Song of the wave / George Cabot Lodge [electronic text]

SONNETS

I
TO SILENCE

LORD of the deserts 'twixt a million spheres, Child of the moon-dawn and the naked moon, Close comrade of the whispered afternoon, Angel of mercy, whose absolving tears Erase the discord of our human fears: Thy lap is freighted with the dawn, thy heart Is warm about the sunset, for thou art The woof and fabric of eternal years. Thy hand is soft upon the troubled eyes, And, in the palace of thy sister Sleep, Thy peace remains when Life's last echo dies. Thou art more tender than the raptured breath That rounds a virgin's breast, and thou dost keep Thy kiss to lay upon the brows of Death.

II
TO THE EARTH

THE heart can understand, oh, Mother Earth! Thy tides and winds and seasons whisper, "Fate Has held us dumb through centuries of hate, And tears, and blood for things of little worth." The heart can understand, since Lilith's mirth Shivered the early echoes, half in scorn, The world-wide leap of light from every dawn, Day's dying pomp around thy blood-drenched girth. Across thy theatre pageants come and pass: The power and pride of man, a scenic thing, Frames forth his glory in enduring brass; And through his dust I hear the whispering Of lifted waters, and a blade of grass Breaking the murmur-laden breast of Spring.

III
ESSEX

I

THY hills are kneeling in the tardy spring, And wait, in supplication's gentleness, The certain resurrection that shall bring A robe of verdure for their nakedness. Thy perfumed valleys where the twilights dwell, Thy fields within the sunlight's living coil, Now promise, while the veins of nature swell, Eternal recompense to human toil. And when the sunset's final shades depart The aspiration to completed birth Is sweet and silent; as the soft tears start, We know how wanton and how little worth Are all the passions of our bleeding heart That vex the awful patience of the earth.

IV

ESSEX
II

THINE are the large winds and the splendid sun Glutting the spread of heaven to the floor Of waters rhythmic from far shore to shore, And thine the stars, revealing one by one. Thine the grave, lucent night's oblivion, The tawny moon that waits below the skies,—Strange as the dawn that smote their blistered eyes Who watched from Calvary when the Deed was done. And thine the good brown earth that bares its breast To thy benign October, thine the trees Lusty with fruitage in the late year's rest; And thine the men whose blood has glorified Thy name with Liberty's divine decrees— The men who loved thy soil and fought and died.

V

TOWARD thine Eastern window when the morn Steals through the silver mesh of silent stars, I come unlaurelled from the strenuous wars Where men have fought and wept and died forlorn. But here, across these early fields of corn, The living silence dwelleth, and the gray Sweet earth-mist, while afar the lisp of spray Breathes from the ocean like a Triton's horn. Open thy lattice, for the gage is wonFor which this earth has journeyed through the dust Of shattered systems, cold about the sun; And proved by sin, by mighty lives impearled,A voice cries through the sunrise: "Time is just! "— And falls like dew God's pity on the world.

VI
FOG AT SEA

GRAY grisly tides that choke the master sun Who domes the caves of sullen fog with pearl, While round and still the sick white eddies swirl Between the smothered vistas one by one; Like ghosts the frail hysteric breezes run Aslant the ashen world, and strive to furl The slow drenched air in one enormous whirl And free the ocean's breast it weighs upon. The world is dying for a draught of air, Great autumn air that like a hoarded stream Floods the gigantic openness of dawn; And, like the whispering of hopeless prayer, The white world's voices, as if drowsed with dream, Sigh through the muffled stillness and are gone.

VII
NIRVANA

I

AND shall we find thee? Shall the tired soul Toiling in gross dull clay, doomed to abide In blurred oblivion, condemned to hide Its eager wings impatient of control, And God-lit eyes that yearn to view the whole Of that divinest splendour glorified In earth's rare visions—shall it feel the tide Of thy calm love in endless pity roll? Oh, let the inward vision drink the light Of thine effulgent countenance! Then might This immaterial dream of Thee and Me Dissolve away like moon-mists in the morn, And we could lapse in silence from the scorn Of Destiny to thy great unity.

VIII
NIRVANA

II

WOOF of the scenic sense, large monotone Where life's diverse inceptions, death and birth, Where all the gaudy overflow of earth, Merge—they the manifold and thou the One. Increate, complete—when the stars are gone In cinders down the void, when yesterday No longer spurs desire starvation-gray, When God grows mortal in men's hearts of stone,—As each pulsation of the Heart Divine Peoples the chaos, or with falling breathBeggars creation, still the soul is thine! And still untortured by the world's increase, Thy wide, harmonic silences of death; And last—thy white uncovered breast of peace.

IX
PASSING DAYS

THEY walk across my life with great, grave eyes That greet my questioning hands with silent scorn And blossoms break upon their crowns of thorn, While garlands wither that their children prize. I kiss their lips and grow a little wise, A little patient, while my strength is worn Beneath the spur of each succeeding morn That dowers its evening with a fresh surmise. Their message dies with them, an empty word; But memory garners, in a wild regret, Their silent beauty that the heart preferred. And in the fire of hopeless love they seem So real with sorrow, that I half forget My soul shall wake and find the days a dream.

X
ON AN ÆOLIAN HARP

LURE of the night's dædalian sea-born breath, Wild as the heart's uncomprehended dole, Strange as the grieving of a mighty soul Touched with the lyric woe of life and death. Phraser of world-wide monotones that toll Like far enormous bells from sky to sky, Voice of the vaster solitudes that lie With life's solution past the mind's control. The golden eyes of long-forgotten days, The dolorous memory of simple things, Sadden thy lapsing chords:—the present pays The past's arrears of sorrow, and they seem To wake a sense, among thy weeping strings, Of other lives, like some unceasing dream.

XI
THE SPHINX

OBLIVION like perfume from the wings Of dim Osiris, and the calm of one High soul, who thy remorseless lips of stoneChiselled to mock the resonance of kings. Thy proper silence, ripe with legend, clings To thine inert omnipotence, endures Though Gods and empires agonize, and luresStrange lapses from life's echoing, brazen strings. Thou seest new stars swing downward through the gloom, While on her dust, who smiled and ravished Rome, Decays the graven marble of her tomb. The fruitful Nile, the desert in thine eyes— Dead laughter, and dead tears—How much to come?—Death, death, and fragile life that weeps and dies.

XII

WHILES were, I almost seemed to understand; I watched the flooding waters with their fleece Of sudden foam, and felt the ripening peace And joy of increase that the earth had planned. Then the great shadow fell across the land, And in the harsh monotony of wind I felt the past like Death about my mind,And mild with grief put forth mine idle hand. There was the question: each day should I be What yesterday I was not, and for me Of my dead self but memory remain? And when upon my nakedness the snow Had spread its silence, should I wake and know, Or sleeping, dream another life as vain?

XIII
TO THE MEMORY OF W. H. P.

LIFE may not perish though the winds of death Whine shrilly through the world, where we alone Crouch in the trodden dust, and feel the moan Of ancient sorrow burthening our breath. The blade endureth, though it break the sheath; Life springs and ceases in oblivion, Gathered and scattered by the master sun Like rain upon the waters calm beneath. We wait like corpses in a charnel-house, And singly, as the shrouded years return, They loose the cere-cloth on our furrowed brows;And one departs in splendour through the tomb, We hear the voice of Cherubim, and turn Weeping like children in the intenser gloom.

XIV
INSOMNIA

To wake upon the shrouded budding sky And sudden silence—wake and lie alone In the gigantic solitude, and groan To feel the sting of light upon the eye. To wake and wait until the senses cry— Knowing the sun shall smite upon the sea, And rouse the tragic day that is to be, Grief-haunted by the days that have gone by. To wake, and wait, and lie alone, and know That through the mist of grim familiar pain The world is perfect music even now; To strive and catch the master-hand that pearled The night with song, and feel, across the rain, A sadness as the sadness of the world.

XV

I STOOD upon the old Earth's breast and gazedTo where the seaward sand was gray with brine, And heard a song-bird weeping in a pine, Beneath the iron heaven, bent and crazed. The sea was like an eye that death had glazed; Amid gray light blown round the ragged marge The fallen sun hung lustreless and large And one thin trace of lifeless waters blazed. I strove to feel God's pity for His men, As, in the Galilean dawn, the love Of Jesu widened on the human ken:— In vain! I watched my fated evening go Heart-broken beyond tears and round me move The strength and sorrow of the life I know.

XVI

OUR lips are laughing while our eyes are wet; The happiness we hope, the grief we fear, The stress and anguish that our moments bear, Are trivial shadows that our lives forget. The day's despairing toil and passion's fret Evanish utterly like empty words; What was has never been; the past affords Only a heritage of divine regret. But whiles the sorrow of a sleeping face Awakes a deeper pity not our own, Or when the soul in Beauty's large embrace Forsakes its margined slumber, we may grow To greater moments, when we stand alone And feel that life is sadder than we know.

XVII
THE GATE OF DREAMS

THE Gate of Dreams, where, time and time again, Through sleep transfigured with a nameless light, Fearful, upon the tired end of night, I come as might a devote to his fane. The Gate of Dreams, of melancholy pain, Flooding the drowsy labyrinthine soul With faces of despair or patient dole— The tragic children of a weary brain. The Gate of Dreams, where throbs a ghostly wail, As it were of sobbing strings and wild accords, Where life is scenic in the smile of fate; Where faces, shrouded in an iron veil, Pass outward in a woe too great for words, Or weep in haggard terror, weep and wait.

XVIII
TO GIACOMO LEOPARDI

DESPAIR is musical, the wings of painAre stirred in rhythm of large winds that bear A mute divinity of human prayerAnd human sorrow that the prayer is vain. The tears of speech that wet thy lips profane No Muse with discord, for the world's control Had never blurred the windows of thy soul Nor bound the beating of thy heart with chain. But we have piled the gates of sun with dust, And in the jangling darkness of the earth, With muffled hearts, exist because we must.Our times are blasphemous: no tears, no shame, But heaven insulted with an evil mirth And greed exalted with a sacred name.

XIX
To J. T. S.

After reading "Amis et Amile."

AND were they friends as thou and I are friends That take the wind of sorrow open-eyed, And, striving sunward though the storms divide,Stand, speak and break amid the press that bends? We ache to life and bear the dower it sends Of Godless temples and of rusted sword, With ashes of the heart the heavens scored, Arched o'er a world unholy in its ends. Was their love more than ours, being impearled With sacrifice of blood and wife and child? Ah! they, who walked the sunshine of the worldAnd heard grave angels speaking through a dream, Had never their unlaurelled brows defiled, Nor strove to stem the world's enormous stream.

XX
TO THE CHILDREN OF THE MUSE

"Nel secol tetro e in questo aer nefando."

— L.

NONE shall put forth a hand and twist the brass That galls the neck of Liberty, none dare Avert the iron stigma of despair And show our eyes how good the battle was.Yet now for you who,'mid the blowing grass That hides the grave of honour, sit and stare In the great muteness of forgotten prayer—The vengeance of the Lord has come to pass! They fester in their cities who have scarred The face of earth until her skeleton Is naked, and her breasts are dry and hard;Say, shall ye tear the world's dishevelled robe And lay her ulcers open to the sun, Or murmur soft, "Thy will be done!" like Job?

XXI
L'ENFANT DU SIÈCLE

DIM dying child be still and taste thy pain, Poor hands be mild, for no new God appears, And patient on thy pinnacle of years, Dark soul forego thy Godlike task and chainThy longings; Faith has died and they are vain, And thou hast lost the power of natural tears, And memories that thy dateless childhood bears Have blurred thy living days like sterile rain.The soul's sweet choristers that once did toll Thro' God's immensity are fallen dumb;As when the accorded harps and martial drum, Thro' some vast palace where a kingly soulHas passed away, are hushed; and thou shalt come Thro' life a mourner, mute and pitiful.

XXII
AUX MODERNES

"DisperaL'ultima volta."

—LEOPARDI.

I

ONLY an empty platitude for God, Only for poetry a jangling nerve, Only for life the baser lusts to serve, Only a fashion where the function stood. Only a shadow stealing span on spanOver the unmeasured whiteness of the soul; Darkness around the God-established goal That blazed before the innocence of man.And when the flame of adolescence breaks On some wild heart the world has overthrown,He stares as one who waits alone and wakes, Cheated of love and faith, his vision drawn Haggard and hopeless from his death-bed down The hard, gray, tacit distances of dawn.

XXIII
AUX MODERNES

II

WHEN I have learned the accents of your speech, The splendid grief of silence; when I know Your acrid laughter and your tearless woe, And learn the shame of life—what you can teach; When dust returns to dust, and mutely each Grows haggard thro' the fard—then I shall say, "Your foolish lips have lied from day to day, And life has reached the goal that life must reach."And then a hush—and then a mighty thought Shall move upon the fabric of your lives As thro' a tavern window looms the dawn; And in your tarnished tinsel, in the scornOf guttered candles, all your lives have sought And you shall fade and finish—Truth survives!

XXIV

OF this that I have written none is mine, Save only as my clouded sense has heard And blurred with ineffectual rhyme the Word Whose virgin silence was and is divine. The veins of God are filled with golden wine Perturbed with splendour, and this world we dream Around our tinsel lives endows a theme Of music—Hearken! for its voice is thine!The Youth and Beauty of the earlier earth Have never died, but on the breast of song They lie like flowers—'tis we that agonize! And in the gray senescence of our birthErase the soul whose voice condemns the wrong, And move our fingers through the dust we prize.

XXV
TO A STATUE

DEEP Soul that may not hold the brazen mould, Spirit whose silence bideth to the moon, Thou Goddess of the closing afternoon, Who gazeth where the tidal air is cold— Thine eyes have watched beyond the stars grown gold,That polar silence where the shrouded spheres Stir slightly through the mist of little years, For thou wert never born, nor young, nor old. Goddess without a shrine to bear the prayer Of thy few faithful, whose despair has won A mourning fillet for thy solemn hair:The soul shall hear thee sigh beyond the cry Of Time, and fallen headlong from the sun, Shall find thy pity in the vaster sky.

XXVI
A DREAM

I DREAMED the world of noon was stricken blind: A sun, so haggard that it starved the air, Scarcely sufficed to light the stark despair Of tearless millions shrieking to the wind. Then, leering on the world, a hellish mind Drawn in a hearse, raved silently of pain;The voices died and silence laid the strainOf unforgotten anguish on mankind. Upon their bones the flesh of men grew gray, All nature withered in a wild regret, And maddened whispers scared the ashy sun:"No more" they moaned "men's hearts, like drops of spray, Shall touch their ocean, mingle and forget— This is the burial of oblivion!"

XXVII
"ELl! ELI! LAMA SABACTHANI!"

THE glare of Hell it was, the haggard light, And tragic to His ears, from Galilee, Like wailing children sobbed His native sea: Then on the cruel nails He strained upright With sinews drawn as steel, and cast His sight Over the blackness, but He might not see— Even He the Christ. He plucked against the treeWith piteous hands, and called across the night Thrice upon God the Father—none replied! The Heavens were void; ecstatic voices cried,"Despair! Despair! in death ye may not die!"He heard: the great sweat beaded on His face, The vital sob urged outward, and a space Rose through dissolving faith the Eternal Lie!

XXVIII
DANTE

THY voice—all its least tones, the strain and stir Measured and ardent, and the mighty trend Outward upon a light-pervaded end, Gained through the fields of flame and hideous blur. Thou art sonorous as the shuddering fir Thwarting the tempest, nor thy metres bendUnder their splendid freight, when thou dost blend Power and light and love to speak of Her. Inward thy flame arose and strong with strife Shone in thy words —thou art to me as life, Beaten, renewed with hope, and undestroyed. Thy voice comes pure to me as waters falling, Swells till it seems I hear the Seraph calling Through open spaces of the dayless void.

XXIX
LOVE

I

SADDER and more divine than human tears Born on the eyes to utter what is dumb, This simple silence when the heart grows numb Among the dead desires of perished years. Such silence quivers with the song it bears, Unsung within a fabric of old pain, Till in the dust of tired passions, plain Through wreaths of light, the naked truth appears. Then poised upon the moment thou canst lay Thy brow upon the Heart of Hearts, and feel The tide that ebbs and waxes through us all; Till from the silence, through the world's decay, A voice shall speak to thee like beaten steel, Lest on thy sea of sun the shadows fall.

XXX
II

IT flows thro' all of time from heart to heart, This solemn wonder fresh with naked strength, This source of life where every mouth at length Must drink and feel the old impulsions start.It is the whole that moves through every part, The aspiration dim of things unborn, The prophecy of life's essential dawn, That tears the everlasting night apart. And we who are, and were the splendid spur For wasted generations, we must bear For human sake the same gigantic stir Of breathless longing, and the great command Of life to life, and leave our spirits bare To feel the truth they cannot understand.

XXXI

I DREAMED of Thee, O Wonder, with the sheen Amid thy temples of a sanguine gem, And warm, between thy garment's purple hem, The languid passions of that Persian Queen Who sate with she-slaves in her quiet gloom, And felt the sob of fountains and the keen Perfume of lotus, and the murmurous lean Of windy flowers, and life's impending doom. O dream of dazzled senses and the pain Of conscious happiness! I woke beneathThe dark maturing dawn, while earth again Renewed its patient toil for human sake, And felt the tender calm of such a death As thine, O Wonder, dream whose death it was to wake.

XXXII

SHE came once only in a dream of death And touched my face with wise, unhurried hand, And "Man," her silence said, "I understand— The end is now, and quiet now, and faith.' And lotos-like and moved with tender breath,Her breast was calm as night and pale and bare, And, watching thro' the gloom of burnished hair, Her solemn eyes were deep, and tears beneath.And tears were on the lips that kissed her mouth, And only tears could speak to her, and tears Fell burning on her breast—the tears of youth. And life, and evermore its weariness Was dim forgotten pain, the iterate years Were ceased, the roar of time was echoless.

XXXIII

THE low moon quivers on the hyacinth sky, And lays upon the ocean's glooming frown Its frail caress; like silence tenderly The shadow falls immeasurably down. A smouldering flame perturbs the heaven's girth, As might, in some great moment, silently, A sudden vision of the tragic earth Blazon the brows of God with mystery. And thou shalt come as the great shadow falls, Like the slow single star, and lay thy last Ethereal kiss upon my tired eyes; And I shall answer thee as one who calls Through the dumb places of the haunted past, Drinking its fulness ere the moment dies.

XXXIV

TELL me again, and then lift up to meThose frail white arms of thine and touch my face, And wrap me wholly in thine eyes' embrace, Till God's sure hand run fire round me and thee. Tell me again, and let thy speaking be A faint phrased echo, delicate as lace, Of seas sonorous through the void of space, The low, lost rhythm of immensity. Tell me again, and where thy breasts divide Pillow my weariness —the breath of fallShall blow crisp crimson leaves upon thy hair;Thy presence is as where a song has died, And left its memory grieving over all This vital solitude of autumn air.

XXXV

GIVE me thy pitiful, soft-moulded hand, And we will bide in silence, Thou and I; Within the choired poem of the sky Thine is the voice I cannot understand. Give me thy hand and let the heart command: My mind is blurred, and yet I seem to know Darkly what men have spoken of, and now The Word itself their lips have never spanned, Nor I shall ever speak it, nor shall theyThat illustrate to-morrow with their birth; The tongue is tethered—we can just obey; And from the gates of sunrise issue dumb, Illumined—while the spirit of the earth Reveals her secret, knowing we have come.

XXXVI

IF I have touched thy heart, as Solomon,When seemed the world dissolving in a kiss, Upon the pages wonder-white with prayer With lyric fingers laid his rose of song; And if the most I am is just—a man, Why yet, Belovèd, in that I am thine, I must not ask forgiveness; this I write Is all and more than I can say I am;Like veilèd music through the threadbare words Thy heart is beating even now, for I Have seen the morning quicken through its sleep In cycles of dim song. Thou canst not say What I have given is deserving scorn, For I have naught to give that is not Thine.

XXXVII
TOO SOON

HIS wordless voice was like a toiling dream; I waited, stupid in my wasted hope, And felt the winds, beneath the heavens cope, Stir like the pulse of some vast gradual stream. This was the end. I heard again his scream Of perfect fear, and felt about me furled The naked hate of all the living world:—God's eyes looked into mine nor were supreme!The crawling fear had thrust his jaws apart And fixed his lidless eyes against the wall, And Death held back the tides within his heart; I cried "For Pity, tell me if she lied!" Then came the hideous simper, and a small Mute whisper writhed upon his lips and died.

XXXVIII
TOO LATE

WHILE over all the sullen embers gloat, Silence, forgetfulness, and only now The twilight of your hair across my brow, And soft my kiss upon your marble throat. Be still—great visions through the quiet float, And while the wind is wailing at our door, And day retires in gloom across the moor, Time shall forget an hour and grow remoteAnd—Hush! The fire is dull between your hair: My tear upon your breast your curtained eyes Have answered—it is all the heart can bear!Peace! Peace! there's pity in the soul of pain, And now our lives fulfil their destinies— Hark! the despairing whisper of the rain.

XXXlX
THE NIGHT-WIND

ECHOLESS voice of few sufficing chords, Soft as the memory of a vaster rest, Secret as sorrow held within the breast Of one whose silence never stoops to words. Harp of waste waters by thy hands caressed, Chalice of music—prayer and song and strife— Filled with that wine that drowns the ills of lifeWhen the last vineyards of the soul are pressed. Prophet of final calm where life shall cease, Cease and a kind forgetfulness of soul Fall like a balm upon the wounds of peace—Thy voice shall soothe the last and sternest fight, Threading the dark dim solitudes of night; Like life without a prelude or a goal.

XL

AND they shall say to thee, "He died distraught; His mind was crazed by dreaming on things past, And so he grew in madness till the lastSheer height of scorn he tottered from to naught.His hands were weak and idle and ne'er caught With strength of purpose at the busy world; Forlorn and proud he stood—Time onward whirled And left the ruins of the things he sought."But thou shalt understand what they despise, Cherish what they reject, and count the few Poor virtues dearer than the things they prize.And weighing all the evil they have said, Thy heart shall say, "What, then, if this be true? Be Silent! for he loved me and is dead."