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!