Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces | Page 4

dramas,
Laid now at ease,?Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow
Sepulture-clad.
So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,
Over the leaze,?Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;?--Yea, as the rhyme?Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness
Captured me these.
For, their lost revisiting manifestations
In their own time?Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,
Seeing behind?Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling
Sweet, sad, sublime.
Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser
Stare of the mind?As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast
Body-borne eyes,?Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them
As living kind.
Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying
In their surmise,?"Ah--whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought
Round him that looms?Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,
Save a few tombs?"
CHANNEL FIRING
That night your great guns, unawares,?Shook all our coffins as we lay,?And broke the chancel window-squares,?We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome?Arose the howl of wakened hounds:?The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,?The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;?It's gunnery practice out at sea?Just as before you went below;?The world is as it used to be:
"All nations striving strong to make?Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters?They do no more for Christes sake?Than you who are helpless in such matters.
"That this is not the judgment-hour?For some of them's a blessed thing,?For if it were they'd have to scour?Hell's floor for so much threatening . . .
"Ha, ha. It will be warmer when?I blow the trumpet (if indeed?I ever do; for you are men,?And rest eternal sorely need)."
So down we lay again. "I wonder,?Will the world ever saner be,"?Said one, "than when He sent us under?In our indifferent century!"
And many a skeleton shook his head.?"Instead of preaching forty year,"?My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,?"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."
Again the guns disturbed the hour,?Roaring their readiness to avenge,?As far inland as Stourton Tower,?And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
April 1914.
THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN
(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")
I
In a solitude of the sea?Deep from human vanity,?And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
II
Steel chambers, late the pyres?Of her salamandrine fires,?Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
III
Over the mirrors meant?To glass the opulent?The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
IV
Jewels in joy designed?To ravish the sensuous mind?Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.
V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near?Gaze at the gilded gear?And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?" . . .
VI
Well: while was fashioning?This creature of cleaving wing,?The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
VII
Prepared a sinister mate?For her--so gaily great -?A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
VIII
And as the smart ship grew?In stature, grace, and hue,?In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
IX
Alien they seemed to be:?No mortal eye could see?The intimate welding of their later history,
X
Or sign that they were bent?By paths coincident?On being anon twin halves of one august event,
XI
Till the Spinner of the Years?Said "Now!" And each one hears,?And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
THE GHOST OF THE PAST
We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;?I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone.?It was a spectral housekeeping
Where fell no jarring tone,?As strange, as still a housekeeping
As ever has been known.
As daily I went up the stair
And down the stair,?I did not mind the Bygone there -
The Present once to me;?Its moving meek companionship
I wished might ever be,?There was in that companionship
Something of ecstasy.
It dwelt with me just as it was,
Just as it was?When first its prospects gave me pause
In wayward wanderings,?Before the years had torn old troths
As they tear all sweet things,?Before gaunt griefs had torn old troths
And dulled old rapturings.
And then its form began to fade,
Began to fade,?Its gentle echoes faintlier played
At eves upon my ear?Than when the autumn's look embrowned
The lonely chambers here,?The autumn's settling shades embrowned
Nooks that it haunted near.
And so with time my vision less,
Yea, less and less?Makes of that Past my housemistress,
It dwindles in my eye;?It looms a far-off skeleton
And not a comrade nigh,?A fitful far-off skeleton
Dimming as days draw by.
AFTER THE VISIT?(To F. E. D.)
Come again to the place?Where your presence was as a leaf that skims?Down a drouthy way whose ascent bedims
The bloom on the farer's face.
Come again, with the feet?That were light on the green as a thistledown ball,?And those mute ministrations to one and to all
Beyond a man's saying sweet.
Until then the faint scent?Of the bordering flowers swam unheeded away,?And I marked not the charm in the changes of day
As the cloud-colours came and went.
Through the dark corridors?Your walk was so soundless I did not know?Your form from a phantom's of long ago
Said to pass on the ancient floors,
Till you drew from the shade,?And I saw the large luminous living eyes?Regard me in fixed