for Spring
Foreword
These poems should not be considered separately, as so many single pieces. They are intended as an essential story, or history, or confession, unfolding one from the other in organic development, the whole revealing the intrinsic experience of a man during the crisis of manhood, when he marries and comes into himself. The period covered is, roughly, the sixth lustre of a man's life
Argument
After much struggling and loss in love and in the world of man, the protagonist throws in his lot with a woman who is already married. Together they go into another country, she perforce leaving her children behind. The conflict of love and hate goes on between the man and the woman, and between these two and the world around them, till it reaches some sort of conclusion, they transcend into some condition of blessedness
MOONRISE AND who has seen the moon, who has not seen Her rise from out the chamber of the deep, Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw Confession of delight upon the wave, Littering the waves with her own superscription Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us Spread out and known at last, and we are sure That beauty is a thing beyond the grave, That perfect, bright experience never falls To nothingness, and time will dim the moon Sooner than our full consummation here In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.
Elegy
The sun immense and rosy
Must have sunk and become extinct
The night you closed your eyes for ever against me.
Grey days, and wan, dree dawnings
Since then, with fritter of flowers—
Day wearies me with its ostentation and fawnings.
Still, you left me the nights,
The great dark glittery window,
The bubble hemming this empty existence with
lights.
Still in the vast hollow
Like a breath in a bubble spinning
Brushing the stars, goes my soul, that skims the
bounds like a swallow!
I can look through
The film of the bubble night, to where you are.
Through the film I can almost touch you.
EASTWOOD
Nonentity
The stars that open and shut
Fall on my shallow breast
Like stars on a pool.
The soft wind, blowing cool
Laps little crest after crest
Of ripples across my breast.
And dark grass under my feet
Seems to dabble in me
Like grass in a brook.
Oh, and it is sweet
To be all these things, not to be
Any more myself.
For look,
I am weary of myself!
Martyr À La Mode
Ah God, life, law, so many names you keep,
You great, you patient Effort, and you Sleep
That does inform this various dream of living,
You sleep stretched out for ever, ever giving
Us out as dreams, you august Sleep
Coursed round by rhythmic movement of all
time,
The constellations, your great heart, the sun
Fierily pulsing, unable to refrain;
Since you, vast, outstretched, wordless Sleep
Permit of no beyond, ah you, whose dreams
We are, and body of sleep, let it never be said
I quailed at my appointed function, turned poltroon
For when at night, from out the full surcharge
Of a day's experience, sleep does slowly draw
The harvest, the spent action to itself;
Leaves me unburdened to begin again;
At night, I say, when I am gone in sleep,
Does my slow heart rebel, do my dead hands
Complain of what the day has had them do?
Never let it be said I was poltroon
At this my task of living, this my dream,
This me which rises from the dark of sleep
In white flesh robed to drape another dream,
As lightning comes all white and trembling
From out the cloud of sleep, looks round about
One moment, sees, and swift its dream is over,
In one rich drip it sinks to another sleep,
And sleep thereby is one more dream enrichened.
