# Sonnets (Masefield, 1916)

SONNETS
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SONNETS
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
AUTHOR OF "THE EVERLASTING MERCY," "THE WIDOW IN THE BYE STREET," "THE FAITHFUL," "THE STORY OF A ROUNDHOUSE," ETC.
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1916, By JOHN MASEFIELD.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
To
MY AMERICAN FRIENDS
LONG, long ago, when all the glittering earth Was heaven itself, when drunkards in the street Were like mazed kings shaking at giving birth To acts of war that sickle men like wheat, When the white clover opened Paradise And God lived in a cottage up the brook, Beauty, you lifted up my sleeping eyes And filled my heart with longing with a look. And all the day I searched but could not find The beautiful dark-eyed who touched me there, Delight in her made trouble in my mind. She was within all Nature, everywhere, The breath I breathed, the brook, the flower, the grass, Were her, her word, her beauty, all she was.
NIGHT came again, but now I could not sleep. The owls were watching in the yew, the mice Gnawed at the wainscot, the mid dark was deep, The death-watch knocked the dead man's summons thrice. The cats upon the pointed housetops peered About the chimneys, with lit eyes which saw Things in the darkness, moving, which they feared, The midnight filled the quiet house with awe. So, creeping down the stair, I drew the bolt And passed into the darkness, and I knew That Beauty was brought near by my revolt; Beauty was in the moonlight, in the dew, But more within myself whose venturous tread Walked the dark house where death ticks called the dead.
EVEN after all these years there comes the dream Of lovelier life than this in some new earth, In the full summer of that unearthly gleam Which lights the spirit when the brain gives birth. Of a perfected I, in happy hours, Treading above the sea that trembles there, A path through thickets of immortal flowers That only grow where sorrows never were. And, at a turn, of coming face to face With Beauty's self, that Beauty I have sought In women's hearts, in friends, in many a place In barren hours passed at grips with thought; Beauty of woman, comrade, earth and sea, Incarnate thought come face to face with me.
IF I could come again to that dear place Where once I came, where Beauty lived and moved, Where, by the sea, I saw her face to face That soul alive by which the world has loved; If, as I stood at gaze among the leaves, She would appear again as once before While the red herdsman gathered up his sheaves And brimming waters trembled up the shore; If, as I gazed, her Beauty that was dumb, In that old time, before I learned to speak, Would lean to me and revelation come, Words to the lips and color to the cheek, Joy with its searing-iron would burn me wise I should know all, all powers, all mysteries.
MEN are made human by the mighty fall The mighty passion led to, these remain. The despot at the last assaulted wall, By long disaster is made man again; The faithful fool who follows the torn flag, The woman marching by the beaten man, Make with their truth atonement for the brag And earn a pity for the too proud plan. For in disaster, in the ruined will, In the soiled shreds of what the brain conceived, Something above the wreck is steady still, Bright above all that cannot be retrieved; Grandeur of soul, a touching of the star That good days cover but by which we are.
HERE in the self is all that man can know Of Beauty, all the wonder, all the power, All the unearthly color, all the glow, Here in the self which withers like a flower, Here in the self which fades as hours pass, And droops and dies and rots and is forgotten Sooner, by ages, than the mirroring glass In which it sees its glory still unrotten. Here in the flesh, within the flesh, behind, Swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone, Beauty herself, the universal mind, Eternal April wandering alone, The god, the holy ghost, the atoning lord, Here in the flesh, the never yet explored.
FLESH, I have knocked at many a dusty door, Gone down full many a windy midnight lane. Probed in old walls and felt along the floor, Pressed in blind hope the lighted window-pane. But useless all, though sometimes when the moon Was full in heaven and the sea was full, Along my body's alleys came a tune Played in the tavern by the Beautiful. Then for an instant I have felt at point To find and seize her, whosoe'er she be, Whether some saint whose glory does anoint Those whom she loves, or but a part of me, Or something that the things not understood Make for their uses out of flesh and blood.
BUT all has passed, the tune has died away, The glamour gone, the glory; is it chance? Is the unfeeling mud stabbed by a ray Cast by an unseen splendor's great advance? Or does the glory gather crumb by crumb Unseen, within, as coral islands rise, Till suddenly the apparitions come Above the surface, looking at the skies? Or does sweet Beauty dwell in lovely things Scattering the holy hintings of her name In women, in dear friends, in flowers, in springs, In the brook's voice, for us to catch the same? Or is it we who are Beauty, we who ask? We by whose gleams the world fulfils its task.
THESE myriad days, these many thousand hours, A man's long life, so choked with dusty things, How little perfect poise with perfect powers Joy at the heart and Beauty at the springs. One hour, or two, or three, in long years scattered, Sparks from a smithy that have fired a thatch, Are all that life has given and all that mattered, The rest, all heaving at a moveless latch. For these, so many years of useless toil, Despair, endeavor, and again despair, Sweat, that the base machine may have its oil, Idle delight to tempt one everywhere. A life upon the cross. To make amends Three flaming memories that the deathbed ends.
THERE, on the darkened deathbed, dies the brain That flared three several times in seventy years, It cannot lift the silly hand again, Nor speak, nor sing, it neither sees nor hears. And muffled mourners put it in the ground And then go home, and in the earth it lies, Too dark for vision and too deep for sound, The million cells that made a good man wise. Yet for a few short years an influence stirs A sense or wraith or essence of him dead, Which makes insensate things its ministers To those beloved, his spirit's daily bread, Then that, too, fades; in book or deed a spark Lingers, then that, too, fades; then all is dark.
SO in the empty sky the stars appear, Are bright in heaven marching through the sky, Spinning their planets, each one to his year, Tossing their fiery hair until they die; Then in the tower afar the watcher sees The sun, that burned, less noble than it was, Less noble still, until by dim degrees No spark of him is specklike in his glass. Then blind and dark in heaven the sun proceeds, Vast, dead and hideous, knocking on his moons, Till crashing on his like creation breeds, Striking such life, a constellation swoons. From dead things striking fire a new sun springs, New fire, new life, new planets with new wings.
IT may be so with us, that in the dark When we have done with Time and wander Space, Some meeting of the blind may strike a spark, And to Death's empty mansion give a grace. It may be, that the loosened soul may find Some new delight of living without limbs, Bodiless joy of flesh-untrammelled mind, Peace like a sky where starlike spirit swims. It may be, that the million cells of sense, Loosed from their seventy years' adhesion, pass Each to some joy of changed experience, Weight in the earth or glory in the grass, It may be that we cease; we cannot tell. Even if we cease life is a miracle.
MAN has his unseen friend, his unseen twin, His straitened spirit's possibility, The palace unexplored he thinks an inn, The glorious garden which he wanders by. It is beside us while we clutch at clay To daub ourselves that we may never see. Like the lame donkey lured by moving hay, We chase the shade but let the real be. Yet, when confusion in our heaven brings stress, We, thrust on that unseen, get stature from it, Cast to the devil's challenge the man's yes, And stream our fiery hour like a comet, And know for that fierce hour a friend behind, With sword and shield, the second to the mind.
WHAT am I, Life? A thing of watery salt Held in cohesion by unresting cells, Which work they know not why, which never halt, Myself unwitting where their Master dwells. I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin; A world which uses me as I use them, Nor do I know which end or which begin, Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn. So, like a marvel in a marvel set, I answer to the vast, as wave by wave The sea of air goes over, dry or wet, Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave, Or the great sun comes north, this myriad I Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.
IF I could get within this changing I, This ever altering thing which yet persists, Keeping the features it is reckoned by, While each component atom breaks or twists, If, wandering past strange groups of shifting forms, Cells at their hidden marvels hard at work, Pale from much toil, or red from sudden storms, I might attain to where the Rulers lurk. If, pressing past the guards in those grey gates The brain's most folded intertwisted shell, I might attain to that which alters fates, The King, the supreme self, the Master Cell, Then, on Man's earthly peak, I might behold The unearthly self beyond, unguessed, untold.
WHAT is this atom which contains the whole, This miracle which needs adjuncts so strange, This, which imagined God and is the soul, The steady star persisting amid change? What waste, that smallness of such power should need Such clumsy tools so easy to destroy, Such wasteful servants difficult to feed, Such indirect dark avenues to joy. Why, if its business is not mainly earth, Should it demand such heavy chains to sense? A heavenly thing demands a swifter birth, A quicker hand to act intelligence. An earthly thing were better like the rose At peace with clay from which its beauty grows.
AH, we are neither heaven nor earth, but men; Something that uses and despises both, That takes its earth's contentment in the pen, Then sees the world's injustice and is wroth, And flinging off youth's happy promise, flies Up to some breach, despising earthly things, And, in contempt of hell and heaven, dies, Rather than bear some yoke of priests or kings. Our joys are not of heaven nor earth, but man's, A woman's beauty or a child's delight, The trembling blood when the discoverer scans The sought-for world, the guessed-at satellite; The ringing scene, the stone at point to blush For unborn men to look at and say 'Hush.'
ROSES are beauty, but I never see Those blood drops from the burning heart of June Glowing like thought upon the living tree, Without a pity that they die so soon; Die into petals, like those roses old Those women, who were summer in men's hearts Before the smile upon the Sphinx was cold, Or sand had hid the Syrian and his arts. O myriad dust of beauty that lies thick Under our feet that not a single grain But stirred and moved in beauty and was quick For one brief moon and died nor lived again; But when the moon rose lay upon the grass Pasture to living beauty, life that was.
OVER the church's door they moved a stone And there, unguessed, forgotten, mortared up, Lay the priest's cell where he had lived alone, There was his ashy hearth, his drinking cup. There was the window whence he saw the host, The God whose beauty quickened bread and wine, The skeleton of a religion lost, The ghostless bones of what had been divine. O many a time the dusty masons come, Knocking their trowels in the stony brain, To cells where perished priests had once a home, And where devout brows pressed the window pane, Watching the thing made God, the god whose bones Bind underground our soul's foundation stones.
I never see the red rose crown the year, Nor feel the young grass underneath my tread, Without the thought "This living beauty here Is earth's remembrance of a beauty dead. Surely where all this glory is displayed Love has been quick, like fire, to high ends; Here, in this grass, an altar has been made For some white joy, some sacrifice of friends; Here, where I stand, some leap of human brains Has touched immortal things and left its trace, The earth is happy here, the gleam remains; Beauty is here, the spirit of the place; I touch the faith which nothing can destroy The earth the living church of ancient joy."
OUT of the clouds come torrents, from the earth Fire and quakings, from the shrieking air Tempests that harry half the planet's girth. Death's unseen seeds are scattered everywhere. Yet in his iron cage the mind of man Measures and braves the terrors of all these The blindest fury and the subtlest plan He turns, or tames, or shows in their degrees. Yet in himself are forces of like power, Untamed, unreckoned; seeds that brain to brain Pass across oceans bringing thought to flower, New worlds, new selves, where he can live again; Eternal beauty's everlasting rose Which casts this world as shadow as it goes.
O little self, within whose smallness lies All that man was, and is, and will become, Atom unseen that comprehends the skies And tells the tracks by which the planets roam; That, without moving, knows the joys of wings, The tiger's strength, the eagle's secrecy, And in the hovel can consort with kings, Or clothe a god with his own mystery. O with what darkness do we cloak thy light, What dusty folly gather thee for food, Thou who alone art knowledge and delight, The heavenly bread, the beautiful, the good. O living self, O god, O morning star, Give us thy light, forgive us what we are.
I went into the fields, but you were there Waiting for me, so all the summer flowers Were only glimpses of your starry powers, Beautiful and inspired dust they were. I went down by the waters, and a bird Sang with your voice in all the unknown tones Of all that self of you I have not heard So that my being felt you to the bones. I went into my house, and shut the door To be alone, but you were there with me; All beauty in a little room may be Though the roof lean and muddy be the floor. Then in my bed I bound my tired eyes To make a darkness for my weary brain, But like a presence you were there again, Being and real, beautiful and wise; So that I could not sleep and cried aloud "You strange grave thing, what is it you would say?" The redness of your dear lips dimmed to gray. The waters ebbed, the moon hid in a cloud.
THERE are two forms of life, of which one moves Seeking its meat in many forms of Death, On scales, on wings, on all the myriad hooves Which stamp earth's exultation in quick breath. It rustles through the reeds in shivering fowl, Cries over moors in curlew, glitters green In the lynx' eye, is fearful in the howl Of winter-bitten wolves whose flanks are lean. It takes dumb joy in cattle, it is fierce, It torts the tiger's loin, the eagle's wings, Its tools are claws to smite and teeth to pierce, Arms to destroy, and coils, and poison stings; Wherever earth is quick and life runs red Its mark is death, its meat is something dead.
RESTLESS and hungry, still it moves and slays Feeding its beauty on dead beauty's bones, Most merciless in all its million ways Its breath for singing bought by dying groans, Roving so far with such a zest to kill (Its strongness adding hunger) that at last Its cells attain beyond the cruel skill To where life's earliest impulses are past. Then this creation of the linkéd lusts, To move and eat, still under their control, Hunts for his prey in thought, his thinking thrusts Through the untrodden jungle of the soul, Through slip and quag, morasses dripping green, Seeking the thing supposed but never seen.
HOW many ways, how many different times, The tiger Mind has clutched at what it sought, Only to prove supposéd virtues crimes, The imagined godhead but a form of thought. How many restless brains have wrought and schemed, Padding their cage, or built, or brought to law, Made in outlasting brass the something dreamed, Only to prove themselves the things of awe; Yet, in the happy moment's lightning blink Comes scent, or track, or trace, the game goes by, Some leopard thought is pawing at the brink, Chaos below, and, up above, the sky. Then the keen nostrils scent, about, about, To prove the Thing Within a Thing Without.
THE other form of Living does not stir; Where the seed chances there it roots and grows, To suck what makes the lily or the fir Out of the earth and from the air that blows. Great power of Will that little thing the seed Has, all alone in earth, to plan the tree, And, though the mud oppresses, to succeed And put out branches where the birds may be. Then the wind blows it, but the bending boughs Exult like billows, and their million green Drink the all-living sunlight in carouse, Like dainty harts where forest wells are clean. While it, the central plant, which looks o'er miles. Draws milk from the earth's breast, and sways, and smiles.
IS there a great green commonwealth of Thought Which ranks the yearly pageant, and decides How Summer's royal progress shall be wrought, By secret stir which in each plant abides? Does rocking daffodil consent that she, The snowdrop of wet winters, shall be first? Does spotted cowslip with the grass agree To hold her pride before the rattle burst? And in the hedge what quick agreement goes, When hawthorn blossoms redden to decay, That Summer's pride shall come, the Summer's rose, Before the flower be on the bramble spray? Or is it, as with us, unresting strife, And each consent a lucky gasp for life?
BEAUTY, let be; I cannot see your face, I shall not know you now, nor touch your feet, Only within me tremble to your grace Tasting this crumb vouchsafed which is so sweet. Even when the full-leaved Summer bore no fruit, You give me this, this apple of man's tree; This planet sings when other spheres were mute, This light begins when darkness covered me. Now, though I know that I shall never know All, through my fault, nor blazon with my pen That path prepared where only I could go, Still, I have this, not given to other men. Beauty, this grace, this spring, this given bread, This life, this dawn, this wakening from the dead.
HERE, where we stood together, we three men, Before the war had swept us to the East, Three thousand miles away, I stand agen, And hear the bells, and breathe, and go to feast. We trod the same path, to the self-same place, Yet here I stand, having beheld their graves, Skyros whose shadows the great seas erase, And Seddul Bahr that ever more blood craves. So, since we communed here, our bones have been Nearer, perhaps, than they again will be, Earth and the world-wide battle lie between, Death lies between, and friend-destroying sea. Yet here, a year ago, we talked and stood As I stand now, with pulses beating blood.
I saw her like a shadow on the sky In the last light, a blur upon the sea, Then the gale's darkness put the shadow by But from one grave that island talked to me; And, in the midnight, in the breaking storm, I saw its blackness and a blinking light, And thought, "So death obscures your gentle form, So memory strives to make the darkness bright; And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies, Part of the island till the planet ends, My gentle comrade, beautiful and wise, Part of this crag this bitter surge offends, While I, who pass, a little obscure thing, War with this force, and breathe, and am its king."
NOT that the stars are all gone mad in heaven Plucking the unseen reins upon men's souls, Not that the law that bound the planets seven Is discord now; man probes for new controls; He bends no longer to the circling stars; New moon and full moon and the living sun, Love-making Venus, Jove and bloody Mars Pass from their thrones, their rule of him is done. And paler gods, made liker men, are past Like their sick eras to their funeral urns, They cannot stand the fire blown by the blast In which man's soul that measures heaven burns Man in his cage of many millioned pain Burns all to ash to prove if God remain.
THERE is no God, as I was taught in youth, Though each, according to his stature, builds Some covered shrine for what he thinks the truth Which day by day his reddest heart-blood gilds. There is no God; but death, the clasping sea, In which we move like fish, deep over deep, Made of men's souls that bodies have set free Floods to a Justice though it seems asleep. There is no God, but still, behind the veil The hurt thing works, out of its agony. Still like a touching of a brimming Grail Return the pennies given to passers by. There is no god, but we, who breathe the air, Are god ourselves and touch god everywhere.
BEAUTY retires; the blood out of the earth Shrinks, the stalk dries, lifeless November still Drops the brown husk of April's greenest birth. Through the thinned beech clump I can see the hill. So withers man, and though his life renews In Aprils of the soul, an autumn comes Which gives an end, not respite, to the thews That bore his soul through the world's martyrdoms. Then all the beauty will be out of mind, Part of man's store, that lies outside his brain, Touch to the dead and vision to the blind, Drink in the desert, bread, eternal grain, Part of the untilled field that beauty sows With flowers untold, where quickened spirit goes.
WHEREVER beauty has been quick in clay Some effluence of it lives, a spirit dwells, Beauty that death can never take away Mixed with the air that shakes the flower bells; So that by waters where the apples fall, Or in lone glens, or valleys full of flowers; Or in the streets where bloody tidings call, The haunting waits the mood that makes it ours. Then at a turn, a word, an act, a thought, Such difference comes, the spirit apprehends That place's glory, for where beauty fought Under the veil the glory never ends, But the still grass, the leaves, the trembling flower Keep, through dead time, that everlasting hour.
YOU are more beautiful than women are, Wiser than men, stronger than ribbéd death, Juster than Time, more constant than the star, Dearer than love, more intimate than breath, Having all art, all science, all control Over the still unsmithied, even as Time Cradles the generations of man's soul, You are the light to guide, the way to climb. So, having followed beauty, having bowed To wisdom and to death, to law, to power, I like a blind man stumble from the crowd Into the darkness of a deeper hour, Where in the lonely silence I may wait The prayed-for gleam—your hand upon the gate.
OUT of the barracks to the castle yard Those Roman soldiers came, buckling their gear, The word was passed that they were prison guard, The sergeant proved their dressing with his spear. Then, as the prisoner came, a wretch who bled Holding a cross, those nearest cursed his soul: He might have died some other time, they said, Not at high noon: the sergeant called the roll. Then, sloping spears, the files passed from the court Into the alleys, thrusting back the crowd, They cursed the bleeding man for stepping short, The drums beat time: the sergeant hummed aloud The rabble closed behind: the soldiers cursed The prisoner's soul, the flies, their packs, their thirst.
NOT for the anguish suffered is the slur, Not for the woman's taunts, the mocks of men, No, but because you never welcomed her, Her of whose beauty I am only the pen.
There was a dog, dog-minded, with dog's eyes, Damned by a dog's brute-nature to be true, Something within her made his spirit wise, He licked her hand, he knew her, not so you.
When all adulterate beauty has gone by, When all inanimate matter has gone down, We will arise and walk, that dog and I, The only two who knew her in the town,
We'll range the pleasant mountains side by side, Seeking the blood-stained flowers where Christs have died.
BEAUTY was with me once, but now, grown old, I cannot hear nor see her: thus a king In the high turret kept him from the cold, Over the fire, with his magic ring Which, as he wrought, made pictures come and go Of men and times, past, present and to be, Now like a smoke, now flame-like, now a glow, Now dead, now bright, but always fantasy. While, on the stair without, a faithful slave Stabbed to the death, crawled bleeding, whispering "Sir, They come to kill you, fly: I come to save. O you great gods, have pity, let him hear." Then, with his last strength tapped and muttered, "Sire." While the king smiled and drowsed above the fire.
SO beauty comes, so with a failing hand She knocks and cries, and fails to make me hear, She who tells futures in the falling sand And still, by signs, makes hidden meanings clear; She, who behind this many peopled smoke, Moves in the light and struggles to direct, Through the deaf ear and by the baffled stroke, The wicked man, the honored architect. Yet at a dawn before the birds begin, In dreams, as the horse stamps and the hound stirs, Sleep slips the bolt and beauty enters in, Crying aloud those hurried words of hers, And I awake and, in the birded dawn, Know her for Queen and own myself a pawn.
IF Beauty be at all, if, beyond sense, There be a wisdom piercing into brains, Why should the glory wait on impotence, Biding its time till blood is in the veins? There is no beauty, but, when thought is quick, Out of the noisy sickroom of ourselves Some flattery comes to try to cheat the sick, Some drowsy drug is groped for on the shelves. And, for the rest, we play upon a scene Beautiful with the blood of living things, We move and speak and wonder and have been, Upon the dust as dust, not queens and kings; We know no beauty, nor does beauty care For us, this dust, that men make everywhere.
EACH greedy self, by consecrating lust, Desire pricking into sacrifice, Adds, in his way, some glory to the dust, Brings, to the light, some haze of Paradise, Hungers and thirsts for beauty, like the hound Snaps it, to eat alone, in secret keeps His miser's patch of consecrated ground, Where beauty's coins are dug down to the deeps. So when disturbing death digs up our lives, Some little gleam among the broken soil May witness for us as the shovel rives The dirty heap of all our tiny toil; Some gleam of you may make the digger hold Touched for an instant with the thought of gold.
TIME being an instant in eternity, Beauty above man's million years must see The heaped corrupted mass that had to die, The husk of man that set the glitter free; Now from those million bodies in the dark, Forgotten, rotten, part of fields or roads, The million gleam united makes a spark Which Beauty sees among her star abodes. And, from the bodies, comes a sigh, "Alas, We hated, fought and killed, as separate men, Now all is merged and we are in the grass, Our efforts merged, would we had known it then. All our lives battle, all our spirits dream, Nought in themselves, a clash which made a gleam."
YOU will remember me in days to come With love, or pride, or pity, or contempt, So will my friends (not many friends, yet some) When this my life will be a dream out-dreamt; And one, remembering friendship by the fire, And one, remembering love time in the dark, And one, remembering unfulfilled desire, Will sigh, perhaps, yet be beside the mark; For this my body with its wandering ghost Is nothing solely but an empty grange, Dark in a night that owls inhabit most, Yet when the king rides by there comes a change; The windows gleam, the cresset's fiery hair Blasts the blown branch and beauty lodges there.
THEY took the bloody body from the cross They laid it in its niche and rolled the stone. One said, "Our blessed Master," one "His loss Ends us companions, we are left alone." And one, "I thought that Pilate would acquit Right to the last;" and one, "The sergeant took The trenching mall and drove the nails with it." One who was weeping went apart and shook. Then one, "He promised that in three short days He would return, oh God; but He is dead." And one, "What was it that He meant to raise? The Temple? No? What was it that He said? He said that He would build? That He would rise?" "No," answered one, "but come from Paradise.
"COME to us fiery with the saints of God To judge the world and take His power and reign." Then one. "This was the very road we trod That April day, would it could come again; The day they flung the flowers." "Let be," said one, "He was a lovely soul, but what He meant Passes our wit, for none among us, none Had brains enough to fathom His intent. His mother did not, nor could one of us, But while He spoke I felt I understood." And one, "He knew that it would finish thus. Let His thought be, I know that He was good. There is the orchard, see, the very same Where we were sleeping when the soldiers came."
SO from the cruel cross they buried God; So, in their desolation, as they went They dug him deeper with each step they trod, Their lightless minds distorting what He meant. Lamenting Him, their leader, who had died, They heaped the stones, they rolled the heavy door; They said, "Our glory has been crucified, Unless He rise our glory will be o'er." While in the grave the spirit left the corpse Broken by torture, slowly, line by line, And saw the dawn come on the eastern thorpes, And shook his wings and sang in the divine, Crying "I told the truth, even unto death, Though I was earth and now am only breath."
IF all be governed by the moving stars, If passing planets bring events to be, Searing the face of Time with bloody scars, Drawing men's souls even as the moon the sea, If as they pass they make a current pass Across man's life and heap it to a tide, We are but pawns, ignobler than the grass Cropped by the beast and crunched and tossed aside. Is all this beauty that does inhabit heaven Trail of a planet's fire? Is all this lust A chymic means by warring stars contriven To bring the violets out of Cæsar's dust? Better be grass, or in some hedge unknown The spilling rose whose beauty is its own.
IN emptiest furthest heaven where no stars are Perhaps some planet of our master sun Still rolls an unguessed orbit round its star, Unthought, unseen, unknown of any one. Roving dead space according to its law, Casting our light on burnt-out suns and blind, Singing in the frozen void its word of awe, One wandering thought in all that idiot mind. And, in some span of many a thousand year, Passing through heaven, its influence may arouse Beauty unguessed in those who habit here, And men may rise with glory on their brows, And feel new life like fire, and see the old Fall from them dead, the bronze's broken mould.
PERHAPS in chasms of the wasted past, That planet wandered within hail of ours, And plucked men's souls to loveliness and cast The old, that was, away, like husks of flowers; And made them stand erect and bade them build Nobler than hovels plaited in the mire, Gave them an altar and a god to gild, Bridled the brooks for them and fettered fire; And, in another coming, forged the steel Which, on life's scarlet wax, forever set Longing for beauty bitten as a seal That blood not clogs nor centuries forget, That built Atlantis, and, in time will raise That grander thing whose image haunts our days.
FOR, like an outcast from the city, I Wander the desert strewn with traveller's bones, Having no comrade but the starry sky Where the tuned planets ride their floating thrones. I pass old ruins where the kings caroused In cups long shards from vines long since decayed, I tread the broken brick where queens were housed In beauty's time ere beauty was betrayed, And in the ceaseless pitting of the sand On monolith and pyle, I see the dawn Making those skeletons of beauty grand By fire that comes as darkness is withdrawn, And in that fire the art of men to come Shines with such glow I bless my martyrdom.
DEATH lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood, Shy-footed beauty dear, half -seen, half-understood, Glimpsed in the beech wood dim, and in the dropping fir, Shy like a fawn and sweet and beauty's minister.
Glimpsed as in flying clouds by night the little moon, A wonder, a delight, a paleness passing soon.
Only a moment held, only an hour seen, Only an instant known in all that life has been, One instant in the sand to drink that gush of grace The beauty of your way, the marvel of your face.
Death lies in wait for you, but few short hours he gives, I perish even as you by whom all spirit lives, Come to me, spirit, come, and fill my hour of breath With hours of life in life that pay no toll to death.
WHAT are we given, what do we take away? Five little senses, startling with delight, That dull to death and perish into clay And pass from human memory as from sight. So the new penny glittering from the mint, Bears the king's head awhile, but Time effaces The head, the date, the seated queen, the print Even as a brook the stone in pebbly places. We bear the stamp, are current, and are prized, Hoarded or spent, the while the mintage passes, Then, like light money, challenged or despised, We join the heap of dross which Time amasses, Erased, uncurrent discs no more to range The clanging counters in the great exchange.
THEY called that broken hedge The Haunted Gate. Strange fires (they said) burnt there at moonless times. Evil was there, men never went there late, The darkness there was quick with threatened crimes. And then one digging in that bloodied clay Found, but a foot below, a rotted chest, Coins of the Romans, tray on rusted tray, Hurriedly heaped there by a digger prest. So that one knew how, centuries before, Some Roman flying from the sack by night, Digging in terror there to hide his store, Sweating his pick, by windy lantern light, Had stamped his anguish on that place's soul, So that it knew and could rehearse the whole.
THERE was an evil in the nodding wood Above the quarry long since overgrown, Something which stamped it as a place of blood Where tortured spirit cried from murdered bone. Then, after years, I saw a rusty knife Stuck in a woman's skull, just as 'twas found, Blackt with a centuried crust of clotted life, In the red clay of that unholy ground. So that I knew the unhappy thing had spoken, That tongueless thing for whom the quarry spoke, The evil seals of murder had been broken By the red earth, the grass, the rooted oak; The inarticulate dead had forced the spade, The hand, the mind, till murder was displayed.
GO, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will, In the grave's darkness let the stamp be lost. The water still will bubble from the hill, And April quicken the meadows with her ghost; Over the grass the daffodils will shiver, The primroses with their pale beauty abound, The blackbird be a lover and make quiver With his glad singing the great soul of the ground. So that if the body rot, it will not matter; Up in the earth the great game will go on, The coming of Spring and the running of the water, And the young things glad of the womb's darkness gone; And the joy we felt will be a part of the glory In the lover's kiss that makes the old couple's story.
NOT for your human beauty nor the power To shake me by your voice or by your touch, Summer must have its rose, the rose must flower, Beauty burn deep, I do not yield to such. No, but because your beauty where it falls Lays bare the spirits in the crowded streets, Shatters the lock, destroys the castle walls, Breaks down the bars till friend with comrade meets, So that I wander brains where beauty dwelled In long dead time, and see again the rose By long dead men for living beauty held, That death's knife spares, and winter with his snows, And know it bloodied by that pulse of birth Which greens the grass in Aprils upon earth.
THE little robin hopping in the wood Draws friendship from you, the rapt nightingale Making the night a marvellous solitude, Only of you to darkness tells the tale. Kingfishers are but jewels on your dress, Dun deer that rove and timid rabbits shy Are but the hintings of your gentleness. Upon your wings the eagle climbs the sky. Fish that are shadows in the water pass With mystery from you, the purpled moth Dust from your kirtle on his broidery has, Out of your bounty every beauty flowth. For you are all, all fire, all living form, Marvel in man and glory in the worm.
THOUGH in life's streets the tempting shops have lured, Because all beauty, howsoever base, Is vision of you, marred, I have endured Tempted or fall'n, to look upon your face. Now through the grinning death's head in the paint, Within the tavern-song, hid in the wine, In many kinded man, emperor and saint, I see you pass, you breath of the divine. I see you pass, as centuries ago The long dead men with passionate spirit saw, O brother man, whom spirit habits so, Through your red sorrows Beauty keeps her law, Beauty herself, who takes your dying hand, To leave through Time the Memnon in the sand.
WHEN all these million cells that are my slaves Fall from my pourried ribs and leave me lone, A living speck among a world of graves, What will it be, that spot in the unknown? A glow-worm in a night that floats the sun? Or deathless dust feeling the passer's foot? An eye undying mourning things undone? Or seed for quickening free from prisoning fruit? Or an eternal jewel on your robe, Caught to your heart, one with the April fire That made me yours as man upon the globe, One with the Spring, a breath in all desire, One with the primrose, present in all joy? Or pash that rots, which pismires can destroy?
LET that which is to come be as it may, Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense, The flies are happy in the summer day, Flies will be happy many summers hence. Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphynx, Time with her men to come whose wings will tower, Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks, But with blind force, to each his little hour. And when the hour has struck, comes death or change, Which, whether good or ill, we cannot tell, But the blind planet will wander through her range Bearing men like us who will serve as well. The sun will rise, the winds that ever move Will blow our dust, and boy and girl will love.
Printed in the United States of America.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1967, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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