But, compelled to heed, I again looked furtive-wise

  Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair.

  “Thank God, she is out of it now!” I said at last,

  In a great relief of heart when the thing was done

  That had set my soul aghast,

  And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past

  But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on.

  She was a woman long hid amid packs of years,

  She might have been living or dead; she was lost to my sight,

  And the deed that had nigh drawn tears

  Was done in a casual clearance of life’s arrears;

  But I felt as if I had put her to death that night! . . .

  * * *

  - Well; she knew nothing thereof did she survive,

  And suffered nothing if numbered among the dead;

  Yet — yet — if on earth alive

  Did she feel a smart, and with vague strange anguish strive?

  If in heaven, did she smile at me sadly and shake her head?

  ON A HEATH

  I could hear a gown-skirt rustling

  Before I could see her shape,

  Rustling through the heather

  That wove the common’s drape,

  On that evening of dark weather

  When I hearkened, lips agape.

  And the town-shine in the distance

  Did but baffle here the sight,

  And then a voice flew forward:

  Dear, is’t you? I fear the night!”

  And the herons flapped to norward

  In the firs upon my right.

  There was another looming

  Whose life we did not see;

  There was one stilly blooming

  Full nigh to where walked we;

  There was a shade entombing

  All that was bright of me.

  AN ANNIVERSARY

  It was at the very date to which we have come,

  In the month of the matching name,

  When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum,

  Its couch-time at night being the same.

  And the same path stretched here that people now follow,

  And the same stile crossed their way,

  And beyond the same green hillock and hollow

  The same horizon lay;

  And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.

  Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness;

  But the tree that neighbours the track,

  And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness,

  Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack.

  And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded

  With mosses of many tones,

  And the garth up afar was not overcrowded

  With a multitude of white stones,

  And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-

  bones.

  KINGSTON-MAURWARD EWELEASE.

  BY THE RUNIC STONE

  (Two who became a story)

  By the Runic Stone

  They sat, where the grass sloped down,

  And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown,

  Pink-faced, breeze-blown.

  Rapt there alone

  In the transport of talking so

  In such a place, there was nothing to let them know

  What hours had flown.

  And the die thrown

  By them heedlessly there, the dent

  It was to cut in their encompassment,

  Were, too, unknown.

  It might have strown

  Their zest with qualms to see,

  As in a glass, Time toss their history

  From zone to zone!

  THE PINK FROCK

  “O my pretty pink frock,

  I sha’n’t be able to wear it!

  Why is he dying just now?

  I hardly can bear it!

  “He might have contrived to live on;

  But they say there’s no hope whatever:

  And must I shut myself up,

  And go out never?

  “O my pretty pink frock,

  Puff-sleeved and accordion-pleated!

  He might have passed in July,

  And not so cheated!”

  TRANSFORMATIONS

  Portion of this yew

  Is a man my grandsire knew,

  Bosomed here at its foot:

  This branch may be his wife,

  A ruddy human life

  Now turned to a green shoot.

  These grasses must be made

  Of her who often prayed,

  Last century, for repose;

  And the fair girl long ago

  Whom I often tried to know

  May be entering this rose.

  So, they are not underground,

  But as nerves and veins abound

  In the growths of upper air,

  And they feel the sun and rain,

  And the energy again

  That made them what they were!

  IN HER PRECINCTS

  Her house looked cold from the foggy lea,

  And the square of each window a dull black blur

  Where showed no stir:

  Yes, her gloom within at the lack of me

  Seemed matching mine at the lack of her.

  The black squares grew to be squares of light

  As the eyeshade swathed the house and lawn,

  And viols gave tone;

  There was glee within. And I found that night

  The gloom of severance mine alone.

  KINGSTON-MAURWARD PARK.

  THE LAST SIGNAL

  (Oct. 11, 1886)

  A MEMORY OF WILLIAM BARNES

  Silently I footed by an uphill road

  That led from my abode to a spot yew-boughed;

  Yellowly the sun sloped low down to westward,

  And dark was the east with cloud.

  Then, amid the shadow of that livid sad east,

  Where the light was least, and a gate stood wide,

  Something flashed the fire of the sun that was facing it,

  Like a brief blaze on that side.

  Looking hard and harder I knew what it meant -

  The sudden shine sent from the livid east scene;

  It meant the west mirrored by the coffin of my friend there,

  Turning to the road from his green,

  To take his last journey forth — he who in his prime

  Trudged so many a time from that gate athwart the land!

  Thus a farewell to me he signalled on his grave-way,

  As with a wave of his hand.

  WINTERBORNE-CAME PATH.

  THE HOUSE OF SILENCE

  ”That is a quiet place -

  That house in the trees with the shady lawn.”

  “ — If, child, you knew what there goes on

  You would not call it a quiet place.

  Why, a phantom abides there, the last of its race,

  And a brain spins there till dawn.”

  ”But I see nobody there, -

  Nobody moves about the green,

  Or wanders the heavy trees between.”

  “ — Ah, that’s because you do not bear

  The visioning powers of souls who dare

  To pierce the material screen.

  ”Morning, noon, and night,

  Mid those funereal shades that seem

  The uncanny scenery of a dream,

  Figures dance to a mind with sight,

  And music and laughter like floods of light

  Make all the precincts gleam.

  ”It is a poet’s bower,

  Through which there pass, in fleet arrays,

  Long teams of all the years and days,

  Of joys and sorrows, of earth and heaven,

  That meet mankind in its ages seven,

  An aion in an hour.”

  GREAT THINGS

  Sweet cyder is a great thing,

  A great thing to me,

  Spinning down to Weymouth town

  By Ridgway thirstily,

  And maid and mistress summoning

  Who tend the hostelry:

  O cyder is a great thing,

  A great thing to me!

  The dance it is a great thing,

  A great thing to me,

  With candles lit and partners fit

  For night-long revelry;

  And going home when day-dawning

  Peeps pale upon the lea:

  O dancing is a great thing,

  A great thing to me!

  Love is, yea, a great thing,

  A great thing to me,

  When, having drawn across the lawn

  In darkness silently,

  A figure flits like one a-wing

  Out from the nearest tree:

  O love is, yes, a great thing,

  A great thing to me!

  Will these be always great things,

  Great things to me? . . .

  Let it befall that One will call,

  ”Soul, I have need of thee:”

  What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,

  Love, and its ecstasy,

  Will always have been great things,

  Great things to me!

  THE CHIMES

  That morning when I trod the town

  The twitching chimes of long renown

  Played out to me

  The sweet Sicilian sailors’ tune,

  And I knew not if late or soon

  My day would be:

  A day of sunshine beryl-bright

  And windless; yea, think as I might,

  I could not say,

  Even to within years’ measure, when

  One would be at my side who then

  Was far away.

  When hard utilitarian times

  Had stilled the sweet Saint-Peter’s chimes

  I learnt to see

  That bale may spring where blisses are,

  And one desired might be afar

  Though near to me.

  THE FIGURE IN THE SCENE

  It pleased her to step in front and sit

  Where the cragged slope was green,

  While I stood back that I might pencil it

  With her amid the scene;

  Till it gloomed and rained;

  But I kept on, despite the drifting wet

  That fell and stained

  My draught, leaving for curious quizzings yet

  The blots engrained.

  And thus I drew her there alone,

  Seated amid the gauze

  Of moisture, hooded, only her outline shown,

  With rainfall marked across.

  — Soon passed our stay;

  Yet her rainy form is the Genius still of the spot,

  Immutable, yea,

  Though the place now knows her no more, and has known her not

  Ever since that day.

  From an old note.

  WHY DID I SKETCH

  Why did I sketch an upland green,

  And put the figure in

  Of one on the spot with me? -

  For now that one has ceased to be seen

  The picture waxes akin

  To a wordless irony.

  If you go drawing on down or cliff

  Let no soft curves intrude

  Of a woman’s silhouette,

  But show the escarpments stark and stiff

  As in utter solitude;

  So shall you half forget.

  Let me sooner pass from sight of the sky

  Than again on a thoughtless day

  Limn, laugh, and sing, and rhyme

  With a woman sitting near, whom I

  Paint in for love, and who may

  Be called hence in my time!

  From an old note.

  CONJECTURE

  If there were in my kalendar

  No Emma, Florence, Mary,

  What would be my existence now -

  A hermit’s? — wanderer’s weary? -

  How should I live, and how

  Near would be death, or far?

  Could it have been that other eyes

  Might have uplit my highway?

  That fond, sad, retrospective sight

  Would catch from this dim byway

  Prized figures different quite

  From those that now arise?

  With how strange aspect would there creep

  The dawn, the night, the daytime,

  If memory were not what it is

  In song-time, toil, or pray-time. -

  O were it else than this,

  I’d pass to pulseless sleep!

  THE BLOW

  That no man schemed it is my hope -

  Yea, that it fell by will and scope

  Of That Which some enthrone,

  And for whose meaning myriads grope.

  For I would not that of my kind

  There should, of his unbiassed mind,

  Have been one known

  Who such a stroke could have designed;

  Since it would augur works and ways

  Below the lowest that man assays

  To have hurled that stone

  Into the sunshine of our days!

  And if it prove that no man did,

  And that the Inscrutable, the Hid,

  Was cause alone

  Of this foul crash our lives amid,

  I’ll go in due time, and forget

  In some deep graveyard’s oubliette

  The thing whereof I groan,

  And cease from troubling; thankful yet

  Time’s finger should have stretched to show

  No aimful author’s was the blow

  That swept us prone,

  But the Immanent Doer’s That doth not know,

  Which in some age unguessed of us

  May lift Its blinding incubus,

  And see, and own:

  “It grieves me I did thus and thus!”

  LOVE THE MONOPOLIST

  (Young Lover’s Reverie)

  The train draws forth from the station-yard,

  And with it carries me.

  I rise, and stretch out, and regard

  The platform left, and see

  An airy slim blue form there standing,

  And know that it is she.

  While with strained vision I watch on,

  The figure turns round quite

  To greet friends gaily; then is gone . . .

  The import may be slight,

  But why remained she not hard gazing

  Till I was out of sight?

  “O do not chat with others there,”

  I brood. “They are not I.

  O strain your thoughts as if they were

  Gold bands between us; eye

  All neighbour scenes as so much blankness

  Till I again am by!

  “A troubled soughing in the breeze

  And the sky overhead

  Let yourself feel; and shadeful trees,

  Ripe corn, and apples red,

  Read as things barren and distasteful

  While we are separated!

  “When I come back uncloak your gloom,

  And let in lovely day;

  Then the long dark as of the tomb

  Can well be thrust away

  With sweet things I shall have to practise,

  And you will have to say!”

  Begun 1871: finished -

  AT MIDDLE-FIELD GATE IN FEBRUARY

  The bars are thick with drops that show

  As they gather themselves from the fog

  Like silver buttons ranged in a row,

  And as evenly spaced as if measured, although

  They fall at the feeblest jog.

  They load the leafless hedge hard by,

  And the blades of last year’s grass,

  While the fallow ploughland turned up nigh

  In raw rolls, clammy and clogging lie -

  Too clogging for feet to pass.

  How dry it was on a far-back day

  When straws hung the hedge and around,

  When amid the sheaves in amorous play

  In curtained bonnets and light array

  Bloomed a bevy now underground!

  BOCKHAMPTON LANE.

  THE YOUTH WHO CARRIED A LIGHT

  I saw him pass as the new day dawned,

  Murmuring some musical phrase;

  Horses were drinking and floundering in the pond,

  And the tired stars thinned their gaze;

  Yet these were not the spectacles at all that he conned,

  But an inner one, giving out rays.

  Such was the thing in his eye, walking there,

  The very and visible thing,

  A close light, displacing the gray of the morning air,

  And the tokens that the dark was taking wing;

  And was it not the radiance of a purpose rare

  That might ripe to its accomplishing?

  What became of that light? I wonder still its fate!

  Was it quenched ere its full apogee?

  Did it struggle frail and frailer to a beam emaciate?

  Did it thrive till matured in verity?

  Or did it travel on, to be a new young dreamer’s freight,

  And thence on infinitely?

  1915.

  THE HEAD ABOVE THE FOG

  Something do I see

  Above the fog that sheets the mead,

  A figure like to life indeed,

  Moving along with spectre-speed,

  Seen by none but me.

  O the vision keen! -

  Tripping along to me for love

  As in the flesh it used to move,

  Only its hat and plume above

  The evening fog-fleece seen.

 

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