prodigal bowers befell,
To share his shameless, elemental mirth
In one great act of faith, while deep and strong,
Incomparably nerved and cheered,
The enormous heart of London joys to beat
To the measures of his rough, majestic song:
The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell
That keeps the rolling universe ensphered
And life and all for which life lives to long
Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

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