virgin will
You harry the wicked strong; but after,
O huntress who could never kill,

Should they be trodden down or pierced,
Swift, swift, you fly with burning cheek
To place your beauty's shield reversed
Above the vile defenceless weak!




STARLIGHT


Last night I lay in an open field
And looked at the stars with lips sealed;
No noise moved the windless air,
And I looked at the stars with steady stare.

There were some that glittered and some that shone
With a soft and equal glow, and one
That queened it over the sprinkled round,
Swaying the host with silent sound.

"Calm things," I thought, "in your cavern blue,
I will learn and hold and master you;
I will yoke and scorn you as I can,
For the pride of my heart is the pride of a man."

Grass to my cheek in the dewy field
I lay quite still with lips sealed,
And the pride of a man and his rigid gaze
Stalked like swords on heaven's ways.

But through a sudden gate there stole
The Universe and spread in my soul;
Quick went my breath and quick my heart,
And I looked at the stars with lips apart.




FLORIAN'S SONG


My soul, it shall not take us,
O we will escape
This world that strives to break us
And cast us to its shape;
Its chisel shall not enter,
Its fire shall not touch,
Hard from rim to centre,
We will not crack or smutch.

'Gainst words sweet and flowered
We have an amulet,
We will not play the coward
For any black threat;
If we but give endurance
To what is now within—
The single assurance
That it is good to win.

Slaves think it better
To be weak than strong,
Whose hate is a fetter
And their love a thong.
But we will view those others
With eyes like stone,
And if we have no brothers
We will walk alone.




DIALOGUE


THE ONE

The dead man's gone, the live man's
sad, the dying leaf shakes on the tree,
The wind constrains the window panes and
moans like moaning of the sea,
And sour's the taste now culled in haste of
lovely things I won too late,
And loud and loud above the crowd the
Voice of One more strong than we.


THE OTHER

This Voice you hear, this call you fear, is
it unprophesied or new?
Were you so insolent to think its rope would
never circle you?
Did you then beastlike live and walk with
ears and eyes that would not turn?
Who bade you hope your service 'scape in
that eternal retinue?


THE ONE

No; for I swear now bare's the tree and loud
the moaning of the wind,
I walked no rut with eyelids shut, my ears
and eyes were never blind,
Only my eager thoughts I bent on many
things that I desired
To make my greedy heart content ere flesh
and blood I left behind.


THE OTHER

Ignorance, then, was all your fault and
filmèd eyes that could not know,
That half discerned and never learned the
temporal way that men must go;
You set the image of the world high for
your heart's idolatry,
Though with your lips you called the world
a toy, a ghost, a passing show.


THE ONE

No, no; this is not true; my lips spoke
only what my heart believed.
Called I the world a toy; I spoke not echo-like
or self-deceived.
But that I thought the toy was mine to play
with, and the passing show
Would sate at least my passing lusts, and did
not, therefore am I grieved.

What did I do that I must bear this lifelong
tyranny of my fate,
That I must writhe in bonds unsought of
accidental love and hate?
Had chance but joinèd different dice, but
once or twice, but once or twice,
All lovely things that I desired I should have
held before too late.

Surely I knew that flesh was grass nor valued
overmuch the prize,
But all the powers of chance conspired to
cheat a man both just and wise.
Happy I'd been had I but had my due
reward, and not a sword
Flaming in diabolic hand between me and
my Paradise.

THE OTHER

No hooded band of fates did stand your
heart's ambitions to gainsay,
No flaming brand in evil hand was ever
thrust across your way,
Only the things all men must meet, the
common attributes of men,
That men may flinch to see or, seeing, deny,
but avoid them no man may.

Fall the dice, not once or twice but always, to
make the self-same sum;
Chance what may, a life's a life and to a
single goal must come;
Though a man search far and wide, never
is hunger satisfied;
Nature brings her natural fetters, man is
meshed and the wise are dumb.

O vain all art to assuage a heart with accents
of a mortal tongue,
All earthly words are incomplete and only
sweet are the songs unsung,
Never yet was cause for regret, yet regret
must afflict us all,
Better it were to grasp the world 'thwart
which this world is a curtain flung.




CREPUSCULAR


No creature stirs in the wide fields.
The rifted western heaven yields
The dying sun's illumination.
This is the hour of tribulation
When, with clear sight of eve engendered,
Day's homage to delusion rendered,
Mute at her window sits the soul.

Clouds and skies and lakes and seas,
Valleys and hills and grass and trees,
Sun, moon, and stars, all stand to her
Limbs of one lordless challenger,
Who, without deigning taunt or frown,
Throws a perennial gauntlet down:
"Come conquer me and take thy toll."

No cowardice or fear she knows,
But, as once more she girds, there grows
An unresignèd hopelessness
From memory of former stress.
Head bent, she muses whilst he waits:
How with such weapons dint his plates?
How quell this vast and sleepless giant
Calmly, immortally defiant,

How fell him, bind him, and control
With a silver cord and a golden bowl?




AT NIGHT


Dark firtops foot the moony sky,
Blue moonlight bars the drive;
Here at the open window I
Sit smoking and alive.

Wind in the branches swells and breaks
Like ocean on a beach;
Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes
A thought I cannot reach.




FOR MUSIC


Death in the cold grey morning
Came to the man where he lay;
And the wind shivered, and the tree shuddered
And the dawn was grey.

And the face of the man was grey in the dawn,
And the watchers by the bed
Knew, as they heard the shaking of the leaves,
That the man was dead.




THE ROOF


I

When the clouds hide the sun away
The tall slate roof is dull and grey,
And when the rain adown it streams
'Tis polished lead with pale-blue gleams.

When the clouds vanish and the rain
Stops, and the sun comes out again,
It shimmers golden in the sun
Almost too bright to look upon.

But soon beneath the steady rays
The roof is dried and reft of blaze,
'Tis dusty yellow traversed through
By long thin lines of deepest blue.

Then at the last, as night draws near,
The lines grow faint and disappear,
The roof becomes a purple mist
A great square darkening amethyst

Which sinks into the gathering shade
Till separate form and colour fade,
And it is but a patch which mars
The beauty of a field of stars.


II

It stands so lonely in the sky
The sparrows never come anigh,
The glossy starlings seldom stop
To preen and chatter on the top.

For a whole week sometimes up there
No wing-wave stirs the quiet air,
The roof lies silent and serene
As though no life had ever been;

Till some bright afternoon, athwart
The edge two sudden shadows dart,
And two white pigeons with pink feet
Flutter above and pitch on it.

Jerking their necks out as they walk
They talk awhile their pigeon-talk,
A low continuous murmur blent
Of mock reproaches and content.

Then cease, and sit there warm and white
An hour, till in the fading light
They wake, and know the close of day,
Flutter above, and fly away,

Leaving the roof whereon they sat
As 'twas before, a peaceful flat
Expanse, as silent and serene
As though no life had ever been.




TREETOPS


There beyond my window ledge,
Heaped against the sky a hedge
Of huge and wavering treetops stands
With multitudes of fluttering hands.

Wave they, beat they to and fro,
Never stillness may they know,
Plunged by the wind and hurled and torn
Anguished, purposeless, forlorn.

"O ferocious, O despairing,
In huddled isolation faring
Through a scattered universe,
Lost coins from the Almighty's purse!"

"No, below you do not see
The firm foundations of the tree;
Anchored to a rock beneath
We laugh in the hammering tempest's teeth."

"Boughs like men but burgeons are
On an adamantine star;
Men are myriad blossoms on
A staunch and cosmic skeleton."




IN THE PARK


This dense hard ground I tread
These iron bars that ripple past,
Will they unshaken stand when I am dead
And my deep thoughts outlast?

Is it my spirit slips,
Falls, like this leaf I kick aside;
This firmness that I feel about my lips,
Is it but empty pride?

Mute knowledge conquers me;
I contemplate them as they are,
Faint earth and shadowy bars that shake and flee,
Less hard, more transient far

Than those unbodied hues
The sunset flings on the calm river;
And, as I look, a swiftness thrills my shoes
And my hands with empire quiver.

Now light the ground I tread,
I walk not now but rather float;
Clear but unreal is the scene outspread,
Pitiful, thin, remote.

Poor vapour is the grass,
So frail the trees and railings seem,
That, did I sweep my hand around, 'twould pass
Through them, as in a dream.

Godlike I fear no changes;
Shatter the world with thunders loud,
Still would I ray-like flit about the ranges
Of dark and ruddy cloud.




SONG


There is a wood where the fairies dance
All night long in a ring of mushrooms daintily,
By each tree bole sits a squirrel or a mole,
And the moon through the branches darts.

Light on the grass their slim limbs glance,
Their shadows in the moonlight swing in quiet unison,
And the moon discovers that they all have lovers,
But they never break their hearts.

They never grieve at all for sands that run,
They never know regret for a deed that's done,
And they never think of going to a shed with a gun
At the rising of the sun.




TOWN


Mostly in a dull rotation
We bear our loads and eat and drink and sleep,
Feeling no tears, knowing no meditation—
Too tired to think, too clogged with earth to weep.

Dimly convinced, poor groping wretches,
Like eyeless insects in a murky pond
That out and out this city stretches,
Away, away, and there is no beyond.

No larger earth, no loftier heaven,
No cleaner, gentler airs to breathe. And yet,
Even to us sometimes is given
Visions of things we otherwhiles forget.

Some day is done, its labour ended,
And as we brood at windows high,
A steady wind from far descended,
Blows off the filth that hid the deeper sky;

There are the empty waiting spaces,
We watch, we watch, unwinking, pale and dumb,
Till gliding up with noiseless paces
Night sweeps o'er all the wide arch: Night has come.

Not that sick false night of the city,
Lurid and low and yellow and obscene,
But mother Night, pure, full of pity,
The star-strewn Night, blue, potent and serene.

O, as we gaze the clamour ceases,
The turbid world around grows dim and small,
The soft-shed influence releases
Our shrouded spirits from their dusty pall.

No more we hear the turbulent traffic,
Not scorned but unremembered is the day;
The Night, all luminous and seraphic,
Has brushed its heavy memories away.

The great blue Night so clear and kindly,
The little stars so wide-eyed and so still,
Open a door for souls that blindly
Had wandered, tunnelling the endless hill;

They draw the long-untraversed portal,
Our souls slip out and tremble and expand,
The immortal feels for the immortal,
The eternal holds the eternal by the hand.

Impalpably we are led and