Corn-Flowers
Book I The First Violets
Who that has loved knows not the tender tale
Which flowers reveal, when lips are coy to tell?
Whose youth has paused not, dreaming, in the vale
Where the rath violets dwell?
Lo, where they shrink along the lonely brake,
Under the leafless melancholy tree;
Not yet the cuckoo sings, nor glides the snake,
Nor wild thyme lures the bee;
Yet at their sight and scent entranced and thrall’d,
All June seems golden in the April skies;
How sweet the days we yearn for,—till fulfill’d:
O distant Paradise,
Dear Land to which Desire for ever flees;
Time doth no present to our grasp allow,
Say in the fix’d Eternal shall we seize
At last the fleeting Now?
Dream not of days to come—of that Unknown
Whither Hope wanders—maze without a clue;
Give their true witchery to the flowers;—thine own
Youth in their youth renew.
Avarice, remember when the cowslip’s gold
Lured and yet lost its glitter in thy grasp.
Do thy hoards glad thee more than those of old?
Those wither’d in thy clasp,
From these thy clasp falls palsied.—It was then
That thou wert rich—thy coffers are a lie;
Alas, poor fool, Joy is the wealth of men,
And Care their penury.
Come, foil’d Ambition, what hast thou desired?
Empire and power?—O, wanderer, tempest-tost!
These once were thine, when life’s gay spring inspired
Thy soul with glories lost.
Let the flowers charm thee back to that rich time
When golden Dreamland lay within thy chart,
When Love bestow’d a realm indeed sublime—
The boundless human heart.
Hark, hark again, the tread of bashful feet!
Hark the boughs rustling round the trysting-place!
Let air again with one dear breath be sweet,
Earth fair with one dear face.
Brief-lived first flowers—first love! The hours steal on
To prank the world in summer’s pomp of hue,
But what can flaunt beneath a fiercer sun
Worth what we lose in you?
Oft by a flower, a leaf, in some loved book
We mark the lines that charm us most;—Retrace
Thy life;—recall its loveliest passage;—Look,
Dead violets keep the place!
The Image on the Tide
Not a sound is heard
But my heart by thine,
Breathe not a word,
Lay thy hand in mine.
How trembling, yet still,
On the lake’s clear tide,
Sleep the distant hill,
And the bank beside.
The near and the far,
Intermingled flow;
The herb and the star
Imaged both below.
So deep and so clear,
Through the shadowy light,
The far and the near
In my soul unite;
The future and past,
Like the bank and hill,
On the surface glass’d,
Though they tremble still;
Disturb not the dream
Of this double whole;
The heav’n in the stream
On my soul thy soul.
The sense cannot count
(As the waters glass
The forest and mount
And the clouds that pass)
The shadows and gleams
In that stilly deep,
Like the tranquil dreams
Of a hermit’s sleep.
One shadow alone
On my soul doth fall,—
And yet in the one
It reflects on All.
Is It All Vanity?
Doubting of life, my spirit paused perplext
Let fall its fardell of laborious care,
And the sharp cry of my great trouble vext
Unsympathizing air.
Out on this choice of unrewarded toil,
This upward path into the realm of snow!
Oh for one glimpse of the old happy soil
Fragrant with flowers below!
For what false gold, like alchemists, we yearn,
Wasting the wealth we never can recall,
Joy and life’s lavish prime;—and our return?
Ashes, cold ashes, all!
Could youth but dream what narrow burial-urns
Hopes that went forth to conquer worlds should hold,
How in a tomb the lamp Experience burns
Amidst the dust of old!—
Look back, how all the beautiful Ideal,
Sporting in doubtful moonlight, one by one
Fade from the rising of the hard-eyed Real,
Like Fairies from the sun.
Love render’d saintlike by its pure devotion;
Knowledge exulting lone by shoreless seas
And Feelings tremulous to each emotion,
As May leaves to the breeze.
And, oh, that grand Ambition, poet-nurst,
When boyhood’s heart swells up to the Sublime,
And on the gaze the towers of Glory first
Flash from the peaks of Time!
Are they then wiser who but nurse the growth
Of joys in life’s most common element,
Creeping from hour to hour in that calm sloth
Which Egoists call “Content?”
Who freight for storms no hopeful argosy,
Who watch no beacon wane on hilltops grey,
Who bound their all, where from the human eye
The horizon fades away?
Alas for Labour, if indeed more wise
To drink life’s tide unwitting where it flows;
Renounce the arduous palm, and only prize
The Cnidian vine and rose!
Out from the Porch the Stoic cries “For shame!”
What hast thou left us, Stoic, in thy school?
“That pain or pleasure is but in the name?”
Go, prick thy finger, fool!
Never grave Pallas, never Muse severe
Charm’d this hard life like the free, zoneless Grace;
Pleasure is sweet, in spite of every sneer
On Zeno’s wrinkled face.
What gain’d and left ye to this age of ours
Ye early priesthoods of the Isis, Truth,—
When light first glimmer’d from the Cuthite’s towers;
When Thebes was in her youth?
When to the weird Chaldæan spoke the seer,
When Hades open’d at Heraclean spells,
When Fate made Nature her interpreter
In leaves and murmuring wells?
When the keen Greek chased flying Science on,
Upward and up the infinite abyss?—
Like perish’d stars your arts themselves have gone
Noiseless to nothingness!
And what is knowledge but the Wizard’s ring,
Kindling a flame to circumscribe a ground?
The belt of light that lures the spirit’s wing
Hems the invoker round.
Ponder and ask again “what boots our toil?”
Can we the Garden’s wanton child gainsay,
When from kind lips he culls their rosy spoil
And lives life’s holiday?
Life answers “No—if ended here be life,
Seize what the sense can give—it is thine all;
Disarm thee, Virtue, barren is thy strife;
Knowledge, thy torch let fall.
“Seek thy lost Psyche, yearning Love, no more!
Love is but lust, if soul be only breath;
Who would put forth one billow from the shore
If the great sea be—Death?”
But if the soul, that slow artificer
For ends its instinct rears from life hath striven,
Feeling beneath its patient webwork stir
Wings only freed in Heaven,
Then and but then to toil is to be wise;
Solved is the riddle of the grand desire
Which ever, ever, for the Distant sighs,
And must perforce aspire.
Rise, then, my soul, take comfort from thy sorrow;
Thou feel’st thy treasure when thou feel’st thy load;
Life without thought, the day without the morrow,
God on the brute bestow’d;
Longings obscure as for a native clime,
Flight from what is to live in what may be,
God gave the Soul.—Thy discontent with Time
Proves thine eternity.
The True Joy-Giver
Oh Œvoë, liber Pater,
Oh, the vintage feast divine,
When the God was in the bosom
And his rapture in the wine;
When the Faun laugh’d out at morning;
When the Mænad hymn’d the night;
And the Earth itself was drunken
With the worship of delight;
Oh Œvoë, liber Pater,
Whose orgies are upon
The hilltops of Parnassus,
The banks of Helicon;—
How often have I hail’d thee!
How often have I been
The bearer of the thyrsus,
When its wither’d leaves were green.
Then the boughs were purple gleaming
With the dewdrop and the star;
And chanting came the wood-nymph,
And flashing came the car.
Long faded are the garlands
Of the thyrsus that I bore,
When the wood-nymph chanted “Follow”
In the vintage-feast of yore.
My vineyards are the richest
Falernian slopes bestow;
Has the vineherd lost his cunning?
Has the summer lost its glow?
Oh, never on Falernium
The Care-Dispeller trod,
Its vine-leaves wreathe no thyrsus,
Its fruits allure no god.
For ever young, Lyæus;
For ever young his priest;
The Boy-god of the Morning,
The conqueror of the East,
His wine is Nature’s life-blood;
His vineyards bloom upon
The hilltops of Parnassus,
The banks of Helicon.
But the hilltops of Parnassus
Are free to every age;
I have trod them with the Poet,
I have mapp’d them with the Sage;
And I’ll take my pert disciple
To see, with humble eyes,
How the Gladness-bringer honours
The worship of the wise.
Lo, the arching of the vine-leaves;
Lo, the sparkle of the fount;
Hark, the carol of the Mænads;
Lo, the car is on the Mount!
“Ho, room, ye thyrsus-bearers,
Your playmate I have been!”
“Go, madman,” laughs Lyæus,
“Thy thyrsus then was green.”
And adown the gleaming alleys
The gladness-givers glide;
And the wood-nymph murmurs “Follow,”
To the young man by my side.