Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems | Page 2

talk with living men;?Whereby a sentence, in its trivial scope,?May centre all we love and all we hope;?And in a couplet, like a rosebud furled,?Lie all the wistful wonder of the world.
Old are the stars, and yet they still endure,?Old are the flowers, yet never fail the spring:?Why is the song that is so old so new,?Known and yet strange each sweet small shape and hue??How may a poet thus for ever sing,?Thus build his climbing music sweet and sure,?As builds in stars and flowers the Eternal mind??Ah, Poet, that is yours to seek and find!?Yea, yours that magisterial skill whereby?God put all Heaven in a woman's eye,?Nature's own mighty and mysterious art?That knows to pack the whole within the part:?The shell that hums the music of the sea,?The little word big with Eternity,?The cosmic rhythm in microcosmic things--?One song the lark and one the planet sings,?One kind heart beating warm in bird and tree--?To hear it beat, who knew so well as he?
Virgil of prose! far distant is the day?When at the mention of your heartfelt name?Shall shake the head, and men, oblivious, say:?'We know him not, this master, nor his fame.'?Not for so swift forgetfulness you wrought,?Day upon day, with rapt fastidious pen,?Turning, like precious stones, with anxious thought,?This word and that again and yet again,?Seeking to match its meaning with the world;?Nor to the morning stars gave ears attent,?That you, indeed, might ever dare to be?With other praise than immortality?Unworthily content.
Not while a boy still whistles on the earth,?Not while a single human heart beats true,?Not while Love lasts, and Honour, and the Brave,?Has earth a grave,?O well-beloved, for you!
AN ODE TO SPRING
(TO GRANT AND NELLIE ALLEN)
Is it the Spring??Or are the birds all wrong?That play on flute and viol,?A thousand strong,?In minstrel galleries?Of the long deep wood,?Epiphanies?Of bloom and bud.
Grave minstrels those,?Of deep responsive chant;?But see how yonder goes,?Dew-drunk, with giddy slant,?Yon Shelley-lark,?And hark!?Him on the giddy brink?Of pearly heaven?His fairy anvil clink.
Or watch, in fancy,?How the brimming note?Falls, like a string of pearls,?From out his heavenly throat;?Or like a fountain?In Hesperides,?Raining its silver rain,?In gleam and chime,?On backs of ivory girls--?Twice happy rhyme!
Ah, none of these?May make it plain,?No image we may seek?Shall match the magic of his gurgling beak.
And many a silly thing?That hops and cheeps,?And perks his tiny tail,?And sideway peeps,?And flitters little wing,?Seems in his consequential way?To tell of Spring.
The river warbles soft and runs?With fuller curve and sleeker line,?Though on the winter-blackened hedge?Twigs of unbudding iron shine,?And trampled still the river sedge.
And O the Sun!?I have no friend so generous as this Sun?That comes to meet me with his big warm hands.?And O the Sky!?There is no maid, how true,?Is half so chaste?As the pure kiss of greening willow wands?Against the intense pale blue?Of this sweet boundless overarching waste.
And see!--dear Heaven, but it is the Spring!--?See yonder, yonder, by the river there,?Long glittering pearly fingers flash?Upon the warm bright air:?Why, 'tis the heavenly palm,?The Christian tree,?Whose budding is a psalm?Of natural piety:?Soft silver notches up the smooth green stem--?Ah, Spring must follow them,?It is the Spring!
O Spirit of Spring,?Whose strange instinctive art?Makes the bird sing,?And brings the bud again;?O in my heart?Take up thy heavenly reign,?And from its deeps?Draw out the hidden flower,?And where it sleeps,?Throughout the winter long,?O sweet mysterious power?Awake the slothful song!
February 7, 1893.
TREE-WORSHIP
(TO JOHN LANE)
Vast and mysterious brother, ere was yet of me?So much as men may poise upon a needle's end,?Still shook with laughter all this monstrous might of thee, And still with haughty crest it called the morning friend.
Thy latticed column jetted up the bright blue air,?Tall as a mast it was, and stronger than a tower;?Three hundred winters had beheld thee mighty there,?Before my little life had lived one little hour.
With rocky foot stern-set like iron in the land,?With leafy rustling crest the morning sows with pearls,?Huge as a minster, half in heaven men saw thee stand,?Thy rugged girth the waists of fifty Eastern girls.
Knotted and warted, slabbed and armoured like the hide?Of tropic elephant; unstormable and steep?As some grim fortress with a princess-pearl inside,?Where savage guardian faces beard the bastioned keep:
So hard a rind, old tree, shielding so soft a heart--?A woman's heart of tender little nestling leaves;?Nor rind so hard but that a touch so soft can part,?And Spring's first baby-bud an easy passage cleaves.
I picture thee within with dainty satin sides,?Where all the long day through the sleeping dryad dreams, But when the moon bends low and taps thee thrice she glides, Knowing the fairy knock, to bask within her beams.
And all the long night through, for him with eyes and ears, She sways within thine arms and sings a fairy tune,?Till, startled with the dawn, she softly disappears,?And sleeps and dreams again until the rising moon.
But with the peep of