RHYMES AND RHYTHMS

I

Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade On desolate sea and lonely sand, Out of the silence and the shade What is the voice of strange command Calling you still, as friend calls friend With love that cannot brook delay, To rise and follow the ways that wend Over the hills and far away?

Hark in the city, street on street A roaring reach of death and life, Of vortices that clash and fleet And ruin in appointed strife, Hark to it calling, calling clear, Calling until you cannot stay From dearer things than your own most dear Over the hills and far away.

Out of the sound of ebb and flow, Out of the sight of lamp and star, It calls you where the good winds blow, And the unchanging meadows are: From faded hopes and hopes agleam, It calls you, calls you night and day Beyond the dark into the dream Over the hills and far away.

II

A desolate shore, The sinister seduction of the Moon, The menace of the irreclaimable Sea.

Flaunting, tawdry and grim, From cloud to cloud along her beat, Leering her battered and inveterate leer, She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, Her horrible old man, Mumbling old oaths and warming His villainous old bones with villainous talk— The secrets of their grisly housekeeping Since they went out upon the pad In the first twilight of self-conscious Time: Growling, obscene and hoarse, Tales of unnumbered Ships, Goodly and strong, Companions of the Advance In some vile alley of the night Waylaid and bludgeoned— Dead.

Deep cellared in primeval ooze, Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled, They lie where the lean water-worm Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides Bulge with the slime of life. Thus they abide, Thus fouled and desecrate, The summons of the Trumpet, and the while These Twain, their murderers, Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued, Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft As in the shining streets, He as in ambush at some fetid stair.

The stalwart Ships, The beautiful and bold adventurers! Stationed out yonder in the isle, The tall Policeman, Flashing his bull’s-eye, as he peers About him in the ancient vacancy, Tells them this way is safety—this way home.

III (To R. F. B.)

We are the Choice of the Will: God, when He gave the word That called us into line, set in our hand a sword;

Set us a sword to wield none else could lift and draw, And bade us forth to the sound of the trumpet of the Law.

East and west and north, wherever the battle grew, As men to a feast we fared, the work of the Will to do.

Bent upon vast beginnings, bidding anarchy cease— (Had we hacked it to the Pit, we had left it a place of peace!)—

Marching, building, sailing, pillar of cloud or fire, Sons of the Will, we fought the fight of the Will, our sire.

Road was never so rough that we left its purpose dark; Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet more stark;

We tracked the winds of the world to the steps of their very thrones; The secret parts of the world were salted with our bones;

Till now the name of names, England, the name of might, Flames from the austral bounds to the ends of the northern night;

And the call of her morning drum goes in a girdle of sound, Like the voice of the sun in song, the great globe round and round;

And the shadow of her flag, when it shouts to the mother-breeze, Floats from shore to shore of the universal seas;

And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of her flowers, And the end of the road to Hell with the sense of her dews and showers!

Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and die, While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky?

For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their father’s debt, And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw was set:

And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none shall brave, Is but less strong than Time and the all-devouring Grave.

IV

It came with the threat of a waning moon And the wail of an ebbing tide, But many a woman has lived for less, And many a man has died; For life upon life took hold and passed, Strong in a fate set free, Out of the deep, into the dark, On for the years to be.

Between the gleam of a waning moon And the song of an ebbing tide, Chance upon chance of love and death Took wing for the world so wide. Leaf out of leaf is the way of the land, Wave out of wave of the sea; And who shall reckon what lives may live In the life that we bade to be?

V

Why, my heart, do we love her so? (Geraldine, Geraldine!)— Why does the great sea ebb and flow? Why does the round world spin? Geraldine, Geraldine, Bid me my life renew, What is it worth unless I win, Love—love and you?

Why, my heart, when we speak her name (Geraldine, Geraldine!), Throbs the word like a flinging flame?— Why does the spring begin? Geraldine, Geraldine, Bid me indeed to be, Open your heart and take us in, Love—love and me.

VI

Space and dread and the dark— Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling like a funeral train Of huge primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief; While in the haunting loneliness The far sea waits and wanders, with a sound As of the trailing skirts of Destiny Passing unseen To some immitigable end With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this Thrilling the wilderness to life As with the bodily shape of Fear? What but a desperate sense, A strong foreboding of those dim, Interminable continents, forlorn And many-silenced in a dusk Inviolable utterly, and dead As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life—life—let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!

Life—give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.

VII

There’s a regret So grinding, so immitigably sad, Remorse thereby feels tolerant, even glad. . . . Do you not know it yet?

For deeds undone Rankle, and snarl, and hunger for their due Till there seems naught so despicable as you In all the grin o’ the sun.

Like an old shoe The sea spurns and the land abhors, you lie About the beach of Time, till by-and-by Death, that derides you too—

Death, as he goes His ragman’s round, espies you, where you stray, With half-an-eye, and kicks you out of his way; And then—and then, who knows

But the kind Grave Turns on you, and you feel the convict Worm, In that black bridewell working out his term, Hanker and grope and crave?

‘Poor fool that might— That might, yet would not, dared not, let this be, Think of it, here and thus made over to me In the implacable night!’

And writhing, fain And like a lover, he his fill shall take Where no triumphant memory lives to make His obscene victory vain.

VIII (To J. A. C.)

Fresh from his fastnesses Wholesome and spacious, The north wind, the mad huntsman, Halloos on his white hounds Over the grey, roaring Reaches and ridges, The forest of ocean, The chace of the world. Hark to the peal Of the pack in full cry, As he thongs them before him Swarming voluminous, Weltering, wide-wallowing, Till in a ruining Chaos of energy, Hurled on their quarry, They crash into foam!

Old Indefatigable, Time’s right-hand man, the sea Laughs as in joy From his millions of wrinkles: Laughs that his destiny, Great with the greatness Of triumphing order, Shows as a dwarf By the strength of his heart And the might of his hands.

Master of masters, O maker of heroes, Thunder the brave, Irresistible message:— ‘Life is worth living Through every grain of it From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.’

IX

‘As like the Woman as you can’— (Thus the New Adam was beguiled)— ‘So shall you touch the Perfect Man’— (God in the Garden heard and smiled). ‘Your father perished with his day: ‘A clot of passions fierce and blind ‘He fought, he slew, he hacked his way: ‘Your muscles, Child, must be of mind.

‘The Brute that lurks and irks within, ‘How, till you have him gagged and bound, ‘Escape the foullest form of Sin?’ (God in the Garden laughed and frowned). ‘So vile, so rank, the bestial mood ‘In which the race is bid to be, ‘It wrecks the Rarer Womanhood: ‘Live, therefore, you, for Purity!

‘Take for your mate no buxom croup, ‘No girl all grace and natural will: ‘To make her happy were to stoop ‘From light to dark, from Good to Ill. ‘Choose one of whom your grosser make’— (God in the Garden laughed outright)— ‘The true refining touch may take ‘Till both attain Life’s highest height.

‘There, equal, purged of soul and sense, ‘Beneficent, high-thinking, just, ‘Beyond the appeal of Violence, ‘Incapable of common Lust, ‘In mental Marriage still prevail’— (God in the Garden hid His face)— ‘Till you achieve that Female-Male, ‘In Which shall culminate the race.

X

Midsummer midnight skies, Midsummer midnight influences and airs, The shining sensitive silver of the sea Touched with the strange-hued blazonings of dawn: And all so solemnly still I seem to hear The breathing of Life and Death, The secular Accomplices, Renewing the visible miracle of the world.

The wistful stars Shine like good memories. The young morning wind Blows full of unforgotten hours As over a region of roses. Life and Death Sound on—sound on. . . . And the night magical, Troubled yet comforting, thrills As if the Enchanted Castle at the heart Of the wood’s dark wonderment Swung wide his valves and filled the dim sea-banks With exquisite visitants: Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires With living looks intolerable, regrets Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child Heard from the grave: shapes of a Might-Have-Been— Beautiful, miserable, distraught— The Law no man may baffle denied and slew.

The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms . . . Glimmers . . . goes out . . . and there, O there where it fades, What grace, what glamour, what wild will, Transfigure the shadows? Whose, Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?

Ghosts—ghosts—the sapphirine air Teems with them even to the gleaming ends Of the wild day-spring! Ghosts, Everywhere—everywhere—till I and you At last—dear love, at last!— Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death, Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will.

XI

Gulls in an aëry morrice Gleam and vanish and gleam . . . The full sea, sleepily basking, Dreams under skies of dream.

Gulls in an aëry morrice Circle and swoop and close . . . Fuller and ever fuller The rose of the morning blows.

Gulls in an aëry morrice Frolicking float and fade . . . O the way of a bird in the sunshine, The way of a man with a maid!

XII

Some starlit garden grey with dew, Some chamber flushed with wine and fire, What matters where, so I and you Are worthy our desire?

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers For ungirt loin and lamp unlit; In front the unmanageable years, The trap upon the pit;

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds, The scandal of unnatural strife, The slur upon immortal needs, The treason done to life:

Arise! no more a living lie And with me quicken and control A memory that shall magnify The universal Soul.

XIII (To James McNeill Whistler)

Under a stagnant sky, Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom, The River, jaded and forlorn, Welters and wanders wearily—wretchedly—on; Yet in and out among the ribs Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles Of some dead lake-built city, fall of skulls, Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, Lingers to babble, to a broken tune (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!) So melancholy a soliloquy It sounds as it might tell The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, The terror of Time and Change and Death, That wastes this floating, transitory world.

What of the incantation That forced the huddled shapes on yonder short To take and wear the night Like a material majesty? That touched the shafts of wavering fire About this miserable welter and wash— (River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams!—) Into long, shining signals from the panes Of an enchanted pleasure-house Where life and life might live life lost in life For ever and evermore?

O Death! O Change! O Time! Without you, O the insufferable eyes Of these poor Might-Have-Beens, These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

XIV

Time and the Earth— The old Father and Mother— Their teeming accomplished, Their purpose fulfilled, Close with a smile For a moment of kindness Ere for the winter They settle to sleep.

Failing yet gracious, Slow pacing, soon homing, A patriarch that strolls Through the tents of his children, The Sun, as he journeys His round on the lower Ascents of the blue, Washes the roofs And the hillsides with clarity; Charms the dark pools Till they break into pictures; Scatters magnificent Alms to the beggar trees; Touches the mist-folk That crowd to his escort Into translucencies Radiant and ravishing, As with the visible Spirit of Summer Gloriously vaporised, Visioned in gold.

Love, though the fallen leaf Mark, and the fleeting light And the loud, loitering Footfall of darkness Sign, to the heart Of the passage of destiny, Here is the ghost Of a summer that lived for us, Here is a promise Of summers to be.

XV

You played and sang a snatch of song, A song that all-too well we knew; But whither had flown the ancient wrong; And was it really I and you? O since the end of life’s to live And pay in pence the common debt, What should it cost us to forgive Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice— Not new, not new, the words you said. You touched me off that famous poise, That old effect, of neck and head. Dear, was it really you and I? In truth the riddle’s ill to read, So many are the deaths we die Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

One with the ruined sunset, The strange forsaken sands, What is it waits and wanders And signs with desperate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight— Calls as its chance were vain? The cry of a gull sent seaward Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset, It walks them as its own, These dreary and desolate reaches . . . But O that it walked alone!

XVII CARMEN PATIBULARE (To H. S.)

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook And the rope of the Black Election, ’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule Can never achieve perfection: And ‘It’s O for the time of the New Sublime And the better than human way When the Wolf (poor beast) shall come to his own And the Rat shall have his day!’

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam And the power of provocation, You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit Till your thought is mere stupration: And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise, And how can we choose but fall, So long as the Hangman makes us dread And the Noose floats free for all?’

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign And the trick there’s no recalling, They will haggle and hew till they hack you through And at last they lay you sprawling: When ‘Hey! for the hour of the race in flower And the long good-bye to sin!’ And ‘Ho! for the fires of Hell gone out For the want of keeping in!’

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man And only his death can end you: They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw, But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the living rock of Law.

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork, When the spent sun reels and blunders Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit As it seethes in spate and thunders, Stern on the glare of the tortured air Your lines august shall gloom, And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed In the ruining roar of Doom.

XVIII (To M. E. H.)

When you wake in your crib, You, an inch of experience— Vaulted about With the wonder of darkness; Wailing and striving To reach from your feebleness Something you feel Will be good to and cherish you, Something you know And can rest upon blindly: O then a hand (Your mother’s, your mother’s!) By the fall of its fingers All knowledge, all power to you, Out of the dreary, Discouraging strangenesses Comes to and masters you, Takes you, and lovingly Woos you and soothes you Back, as you cling to it, Back to some comforting Corner of sleep.

So you wake in your bed, Having lived, having loved: But the shadows are there, And the world and its kingdoms Incredibly faded; And you grope in the Terror Above you and under For the light, for the warmth, The assurance of life; But the blasts are ice-born, And your heart is nigh burst With the weight of the gloom And the stress of your strangled And desperate endeavour: Sudden a hand— Mother, O Mother!— God at His best to you, Out of the roaring, Impossible silences, Falls on and urges you, Mightily, tenderly, Forth, as you clutch at it, Forth to the infinite Peace of the Grave.

XIX

O Time and Change, they range and range From sunshine round to thunder!— They glance and go as the great winds blow, And the best of our dreams drive under: For Time and Change estrange, estrange— And, now they have looked and seen us, O we that were dear we are all-too near With the thick of the world between us.

O Death and Time, they chime and chime Like bells at sunset falling!— They end the song, they right the wrong, They set the old echoes calling: For Death and Time bring on the prime Of God’s own chosen weather, And we lie in the peace of the Great Release As once in the grass together.

XX

The shadow of Dawn; Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams Of Life and Death and Sleep; Heard over gleaming flats the old unchanging sound Of the old unchanging Sea.

My soul and yours— O hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts, Into the ghostliness, The infinite and abounding solitudes, Beyond—O beyond!—beyond . . .

Here in the porch Upon the multitudinous silences Of the kingdoms of the grave, We twain are you and I—two ghosts Omnipotence Can touch no more—no more!

XXI

When the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves Exult in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves, Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife— Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before, When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore, Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong, Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire’s old song— O you envy the blessèd dead that can live no more!

XXII

Trees and the menace of night; Then a long, lonely, leaden mere Backed by a desolate fell As by a spectral battlement; and then, Low-brooding, interpenetrating all, A vast, grey, listless, inexpressive sky, So beggared, so incredibly bereft Of starlight and the song of racing worlds It might have bellied down upon the Void Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.

Hist! In the trees fulfilled of night (Night and the wretchedness of the sky) Is it the hurry of the rain? Or the noise of a drive of the Dead Streaming before the irresistible Will Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land Between their place and ours?

Like the forgetfulness Of the work-a-day world made visible, A mist falls from the melancholy sky: A messenger from some lost and loving soul, Hopeless, far wandered, dazed Here in the provinces of life, A great white moth fades miserably past.

Thro’ the trees in the strange dead night, Under the vast dead sky, Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell, And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.

XXIII (To P. A. G.)

Here they trysted, here they strayed, In the leafage dewy and boon, Many a man and many a maid, And the morn was merry June: ‘Death is fleet, Life is sweet,’ Sang the blackbird in the may; And the hour with flying feet While they dreamed was yesterday.

Many a maid and many a man Found the leafage close and boon; Many a destiny began— O the morn was merry June. Dead and gone, dead and gone, (Hark the blackbird in the may!), Life and Death went hurrying on, Cheek on cheek—and where were they?

Dust in dust engendering dust In the leafage fresh and boon, Man and maid fulfil their trust— Still the morn turns merry June. Mother Life, Father Death (O the blackbird in the may!), Each the other’s breath for breath, Fleet the times of the world away.

XXIV (To A. C.)

What should the Trees, Midsummer-manifold, each one, Voluminous, a labyrinth of life— What should such things of bulk and multitude Yield of their huge, unutterable selves, To the random importunity of Day, The blabbing journalist? Alert to snatch and publish hour by hour Their greenest hints, their leafiest privacies, How can he other than endure The ruminant irony that foists him off With broad-blown falsehoods, or the obviousness Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade, And disappearances of homing birds, And frolicsome freaks Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs?

Now, at the word Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night, Night of the many secrets, whose effect— Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread— Themselves alone may fully apprehend, They tremble and are changed: In each, the uncouth individual soul Looms forth and glooms Essential, and, their bodily presences Touched with inordinate significance, Wearing the darkness like the livery Of some mysterious and tremendous guild, They brood—they menace—they appal: Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they wring Wild hands of warning in the face Of some inevitable advance of doom: Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing, As in some monstrous market-place, They pass the news, these Gossips of the Prime, In that old speech their forefathers Learned on the lawns of Eden, ere they heard The troubled voice of Eve Naming the wondering folk of Paradise.

Your sense is sealed, or you should hear them tell The tale of their dim life and all Its compost of experience: how the Sun Spreads them their daily feast, Sumptuous, of light, firing them as with wine; Of the old Moon’s fitful solicitude And those mild messages the Stars Descend in silver silences and dews; Or what the buxom West, Wanton with wading in the swirl of the wheat, Said, and their leafage laughed; And how the wet-winged Angel of the Rain Came whispering . . . whispering; and the gifts of the Year— The sting of the stirring sap Under the wizardry of the young-eyed Spring, Their summer amplitudes of pomp And rich autumnal melancholy, and the shrill, Embittered housewifery Of the lean Winter: all such things, And with them all the goodness of the Master Whose right hand blesses with increase and life, Whose left hand honours with decay and death.

So, under the constraint of Night, These gross and simple creatures, Each in his scores of rings, which rings are years, A servant of the Will. And God, the Craftsman, as He walks The floor of His workshop, hearkens, full of cheer In thus accomplishing The aims of His miraculous artistry.

XXV

What have I done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England my own? With your glorious eyes austere, As the Lord were walking near, Whispering terrible things and dear As the Song on your bugles blown, England— Round the world on your bugles blown!

Where shall the watchful Sun, England, my England, Match the master-work you’ve done, England my own? When shall he rejoice agen Such a breed of mighty men As come forward, one to ten, To the Song on your bugles blown, England— Down the years on your bugles blown?

Ever the faith endures, England, my England:— ‘Take and break us: we are yours, ‘England, my own! ‘Life is good, and joy runs high ‘Between English earth and sky: ‘Death is death; but we shall die ‘To the Song on your bugles blown, ‘England— ‘To the stars on your bugles blown!’

They call you proud and hard, England, my England: You with worlds to watch and ward, England, my own! You whose mailed hand keeps the keys Of such teeming destinies You could know nor dread nor ease Were the Song on your bugles blown, England, Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

Mother of Ships whose might, England, my England, Is the fierce old Sea’s delight, England, my own, Chosen daughter of the Lord, Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword, There’s the menace of the Word In the Song on your bugles blown, England— Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty