Sings his Sicilian fold,
His sheep, his hapless love, his blinded eyes;
And how a call celestial round him rang
And heavenward from the fountain-brink he sprang,
And all the marvel of the golden skies. 190
There thou art gone, and me thou leavest here
Sole in these fields; yet will I not despair;
Despair I will not, while I yet descry
‘Neath the soft canopy of English air
That lonely Tree against the western sky. 195
Still, still these slopes, ‘tis clear,
Our Gipsy-Scholar haunts, outliving thee!
Fields where soft sheep from cages pull the hay,
Woods with anemonies in flower till May,
Know him a wanderer still; then why not me? 200
A fugitive and gracious light he seeks,
Shy to illumine; and I seek it too.
This does not come with houses or with gold,
With place, with honour, and a flattering crew;
‘Tis not in the world’s market bought and sold. 205
But the smooth-slipping weeks
Drop by, and leave its seeker still untired;
Out of the heed of mortals he is gone,
He wends unfollow’d, he must house alone;
Yet on he fares, by his own heart inspired. 210
Thou too, O Thyrsis, on like quest wert bound,
Thou wanderedst with me for a little hour;
Men gave thee nothing, but this happy quest,
If men esteem’d thee feeble, gave thee power,
If men procured thee trouble, gave thee rest. 215
And this rude Cumner ground,
Its fir-topped Hurst, its farms, its quiet fields,
Here cam’st thou in thy jocund youthful time,
Here was thine height of strength, thy golden prime;
And still the haunt beloved a virtue yields. 220
What though the music of thy rustic flute
Kept not for long its happy, country tone,
Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note
Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,
Which task’d thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat — 225
It fail’d, and thou wast mute;
Yet hadst thou alway visions of our light,
And long with men of care thou couldst not stay,
And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way,
Left human haunt, and on alone till night. 230
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
‘Mid city-noise, not, as with thee of yore,
Thyrsis, in reach of sheep-bells is my home!
Then through the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar,
Let in thy voice a whisper often come, 235
To chase fatigue and fear:
Why faintest thou? I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! the light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our Tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside. 240
NEW POEMS, 1867
CONTENTS
A Picture at Newstead
Rachel
East London
West London
Anti-Desperation
Immortality
Worldly Place
The Divinity
The Good Shepherd with the Kid
Austerity of Poetry
East and West
Monica’s Last Prayer
Calais Sands
Dover Beach
The Terrace at Berne
Stanzas composed at Carnac
Fragment of Chorus of a Dejaneira
Palladium
Early Death and Fame
Youth and Calm
Growing Old
The Progress of Poesy
A Nameless Epitaph
The Last Word
A Wish
A Caution to Poets
Pis-Aller
Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön
Bacchanalia; Or, The New Age
Rugby Chapel
Heine’s Grave
Obermann once more
Arnold, 1883
A Picture at Newstead
Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth to-day,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.
WHAT made my heart, at Newstead, fullest swell? —
‘Twas not the thought of Byron, of his cry
Stormily sweet, his Titan agony;
It was the sight of that Lord Arundel
Who struck, in heat, the child he loved so well, 5
And the child’s reason flickered, and did die.
Painted (he will’d it) in the gallery
They hang; the picture doth the story tell.
Behold the stern, mail’d father, staff in hand!
The little fair-hair’d son, with vacant gaze, 10
Where no more lights of sense or knowledge are!
Methinks the woe which made that father stand
Baring his dumb remorse to future days,
Was woe than Byron’s woe more tragic far.
Rachel
I
IN Paris all look’d hot and like to fade.
Brown in the garden of the Tuileries,
Brown with September, droop’d the chestnut-trees.
‘Twas dawn; a brougham roll’d through the streets, and made
Halt at the white and silent colonnade 5
Of the French Theatre. Worn with disease,
Rachel, with eyes no gazing can appease,
Sate in the brougham, and those blank walls survey’d.
She follows the gay world, whose swarms have fled
To Switzerland, to Baden, to the Rhine; 10
Why stops she by this empty play-house drear?
Ah, where the spirit its highest life hath led,
All spots, match’d with that spot, are less divine;
And Rachel’s Switzerland, her Rhine, is here!
II
UNTO a lonely villa in a dell 15
Above the fragrant warm Provençal shore
The dying Rachel in a chair they bore
Up the steep pine-plumed paths of the Estrelle,
And laid her in a stately room, where fell
The shadow of a marble Muse of yore — 20
The rose-crown’d queen of legendary lore,
Polymnia — full on her death-bed. ‘Twas well!
The fret and misery of our northern towns,
In this her life’s last day, our poor, our pain,
Our jangle of false wits, our climate’s frowns, 25
Do for this radiant Greek-soul’d artist cease;
Sole object of her dying eyes remain
The beauty and the glorious art of Greece.
III
SPRUNG from the blood of Israel’s scatter’d race,
At a mean inn in German Aarau born, 30
To forms from antique Greece and Rome uptorn,
Trick’d out with a Parisian speech and face,
Imparting life renew’d, old classic grace;
Then soothing with thy Christian strain forlorn,
A-Kempis! her departing soul outworn, 35
While by her bedside Hebrew rites have place —
Ah, not the radiant spirit of Greece alone
She had — one power, which made her breast its home!
In her, like us, there clash’d, contending powers,
Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome. 40
The strife, the mixture in her soul, are ours;
Her genius and her glory are her own.
East London
‘TWAS August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, look
’d thrice dispirited;
I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 5
‘Ill and o’erwork’d, how fare you in this scene?’
‘Bravely!’ said he; ‘for I of late have been
Much cheer’d with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.’
O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light, 10
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night!
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home.
West London
CROUCH’D on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there, 5
Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied
Across, and begg’d, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends, 10
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.
Anti-Desperation
LONG fed on boundless hopes, O race of man,
How angrily thou spurn’st all simpler fare!
Christ, some one says, was human as we are;
No judge eyes us from heaven, our sin to scan;
We line no more, when we have done our span. 5
‘Well, then, for Christ’, thou answerest, ‘who can care?
‘From sin, which heaven records not, why forbear?
‘Live we like brutes our life without a plan!’
So answerest thou; but why not rather say:
‘Hath man no second life? — Pitch this one high! 10
‘Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see? —
‘More strictly, then, the inward judge obey!
‘Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try
‘If we then, too, can be such men as he!’
Immortality
FOIL’D by our fellow men, depress’d, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say,
The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne!
And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn 5
The world’s poor, routed leavings; or will they,
Who fail’d under the heat of this life’s day,
Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?
No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun; 10
And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife,
From strength to strength advancing — only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Worldly Place
Even in a palace, life may be led well!
So spoke the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. — But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell.
Our freedom for a little bread we sell, 5
And drudge under some foolish master’s ken,
Who rates us, if we peer outside our pen —
Match’d with a palace, is not this a hell?
Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,
Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came; 10
And when my ill-school’d spirit is aflame
Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,
I’ll stop, and say: ‘There were no succour here!
‘The aids to noble life are all within.’
The Divinity
‘YES, write it in the rock!’ Saint Bernard said,
‘Grave it on brass with adamantine pen!
‘‘Tis God himself becomes apparent, when
‘God’s wisdom and God’s goodness are display’d,
‘For God of these his attributes is made.’ — 5
Well spake the impetuous Saint, and bore of men
The suffrage captive; now, not one in ten
Recalls the obscure opposer he outweigh’d.
God’s wisdom and God’s goodness! — Ay, but fools
Mis-define these till God knows them no more. 10
Wisdom and goodness, they are God! — what schools
Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore?
This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules;
‘Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
The Good Shepherd with the Kid
HE saves the sheep, the goats he doth not save!
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried:
‘Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
‘Who sins, once wash’d by the baptismal wave!’ 5
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh’d,
The infant Church; of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true, 10
On those walls subterranean, where she did
Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.
Austerity of Poetry
THAT son of Italy who tried to blow,
Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song,
In his light youth amid a festal throng
Sate with his bride to see a public show.
Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow 5
Youth like a star; and what to youth belong,
Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong.
A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! lo,
Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay!
Shuddering they drew her garments off — and found 10
A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin.
Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorn’d outside; a hidden ground
Of thought and of austerity within.
East and West
IN the bare midst of Anglesey they show
Two springs which close by one another play,
And, ‘Thirteen hundred years agone,’ they say,
‘Two saints met often where those waters flow.
‘One came from Penmon, westward, and a glow 5
‘Whiten’d his face from the sun’s fronting ray.
‘Eastward the other, from the dying day;
‘And he with unsunn’d face did always go.’
Seiriol the Bright, Kybi the Dark, men said.
The Seër from the East was then in light, 10
The Seër from the West was then in shade.
Ah! now ‘tis changed. In conquering sunshine bright
The man of the bold West now comes array’d;
He of the mystic East is touch’d with night.
Monica’s Last Prayer
‘OH could thy grave at home, at Carthage, be!’ —
Care not for that, and lay me where I fall.
Everywhere heard will be the judgement-call.
But at God’s altar, oh! remember me.
Thus Monica, and died in Italy. 5
Yet fervent had her longing been, through all
Her course, for home at last, and burial
With her own husband, by the Libyan sea.
Had been; but at the end, to her pure soul
All tie with all beside seem’d vain and cheap, 10
> And union before God the only care.
Creeds pass, rites change, no altar standeth whole;
Yet we her memory, as she pray’d, will keep,
Keep by this: Life in God, and union there!
Calais Sands
A THOUSAND knights have rein’d their steeds
To watch this line of sand-hills run,
Along the never silent Strait,
To Calais glittering in the sun:
To look toward Ardres’ Golden Field 5
Across this wide aërial plain,
Which glows as if the Middle Age
Were gorgeous upon earth again.
Oh, that to share this famous scene
I saw, upon the open sand, 10
Thy lovely presence at my side,
Thy shawl, thy look, thy smile, thy hand!
How exquisite thy voice would come,
My darling, on this lonely air!
How sweetly would the fresh sea-breeze 15
Shake loose some lock of soft brown hair!
But now my glance but once hath royed
O’er Calais and its famous plain;
To England’s cliffs my gaze is turn’d,
O’er the blue Strait mine eyes I strain. 20
Thou comest! Yes, the vessel’s cloud
Hangs dark upon the rolling sea! —
Oh that yon seabird’s wings were mine
To win one instant’s glimpse of thee!
I must not spring to grasp thy hand, 25
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold Page 38
