WESSEX HEIGHTS (1896)

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend— Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend: Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I, But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways— Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days: They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things— Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was, And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon, Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune; I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There’s a ghost at Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night, There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin lipped and vague, in a shroud of white, There is one in the railway-train whenever I do not want it near, I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west, Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest, Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me, And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.

I shall rot here, with those whom in their day You never knew, And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay, Met not my view, Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Some organ may resound on Sunday noons By where you lie, Some other thrill the panes with other tunes Where moulder I; No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

The simply-cut memorial at my head Perhaps may take A Gothic form, and that above your bed Be Greek in make; No linking symbol show thereon for our tale’s sake.

And in the monotonous moils of strained, hard-run Humanity, The eternal tie which binds us twain in one No eye will see Stretching across the miles that sever you from me.

I look upon the map that hangs by me— Its shires and towns and rivers lined in varnished artistry— And I mark a jutting height Coloured purple, with a margin of blue sea.

—’Twas a day of latter summer, hot and dry; Ay, even the waves seemed drying as we walked on, she and I, By this spot where, calmly quite, She informed me what would happen by and by.

This hanging map depicts the coast and place, And resuscitates therewith our unexpected troublous case All distinctly to my sight, And her tension, and the aspect of her face.

Weeks and weeks we had loved beneath that blazing blue, Which had lost the art of raining, as her eyes to-day had too, While she told what, as by sleight, Shot our firmament with rays of ruddy hue.

For the wonder and the wormwood of the whole Was that what in realms of reason would have joyed our double soul Wore a torrid tragic light Under order-keeping’s rigorous control.

So, the map revives her words, the spot, the time, And the thing we found we had to face before the next year’s prime; The charted coast stares bright, And its episode comes back in pantomime.

Where we made the fire, In the summer time, Of branch and briar On the hill to the sea I slowly climb Through winter mire, And scan and trace The forsaken place Quite readily.

Now a cold wind blows, And the grass is gray, But the spot still shows As a burnt circle—aye, And stick-ends, charred, Still strew the sward Whereon I stand, Last relic of the band Who came that day!

Yes, I am here Just as last year, And the sea breathes brine From its strange straight line Up hither, the same As when we four came. —But two have wandered far From this grassy rise Into urban roar Where no picnics are, And one—has shut her eyes For evermore.

Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim; Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams Upon my nearing vision, less it seems A looming Alp-height than a guise of him Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb, Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe, Of semblance to his personality In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.

At his last change, when Life’s dull coils unwind, Will he, in old love, hitherward escape, And the eternal essence of his mind Enter this silent adamantine shape, And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?

In this fair niche above the unslumbering sea, That sentrys up and down all night, all day, From cove to promontory, from ness to bay, The Fates have fitly bidden that he should be Pillowed eternally.

—It was as though a garland of red roses Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes, Upon Victoria’s formal middle time His leaves of rhythm and rhyme.

O that far morning of a summer day When, down a terraced street whose pavements lay Glassing the sunshine into my bent eyes, I walked and read with a quick glad surprise New words, in classic guise,—

The passionate pages of his earlier years, Fraught with hot sighs, sad laughters, kisses, tears; Fresh-fluted notes, yet from a minstrel who Blew them not naïvely, but as one who knew Full well why thus he blew.

I still can hear the brabble and the roar At those thy tunes, O still one, now passed through That fitful fire of tongues then entered new! Their power is spent like spindrift on this shore; Thine swells yet more and more.

—His singing-mistress verily was no other Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother Of all the tribe that feel in melodies; Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep Into the rambling world-encircling deep Which hides her where none sees.

And one can hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water’s brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing of her and him.

One dreams him sighing to her spectral form: “O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line; Where are those songs, O poetess divine Whose very arts are love incarnadine?” And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm, Sufficient now are thine.” . . .

So here, beneath the waking constellations, Where the waves peal their everlasting strains, And their dull subterrene reverberations Shake him when storms make mountains of their plains— Him once their peer in sad improvisations, And deft as wind to cleave their frothy manes— I leave him, while the daylight gleam declines Upon the capes and chines.

When you slowly emerged from the den of Time, And gained percipience as you grew, And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,

Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you The unhappy need of creating me— A form like your own—for praying to?

My virtue, power, utility, Within my maker must all abide, Since none in myself can ever be,

One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet, And by none but its showman vivified.

“Such a forced device,” you may say, “is meet For easing a loaded heart at whiles: Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

Somewhere above the gloomy aisles Of this wailful world, or he could not bear The irk no local hope beguiles.”

—But since I was framed in your first despair The doing without me has had no play In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day Beneath the deicide eyes of seers In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears, The truth should be told, and the fact be faced That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed On the human heart’s resource alone, In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown, And visioned help unsought, unknown.

I saw a slowly-stepping train— Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar— Following in files across a twilit plain A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

And by contagious throbs of thought Or latent knowledge that within me lay And had already stirred me, I was wrought To consciousness of sorrow even as they.

The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes, At first seemed man-like, and anon to change To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size, At times endowed with wings of glorious range.

And this phantasmal variousness Ever possessed it as they drew along: Yet throughout all it symboled none the less Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.

Almost before I knew I bent Towards the moving columns without a word; They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went, Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard:—

“O man-projected Figure, of late Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive? Whence came it we were tempted to create One whom we can no longer keep alive?

“Framing him jealous, fierce, at first, We gave him justice as the ages rolled, Will to bless those by circumstance accurst, And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

“And, tricked by our own early dream And need of solace, we grew self-deceived, Our making soon our maker did we deem, And what we had imagined we believed.

“Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing, Uncompromising rude reality Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning, Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

“So, toward our myth’s oblivion, Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon, Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

“How sweet it was in years far hied To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer, To lie down liegely at the eventide And feel a blest assurance he was there!

“And who or what shall fill his place? Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes For some fixed star to stimulate their pace Towards the goal of their enterprise?” . . .

Some in the background then I saw, Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous, Who chimed as one: “This figure is of straw, This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!”

I could not prop their faith: and yet Many I had known: with all I sympathized; And though struck speechless, I did not forget That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

Still, how to bear such loss I deemed The insistent question for each animate mind, And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

Whereof to lift the general night, A certain few who stood aloof had said, “See you upon the horizon that small light— Swelling somewhat?” Each mourner shook his head.

And they composed a crowd of whom Some were right good, and many nigh the best . . . Thus dazed and puzzled ’twixt the gleam and gloom Mechanically I followed with the rest.

“It is not death that harrows us,” they lipped, “The soundless cell is in itself relief, For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped At unawares, and at its best but brief.”

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone, Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye, As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead, They should not, like the many, be at rest, But stray as apparitions; hence I said, “Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

“We are among the few death sets not free, The hurt, misrepresented names, who come At each year’s brink, and cry to History To do them justice, or go past them dumb.

“We are stript of rights; our shames lie unredressed, Our deeds in full anatomy are not shown, Our words in morsels merely are expressed On the scriptured page, our motives blurred, unknown.”

Then all these shaken slighted visitants sped Into the vague, and left me musing there On fames that well might instance what they had said, Until the New-Year’s dawn strode up the air.

“Ah, are you digging on my grave My loved one?—planting rue?” —“No: yesterday he went to wed One of the brightest wealth has bred. ‘It cannot hurt her now,’ he said, ‘That I should not be true.’”

“Then who is digging on my grave? My nearest dearest kin?” —“Ah, no; they sit and think, ‘What use! What good will planting flowers produce? No tendance of her mound can loose Her spirit from Death’s gin.’”

“But some one digs upon my grave? My enemy?—prodding sly?” —“Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate That shuts on all flesh soon or late, She thought you no more worth her hate, And cares not where you lie.”

“Then, who is digging on my grave? Say—since I have not guessed!” —“O it is I, my mistress dear, Your little dog, who still lives near, And much I hope my movements here Have not disturbed your rest?”

“Ah, yes! You dig upon my grave . . . Why flashed it not on me That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind A dog’s fidelity!”

“Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting-place.”