by Dinah Roe
When, through eyes raised an instant, her soul sought
My soul, and from the sudden confluence caught
The words that made her love the loveliest.
XVIII
Genius in Beauty
Beauty like hers is genius. Not the call
Of Homer’s or of Dante’s heart sublime, –
Not Michael’s hand furrowing the zones of time, –
Is more with compassed mysteries musical;
5 Nay, not in Spring’s or Summer’s sweet footfall
More gathered gifts exuberant Life bequeathes
Than doth this sovereign face, whose love-spell breathes
Even from its shadowed contour on the wall.
As many men are poets in their youth,
10 But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all change the indomitable song;
So in likewise the envenomed years, whose tooth
Rends shallower grace with ruin void of ruth,
Upon this beauty’s power shall wreak no wrong.
XIX
Silent Noon
Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, –
The finger-points look through like rosy blooms:
Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms
’Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.
5 All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,
Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge
Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.
’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
10 Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: –
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.
XXV
Winged Hours
Each hour until we meet is as a bird
That wings from far his gradual way along
The rustling covert of my soul, – his song
Still loudlier trilled through leaves more deeply stirr’d:
5 But at the hour of meeting, a clear word
Is every note he sings, in Love’s own tongue;
Yet, Love, thou know’st the sweet strain suffers wrong,
Full oft through our contending joys unheard.
What of that hour at last, when for her sake
10 No wing may fly to me nor song may flow;
When, wandering round my life unleaved, I know
The bloodied feathers scattered in the brake,
And think how she, far from me, with like eyes
Sees through the untuneful bough the wingless skies?
XXVII
Heart’s Compass
Sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;
5 Whose unstirred lips are music’s visible tone;
Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular; –
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.
Even such Love is; and is not thy name Love?
10 Yea, by thy hand the Love-god rends apart
All gathering clouds of Night’s ambiguous art;
Flings them far down, and sets thine eyes above;
And simply, as some gage of flower or glove,
Stakes with a smile the world against thy heart.
XXIX
The Moonstar
Lady, I thank thee for thy loveliness,
Because my lady is more lovely still.
Glorying I gaze, and yield with glad goodwill
To thee thy tribute; by whose sweet-spun dress
5 Of delicate life Love labours to assess
My lady’s absolute queendom; saying, ‘Lo!
How high this beauty is, which yet doth show
But as that beauty’s sovereign votaress.’
Lady, I saw thee with her, side by side;
And as, when night’s fair fires their queen
10 surround,
An emulous star too near the moon will ride, –
Even so thy rays within her luminous bound
Were traced no more; and by the light so drown’d,
Lady, not thou but she was glorified.
XL
Severed Selves
Two separate divided silences,
Which, brought together, would find loving voice;
Two glances which together would rejoice
In love, now lost like stars beyond dark trees;
5 Two hands apart whose touch alone gives ease;
Two bosoms which, heart-shrined with mutual flame,
Would, meeting in one clasp, be made the same;
Two souls, the shores wave-mocked of sundering seas: –
Such are we now. Ah! may our hope forecast
10 Indeed one hour again, when on this stream
Of darkened love once more the light shall gleam? –
An hour how slow to come, how quickly past, –
Which blooms and fades, and only leaves at last,
Faint as shed flowers, the attenuated dream.
XLIX, L, LI, LII
Willowwood
I
I sat with Love upon a woodside well,
Leaning across the water, I and he;
Nor ever did he speak nor looked at me,
But touched his lute wherein was audible
5 The certain secret thing he had to tell:
Only our mirrored eyes met silently
In the low wave; and that sound came to be
The passionate voice I knew; and my tears fell.
And at their fall, his eyes beneath grew hers;
10 And with his foot and with his wing-feathers
He swept the spring that watered my heart’s drouth.
Then the dark ripples spread to waving hair,
And as I stooped, her own lips rising there
Bubbled with brimming kisses at my mouth.
II
And now Love sang: but his was such a song,
So meshed with half-remembrance hard to free,
As souls disused in death’s sterility
May sing when the new birthday tarries long.
5 And I was made aware of a dumb throng
That stood aloof, one form by every tree,
All mournful forms, for each was I or she,
The shades of those our days that had no tongue.
They looked on us, and knew us and were known;
10 While fast together, alive from the abyss,
Clung the soul-wrung implacable close kiss;
And pity of self through all made broken moan
Which said, ‘For once, for once, for once alone!’
And still Love sang, and what he sang was this: –
III
‘O ye, all ye that walk in Willowwood,
That walk with hollow faces burning white;
What fathom-depth of soul-struck widowhood,
What long, what longer hours, one lifelong night,
5 Ere ye again, who so in vain have wooed
Your last hope lost, who so in vain invite
Your lips to that their unforgotten food,
Ere ye, ere ye again shall see the light!
Alas! the bitter banks in Willowwood,
10 With tear-spurge wan, with blood-wort burning red:
Alas! if ever such a pillow could
Steep deep the soul in sleep till she were dead, –
Better all life forget her than this thing,
That Willowwood should hold her wandering!’
IV
So sang he: and as meeting rose and rose
Together cling throu
gh the wind’s wellaway
Nor change at once, yet near the end of day
The leaves drop loosened where the heart-stain glows, –
5 So when the song died did the kiss unclose;
And her face fell back drowned, and was as grey
As its grey eyes; and if it ever may
Meet mine again I know not if Love knows.
Only I know that I leaned low and drank
10 A long draught from the water where she sank,
Her breath and all her tears and all her soul:
And as I leaned, I know I felt Love’s face
Pressed on my neck with moan of pity and grace,
Till both our heads were in his aureole.
LIII
Without Her
What of her glass without her? The blank grey
There where the pool is blind of the moon’s face.
Her dress without her? The tossed empty space
Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.
5 Her paths without her? Day’s appointed sway
Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place
Without her? Tears, ah me! for love’s good grace,
And cold forgetfulness of night or day.
What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,
10 Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?
A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,
Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,
Where the long cloud, the long wood’s counterpart,
Sheds doubled darkness up the labouring hill.
LXIII
Inclusiveness
The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
5 What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies? –
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
10 In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.
LXIX
Autumn Idleness
This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be over-run.
But with a blessing every glade receives
5 High salutation; while from hillock-eaves
The deer gaze calling, dappled white and dun,
As if, being foresters of old, the sun
Had marked them with the shade of forest-leaves.
Here dawn to-day unveiled her magic glass;
Here noon now gives the thirst and takes the
10 dew;
Till eve bring rest when other good things pass.
And here the lost hours the lost hours renew
While I still lead my shadow o’er the grass,
Nor know, for longing, that which I should do.
LXXVIII
Body’s Beauty
Of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake’s, her sweet tongue could
deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
5 And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
10 Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
LXXXIII
Barren Spring
Once more the changed year’s turning wheel returns:
And as a girl sails balanced in the wind,
And now before and now again behind
Stoops as it swoops, with cheek that laughs and burns, –
5 So Spring comes merry towards me here, but earns
No answering smile from me, whose life is twin’d
With the dead boughs that winter still must bind,
And whom to-day the Spring no more concerns.
Behold, this crocus is a withering flame;
10 This snowdrop, snow; this apple-blossom’s part
To breed the fruit that breeds the serpent’s art.
Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them,
Nor stay till on the year’s last lily-stem
The white cup shrivels round the golden heart.
LXXXV
Vain Virtues
What is the sorriest thing that enters Hell?
None of the sins, – but this and that fair deed
Which a soul’s sin at length could supersede.
These yet are virgins, whom death’s timely knell
5 Might once have sainted; whom the fiends compel
Together now, in snake-bound shuddering sheaves
Of anguish, while the pit’s pollution leaves
Their refuse maidenhood abominable.
Night sucks them down, the tribute of the pit,
10 Whose names, half entered in the book of Life,
Were God’s desire at noon. And as their hair
And eyes sink last, the Torturer deigns no whit
To gaze, but, yearning, waits his destined wife,
The Sin still blithe on earth that sent them there.
LXXXVI
Lost Days
The lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food but trodden into clay?
5 Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The undying throats of Hell, athirst alway?
I do not see them here; but after death
5 God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
‘I am thyself, – what hast thou done to me?’
‘And I – and I – thyself,’ (lo! each one saith,)
‘And thou thyself to all eternity!’
XCV
The Vase of Life
Around the vase of Life at your slow pace
He has not crept, but turned it with his hands,
And all its sides already understands.
There, girt, one breathes alert for some great race;
5 Whose road runs far by sands and fruitful space;
Who laughs, yet through the jolly throng has pass’d;
Who weeps, nor stays for weeping; who at last,
A youth, stands somewhere crowned, with silent face.
And he has filled this vase with wine for blood,
10 With blood for tears, with spice for burning vow,
With watered flowers for buried love most fit;
And would have cast it shattered to the flood,
Yet in Fate’s name has kept it whole; which now
Stands empty till his ashes fall in it.
XCVII
A Superscription
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell
Cast up thy Life’s foam-fretted feet betwe
en;
5 Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life’s form and Love’s, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.
Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
10 One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that winged Peace which lulls the breath of sigh, –
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.
CI
The One Hope
When vain desire at last and vain regret
Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
And teach the unforgetful to forget?
5 Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, –
Or may the soul at once in a green plain
Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain
And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet?
Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air
10 Between the scriptured petals softly blown
Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown, –
Ah! let none other alien spell soe’er
But only the one Hope’s one name be there, –
Not less nor more, but even that word alone.
To the P.R.B.
Woolner and Stephens, Collinson, Millais,
And my first brother, each and every one,
What portion is theirs now beneath the sun
Which, even as here, in England makes to-day?
5 For most of them life runs not the same way
Always, but leaves the thought at loss: I know
Merely that Woolner keeps not even the show
Of work, nor is enough awake for play.
Meanwhile Hunt and myself race at full speed
10 Along the Louvre, and yawn from school to school,