A Reading of Life, and Other Poems | Page 7

shut of lids,?Her ready secret: the abounding life?Returned for valiant labour: she and they?Defeated and victorious turn by turn;?By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.?Exchange of powers of this conflict came;?Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.?Is battle nature's mandate, here it reigned,?As music unto the hand that smote the strings;?And she the rosier from their showery brows,?They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.?Back to the primal rational of those?Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp?Stability in hatred of the insane,?Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce?The mortal mind's concept of earth's divorced?Above; those beautiful, those masterful,?Those lawless. High they sit, and if descend,?Descend to reap, not sowing. Is it just??Earth in her happy children asked that word,?Whereto within their breast was her reply.?Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,?Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;?Yet they ('twas the Great Mother's voice inspired?The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,?Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,?To meet the certain fate of earth's divorced,?And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,?Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,?Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled?The Tyranny. This her voice within them told,?When softly the Great Mother chid her sons?Not of the giant brood, who did create?Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain?Set moving by an abject blood, that waked?To wanton under elements more benign,?And planted aliens on Olympian heights; -?Imagination's cradle poesy?Become a monstrous pressure upon men; -?Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed?By light from her, born of the love of her,?Their lordship the illumined brain rejects?For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law,?Her other name. So spake she in their heart,?Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath?Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,?Confidently to cling. And when brown corn?Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,?With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss;?When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil?Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;?When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,?Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;?The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,?And yet a burning lion for the spring;?Then in that time of general cherishment,?Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,?He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,?Then did good Gaea's children gratefully?Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,?Delightful Peace, that answers Reason's call?Harmoniously and images her Law;?Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,?In memories made present on the brain?By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;?The picture of an earth allied to heaven;?Between them the known smile behind black masks;?Rightly their various moods interpreted;?And frolic because toilful children borne?With larger comprehension of Earth's aim?At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.
Poem: The Night-Walk
Awakes for me and leaps from shroud?All radiantly the moon's own night?Of folded showers in streamer cloud;?Our shadows down the highway white?Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,?With yon and yon a stem alight.
I see marauder runagates?Across us shoot their dusky wink;?I hear the parliament of chats?In haws beside the river's brink;?And drops the vole off alder-banks,?To push his arrow through the stream.?These busy people had our thanks?For tickling sight and sound, but theme?They were not more than breath we drew?Delighted with our world's embrace:?The moss-root smell where beeches grew,?And watered grass in breezy space;?The silken heights, of ghostly bloom?Among their folds, by distance draped.?'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,?That cried to have its chaos shaped:?Absorbing, little noting, still?Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;?With wistful looks on each far hill?For something hidden, something owed.?Unto his mantled sister, Day?Had given the secret things we sought?And she was grave and saintly gay;?At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;?She flew on it, then folded wings,?In meditation passing lone,?To breathe around the secret things,?Which have no word, and yet are known;?Of thirst for them are known, as air?Is health in blood: we gained enough?By this to feel it honest fare;?Impalpable, not barren, stuff.
A pride of legs in motion kept?Our spirits to their task meanwhile,?And what was deepest dreaming slept:?The posts that named the swallowed mile;?Beside the straight canal the hut?Abandoned; near the river's source?Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;?The roadway missed; were our discourse;?At times dear poets, whom some view?Transcendent or subdued evoked?To speak the memorable, the true,?The luminous as a moon uncloaked;?For proof that there, among earth's dumb,?A soul had passed and said our best.?Or it might be we chimed on some?Historic favourite's astral crest,?With part to reverence in its gleam,?And part to rivalry the shout:?So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream?Of power within to strike without.?But most the silences were sweet,?Like mothers' breasts, to bid it feel?It lived in such divine conceit?As envies aught we stamp for real.
To either then an untold tale?Was Life, and author, hero, we.?The chapters holding peaks to scale,?Or depths to fathom, made our glee;?For we were armed of inner fires,?Unbled in us the ripe desires;?And passion rolled a quiet sea,?Whereon was Love