Delphi Poetry Anthology: The World's Greatest Poems (Delphi Poets Series Book 50)

by Homer

  Or took it for a cloud; but, otherwise

  The vigorous sun would catch it up at eve

  And use it for an anvil till he had filled

  The shelves of heaven with burning thunderbolts,

  And proved he need not rest so early;–then

  When all his setting trouble was resolved

  Toa trance of passive glory, you might see

  In apparition on the golden sky

  (Alas, my Giotto’s background!) the sheep run

  Along the fine clear outline, small as mice

  That run along a witch’s scarlet thread.

  Not a grand nature. Not my chestnut-woods

  Of Vallombrosa, cleaving by the spurs

  To the precipices. Not my headlong leaps

  Of waters, that cry out for joy or fear

  In leaping through the palpitating pines,

  Like a white soul tossed out to eternity

  With thrills of time upon it. Not indeed

  My multitudinous mountains, sitting in

  The magic circle, with the mutual touch

  Electric, panting from their full deep hearts

  Beneath the influent heavens, and waiting for

  Communion and commission. Italy

  Is one thing, England one.

  On English ground

  You understand the letter . . ere the fall,

  How Adam lived in a garden. All the fields

  Are tied up fast with hedges, nosegay-like;

  The hills are crumpled plains–the plains, parterres–

  The trees, round, woolly, ready to be clipped;

  And if you seek for any wilderness

  You find, at best, a park. A nature tamed

  And grown domestic like a barn-door fowl,

  Which does not awe you with its claws and beak,

  Nor tempt you to an eyrie too high up,

  But which, in cackling, sets you thinking of

  Your eggs to-morrow at breakfast, in the pause

  Of finer meditation.

  Rather say

  A sweet familiar nature, stealing in

  As a dog might, or child, to touch your hand

  Or pluck your gown, and humbly mind you so

  Of presence and affection, excellent

  For inner uses, from the things without.

  I could not be unthankful, I who was

  Entreated thus and holpen. In the room

  I speak of, ere the house was well awake,

  And also after it was well asleep,

  I sat alone, and drew the blessing in

  Of all that nature. With a gradual step,

  A stir among the leaves, a breath, a ray,

  It came in softly, while the angels made

  A place for it beside me. The moon came,

  And swept my chamber clean of foolish thoughts

  The sun came, saying, ‘Shall I lift this light

  Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?

  I make the birds sing–listen! . . but, for you.

  God never hears your voice, excepting when

  You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.’

  Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up

  More slowly than I verily write now,

  But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide

  The window and my soul, and let the airs .

  And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,

  Regenerating what I was. O Life,

  How oft we throw it off and think,–’Enough,

  Enough of life in so much!–here’s a cause

  For rupture; herein we must break with Life,

  Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,

  Maimed, spoiled for aspiration; farewell Life!’

  –And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes

  And think all ended.–Then, Life calls to us,

  In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,

  Above us, or below us, or around . .

  Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s,

  Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed

  So own our compensations than our griefs:

  Still, Life’s voice!–still, we make our peace with Life.

  And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon

  I used to get up early, just to sit

  And watch the morning quicken in the grey,

  And hear the silence open like a flower,

  Leaf after leaf,–and stroke with listless hand

  The woodbine through the window, till at last

  I came to do it with a sort of love,

  At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,–

  A melancholy smile, to catch myself

  Smiling for joy.

  Capacity for joy

  Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while

  To dodge the sharp sword set against my life;

  To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house,

  As mute as any dream there, and escape

  As a soul from the body, out of doors,–

  Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane,

  And wander on the hills an hour or two,

  Then back again before the house should stir.

  Or else I sat on in my chamber green,

  And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed

  My prayers without the vicar; read my books,

  Without considering whether they were fit

  To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good

  By being ungenerous, even to a book,

  And calculating profits . . so much help

  By so much rending. It is rather when

  We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge

  Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,

  Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth–

  ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

  I read much. What my father taught before

  From many a volume, Love re-emphasised

  Upon the self-same pages: Theophrast

  Grew tender with the memory of his eyes,

  And Ælian made mine wet. The trick of Greek

  And Latin, he had taught me, as he would

  Have taught me wrestling or the game of fives

  If such he had known.–most like a shipwrecked man

  Who heaps his single platter with goats’ cheese

  And scarlet berries; or like any man

  Who loves but one, and so gives all at once,

  Because he has it, rather than because

  He counts it worthy. Thus, my father gave;

  And thus, as did the women formerly

  By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil

  Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept

  With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,

  He wrapt his little daughter in his large

  Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.

  But, after I had read for memory,

  I read for hope. The path my father’s foot

  Had trod me out, which suddenly broke off,

  (What time he dropped the wallet of the flesh

  And passed) alone I carried on, and set

  My child-heart ‘gainst the thorny underwood,

  To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.

  Ah, babe i’ the wood, without a brother-babe!

  My own self-pity, like the red-breast bird,

  Flies back to cover all that past with leaves.

  Sublimest danger, over which none weeps,

  When any young wayfaring soul goes forth

  Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,

  The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,

  To thrust his own way, he an alien, through

  The world of books! Ah, you!–you think it fine,

  You clap hands–’A fair day!’–you cheer him on,

  As if the worst, could happen, were to rest

  Too long beside a fountain. Yet, beho
ld,

  Behold!–the world of books is still the world;

  And worldlings in it are less merciful

  And more puissant. For the wicked there

  Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes,

  Is edged from elemental fire to assail

  A spiritual life. The beautiful seems right

  By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong

  Because of weakness. Power is justified,

  Though armed against St. Michael. Many a crown

  Covers bald foreheads. In the book-world, true,

  There’s no lack, neither, of God’s saints and kings,

  That shake the ashes of the grave aside

  From their calm locks, and undiscomfited

  Look stedfast truths against Time’s changing mask.

  True, many a prophet teaches in the roads;

  True, many a seer pulls down the flaming heavens

  Upon his own head in strong martyrdom,

  In order to light men a moment’s space.

  But stay !–who judges?–who distinguishes

  ‘Twixt Saul and Nahash justly, at first sight,

  And leaves king Saul precisely at the sin,

  To serve king David? who discerns at once

  The sound of the trumpets, when the trumpets blow

  For Alaric as well as Charlemagne ?

  Who judges prophets, and can tell true seers

  From conjurors ? The child, there ? Would you leave

  That child to wander in a battle-field

  And push his innocent smile against the guns?

  Or even in the catacombs, . . his torch

  Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all

  The dark a-mutter round him ? not a child !

  I read books bad and good–some bad and good

  At once: good aims not always make good books;

  Well-tempered spades turn up ill-smelling soils

  In digging vineyards, even: books, that prove

  God’s being so definitely, that man’s doubt

  Grows self-defined the other side the line,

  Made Atheist by suggestion; moral books,

  Exasperating to license; genial books,

  Discounting from the human dignity;

  And merry books, which set you weeping when

  The sun shines,–ay, and melancholy books,

  Which make you laugh that any one should weep

  In this disjointed life, for one wrong more.

  The world of books is still the world, I write,

  And both worlds have God’s providence, thank God,

  To keep and hearten: with some struggle, indeed,

  Among the breakers, some hard swimming through

  The deeps–I lost breath in my soul sometimes

  And cried ‘God save me if there’s any God.’

  But even so, God save me; and, being dashed

  From error on to error, every turn

  Still brought me nearer to the central truth.

  I thought so. All this anguish in the thick

  Of men’s opinions . . press and counterpress

  Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now

  Emergent . . all the best of it perhaps,

  But throws you back upon a noble trust

  And use of your own instinct,–merely proves

  Pure reason stronger than bare inference

  At strongest. Try it,–fix against heaven’s wall

  Your scaling ladders of high logic–mount

  Step by step!–Sight goes faster; that still ray

  Which strikes out from you, how, you cannot tell,

  And why, you know not–(did you eliminate,

  That such as you, indeed, should analyse?)

  Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.

  The cygnet finds the water: but the man

  Is born in ignorance of his element,

  And feels out blind at first, disorganised

  By sin i’ the blood,–his spirit-insight dulled

  And crossed by his sensations. Presently

  We feel it quicken in the dark sometimes;

  Then mark, be reverent, be obedient,–

  For those dumb motions of imperfect life

  Are oracles of vital Deity

  Attesting the Hereafter. Let who says

  ‘The soul’s a clean white paper,’ rather say,

  A palimpsest, a prophets holograph

  Defiled, erased and covered by a monk’s,–

  The apocalypse, by a Longus! poring on

  Which obscene text, we may discern perhaps

  Some fair, fine trace of what was written once,

  Some upstroke of an alpha and omega

  Expressing the old scripture.

  Books, books, books!

  I had found the secret of a garret-room

  Piled high with cases in my father’s name;

  Piled high, packed large,–where, creeping in and out

  Among the giant fossils of my past,

  Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs

  Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there

  At this or that box, pulling through the gap,

  In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,

  The first book first. And how I felt it beat

  Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark,

  An hour before the sun would let me read!

  My books!

  At last, because the time was ripe,

  I chanced upon the poets.

  As the earth

  Plunges in fury, when the internal fires

  Have reached and pricked her heart, and, throwing flat

  The marts and temples, the triumphal gates

  And towers of observation, clears herself

  To elemental freedom–thus, my soul,

  At poetry’s divine first finger touch,

  Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,

  Convicted of the great eternities

  Before two worlds.

  What’s this, Aurora Leigh,

  You write so of the poets, and not laugh?

  Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,

  Exaggerators of the sun and moon,

  And soothsayers in a tea-cup?

  I write so

  Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,–

  The only speakers of essential truth,

  Posed to relative, comparative,

  And temporal truths; the only holders by

  His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;

  The only teachers who instruct mankind,

  From just a shadow on a charnel wall,

  To find man’s veritable stature out,

  Erect, sublime,–the measure of a man,

  And that’s the measure of an angel, says

  The apostle. Ay, and while your common men

  Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,

  And dust the flaunty carpets of the world

  For kings to walk on, or our senators,

  The poet suddenly will catch them up

  With his voice like a thunder. . ‘This is soul,

  This is life, this word is being said in heaven,

  Here’s God down on us! what are you about?

  How all those workers start amid their work,

  Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,

  That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,

  Is not the imperative labour after all.

  My own best poets, am I one with you,

  That thus I love you,–or but one through love?

  Does all this smell of thyme about my feet

  Conclude my visit to your holy hill

  In personal presence, or but testify

  The rustling of your vesture through my dreams

  With influent odours? When my joy and pain,

  My thought and aspiration, like the stops

  Of pipe or flute, are absolutely dumb

  If n
ot melodious, do you play on me,

  My pipers,–and if, sooth, you did not blow,

  Would not sound come? or is the music mine,

  As a man’s voice or breath is called his own,

  In breathed by the Life-breather? There’s a doubt

  For cloudy seasons !

  But the sun was high

  When first I felt my pulses set themselves

  For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence

  Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,

  As wind upon the alders blanching them

  By turning up their under-natures till

  They trembled in dilation. O delight

  And triumph of the poet,–who would say

  A man’s mere ‘yes,’ a woman’s common ‘no,’

  A little human hope of that or this,

  And says the word so that it burns you through

  With a special revelation, shakes the heart

  Of all the men and women in the world,

  As if one came back from the dead and spoke,

  With eyes too happy, a familiar thing

  Become divine i’ the utterance! while for him

  The poet, the speaker, he expands with joy;

  The palpitating angel in his flesh

  Thrills inly with consenting fellowship

  To those innumerous spirits who sun themselves

  Outside of time.

  O life, O poetry,

  Which means life in life! cognisant of life

  Beyond this blood-beat,–passionate for truth

  Beyond these senses, –poetry, my life,–

  My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot

  From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me

  Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,

  And set me in the Olympian roar and round

  Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,

  To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist

  For everlasting laughters,–I, myself,

  Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!

  How those gods look!

  Enough so, Ganymede.

  We shall not bear above a round or two–

  We drop the golden cup at Heré’s foot

  And swoon back to the earth,–and find ourselves

  Face-down among the pine-cones, cold with dew,

  While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,

  ‘What’s come now to the youth?’ Such ups and downs

  Have poets.

  Am I such indeed? The name

  Is royal, and to sign it like a queen,

  Is what I dare not,–though some royal blood

  Would seem to tingle in me now and then,

  With sense of power and ache,–with imposthumes

  And manias usual to the race. Howbeit