Nay, dwells he in cloudy rumour alone?
—Binyon
I.
I am worn faint,
The winds of good and evil
Blind me with dust
And burn me with the cold,
There is no comfort being over-man;
Yet are we come more near
The great oblivions and the labouring night,
Inchoate truth and the sepulchral forces.
II.
Confusion, clamour, ’mid the many voices
Is there a meaning, a significance?
That life apart from all life gives and takes,
This life, apart from all life’s bitter and life’s sweet,
Is good.
Ye see me and ye say: exceeding sweet
Life’s gifts, his youth, his art,
And his too soon acclaim.
I also knew exceeding bitterness,
Saw good things altered and old friends fare forth,
And what I loved in me hath died too soon,
Yea I have seen the “gray above the green”;
Gay have I lived in life;
Though life hath lain
Strange hands upon me and hath torn my sides,
Yet I believe.
* * * * *
Life is most cruel where she is most wise.
III.
The will to live goes from me.
I have lain
Dull and out-worn
with some strange, subtle sickness.
Who shall say
That love is not the very root of this,
O thou afar?
Yet she was near me,
that eternal deep.
O it is passing strange that love
Can blow two ways across one soul.
* * * * *
And I was Aengus for a thousand years,
And she, the ever-living, moved with me
And strove amid the waves, and
would not go.
IV. Elegia
“Far buon tempo e trionfare”
“I have put my days and dreams out of mind’
For all their hurry and their weary fret
Availed me little. But another kind
Of leaf that’s fast in some more sombre wind,
Is man on life, and all our tenuous courses
Wind and unwind as vainly.
* * * * *
I have lived long, and died,
Yea I have been dead, right often,
And have seen one thing:
The sun, while he is high, doth light our wrong
And none can break the darkness with a song.
To-day’s the cup. To-morrow is not ours:
Nay, by our strongest bands we bind her not,
Nor all our fears and our anxieties
Turn her one leaf or hold her scimitar.
The deed blots out the thought
And many thoughts, the vision;
And right’s a compass with as many poles
As there are points in her circumference,
’Tis vain to seek to steer all courses even,
And all things save sheer right are vain enough.
The blade were vain to grow save toward the sun,
And vain th’ attempt to hold her green forever.
All things in season and no thing o’er long!
Love and desire and gain and good forgetting,
Thou canst not stay the wheel, hold none too long!
V.
How our modernity,
Nerve-wracked and broken, turns
Against time’s way and all the way of things,
Crying with weak and egoistic cries!
* * * * *
All things are given over,
Only the restless will
Surges amid the stars
Seeking new moods of life,
New permutations.
* * * * *
See, and the very sense of what we know
Dodges and hides as in a sombre curtain
Bright threads leap forth, and hide, and leave no pattern.
VI.
I thought I had put Love by for a time
And I was glad, for to me his fair face
Is like Pain’s face.
A little light,
The lowered curtain and the theatre!
And o’er the frail talk of the inter-act
Something that broke the jest! A little light,
The gold, and half the profile!
The whole face
Was nothing like you, yet that image cut
Sheer through the moment.
VIb
I have gone seeking for you in the twilight,
Here in the flurry of Fifth Avenue,
Here where they pass between their teas and teas.
Is it such madness? though you could not be
Ever in all that crowd, no gown
Of all their subtle sorts could be your gown.
Yet I am fed with faces, is there one
That even in the half-light mindeth me.
VII. The house of splendour
’Tis Evanoe’s,
A house not made with hands,
But out somewhere beyond the worldly ways
Her gold is spread, above, around, inwoven,
Strange ways and walls are fashioned out of it.
And I have seen my Lady in the sun,
Her hair was spread about, a sheaf of wings,
And red the sunlight was, behind it all.
And I have seen her there within her house,
With six great sapphires hung along the wall,
Low, panel-shaped, a-level with her knees,
And all her robe was woven of pale gold.
There are there many rooms and all of gold,
Of woven walls deep patterned, of email,
Of beaten work; and through the claret stone,
Set to some weaving, comes the aureate light.
Here am I come perforce my love of her,
Behold mine adoration
Maketh me clear, and there are powers in this
Which, played on by the virtues of her soul,
Break down the four-square walls of standing time.
VIII. The flame
’Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
Provençe knew;
’Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
Provençe knew.
We who are wise beyond your dream of wisdom,
Drink our immortal moments; we “pass through.”
We have gone forth beyond your bonds and borders,
Provençe knew;
And all the tales they ever writ of Oisin
Say but this:
That man doth pass the net of days and hours.
Where time is shrivelled down to time’s seed corn
We of the Ever-living, in that light
Meet through our veils and whisper, and of love.
O smoke and shadow of a darkling world,
Barters of passion, and that tenderness
That’s but a sort of cunning! O my Love,
These, and the rest, and all the rest we knew.
’Tis not a game that plays at mates and mating,
’Tis not a game of barter, lands and houses,
’Tis not “of days and nights” and troubling years,
Of cheeks grown sunken and glad hair gone gray;
There is the subtler music, the clear light
Where time burns back about th’ eternal embers.
We are not shut from all the thousand heavens:
Lo, there are many gods whom we have seen,
Folk of unearthly fashion, places splendid,
Bulwarks of beryl and of chrysophrase.
Sapphire Benacus, in thy mists and thee
Nature herself’s turned metaphysical,
Who can look on that blue and not believe?
Thou hooded opal, thou eternal pearl,
O thou dark secret with a shimmering floor,
Through all thy various mood I know thee mine;
If I have merged my soul, or utterly
Am solved and bound in, through aught here on earth,
There canst thou find me, O thou anxious thou,
Who call’st about my gates for some lost me;
I say my soul flowed back, became translucent.
Search not my lips, O Love, let go my hands,
This thing that moves as man is no more mortal.
If thou hast seen my shade sans character,
If thou hast seen that mirror of all moments,
That glass to all things that o’ershadow it,
Call not that mirror me, for I have slipped
Your grasp, I have eluded.
IX. Horae Beatae Inscriptio
How will this beauty, when I am far hence,
Sweep back upon me and engulf my mind!
How will these hours, when we twain are gray,
Turned in their sapphire tide, come flooding o’er us!
X. The Altar
Let us build here an exquisite friendship,
The flame, the autumn, and the green rose of love
Fought out their strife here, ’tis a place of wonder;
Where these have been, meet ’tis, the ground is holy.
IX. Au Salon
Her grave, sweet haughtiness
Pleaseth me, and in like wise
Her quiet ironies.
Others are beautiful, none more, some less.
I suppose, when poetry comes down to facts,
When our souls are returned to the gods
and the spheres they belong in,
Here in the every-day where our acts
Rise up and judge us;
I suppose there are a few dozen verities
That no shift of mood can shake from us:
One place where we’d rather have tea
(Thus far hath modernity brought us)
“Tea” (Damn you!)
Have tea, damn the Caesars,
Talk of the latest success, give wing to some scandal,
Garble a name we detest, and for prejudice?
Set loose the whole consummate pack
to bay like Sir Roger de Coverley’s
This our reward for our works,
sic crescit gloria mundi:
Some circle of not more than three
that we prefer to play up to,
Some few whom we’d rather please
than hear the whole aegrum vulgrus
Splitting its beery jowl
a-meaowling our praises.
Some certain peculiar things,
cari laresque, penates,
Some certain accustomed forms,
the absolute unimportant.
XII. Au Jardin
O You away high there,
you that lean
From amber lattices upon the cobalt night,
I am below amid the pine trees,
Amid the little pine trees, hear me!
“The jester walked in the garden.”
Did he so?
Well, there’s no use your loving me
That way, Lady;
For I’ve nothing but songs to give you.
I am set wide upon the world’s ways
To say that life is, some way, a gay thing,
But you never string two days upon one wire
But there’ll come sorrow of it.
And I loved a love once,
Over beyond the moon there,
I loved a love once,
And, may be, more times,
But she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.
Oh, I know you women from the “other folk,”
And it’ll all come right,
O’ Sundays.
“The jester walked in the garden.”
Did he so?