The Poems of William Watson | Page 3

Were merrier thing. A child? A fragment of the morn, A piece of Spring!
Surely an ampler, fuller day Than drapes our English skies with grey-- A deeper light, a richer ray Than here we know-- To this bright tress have given away Their living glow.
For Willie dwells where gentian flowers Make mimic sky in mountain bowers; And vineyards steeped in ardent hours Slope to the wave Where storied Chillon's tragic towers Their bases lave;
And over piny tracts of Vaud The rose of eve steals up the snow; And on the waters far below Strange sails like wings Half-bodilessly come and go, Fantastic things;
And tender night falls like a sigh On _chalet_ low and _chateau_ high; And the far cataract's voice comes nigh, Where no man hears; And spectral peaks impale the sky On silver spears.
Ah, Willie, whose dissevered tress Lies in my hand!--may you possess At least one sovereign happiness, Ev'n to your grave; One boon than which I ask naught less, Naught greater crave:
May cloud and mountain, lake and vale, Never to you be trite or stale As unto souls whose wellsprings fail Or flow defiled, Till Nature's happiest fairy-tale Charms not her child!
For when the spirit waxes numb, Alien and strange these shows become, And stricken with life's tedium The streams run dry, The choric spheres themselves are dumb, And dead the sky,--
Dead as to captives grown supine, Chained to their task in sightless mine: Above, the bland day smiles benign, Birds carol free, In thunderous throes of life divine Leaps the glad sea;
But they--their day and night are one. What is't to them, that rivulets run, Or what concern of theirs the sun? It seems as though Their business with these things was done Ages ago:
Only, at times, each dulled heart feels That somewhere, sealed with hopeless seals, The unmeaning heaven about him reels, And he lies hurled Beyond the roar of all the wheels Of all the world.
* * * * *
On what strange track one's fancies fare! To eyeless night in sunless lair 'Tis a far cry from Willie's hair; And here it lies-- Human, yet something which can ne'er Grow sad and wise:
Which, when the head where late it lay In life's grey dusk itself is grey, And when the curfew of life's day By death is tolled, Shall forfeit not the auroral ray And eastern gold.

THE KEY-BOARD
Five-and-thirty black slaves, Half-a-hundred white, All their duty but to sing For their Queen's delight, Now with throats of thunder, Now with dulcet lips, While she rules them royally With her finger-tips!
When she quits her palace, All the slaves are dumb-- Dumb with dolour till the Queen Back to Court is come: Dumb the throats of thunder, Dumb the dulcet lips, Lacking all the sovereignty Of her finger-tips.
Dusky slaves and pallid, Ebon slaves and white, When the Queen was on her throne How you sang to-night! Ah, the throats of thunder! Ah, the dulcet lips! Ah, the gracious tyrannies Of her finger-tips!
Silent, silent, silent, All your voices now; Was it then her life alone Did your life endow? Waken, throats of thunder! Waken, dulcet lips! Touched to immortality By her finger-tips.

"SCENTLESS FLOW'RS I BRING THEE"
Scentless flow'rs I bring thee--yet In thy bosom be they set; In thy bosom each one grows Fragrant beyond any rose.
Sweet enough were she who could, In thy heart's sweet neighbourhood, Some redundant sweetness thus Borrow from that overplus.

ON LANDOR'S "HELLENICS"
Come hither, who grow cloyed to surfeiting With lyric draughts o'ersweet, from rills that rise On Hybla not Parnassus mountain: come With beakers rinsed of the dulcifluous wave Hither, and see a magic miracle Of happiest science, the bland Attic skies True-mirrored by an English well;--no stream Whose heaven-belying surface makes the stars Reel, with its restless idiosyncrasy; But well unstirred, save when at times it takes Tribute of lover's eyelids, and at times Bubbles with laughter of some sprite below.

TO ----
(WITH A VOLUME OF EPIGRAMS)
Unto the Lady of The Nook Fly, tiny book. There thou hast lovers--even thou! Fly thither now.
Seven years hast thou for honour yearned, And scant praise earned; But ah! to win, at last, such friends, Is full amends.

ON EXAGGERATED DEFERENCE TO FOREIGN LITERARY OPINION
What! and shall _we_, with such submissive airs As age demands in reverence from the young, Await these crumbs of praise from Europe flung, And doubt of our own greatness till it bears The signet of your Goethes or Voltaires? We who alone in latter times have sung With scarce less power than Arno's exiled tongue-- We who are Milton's kindred, Shakespeare's heirs. The prize of lyric victory who shall gain If ours be not the laurel, ours the palm? More than the froth and flotsam of the Seine, More than your Hugo-flare against the night, And more than Weimar's proud elaborate calm, One flash