Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with Miscellaneous Pieces | Page 8

same
As when we four came.

- But two have wandered far
From this grassy rise
Into urban roar

Where no picnics are,
And one--has shut her eyes
For evermore.
THE SCHRECKHORN
(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)
(June
1897)
Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and
desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A
looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with
ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of
semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and
rugged trim.
At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love,
hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this
silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping

snows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?
A SINGER ASLEEP
(Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1909)
I
In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea,
That sentrys up and
down all night, all day,
From cove to promontory, from ness to bay,
The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.
II
0. It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of
some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In
fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria's
formal middle time
0. His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.
III
O that far morning of a summer day
When, down a terraced street
whose pavements lay
Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes,
I
walked and read with a quick glad surprise
New words, in classic guise, -
IV
The passionate pages of his earlier years,
Fraught with hot sighs, sad
laughters, kisses, tears;
Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who

Blew them not naively, but as one who knew
Full well why thus he blew.
V
I still can hear the brabble and the roar
At those thy tunes, O still one,

now passed through
That fitful fire of tongues then entered new!

Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore;
Thine swells yet more and more.
VI
0. His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she
the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies; Who leapt,
love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling
world-encircling deep
0. Which hides her where none sees.
VII
And one can hold in thought that nightly here
His phantom may draw
down to the water's brim,
And hers come up to meet it, as a dim

Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,
And mariners wonder as
they traverse near,
Unknowing of her and him.
VIII
One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:
"O teacher, where lies
hid thy burning line;
Where are those songs, O poetess divine

Whose very arts are love incarnadine?"
And her smile back: "Disciple
true and warm,
Sufficient now are thine." . . .
IX
So here, beneath the waking constellations,
Where the waves peal
their everlasting strains,
And their dull subterrene reverberations

Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains -
Him once
their peer in sad improvisations,
And deft as wind to cleave their

frothy manes -
I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines
Upon the capes and chines.
BONCHURCH, 1910.
A PLAINT TO MAN
When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,
And gained
percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,
Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of
creating me -
A form like your own--for praying to?
My virtue, power, utility,
Within my maker must all abide,
Since
none in myself can ever be,
One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide
Shown forth in the dark upon
some dim sheet,
And by none but its showman vivified.
"Such a forced device," you may say, "is meet
For easing a loaded
heart at whiles:
Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat
Somewhere above the gloomy aisles
Of this wailful world, or he
could not bear
The irk no local hope beguiles."
0. But since I was framed in your first despair The doing without me has
had no play In the minds of men when shadows scare;
And now that I dwindle day by day
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers

In a light that will not let me stay,
And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told,
and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:
The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart's
resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought,
unknown.
1909-10.
GOD'S FUNERAL
I
I saw a slowly-stepping train -
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and
bent and hoar -
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and
mystic form the foremost bore.
II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within
me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To
consciousness of sorrow even as they.
III
The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
At first seemed man-like,
and anon to change
To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,
At
times endowed with wings of