A Reading of Life, and Other Poems | Page 4

its crimson weave their mesh:
Others
to snap of fingers leap,
As bearing breast with love asleep.
These
are her laughters in the flesh.
Or would she fit a warrior mood,
She
lights her seeming unsubdued,
And indicates the fortress-key.
Or is
it heart for heart that craves,
She flecks along a run of waves
The
one to promise deeper sea.
Bands of her limpid primitives,
Or patterned in the curious braid,

Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives,
For what he gives is he
repaid.
Good is it if by him 'tis held
He wins the fairest ever welled

From Nature's founts: she whispers it: Even I
Not fairer! and
forbids him to deny,
Else little is he lover. Those he clasps,
Intent
as tempest, worshipful as prayer, -
And be they doves or be they asps,
-
Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
Else counts he soon among
life's wholly tamed.
Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,

Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
The lover. Else, past
ripeness, deathward bound,
He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,

Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
Doth man divide
divine Necessity
From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts

A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
Present her; armed
to bless and to constrain.
Of this he perishes; not she, the throned

On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
A loftier
Reason out of deeper founts
Earth's chosen Goddess bears: by none
disowned
While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
And
Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
Earth's answer, heaven's
consent unto man's cry,
Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.
Quickened of Nature's eye and ear,
When the wild sap at high tide
smites
Within us; or benignly clear
To vision; or as the iris lights

On fluctuant waters; she is ours
Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;

Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
A soft compulsion on

terrene
By heavenly: and the world is hers
While hunger after
Beauty spurs.
So is it sung in any space
She fills, with laugh at shallow laws

Forbidding love's devised embrace,
The music Beauty from it draws.
Poem: A Reading of Life--The Test Of Manhood
Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
An army issues out of
wilderness,
With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;

Obstruction in the van; insane excess
Oft at the heart; yet hard the
onward stress
Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,
And
rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,
The work of hands not
pledged to grind or slay.
They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;

A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.
Then was the
gracious birth of man's new day;
Divided from the haunted night it
shone.
That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang
Ethereal Beauty in
full morningtide.
Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:
It was
another earth unto him sang.
Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?
From the
Persuader came it, in those vales
Whereunto she melodiously invites,

Her troops of eager servitors regales?
Not far those two great
Powers of Nature speed
Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;

Nor either points for us the way of flame.
From him predestined
mightier it came;
His task to hold them both in breast, and yield

Their dues to each, and of their war be field.
The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
Must he, who once has been
the goodly beast
Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
Constrain to
make him serviceable man;
Offending neither, nor the natural claim

Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.

Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
To hold them fast conjoined
within him still;
Submissive to his will
Along the road of life!

And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
The forward step met frowns,
the backward smiles.
For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;

Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.
Delicious licence called it
Nature's cry;
Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;
A tread on
shingle timed his lame advance
Flung as the die of Bacchanalian
Chance,
He of the troubled marching army leaned
On godhead
visible, on godhead screened;
The radiant roseate, the curtained white;

Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.
He drank of fictions, till celestial aid
Might seem accorded when he
fawned and prayed;
Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,
To
choose for grants the egregious, his elect;
And ever that imagined
succour slew
The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.
In fellowship religion has its founts:
The solitary his own God reveres:

Ascend no sacred Mounts
Our hungers or our fears.
As only for
the numbers Nature's care
Is shown, and she the personal nothing
heeds,
So to Divinity the spring of prayer
From brotherhood the one
way upward leads.
Like the sustaining air
Are both for flowers and
weeds.
But he who claims in spirit to be flower,
Will find them
both an air that doth devour.
Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored
External gifts bestowed
but on the sword;
Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,

Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,
His army's
foe, condemned to strive and fail;
See a black adversary's ghost
prevail;
Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win
While still
the conflict tore his breast within.
Out of that