Kitobni o'qish: «Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses», sahifa 6

THE REMINDER

 
While I watch the Christmas blaze
Paint the room with ruddy rays,
Something makes my vision glide
To the frosty scene outside.
 
 
There, to reach a rotting berry,
Toils a thrush, – constrained to very
Dregs of food by sharp distress,
Taking such with thankfulness.
 
 
Why, O starving bird, when I
One day’s joy would justify,
And put misery out of view,
Do you make me notice you!
 

THE RAMBLER

 
I do not see the hills around,
Nor mark the tints the copses wear;
I do not note the grassy ground
And constellated daisies there.
 
 
I hear not the contralto note
Of cuckoos hid on either hand,
The whirr that shakes the nighthawk’s throat
When eve’s brown awning hoods the land.
 
 
Some say each songster, tree, and mead —
All eloquent of love divine —
Receives their constant careful heed:
Such keen appraisement is not mine.
 
 
The tones around me that I hear,
The aspects, meanings, shapes I see,
Are those far back ones missed when near,
And now perceived too late by me!
 

NIGHT IN THE OLD HOME

 
When the wasting embers redden the chimney-breast,
And Life’s bare pathway looms like a desert track to me,
And from hall and parlour the living have gone to their rest,
My perished people who housed them here come back to me.
 
 
They come and seat them around in their mouldy places,
Now and then bending towards me a glance of wistfulness,
A strange upbraiding smile upon all their faces,
And in the bearing of each a passive tristfulness.
 
 
“Do you uphold me, lingering and languishing here,
A pale late plant of your once strong stock?” I say to them;
“A thinker of crooked thoughts upon Life in the sere,
And on That which consigns men to night after showing the day to them?”
 
 
“ – O let be the Wherefore!  We fevered our years not thus:
Take of Life what it grants, without question!” they answer me seemingly.
“Enjoy, suffer, wait: spread the table here freely like us,
And, satisfied, placid, unfretting, watch Time away beamingly!”
 

AFTER THE LAST BREATH
(J. H. 1813–1904)

 
There’s no more to be done, or feared, or hoped;
None now need watch, speak low, and list, and tire;
No irksome crease outsmoothed, no pillow sloped
   Does she require.
 
 
Blankly we gaze.  We are free to go or stay;
Our morrow’s anxious plans have missed their aim;
Whether we leave to-night or wait till day
   Counts as the same.
 
 
The lettered vessels of medicaments
Seem asking wherefore we have set them here;
Each palliative its silly face presents
   As useless gear.
 
 
And yet we feel that something savours well;
We note a numb relief withheld before;
Our well-beloved is prisoner in the cell
   Of Time no more.
 
 
We see by littles now the deft achievement
Whereby she has escaped the Wrongers all,
In view of which our momentary bereavement
   Outshapes but small.
 

1904.

IN CHILDBED

 
   In the middle of the night
Mother’s spirit came and spoke to me,
   Looking weariful and white —
As ’twere untimely news she broke to me.
 
 
   “O my daughter, joyed are you
To own the weetless child you mother there;
   ‘Men may search the wide world through,’
You think, ‘nor find so fair another there!’
 
 
   “Dear, this midnight time unwombs
Thousands just as rare and beautiful;
   Thousands whom High Heaven foredooms
To be as bright, as good, as dutiful.
 
 
   “Source of ecstatic hopes and fears
And innocent maternal vanity,
   Your fond exploit but shapes for tears
New thoroughfares in sad humanity.
 
 
   “Yet as you dream, so dreamt I
When Life stretched forth its morning ray to me;
   Other views for by and by!”.
Such strange things did mother say to me.
 

THE PINE PLANTERS
(Marty South’s Reverie)

I

 
We work here together
   In blast and breeze;
He fills the earth in,
   I hold the trees.
 
 
He does not notice
   That what I do
Keeps me from moving
   And chills me through.
 
 
He has seen one fairer
   I feel by his eye,
Which skims me as though
   I were not by.
 
 
And since she passed here
   He scarce has known
But that the woodland
   Holds him alone.
 
 
I have worked here with him
   Since morning shine,
He busy with his thoughts
   And I with mine.
 
 
I have helped him so many,
   So many days,
But never win any
   Small word of praise!
 
 
Shall I not sigh to him
   That I work on
Glad to be nigh to him
   Though hope is gone?
 
 
Nay, though he never
   Knew love like mine,
I’ll bear it ever
   And make no sign!
 

II

 
From the bundle at hand here
   I take each tree,
And set it to stand, here
   Always to be;
When, in a second,
   As if from fear
Of Life unreckoned
   Beginning here,
It starts a sighing
   Through day and night,
Though while there lying
   ’Twas voiceless quite.
 
 
It will sigh in the morning,
   Will sigh at noon,
At the winter’s warning,
   In wafts of June;
Grieving that never
   Kind Fate decreed
It should for ever
   Remain a seed,
And shun the welter
   Of things without,
Unneeding shelter
   From storm and drought.
 
 
Thus, all unknowing
   For whom or what
We set it growing
   In this bleak spot,
It still will grieve here
   Throughout its time,
Unable to leave here,
   Or change its clime;
Or tell the story
   Of us to-day
When, halt and hoary,
   We pass away.
 

THE DEAR

 
I plodded to Fairmile Hill-top, where
   A maiden one fain would guard
From every hazard and every care
   Advanced on the roadside sward.
 
 
I wondered how succeeding suns
   Would shape her wayfarings,
And wished some Power might take such ones
   Under Its warding wings.
 
 
The busy breeze came up the hill
   And smartened her cheek to red,
And frizzled her hair to a haze.  With a will
   “Good-morning, my Dear!” I said.
 
 
She glanced from me to the far-off gray,
   And, with proud severity,
“Good-morning to you – though I may say
   I am not your Dear,” quoth she:
 
 
“For I am the Dear of one not here —
   One far from his native land!” —
And she passed me by; and I did not try
   To make her understand.
 

1901

ONE WE KNEW
(M. H. 1772–1857)

 
She told how they used to form for the country dances —
   “The Triumph,” “The New-rigged Ship” —
To the light of the guttering wax in the panelled manses,
   And in cots to the blink of a dip.
 
 
She spoke of the wild “poussetting” and “allemanding”
   On carpet, on oak, and on sod;
And the two long rows of ladies and gentlemen standing,
   And the figures the couples trod.
 
 
She showed us the spot where the maypole was yearly planted,
   And where the bandsmen stood
While breeched and kerchiefed partners whirled, and panted
   To choose each other for good.
 
 
She told of that far-back day when they learnt astounded
   Of the death of the King of France:
Of the Terror; and then of Bonaparte’s unbounded
   Ambition and arrogance.
 
 
Of how his threats woke warlike preparations
   Along the southern strand,
And how each night brought tremors and trepidations
   Lest morning should see him land.
 
 
She said she had often heard the gibbet creaking
   As it swayed in the lightning flash,
Had caught from the neighbouring town a small child’s shrieking
   At the cart-tail under the lash.
 
 
With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers —
   We seated around her knees —
She would dwell on such dead themes, not as one who remembers,
   But rather as one who sees.
 
 
She seemed one left behind of a band gone distant
   So far that no tongue could hail:
Past things retold were to her as things existent,
   Things present but as a tale.
 

May 20, 1902.

SHE HEARS THE STORM

 
There was a time in former years —
   While my roof-tree was his —
When I should have been distressed by fears
   At such a night as this!
 
 
I should have murmured anxiously,
   “The pricking rain strikes cold;
His road is bare of hedge or tree,
   And he is getting old.”
 
 
But now the fitful chimney-roar,
   The drone of Thorncombe trees,
The Froom in flood upon the moor,
   The mud of Mellstock Leaze,
 
 
The candle slanting sooty wick’d,
   The thuds upon the thatch,
The eaves-drops on the window flicked,
   The clacking garden-hatch,
 
 
And what they mean to wayfarers,
   I scarcely heed or mind;
He has won that storm-tight roof of hers
   Which Earth grants all her kind.
 

A WET NIGHT

 
I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me,
Mile after mile out by the moorland way,
And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray
Into the lane, and round the corner tree;
 
 
Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred,
And the enfeebled light dies out of day,
Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say,
“This is a hardship to be calendared!”
 
 
Yet sires of mine now perished and forgot,
When worse beset, ere roads were shapen here,
And night and storm were foes indeed to fear,
Times numberless have trudged across this spot
In sturdy muteness on their strenuous lot,
And taking all such toils as trifles mere.
 

BEFORE LIFE AND AFTER

 
   A time there was – as one may guess
And as, indeed, earth’s testimonies tell —
   Before the birth of consciousness,
      When all went well.
 
 
   None suffered sickness, love, or loss,
None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
   None cared whatever crash or cross
      Brought wrack to things.
 
 
   If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,
If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
   If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,
      No sense was stung.
 
 
   But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
   Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
      How long, how long?
 

NEW YEAR’S EVE

 
“I have finished another year,” said God,
   “In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
   And let the last sun down.”
 
 
“And what’s the good of it?” I said.
   “What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
   Why nought should be at all?
 
 
“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
   This tabernacle groan’ —
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
   If he had never known!”
 
 
Then he: “My labours – logicless —
   You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
   To ask for reasons why.
 
 
“Strange that ephemeral creatures who
   By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
   Or made provision for!”
 
 
He sank to raptness as of yore,
   And opening New Year’s Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
   In his unweeting way.
 

1906.

GOD’S EDUCATION

 
I saw him steal the light away
   That haunted in her eye:
It went so gently none could say
More than that it was there one day
   And missing by-and-by.
 
 
I watched her longer, and he stole
   Her lily tincts and rose;
All her young sprightliness of soul
Next fell beneath his cold control,
   And disappeared like those.
 
 
I asked: “Why do you serve her so?
   Do you, for some glad day,
Hoard these her sweets – ?”  He said, “O no,
They charm not me; I bid Time throw
   Them carelessly away.”
 
 
Said I: “We call that cruelty —
   We, your poor mortal kind.”
He mused.  “The thought is new to me.
Forsooth, though I men’s master be,
   Theirs is the teaching mind!”
 

TO SINCERITY

 
O sweet sincerity! —
Where modern methods be
What scope for thine and thee?
 
 
Life may be sad past saying,
Its greens for ever graying,
Its faiths to dust decaying;
 
 
And youth may have foreknown it,
And riper seasons shown it,
But custom cries: “Disown it:
 
 
“Say ye rejoice, though grieving,
Believe, while unbelieving,
Behold, without perceiving!”
 
 
– Yet, would men look at true things,
And unilluded view things,
And count to bear undue things,
 
 
The real might mend the seeming,
Facts better their foredeeming,
And Life its disesteeming.
 

February 1899.

PANTHERA

(For other forms of this legend – first met with in the second century – see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)

 
Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent,
I think of Panthera, who underwent
Much from insidious aches in his decline;
But his aches were not radical like mine;
They were the twinges of old wounds – the feel
Of the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel,
Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air,
Fingers and all, as if it still were there.
My pains are otherwise: upclosing cramps
And stiffened tendons from this country’s damps,
Where Panthera was never commandant. —
The Fates sent him by way of the Levant.
   He had been blithe in his young manhood’s time,
And as centurion carried well his prime.
In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell,
He had seen service and had borne him well.
Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave;
Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow grave
When pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind
Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind;
And it was in the way of warning me
(By much his junior) against levity
That he recounted them; and one in chief
Panthera loved to set in bold relief.
 
 
   This was a tragedy of his Eastern days,
Personal in touch – though I have sometimes thought
That touch a possible delusion – wrought
Of half-conviction carried to a craze —
His mind at last being stressed by ails and age: —
Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.
 
 
   I had said it long had been a wish with me
That I might leave a scion – some small tree
As channel for my sap, if not my name —
Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim,
In whose advance I secretly could joy.
Thereat he warned.
      “Cancel such wishes, boy!
A son may be a comfort or a curse,
A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse —
A criminal.. That I could testify!”
“Panthera has no guilty son!” cried I
All unbelieving.  “Friend, you do not know,”
He darkly dropt: “True, I’ve none now to show,
For the law took him.  Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!”
 
 
   “This noon is not unlike,” he again began,
“The noon these pricking memories print on me —
Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red,
And I served in Judæa.. ’Twas a date
Of rest for arms.  The Pax Romana ruled,
To the chagrin of frontier legionaries!
Palestine was annexed – though sullen yet, —
I, being in age some two-score years and ten
And having the garrison in Jerusalem
Part in my hands as acting officer
Under the Governor.  A tedious time
I found it, of routine, amid a folk
Restless, contentless, and irascible. —
Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall,
Sending men forth on public meeting-days
To maintain order, were my duties there.
 
 
   “Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sun
Whitened the city and the hills around,
And every mountain-road that clambered them,
Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm,
And the rank cacti round the valley’s sides.
The day was one whereon death-penalties
Were put in force, and here and there were set
The soldiery for order, as I said,
Since one of the condemned had raised some heat,
And crowds surged passionately to see him slain.
I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse,
With some half-company of auxiliaries,
Had captained the procession through the streets
When it came streaming from the judgment-hall
After the verdicts of the Governor.
It drew to the great gate of the northern way
That bears towards Damascus; and to a knoll
Upon the common, just beyond the walls —
Whence could be swept a wide horizon round
Over the housetops to the remotest heights.
Here was the public execution-ground
For city crimes, called then and doubtless now
Golgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.
 
 
   “The usual dooms were duly meted out;
Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed,
And no great stir occurred.  A day of wont
It was to me, so far, and would have slid
Clean from my memory at its squalid close
But for an incident that followed these.
 
 
   “Among the tag-rag rabble of either sex
That hung around the wretches as they writhed,
Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye —
A weeping woman, whose strained countenance,
Sharpened against a looming livid cloud,
Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon —
The mother of one of those who suffered there
I had heard her called when spoken roughly to
By my ranged men for pressing forward so.
It stole upon me hers was a face I knew;
Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a while
Eluded me.  And then at once it came.
 
 
   “Some thirty years or more before that noon
I was sub-captain of a company
Drawn from the legion of Calabria,
That marched up from Judæa north to Tyre.
We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel,
The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floor
Of Jew with Canaanite, and with the host
Of Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, met
While crossing there to strike the Assyrian pride.
We left behind Gilboa; passed by Nain;
Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the top
With arbute, terabinth, and locust growths.
 
 
   “Encumbering me were sundry sick, so fallen
Through drinking from a swamp beside the way;
But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge,
We dipt into a world of pleasantness —
A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon —
Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes
Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh.
In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where,
Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we made
To rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.
 
 
   “Here a day onward, towards the eventide,
Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic dance
Trod by their comrades, when the young women came
To fill their pitchers, as their custom was.
I proffered help to one – a slim girl, coy
Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.
Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins
That hung down by her banded beautiful hair,
Symboled in full immaculate modesty.
 
 
   “Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirred
To quick desire.  ’Twas tedious timing out
The convalescence of the soldiery;
And I beguiled the long and empty days
By blissful yieldance to her sweet allure,
Who had no arts, but what out-arted all,
The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.
We met, and met, and under the winking stars
That passed which peoples earth – true union, yea,
To the pure eye of her simplicity.
 
 
   “Meanwhile the sick found health; and we pricked on.
I made her no rash promise of return,
As some do use; I was sincere in that;
I said we sundered never to meet again —
And yet I spoke untruth unknowingly! —
For meet again we did.  Now, guess you aught?
The weeping mother on Calvaria
Was she I had known – albeit that time and tears
Had wasted rudely her once flowerlike form,
And her soft eyes, now swollen with sorrowing.
 
 
   “Though I betrayed some qualms, she marked me not;
And I was scarce of mood to comrade her
And close the silence of so wide a time
To claim a malefactor as my son —
(For so I guessed him).  And inquiry made
Brought rumour how at Nazareth long before
An old man wedded her for pity’s sake
On finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how,
Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.
 
 
   “Well; there it ended; save that then I learnt
That he – the man whose ardent blood was mine —
Had waked sedition long among the Jews,
And hurled insulting parlance at their god,
Whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill,
Vowing that he would raze it, that himself
Was god as great as he whom they adored,
And by descent, moreover, was their king;
With sundry other incitements to misrule.
 
 
   “The impalements done, and done the soldiers’ game
Of raffling for the clothes, a legionary,
Longinus, pierced the young man with his lance
At signs from me, moved by his agonies
Through naysaying the drug they had offered him.
It brought the end.  And when he had breathed his last
The woman went.  I saw her never again.
Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend? —
That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy
So trustingly, you blink contingencies.
Fors Fortuna!  He who goes fathering
Gives frightful hostages to hazardry!”
 
 
   Thus Panthera’s tale.  ’Twas one he seldom told,
But yet it got abroad.  He would unfold,
At other times, a story of less gloom,
Though his was not a heart where jests had room.
He would regret discovery of the truth
Was made too late to influence to ruth
The Procurator who had condemned his son —
Or rather him so deemed.  For there was none
To prove that Panthera erred not: and indeed,
When vagueness of identity I would plead,
Panther himself would sometimes own as much —
Yet lothly.  But, assuming fact was such,
That the said woman did not recognize
Her lover’s face, is matter for surprise.
However, there’s his tale, fantasy or otherwise.
 
 
   Thereafter shone not men of Panthera’s kind:
The indolent heads at home were ill-inclined
To press campaigning that would hoist the star
Of their lieutenants valorous afar.
Jealousies kept him irked abroad, controlled
And stinted by an Empire no more bold.
Yet in some actions southward he had share —
In Mauretania and Numidia; there
With eagle eye, and sword and steed and spur,
Quelling uprisings promptly.  Some small stir
In Parthia next engaged him, until maimed,
As I have said; and cynic Time proclaimed
His noble spirit broken.  What a waste
Of such a Roman! – one in youth-time graced
With indescribable charm, so I have heard,
Yea, magnetism impossible to word
When faltering as I saw him.  What a fame,
O Son of Saturn, had adorned his name,
Might the Three so have urged Thee! – Hour by hour
His own disorders hampered Panthera’s power
To brood upon the fate of those he had known,
Even of that one he always called his own —
Either in morbid dream or memory.
He died at no great age, untroublously,
An exit rare for ardent soldiers such as he.