Selected Poems and Prose
Page 46
Some lost among bowers of blossoming trees,
Were all paved with daisies and delicate bells
As fair as the fabulous asphodels,
55And flow’rets which drooping as day drooped too
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew.
And from this undefiled Paradise
The flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes
60Smile on its mother, whose singing sweet
Can first lull, and at last must awaken it),
When Heaven’s blithe winds had unfolded them,
As mine-lamps enkindle a hidden gem,
Shone smiling to Heaven, and every one
65Shared joy in the light of the gentle sun;
For each one was interpenetrated
With the light and the odour its neighbour shed,
Like young lovers whom youth and love make dear
Wrapped and filled by their mutual atmosphere.
70But the Sensitive-plant which could give small fruit
Of the love which it felt from the leaf to the root,
Received more than all—it loved more than ever,
Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver.
For the Sensitive-plant has no bright flower;
75Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not—the beautiful!
The light winds which from unsustaining wings
Shed the music of many murmurings;
80The beams which dart from many a star
Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar;
The plumed insects swift and free,
Like golden boats on a sunny sea,
Laden with light and odour, which pass
85Over the gleam of the living grass;
The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
Like fire in the flowers till the Sun rides high,
Then wander like spirits among the spheres,
Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears;
90The quivering vapours of dim noontide,
Which like a sea o’er the warm earth glide,
In which every sound, and odour, and beam
Move, as reeds in a single stream;
Each, and all, like ministering angels were
95For the Sensitive-plant sweet joy to bear
Whilst the lagging hours of the day went by
Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.
And when evening descended from Heaven above,
And the Earth was all rest, and the air was all love,
100And delight, tho’ less bright, was far more deep,
And the day’s veil fell from the world of sleep,
And the beasts, and the birds, and the insects were drowned
In an ocean of dreams without a sound
Whose waves never mark, tho’ they ever impress
105The light sand which paves it—Consciousness;
(Only over head the sweet nightingale
Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,
And snatches of its Elysian chant
Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive-plant).
110The Sensitive-plant was the earliest
Up-gathered into the bosom of rest;
A sweet child weary of its delight,
The feeblest and yet the favourite—
Cradled within the embrace of night.
PART SECOND
There was a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream,
Was as God is to the starry scheme.
5A Lady, the wonder of her kind,
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which, dilating, had moulded her mien and motion
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean,
Tended the garden from morn to even:
10And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven,
Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth!
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
15Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:
As if some bright Spirit for her sweet sake
Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake,
As if yet around her he lingering were,
20Tho’ the veil of daylight concealed him from her.
Her step seemed to pity the grass it prest;
You might hear by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there and left passion behind.
25And wherever her airy footstep trod,
Her trailing hair from the grassy sod
Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep,
Like a sunny storm o’er the dark green deep.
I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet
30Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle feet;
I doubt not they felt the spirit that came
From her glowing fingers thro’ all their frame.
She sprinkled bright water from the stream
On those that were faint with the sunny beam;
35And out of the cups of the heavy flowers
She emptied the rain of the thunder showers.
She lifted their heads with her tender hands
And sustained them with rods and ozier bands;
If the flowers had been her own infants she
40Could never have nursed them more tenderly.
And all killing insects and gnawing worms
And things of obscene and unlovely forms
She bore, in a basket of Indian woof,
Into the rough woods far aloof,
45In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,
The freshest her gentle hands could pull
For the poor banished insects, whose intent,
Although they did ill, was innocent.
But the bee and the beam-like ephemeris
50Whose path is the lightning’s, and soft moths that kiss
The sweet lips of the flowers, and harm not, did she
Make her attendant angels be.
And many an antenatal tomb
Where butterflies dream of the life to come
55She left, clinging round the smooth and dark
Edge of the odorous Cedar bark.
This fairest creature from earliest spring
Thus moved through the garden ministering
All the sweet season of summer tide,
60And ere the first leaf looked brown—she died!
PART THIRD
Three days the flowers of the garden fair,
Like stars when the moon is awakened, were;
Or the waves of Baiae, ere luminous
She floats up through the smoke of Vesuvius.
5And on the fourth, the Sensitive-plant
Felt the sound of the funeral chaunt
And the steps of the bearers heavy and slow,
And the sobs of the mourners deep and low;
The weary sound and the heavy breath
10And the silent motions of passing death
And the smell, cold, oppressive and dank,
Sent through the pores of the coffin plank;
The dark grass, and the flowers among the grass,
Were bright with tears as the crowd did pass;
15From their sighs the wind caught a mournful tone
And sate in the pines and gave groan for groan.
The garden once fair became cold and foul
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul,
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
20Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
> To make men tremble who never weep.
Swift summer into the autumn flowed,
And frost in the mist of the morning rode
Though the noonday sun looked clear and bright,
25Mocking the spoil of the secret night.
The rose leaves, like flakes of crimson snow,
Paved the turf and the moss below:
The lilies were drooping, and white, and wan,
Like the head and the skin of a dying man.
30And Indian plants, of scent and hue
The sweetest that ever were fed on dew,
Leaf after leaf, day after day,
Were massed into the common clay.
And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red,
35And white with the whiteness of what is dead,
Like troops of ghosts on the dry wind past;
Their whistling noise made the birds aghast.
And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds
Out of their birthplace of ugly weeds,
40Till they clung round many a sweet flower’s stem
Which rotted into the earth with them.
The water-blooms under the rivulet
Fell from the stalks on which they were set;
And the eddies drove them here and there
45As the winds did those of the upper air.
Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks
Were bent and tangled across the walks;
And the leafless net-work of parasite bowers
Massed into ruin; and all sweet flowers.
50Between the time of the wind and the snow
All loathliest weeds began to grow,
Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck
Like the water-snake’s belly and the toad’s back.
And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank,
55And the dock, and henbane; and hemlock dank
Stretched out its long and hollow shank
And stifled the air, till the dead wind stank.
And plants at whose names the verse feels loath
Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth,
60Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue,
Livid, and starred with a lurid dew.
And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould
Started like mist from the wet ground cold;
Pale, fleshy,—as if the decaying dead
65With a spirit of growth had been animated!
Their mass rotted off them, flake by flake,
Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer’s stake,
Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high
Infecting the winds that wander by.
70Spawn, weeds and filth, a leprous scum,
Made the running rivulet thick and dumb,
And at its outlet flags huge as stakes
Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.
And hour by hour, when the air was still,
75The vapours arose which have strength to kill:
At morn they were seen, at noon they were felt,
At night they were darkness no star could melt.
And unctuous meteors from spray to spray
Crept and flitted in broad noon-day
80Unseen; every branch on which they alit
By a venomous blight was burned and bit.
The Sensitive-plant like one forbid
Wept, and the tears, within each lid
Of its folded leaves which together grew,
85Were changed to a blight of frozen glue.
For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon
By the heavy axe of the blast were hewn;
The sap shrank to the root through every pore
As blood to a heart that will beat no more.
90For Winter came—the wind was his whip—
One choppy finger was on his lip:
He had torn the cataracts from the hills
And they clanked at his girdle like manacles;
His breath was a chain which without a sound
95The earth and the air and the water bound;
He came, fiercely driven in his Chariot-throne
By the tenfold blasts of the arctic zone.
Then the weeds which were forms of living death
Fled from the frost to the Earth beneath.
100Their decay and sudden flight from frost
Was but like the vanishing of a ghost!
And under the roots of the Sensitive-plant
The moles and the dormice died for want.
The birds dropped stiff from the frozen air
105And were caught in the branches naked and bare.
First there came down a thawing rain
And its dull drops froze on the boughs again;
Then there steamed up a freezing dew
Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew;
110And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden and heavy and stiff
And snapped them off with his rigid griff.
When winter had gone and spring came back
115The Sensitive-plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.
CONCLUSION
Whether the Sensitive-plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change,—I cannot say.
5Whether that Lady’s gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness, where it left delight,
I dare not guess; but in this life
10Of error, ignorance and strife—
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we, the shadows of the dream,
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
15To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest,—a mockery.
That Garden sweet, that Lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never pass’d away—
20’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed—not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight
There is no death nor change: their might
Exceeds our organs—which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
An Exhortation
Camelions feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
5With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light camelions do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a-day?
10Poets are on this cold earth
As camelions might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, camelions change:
15 Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.
Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
20 A poet’s free and heavenly mind:
If bright camelions should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
25 Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!
Song of Apollo
The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie
Curtained with star-enwoven tapestries
From the broad moonlight of the open sky,
Fanning the
busy dreams from my dim eyes,
5Waken me when their mother, the grey Dawn,
Tells them that Dreams and that the moon is gone.
Then I arise; and climbing Heaven’s blue dome
I walk over the mountains and the waves,
Leaving my robe upon the Ocean foam.
10 My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the caves
Are filled with my bright presence, and the air
Leaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.
The sunbeams are my shafts with which I kill
Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day.
15All men who do, or even imagine ill
Fly me; and from the glory of my ray
Good minds, and open actions, take new might
Until diminished by the reign of night.
I feed the clouds, the rainbows and the flowers
20 With their aetherial colours; the moon’s globe
And the pure stars in their eternal bowers
Are cinctured with my power as with a robe;
Whatever lamps on Earth or Heaven may shine
Are portions of one spirit; which is mine.
25I stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven;
Then with unwilling steps, I linger down
To the clouds of the Atlantic even.
For grief that I depart they weep and frown—
What look is more delightful, than the smile
30With which I soothe them from the Western isle?
I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself, and knows it is divine.
All harmony of instrument and verse,
All prophecy and medicine are mine;
35All light of art or nature—to my song
Victory and praise, in its own right, belong.