The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dreams and Dust

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Title: Dreams and Dust

Author: Don Marquis

Release date: March 1, 1996 [eBook #458]

Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Judith Boss

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DREAMS AND DUST ***

Produced by Judith Boss

DREAMS & DUST

POEMS BY DON MARQUIS

TO MY MOTHER VIRGINIA WHITMORE MARQUIS

CONTENTS

PROEM

DAYLIGHT HUMORS

THIS IS ANOTHER DAY APRIL SONG THE EARTH, IT IS ALSO A STAR THE NAME THE BIRTH A MOOD OF PAVLOWA THE POOL "THEY HAD NO POET" NEW YORK A HYMN THE SINGER WORDS ARE NOT GUNS WITH THE SUBMARINES NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO DICKENS A POLITICIAN THE BAYONET THE BUTCHERS AT PRAYER

SHADOWS

HAUNTED A NIGHTMARE THE MOTHER IN THE BAYOU THE SAILOR'S WIFE SPEAKS HUNTED A DREAM CHILD ACROSS THE NIGHT SEA CHANGES THE TAVERN OF DESPAIR

COLORS AND SURFACES

A GOLDEN LAD THE SAGE AND THE WOMAN NEWS FROM BABYLON A RHYME OF THE ROADS THE LAND OF YESTERDAY OCTOBER CHANT OF THE CHANGING HOURS

DREAMS AND DUST

SELVES THE WAGES IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR? THE GOD-MAKER, MAN UNREST THE PILTDOWN SKULL THE SEEKER THE AWAKENING A SONG OF MEN THE NOBLER LESSON AT LAST

LYRICS

"KING PANDION, HE IS DEAD" DAVID TO BATHSHEBA THE JESTERS "MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY" THE TRIOLET FROM THE BRIDGE "PALADINS, PALADINS, YOUTH NOBLE-HEARTED" "MY LANDS, NOT THINE" TO A DANCING DOLL LOWER NEW YORK—A STORM AT SUNSET A CHRISTMAS GIFT SILVIA THE EXPLORERS EARLY AUTUMN "TIME STEALS FROM LOVE" THE RONDEAU VISITORS THE PARTING AN OPEN FIRE

REALITIES

REALITIES THE STRUGGLE THE REBEL THE CHILD AND THE MILL "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI" THE COMRADE ENVOI

PROEM

"SO LET THEM PASS, THESE SONGS OF MINE"

So let them pass, these songs of mine,

Into oblivion, nor repine;

Abandoned ruins of large schemes,

Dimmed lights adrift from nobler dreams,

Weak wings I sped on quests divine,

So let them pass, these songs of mine.

They soar, or sink ephemeral—

I care not greatly which befall!

For if no song I e'er had wrought,

Still have I loved and laughed and fought;

So let them pass, these songs of mine;

I sting too hot with life to whine!

Still shall I struggle, fail, aspire,

Lose God, and find Gods in the mire,

And drink dream-deep life's heady wine—

So let them pass, these songs of mine.

DAYLIGHT HUMORS

THIS IS ANOTHER DAY

I AM mine own priest, and I shrive myself

Of all my wasted yesterdays. Though sin

And sloth and foolishness, and all ill weeds

Of error, evil, and neglect grow rank

And ugly there, I dare forgive myself

That error, sin, and sloth and foolishness.

God knows that yesterday I played the fool;

God knows that yesterday I played the knave;

But shall I therefore cloud this new dawn o'er

With fog of futile sighs and vain regrets?

This is another day! And flushed Hope walks

Adown the sunward slopes with golden shoon.

This is another day; and its young strength

Is laid upon the quivering hills until,

Like Egypt's Memnon, they grow quick with song.

This is another day, and the bold world

Leaps up and grasps its light, and laughs, as leapt

Prometheus up and wrenched the fire from Zeus.

This is another day—are its eyes blurred

With maudlin grief for any wasted past?

A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt!

Let dust clasp dust; death, death—I am alive!

And out of all the dust and death of mine

Old selves I dare to lift a singing heart

And living faith; my spirit dares drink deep

Of the red mirth mantling in the cup of morn.

APRIL SONG

FLEET across the grasses

Flash the feet of Spring,

Piping, as he passes

Fleet across the grasses,

"Follow, lads and lasses!

Sing, world, sing!"

Fleet across the grasses

Flash the feet of Spring!

Idle winds deliver

Rumors through the town,

Tales of reeds that quiver,

Idle winds deliver,

Where the rapid river

Drags the willows down—

Idle winds deliver

Rumors through the town.

In the country places

By the silver brooks

April airs her graces;

In the country places

Wayward April paces,

Laughter in her looks;

In the country places

By the silver brooks.

Hints of alien glamor

Even reach the town;

Urban muses stammer

Hints of alien glamor,

But the city's clamor

Beats the voices down;

Hints of alien glamor

Even reach the town.

THIS EARTH, IT IS ALSO A STAR

WHERE the singers of Saturn find tongue,

Where the Galaxy's lovers embrace,

Our world and its beauty are sung!

They lean from their casements to trace

If our planet still spins in its place;

Faith fables the thing that we are,

And Fantasy laughs and gives chase:

This earth, it is also a star!

Round the sun, that is fixed, and hung

For a lamp in the darkness of space

We are whirled, we are swirled, we are flung;

Singing and shining we race

And our light on the uplifted face

Of dreamer or prophet afar

May fall as a symbol of grace:

This earth, it is also a star!

Looking out where our planet is swung

Doubt loses his writhen grimace,

Dry hearts drink the gleams and are young;—

Where agony's boughs interlace

His Garden some Jesus may pace,

Lifting, the wan avatar,

His soul to this light as a vase!

This earth, it is also a star!

Great spirits in sorrowful case

Yearn to us through the vapors that bar:

Canst think of that, soul, and be base?—

This earth, it is also a star!

THE NAME

IT shifts and shifts from form to form,

It drifts and darkles, gleams and glows;

It is the passion of the storm,

The poignance of the rose;

Through changing shapes, through devious

ways,

By noon or night, through cloud or flame,

My heart has followed all my days

Something I cannot name.

In sunlight on some woman's hair,

Or starlight in some woman's eyne,

Or in low laughter smothered where

Her red lips wedded mine,

My heart hath known, and thrilled to know,

This unnamed presence that it sought;

And when my heart hath found it so,

"Love is the name," I thought.

Sometimes when sudden afterglows

In futile glory storm the skies

Within their transient gold and rose

The secret stirs and dies;

Or when the trampling morn walks o'er

The troubled seas, with feet of flame,

My awed heart whispers, "Ask no more,

For Beauty is the name!"

Or dreaming in old chapels where

The dim aisles pulse with murmurings

That part are music, part are prayer—

(Or rush of hidden wings)

Sometimes I lift a startled head

To some saint's carven countenance,

Half fancying that the lips have said,

All names mean God, perchance!"

THE BIRTH

THERE is a legend that the love of God

So quickened under Mary's heart it wrought

Her very maidenhood to holier stuff….

However that may be, the birth befell

Upon a night when all the Syrian stars

Swayed tremulous before one lordlier orb

That rose in gradual splendor,

Paused,

Flooding the firmament with mystic light,

And dropped upon the breathing hills

A sudden music

Like a distillation from its gleams;

A rain of spirit and a dew of song!

A MOOD OF PAVLOWA

THE soul of the Spring through its body of earth

Bursts in a bloom of fire,

And the crocuses come in a rainbow riot of mirth….

They flutter, they burn, they take wing, they

aspire….

Wings, motion and music and flame,

Flower, woman and laughter, and all these the

same!

She is light and first love and the youth of the

world,

She is sandaled with joy … she is lifted and

whirled,

She is flung, she is swirled, she is driven along

By the carnival winds that have torn her away

From the coronal bloom on the brow of the

May….

She is youth, she is foam, she is flame, she is

visible Song!

THE POOL

REACH over, my Undine, and clutch me a reed—

Nymph of mine idleness, notch me a pipe—

For I am fulfilled of the silence, and long

For to utter the sense of the silence in song.

Down-stream all the rapids are troubled with pebbles

That fetter and fret what the water would utter,

And it rushes and splashes in tremulous trebles;

It makes haste through the shallows, its soul is

aflutter;

But here all the sound is serene and outspread

In the murmurous moods of a slow-swirling pool;

Here all the sounds are unhurried and cool;

Every silence is kith to a sound; they are wed,

They are mated, are mingled, are tangled, are

bound;

Every hush is in love with a sound, every sound

By the law of its life to some silence is bound.

Then here will we hide; idle here and abide,

In the covert here, close by the waterside—

Here, where the slim flattered reeds are aquiver

With the exquisite hints of the reticent river,

Here, where the lips of this pool are the lips

Of all pools, let us listen and question and wait;

Let us hark to the whispers of love and of death,

Let us hark to the lispings of life and of fate—

In this place where pale silences flower into sound

Let us strive for some secret of all the profound

Deep and calm Silence that meshes men 'round!

There's as much of God hinted in one ripple's

plashes—

There's as much of Truth glints in yon

dragon-fly's flight—

There's as much Purpose gleams where yonder

trout flashes

As in—any book else!—could we read things

aright.

Then nymph of mine indolence, here let us hide,

Learn, listen, and question; idle here and abide

Where the rushes and lilies lean low to the tide.

"THEY HAD NO POET …"

"Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!

They had no poet and they died."—POPE.

By Tigris, or the streams of Ind,

Ere Colchis rose, or Babylon,

Forgotten empires dreamed and sinned,

Setting tall towns against the dawn,

Which, when the proud Sun smote upon,

Flashed fire for fire and pride for pride;

Their names were … Ask oblivion! …

"They had no poet, and they died."

Queens, dusk of hair and tawny-skinned,

That loll where fellow leopards fawn …

Their hearts are dust before the wind,

Their loves, that shook the world, are wan!

Passion is mighty … but, anon,

Strong Death has Romance for his bride;

Their legends … Ask oblivion! …

"They had no poet, and they died."

Heroes, the braggart trumps that dinned

Their futile triumphs, monarch, pawn,

Wild tribesmen, kingdoms disciplined,

Passed like a whirlwind and were gone;

They built with bronze and gold and brawn,

The inner Vision still denied;

Their conquests … Ask oblivion! …

"They had no poet, and they died."

Dumb oracles, and priests withdrawn,

Was it but flesh they deified?

Their gods were … Ask oblivion! …

"They had no poet, and they died."

NEW YORK

SHE is hot to the sea that crouches beside,

Human and hot to the cool stars peering down,

My passionate city, my quivering town,

And her dark blood, tide upon purple tide,

With throbs as of thunder beats,

With leaping rhythms and vast, is swirled

Through the shaken lengths of her veined streets…

She pulses, the heart of a world!

I have thrilled with her ecstasy, agony, woe—

Hath she a mood that I do not know?

The winds of her music tumultuous have seized

me and swayed me,

Have lifted, have swung me around

In their whorls as of cyclonic sound;

Her passions have torn me and tossed me and

brayed me;

Drunken and tranced and dazzled with visions

and gleams,

I have spun with her dervish priests;

I have searched to the souls of her hunted beasts

And found love sleeping there;

I have soared on the wings of her flashing dreams;

I have sunk with her dull despair;

I have sweat with her travails and cursed with

her pains;

I have swelled with her foolish pride;

I have raged through a thick red mist at one

with her branded Cains,

With her broken Christs have died.

O beautiful half-god city of visions and love!

O hideous half-brute city of hate!

O wholly human and baffled and passionate town!

The throes of thy burgeoning, stress of thy fight,

Thy bitter, blind struggle to gain for thy body a

soul,

I have known, I have felt, and been shaken

thereby!

Wakened and shaken and broken,

For I hear in thy thunders terrific that throb

through thy rapid veins

The beat of the heart of a world.

A HYMN

(1914)

CLOTHED on with thunder and with steel

And black against the dawn

The whirling armies clash and reel….

A wind, and they are gone

Like mists withdrawn,

Like mists withdrawn!

Like clouds withdrawn, like driven sands,

Earth's body vanisheth:

One solid thing unconquered stands,

The ghost that humbles death.

All else is breath,

All else is breath!

Man rose from out the stinging slime,

Half brute, and sought a soul,

And up the starrier ways of time,

Half god, unto his goal,

He still must climb,

He still must climb!

What though worlds stagger, and the suns

Seem shaken in their place,

Trust thou the leaping love that runs

Creative over space:

Take heart of grace,

Take heart of grace!

What though great kingdoms fall on death

Before the stabbing blade,

Their brazen might was only breath,

Their substance but a shade—

Be not dismayed,

Be not dismayed!

Man's dream which conquered brute and clod

Shall fail not, but endure,

Shall rise, though beaten to the sod,

Shall hold its vantage sure—

As sure as God,

As sure as God!

THE SINGER

A LITTLE while, with love and youth,

He wandered, singing:—

He felt life's pulses hot and strong

Beat all his rapid veins along;

He wrought life's rhythms into song:

He laughed, he sang the Dawn!

So close, so close to life he dwelt

That at rare times and rapt he felt

The fleshly barriers yield and melt;

He trembled, looking on

Creation at her miracles;

His soul-sight pierced the earthly shells

And saw the spirit weave its spells,

The veil of clay withdrawn;—

A little while, with love and youth,

He wandered, singing!

A little while, with age and death,

He wanders, dreaming;—

No more the thunder and the urge

Of earth's full tides that storm the verge

Of heaven with their sweep and surge

Shall lift, shall bear him on;

Where is the golden hope that led

Him comrade with the mighty dead?

The love that aureoled his head?—

The glory is withdrawn!

How shall one soar with broken wings?

The leagued might of futile things

Wars with the heart that dares and sings;—

It is not always Dawn!

A little while, with age and death,

He wanders, dreaming.

WORDS ARE NOT GUNS

Put by the sword (a dreamer saith),

The years of peace draw nigh!

Already the millennial dawn

Makes red the eastern sky!

Be not deceived. It comes not yet!

The ancient passions keep

Alive beneath their changing masks.

They are not dead. They sleep.

Surely peace comes. As sure as Man

Rose from primeval slime.

That was not yesterday. There's still

A weary height to climb!

And we can dwell too long with dreams

And play too much with words,

Forgetting our inheritance

Was bought and held with swords.

But Truth (you say) makes tyrants quail—

Beats down embattled Wrong?

If truth be armed! Be not deceived.

The strife is to the strong.

Words are not guns. Words are not ships.

And ships and guns prevail.

Our liberties, that blood has gained,

Are guarded, or they fail.

Truth does not triumph without blows,

Error not tamely yields.

But falsehood closes with quick faith,

Fierce, on a thousand fields.

And surely, somewhat of that faith

Our fathers fought for clings!

Which called this freedom's hemisphere,

Despite Earth's leagued kings.

Great creeds grow thews, or else they die.

Thought clothed in deed is lord.

What are thy gods? Thy gods brought love?

They also brought a sword.

Unchallenged, shall we always stand,

Secure, apart, aloof?

Be not deceived. That hour shall come

Which puts us to the proof.

Then, that we hold the trust we have

Safeguarded for our sons,

Let us cease dreaming! Let us have

More ships, more troops, more guns!

WITH THE SUBMARINES

ABOVE, the baffled twilight fails; beneath, the

blind snakes creep;

Beside us glides the charnel shark, our pilot

through the deep;

And, lurking where low headlands shield from

cruising scout and spy,

We bide the signal through the gloom that bids

us slay or die.

All watchful, mute, the crouching guns that guard

the strait sea lanes—

Watchful and hawklike, plumed with hate, the

desperate aeroplanes—

And still as death and swift as fate, above the

darkling coasts,

The spying Wireless sows the night with troops

of stealthy ghosts,

While hushed through all her huddled streets the

tide-walled city waits

The drumming thunders that announce brute

battle at her gates.

Southward a hundred windy leagues, through

storms that blind and bar,

Our cheated cruisers search the waves, our captains

seek the war;

But here the port of peril is; the foeman's

dreadnoughts ride

Sullen and black against the moon, upon a sullen

tide.

And only we to launch ourselves against their

stark advance—

To guide uncertain lightnings through these

treacherous seas of chance!

. . . . . .

And now a wheeling searchlight paints a signal on

the night;

And now the bellowing guns are loud with the

wild lust of fight.

. . . . . .

And now, her flanks of steel apulse with all the

power of hell,

Forth from the darkness leaps in pride a hateful

miracle,

The flagship of their Admiral—and now God help

and save!—

We challenge Death at Death's own game; we

sink beneath the wave!

. . . . . .

Ah, steady now—and one good blow—one straight

stab through the gloom—

Ah, good!—the thrust went home!—she founders—

flounders to her doom!—

Full speed ahead!—those damned quick-firing guns

—but let them bark—

What's that—the dynamos?—they've got us, men!

—Christ! in the dark!

NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO

(1912)

HE speaks as straight as his rifles shot,

As straight as a thrusting blade,

Waiting the deed that shall trouble the truce

His savage guns have made.

"You have dared the wrath of a dozen states,"

Was the challenge that he heard;

"We can die but once!" said the grim old King

As he gripped his mountain sword.

"For I paid in blood for the town I took,

The blood of my brave men slain,—

And if you covet the town I took

You must buy it with blood again!"

Stern old King of the stark, black hills,

Where the lean, fierce eagles breed,

Your speech rings true as your good sword rings—

And you are a king indeed!

DICKENS

"The only book that the party had was a volume of Dickens. During the six months that they lay in the cave which they had hacked in the ice, waiting for spring to come, they read this volume through again and again."—From a newspaper report of an antarctic expedition.

HUDDLED within their savage lair

They hearkened to the prowling wind;

They heard the loud wings of despair …

And madness beat against the mind….

A sunless world stretched stark outside

As if it had cursed God and died;

Dumb plains lay prone beneath the weight

Of cold unutterably great;

Iron ice bound all the bitter seas,

The brutal hills were bleak as hate….

Here none but Death might walk at ease!

Then Dickens spoke, and, lo! the vast

Unpeopled void stirred into life;

The dead world quickened, the mad blast

Hushed for an hour its idiot strife

With nothingness….

And from the gloom,

Parting the flaps of frozen skin,

Old friends and dear came trooping in,

And light and laughter filled the room….

Voices and faces, shapes beloved,

Babbling lips and kindly eyes,

Not ghosts, but friends that lived and moved …

They brought the sun from other skies,

They wrought the magic that dispels

The bitterer part of loneliness …

And when they vanished each man dreamed

His dream there in the wilderness….

One heard the chime of Christmas bells,

And, staring down a country lane,

Saw bright against the window-pane

The firelight beckon warm and red….

And one turned from the waterside

Where Thames rolls down his slothful tide

To breast the human sea that beats

Through roaring London's battered streets

And revel in the moods of men….

And one saw all the April hills

Made glad with golden daffodils,

And found and kissed his love again….

. . . . . .

By all the troubled hearts he cheers

In homely ways or by lost trails,

By all light shed through all dark years

When hope grows sick and courage quails,

We hail him first among his peers;

Whether we sorrow, sing, or feast,

He, too, hath known and understood—

Master of many moods, high priest

Of mirth and lord of cleansing tears!

A POLITICIAN

LEADER no more, be judged of us!

Hailed Chief, and loved, of yore—

Youth, and the faith of youth, cry out:

Leader and Chief no more!

We dreamed a Prophet, flushed with faith,

Content to toil in pain

If that his sacrifice might be,

Somehow, his people's gain.

We saw a vision, and our blood

Beat red and hot and strong:

"Lead us (we cried) to war against

Some foul, embattled wrong!"

We dreamed a Warrior whose sword

Was edged for sham and shame;

We dreamed a Statesman far above

The vulgar lust for fame.

We were not cynics, and we dreamed

A Man who made no truce

With lies nor ancient privilege

Nor old, entrenched abuse.

We dreamed … we dreamed … Youth dreamed

a dream!

And even you forgot

Yourself, one moment, and dreamed, too—

Struck, while your mood was hot!

Struck three or four good blows … and then

Turned back to easier things:

The cheap applause, the blatant mob,

The praise of underlings!

Praise … praise … was ever man so filled,

So avid still, of praise?

So hungry for the crowd's acclaim,

The sycophantic phrase?

O you whom Greatness beckoned to …

O swollen Littleness

Who turned from Immortality

To fawn upon Success!

O blind with love of self, who led

Youth's vision to defeat,

Bawling and brawling for rewards,

Loud, in the common street!

O you who were so quick to judge—

Leader, and loved, of yore—

Hear now the judgment of our youth:

Leader and Chief no more!

THE BAYONET

(1914)

THE great guns slay from a league away, the death-bolts

fly unseen,

And bellowing hill replies to hill, machine to brute

machine,

But still in the end when the long lines bend and

the battle hangs in doubt

They take to the steel in the same old way that

their fathers fought it out—

It is man to man and breast to breast and eye

to bloodshot eye

And the reach and twist of the thrusting wrist, as

it was in the days gone by!

Along the shaken hills the guns their drumming

thunder roll—

But the keen blades thrill with the lust to kill

that leaps from the slayer's soul!

For hand and heart and living steel, one pulse of

hate they feel.

Is your clan afraid of the naked blade? Does it

flinch from the bitter steel?

Perish your dreams of conquest then, your swollen

hopes and bold,

For empire dwells with the stabbing blade, as it

did in the days of old!

THE BUTCHERS AT PRAYER

(1914)

EACH nation as it draws the sword

And flings its standard to the air

Petitions piously the Lord—

Vexing the void abyss with prayer.

O irony too deep for mirth!

O posturing apes that rant, and dare

This antic attitude! O Earth,

With your wild jest of wicked prayer!

I dare not laugh … a rising swell

Of laughter breaks in shrieks somewhere—

No doubt they relish it in Hell,

This cosmic jest of Earth at prayer!

SHADOWS

HAUNTED

(THE GHOST SPEAKS)

A GHOST is the freak of a sick man's brain?

Then why do ye start and shiver so?

That's the sob and drip of a leaky drain?

But it sounds like another noise we know!

The heavy drops drummed red and slow,

The drops ran down as slow as fate—

Do ye hear them still?—it was long ago!—

But here in the shadows I wait, I wait!

Spirits there be that pass in peace;

Mine passed in a whorl of wrath and dole;

And the hour that your choking breath shall cease

I will get my grip on your naked soul—

Nor pity may stay nor prayer cajole—

I would drag ye whining from Hell's own gate:

To me, to me, ye must pay the toll!

And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!

The dead they are dead, they are out of the way?

And a ghost is the whim of an ailing mind?

Then why did ye whiten with fear to-day

When ye heard a voice in the calling wind?

Why did ye falter and look behind

At the creeping mists when the hour grew late?

Ye would see my face were ye stricken blind!

And here in the shadows I wait, I wait!

Drink and forget, make merry and boast,

But the boast rings false and the jest is thin—

In the hour that I meet ye ghost to ghost,

Stripped of the flesh that ye skulk within,

Stripped to the coward soul 'ware of its sin,

Ye shall learn, ye shall learn, whether dead men

hate!

Ah, a weary time has the waiting been,

But here in the shadows I wait, I wait!

A NIGHTMARE

LEAGUES before me, leagues behind,

Clamor warring wastes of flood,

All the streams of all the worlds

Flung together, mad of mood;

Through the canon beats a sound,

Regular of interval,

Distant, drumming, muffled, dull,

Thunderously rhythmical;

Crafts slip by my startled soul—

Soul that cowers, a thing apart—

They are corpuscles of blood!

That's the throbbing of a heart!

God of terrors!—am I mad?—

Through my body, mine own soul,

Shrunken to an atom's size,

Voyages toward an unguessed goal!

THE MOTHER

THE mother by the gallows-tree,

The gallows-tree, the gallows-tree,

(While the twitching body mocked the sun)

Lifted to Heaven her broken heart

And called for sympathy.

Then Mother Mary bent to her,

Bent from her place by God's left side,

And whispered: "Peace—do I not know?—

My son was crucified!"

"O Mother Mary," answered she,

"You cannot, cannot enter in

To my soul's woe—you cannot know—

For your son wrought no sin!"

(And men whose work compelled them there,

Their hearts were stricken dead;

They heard the rope creak on the beam;

I thought I heard the frightened ghost

Whimpering overhead.)

The mother by the gallows-tree,

The gallows-tree, the gallows-tree,

Lifted to Christ her broken heart

And called in agony.

Then Lord Christ bent to her and said:

"Be comforted, be comforted;

I know your grief; the whole world's woe

I bore upon my head."

"But O Lord Christ, you cannot know,

No one can know," she said, "no one"—

(While the quivering corpse swayed in the wind)—

"Lord Christ, no one can understand

Who never had a son!"

IN THE BAYOU

LAZY and slow, through the snags and trees

Move the sluggish currents, half asleep;

Around and between the cypress knees,

Like black, slow snakes the dark tides creep—

How deep is the bayou beneath the trees?

"Knee-deep,

Knee-deep,

Knee-deep,

Knee-deep!"

Croaks the big bullfrog of Reelfoot Lake

From his hiding-place in the draggled brake.

What is the secret the slim reeds know

That makes them to shake and to shiver so,

And the scared flags quiver from plume to foot?—

The frogs pipe solemnly, deep and slow:

"Look under

the root!

Look under

the root!"

The hoarse frog croaks and the stark owl hoots

Of a mystery moored in the cypress roots.

Was it love turned hate? Was it friend turned foe?

Only the frogs and the gray owl know,

For the white moon shrouded her face in a mist

At the spurt of a pistol, red and bright—

At the sound of a shriek that stabbed the night—

And the little reeds were frightened and whist;

But always the eddies whimper and choke,

And the frogs would tell if they could, for they

croak:

"Deep, deep!

Death-deep!

Deep, deep!

Death-deep!"

And the dark tide slides and glisters and glides

Snakelike over the secret it hides.

THE SAILOR'S WIFE SPEAKS

YE are dead, they say, but ye swore, ye swore,

Ye would come to me back from the sea!

From out of the sea and the night, ye cried,

Nor the crawling weed nor the dragging tide

Could hold ye fast from me:—

Come, ah, come to me!

Three spells I have laid on the rising sun

And three on the waning moon—

Are ye held in the bonds of the night or the day

Ye must loosen your bonds and away, away!

Ye must come where I wait ye, soon—

Ah, soon! soon! soon!

Three times I have cast my words to the wind,

And thrice to the climbing sea;

If ye drift or dream with the clouds or foam

Ye must drift again home, ye must drift again

home—

Wraith, ye are free, ye are free;

Ghost, ye are free, ye are free!

Are the coasts of death so fair, so fair?

But I wait ye here on the shore!

It is I that ye hear in the calling wind—

I have stared through the dark till my soul is blind!

O lover of mine, ye swore,

Lover of mine, ye swore!

HUNTED

Oh, why do they hunt so hard, so hard, who have

no need of food?

Do they hunt for sport, do they hunt for hate, do

they hunt for the lust of blood?

. . . . . .

If I were a god I would get me a spear, I would

get me horse and dog,

And merrily, merrily I would ride through covert

and brake and bog,

With hound and horn and laughter loud, over the

hills and away—

For there is no sport like that of a god with a

man that stands at bay!

Ho! but the morning is fresh and fair, and oh!

but the sun is bright,

And yonder the quarry breaks from the brush and

heads for the hills in flight;

A minute's law for the harried thing—then follow

him, follow him fast,

With the bellow of dogs and the beat of hoofs

and the mellow bugle's blast.

. . . . . .

_Hillo! Halloo! they have marked a man! there is

sport in the world to-day—

And a clamor swells from the heart of the wood that

tells of a soul at bay!

A DREAM CHILD

WHERE tides of tossed wistaria bloom

Foam up in purple turbulence,

Where twining boughs have built a room

And wing'd winds pause to garner scents

And scattered sunlight flecks the gloom,

She broods in pensive indolence.

What is the thought that holds her thrall,

That dims her sight with unshed tears?

What songs of sorrow droop and fall

In broken music for her ears?

What voices thrill her and recall

The poignant joy of happier years?

She dreams 'tis not the winds which pass

That whisper through the shaken vine;

Whose footstep stirs the rustling grass

None else that listened might divine;

She sees her child that never was

Look up with longing in his eyne.

Unkissed, his lifted forehead gains

A grace not earthly, but more rare—

For since her heart but only feigns,

Wherefore should love not feign him fair?

Put blood of roses in his veins,

Weave yellow sunshines for his hair?

All ghosts of little children dead

That wander wistful, uncaressed,

Their seeking lips by love unfed,

She fain would cradle on her breast

For his sweet sake whose lonely head

Has never known that tender rest.

And thus she sits, and thus she broods,

Where drifted blossoms freak the grass;

The winds that move across her moods

Pulse with low whispers as they pass,

And in their eerier interludes

She hears a voice that never was.

ACROSS THE NIGHT

MUCH listening through the silences,

Much staring through the night,

And lo! the dumb blind distances

Are bridged with speech and sight!

Magician Thought, informed of Love,

Hath fixed her on the air—

Oh, Love and I laughed down the fates

And clasped her, here as there!

Across the eerie silences

She came in headlong flight,

She stormed the serried distances,

She trampled space and night!

Oh, foolish scientists might give

This miracle a name—

But Love and I care but to know

That when we called she came.

And since I find the distances

Subservient to my thought,

And of the sentient silences

More vital speech have wrought,

Then she and I will mock Death's self,

For all his vaunted might—

There are no gulfs we dare not leap,

As she leapt through the night!

SEA CHANGES

I

MORNING

WE stood among the boats and nets;

We saw the swift clouds fall,

We watched the schooners scamper in

Before the sudden squall;—

The jolly squall strove lustily

To whelm the sheltered street—

The merry squall that piled the seas

About the patient headland's knees

And chased the fishing fleet.

She laughed; as if with wings her mirth

Arose and left the wingless earth

And all tame things behind;

Rose like a bird, wild with delight

Whose briny pinions flash in flight

Through storm and sun and wind.

Her laughter sought those skies because

Their mood and hers were one,

For she and I were drunk with love

And life and storm and sun!

And while she laughed, the Sun himself

Leapt laughing through the rain

And struck his harper hand along

The ringing coast; and that wind-song

Whose joy is mixed with pain

Forgot the undertone of grief

And joined the jocund strain,

And over every hidden reef

Whereon the waves broke merrily

Rose jets and sprays of melody

And leapt and laughed again.

II

MOONLIGHT

We stood among the boats and nets …

We marked the risen moon

Walk swaying o'er the trembling seas

As one sways in a swoon;

The little stars, the lonely stars,

Stole through the hollow sky,

And every sucking eddy where

The waves lapped wharf or rotten stair

Moaned like some stricken thing hid there

And strangled with its own despair

As the shuddering tide crept by.

I loved her, and I hated her—

Or did I hate myself because,

Bound by obscure, strong, silken laws,

I felt myself the worshiper

Of beauty never wholly mine?

With lures most apt to snare, entwine,

With bonds too subtle to define,

Her lighter nature mastered mine;

Herself half given, half withheld,

Her lesser spirit still compelled

Its tribute from my franker soul:

So—rebel, slave, and worshiper!—

I loved her and I hated her.

I gazed upon her, I, her thrall,

And musing, murmured, What if death

Were just the answer to it all?—

Suppose some dainty dagger quaffed

Her life in one deep eager draught?—

Suppose some amorous knife caressed

The lovely hollow of her breast?"—

She turned a mocking look to mine:

She read the thought within my eyne,

She held me with her look—and laughed!

Now who may tell what stirs, controls,

And shapes mad fancies into facts?

What trivial things may quicken souls

To irrevocable, swift acts?

Now who has known, who understood,

Wherefore some idle thing

May stab with deadlier sting

Than well-considered insult could?—

May spur the languor of a mood

And rouse a tiger in the blood?—

Ah, Christ!—had she not laughed just when

That fancy came! … for then … and then …

A sudden mist dropped from the sky,

A mist swept in across the sea …

A mist that hid her face from me …

A weeping mist all tinged with red,

A dripping mist that smelt like blood …

It choked my throat, it burnt my brain …

And through it peered one sallow star,

And through it rang one shriek of pain …

And when it passed my hands were red,

My soul was dabbled with her blood;

And when it passed my love was dead

And tossed upon the troubled flood.

III

MOONSET

But see! … the body does not sink;

It rides upon the tide

(A starbeam on the dagger's haft),

With staring eyes and wide …

And now, up from the darkling sea,

Down from the failing moon,

Are come strange shapes to mock at me …

All pallid from the star-pale sea,

White from the paling moon …

Or whirling fast or wheeling slow

Around, around the corpse they go,

All bloodless o'er the sickened sea

Beneath the ailing moon!

And are they only wisps of fog

That dance along the waves?

Only shapes of mist the wind

Drives along the waves?

Or are they spirits that the sea

Has cheated of their graves?

The ghosts of them that died at sea,

Of murdered men flung in the sea,

Whose bodies had no graves?—

Lost souls that haunt for evermore

The sobbing reef and hollowed shore

And always-murmuring caves?

Ah, surely something more than fog,

More than starlit mist!

For starlight never makes a sound

And fogs are ever whist—

But hearken, hearken, hearken, now,

For these sing as they dance!

As airily, as eerily,

They wheel about and whirl,

They jeer at me, they fleer at me,

They flout me as they swirl!

As whirling fast or swaying slow,

Reeling, wheeling, to and fro,

Around, around the corpse they go,

They chill me with their chants!

These be neither men nor mists—

Hearken to their chants:

Ever, ever, ever,

Drifting like a blossom

Seaward, with the starlight

Wan upon her bosom—

Ever when the quickened

Heart of night is throbbing,

Ever when the trembling

Tide sets seaward, sobbing,

Shall you see this burden

Borne upon its ebbing:

See her drifting seaward

Like a broken blossom,

_Ever see the starlight

Kiss her bruised bosom.

Flight availeth nothing …

Still the subtle beaches

Draw you back where Horror

Walks their shingled reaches …

Ever shall your spirit

Hear the surf resounding,

Evermore the ocean

Thwarting you and bounding;

Vainly struggle inland!

Lashing you and hounding,

Still the vision hales you

From the upland reaches,

Goading you and gripping,

Binds you to the beaches!

Ever, ever, ever,

Ever shall her laughter,

Hunting you and haunting,

Mock and follow after;

Rising where the buoy-bell

Clangs across the shallows,_

Leaping where the spindrift

Hurtles o'er the hollows,

Ringing where the moonlight

Gleams along the billows,

Ever, ever, ever,

Ever shall her laughter,

Hounding you and haunting,

Whip and follow after!

IV

SUNSET

I stood among the boats

The sinking sun, the angry sun,

Across the sullen wave

Laid the sudden strength of his red wrath

Like to a shaken glaive:—

Or did the sun pause in the west

To lift a sword at me,

Or was it she, or was it she,

Rose for an instant on some crest

And plucked the red blade from her breast

And brandished it at me?

THE TAVERN OF DESPAIR

THE wraiths of murdered hopes and loves

Come whispering at the door,

Come creeping through the weeping mist

That drapes the barren moor;

But we within have turned the key

'Gainst Hope and Love and Care,

Where Wit keeps tryst with Folly, at

The Tavern of Despair.

And we have come by divers ways

To keep this merry tryst,

But few of us have kept within

The Narrow Way, I wist;

For we are those whose ampler wits

And hearts have proved our curse—

Foredoomed to ken the better things

And aye to do the worse!

Long since we learned to mock ourselves;

And from self-mockery fell

To heedless laughter in the face

Of Heaven, Earth, and Hell.

We quiver 'neath, and mock, God's rod;

We feel, and mock, His wrath;

We mock our own blood on the thorns

That rim the "Primrose Path."

We mock the eerie glimmering shapes

That range the outer wold,

We mock our own cold hearts because

They are so dead and cold;

We flout the things we might have been

Had self to self proved true,

We mock the roses flung away,

We mock the garnered rue;

The fates that gibe have lessoned us;

There sups to-night on earth

No madder crew of wastrels than

This fellowship of mirth….

(Of mirth … drink, fools!—nor let it flag

Lest from the outer mist

Creep in that other company

Unbidden to the tryst.

We're grown so fond of paradox

Perverseness holds us thrall,

So what each jester loves the best

He mocks the most of all;

But as the jest and laugh go round,

Each in his neighbor's eyes

Reads, while he flouts his heart's desire,

The knowledge that he lies.

Not one of us but had some pearls

And flung them to the swine,

Not one of us but had some gift—

Some spark of fire divine—

Each might have been God's minister

In the temple of some art—

Each feels his gift perverted move

Wormlike through his dry heart.

If God called Azrael to Him now

And bade Death bend the bow

Against the saddest heart that beats

Here on this earth below,

Not any sobbing breast would gain

The guerdon of that barb—

The saddest ones are those that wear

The jester's motley garb.

Whose shout aye loudest rings, and whose

The maddest cranks and quips—

Who mints his soul to laughter's coin

And wastes it with his lips—

Has grown too sad for sighs and seeks

To cheat himself with mirth;

We fools self-doomed to motley are

The weariest wights on earth!

But yet, for us whose brains and hearts

Strove aye in paths perverse,

Doomed still to know the better things

And still to do the worse,—

What else is there remains for us

But make a jest of care

And set the rafters ringing, in

Our Tavern of Despair?

COLORS AND SURFACES

A GOLDEN LAD

(D. V. M.)

"Golden lads and lasses must

Like chimney-sweepers come to dust."

—SHAKESPEARE.

So young, but already the splendor

Of genius robed him about—

Already the dangerous, tender

Regard of the gods marked him out—

(On whom the burden and duty

They bind, at his earliest breath,

Of showing their own grave beauty,

They love and they crown with death.)

We were of one blood, but the olden

Rapt poets spake out in his tone;

We were of one blood, but the golden

Rathe promise was his, his alone.

And ever his great eye glistened

With visions I could not see,

Ever he thrilled and listened

To voices withholden from me.

Young lord of the realms of fancy,

The bright dreams flocked to his call

Like sprites that the necromancy

Of a Prospero holds in thrall—

Quick visions that served and attended,

Elusive and hovering things,

With a quiver of joy in the splendid

Wild sweep of their luminous wings;

He dwelt in an alien glamor,

He wrought of its gleams a crown,—

But the world, with its cruelty and clamor,

Broke him and beat him down;

So he passed; he was worn, he was weary,

He was slain at the touch of life;—

With a smile that was wistful and eerie

He passed from the senseless strife;—

So he ceased (is their humor satiric,

These gods that make perfect and blight?)—

He ceased like an exquisite lyric

That dies on the breast of night.

THE SAGE AND THE WOMAN

'TWIXT ancient Beersheba and Dan

Another such a caravan

Dazed Palestine had never seen

As that which bore Sabea's queen

Up from the fain and flaming South

To slake her yearning spirit's drouth

At wisdom's pools, with Solomon.

With gifts of scented sandalwood,

And labdanum, and cassia-bud,

With spicy spoils of Araby

And camel-loads of ivory

And heavy cloths that glanced and shone

With inwrought pearl and beryl-stone

She came, a bold Sabean girl.

And did she find him grave, or gay?

Perchance his palace breathed that day

With psalters sounding solemnly—

Or cymbals' merrier minstrelsy—

Perchance the wearied monarch heard

Some loose-tongued prophet's meddling word;—

None knows, no one—but Solomon!

She looked—with eyne wherein were blent

All ardors of the Orient;

She spake—all magics of the South

Were compassed in the witch's mouth;—

He thought the scarlet lips of her

More precious than En Gedi's myrrh,

The lips of that Sabean girl;

By many an amorous sun caressed,

From lifted brow to amber breast

She gleamed in vivid loveliness—

And lithe as any leopardess—

And verily, one blames thee not

If thine own proverbs were forgot,

O Solomon, wise Solomon!

She danced for him, and surely she

Learnt dancing from some moonlit sea

Where elfin vapors swirled and swayed

While the wild pipes of witchcraft played

Such clutching music 'twould impel

A prophet's self to dance to hell—

So spun the light Sabean girl.

He swore her laughter had the lilt

Of chiming waters that are spilt

In sprays of spurted melody

From founts of carven porphyry,

And in the billowy turbulence

Of her dusk hair drowned soul and sense—

Dark tides and deep, O Solomon!

Perchance unto her day belongs

His poem called the Song of Songs,

Each little lyric interval

Timed to her pulse's rise and fall;—

Or when he cried out wearily

That all things end in vanity

Did he mean that Sabean girl?

The bright barbaric opulence,

The sun-kist Temple, Kedar's tents,—

How many a careless caravan

'Twixt Beersheba and ruined Dan,

Within these forty centuries,

Has flung their dust to many a breeze,

With dust that was King Solomon!

But still the lesson holds as true,

O King, as when she lessoned you:

That very wise men are not wise

Until they read in Folly's eyes

The wisdom that escapes the schools,

That bids the sage revise his rules

By light of some Sabean girl!

NEWS FROM BABYLON

"Archaeologists have discovered a love-letter among the ruins

of Babylon." —Newspaper report.

The world hath just one tale to tell, and it is very old,

A little tale—a simple tale—a tale that's easy told:

"There was a youth in Babylon who greatly loved a

maid!"

The world hath just one song to sing, but sings it

unafraid,

A little song—a foolish song—the only song it hath:

"There was a youth in Ascalon who loved a girl in

Gath!"

Homer clanged it, Omar twanged it, Greece and

Persia knew!—

Nimrod's reivers, Hiram's weavers, Hindu, Kurd,

and Jew—

Crowning Tyre, Troy afire, they have dreamed

the dream;

Tiber-side and Nilus-tide brightened with the

gleam—

Oh, the suing, sighing, wooing, sad and merry

hours,

Blisses tasted, kisses wasted, building Babel's

towers!

Hearts were aching, hearts were breaking, lashes

wet with dew,

When the ships touched the lips of islands Sappho

knew;

Yearning breasts and burning breasts, cold at last,

are hid

Amid the glooms of carven tombs in Khufu's

pyramid—

Though the sages, down the ages, smile their cynic

doubt,

Man and maid, unafraid, put the schools to rout;

Seek to chain love and retain love in the bonds of

breath,

Vow to hold love, bind and fold love even unto

death!

The dust of forty centuries has buried Babylon,

And out of all her lovers dead rises only one;

Rises with a song to sing and laughter in his eyes,

The old song—the only song—for all the rest are lies!

For, oh, the world has just one dream, and it is very

old—

'Tis youth's dream—a silly dream—but it is flushed

with gold!

A RHYME OF THE ROADS

PEARL-SLASHED and purple and crimson and

fringed with gray mist of the hills,

The pennons of morning advance to the music of

rock-fretted rills,

The dumb forest quickens to song, and the little

gusts shout as they fling

A floor-cloth of orchard bloom down for the flashing,

quick feet of the Spring.

To the road, gipsy-heart, thou and I! 'Tis the

mad piper, Spring, who is leading;

'Tis the pulse of his piping that throbs through

the brain, irresistibly pleading;

Full-blossomed, deep-bosomed, fain woman,

light-footed, lute-throated and fleet,

We have drunk of the wine of this Wanderer's song;

let us follow his feet!

Like raveled red girdles flung down by some

hoidenish goddess in mirth

The tangled roads reach from rim unto utter-most

rim of the earth—

We will weave of these strands a strong net, we

will snare the bright wings of delight,—

We will make of these strings a sweet lute that

will shame the low wind-harps of night.

The clamor of tongues and the clangor of trades

in the peevish packed street,

The arrogant, jangling Nothings, with iterant,

dissonant beat,

The clattering, senseless endeavor with dross of

mere gold for its goal,

These have sickened the senses and wearied the

brain and straitened the soul.

"Come forth and be cleansed of the folly of strife

for things worthless of strife,

Come forth and gain life and grasp God by foregoing

gains worthless of life"—

It was thus spake the wizard wildwood, low-voiced

to the hearkening heart,

It was thus sang the jovial hills, and the harper

sun bore part.

O woman, whose blood as my blood with the fire

of the Spring is aflame,

We did well, when the red roads called, that we

heeded the call and came—

Came forth to the sweet wise silence where soul

may speak sooth unto soul,

Vine-wreathed and vagabond Love, with the goal

of Nowhere for our goal!

What planet-crowned Dusk that wanders the

steeps of our firmament there

Hath gems that may match with the dew-opals

meshed in thine opulent hair?

What wind-witch that skims the curled billows

with feet they are fain to caress

Hath sandals so wing'd as thine art with a

god-like carelessness?

And dare we not dream this is heaven?—to wander

thus on, ever on.

Through the hush-heavy valleys of space, up the

flushing red slopes of the dawn?—

For none that seeks rest shall find rest till he

ceaseth his striving for rest,

And the gain of the quest is the joy of the road

that allures to the quest.

THE LAND OF YESTERDAY

AND I would seek the country town

Amid green meadows nestled down

If I could only find the way

Back to the Land of Yesterday!

How I would thrust the miles aside,

Rush up the quiet lane, and then,

Just where her roses laughed in pride,

Find her among the flowers again.

I'd slip in silently and wait

Until she saw me by the gate,

And then … read through a blur of tears

Quick pardon for the selfish years.

This time, this time, I would not wait

For that brief wire that said, Too late!—

If I could only find the way

Into the Land of Yesterday.

I wonder if her roses yet

Lift up their heads and laugh with pride,

And if her phlox and mignonette

Have heart to blossom by their side;

I wonder if the dear old lane

Still chirps with robins after rain,

And if the birds and banded bees

Still rob her early cherry-trees….

I wonder, if I went there now,

How everything would seem, and how—

But no! not now; there is no way

Back to the Land of Yesterday.

OCTOBER

CEASE to call him sad and sober,

Merriest of months, October!

Patron of the bursting bins,

Reveler in wayside inns,

I can nowhere find a trace

Of the pensive in his face;

There is mingled wit and folly,

But the madcap lacks the grace

Of a thoughtful melancholy.

Spendthrift of the seasons' gold,

How he flings and scatters out

Treasure filched from summer-time!—

Never ruffling squire of old

Better loved a tavern bout

When Prince Hal was in his prime.

Doublet slashed with gold and green;

Cloak of crimson; changeful sheen,

Of the dews that gem his breast;

Frosty lace about his throat;

Scarlet plumes that flaunt and float

Backward in a gay unrest—

Where's another gallant drest

With such tricksy gaiety,

Such unlessoned vanity?

With his amber afternoons

And his pendant poets' moons—

With his twilights dashed with rose

From the red-lipped afterglows—

With his vocal airs at dawn

Breathing hints of Helicon—

Bacchanalian bees that sip

Where his cider-presses drip—

With the winding of the horn

Where his huntsmen meet the morn—

With his every piping breeze

Shaking from familiar trees

Apples of Hesperides—

With the chuckle, chirp, and trill

Of his jolly brooks that spill

Mirth in tangled madrigals

Down pebble-dappled waterfalls—

(Brooks that laugh and make escape

Through wild arbors where the grape

Purples with a promise of

Racy vintage rare as love)—

With his merry, wanton air,

Mirth and vanity and folly

Why should he be made to bear

Burden of some melancholy

Song that swoons and sinks with care?

Cease to call him sad or sober,—

He's a jolly dog, October!

CHANT OF THE CHANGING HOURS

THE Hours passed by, a fleet, confused crowd;

With wafture of blown garments bright as fire,

Light, light of foot and laughing, morning-browed,

And where they trod the jonquil and the briar

Thrilled into jocund life, the dreaming dells

Waked to a morrice chime of jostled bells;—

They danced! they danced! to piping such as

flings

The garnered music of a million Springs

Into one single, keener ecstasy;—

One paused and shouted to my questionings:

"Lo, I am Youth; I bid thee follow me!"

The Hours passed by; they paced, great lords and

proud,

Crowned on with sunlight, robed in rich attire;

Before their conquering word the brute deed

bowed,

And Ariel fancies served their large desire;

They spake, and roused the mused soul that dwells

In dust, or, smiling, shaped new heavens and

hells,

Dethroned old gods and made blind beggars kings:

"And what art thou," I cried to one, "that brings

His mistress, for a brooch, the Galaxy?"—

"I am the plumed Thought that soars and sings:

Lo, I am Song; I bid thee follow me!"

The Hours passed by, with veiled eyes endowed

Of dream, and parted lips that scarce suspire,

To breathing dusk and arrowy moonlight vowed,

South wind and shadowy grove and murmuring

lyre;—

Swaying they moved, as drows'd of wizard spells

Or tranc'd with sight of recent miracles,

And yet they trembled, down their folded wings

Quivered the hint of sweet withholden things,

Ah, bitter-sweet in their intensity!

One paused and said unto my wonderings:

"Lo, I am Love; I bid thee follow me!"

The Hours passed by, through huddled cities loud

With witless hate and stale with stinking mire:

So cowled monks might march with bier and shroud

Down streets plague-spotted toward some cleansing pyre;—

Yet, lo! strange lilies bloomed in lightless cells,

And passionate spirits burst their clayey shells

And sang the stricken hope that bleeds and clings:

Earth's bruised heart beat in the throbbing strings,

And joy still struggled through the threnody!

One stern Hour said unto my marvelings:

"Lo, I am Life; I bid thee follow me!"

The Hours passed by, the stumbling hours and

cowed,

Uncertain, prone to tears and childish ire,—

The wavering hours that drift like any cloud

At whim of winds or fortunate or dire,—

The feeble shapes that any chance expells;

Their wisdom useless, lacking the blood that swells

The tensed vein: the hot, swift tide that stings

With life. Ah, wise! but naked to the slings

Of fate, and plagued of youthful memory!

A cracked voice broke upon my pityings:

"Lo, I am Age; I bid thee follow me!"

Ah, Youth! we dallied by the babbling wells

Where April all her lyric secret tells;—

Ah, Song! we sped our bold imaginings

As far as yon red planet's triple rings;—

O Life! O Love! I followed, followed thee!

There waits one word to end my journeyings:

"Lo, I am Death; I bid thee follow me!"

DREAMS AND DUST

SELVES

My dust in ruined Babylon

Is blown along the level plain,

And songs of mine at dawn have soared

Above the blue Sicilian main.

We are ourselves, and not ourselves …

For ever thwarting pride and will

Some forebear's passion leaps from death

To claim a vital license still.

Ancestral lusts that slew and died,

Resurgent, swell each living vein;

Old doubts and faiths, new panoplied,

Dispute the mastery of the brain.

The love of liberty that flames

From written rune and stricken reed

Shook the hot hearts of swordsmen sires

At Marathon and Runnymede.

What are these things we call our "selves"? …

Have I not shouted, sobbed, and died

In the bright surf of spears that broke

Where Greece rolled back the Persian tide?

Are we who breathe more quick than they

Whose bones are dust within the tomb?

Nay, as I write, what gray old ghosts

Murmur and mock me from the gloom….

They call … across strange seas they call,

Strange seas, and haunted coasts of time….

They startle me with wordless songs

To which the Sphinx hath known the rhyme.

Our hearts swell big with dead men's hates,

Our eyes sting hot with dead men's tears;

We are ourselves, but not ourselves,

Born heirs, but serfs, to all the years!

I rode with Nimrod … strove at Troy …

A slave I stood in Crowning Tyre,

A queen looked on me and I loved

And died to compass my desire.

THE WAGES

EARTH loves to gibber o'er her dross,

Her golden souls, to waste;

The cup she fills for her god-men

Is a bitter cup to taste.

Who sees the gyves that bind mankind

And strives to strike them off

Shall gain the hissing hate of fools,

Thorns, and the ingrate's scoff.

Who storms the moss-grown walls of eld

And beats some falsehood down

Shall pass the pallid gates of death

Sans laurel, love or crown;

For him who fain would teach the world

The world holds hate in fee—

For Socrates, the hemlock cup;

For Christ, Gethsemane.

IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR?

"In Vishnu-land, what avatar?"

—BROWNING.

PERCHANCE the dying gods of Earth

Are destined to another birth,

And worn-out creeds regain their worth

In the kindly air of other stars—

What lords of life and light hold sway

In the myriad worlds of the Milky Way?

What avatars in Mars?

What Aphrodites from the seas

That lap the plunging Pleiades

Arise to spread afar

The dream that was the soul of Greece?

In Mars, what avatar?

Which hundred moons are wan with love

For dull Endymions?

Which hundred moons hang tranced above

Audacious Ajalons?

What Holy Grail lures errants pale

Through the wastes of yonder star?

What fables sway the Milky Way?

In Mars, what avatar?

When morning skims with crimson wings

Across the meres of Mercury,

What dreaming Memnon wakes and sings

Of miracles on Mercury?

What Christs, what avatars,

Claim Mars?

THE GOD-MAKER, MAN

NEVERMORE

Shall the shepherds of Arcady follow

Pan's moods as he lolls by the shore

Of the mere, or lies hid in the hollow;

Nevermore

Shall they start at the sound of his reed-fashioned

flute;

Fallen mute

Are the strings of Apollo,

His lyre and his lute;

And the lips of the Memnons are mute

Evermore;

And the gods of the North,—are they dead or

forgetful,

Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?

Are they drunk, or grown weary of worship and

fretful,

Our Odin and Baldur and Thor?

And into what night have the Orient dieties

strayed?

Swart gods of the Nile, in dusk splendors arrayed,

Brooding Isis and somber Osiris,

You were gone ere the fragile papyrus,

(That bragged you eternal!) decayed.

The avatars

But illumine their limited evens

And vanish like plunging stars;

They are fixed in the whirling heavens

No firmer than falling stars;

Brief lords of the changing soul, they pass

Like a breath from the face of a glass,

Or a blossom of summer blown shallop-like over

The clover

And tossed tides of grass.

Sink to silence the psalms and the paeans

The shibboleths shift, and the faiths,

And the temples that challenged the aeons

Are tenanted only by wraiths;

Swoon to silence the cymbals and psalters,

The worships grow senseless and strange,

And the mockers ask, "Where be thy altars?"

Crying, "Nothing is changeless—but Change!"

Yes, nothing seems changeless, but Change.

And yet, through the creed-wrecking years,

One story for ever appears;

The tale of a City Supernal—

The whisper of Something eternal—

A passion, a hope, and a vision

That peoples the silence with Powers;

A fable of meadows Elysian

Where Time enters not with his Hours;—

Manifold are the tale's variations,

Race and clime ever tinting the dreams,

Yet its essence, through endless mutations,

Immutable gleams.

Deathless, though godheads be dying,

Surviving the creeds that expire,

Illogical, reason-defying,

Lives that passionate, primal desire;

Insistent, persistent, forever

Man cries to the silences, Never

Shall Death reign the lord of the soul,

Shall the dust be the ultimate goal—

I will storm the black bastions of Night!

I will tread where my vision has trod,

I will set in the darkness a light,

In the vastness, a god!"

As the forehead of Man grows broader, so do

his creeds;

And his gods they are shaped in his image, and

mirror his needs;

And he clothes them with thunders and beauty,

he clothes them with music and fire;

Seeing not, as he bows by their altars, that he

worships his own desire;

And mixed with his trust there is terror, and

mixed with his madness is ruth,

And every man grovels in error, yet every man

glimpses a truth.

For all of the creeds are false, and all of the creeds

are true;

And low at the shrines where my brothers bow,

there will I bow, too;

For no form of a god, and no fashion

Man has made in his desperate passion

But is worthy some worship of mine;—

Not too hot with a gross belief,

Nor yet too cold with pride,

I will bow me down where my brothers bow,

Humble—but open-eyed!

UNREST

A FIERCE unrest seethes at the core

Of all existing things:

It was the eager wish to soar

That gave the gods their wings.

From what flat wastes of cosmic slime,

And stung by what quick fire,

Sunward the restless races climb!—

Men risen out of mire!

There throbs through all the worlds that are

This heart-beat hot and strong,

And shaken systems, star by star,

Awake and glow in song.

But for the urge of this unrest

These joyous spheres were mute;

But for the rebel in his breast

Had man remained a brute.

When baffled lips demanded speech,

Speech trembled into birth—

(One day the lyric word shall reach

From earth to laughing earth)—

When man's dim eyes demanded light

The light he sought was born—

His wish, a Titan, scaled the height

And flung him back the morn!

From deed to dream, from dream to deed,

From daring hope to hope,

The restless wish, the instant need,

Still lashed him up the slope!

. . . . . .

I sing no governed firmament,

Cold, ordered, regular—

I sing the stinging discontent

That leaps from star to star!

THE PILTDOWN SKULL

WHAT was his life, back yonder

In the dusk where time began,

This beast uncouth with the jaw of an ape

And the eye and brain of a man?—

Work, and the wooing of woman,

Fight, and the lust of fight,

Play, and the blind beginnings

Of an Art that groped for light?—

In the wonder of redder mornings,

By the beauty of brighter seas,

Did he stand, the world's first thinker,

Scorning his clan's decrees?—

Seeking, with baffled eyes,

In the dumb, inscrutable skies,

A name for the greater glory

That only the dreamer sees?

One day, when the afterglows,

Like quick and sentient things,

With a rush of their vast, wild wings,

Rose out of the shaken ocean

As great birds rise from the sod,

Did the shock of their sudden splendor

Stir him and startle and thrill him,

Grip him and shake him and fill him

With a sense as of heights untrod?—

Did he tremble with hope and vision,

And grasp at a hint of God?

London stands where the mammoth

Caked shag flanks with slime—

And what are our lives that inherit

The treasures of all time?

Work, and the wooing of woman,

Fight, and the lust of fight,

A little play (and too much toil!)

With an Art that gropes for light;

And now and then a dreamer,

Rapt, from his lonely sod

Looks up and is thrilled and startled

With a fleeting sense of God!

THE SEEKER

THE creeds he wrought of dream and thought

Fall from him at the touch of life,

His old gods fail him in the strife—

Withdrawn, the heavens he sought!

Vanished, the miracles that led,

The cloud at noon, the flame at night;

The vision that he wing'd and sped

Falls backward, baffled, from the height;

Yet in the wreck of these he stands

Upheld by something grim and strong;

Some stubborn instinct lifts a song

And nerves him, heart and hands:

He does not dare to call it hope;—

It is not aught that seeks reward—

Nor faith, that up some sunward slope

Runs aureoled to meet its lord;

It touches something elder far

Than faith or creed or thought in man,

It was ere yet these lived and ran

Like light from star to star;

It touches that stark, primal need

That from unpeopled voids and vast

Fashioned the first crude, childish creed,—

And still shall fashion, till the last!

For one word is the tale of men:

They fling their icons to the sod,

And having trampled down a god

They seek a god again!

Stripped of his creeds inherited,

Bereft of all his sires held true,

Amid the wreck of visions dead

He thrills at touch of visions new….

He wings another Dream for flight….

He seeks beyond the outmost dawn

A god he set there … and, anon,

Drags that god from the height!

. . . . . .

But aye from ruined faiths and old

That droop and die, fall bruised seeds;

And when new flowers and faiths unfold

They're lovelier flowers, they're kindlier creeds.

THE AWAKENING

THE steam, the reek, the fume, of prayer

Blown outward for a million years,

Becomes a mist between the spheres,

And waking Sentience struggles there.

Prayer still creates the boon we pray;

And gods we've hoped for, from those hopes

Will gain sufficient form one day

And in full godhood storm the slopes

Where ancient Chaos, stark and gray,

Already trembles for his sway.

When that the restless worlds would fly

Their wish created rapid wings,

But not till aeons had passed by

With dower of many idler things;

And when dumb flesh demanded speech

Speech struggled to the lips at last;—

Now the unpeopled Void, and vast,

Clean to that uttermost blank beach

Whereto the boldest thought may reach

That voyages from the vaguest past—

(Dim realm and ultimate of space)—

Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes,

In prescience of a god that wakes,

Born of man's wish to see God's face!

The endless, groping, dumb desires,—

The climbing incense thick and sweet,

The lovely purpose that aspires,

The wraiths of vapor wing'd and fleet

That rise and run with eager feet

Forth from a myriad altar fires:

All these become a mist that fills

The vales and chasms nebular;

A shaping Soul that moves and thrills

The wastes between red star and star!

A SONG OF MEN

OUT of the soil and the slime,

Reeking, they climb,

Out of the muck and the mire,

Rank, they aspire;

Filthy with murder and mud,

Black with shed blood,

Lust and passion and clay—

Dying, they slay;

Stirred by vague hints of a goal,

Seeking a soul!

Groping through terror and night

Up to the light:

Life in the dust and the clod

Sensing a God;

Flushed of the glamor and gleam

Caught from a dream;

Stained of the struggle and toil,

Stained of the soil,

Ally of God in the end—

Helper and friend—

Hero and prophet and priest

Out of the beast!

THE NOBLER LESSON

CHRIST was of virgin birth, and, being slain,

The creedists say, He rose from death again.

Oh, futile age-long talk of death and birth!—

His life, that is the one thing wonder-worth;

Not how He came, but how He lived on earth.

For if gods stoop, and with quaint jugglery

Mock nature's laws, how shall that profit thee?—

The nobler lesson is that mortals can

Grow godlike through this baffled front of man!

AT LAST

EACH race has died and lived and fought for the

"true" gods of that poor race,

Unconsciously, divinest thought of each race

gilding its god's face.

And every race that lives and dies shall make itself

some other gods,

Shall build, with mingled truth and lies, new icons

from the world-old clods.

Through all the tangled creeds and dreams and

shifting shibboleths men hold

The false-and-true, inwoven, gleams: a matted

mass of dross and gold.

Prove, then, thy gods in thine own soul; all others'

gods, for thee, are vain;

Nor swerved be, struggling for the goal, by bribe

of joy nor threat of pain.

As skulls grow broader, so do faiths; as old tongues

die, old gods die, too,

And only ghosts of gods and wraiths may meet

the backward-gazer's view.

Where, where the faiths of yesterday? Ah,

whither vanished, whither gone?

Say, what Apollos drive to-day adown the flaming

slopes of dawn?

Oh, does the blank past hide from view forgotten

Christs, to be reborn,

The future tremble where some new Messiah-Memnon

sings the morn?

Of all the worlds, say any earth, like dust

wind-harried to and fro,

Shall give the next Prometheus birth; but say—at

last—you do not know.

How should I know what dawn may gleam beyond

the gates of darkness there?—

Which god of all the gods men dream? Why

should I whip myself to care?

Whichever over all hath place hath shaped and

made me what I am;

Hath made me strong to front his face, to dare

to question though he damn.

Perhaps to cringe and cower and bring a shrine

a forced and faithless faith

Is far more futile than to fling your laughter in

the face of Death.

For writhe or whirl in dervish rout, they are not

flattered there on high,

Or sham belief to hide a doubt—no gods are mine

that love a lie!

Nor gods that beg belief on earth with portents

that some seer foretells—

Is life itself not wonder-worth that we must cry

for miracles?

Is it not strange enough we breathe? Does every-

thing not God reveal?

Or must we ever weave and wreathe some creed

that shall his face conceal?

Some creed of which its prophets cry it holds

the secret's all-in-all:

Some creed which ever bye and bye doth crumble,

totter, to its fall!

Say any dream of all the dreams that drift and

darkle, glint and glow,

Holds most of truth within its gleams; but say

—at last—you do not know.

Oh, say the soul, from star to star, with victory

wing'd, leap on through space

And scale the bastioned nights that bar the secret's

inner dwelling-place;

Or say it ever roam dim glades where pallid

wraiths of long-dead moons

Flit like blown feathers through the shades, borne

on the breath of sobbing tunes:

Say any tide of any time, of all the tides that ebb

and flow,

Shall buoy us on toward any clime; but say—at

last—you do not know!

LYRICS

"KING PANDION, HE IS DEAD"

"King Pandion, he is dead;

All thy friends are lapp'd in lead."

—SHAKESPEARE.

DREAMERS, drinkers, rebel youth,

Where's the folly free and fine

You and I mistook for truth?

Wits and wastrels, friends of wine,

Wags and poets, friends of mine,

Gleams and glamors all are fled,

Fires and frenzies half divine!

King Pandion, he is dead!

Time's unmannerly, uncouth!

Here's the crow's-foot for a sign!

And, upon our brows, forsooth,

Wits and wastrels, friends of wine,

Time hath set his mark malign;

Frost has touched us, heart and head,

Cooled the blood and dulled the eyne:

King Pandion, he is dead!

Time's a tyrant without ruth:—

Fancies used to bloom and twine

Round a common tavern booth,

Wits and wastrels, friends of wine,

In that youth of mine and thine!

'Tis for youth the feast is spread;

When we dine now—we but dine!—

King Pandion, he is dead!

How our dreams would glow and shine,

Wits and wastrels, friends of wine,

Ere the drab Hour came that said:

King Pandion, he is dead!

DAVID TO BATHSHEBA

VERY red are the roses of Sharon,

But redder thy mouth,

There is nard, there is myrrh, in En Gedi,

From the uplands of Lebanon, heavy

With balsam, the winds

Drift freighted and scented and cedarn—

But thy mouth is more precious than spices!

Thy breasts are twin lilies of Kedron;

White lilies, that sleep

In the shallows where loitering Kedron

Broadens out and is lost in the Jordan;

Globed lilies, so white

That David, thy King, thy beloved

Declareth them meet for his gardens.

Under the stars very strangely

The still waters gleam;

Deep down in the waters of Hebron

The soul of the starlight is sunken,

But deep in thine eyes

Stirs a more wonderful secret

Than pools ever learn of the starlight.

THE JESTERS

A TOAST to the Fools!

Pierrot, Pantaloon,

Harlequin, Clown,

Merry-Andrew, Buffoon—

Touchstone and Triboulet—all of the tribe.—

Dancer and jester and singer and scribe.

We sigh over Yorick—(unfortunate fool,

Ten thousand Hamlets have fumbled his skull!)—

But where is the Hamlet to weep o'er the biers

Of his brothers?

And where is the poet solicits our tears

For the others?

They have passed from the world and left never

a sign,

And few of us now have the courage to sing

That their whimsies made life a more livable

thing—

We, that are left of the line,

Let us drink to the jesters—in gooseberry wine!

Then here's to the Fools!

Flouting the sages

Through history's pages

And driving the dreary old seers into rages—

The humbugging Magis

Who prate that the wages

Of Folly are Death—toast the Fools of all ages!

They have ridden like froth down the whirlpools

of time,

They have jingled their caps in the councils of

state,

They have snared half the wisdom of life in a

rhyme,

And tripped into nothingness grinning at fate—

Ho, brothers mine,

Brim up the glasses with gooseberry wine!

Though the prince with his firman,

The judge in his ermine,

Affirm and determine

Bold words need the whip,

Let them spare us the rod and remit us the

sermon,

For Death has a quip

Of the tomb and the vermin

That will silence at last the most impudent lip!

Is the world but a bubble, a bauble, a joke?

Heigho, Brother Fools, now your bubble is broke,

Do you ask for a tear?—or is it worth while?

Here's a sigh for you, then—but it ends in a smile!

Ho, Brother Death,

We would laugh at you, too—if you spared us the

breath!

"MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY"

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockle-shells

And pretty maids all in a row!"

—Mother Goose.

MARY, Mistress Mary,

How does your garden grow?

From your uplands airy,

Mary, Mistress Mary,

Float the chimes of faery

When the breezes blow!

Mary, Mistress Mary,

How does your garden grow?

With flower-maidens, singing

Among the morning hills—

With silvern bells a-ringing,

With flower-maidens singing,

With vocal lilies, springing

By chanting daffodils;

With flower-maidens, singing

Among the morning hills!

THE TRIOLET

YOUR triolet should glimmer

Like a butterfly;

In golden light, or dimmer,

Your triolet should glimmer,

Tremble, turn, and shimmer,

Flash, and flutter by;

Your triolet should glimmer

Like a butterfly.

FROM THE BRIDGE

HELD and thrilled by the vision

I stood, as the twilight died,

Where the great bridge soars like a song

Over the crawling tide—

Stood on the middle arch—

And night flooded in from the bay,

And wonderful under the stars

Before me the city lay;

Girdled with swinging waters—

Guarded by ship on ship—

A gem that the strong old ocean

Held in his giant grip;

There was play of shadows above

And drifting gleams below,

And magic of shifting waves

That darkle and glance and glow;

Dusky and purple and splendid,

Banded with loops of light,

The tall towers rose like pillars,

Lifting the dome of night;

The gliding cars of traffic

Slid swiftly up and down

Like monsters, fiery mailed,

Leaping across the town.

Not planned with a thought of beauty;

Built by a lawless breed;

Builded of lust for power,

Builded of gold and greed.

Risen out of the trader's

Brutal and sordid wars—

And yet, behold! a city

Wonderful under the stars!

"PALADINS, PALADINS, YOUTH NOBLE-HEARTED"

GALAHADS, Galahads, Percivals, gallop!

Bayards, to the saddle!—the clangorous trumpets,

Hoarse with their ecstasy, call to the mellay.

Paladins, Paladins, Rolands flame-hearted,

Olivers, Olivers, follow the bugles!

Girt with the glory and glamor of power,

Error sits throned in the high place of justice;

Paladins, Paladins, youth noble-hearted,

Saddle and spear, for the battle-flags beckon!

Thrust the keen steel through the throat of the liar.

Star (or San Grael) that illumines thy pathway,

Follow it, follow that far Ideal!—

Thine not the guerdon to gain it or grasp it;

Soul of thee, passing, ascendeth unto it,

Augmenting its brightness for them that come

after.

Heed then the call of the trumpets, the trumpets,

Hoarse with the fervor, the frenzy of battle,—

Paladins, Paladins, saddle! to saddle!

Bide not, abide not, God's bugles are calling!—

Thrust the sharp sword through the heart of the

liar.

"MY LANDS, NOT THINE"

MY lands, not thine, we look upon,

Friend Croesus, hill and vale and lawn.

Mine every woodland madrigal,

And mine thy singing waterfall

That vaguely hints of Helicon.

Mark how thine upland slopes have drawn

A golden glory from the dawn!—

Fool's gold?—thy dullness proves them all

My lands—not thine!

For when all title-deeds are gone,

Still, still will satyr, nymph, and faun

Through brake and covert pipe and call

In dances bold and bacchanal—

For them, for me, you hold in pawn,

My lands—not thine!

TO A DANCING DOLL

FORMAL, quaint, precise, and trim,

You begin your steps demurely—

There's a spirit almost prim

In the feet that move so surely,

So discreetly, to the chime

Of the music that so sweetly

Marks the time.

But the chords begin to tinkle

Quicker,

And your feet they flash and flicker—

Twinkle!—

Flash and flutter to a tricksy

Fickle meter;

And you foot it like a pixie—

Only fleeter!

Now our current, dowdy

Things—

"Turkey-trots" and rowdy

Flings—

For they made you overseas

In politer times than these,

In an age when grace could please,

Ere St. Vitus

Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;—

Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us!

Well, our day is far more brisk

And our manner rather slacker),

And you are nothing more than bisque

And lacquer—

But you shame us with the graces

Of courtlier times and places

When the cheap

And vulgar wasn't "art"—

When the faunal prance and leap

Weren't "smart."

Have we lost the trick of wedding

Grace to pleasure?

Must we clown it at the bidding

Of some tawdry, common measure?

Can't you school us in the graces

Of your pose and dainty paces?—

Now the chords begin to tinkle

Quicker—

And your feet they flash and flicker—

Twinkle!—

And you mock us as you featly

Swing and flutter to the chime

Of the music-box that sweetly

Marks the time!

LOWER NEW YORK—A STORM

WHITE wing'd below the darkling clouds

The driven sea-gulls wheel;

The roused sea flings a storm against

The towers of stone and steel.

The very voice of ocean rings

Along the shaken street—

Dusk, storm, and beauty whelm the world

Where sea and city meet—

But what care they for flashing wings,

Quick beauty, loud refrain,

These huddled thousands, deaf and blind

To all but greed and gain?

AT SUNSET

THE sun-god stooped from out the sky

To kiss the flushing sea,

While all the winds of all the world

Made jovial melody;

The night came hurrying up to hide

The lovers with her tent;

The governed thunders, rank on rank,

Stood mute with wonderment;

The pale worn moon, a jealous shade,

Peered from the firmament;

The early stars, the curious stars,

Came peering forth to see

What mighty nuptials shook the world

With such an ecstasy

Whenas the sun-god left the sky

To mingle with the sea.

A CHRISTMAS GIFT

ALACK-A-DAY for poverty!

What jewels my mind doth give to thee!

Carved agate stone porphyrogene,

Green emerald and beryl green,

Deep sapphine and pale amethyst,

Sly opal, cloaking with a mist

The levin of its love elate,

Shy brides' pearls, flushed and delicate,

Sea-colored lapis lazuli,

Sardonyx and chalcedony,

Enkindling diamond, candid gold,

Red rubies and red garnets bold:

And all their humors should be blent

In one intolerable blaze,

Barbaric, fierce, and opulent,

To dazzle him that dared to gaze!

Alack-a-day for poverty:

My rhymes are all you get of me!

Yet, if your heart receive, behold!

The worthless words are set in gold.

SILVIA

I STILL remember how she moved

Among the rathe, wild blooms she loved,

(When Spring came tip-toe down the slopes,

Atremble 'twixt her doubts and hopes,

Half fearful and all virginal)—

How Silvia sought this dell to call

Her flowers into full festival,

And chid them with this madrigal:

_"The busy spider hangs the brush

With filmy gossamers,

The frogs are croaking in the creek,

The sluggish blacksnake stirs,

But still the ground is bare of bloom

Beneath the fragrant firs.

"Arise, arise, O briar rose,

And sleepy violet!

Awake, awake, anemone,

Your wintry dreams forget—_

_For shame, you tardy marigold,

Are you not budded yet?

"The Swallow's back, and claims the eaves

That last year were his home;

The Robin follows where the plow

Breaks up the crusted loam;

And Red-wings spies the Thrush and pipes:

'Look! Speckle-breast is come!'

"Up, blooms! and storm the wooded slopes,

The lowlands and the plain—

Blow, jonquil, blow your golden horn

Across the ranks of rain!

To arms! to arms! and put to flight

The Winter's broken train!"_

She paused beside this selfsame rill,

And as she ceased, a daffodil

Held up reproachfully his head

And fluttered into speech, and said:

"Chide not the flowers! You little know

Of all their travail 'neath the snow,

Their struggling hours

Of choking sorrow underground.

Chide not the flowers!

You little guess of that profound

And blind, dumb agony of ours!

Yet, victor here beside the rill,

I greet the light that I have found,

A Daffodil!"

And when the Daffodil was done

A boastful Marigold spake on:

"Oh, chide the white frost, if you choose,

The heavy clod, so hard to loose,

The preying powers

Of worm and insect underground.

Chide not the flowers!

For spite of scathe and cruel wound,

Unconquered by the sunless hours,

I rise in regal pride, a bold

And golden-hearted, golden-crowned

Marsh Marigold!"

And when she came no more, her creek

Would not believe, but bade us seek

Hither, yon, and to and fro—

Everywhere that children go

When the Spring

Is on the wing

And the winds of April blow—

"I will never think her dead;

"She will come again!" it said;

And then the birds that use the vale,

Broken-hearted, turned the tale

Into syllables of song

And chirped it half a summer long:

"Silvia, Silvia,

Be our Song once more,

Our vale revisit, Silvia,

And be our Song once more:

For joy lies sleeping in the lute;

The merry pipe, the woodland flute,

And all the pleading reeds are mute

That breathed to thee of yore.

"Silvia, Silvia,

Be our Moon again,

_Shine on our valley, Silvia,

And be our Moon again:

The fluffy owl and nightingale

Flit silent through the darkling vale,

Or utter only words of wail

From throats all harsh with pain.

"Silvia, Silvia,

Be Springtime, as of old;

Come clad in laughter, Silvia,

Our Springtime, as of old:

The waiting lowlands and the hills

Are tremulous with daffodils

Unblown, until thy footstep thrills

Their promise into gold."_

And, musing on her here, I too

Must wonder if it can be true

She died, as other mortals do.

The thought would fit her more, to feign

That, full of life and unaware

That earth holds aught of grief or stain,

The fairies stole and hold her where

Death enters not, nor strife nor pain;—

That, drowsing on some bed of pansies,

By Titania's necromancies

Her senses were to slumber lulled,

Deeply sunken, steeped and dulled,

And by wafture of swift pinions

She was borne out through earth's portals

To the fairy queen's dominions,

To some land of the immortals.

THE EXPLORERS

AND some still cry: "What is the use?

The service rendered? What the gain?

Heroic, yes!—but in what cause?

Have they made less one earth-borne pain?

Broadened the bounded spirit's scope?

Or died to make the dull world hope?"

Must man still be the slave of Use?—

But these men, careless and elate,

Join battle with a burly world

Or come to wrestling grips with fate,

And not for any good nor gain

Nor any fame that may befall—

But, thrilling in the clutch of life,

Heed the loud challenge and the call;—

And grown to symbols at the last,

Stand in heroic silhouette

Against horizons ultimate,

As towers that front lost seas are set;—

The reckless gesture, the strong pose,

Sharp battle-cry flung back to Earth,

And buoyant humor, as a god

Might say: "Lo, here my feet have trod!"—

There lies the meaning and the worth!

They bring no golden treasure home,

They win no acres for their clan,

Nor dream nor deed of theirs shall mend

The ills of man's bedeviled span—

Nor are they skilled in sleights of speech,

(Nor overeager) to make plain

The use they serve, transcending use,—

The gain beyond apparent gain!

EARLY AUTUMN

WITH half-hearted levies of frost that make foray,

retire, and refrain—

Ambiguous bugles that blow and that falter to

silence again—

With banners of mist that still waver above them,

advance and retreat,

The hosts of the Autumn still hide in the hills,

for a doubt stays their feet;—

But anon, with a barbaric splendor to dazzle the

eyes that behold,

And regal in raiment of purple and umber and

amber and gold,

And girt with the glamor of conquest and scarved

with red symbols of pride,

From the hills in their might and their mirth on

the steeds of the wind will they ride,

To make sport and make spoil of the Summer,

who dwells in a dream on the plain,

Still tented in opulent ease in the camps of her

indolent train.

"TIME STEALS FROM LOVE"

TIME steals from Love all but Love's wings;

And how should aught but evil things,

Or any good but death, befall

Him that is thrall unto Time's thrall,

Slave to the lesser of these Kings?

O heart of youth that wakes and sings!

O golden vows and golden rings!

Life mocks you with the tale of all

Time steals from Love!

O riven lute and writhen strings,

Dead bough whereto no blossom clings,

The glory was ephemeral!

Nor may our Autumn grief recall

The passion of the perished Springs

Time steals from Love!

THE RONDEAU

YOUR rondeau's tale must still be light—

No bugle-call to life's stern fight!

Rather a smiling interlude

Memorial to some transient mood

Of idle love and gala-night.

Its manner is the merest sleight

O' hand; yet therein dwells its might,

For if the heavier touch intrude

Your rondeau's stale.

Fragrant and fragile, fleet and bright,

And wing'd with whim, it gleams in flight

Like April blossoms wind-pursued

Down aisles of tangled underwood;—

Nor be too serious when you write

Your rondeau's tail!

VISITORS

THEY haunt me, they tease me with hinted

Withheld revelations,

The songs that I may not utter;

They lead me, they flatter, they woo me.

I follow, I follow, I snatch

At the veils of their secrets in vain—

For lo! they have left me and vanished,

The songs that I cannot sing.

There are visions elusive that come

With a quiver and shimmer of wings;—

Shapes shadows and shapes, and the murmur

Of voices;—

Shapes, that out of the twilight

Leap, and with gesture appealing

Seem to deliver a message,

And are gone 'twixt a breath and a breath;—

Shapes that race in with the waves

Moving silverly under the moon,

And are gone ere they break into foam on the rocks

And recede;—

Breathings of love from invisible

Flutes,

Blown somewhere out in the tender

Dusk,

That die on the bosom of Silence;—

Formless,

And fleeter than thought,

Vaguer than thought or emotion,

What are these visitors?

Out of the vast and uncharted

Realms that encircle the visible world,

With a glimmer of light on their pinions,

They rush …

They waver, they vanish,

Leaving me stirred with a dream of the ultimate

beauty,

A sense of the ultimate music,

I never shall capture;—

They are Beauty,

Formless and tremulous Beauty,

Beauty unborn;

Beauty as yet unappareled

In thought;

Beauty that hesitates,

Falters,

Withdraws from the verge of birth,

Flutters,

Retreats from the portals of life;—

O Beauty for ever uncaptured!

O songs that I never shall sing!

THE PARTING

WE have come "the primrose way,"

Folly, thou and I!

Such a glamor and a grace

Ever glimmered on thy face,

Ever such a witchery

Lit the laughing eyes of thee,

Could a fool like me withstand

Folly's feast and beckoning hand?

Drinking, how thy lips' caress

Spiced the cup of waywardness!

So we came "the primrose way,"

Folly, thou and I!

But now, Folly, we must part,

Folly, thou and I!

Shall one look with mirth or tears

Back on all his wasted years,

Purposes dissolved in wine,

Pearls flung to the heedless swine?—

Idle days and nights of mirth,

Were they pleasures nothing worth?

Well, there's no gainsaying we

Squandered youth right merrily!

But now, Folly, we must part,

Folly, thou and I!

AN OPEN FIRE

THESE logs with drama and with dream are rife,

For all their golden Summers and green Springs

Through leaf and root they sucked the forest's life,

Drank in its secret, deep, essential things,

Its midwood moods, its mystic runes,

Its breathing hushes stirred of faery wings,

Its August nights and April noons;

The garnered fervors of forgotten Junes

Flare forth again and waste away;

And in the sap that leaps and sings

We hear again the chant the cricket flings

Across the hawthorn-scented dusks of May.

REALITIES

REALITIES

WE are deceived by the shadow, we see not the

substance of things.

For the hills are less solid than thought; and

deeds are but vapors; and flesh

Is a mist thrown off and resumed by the soul, as

a world by a god.

Back of the transient appearance dwells in

ineffable calm

The utter reality, ultimate truth; this seems and

that is.

THE STRUGGLE

I HAVE been down in a dark valley;

I have been groping through a deep gorge;

Far above, the lips of it were rimmed with moonlight,

And here and there the light lay on the dripping

rocks

So that it seemed they dripped with moonlight,

not with water;

So deep it was, that narrow gash among the hills,

That those great pines which fringed its edge

Seemed to me no larger than upthrust fingers

Silhouetted against the sky;

And at its top the vale was strait,

And the rays were slant

And reached but part way down the sides;

I could not see the moon itself;

I walked through darkness, and the valley's edge

Seemed almost level with the stars,

The stars that were like fireflies in the little trees.

It was the midnight of defeat;

I felt that I had failed;

I was mocked of the gods;

There was no way out of that gorge;

The paths led no whither

And I could not remember their beginnings;

I was doomed to wander evermore,

Thirsty, with the sound of mocking waters in

mine ears,

Groping, with gleams of useless light

Splashed in ironic beauty on the rocks above.

And so I whined.

And then despair flashed into rage;

I leapt erect, and cried:

"Could I but grasp my life as sculptors grasp the clay

And knead and thrust it into shape again!—

If all the scorn of Heaven were but thrown

Into the focus of some creature I could clutch!—

If something tangible were but vouchsafed me

By the cold, far gods!—

If they but sent a Reason for the failure of my life

I'd answer it;

If they but sent a Fiend, I'd conquer it!—

But I reach out, and grasp the air,

I rage, and the brute rock echoes my words in

mockery—

How can one fight the sliding moonlight on the cliffs?

You gods, coward gods,

Come down, I challenge you!—

You who set snares with roses and with passion,

You who make flesh beautiful and damn men through

the flesh,

You who plump the purple grape and then put poison

in the cup,

You who put serpents in your Edens,

You who gave me delight of my senses and broke me

for it,

You who have mingled death with beauty,

You who have put into my blood the impulses for

which you cursed me,

You who permitted my brain the doubts wherefore

you damn me,

Behold, I doubt you, gods, no longer, but defy!—

I perish here?

Then I will be slain of a god!

You who have wrapped me in the scorn of your silence,

The divinity in this same dust you flout

Flames through the dust,

And dares,

And flings you back your scorn,—

Come, face to face, and slay me if you will,

But not until you've felt the weight

Of all betricked humanity's contempt

In one bold blow!—

Speak forth a Reason, and I will answer it,

Yes, to your faces I will answer it;

Come garmented in flesh and I will fight with you,

Yes, in your faces will I smite you, gods;

Coward gods and tricksters that set traps

In paradise!—

Far gods that hedge yourselves about with silence

And with distance;

That mock men from the unscalable escarpments of

your Heavens."

Thus I raved, being mad.

I had no sooner finished speaking than I felt

The darkness fluttered by approaching feet,

And the silence was burned through by trembling

flames of sound,

And I was 'ware that Something stood by me.

And with a shout I leapt and grasped that Being,

And the Thing grasped me.

We came to wrestling grips,

And back and forth we swayed,

Hand seeking throat, and crook'd knee seeking

To encrook unwary leg,

And spread toes grasping the uneven ground;

The strained breast muscles cracked and creaked,

The sweat ran in my eyes,

The plagued breath sobbed and whistled through

my throat,

I tasted blood, and strangled, but still struggled

on—

The stars above me danced in swarms like yellow

bees,

The shaken moonlight writhed upon the rocks;—

But at the last I felt his breathing weaker grow,

The tense limbs grow less tense,

And with a bursting cry I bent his head right

back,

Back, back, until

I heard his neck bones snap;

His spine crunched in my grip;

I flung him to the earth and knelt upon his breast

And listened till the fluttering pulse was stilled.

Man, god, or devil, I had wrenched the life from

him!

And lo!—even as he died

The moonlight failed above the vale,—

And somehow, sure, I know now how!—

Between the rifted rocks the great Sun struck

A finger down the cliff, and that red beam

Lay sharp across the face of him that I had slain;

And in that light I read the answer of the silent

gods

Unto my cursed-out prayer,

For he that lay upon the ground was—I!

I understood the lesson then;

It was myself that lay there dead;

Yes, I had slain my Self.

THE REBEL

No doubt the ordered worlds speed on

With purpose in their wings;

No doubt the ordered songs are sweet

Each worthy angel sings;

And doubtless it is wise to heed

The ordered words of Kings;

But how the heart leaps up to greet

The headlong, rebel flight,

Whenas some reckless meteor

Blazes across the night!

Some comet—Byron—Lucifer—

Has dared to Be, and fight!

No doubt but it is safe to dwell

Where ordered duties are;

No doubt the cherubs earn their wage

Who wind each ticking star;

No doubt the system is quite right!—

Sane, ordered, regular;

But how the rebel fires the soul

Who dares the strong gods' ire!

Each Byron!—Shelley!—Lucifer!—

And all the outcast choir

That chant when some Prometheus

Leaps up to steal Jove's fire!

THE CHILD AND THE MILL

BETTER a pauper, penniless, asleep on the kindly

sod—

Better a gipsy, houseless, but near to the heart

of God,

That beats for ears not dulled by the clanking

wheels of care—

Better starvation and freedom, hope and the good

fresh air

Than death to the Something in him that was

born to laugh and dream,

That was kin to the idle lilies and the ripples of

the stream.

For out of the dreams of childhood, that careless

come and go,

The boy gains strength, unknowing, that the Man

will prove and know.

But these fools with their lies and their dollars,

their mills and their bloody hands,

Who make a god of a wheel, who worship their

whirring bands,

They are flinging the life of a people, raw, to the

brute machines.

Dull-eyed, weary, and old—old in his early teens—

Stunted and stupid and twisted, marred in the

mills of grief,

Can your factories fashion a Man of this thing—

a Man and a Chief?

Dumb is the heart of him now, at the time when

his heart should sing—

Wasters of body and brain, what race will the

future bring?

What of the nation's nerve whenas swift crises

come?

What of the brawn that should heave the guns on

the beck of the drum?

Thieves of body and soul, who can neither think

nor feel,

Swine-eyed priests of little false gods of gold and

steel,

Bow to your obscene altars, worship your loud

mills then!

Feed to Moloch and Baal the brawn and brains

of men—

But silent and watchful and hidden forever over

all

The masters brood of those Mills that "grind

exceeding small."

And it needs no occult art nor magic to foreshow

That a people who sow defeat they will reap the

thing they sow.

"SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI"

CONQUERORS leonine, lordly,

Princes and vaunting kings,

Ye are drunk with the sound of your braggart

trumps—

_But lo! ye are little things!

Earth … it is charnel with monarchs!

And the puffs of dust that start

Where your war steeds stamp with their ringing hoofs

Were each some warrior's heart._

Peoples imperial, mighty,

Masterful, challenging fate,

The tread of your cohorts shakes the hills—

_But lo! ye are not great!

Nations that swarm and murmur,

Ye are moths that flutter and climb—

Ye are whirling gnats, ye are swirling bees,

Tossed in the winds of time!_

Earth that is flushed with glory,

A marvelous world ye are!

_But lo! in the midst of a million stars

Ye are only one pale star!

A breath stirs the dark abysses….

The deeps below the deep

Are troubled and vexed … and a thousand worlds

Fall on eternal sleep!_

THE COMRADE

I

HATH not man at his noblest

An air of something more than man?—

A hint of grace immortal,

Born of his greatly daring to assist the gods

In conquering these shaggy wastes,

These desert worlds,

And planting life and order in these stars?—

So Woman at her best:

Her eyes are bright with visions and with dreams

That triumph over time;

Her plumed thought, wing for wing, is mate with

his.

II

The world rolls on from dream to dream,

And 'neath the vast impersonal revenges of its

going,

Crushed fools that cried defeat

Lie dead amid the dust they prophesied—

Ye doubters of man's larger destiny,

Ye that despair,

Look backward down the vistaed years,

And all is battle—and all victory!

Man fought, to be a man!

Through painful centuries the slow beast fought,

Blinded and baffled, fought to gain his soul;—

Wild, hairy, shag, and feared of shadows,

Yet the clouds

Made him strange signals that he puzzled o'er;—

Beast, child, and ape,

And yet the winds harped to him, and the sea

Rolled in upon his consciousness

Its tides of wonder and romance;—

Uncouth and caked with mire,

And yet the stars said something to him, and the

sun

Declared itself a god;—

The lagging cycles turned at last

The pictures into thought,

Thought flowered in soul;—

But, oh, the myriad weary years

Ere Caliban was Shakespeare's self

And Darwin's ape had Darwin's brain!—

The battling, battling, and the steep ascent,

The fight to hold the little gained,

The loss, the doubt, the shaken heart,

The stubborn, groping slow recovery!—

But looking backward toward the dim beginnings,

You that despair,

Hath he not climbed and conquered?

Look backward and all's Victory!

What coward looks forward and foresees defeat?

III

Who climbed beside him, and who fought

And suffered and was glad?

Is she a lesser thing than he,

Who stained the slopes with bloody feet, or stood

Beside him on some hard-won eminence of hope

Exulting as the bold dawn swept

A harper hand along the ringing hills?

Flesh of his flesh, and of his soul the soul,

Hath she not fought, hath she not climbed?

And how is she a lesser thing?—

Nay, if she ever was

'Twas we that made her so, who called her queen

But kept her slave.

IV

Had she not courage for the fight?

Hath she not courage for the years to come?

Hath she not courage who descends alone—

(How pitifully alone, except for Love!)

Where man's thought even falters that would

follow,

Into the shadowy abyss

(Through vast and murmurous caverns dark with

crowding dread

And terrible with hovering wings),

To battle there with Death?—to battle

There with Death, and wrest from him,

O Conqueror and Mother,

Life!

V

Hath she too long dwelt dream-bound in the world

of love,

Unconscious of the sterner throes,

The more austere, impersonal, wide faith,

The urge that drives Christs to the cross

Not for the love of one beloved,

But for the love of all?

If so, she wakes!

Wakes and demands a share in all man's bolder

destinies,

The high, audacious ventures of the soul

That thinks to scale the bastioned slopes

And strike stark Chaos from his throne.

We still stand in the dawn of time.

Not meanly let us stand nor shaken with low

doubts!

For there beyond the verge and margin of gray cloud

The future thrills with promise

And the skies are tremulous with golden light;—

She too would share those victories,

Comrade, and more than comrade;—

New times, new needs confront us now;

We must evolve new powers

To battle with;—

We must go forward now together,

Or perchance we fail!

ENVOI

A LITTLE WHILE

_A little while the tears and laughter,

The willow and the rose—

A little while, and what comes after

No man knows.

An hour to sing, to love and linger …

Then lutanist and lute

Will fall on silence, song and singer

Both be mute.

Our gods from our desires we fashion….

Exalt our baffled lives,

And dream their vital bloom and passion

Still survives;

But when we're done with mirth and weeping,

With myrtle, rue, and rose,

Shall Death take Life into his keeping? …

No man knows._

_What heart hath not, through twilight places,

Sought for its dead again

To gild with love their pallid faces? …

Sought in vain! …

Still mounts the Dream on shining pinion …

Still broods the dull distrust …

Which shall have ultimate dominion,

Dream, or dust?

A little while with grief and laughter,

And then the day will close;

The shadows gather … what comes after

No man knows!_

Note: In "The Parting," page 161, line 4, I have changed "they face" to "thy face"; in "The Struggle," page 173, line 4, I have changed "l!o" to "lo!"

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

PROEM DAYLIGHT HUMORS

SHADOWS

COLORS AND SURFACES

DREAMS AND DUST

LYRICS

REALITIES

PROEM

DAYLIGHT HUMORS THIS IS ANOTHER DAY

APRIL SONG

THIS EARTH, IT IS ALSO A STAR

THE NAME

THE BIRTH

A MOOD OF PAVLOWA

THE POOL

"THEY HAD NO POET …"

NEW YORK

A HYMN

THE SINGER

WORDS ARE NOT GUNS

WITH THE SUBMARINES

NICHOLAS OF MONTENEGRO

DICKENS

A POLITICIAN

THE BAYONET

THE BUTCHERS AT PRAYER

SHADOWS

HAUNTED

A NIGHTMARE

THE MOTHER

IN THE BAYOU

THE SAILOR'S WIFE SPEAKS

HUNTED

A DREAM CHILD

ACROSS THE NIGHT

SEA CHANGES

I

II

III

IV

THE TAVERN OF DESPAIR

COLORS AND SURFACES

A GOLDEN LAD

THE SAGE AND THE WOMAN

NEWS FROM BABYLON

A RHYME OF THE ROADS

THE LAND OF YESTERDAY

OCTOBER

CHANT OF THE CHANGING HOURS

DREAMS AND DUST SELVES

THE WAGES

IN MARS, WHAT AVATAR?

THE GOD-MAKER, MAN

UNREST

THE PILTDOWN SKULL

THE SEEKER

THE AWAKENING

A SONG OF MEN

THE NOBLER LESSON

AT LAST

LYRICS

"KING PANDION, HE IS DEAD"

DAVID TO BATHSHEBA

THE JESTERS

"MARY, MARY, QUITE CONTRARY"

THE TRIOLET

FROM THE BRIDGE

"PALADINS, PALADINS, YOUTH NOBLE-HEARTED"

"MY LANDS, NOT THINE"

TO A DANCING DOLL

LOWER NEW YORK—A STORM

AT SUNSET

A CHRISTMAS GIFT

SILVIA

THE EXPLORERS

EARLY AUTUMN

"TIME STEALS FROM LOVE"

THE RONDEAU

VISITORS

THE PARTING

AN OPEN FIRE

REALITIES

REALITIES

THE STRUGGLE

THE REBEL

THE CHILD AND THE MILL

THE COMRADE

II

III

IV

V

ENVOI

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE