The Englishman and Other Poems | Page 9

me?Must this great reproductive impulse lie?Hidden, ashamed, unnourished, and denied,?Until it starves to slow and tortuous death??I knew the hope of spring-time; like the tree?Now ripe with fruit, I budded, and then bloomed;?We laughed together through the young May morns;?We dreamed together through the summer moons;?Till all Thy purposes within the tree?Were to fruition brought. Lord, Thou hast heard?The Woman in me crying for the Man;?The Mother in me crying for the Child;?And made no answer. Am I less to Thee?Than lover forms of Nature, or in truth?Dost Thou hold Somewhere in another Realm?Full compensation and large recompense?For lonely virtue forced by fate to live?A life unnatural, in a natural world?
II
Thou who hast made for such sure purposes?The mightiest and the meanest thing that is -?Planned out the lives of insects of the air?With fine precision and consummate care,?Thou who hast taught the bee the secret power?Of carrying on love's laws 'twixt flower and flower,?Why didst Thou shape this mortal frame of mine,?If Heavenly joys alone were Thy design??Wherefore the wonder of my woman's breast,?By lips of lover and of babe unpressed,?If spirit children only shall reply?Unto my ever urgent mother cry??Why should the rose be guided to its own,?And my love-craving heart beat on alone?
III
Yet do I understand; for Thou hast made?Something more subtle than this heart of me;?A finer part of me?To be obeyed.
Albeit I am a sister to the earth,?This nature self is not the whole of me;?The deathless soul of me?Has nobler birth.
The primal woman hungers for the man;?My better self demands the mate of me;?The spirit fate of me,?Part of Thy plan.
Nature is instinct with the mother-need;?So is my heart; but ah, the child of me?Should, undefiled of me,?Spring from love's seed.
And if, in barren chastity, I must?Know but in dreams that perfect choice of me,?Still will the voice of me?Proclaim God just.
BROTHERHOOD
When in the even ways of life
The old world jogs along,?Our little coloured flags we flaunt:?Our little separate selves we vaunt:
Each pipes his native song.?And jealousy and greed and pride
Join their ungodly hands,?And this round lovely world divide
Into opposing lands.
But let some crucial hour of pain
Sound from the tower of time,?Then consciousness of brotherhood?Wakes in each heart the latent good,
And men become sublime.?As swarming insects of the night,
Fly when the sun bursts in,?Self fades, before love's radiant light,
And all the world is kin.
God, what a place this earth would be
If that uplifting thought,?Born of some vast world accident,?Into our daily lives were blent,
And in each action wrought.?But while we let the old sins flock
Back to our hearts again,?In flame, and flood, and earthquake shock,
Thy voice must speak to men.
'THE TAVERN OF LAST TIMES'?(AT BOX HILL, SURREY)
A modern hour from London (as we spin?Into a silver thread the miles of space?Between us and our goal), there is a place?Apart from city traffic, dust, and din,?Green with great trees, where hides a quiet Inn.?Here Nelson last looked on the lovely face?Which made his world; and by its magic grace?Trailed rosy clouds across each early sin.?And, leaning lawnward, is the room where Keats?Wrote the last one of those immortal songs?(Called by the critics of his day 'mere rhymes').?A lark, high in the boxwood bough repeats?Those lyric strains, to idle passing throngs,?There by the little Tavern-of-Last-Times.
THE TWO AGES
On a great cathedral window I have seen?A Summer sunset swoon and sink away,?Lost in the splendours of immortal art.?Angels and saints and all the heavenly hosts,?With smiles undimmed by half a thousand years,?From wall and niche have met my lifted gale.?Sculpture and carving and illumined page,?And the fair, lofty dreams of architects,?That speak of beauty to the centuries -?All these have fed me with divine repasts.?Yet in my mouth is left a bitter taste,?The taste of blood that stained that age of art.
Those glorious windows shine upon the black?And hideous structure of the guillotine;?Beside the haloed countenance of saints?There hangs the multiple and knotted lash.?The Christ of love, benign and beautiful,?Looks at the torture-rack, by hate conceived?And bigotry sustained. The prison cell,?With blood-stained walls, where starving men went mad,?Lies under turrets matchless in their grace.
God, what an age! How was it that You let?Colossal genius and colossal crime?Walk for a hundred years across the earth,?Like giant twins? How was it then that men,?Conceiving such vast beauty for the world,?And such large hopes of heaven, could entertain?Such hellish projects for their human kin??How could the hand that, with consummate skill?And loving patience, limned the luminous page,?Drop pen and brush, and seize the branding-rod,?To scourge a brother for his differing faith?
Not great this age in beauty or in art;?Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure?For earth's adornment, through long centuries;?Not ours the fervid worship of a God?That wastes its splendid opulence on glass,?Leaving but hate for hungry human hearts.?Yet great this age; its mighty work is man?Knowing himself the universal life.?And