Part 1 (2/2)

AH G.o.d, life, law, so many names you keep, You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep That does inform this various dream of living, You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving Us out as dreams, you august Sleep Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all time,

The constellations, your great heart, the sun Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain; Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon

For when at night, from out the full surcharge Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw The harvest, the spent action to itself; Leaves me unburdened to begin again; At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep, Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands Complain of what the day has had them do?

Never let it be said I was poltroon At this my task of living, this my dream, This me which rises from the dark of sleep In white flesh robed to drape another dream, As lightning comes all white and trembling From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over, In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep, And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.

If so the Vast, the G.o.d, the Sleep that still grows richer Have said that I, this mote in the body of sleep Must in my transiency pa.s.s all through pain, Must be a dream of grief, must like a crude Dull meteorite flash only into light When tearing through the anguish of this life, Still in full flight extinct, shall I then turn Poltroon, and beg the silent, outspread G.o.d To alter my one speck of doom, when round me burns The whole great conflagration of all life, Lapped like a body close upon a sleep, Hiding and covering in the eternal Sleep Within the immense and toilsome life-time, heaved With ache of dreams that body forth the Sleep?

Shall I, less than the least red grain of flesh Within my body, cry out to the dreaming soul That slowly labours in a vast travail, To halt the heart, divert the streaming flow That carries moons along, and spare the stress That crushes me to an unseen atom of fire?

When pain and all And grief are but the same last wonder, Sleep Rising to dream in me a small keen dream Of sudden anguish, sudden over and spent--

CROYDON

_DON JUAN_

IT is Isis the mystery Must be in love with me.

Here this round ball of earth Where all the mountains sit Solemn in groups, And the bright rivers flit Round them for girth.

Here the trees and troops Darken the s.h.i.+ning gra.s.s, And many people pa.s.s Plundered from heaven, Many bright people pa.s.s, Plunder from heaven.

What of the mistresses What the beloved seven?

--They were but witnesses, I was just driven.

Where is there peace for me?

Isis the mystery Must be in love with me.

_THE SEA_

You, you are all unloving, loveless, you; Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods, You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even, Thres.h.i.+ng your own pa.s.sions with no woman for the thres.h.i.+ng-floor, Finis.h.i.+ng your dreams for your own sake only, Playing your great game around the world, alone, Without playmate, or helpmate, having no one to cherish, No one to comfort, and refusing any comforter.

Not like the earth, the spouse all full of increase Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young; You are single, you are fruitless, phosph.o.r.escent, cold and callous, Naked of wors.h.i.+p, of love or of adornment, Scorning the panacea even of labour, Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings, Sea, only you are free, sophisticated.

You who toil not, you who spin not, Surely but for you and your like, toiling Were not worth while, nor spinning worth the effort!

You who take the moon as in a sieve, and sift Her flake by flake and spread her meaning out; You who roll the stars like jewels in your palm, So that they seem to utter themselves aloud; You who steep from out the days their colour, Reveal the universal tint that dyes Their web; who shadow the sun's great gestures and expressions So that he seems a stranger in his pa.s.sing; Who voice the dumb night fittingly; Sea, you shadow of all things, now mock us to death with your shadowing.

BOURNEMOUTH

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