Poems of the Past and the Present

Hardy, Thomas

Poems of the Past and the Present

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Thomas Hardy

Poems of the Past and the Present

Preface

Herewith I tender my thanks to the editors and proprietors of The Times, the Morning Post, the Daily Chronicle, the Westminster Gazette, Literature, the Graphic, Cornhill, Sphere, and other papers, for permission to reprint from their pages such of the following pieces of verse as have already been published.

Of the subject-matter of this volume – even that which is in other than narrative form – much is dramatic or impersonative even where not explicitly so. Moreover, that portion which may be regarded as individual comprises a series of feelings and fancies written down in widely differing moods and circumstances, and at various dates. It will probably be found, therefore, to possess little cohesion of thought or harmony of colouring. I do not greatly regret this. Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.

T. H.

August 1901

V. R. 1819-1901

A Reverie

The mightiest moments pass uncalendared,

And when the Absolute

In backward Time pronounced the deedful word

Whereby all life is stirred:

»Let one be born and throned whose mould shall constitute

The norm of every royal-reckoned attribute,«

No mortal knew or heard.

But in due days the purposed Life outshone –

Serene, sagacious, free;

Her waxing seasons bloomed with deeds well done,

And the world's heart was won ...

Yet may the deed of hers most bright in eyes to be

Lie hid from ours – as in the All-One's thought lay she –

Till ripening years have run.

Sunday Night, 27 January 1901

War Poems

Embarcation

(Southampton Docks: October 1899)

Here, where Vespasian's legions struck the sands,

And Cerdic with his Saxons entered in,

And Henry's army leapt afloat to win

Convincing triumphs over neighbour lands,

Vaster battalions press for further strands,

To argue in the selfsame bloody mode

Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,

Still fails to mend. – Now deckward tramp the bands,

Yellow as autumn leaves, alive as spring;

And as each host draws out upon the sea

Beyond which lies the tragical To-be,

None dubious of the cause, none murmuring,

Wives, sisters, parents, wave white hands and smile,

As if they knew not that they weep the while.

Departure

(Southampton Docks: October 1899)

While the far farewell music thins and fails,

And the broad bottoms rip the bearing brine –

All smalling slowly to the gray sea-line –

And each significant red smoke-shaft pales,

Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails,

Which shapes the late long tramp of mounting men

To seeming words that ask and ask again:

»How long, O striving Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels

Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,

That are as puppets in a playing hand? –

When shall the saner softer polities

Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land

And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand

Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?«

The Colonel's Soliloquy

(Southampton Docks: October 1899)

»The quay recedes. Hurrah! Ahead we go! ...

It's true I've been accustomed now to home,

And joints get rusty, and one's limbs may grow

More fit to rest than roam.

But I can stand as yet fair stress and strain;

There's not a little steel beneath the rust;

My years mount somewhat, but here's to't again!

And if I fall, I must.

God knows that for myself I have scanty care;

Past scrimmages have proved as much to all;

In Eastern lands and South I have had my share

Both of the blade and ball.

And where those villains ripped me in the flitch

With their old iron in my early time,

I'm apt at change of wind to feel a twitch,

Or at a change of clime.

And what my mirror shows me in the morning

Has more of blotch and wrinkle than of bloom;

My eyes, too, heretofore all glasses scorning,

Have just a touch of rheum. ...

Now sounds ›The Girl I've left behind me‹, – Ah,

The years, the ardours, wakened by that tune!

Time was when, with the crowd's farewell ›Hurrah!‹

'Twould lift me to the moon.

But now it's late to leave behind me one

Who if, poor soul, her man goes underground,

Will not recover as she might have done

In days when hopes abound.

She's waving from the wharfside, palely grieving,

As down we draw. ... Her tears make little show,

Yet now she suffers more than at my leaving

Some twenty years ago!

I pray those left at home will care for her;

I shall come back; I have before; though when

The Girl you leave behind you is a grandmother,

Things may not be as then.«

The Going of the Battery

Wives' Lament

(2 November 1899)

I

O it was sad enough, weak enough, mad enough –

Light in their loving as soldiers can be –

First to risk choosing them, leave alone losing them

Now, in far battle, beyond the South Sea! ...

II

– Rain came down drenchingly; but we unblenchingly

Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire,

They stepping steadily – only too readily! –

Scarce as if stepping brought parting-time nigher.

III

Great guns were gleaming there, living things seeming there,

Cloaked in their tar-cloths, upmouthed to the night;

Wheels wet and yellow from axle to felloe,

Throats blank of sound, but prophetic to sight.

IV

Gas-glimmers drearily, blearily, eerily

Lit our pale faces outstretched for one kiss,

While we stood prest to them, with a last quest to them

Not to court perils that honour could miss.

V

Sharp were those sighs of ours, blinded these eyes of ours,

When at last moved away under the arch

All we loved. Aid for them each woman prayed for them,

Treading back slowly the track of their march.

VI

Some one said: »Nevermore will they come: evermore

Are they now lost to us.« O it was wrong!

Though may be hard their ways, some Hand will guard their ways,

Bear them through safely, in brief time or long.

VII

– Yet, voices haunting us, daunting us, taunting us,

Hint in the night-time when life beats are low

Other and graver things. ... Hold we to braver things,

Wait we, in trust, what Time's fulness shall show.

At the War Office, London

(Affixing the Lists of Killed and Wounded: December 1899)

I

Last year I called this world of gaingivings

The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly

If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly,

So charged it seemed with circumstance that brings

The tragedy of things.

II

Yet at that censured time no heart was rent

Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter

By hourly posted sheets of scheduled slaughter;

Death waited Nature's wont; Peace smiled unshent

From Ind to Occident.

A Christmas Ghost-Story

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies – your countryman.

Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,

And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans

Nightly to clear Canopus: »I would know

By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law

Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,

Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?

And what of logic or of truth appears

In tacking ›Anno Domini‹ to the years?

Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,

But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.«

Drummer Hodge

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined – just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

That breaks the veldt around;

And foreign constellations west

Each night above his mound.

II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

Fresh from his Wessex home –

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge for ever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellations reign

His stars eternally.

A Wife in London

(December 1899)

I

She sits in the tawny vapour

That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled,

Behind whose webby fold on fold

Like a waning taper

The street-lamp glimmers cold.

A messenger's knock cracks smartly,

Flashed news is in her hand

Of meaning it dazes to understand

Though shaped so shortly:

He – has fallen – in the far South Land. ...

II

'Tis the morrow; the fog hangs thicker,

The postman nears and goes:

A letter is brought whose lines disclose

By the firelight flicker

His hand, whom the worm now knows:

Fresh – firm – penned in highest feather –

Page-full of his hoped return,

And of home-planned jaunts by brake and burn

In the summer weather,

And of new love that they would learn.

The Souls of the Slain

I

The thick lids of Night closed upon me

Alone at the Bill

Of the Isle by the Race32 –

Many-caverned, bald, wrinkled of face –

And with darkness and silence the spirit was on me

To brood and be still.

II

No wind fanned the flats of the ocean,

Or promontory sides,

Or the ooze by the strand,

Or the bent-bearded slope of the land,

Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion

Of criss-crossing tides.

III

Soon from out of the Southward seemed nearing

A whirr, as of wings

Waved by mighty-vanned flies,

Or by night-moths of measureless size,

And in softness and smoothness well-nigh beyond hearing

Of corporal things.

IV

And they bore to the bluff, and alighted –

A dim-discerned train

Of sprites without mould,

Frameless souls none might touch or might hold –

On the ledge by the turreted lantern, far-sighted

By men of the main.

V

And I heard them say »Home!« and I knew them

For souls of the felled

On the earth's nether bord

Under Capricorn, whither they'd warred,

And I neared in my awe, and gave heedfulness to them

With breathings inheld.

VI

Then, it seemed, there approached from the northward

A senior soul-flame

Of the like filmy hue:

And he met them and spake: »Is it you,

O my men?« Said they, »Aye! We bear homeward and hearthward

To feast on our fame!«

VII

»I've flown there before you,« he said then:

»Your households are well;

But – your kin linger less

On your glory and war-mightiness

Than on dearer things.« – »Dearer?« cried these from the dead then,

»Of what do they tell?«

VIII

»Some mothers muse sadly, and murmur

Your doings as boys –

Recall the quaint ways

Of your babyhood's innocent days.

Some pray that, ere dying, your faith had grown firmer,

And higher your joys.

IX

A father broods: ›Would I had set him

To some humble trade,

And so slacked his high fire,

And his passionate martial desire;

And told him no stories to woo him and whet him

To this dire crusade!‹«

X

»And, General, how hold out our sweethearts,

Sworn loyal as doves?«

– »Many mourn; many think

It is not unattractive to prink

Them in sables for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts

Have found them new loves.«

XI

»And our wives?« quoth another resignedly,

»Dwell they on our deeds?«

– »Deeds of home; that live yet

Fresh as new – deeds of fondness or fret;

Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly,

These, these have their heeds.«

XII

– »Alas! then it seems that our glory

Weighs less in their thought

Than our old homely acts,

And the long-ago commonplace facts

Of our lives – held by us as scarce part of our story,

And rated as nought!«

XIII

Then bitterly some: »Was it wise now

To raise the tomb-door

For such knowledge? Away!«

But the rest: »Fame we prized till to-day;

Yet that hearts keep us green for old kindness we prize now

A thousand times more!«

XIV

Thus speaking, the trooped apparitions

Began to disband

And resolve them in two:

Those whose record was lovely and true

Bore to northward for home: those of bitter traditions

Again left the land,

XV

And, towering to seaward in legions,

They paused at a spot

Overbending the Race –

That engulphing, ghast, sinister place –

Whither headlong they plunged, to the fathomless regions

Of myriads forgot.

XVI

And the spirits of those who were homing

Passed on, rushingly,

Like the Pentecost Wind;

And the whirr of their wayfaring thinned

And surceased on the sky, and but left in the gloaming

Sea-mutterings and me.

Song of the Soldiers' Wives and Sweethearts

I

At last! In sight of home again,

Of home again;

No more to range and roam again

As at that bygone time?

No more to go away from us

And stay from us? –

Dawn, hold not long the day from us,

But quicken it to prime!

II

Now all the town shall ring to them,

Shall ring to them,

And we who love them cling to them

And clasp them joyfully;

And cry, »O much we'll do for you

Anew for you,

Dear Loves! – aye, draw and hew for you,

Come back from oversea.«

III

Some told us we should meet no more,

Yea, meet no more! –

Should wait, and wish, but greet no more

Your faces round our fires;

That, in a while, uncharily

And drearily

Men gave their lives – even wearily,

Like those whom living tires.

IV

And now you are nearing home again,

Dears, home again;

No more, may be, to roam again

As at that bygone time,

Which took you far away from us

To stay from us;

Dawn, hold not long the day from us,

But quicken it to prime!

The Sick Battle-God

I

In days when men found joy in war,

A God of Battles sped each mortal jar;

The peoples pledged him heart and hand,

From Israel's land to isles afar.

II

His crimson form, with clang and chime,

Flashed on each murk and murderous meeting-time,

And kings invoked, for rape and raid,

His fearsome aid in rune and rhyme.

III

On bruise and blood-hole, scar and seam,

On blade and bolt, he flung his fulgid beam:

His haloes rayed the very gore,

And corpses wore his glory-gleam.

IV

Often an early King or Queen,

And storied hero onward, caught his sheen;

'Twas glimpsed by Wolfe, by Ney anon,

And Nelson on his blue demesne.

V

But new light spread. That god's gold nimb

And blazon have waned dimmer and more dim;

Even his flushed form begins to fade,

Till but a shade is left of him.

VI

That modern meditation broke

His spell, that penmen's pleadings dealt a stroke,

Say some; and some that crimes too dire

Did much to mire his crimson cloak.

VII

Yea, seeds of crescent sympathy

Were sown by those more excellent than he,

Long known, though long contemned till then –

The gods of men in amity.

VIII

Souls have grown seers, and thought outbrings

The mournful many-sidedness of things

With foes as friends, enfeebling ires

And fury-fires by gaingivings!

IX

He rarely gladdens champions now;

They do and dare, but tensely – pale of brow;

And would they fain uplift the arm

Of that weak form they know not how.

X

Yet wars arise, though zest grows cold;

Wherefore, at times, as if in ancient mould

He looms, bepatched with paint and lath;

But never hath he seemed the old!

XI

Let men rejoice, let men deplore,

The lurid Deity of heretofore

Succumbs to one of saner nod;

The Battle-god is god no more.

Poems of Pilgrimage

Genoa and the Mediterranean

(March 1887)

O epic-famed, god-haunted Central Sea,

Heave careless of the deep wrong done to thee

When from Torino's track I saw thy face first flash on me.

And multimarbled Genova the Proud,

Gleam all unconscious how, wide-lipped, up-browed,

I first beheld thee clad – not as the Beauty but the Dowd.

Out from a deep-delved way my vision lit

On housebacks pink, green, ochreous – where a slit

Shoreward 'twixt row and row revealed the classic blue through it.

And thereacross waved fishwives' high-hung smocks,

Chrome kerchiefs, scarlet hose, darned underfrocks;

Often since when my dreams of thee, O Queen, that frippery mocks:

Whereat I grieve, Superba! ... Afterhours

Within Palazzo Doria's orange bowers

Went far to mend these marrings of thy soul-subliming powers.

But, Queen, such squalid undress none should see,

Those dream-endangering eyewounds no more be

Where lovers first behold thy form in pilgrimage to thee.

Shelley's Skylark

(The neighbourhood of Leghorn: March 1887)

Somewhere afield here something lies

In Earth's oblivious eyeless trust

That moved a poet to prophecies –

A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust:

The dust of the lark that Shelley heard,

And made immortal through times to be; –

Though it only lived like another bird,

And knew not its immortality:

Lived its meek life; then, one day, fell –

A little ball of feather and bone;

And how it perished, when piped farewell,

And where it wastes, are alike unknown.

Maybe it rests in the loam I view,

Maybe it throbs in a myrtle's green,

Maybe it sleeps in the coming hue

Of a grape on the slopes of yon inland scene.

Go find it, faeries, go and find

That tiny pinch of priceless dust,

And bring a casket silver-lined,

And framed of gold that gems encrust;

And we will lay it safe therein,

And consecrate it to endless time;

For it inspired a bard to win

Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme.

In the Old Theatre, Fiesole

(April 1887)

I traced the Circus whose gray stones incline

Where Rome and dim Etruria interjoin,

Till came a child who showed an ancient coin

That bore the image of a Constantine.

She lightly passed; nor did she once opine

How, better than all books, she had raised for me

In swift perspective Europe's history

Through the vast years of Cæsar's sceptred line.

For in my distant plot of English loam

'Twas but to delve, and straightway there to find

Coins of like impress. As with one half blind

Whom common simples cure, her act flashed home

In that mute moment to my opened mind

The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome.

Rome: On the Palatine

(April 1887)

We walked where Victor Jove was shrined awhile,

And passed to Livia's rich red mural show,

Whence, thridding cave and Criptoportico,

We gained Caligula's dissolving pile.

And each ranked ruin tended to beguile

The outer sense, and shape itself as though

It wore its marble gleams, its pristine glow

Of scenic frieze and pompous peristyle.

When lo, swift hands, on strings nigh overhead,

Began to melodize a waltz by Strauss:

It stirred me as I stood, in Cæsar's house,

Raised the old routs Imperial lyres had led,

And blended pulsing life with lives long done,

Till Time seemed fiction, Past and Present one.

Rome

Building a New Street in the Ancient Quarter

(April 1887)

These umbered cliffs and gnarls of masonry

Outskeleton Time's central city, Rome;

Whereof each arch, entablature, and dome

Lies bare in all its gaunt anatomy.

And cracking frieze and rotten metope

Express, as though they were an open tome

Top-lined with caustic monitory gnome;

»Dunces, Learn here to spell Humanity!«

And yet within these ruins' very shade

The singing workmen shape and set and join

Their frail new mansion's stuccoed cove and quoin

With no apparent sense that years abrade,

Though each rent wall their feeble works invade

Once shamed all such in power of pier and groin.

Rome

The Vatican: Sala delle Muse

(1887)

I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the day,

And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away,

And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun,

Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One.

She looked not this nor that of those beings divine,

But each and the whole – an essence of all the Nine;

With tentative foot she neared to my halting-place,

A pensive smile on her sweet, small, marvellous face.

»Regarded so long, we render thee sad?« said she.

»Not you,« sighed I, »but my own inconstancy!

I worship each and each; in the morning one,

And then, alas! another at sink of sun.

To-day my soul clasps Form; but where is my troth

Of yesternight with Tune: can one cleave to both?«

– »Be not perturbed,« said she. »Though apart in fame,

As I and my sisters are one, those, too, are the same.«

– »But my love goes further – to Story, and Dance, and Hymn,

The lover of all in a sun-sweep is fool to whim –

Is swayed like a river-weed as the ripples run!«

– »Nay, wooer, thou sway'st not. These are but phases of one;

And that one is I; and I am projected from thee,

One that out of thy brain and heart thou causest to be –

Extern to thee nothing. Grieve not, nor thyself becall,

Woo where thou wilt; and rejoice thou canst love at all!«

Rome

At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats

(1887)

Who, then, was Cestius,

And what is he to me? –

Amid thick thoughts and memories multitudinous

One thought alone brings he.

I can recall no word

Of anything he did;

For me he is a man who died and was interred

To leave a pyramid

Whose purpose was exprest

Not with its first design,

Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest

Two countrymen of mine.

Cestius in life, maybe,

Slew, breathed out threatening;

I know not. This I know: in death all silently

He does a finer thing,

In beckoning pilgrim feet

With marble finger high

To where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street,

Those matchless singers lie. ...

– Say, then, he lived and died

That stones which bear his name

Should mark, through Time, where two immortal Shades abide;

It is an ample fame.

Lausanne

In Gibbon's Old Garden: 11-12 p.m.

27 June 1897

(The 110th anniversary of the completion of the »Decline and Fall« at the same hour and place)

A spirit seems to pass,

Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand:

He contemplates a volume in his hand,

And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias.

Anon the book is closed,

With »It is finished!« And at the alley's end

He turns, and when on me his glances bend

As from the Past comes speech – small, muted, yet composed.

»How fares the Truth now? – Ill?

– Do pens but slily further her advance?

May one not speed her but in phrase askance?

Do scribes aver the Comic to be Reverend still?

Still rule those minds on earth

At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:

›Truth like a bastard comes into the world

Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth‹?«

Zermatt

To the Matterhorn

(June-July 1897)

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,

Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,

Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,

And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done,

And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight

To that day's tragic feat of manly might,

As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon

Thou didst behold the planets lift and lower;

Saw'st, maybe, Joshua's pausing sun and moon,

And the betokening sky when Cæsar's power

Approached its bloody end; yea, even that Noon

When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

The Bridge of Lodi33

(Spring 1887)

I

When of tender mind and body,

I was moved by minstrelsy,

And that air »The Bridge of Lodi«

Brought a strange delight to me.

II

In the battle-breathing jingle

Of its forward-footing tune

I could see the armies mingle,

And the columns crushed and hewn

III

On that far-famed spot by Lodi

Where Napoleon clove his way

To his fame, when like a god he

Bent the nations to his sway.

IV

Hence the tune came capering to me

While I traced the Rhone and Po;

Nor could Milan's Marvel woo me

From the spot englamoured so.

V

And to-day, sunlit and smiling,

Here I stand upon the scene,

With its saffron walls, dun tiling,

And its meads of maiden green,

VI

Even as when the trackway thundered

With the charge of grenadiers,

And the blood of forty hundred

Splashed its parapets and piers. ...

VII

Any ancient crone I'd toady

Like a lass in young-eyed prime,

Could she tell some tale of Lodi

At that moving mighty time.

VIII

So, I ask the wives of Lodi

For traditions of that day;

But, alas! not anybody

Seems to know of such a fray.

IX

And they heed but transitory

Marketings in cheese and meat,

Till I judge that Lodi's story

Is extinct in Lodi's street.

X

Yet while here and there they thrid them

In their zest to sell and buy,

Let me sit me down amid them

And behold those thousands die. ...

XI

– Not a creature cares in Lodi

How Napoleon swept each arch,

Or where up and downward trod he,

Or for his outmatching march!

XII

So that wherefore should I be here,

Watching Adda lip the lea,

When the whole romance to see here

Is the dream I bring with me?

XIII

And why sing »The Bridge of Lodi«

As I sit thereon and swing,

When none shows by smile or nod he

Guesses why or what I sing? ...

XIV

Since all Lodi, low and head ones,

Seem to pass that story by,

It may be the Lodi-bred ones

Rate it truly, and not I.

XV

Once engrossing Bridge of Lodi,

Is thy claim to glory gone?

Must I pipe a palinody,

Or be silent thereupon?

XVI

And if here, from strand to steeple,

Be no stone to fame the fight,

Must I say the Lodi people

Are but viewing war aright? ...

XVII

Nay; I'll sing »The Bridge of Lodi« –

That long-loved, romantic thing,

Though none show by smile or nod he

Guesses why and what I sing!

On an Invitation to the United States

I

My ardours for emprize nigh lost

Since Life has bared its bones to me,

I shrink to seek a modern coast

Whose riper times have yet to be;

Where the new regions claim them free

From that long drip of human tears

Which peoples old in tragedy

Have left upon the centuried years.

II

For, wonning in these ancient lands,

Enchased and lettered as a tomb,

And scored with prints of perished hands,

And chronicled with dates of doom,

Though my own Being bear no bloom

I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,

Give past exemplars present room,

And their experience count as mine.

Miscellaneous Poems

The Mother Mourns

When mid-autumn's moan shook the night-time,

And sedges were horny,

And summer's green wonderwork faltered

On leaze and in lane,

I fared Yell'ham-Firs way, where dimly

Came wheeling around me

Those phantoms obscure and insistent

That shadows unchain.

Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me

A low lamentation,

As though from a tree-god disheartened,

Perplexed, or in pain.

And, heeding, it awed me to gather

That Nature herself there

Was breathing in aëry accents,

With dirge-like refrain,

Weary plaint that Mankind, in these late days,

Had grieved her by holding

Her ancient high fame of perfection

In doubt and disdain. ...

– »I had not proposed me a Creature

(She soughed) so excelling

All else of my kingdom in compass

And brightness of brain

As to read my defects with a god-glance,

Uncover each vestige

Of old inadvertence, annunciate

Each flaw and each stain!

My purpose went not to develop

Such insight in Earthland;

Such potent appraisements affront me,

And sadden my reign!

Why loosened I olden control here

To mechanize skywards,

Undeeming great scope could outshape in

A globe of such grain?

Man's mountings of mindsight I checked not,

Till range of his vision

Now tops my intent, and finds blemish

Throughout my domain.

He holds as inept his own soul-shell –

My deftest achievement –

Contemns me for fitful inventions

Ill-timed and inane:

No more sees my sun as a Sanct-shape,

My moon as the Night-queen,

My stars as august and sublime ones

That influences rain:

Reckons gross and ignoble my teaching,

Immoral my story,

My love-lights a lure that my species

May gather and gain.

›Give me,‹ he has said, ›but the matter

And means the gods lot her,

My brain could evolve a creation

More seemly, more sane.‹

If ever a naughtiness seized me

To woo adulation

From creatures more keen than those crude ones

That first formed my train –

If inly a moment I murmured,

›The simple praise sweetly,

But sweetlier the sage‹ – and did rashly

Man's vision unrein,

I rue it! ... His guileless forerunners,

Whose brains I could blandish,

To measure the deeps of my mysteries

Applied them in vain.

From them my waste aimings and futile

I subtly could cover;

›Every best thing,‹ said they, ›to best purpose

Her powers preordain.‹ –

No more such! ...