Outros

How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue?
The coin I'd heap for marrying my Muse
And build our home i'th' greater Time-to-be
Becomes dissolved by needs of each day's use
And I feel beggared of infinity,
Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven
By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven.

How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue?
The coin I'd heap for marrying my Muse
And build our home i'th' greater Time-to-be
Becomes dissolved by needs of each day's use
And I feel beggared of infinity,
Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven
By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven.

THE SHINNING POOL


Go: thou hast nothing to forgive.
To dream is better than to live.

But he shall see the rising sun
Who leaveth everything undone;
Whose mind from his attention's task
Strays like the shifting of a mask.

He only shall through greener vales
Than even those that shine right through
The window-panes of children's tales
Wander, who thinks the world anew.

Only for him who sits and sings
On the stiles and forgets his road
Does the fairies' bird spread her wings
And the fairies' flowers grow more broad.

He shall not find a hand to feed
The silent sources of his need.
No one shall point the rill where he
May slake the thirst of infancy.

But greener valleys than To-Day
And dearer thoughts than Far Away
Shall tap at his window and wake
His freshness other thirsts to slake.

So, like a seamstress sitting still
At a window in the sunset
Of a village no steps have met,
He shall belong to nothing ill,

But incorporeal, like a wish,
His soul shall like a rainbow cross
The rain-green pastures of his loss
And earth shall blossom into speech.

I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape
Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed,
Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light remembered,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

Even ye, now old, that to this come as to
Your past, your own joy throw
Into the cup, and with the younger drink
That which now makes you think
Of what love was when love was. (For not now
Your winter thoughts allow).
Drink with the hot day, the bride's sad joy and
The bridegroom's haste inreined,
The memory of that day when ye were young
And with great paeans sung
Along the surface of the depths of you,
You paired and the night saw
The day come in and you did still pant close,
And still the half-fallen flesh distending rose.

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie –
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words sense from words – knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

The world is woven all of dream and error
And but one sureness in our truth may lie –
That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror
We know it not by knowing it thereby.
For but one side of things the mirror knows,
And knows it colded from its solidness.
A double lie its truth is; what it shows
By true show's false and nowhere by true place.
Thought clouds our life's day-sense with strangeness, yet
Never from strangeness more than that it's strange
Doth buy our perplexed thinking, for we get
But the words sense from words – knowledge, truth, change.
We know the world is false, not what is true.
Yet we think on, knowing we ne'er shall know.

This is the month and this the day.
Ye must not stay.
Sally ye out and in warm clusters move
To where beyond the trees the belfry's height
Does in the blue wide heaven a message prove,
Somewhat calm, of delight.
Now flushed and whispering loud sally ye out
To church! The sun pours on the ordered rout,
And all their following eyes clasp round the bride:
They feel like hands her bosom and her side;
Like the inside of the vestment next her skin,
They round her round and fold each crevice in;
They lift her skirts up, as to tease or woo
The cleft hid thing below;
And this they think at her peeps in their ways
And in their glances plays.

When I should be asleep to mine own voice
In telling thee how much thy love's my dream,
I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them.
Yet wonder not: this is the poet's soul.
I could not tell thee well of how I love,
Loved I not less by knowing it, were all
My self my love and no thought love to prove.
What consciousness makes more by consciousness,
It makes less, for it makes it less itself.
My sense of love could not my love rich-dress
Did it not for it spend love's own love-pelf.
Poet's love's this (as in these words I prove thee):
I love my love for thee more than I love thee.

When I should be asleep to mine own voice
In telling thee how much thy love's my dream,
I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them.
Yet wonder not: this is the poet's soul.
I could not tell thee well of how I love,
Loved I not less by knowing it, were all
My self my love and no thought love to prove.
What consciousness makes more by consciousness,
It makes less, for it makes it less itself.
My sense of love could not my love rich-dress
Did it not for it spend love's own love-pelf.
Poet's love's this (as in these words I prove thee):
I love my love for thee more than I love thee.

LYCANTHROPY

Somewhere dreams will be true.
There is a lonely lake
Moonlit for me and you
And like none for our sake.

There the dark white sail spread
To a vague wind unfelt
Shall make our sleep-life led
Towards where the waters melt

Into the black-tree'd shore,
Where the unknown woods meet
The lake's wish to be more,
And make the dream complete.

There we will hide and fade,
Emptly moon-bound all,
Feeling that what we are made
Was something musical.

Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling
From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,
Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling
With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,
I look with inner eyes afraid to look,
Yet perplexed into looking, at the worth
This verse may have and wonder, of my book,
To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth.
But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes,
Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof,
And in his mind for possible proofs gropes,
Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff,
I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,
But by my thought of others' thought of me.

Like a bad suitor desperate and trembling
From the mixed sense of being not loved and loving,
Who with feared longing half would know, dissembling
With what he'd wish proved what he fears soon proving,
I look with inner eyes afraid to look,
Yet perplexed into looking, at the worth
This verse may have and wonder, of my book,
To what thoughts shall't in alien hearts give birth.
But, as he who doth love, and, loving, hopes,
Yet, hoping, fears, fears to put proof to proof,
And in his mind for possible proofs gropes,
Delaying the true proof, lest the real thing scoff,
I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,
But by my thought of others' thought of me.

SUSPENSE

I dream, and strange dim powers
My shining sleep assist;
A sound as of coming showers
Creeps towards me, loudly hist;
And lo! all my forgotten hours
Lie round me like a mist.

The ghosts of my dead selves
Weave round me a false mesh;
My undreamed dreams, pale elves,
Are now part of my flesh;
And all I am my unselfing shelves
On dreams, out of my reach.

I touch impalpable things;
I am sunny with past days;
Remote sounds, like near wings,
Flank my blind spirit's ways;
And from the other side of the big hill rings
A bell that summons to praise.

But I am sick of dreaming,
Weary of being the same
Over desert spaces of seeming,
Unwilling player of a game
With life, far star but gleaming
On dead earths without name.

Fierce dreams of something else!
Frenzy to go away
(O wave in me that swells!)
From life where life must stay –
Life ever at today!

Some other place and thing!
Not a life! not mine so!
O to be a wind, a wing,
A bark me there to bring!

Whither? If I could know,
I would not wish to go.

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

The edge of the green wave whitely doth hiss
Upon the wetted sand. I look, yet dream.
Surely reality cannot be this!
Somehow, somewhere this surely doth but seem!
The sky, the sea, this great extent disclosed
Of outward joy, this bulk of life we feel,
Is not something, but something interposed.
Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,
For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take
And for truth commune with imaginings,
Holding a dream too bitter, a too fair curse,
This common sleep of men, the universe.

My weary life, that lives unsatisfied
On the foiled off-brink of being e'er but this,
To whom the power to will hath been denied
And the will to renounce doth also miss;
My sated life, with having nothing sated,
In the motion of moving poised aye,
Within its dreams from its own dreams abated –
This life let the Gods change or take away.
For this endless succession of empty hours,
Like deserts after deserts, voidly one,
Doth undermine the very dreaming powers
And dull even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact.

How yesterday is long ago! The past
Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave will bear
My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.

Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid.
And, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart
Within the peril disimperilled grows;
A port is near the more from port we part –
The port where to our driven direction goes.
If we reap knowledge to cross-profit, this
From storms we learn, when the storm's height doth drive –
That the black presence of its violence is
The pushing promise of near far blue skies.
Learn we but how to have the pilot-skill,
And the storm's very might shall mate our will.

Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid.
And, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart
Within the peril disimperilled grows;
A port is near the more from port we part –
The port where to our driven direction goes.
If we reap knowledge to cross-profit, this
From storms we learn, when the storm's height doth drive –
That the black presence of its violence is
The pushing promise of near far blue skies.
Learn we but how to have the pilot-skill,
And the storm's very might shall mate our will.

As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
Thus with deceit do I detain the heart
Of which deceit's self knows itself a part.

As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
Thus with deceit do I detain the heart
Of which deceit's self knows itself a part.

When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
With the old sadness for the immortal home,
Shall I revisit these same differing fields
And cull the old new flowers with the same sense,
That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,
Of more age than my days in this pretence?
Shall I again regret strange faces lost
Of which the present memory is forgot
And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed
Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?
Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be.
Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!

THE MAD FIDDLER

I

THE MAD FIDDLER


THE MAD FIDDLER

Not from the northern road,
Not from the southern way
First his wild music flowed
Into the village that day.

He suddenly was in the lane,
The people came out to hear
He suddenly went, and in vain
Their hopes wished him to appear.

His music strange did fret
Each heart to wish 'twas free.
If was not a melody yet
It was not no melody.

Somewhere far away
Somewhere far outside
Being forced to live, they
Felt this tune replied.

Replied to that longing
All have in their breasts,
To lost sense belonging
To forgotten quests.

The happy wife now knew
That she had married ill,
The glad fond lover grew
Weary of loving still,

The maid and the boy felt glad
That they had dreaming only
The lone hearts that were sad
Felt somewhere less lonely.

In each soul woke the flower
Whose touch leaves earthless dust,
The soul's husband's first hour,
The thing completing us,

The shadow that comes to bless
From kissed depths unexpressed,
The luminous restlessness
That is better than rest.

As he came, he went.
They felt him but half-be.
Then he was quietly blent
With silence and memory.

Sleep left again their laughter,
Their tranced hope ceased to last,
And but a small time after
They knew not he had passed.

Yet when the sorrow of living,
Because life is not willed,
Comes back in dreams' hours, giving
A sense of life being chilled,

Suddenly each remembers –
It glows like a coming moon
On where their dream-life embers –
The mad fiddlers tune.