New Poems | Page 4

O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the

Heaven allows?
XV
On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart--
Joy
and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils
start.
XVI
O, dismay!
I, a wingless mortal, sporting
With the tresses of the sun?

I, that dare my hand to lay
On the thunder in its snorting?
Ere
begun,
Falls my singed song down the sky, even the old
Icarian way.
XVII
From the fall precipitant
These dim snatches of her chant
Only have
remain-ed mine;--
That from spear and thorn alone
May be grown

For the front of saint or singer any divinizing twine.
XVIII
Her song said that no springing
Paradise but evermore
Hangeth on
a singing
That has chords of weeping,
And that sings the
after-sleeping
To souls which wake too sore.
'But woe the singer,
woe!' she said; 'beyond the
dead his singing-lore,
All its art of sweet and sore,
He learns, in
Elenore!'
XIX
Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am
bound therefor.

XX
'Pierce thy heart to find the key;
With thee take
Only what none
else would keep;
Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
Learn to
wake when thou dost sleep.
Learn to water joy with tears,
Learn
from fears to vanquish fears;
To hope, for thou dar'st not despair,

Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve;
Plough thou the rock until it bear;

Know, for thou else couldst not believe;
Lose, that the lost thou
may'st receive;
Die, for none other way canst live.
When earth and
heaven lay down their veil,
And that apocalypse turns thee pale;

When thy seeing blindeth thee
To what thy fellow-mortals see;

When their sight to thee is sightless;
Their living, death; their light,
most lightless;
Search no more--
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore.'
XXI
Where is the land of Luthany,
And where the region Elenore?
I do
faint therefor.
'When to the new eyes of thee
All things by immortal
power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other link-ed are,
That
thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star;
When thy
song is shield and mirror
To the fair snake-curl-ed Pain,
Where
thou dar'st affront her terror
That on her thou may'st attain
Persean
conquest; seek no more,
O seek no more!
Pass the gates of Luthany,
tread the region Elenore.'
XXII
So sang she, so wept she,
Through a dream-night's day;
And with
her magic singing kept she--
Mystical in music--
That garden of
enchanting
In visionary May;
Swayless for my spirit's haunting,

Thrice-threefold walled with emerald from our mortal
mornings grey.

XXIII
And as a necromancer
Raises from the rose-ash
The ghost of the
rose;
My heart so made answer
To her voice's silver plash,--

Stirred in reddening flash,
And from out its mortal ruins the purpureal
phantom
blows.
XXIV
Her tears made dulcet fretting,
Her voice had no word,
More than
thunder or the bird.
Yet, unforgetting,
The ravished soul her
meanings knew. Mine ears
heard not, and I heard.
XXV
When she shall unwind
All those wiles she wound about me,
Tears
shall break from out me,
That I cannot find
Music in the holy poets
to my wistful want, I doubt
me!
CONTEMPLATION.
This morning saw I, fled the shower,
The earth reclining in a lull of
power:
The heavens, pursuing not their path,
Lay stretched out
naked after bath,
Or so it seemed; field, water, tree, were still,
Nor
was there any purpose on the calm-browed hill.
The hill, which sometimes visibly is
Wrought with unresting energies,

Looked idly; from the musing wood,
And every rock, a life
renewed
Exhaled like an unconscious thought
When poets,
dreaming unperplexed,
Dream that they dream of nought.
Nature
one hour appears a thing unsexed,
Or to such serene balance brought


That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms,
And sleep in one
another's arms.
The sun with resting pulses seems to brood,
And
slacken its command upon my unurged blood.
The river has not any care
Its passionless water to the sea to bear;

The leaves have brown content;
The wall to me has freshness like a
scent,
And takes half animate the air,
Making one life with its green
moss and stain;
And life with all things seems too perfect blent
For
anything of life to be aware.
The very shades on hill, and tree, and
plain,
Where they have fallen doze, and where they doze remain.
No hill can idler be than I;
No stone its inter-particled vibration

Investeth with a stiller lie;
No heaven with a more urgent rest betrays

The eyes that on it gaze.
We are too near akin that thou shouldst
cheat
Me, Nature, with thy fair deceit.
In poets floating like a water-flower
Upon the bosom of the glassy
hour,
In skies that no man sees to move,
Lurk untumultuous
vortices of power,
For joy too native, and for agitation
Too instant,
too entire for sense thereof,
Motion like gnats when autumn suns are
low,
Perpetual as the prisoned feet of love
On the heart's floors with
pain-ed pace that go.
From stones and poets you may know,

Nothing so active is, as that which least seems so.
For he, that conduit running wine of song,
Then to himself does most
belong,
When he his mortal house unbars
To the importunate and
thronging feet
That round our corporal walls unheeded beat;
Till,
all containing, he exalt
His stature to the stars,