Time's Laughingstocks and Other verses Read Online

1772-1857)

She told how they used to form for the country dances –

›The Triumph‹, ›The New-rigged Ship‹ –

To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,

And in cots to the blink of a dip.

She spoke of the wild ›poussetting‹ and ›allemanding‹

On carpet, on oak, and on sod;

And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing,

And the figures the couples trod.

She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted,

And where the bandsmen stood

While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted

To choose each other for good.

She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded

Of the death of the King of France:

Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte's unbounded

Ambition and arrogance.

Of how his threats woke warlike preparations

Along the southern strand,

And how each night brought tremors and trepidations

Lest morning should see him land.

She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking

As it swayed in the lightning flash,

Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child's shrieking

At the cart-tail under the lash. ...

With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers –

We seated around her knees –

She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers,

But rather as one who sees.

She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant

So far that no tongue could hail:

Past things retold were to her as things existent,

Things present but as a tale.

She Hears the Storm

There was a time in former years –

While my roof-tree was his –

When I should have been distressed by fears

At such a night as this!

I should have murmured anxiously,

»The pricking rain strikes cold;

His road is bare of hedge or tree,

And he is getting old.«

But now the fitful chimney-roar,

The drone of Thorncombe trees,

The Froom in flood upon the moor,

The mud of Mellstock Leaze,

The candle slanting sooty-wick'd,

The thuds upon the thatch,

The eaves-drops on the window flicked,

The clacking garden-hatch,

And what they mean to wayfarers,

I scarcely heed or mind;

He has won that storm-tight roof of hers

Which Earth grants all her kind.

A Wet Night

I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,

Mile after mile out by the moorland way,

And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray

Into the lane, and round the corner tree;

Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,

And the enfeebled light dies out of day,

Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,

»This is a hardship to be calendared!«

Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,

When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,

And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,

Times numberless have trudged across this spot

In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,

And taking all such toils as trifles mere.

Before Life and After

A time there was – as one may guess

And as, indeed, earth's testimonies tell –

Before the birth of consciousness,

When all went well.

None suffered sickness, love, or loss,

None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;

None cared whatever crash or cross

Brought wrack to things.

If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,

If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;

If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,

No sense was stung.

But the disease of feeling germed,

And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;

Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed

How long, how long?

New Year's Eve

»I have finished another year,« said God,

»In grey, green, white, and brown;

I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,

Sealed up the worm within the clod,

And let the last sun down.«

»And what's the good of it?« I said,

»What reasons made you call

From formless void this earth we tread,

When nine-and-ninety can be read

Why nought should be at all?

Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ›who in

This tabernacle groan‹ –

If ever a joy be found herein,

Such joy no man had wished to win

If he had never known!«

Then he: »My labours – logicless –

You may explain; not I:

Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess

That I evolved a Consciousness

To ask for reasons why.

Strange that ephemeral creatures who

By my own ordering are,

Should see the shortness of my view,

Use ethic tests I never knew,

Or made provision for!«

He sank to raptness as of yore,

And opening New Year's Day

Wove it by rote as theretofore,

And went on working evermore

In his unweeting way.

God's Education

I saw him steal the light away

That haunted in her eye:

It went so gently none could say

More than that it was there one day

And missing by-and-by.

I watched her longer, and he stole

Her lily tincts and rose;

All her young sprightliness of soul

Next fell beneath his cold control,

And disappeared like those.

I asked: »Why do you serve her so?

Do you, for some glad day,

Hoard these her sweets –?« He said, »O no,

They charm not me; I bid Time throw

Them carelessly away.«

Said I: »We call that cruelty –

We, your poor mortal kind.«

He mused. »The thought is new to me.

Forsooth, though I men's master be,

Theirs is the teaching mind!«

To Sincerity

O sweet sincerity! –

Where modern methods be

What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying,

Its greens for ever graying,

Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it,

And riper seasons shown it,

But custom cries: »Disown it:

Say ye rejoice, though grieving,

Believe, while unbelieving,

Behold, without perceiving!«

– Yet, would men look at true things,

And unilluded view things,

And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming,

Facts better their foredeeming,

And Life its disesteeming.

Panthera

(For other forms of this legend – first met with in the second century – see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)

Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent,

I think of Panthera, who underwent

Much from insidious aches in his decline;

But his aches were not radical like mine;

They were the twinges of old wounds – the feel

Of the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel,

Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air,

Fingers and all, as if it still were there.

My pains are otherwise: upclosing cramps

And stiffened tendons from this country's damps,

Where Panthera was never commandant. –

The Fates sent him by way of the Levant.

He had been blithe in his young manhood's time,

And as centurion carried well his prime.

In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell,

He had seen service and had borne him well.

Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave;

Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow grave

When pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind

Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind;

And it was in the way of warning me

(By much his junior) against levity

That he recounted them; and one in chief

Panthera loved to set in bold relief.

This was a tragedy of his Eastern days,

Personal in touch – though I have sometimes thought

That touch a possible delusion – wrought

Of half-conviction carried to a craze –

His mind at last being stressed by ails and age: –

Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.

I had said it long had been a wish with me

That I might leave a scion – some small tree

As channel for my sap, if not my name –

Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim,

In whose advance I secretly could joy.

Thereat he warmed.

»Cancel such wishes, boy!

A son may be a comfort or a curse,

A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse –

A criminal. ... That I could testify!« ...

»Panthera has no guilty son!« cried I

All unbelieving. »Friend, you do not know,«

He darkly dropt: »True, I've none now to show,

For the law took him. Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!«

»This noon is not unlike,« he again began,

»The noon these pricking memories print on me –

Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red,

And I served in Judæa. ... 'Twas a date

Of rest for arms. The Pax Romana ruled,

To the chagrin of frontier legionaries!

Palestine was annexed – though sullen yet, –

I, being in age some two-score years and ten,

And having the garrison in Jerusalem

Part in my hands as acting officer

Under the Governor. A tedious time

I found it, of routine, amid a folk

Restless, contentless, and irascible. –

Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall,

Sending men forth on public meeting-days

To maintain order, were my duties there.

Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sun

Whitened the city and the hills around,

And every mountain-road that clambered them,

Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm,

And the rank cacti round the valley's sides.

The day was one whereon death-penalties

Were put in force, and here and there were set

The soldiery for order, as I said,

Since one of the condemned had raised some heat,

And crowds surged passionately to see him slain.

I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse,

With some half-company of auxiliaries,

Had captained the procession through the streets

When it came streaming from the judgment-hall

After the verdicts of the Governor.

It drew to the great gate of the northern way

That bears towards Damascus; and to a knoll

Upon the common, just beyond the walls –

Whence could be swept a wide horizon round

Over the housetops to the remotest heights.

Here was the public execution-ground

For city crimes, called then and doubtless now

Golgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.

The usual dooms were duly meted out;

Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed,

And no great stir occurred. A day of wont

It was to me, so far, and would have slid

Clean from my memory at its squalid close

But for an incident that followed these.

Among the tag-rag rabble of either sex

That hung around the wretches as they writhed,

Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye –

A weeping woman, whose strained countenance,

Sharpened against a looming livid cloud,

Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon –

The mother of one of those who suffered there

I had heard her called when spoken roughly to

By my ranged men for pressing forward so.

It stole upon me hers was a face I knew;

Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a while

Eluded me. And then at once it came.

Some thirty years or more before that noon

I was sub-captain of a company

Drawn from the legion of Calabria,

That marched up from Judæa north to Tyre.

We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel,

The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floor

Of Jew with Canaanite, and with the host

Of Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, met

While crossing there to strike the Assyrian pride.

We left behind Gilboa; passed by Nain;

Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the top

With arbute, terebinth, and locust growths.

Encumbering me were sundry sick, so fallen

Through drinking from a swamp beside the way;

But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge,

We dipt into a world of pleasantness –

A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon –

Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes

Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh.

In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where,

Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we made

To rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.

Here a day onward, towards the eventide,

Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic dance

Trod by their comrades, when the young women came

To fill their pitchers, as their custom was.

I proffered help to one – a slim girl, coy

Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.

Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins

That hung down by her banded beautiful hair,

Symboled in full immaculate modesty.

Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirred

To quick desire. 'Twas tedious timing out

The convalescence of the soldiery;

And I beguiled the long and empty days

By blissful yieldance to her sweet allure,

Who had no arts, but what out-arted all,

The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.

We met, and met, and under the winking stars

That passed which peoples earth – true union, yea,

To the pure eye of her simplicity.

Meanwhile the sick found health; and we pricked on.

I made her no rash promise of return,

As some do use; I was sincere in that;

I said we sundered never to meet again –

And yet I spoke untruth unknowingly! –

For meet again we did. Now, guess you aught?

The weeping mother on Calvaria

Was she I had known – albeit that time and tears

Had wasted rudely her once flowerlike form,

And her soft eyes, now swollen with sorrowing.

Though I betrayed some qualms, she marked me not;

And I was scarce of mood to comrade her

And close the silence of so wide a time

To claim a malefactor as my son –

(For so I guessed him). And inquiry made

Brought rumour how at Nazareth long before

An old man wedded her for pity's sake

On finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how,

Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.

Well; there it ended; save that then I learnt

That he – the man whose ardent blood was mine –

Had waked sedition long among the Jews,

And hurled insulting parlance at their god,

Whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill,

Vowing that he would raze it, that himself

Was god as great as he whom they adored,

And by descent, moreover, was their king;

With sundry other incitements to misrule.

The impalements done, and done the soldiers' game

Of raffling for the clothes, a legionary,

Longinus, pierced the young man with his lance

At signs from me, moved by his agonies

Through naysaying the drug they had offered him.

It brought the end. And when he had breathed his last

The woman went. I saw her never again. ...

Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend? –

That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy

So trustingly, you blink contingencies.

Fors Fortuna! He who goes fathering

Gives frightful hostages to hazardry!«

Thus Panthera's tale. 'Twas one he seldom told,

But yet it got abroad. He would unfold,

At other times, a story of less gloom,

Though his was not a heart where jests had room.

He would regret discovery of the truth

Was made too late to influence to ruth

The Procurator who had condemned his son –

Or rather him so deemed. For there was none

To prove that Panthera erred not: and indeed,

When vagueness of identity I would plead,

Panther himself would sometimes own as much –

Yet lothly. But, assuming fact was such,

That the said woman did not recognize

Her lover's face, is matter for surprise.

However, there's his tale, fantasy or otherwise.

Thereafter shone not men of Panthera's kind:

The indolent heads at home were ill-inclined

To press campaigning that would hoist the star

Of their lieutenants valorous afar.

Jealousies kept him irked abroad, controlled

And stinted by an Empire no more bold.

Yet in some actions southward he had share –

In Mauretania and Numidia; there

With eagle eye, and sword and steed and spur,

Quelling uprisings promptly. Some small stir

In Parthia next engaged him, until maimed,

As I have said; and cynic Time proclaimed

His noble spirit broken. What a waste

Of such a Roman! – one in youth-time graced

With indescribable charm, so I have heard,

Yea, magnetism impossible to word

When faltering as I saw him. What a fame,

O Son of Saturn, had adorned his name,

Might the Three so have urged Thee! – Hour by hour

His own disorders hampered Panthera's power

To brood upon the fate of those he had known,

Even of that one he always called his own –

Either in morbid dream or memory. ...

He died at no great age, untroublously,

An exit rare for ardent soldiers such as he.

The Unborn

I rose at night, and visited

The Cave of the Unborn:

And crowding shapes surrounded me

For tidings of the life to be,

Who long had prayed the silent Head

To haste its advent morn.

Their eyes were lit with artless trust,

Hope thrilled their every tone;

»A scene the loveliest, is it not?

A pure delight, a beauty-spot

Where all is gentle, true and just,

And darkness is unknown?«

My heart was anguished for their sake,

I could not frame a word;

And they descried my sunken face,

And seemed to read therein, and trace

The news that pity would not break,

Nor truth leave unaverred.

And as I silently retired

I turned and watched them still,

And they came helter-skelter out,

Driven forward like a rabble rout

Into the world they had so desired,

By the all-immanent Will.

The Man He Killed

»Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because –

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like – just as I –

Was out of work – had sold his traps –

No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.«

Geographical Knowledge

(A Memory of Christiana C––)

Where Blackmoor was, the road that led

To Bath, she could not show,

Nor point the sky that overspread

Towns ten miles off or so.

But that Calcutta stood this way,

Cape Horn there figured fell,

That here was Boston, here Bombay,

She could declare full well.

Less known to her the track athwart

Froom Mead or Yell'ham Wood

Than how to make some Austral port

In seas of surly mood.

She saw the glint of Guinea's shore

Behind the plum-tree nigh,

Heard old unruly Biscay's roar

In the weir's purl hard by. ...

»My son's a sailor, and he knows

All seas and many lands,

And when he's home he points and shows

Each country where it stands.

He's now just there – by Gib's high rock –

And when he gets, you see,

To Portsmouth here, behind the clock,

Then he'll come back to me!«

One Ralph Blossom Soliloquizes

(»It being deposed that vij women who were mayds before he knew them have been brought upon the towne [rates?] by the fornicacions of one Ralph Blossom, Mr.