Miscellany of Poetry | Page 9

skylarks told again?To all the sheep and shepherd men?On green downs where winds blow._
THE SINGER OF HIGH STATE
On hills too harsh for firs to climb,?Where eagle dare not hatch her brood,?Upon the peak of solitude,?With anvils of black granite crude?I forge austerities of rhyme.
Such godlike stuff my spirit drinks?I make grand odes of tempests there.?The steel-winged eagle, if he dare?To cleave these tracts of frozen air,?Hearing such music, swoops and sinks.
Stark clangours of forgotten wars,?Tumults of primal love and hate,?Through crags of song reverberate.?Held by the Singer of High State,?Battalions of the midnight pause.
On hills uplift from Space and Time,?Upon the peak of Solitude,?With stars to give my furnace food,?On anvils of black granite crude?I forge austerities of rhyme.

GERALD GOULD
FREEDOMS
1
Those were our freedoms, and we come to this:?The climbing road that lures the climbing feet?Is lost: there lies no mist above the wheat,?Where-thro' to glimpse the silver precipice,?Far off, about whose base the white seas hiss?In spray; the world grows narrow and complete;?We have lost our perils in the certain sweet;?We have sold our great horizon for a kiss.
To every hill there is a lowly slope,?But some have heights beyond all height--so high?They make new worlds for the adventuring eye.?We for achievement have forgone our hope,?And shall not see another morning ope,?Nor the new moon come into the new sky.
2
Where is our freedom sought, and where to seek??The voices of the various world agree?The future's ours: to hope is to be free:?Only to doubt, to fear, is to be weak.?Have you not felt upon your calm clear cheek?The kiss of the bright wind of liberty??What more is there to ask, what more to be??Peace, peace, my soul, and let the silence speak!
To hope is to be free? Nay, hope's a slave?To every chance; hope is the same as fear;?Hope trembles at the wind, the star, the wave,?The voice, the mood, the music; hope stands near?The chilly threshold of the waiting grave,?And when the silence speaks, hope does not hear.
3
In the old days came freedom with a sword.?Ev'n so; but also freedom came with wings?Fanning the faint and purple bloom that clings?To the great twilight where our dreams are stored.?Freedom was what the waters would afford?That yet obeyed the white moon's whisperings,?And freedom leapt and listened in the strings?Of dulcimer and lute and clavichord.
In the old days? But those old days are now.?O merciful, O bright, O valiant brow,?Can you seek freedom that way and I this??Not in the single note is music free,?But where creation's climbing fires agree?In multitudes, in nights, in silences.
4
Shall we mark off our little patch of power?From time's compulsive process? Shall we sit?With memory, warming our weak hands at it,?And say: "So be it; we have had one hour"??Surely the mountains are a better dower,?With their dark scope and cloudy infinite,?Than small perfection, trivial exquisite;?'Mid all that dark the brightness of a flower!
Lovers are not themselves: they are more, they are all:?For them are past and future spread together?Like a green landscape lit by golden weather:?For them the rhythmic change conjectural?Of time and place is but the question whether?Their God shall stand (as stand he must) or fall.
5
O cold remembrance, careful-careless kiss,?That does not wake to hope with waking day,?And at the hour of bed-time does not say:?"That was for rapture, that for peace, but this?Burns for the night's more terrible auspices,?And pangs and sweets of doubt and disarray!"--?Yet in one kiss two hearts found once the way?From perfect ignorance to perfect bliss.
Love has so many voices, low and high.?Such range of reason, such delight of rhyme!?Yet when I asked love such a simple thing?As why the autumn comes where came the spring,?The only soul that answered me was I,?And love was silent then for the first time.
6
Our love is hurt, and the bad world goes on?Moving to its conclusion: in a year?This corn now reaped will come again to ear,?The moon will shine as last night the moon shone;?The tide, whose thought is the moon's thought, will don?The silver livery of subjection. Dear,?Is it not strange that hearts will hope and fear?And break, when our hearts, broken now, are gone?
If this were true, life's movement would rebel,?And curdle to its source, as blood to the heart?When the cold fires of indignation start?From their obscure lair in the body.--Well,?If for us two to part were just to part?All years would have one pointless tale to tell.
7
The little things, the little restless things,?The base and barren things, the things that spite?The day, and trail processions through the night?Of sad remembrances and questionings;?The poverties, stupidities and stings,?The silted misery, the hovering blight;?The things that block the paths of sound and sight;?The things that snare our thought and break its wings--
How shall we bear these?--we who suffer so?The shattering sacrifice, the huge despair,?The terrors loosed like lightnings on the