hours, as when the moon
Looks upon daylight. And with her
I stooped to drink the spring-water,
Athirst where other waters sprang;
And where the echo is, she sang, –
45 My soul another echo there.
But when that hour my soul won strength
For words whose silence wastes and kills,
Dull raindrops smote us, and at length
Thundered the heat within the hills.
50 That eve I spoke those words again
Beside the pelted window-pane;
And there she hearkened what I said,
With under-glances that surveyed
The empty pastures blind with rain.
55 Next day the memories of these things,
Like leaves through which a bird has flown,
Still vibrated with Love’s warm wings;
Till I must make them all my own
And paint this picture. So, ’twixt ease
60 Of talk and sweet long silences,
She stood among the plants in bloom
At windows of a summer room,
To feign the shadow of the trees.
And as I wrought, while all above
65 And all around was fragrant air,
In the sick burthen of my love
It seemed each sun-thrilled blossom there
Beat like a heart among the leaves.
O heart that never beats nor heaves,
70 In that one darkness lying still,
What now to thee my love’s great will
Or the fine web the sunshine weaves?
For now doth daylight disavow
Those days, – nought left to see or hear.
75 Only in solemn whispers now
At night-time these things reach mine ear;
When the leaf-shadows at a breath
Shrink in the road, and all the heath,
Forest and water, far and wide,
80 In limpid starlight glorified,
Lie like the mystery of death.
Last night at last I could have slept,
And yet delayed my sleep till dawn,
Still wandering. Then it was I wept:
85 For unawares I came upon
Those glades where once she walked with me:
And as I stood there suddenly,
All wan with traversing the night,
Upon the desolate verge of light
90 Yearned loud the iron-bosomed sea.
Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears
The beating heart of Love’s own breast, –
Where round the secret of all spheres
All angels lay their wings to rest, –
95 How shall my soul stand rapt and awed,
When, by the new birth borne abroad
Throughout the music of the suns,
It enters in her soul at once
And knows the silence there for God!
100 Here with her face doth memory sit
Meanwhile, and wait the day’s decline,
Till other eyes shall look from it,
Eyes of the spirit’s Palestine,
Even than the old gaze tenderer:
105 While hopes and aims long lost with her
Stand round her image side by side,
Like tombs of pilgrims that have died
About the Holy Sepulchre.
Nuptial Sleep
At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
5 Their bosoms sundered, with the opening start
Of married flowers to either side outspread
From the knit stem; yet still their mouths, burnt red,
Fawned on each other where they lay apart.
Sleep sank them lower than the tide of dreams,
10 And their dreams watched them sink, and slid
away.
Slowly their souls swam up again, through gleams
Of watered light and dull drowned waifs of day;
Till from some wonder of new woods and streams
He woke, and wondered more: for there she lay.
The Woodspurge
The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,
Shaken out dead from tree and hill:
I had walked on at the wind’s will, –
I sat now, for the wind was still.
5 Between my knees my forehead was, –
My lips, drawn in, said not Alas!
My hair was over in the grass,
My naked ears heard the day pass.
My eyes, wide open, had the run
10 Of some ten weeds to fix upon;
Among those few, out of the sun,
The woodspurge flowered, three cups in one.
From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory:
15 One thing then learnt remains to me, –
The woodspurge has a cup of three.
The Honeysuckle
I plucked a honeysuckle where
The hedge on high is quick with thorn,
And climbing for the prize, was torn,
And fouled my feet in quag-water;
5 And by the thorns and by the wind
The blossom that I took was thinn’d,
And yet I found it sweet and fair.
Thence to a richer growth I came,
Where, nursed in mellow intercourse,
10 The honeysuckles sprang by scores,
Not harried like my single stem,
All virgin lamps of scent and dew.
So from my hand that first I threw,
Yet plucked not any more of them.
The Sea-Limits
Consider the sea’s listless chime:
Time’s self it is, made audible, –
The murmur of the earth’s own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
5 Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was,
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
No quiet, which is death’s, – it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life,
10 Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world’s heart of rest and wrath,
Its painful pulse is in the sands.
Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
Grey and not known, along its path.
15 Listen alone beside the sea,
Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin solitudes
Shall have one sound alike to thee:
Hark where the murmurs of thronged men
20 Surge and sink back and surge again, –
Still the one voice of wave and tree.
Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips: they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
25 The echo of the whole sea’s speech.
And all mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art:
And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.
For ‘The Wine of Circe’ by Edward Burne-Jones
Dusk-haired and gold-robed o’er the golden wine
She stoops, wherein, distilled of death and shame,
Sink the black drops; while, lit with fragrant flame,
Round her spread board the golden sunflowers shine.
5 Doth Helios here with Hecatè combine
(O Circe, thou their votaress?) to proclaim
For these thy guests all rapture in Love’s name,
Till pitiless Night give Day the countersign?
Lords of their hour, they come. And by her knee
10 Those cowering beasts, their equals heretofore,
Wait; who with them in new equality
To-ni
ght shall echo back the sea’s dull roar
With a vain wail from passion’s tide-strown shore
Where the dishevelled seaweed hates the sea.
Mary’s Girlhood
(For a Picture)
This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect
God’s Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she
Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.
Unto God’s will she brought devout respect,
5 Profound simplicity of intellect,
And supreme patience. From her mother’s knee
Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;
Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.
So held she through her girlhood; as it were
10 An angel-watered lily, that near God
Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home,
She woke in her white bed, and had no fear
At all, – yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed:
Because the fulness of the time was come.
On the ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante
As he that loves oft looks on the dear form
And guesses how it grew to womanhood,
And gladly would have watched the beauties bud
And the mild fire of precious life wax warm: –
5 So I, long bound within the threefold charm
Of Dante’s love sublimed to heavenly mood,
Had marvelled, touching his Beatitude,
How grew such presence from man’s shameful swarm.
At length within this book I found portrayed
10 Newborn that Paradisal Love of his,
And simple like a child; with whose clear aid
I understood. To such a child as this,
Christ, charging well his chosen ones, forbade
Offence: ‘for lo! of such my kingdom is.’
Beauty and the Bird
She fluted with her mouth as when one sips,
And gently waved her golden head, inclin’d
Outside his cage close to the window-blind;
Till her fond bird, with little turns and dips,
5 Piped low to her of sweet companionships.
And when he made an end, some seed took she
And fed him from her tongue, which rosily
Peeped as a piercing bud between her lips.
And like the child in Chaucer, on whose tongue
10 The Blessed Mary laid, when he was dead,
A grain, – who straightway praised her name in song:
Even so, when she, a little lightly red,
Now turned on me and laughed, I heard the throng
Of inner voices praise her golden head.
A Match with the Moon
Weary already, weary miles to-night
I walked for bed: and so, to get some ease,
I dogged the flying moon with similes.
And like a wisp she doubled on my sight
5 In ponds; and caught in tree-tops like a kite;
And in a globe of film all liquorish
Swam full-faced like a silly silver fish; –
Last like a bubble shot the welkin’s height
Where my road turned, and got behind me, and sent
10 My wizened shadow craning round at me,
And jeered, ‘So, step the measure, – one two three!’ –
And if I faced on her, looked innocent.
But just at parting, halfway down a dell,
She kissed me for good-night. So you’ll not tell.
John Keats
The weltering London ways where children weep
And girls whom none call maidens laugh, – strange
road
Miring his outward steps, who inly trode
5 The bright Castalian brink and Latmos’ steep: –
Even such his life’s cross-paths; till deathly deep
He toiled through sands of Lethe; and long pain,
Weary with labour spurned and love found vain,
In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow wrapped his sleep.
10 O pang-dowered Poet, whose reverberant lips
And heart-strung lyre awoke the Moon’s eclipse, –
Thou whom the daisies glory in growing o’er, –
Their fragrance clings around thy name, not writ
But rumour’d in water, while the fame of it
15 Along Time’s flood goes echoing evermore.
Words on the Window-Pane*
Did she in summer write it, or in spring,
Or with this wail of autumn at her ears,
Or in some winter left among old years
Scratched it through tettered cark? A certain thing
5 That round her heart the frost was hardening,
Not to be thawed of tears, which on this pane
Channelled the rime, perchance, in fevered rain,
For false man’s sake and love’s most bitter sting.
Howbeit, between this last word and the next
10 Unwritten, subtly seasoned was the smart,
And here at least the grace to weep: if she,
Rather, midway in her disconsolate text,
Rebelled not, loathing from the trodden heart
That thing which she had found man’s love to be.
Astarte Syriaca
(For a Picture)
Mystery: lo! betwixt the sun and moon
Astarte of the Syrians: Venus Queen
Ere Aphrodite was. In silver sheen
Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon
5 Of bliss whereof the heaven and earth commune:
And from her neck’s inclining flower-stem lean
Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean
The pulse of hearts to the spheres’ dominant tune.
Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel
10 All thrones of light beyond the sky and sea
The witnesses of Beauty’s face to be:
That face, of Love’s all-penetrative spell
Amulet, talisman, and oracle, –
Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.
FROM THE HOUSE OF LIFE
A Sonnet is a moment’s monument, –
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
5 Of its own arduous fulness reverent:
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
10 The soul, – its converse, to what Power ’tis due: –
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue,
It serve; or, ’mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.
V
Heart’s Hope
By what word’s power, the key of paths untrod,
Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,
Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore
Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod?
5 For lo! in some poor rhythmic period,
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
Yea, in God’s name, and Love’s, and thine, would I
10 Draw from one loving heart such evidence
As to all hearts all things shall signify;
Tender as dawn’s first hill-fire, and intense
As instantaneous penetrating sense,
In Spring’s birth-hour, of other Springs gone by.
VI
The Kiss
What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay
Or seizure of malign vicissitude
Can rob this body of honour, or denude
This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day?
5 For lo! even n
ow my lady’s lips did play
With these my lips such consonant interlude
As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed
The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay.
I was a child beneath her touch, – a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and
10 she, –
A spirit when her spirit looked through me, –
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love’s emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.
X
The Portrait
O Lord of all compassionate control,
O Love! let this my lady’s picture glow
Under my hand to praise her name, and show
Even of her inner self the perfect whole:
5 That he who seeks her beauty’s furthest goal,
Beyond the light that the sweet glances throw
And refluent wave of the sweet smile, may know
The very sky and sea-line of her soul.
Lo! it is done. Above the enthroning throat
10 The mouth’s mould testifies of voice and kiss,
The shadowed eyes remember and foresee.
Her face is made her shrine. Let all men note
That in all years (O Love, thy gift is this!)
They that would look on her must come to me.
XI
The Love-Letter
Warmed by her hand and shadowed by her hair
As close she leaned and poured her heart through thee,
Whereof the articulate throbs accompany
The smooth black stream that makes thy whiteness fair, –
5 Sweet fluttering sheet, even of her breath aware, –
Oh let thy silent song disclose to me
That soul wherewith her lips and eyes agree
Like married music in Love’s answering air.
Fain had I watched her when, at some fond thought,
10 Her bosom to the writing closelier press’d,
And her breast’s secrets peered into her breast;