Charles George Douglas Roberts
A Nocturne of Consecration
I TALKED about you, Dear, the other night,
Having myself alone with my delight.
Alone with dreams and memories of you,
All the divine-houred summer stillness through
I talked of life, of love the always new,
Of tears, and joy,—yet only talked of you.
To the sweet air
That breathed upon my face
The spirit of lilies in a leafy place,
Your breath’s caress, the lingering of your hair,
I said—“In all your wandering through the dusk,
Your waitings on the marriages of flowers
Through the long, intimate hours
When soul and sense, desire and love confer,
You must have known the best that God has made.
What do you know of Her?”
Said the sweet air—
“Since I have touched her lips,
Bringing the consecration of her kiss,
Half passion and half prayer,
And all for you,
My various lore has suffered an eclipse.
I have forgot all else of sweet I know.”
To the wise earth,
Kind, and companionable, and dewy cool,
Fair beyond words to tell, as you are fair,
And cunning past compare
To leash all heaven in a windless pool,
I said—“The mysteries of death and birth
Are in your care.
You love, and sleep; you drain life to the lees;
And wonderful things you know.
Angels have visited you, and at your knees
Learned what I learn forever at her eyes,
The pain that still enhances Paradise.
You in your breast felt her first pulses stir;
And you have thrilled to the light touch of her feet,
Blindingly sweet.
Now make me wise with some new word of Her.”
Said the wise earth—
“She is not all my child.
But the wild spirit that rules her heart-beats wild
Is of diviner birth,
And kin to the unknown light beyond my ken.
All I can give to Her have I not given?
Strength to be glad, to suffer, and to know;
The sorcery that subdues the souls of men;
The beauty that is as the shadow of heaven;
The hunger of love
And unspeakable joy thereof.
And these are dear to Her because of you.
You need no word of mine to make you wise
Who worship at her eyes
And find there life and love forever new!”
To the white stars,
Eternal and all-seeing,
In their wide home beyond the wells of being,
I said—“There is a little cloud that mars
The mystical perfection of her kiss.
Mine, mine, She is,
As far as lip to lip, and heart to heart,
And spirit to spirit when lips and hands must part,
Can make her mine. But there is more than this,—
More, more of Her to know.
For still her soul escapes me unaware,
To dwell in secret where I may not go.
Take, and uplift me. Make me wholly Hers.”
Said the white stars, the heavenly ministers,—
“This life is brief, but it is only one.
Before to-morrow’s sun
For one or both of you it may be done.
This love of yours is only just begun.
Will all the ecstasy that may be won
Before this life its little course has run
At all suffice
The love that agonizes in your eyes?
Therefore be wise.
Content you with the wonder of love that lies
Between her lips and underneath her eyes.
If more you should surprise,
What would be left to hope from Paradise?
In other worlds expect another joy
Of Her, which blundering fate shall not annoy,
Nor time nor change destroy.”
So, Dear, I talked the long, divine night through,
And felt you in the chrismal balms of dew.
The thing then learned
Has ever since within my bosom burned—
One life is not enough for love of you.
A Nocturne of Spiritual Love
SLEEP, sleep, imperious heart! Sleep, fair and undefiled!
Sleep, and be free!
Come in your dreams at last, comrade and queen and child,—
At last to me.
Come, for the honeysuckle calls you out of the night.
Come, for the air
Calls with a tyrannous remembrance of delight,
Passion and prayer.
Sleep, sovereign heart! And now—for dream and memory
Endure no door,—
My spirit undenied goes where my feet, to thee,
Have gone before.
A moonbeam or a breath, above thine eyes I bow,
Silent, unseen,
But not, ah not unknown! Thy spirit knows me now
Where I have been.
Surely my long desire upon thy soul hath power.
Surely for this
Thy sleep shall breathe thee forth, soul of the lily flower,
Under my kiss.
Sleep, body wonderful! Wake, spirit wise and wild,
White and divine!
Here is our heaven of dreams, O dear and undefiled,
All thine, all mine.
An Ode for the Canadian Confederacy
AWAKE, my country, the hour is great with change!
Under this gloom which yet obscures the land,
From ice-blue strait and stem Laurentian range
To where giant peaks our western bounds command,
A deep voice stirs, vibrating in men’s ears
As if their own hearts throbbed that thunder forth,
A sound wherein who hearkens wisely hears
The voice of the desire of this strong North,—
This North whose heart of fire
Yet knows not its desire
Clearly, but dreams, and murmurs in the dream.
The hour of dreams is done. Lo, on the hills the gleam!
Awake, my country, the hour of dreams is done!
Doubt not, nor dread the greatness of thy fate.
Tho’ faint souls fear the keen confronting sun,
And fain would bid the morn of splendor wait;
Tho’ dreamers, rapt in starry visions, cry
“Lo, yon thy future, yon thy faith, thy fame!”
And stretch vain hands to stars, thy fame is nigh,
Here in Canadian hearth, and home, and name;—
This name which yet shall grow
Till all the nations know
Us for a patriot people, heart and hand
Loyal to our native earth, our own Canadian land!
O strong hearts, guarding the birthright of our glory,
Worth your best blood this heritage that ye guard!
These mighty streams resplendent with our story,
These iron coasts by rage of seas unjarred,—
What fields of peace these bulwarks will secure!
What vales of plenty those calm floods supply!
Shall not our love this rough, sweet land make sure,
Her bounds preserve inviolate, though we die?
O strong hearts of the North,
Let flame your loyalty forth,
And put the craven and base to an open shame,
Till earth shall know the Child of Nations by her name!
Canadian Streams
O RIVERS rolling to the sea
From lands that bear the maple tree,
How swell your voices with the strain
Of loyalty and liberty!
A holy music, heard in vain
By coward heart and sordid brain,
To whom this strenuous being seems
Naught but a greedy race for gain.
O unsung streams—not splendid themes
Ye lack to fire your patriot dreams!
Annals of glory gild your waves,
Hope freights your tides, Canadian streams!
St Lawrence, whose wide water laves
The shores that ne’er have nourished slaves!
Swift Richelieu of lilied fame!
Niagara of glorious graves!
Thy rapids, Ottawa, proclaim
Where Daulac and his heroes came!
Thy tides, St John, declare La Tour,
And, later, many a loyal name!
Thou inland stream, whose vales, secure
From storm, Tecumseh’s death made poor!
And thou, small water, red with war,
’Twixt Beaubassin and Beauséjour!
Dread Saguenay, where eagles soar,
What voice shall from the bastioned shore
The tale of Roberval reveal,
Or his mysterious fate deplore?
Annapolis, do thy floods yet feel
Faint memories of Champlain’s keel,
Thy pulses yet the deed repeat
Of Poutrincourt and d’Iberville?
And thou far tide, whose plains now beat
With march of myriad westering feet,
Saskatchewan, whose virgin sod
So late Canadian blood made sweet?
Your bulwark hills, your valleys broad,
Streams where de Salaberry trod,
Where Wolfe achieved, where Brock was slain,—
Their voices are the voice of God!
O sacred waters! not in vain,
Across Canadian height and plain,
Ye sound us in triumphant tone
The summons of your high refrain.
The Silver Thaw
THERE came a day of showers
Upon the shrinking snow;
The south wind sighed of flowers,
The softening skies hung low.
Midwinter for a space
Foreshadowing April’s face,
The white world caught the fancy,
And would not let it go.
In reawakened courses
The brooks rejoiced the land;
We dreamed the Spring’s shy forces
Were gathering close at hand.
The dripping buds were stirred,
As if the sap had heard
The long-desired persuasion
Of April’s soft command.
But antic Time had cheated
With hope’s elusive gleam;
The phantom Spring, defeated,
Fled down the ways of dream.
And in the night the reign
Of winter came again,
With frost upon the forest
And stillness on the stream.
When morn in rose and crocus
Came up the bitter sky,
Celestial beams awoke us
To wondering ecstasy.
The wizard Winter’s spell
Had wrought so passing well,
That earth was bathed in glory,
As if God’s smile were nigh.
The silver’d saplings, bending,
Flashed in a rain of gems;
The statelier trees, attending,
Blazed in their diadems.
White fire and amethyst
All common things had kissed,
And chrysolites and sapphires
Adorned the bramble-stems.
In crystalline confusion
All beauty came to birth;
It was a kind illusion
To comfort waiting earth—
To bid the buds forget
The Spring so distant yet,
And hearts no more remember
The iron season’s dearth.
Epitaph for a Sailor Buried Ashore
HE who but yesterday would roam
Careless as clouds, and currents range,
In homeless wandering most at home,
Inhabiter of change;
Who wooed the West to win the East,
And named the stars of North and South,
And felt the zest of Freedom’s feast
Familiar in his mouth;
Who found a faith in stranger-speech,
And fellowship in foreign hands,
And had within his eager reach
The relish of all lands—
How circumscribed a plot of earth
Keeps now his restless footsteps still,
Whose wish was wide as ocean’s girth,
Whose will the water’s will!
The Train Among the Hills
VAST, unrevealed, in silence and the night
Brooding, the ancient hills commune with sleep.
Inviolate the solemn valleys keep
Their contemplation. Soon from height to height
Steals a red finger of mysterious light,
And lion-footed through the forests creep
Strange mutterings; till suddenly, with sweep
And shattering thunder of resistless flight
And crash of routed echoes, roars to view,
Down the long mountain gorge, the Night Express,
Freighted with fears and tears and happiness....
The dread form passes; silence falls anew.
And lo! I have beheld the thronged, blind world
To goals unseen from God’s hand onward hurled.
A Song of Growth
IN the heart of a man
Is a thought upfurled,
Reached its full span
It shakes the world,
And to one high thought
Is a whole race wrought.
Not with vain noise
The great work grows,
Nor with foolish voice,
But in repose,—
Not in the rush
But in the hush.
From the cogent lash
Of the cloud-herd wind
The low clouds dash,
Blown headlong, blind;
But beyond, the great blue
Looks moveless through.
O’er the loud world sweep
The scourge and the rod;
But in deep beyond deep
Is the stillness of God;—
At the Fountains of Life
No cry, no strife.
Sleepy Man
WHEN the Sleepy Man comes with dust in his eyes
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
He comes with a murmur of dreams in his wings
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
And whispers of mermaids and wonderful things.
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
When the top is a burden, the bugle a bane,
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane,
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry.
(So hush-a-by, weary, my Dearie!)
Night in a Down-Town Street
NOT in the eyed, expectant gloom,
Where soaring peaks repose
And incommunicable space
Companions with the snows;
Not in the glimmering dusk that crawls
Upon the clouded sea,
Where bourneless wave on bourneless wave
Complains continually;
Not in the palpable dark of woods
Where groping hands clutch fear,
Does Night her deeps of solitude
Reveal unveiled as here.
The street is a grim cañon carved
In the eternal stone,
That knows no more the rushing stream
It anciently has known.
The emptying tide of life has drained
The iron channel dry,
Strange winds from the forgotten day
Draw down, and dream, and sigh.
The narrow heaven, the desolate moon
Made wan with endless years,
Seem less immeasurably remote
Than laughter, love, or tears.
The Falling Leaves
LIGHTLY He blows, and at His breath they fall,
The perishing kindreds of the leaves; they drift,
Spent flames of scarlet, gold aërial,
Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift.
Lightly he blows, and countless as the falling
Of snow by night upon a solemn sea,
The ages circle down beyond recalling,
To strew the hollows of Eternity.
He sees them drifting through the spaces dim,
And leaves and ages are as one to Him.
An Epitaph for a Husbandman
HE who would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks—
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home,—
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again,
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy, and blithe, and bold,
He labored for the morrow,—
The plough his hands would hold
Rusts in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
The clods he used to cleave
Now cover him.
But the green, growing things
Lean kindly to his sleep,—
White roots and wandering strings,
Closer they creep.
Because he loved them long
And with them bore his part,
Tenderly now they throng
About his heart.
Origins
OUT of the dreams that heap
The hollow hand of sleep,—
Out of the dark sublime,
The echoing deeps of time,—
From the averted Face
Beyond the bournes of space,
Into the sudden sun
We journey, one by one.
Out of the hidden shade
Wherein desire is made,—
Out of the pregnant stir
Where death and life confer,—
The dark and mystic heat
Where soul and matter meet,—
The enigmatic Will,—
We start! and then are still.
Inexorably decreed
By the ancestral deed,
The puppets of our sires,
We work out blind desires,
And for our sons ordain
The blessing or the bane.
In ignorance we stand
With fate on either hand,
And question stars and earth
Of life, and death, and birth.
With wonder in our eyes
We scan the kindred skies,
While through the common grass
Our atoms mix and pass.
We feel the sap go free
When spring comes to the tree;
And in our blood is stirred
What warms the brooding bird.
The vital fire we breathe
That bud and blade bequeathe,
And strength of native clay
In our full veins hath sway.
But in the urge intense
And fellowship of sense,
Suddenly comes a word
In other ages heard.
On a great wind our souls
Are borne to unknown goals,
And past the bournes of space
To the unaverted Face.
The Wrestler
WHEN God sends out His company to travel through the stars,
There is every kind of wonder in the show;
There is every kind of animal behind its prison bars;
With riders in a many-colored row.
The master showman, Time, has a strange trick of rhyme,
And the clown’s most ribald jest is a tear;
But the best drawing card is the Wrestler huge and hard,
Who can fill the tent at any time of year.
His eye is on the crowd, and he beckons with his hand,
With authoritative finger, and they come.
The rules of the game they do not understand,
But they go as in a dream, and are dumb.
They would fain say him nay, and they look the other way,
Till at last to the ropes they cling;
But he throws them one by one till the show for them is done,
In the blood-red dust of the ring.
There’s none to shun his challenge—they must meet him soon or late,
And he knows a cunning trick for all heels.
The king’s haughty crown drops in jeers from his pate
As the hold closes on him, and he reels.
The burly and the proud, the braggarts of the crowd,
Every one of them he topples down in thunder.
His grip grows mild for the dotard and the child,
But alike they must all go under.
Oh, many a mighty foeman would try a fall with him—
Persepolis and Babylon and Rome,
Assyria and Sardis, they see their fame grow dim,
As he tumbles in the dust every dome.
At length will come an hour when the stars shall feel his power,
And he shall have his will upon the sun.
Ere we know what he’s about, the stars will be put out,
And the wonder of the show will be undone.
Recessional
NOW along the solemn heights
Fade the Autumn’s altar-lights;
Down the great earth’s glimmering chancel
Glide the days and nights.
Little kindred of the grass,
Like a shadow in a glass
Falls the dark and falls the stillness;
We must rise and pass.
We must rise and follow, wending
Where the nights and days have ending,—
Pass in order pale and slow
Unto sleep extending.
Little brothers of the clod,
Soul of fire and seed of sod,
We must fare into the silence
At the knees of God.
Little comrades of the sky
Wing to wing we wander by,
Going, going, going, going,
Softly as a sigh.
Hark, the moving shapes confer,
Globe of dew and gossamer,
Fading and ephemeral spirits
In the dusk astir.
Moth and blossom, blade and bee,
Worlds must go as well as we,
In the long procession joining
Mount, and star, and sea.
Toward the shadowy brink we climb
Where the round year rolls sublime,
Rolls, and drops, and falls forever
In the vast of time;
Like a plummet plunging deep
Past the utmost reach of sleep,
Till remembrance has no longer
Care to laugh or weep.
Ascription
O THOU who hast beneath Thy hand
The dark foundations of the land,—
The motion of whose ordered thought
An instant universe hath wrought;
Who hast within Thine equal hand
The rolling sun, the ripening seed,
The azure of the speedwell’s eye,
The vast solemnities of sky,—
Who hear’st no less the feeble note
Of one small bird’s awakening throat
Than that unnamed, tremendous chord
Arcturus sounds before his Lord,—
More sweet to Thee than all acclaim
Of storm and ocean, stars and flame,
In favor more before Thy face
Than pageantry of time and space,
The worship and the service be
Of him Thou madest most like Thee,—
Who in his nostrils hath Thy breath,
Whose spirit is the lord of death!