Hawthorn and Lavender | Page 6

cannot tell_?_Of which he died_. _But Death was well_.
Will I die of drink?
Why not??Won't I pause and think?
--What??Why in seeming wise
Waste your breath??Everybody dies--
And of death!
Youth--if you find it's youth
Too late??Truth--and the back of truth?
Straight,?Be it love or liquor,
What's the odds,?So it slide you quicker
To the gods?
XLV
O, these long nights of days!?All the year's baseness in the ways,?All the year's wretchedness in the skies;?While on the blind, disheartened sea?A tramp-wind plies?Cringingly and dejectedly!?And rain and darkness, mist and mud,?They cling, they close, they sneak into the blood,?They crawl and crowd upon the brain:?Till in a dull, dense monotone of pain?The past is found a kind of maze,?At whose every coign and crook,?Broad angle and privy nook,?There waits a hooded Memory,?Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching eyes.
XLVI
In Shoreham River, hurrying down?To the live sea,?By working, marrying, breeding Shoreham Town,?Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream,?An old, black rotter of a boat?Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote,?Lay stranded in mid-stream:?With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,?That made me think of legs and a broken spine:?Soon, all-too soon,?Ungainly and forlorn to lie?Full in the eye?Of the cynical, discomfortable moon?That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky,?A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by?The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned;?The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing;?The poor old hulk remained,?Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why--?Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying. {63}?For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying--?Dying or dead;?And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:--?'_Dear God_, _it's I_!'
XLVII
Come by my bed,?What time the gray ghost shrieks and flies;?Take in your hands my head,?And look, O look, into my failing eyes;?And, by God's grace,?Even as He sunders body and breath,?The shadow of your face?Shall pass with me into the run?Of the Beyond, and I shall keep and save?Your beauty, as it used to be,?An absolute part of me,?Lying there, dead and done,?Far from the sovran bounty of the sun,?Down in the grisly colonies of the Grave.
XLVIII
Gray hills, gray skies, gray lights,?And still, gray sea--?O fond, O fair,?The Mays that were,?When the wild days and wilder nights?Made it like heaven to be!
Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams--?O, breath by breath,?Night-tide and day?Lapse gentle and gray,?As to a murmur of tired streams,?Into the haze of death.
XLIX
Silence, loneliness, darkness--
These, and of these my fill,?While God in the rush of the Maytide
Without is working His will.
Without are the wind and the wall-flowers,
The leaves and the nests and the rain,?And in all of them God is making
His beautiful purpose plain.
But I wait in a horror of strangeness--
A tool on His workshop floor,?Worn to the butt, and banished
His hand for evermore.
L
So let me hence as one?Whose part in the world has been dreamed out and done:?One that hath fairly earned and spent?In pride of heart and jubilance of blood?Such wages, be they counted bad or good,?As Time, the old taskmaster, was moved to pay;?And, having warred and suffered, and passed on?Those gifts the Arbiters preferred and gave,?Fare, grateful and content,?Down the dim way?Whereby races innumerable have gone,?Into the silent universe of the grave.
Grateful for what hath been--?For what my hand hath done, mine eyes have seen,?My heart been privileged to know;?With all my lips in love have brought?To lips that yearned in love to them, and wrought?In the way of wrath, and pity, and sport, and song:?Content, this miracle of being alive?Dwindling, that I, thrice weary of worst and best,?May shed my duds, and go?From right and wrong,?And, ceasing to regret, and long, and strive,?Accept the past, and be for ever at rest.
FINALE
_Schizzando ma con sentimento_
A sigh sent wrong,?A kiss that goes astray,?A sorrow the years endlong--?So they say.
So let it be--?Come the sorrow, the kiss, the sigh!?They are life, dear life, all three,?And we die.
WORTHING, 1899-1901.
LONDON TYPES
(_To_ S. S. P.)
I. BUS-DRIVER
He's called _The General_ from the brazen craft?And dash with which he _sneaks a bit of road_?And all its fares; challenged, or chafed, or chaffed,?_Back-answers_ of the newest he'll explode;?He reins his horses with an air; he treats?With scoffing calm whatever powers there be;?He _gets it straight_, puts _a bit on_, and meets?His losses with both _lip_ and _pounds s. d._;?He arrogates a special taste in _short_;?Is loftily grateful for a flagrant _smoke_;?At all the smarter housemaids winks his court,?And taps them for half-crowns; being _stoney-broke_,
Lives lustily; is ever _on the make_;?And hath, I fear, none other gods but _Fake_.
II. LIFE-GUARDSMAN
Joy of the Milliner, Envy of the Line,?Star of the Parks, jack-booted, sworded, helmed,?He sits between his holsters, solid of spine;?Nor, as it seems, though _WESTMINSTER_ were whelmed,?With the great globe, in earthquake and eclipse,?Would he and his charger cease from mounting guard,?This Private in the Blues, nor would his lips?Move, though his gorge with throttled oaths were charred!?He wears his inches weightily,