Astrophel and Other Poems | Page 9

vast and vain?Frowned, and renounced not night's reluctant reign.?The serpentine swift sounds and shapes wherein?The stainless sea mocks earth and death and sin,?Crawls dark as craft, or flashes keen as hate,?Subdued and insubmissive, strong like fate?And weak like man, bore wrathful witness yet?That storms and sins are more than suns that set;?That evil everlasting, girt for strife?Eternal, wars with hope as death with life.?The dark sharp shifting wind that bade the waves?Falter, lose heart, bow down like foes made slaves,?And waxed within more bitter as they bowed,?Baffling the sea, swallowing the sun with cloud,?Devouring fast as fire on earth devours?And hungering hard as frost that feeds on flowers,?Clothed round with fog that reeked as fume from hell,?And darkening with its miscreative spell?Light, glad and keen and splendid as the sword?Whose heft had known Othello's hand its lord,?Spake all the soul that hell drew back to greet?And felt its fire shrink shuddering from his feet.?Far off the darkness darkened, and recoiled,?And neared again, and triumphed: and the coiled?Colourless cloud and sea discoloured grew?Conscious of horror huge as heaven, and knew?Where Goneril's soul made chill and foul the mist,?And all the leprous life in Regan hissed.?Fierce homeless ghosts, rejected of the pit,?From hell to hell of storm fear watched them flit.?About them and before, the dull grey gloom?Shuddered, and heaven seemed hateful as the tomb?That shrinks from resurrection; and from out?That sullen hell which girt their shades about?The nether soul that lurks and lowers within?Man, made of dust and fire and shame and sin,?Breathed: all the cloud that felt it breathe and blight Was blue as plague or black as thunderous night.?Elect of hell, the children of his hate?Thronged, as to storm sweet heaven's triumphal gate.?The terror of his giving rose and shone?Imminent: life had put its likeness on.?But higher than all its horrent height of shade?Shone sovereign, seen by light itself had made,?Above the woes of all the world, above?Life, sin, and death, his myriad-minded love.?From landward heights whereon the radiance leant?Full-fraught from heaven, intense and imminent,?To depths wherein the seething strengths of cloud?Scarce matched the wrath of waves whereon they bowed,?From homeborn pride and kindling love of home?To the outer skies and seas of fire and foam,?From splendour soft as dew that sundawn thrills?To gloom that shudders round the world it fills,?From midnights murmuring round Titania's ear?To midnights maddening round the rage of Lear,?The wonder woven of storm and sun became?One with the light that lightens from his name.?The music moving on the sea that felt?The storm-wind even as snows of springtide melt?Was blithe as Ariel's hand or voice might make?And bid all grief die gladly for its sake.?And there the soul alive in ear and eye?That watched the wonders of an hour pass by?Saw brighter than all stars that heaven inspheres?The silent splendour of Cordelia's tears,?Felt in the whispers of the quickening wind?The radiance of the laugh of Rosalind,?And heard, in sounds that melt the souls of men?With love of love, the tune of Imogen.
VII
For the strong north-east is not strong to subdue and to slay the
divine south-west,?And the darkness is less than the light that it darkens, and dies
in reluctant rest.?It hovers and hangs on the labouring and trembling ascent of the
dawn from the deep,?Till the sun's eye quicken the world and the waters, and smite it
again into sleep.?Night, holy and starry, the fostress of souls, with the fragrance
of heaven in her breath,?Subdues with the sense of her godhead the forces and mysteries of
sorrow and death.?Eternal as dawn's is the comfort she gives: but the mist that
beleaguers and slays?Comes, passes, and is not: the strength of it withers, appalled or
assuaged by the day's.?Faith, haggard as Fear that had borne her, and dark as the sire
that begat her, Despair,?Held rule on the soul of the world and the song of it saddening
through ages that were;?Dim centuries that darkened and brightened and darkened again, and
the soul of their song?Was great as their grief, and sublime as their suffering, and
strong as their sorrows were strong.?It knew not, it saw not, but shadows triune, and evoked by the
strength of their spell?Dark hell, and the mountain of anguish, and heaven that was
hollower and harder than hell.?These are not: the womb of the darkness that bare them rejects
them, and knows them no more:?Thought, fettered in misery and iron, revives in the light that it
lived in of yore.?For the soul that is wisdom and freedom, the spirit of England
redeemed from her past,?Speaks life through the lips of the master and lord of her
children, the first and the last.?Thought, touched by his hand and redeemed by his breath, sees,
hears, and accepts from above?The limitless lightnings of vision and passion, the measureless
music of love.
A SWIMMER'S DREAM
NOVEMBER 4, 1889
_Somno mollior unda_
I
Dawn is dim on the dark soft water,?Soft and passionate, dark and sweet.?Love's own self was the deep