Part 6 (1/2)
INCLUSIVENESS
The changing guests, each in a different mood, Sit at the roadside table and arise: And every life among them in likewise Is a soul's board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?-- Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes, Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit'st in dwell In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well; And may be stamped, a memory all in vain, Upon the sight of lidless eyes in h.e.l.l.
ARDOUR AND MEMORY
The cuckoo-throb, the heartbeat of the Spring; The rosebud's blush that leaves it as it grows Into the full-eyed fair unblus.h.i.+ng rose; The summer clouds that visit every wing With fires of sunrise and of sunsetting; The furtive flickering streams to light re-born 'Mid airs new-fledged and valorous l.u.s.ts of morn, While all the daughters of the daybreak sing:--
These ardour loves, and memory: and when flown All joys, and through dark forest-boughs in flight The wind swoops onward brandis.h.i.+ng the light, Even yet the rose-tree's verdure left alone Will flush all ruddy though the rose be gone; With ditties and with dirges infinite.
KNOWN IN VAIN
As two whose love, first foolish, widening scope, Knows suddenly, with music high and soft, The Holy of holies; who because they scoff'd Are now amazed with shame, nor dare to cope With the whole truth aloud, lest heaven should ope; Yet, at their meetings, laugh not as they In speech; nor speak, at length; but sitting oft Together, within hopeless sight of hope For hours are silent:--So it happeneth When Work and Will awake too late, to gaze After their life sailed by, and hold their breath.
Ah! who shall dare to search through what sad maze Thenceforth their incommunicable ways Follow the desultory feet of Death?
HEART OF THE NIGHT
From child to youth; from youth to arduous man; From lethargy to fever of the heart; From faithful life to dream-dowered days apart; From trust to doubt; from doubt to brink of ban;-- Thus much of change in one swift cycle ran Till now. Alas, the soul!--how soon must she Accept her primal immortality,-- The flesh resume its dust whence it began?
O Lord of work and peace! O Lord of life!
O Lord, the awful Lord of will! though late, Even yet renew this soul with duteous breath: That when the peace is garnered in from strife, The work retrieved, the will regenerate, This soul may see thy face, O Lord of death!
THE LANDMARK
Was _that_ the landmark? What,--the foolish well Whose wave, low down, I did not stoop to drink, But sat and flung the pebbles from its brink In sport to send its imaged skies pell-mell, (And mine own image, had I noted well!) Was that my point of turning?--I had thought The stations of my course should rise unsought, As altar-stone or ensigned citadel.
But lo! the path is missed, I must go back, And thirst to drink when next I reach the spring Which once I stained, which since may have grown black.
Yet though no light be left nor bird now sing As here I turn, I'll thank G.o.d, hastening, That the same goal is still on the same track.
A DARK DAY
The gloom that breathes upon me with these airs Is like the drops which strike the traveller's brow Who knows not, darkling, if they bring him now Fresh storm, or be old rain the covert bears.
Ah! bodes this hour some harvest of new tares, Or hath but memory of the day whose plough Sowed hunger once,--the night at length when thou, O prayer found vain, didst fall from out my prayers?
How p.r.i.c.kly were the growths which yet how smooth, Along the hedgerows of this journey shed, Lie by Time's grace till night and sleep may soothe!
Even as the thistledown from pathsides dead Gleaned by a girl in autumns of her youth, Which one new year makes soft her marriage-bed.
AUTUMN IDLENESS
This sunlight shames November where he grieves In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun The day, though bough with bough be over-run.