by Grant Allen
We search the mighty world above and under,
Yet nowhere find the soul we fain would find,
Speech in the hollow rumbling of the thunder,
Words in the whispering wind.
We yearn for brotherhood with lake and mountain;
Our conscious soul seeks conscious sympathy,
Nymphs in the coppice, Naiads in the fountain,
Gods on the craggy height and roaring sea.
We find but soulless sequences of matter,
Fact linked to fact by adamantine rods,
Eternal bonds of former sense and latter,
Dead laws for living Gods.
They care not any whit for pain or pleasure
That seem to men the sum and end of all:
Dumb force and barren number are their measure;
What can be, shall be, though the great world fall.
They take no heed of man or man’s deserving,
Reck not what happy lives they make or mar,
Work out their fatal will, unswerved, unswerving,
And know not that they are.
Can lifeless law beget on senseless matter
The fuller life of self-reflecting thought?
Or may the pregnant soul itself but scatter
These myriad fancies through a world of nought?
Are all these outer shapes a vain illusion
(As in deep tones our clearest prophet sings),
And mind alone, set free from vague confusion,
The inmost core of things?
The city lies below me, wrapped in slumber;
Mute and unmoved in all her streets she lies:
Mid rapid thoughts that throng me without number
Flashes the image of an old surmise:
Her hopes and fears and griefs are all suspended;
Ten thousand souls throughout her precincts take
Sleep, in whose bosom life and death are blended,
And I alone awake.
Am I alone the solitary centre
Of all the seeming universe around,
With mocking senses through whose portals enter
Unmeaning fantasies of sight and sound?
Are all the countless minds wherewith I people
The empty forms that float before my eyes
Vain as the cloud that girds the distant steeple
With snowy canopies?
Yet though the world be but myself unfolded,
Soul bent again on soul in mystic play,
No less each sense and thought and act is moulded,
By dead necessities I may not sway.
Some mightier power against my will can move me,
Some potent nothing force and overawe;
Though I be all that is, I feel above me
The godhead of blind law.
I seem a passive consciousness of passion
Poised in the boundless vault of empty space;
A mirror for strange shapes of alien fashion
That come and go before my lonely face.
My soul that reigns the mistress of creation,
That grasps within herself the sum of things,
Wears round her feet the gyves of limitation,
And fetters bind her wings.
The sense I fain would feel I cannot summon;
The sense I fain would shirk I cannot shun:
I know the measured sequence that they come in;
I may not change the grooves wherein they run.
I know not if they be but phantom faces
Whose being is but seeming, seen awry:
They pass, I know not how, and leave no traces;
They come I know not why.
My inmost hope, my deepest aspiration,
Each quiver of my brain, each breath I draw,
Fear curdling up the blood, love’s wild pulsation,
Work surely out the inevitable law:
The will herself that pants for freedom, flouting
Its soulless despotism, yet works it out:
Ay, even though I doubt, my very doubting
Fulfils the law I doubt.
So, dimly cloaked in infinite disguises,
The hopes I seem to grasp again dissolve,
And through their vacant images arises
The central problem that I may not solve;
Till, like this fading creeper’s blighted blossom,
My life too fade before some wintry breath,
And sink at last upon the peaceful bosom
Of all-embracing death.
But now that far and wide the pale horizon,
Faint grey to eastward, darker on the west,
Lights up the misty sphere its border lies on,
My weary brain has need of gentle rest.
The growing haze of sunrise gives me warning
To check these wayward thoughts that dive too deep.
Perchance a little light will come with morning,
Perchance I shall but sleep.
A BALLADE OF EVOLUTION
IN the mud of the Cambrian main
Did our earliest ancestor dive:
From a shapeless albuminous grain
We mortals our being derive.
He could split himself up into five,
Or roll himself round like a ball;
For the fittest will always survive,
While the weakliest go to the wall.
As an active ascidian again
Fresh forms he began to contrive,
Till he grew to a fish with a brain,
And brought forth a mammal alive.
With his rivals he next had to strive
To woo him a mate and a thrall;
So the handsomest managed to wive,
While the ugliest went to the wall.
At length as an ape he was fain
The nuts of the forest to rive,
Till he took to the low-lying plain,
And proceeded his fellows to knive.
Thus did cannibal men first arrive
One another to swallow and maul:
And the strongest continued to thrive,
While the weakliest went to the wall.
ENVOY
Prince, in our civilised hive,
Now money’s the measure of all;
And the wealthy in coaches can drive,
While the needier go to the wall.
THE RETURN OF APHRODITE
DEEP in Cythera a cave,
Pealing a thunderous paean,
Roars, as the shivering wave
Whitens the purple Ægean:
There to astonish the globe,
Terrible, beautiful, mighty,
Clad with desire as a robe,
Rose Aphrodite.
Never again upon earth
Like her arose any other;
Got without labour or birth,
Sprung without father or mother:
Zeus, from his aery home,
Seeing the roseate water
Lift her aloft on its foam,
Hailed her his daughter.
Sweet was her shape, and is now;
Sweeter the breath of her kisses;
Delicate ivory brow;
Wealth of ambrosial tresses;
Mouth that no favour denies;
Cheek that no ardour abashes;
Languishing eyelids and eyes,
Languishing lashes.
Then, as her luminous face
Shone like the ocean that bore her,
Every nation and race
Worshipped her, falling before her;
Chaplets they culled for her fane,
Fairer than any can cull us;
Greece gave her Sappho’s refrain,
Rome her Catullus.
Soft was the sound of their lyre,
Luscious their lay without cloying,
Till, as a billow of fire,
Crushing, consuming, destroying,
Wasting her wines in their spleen,
Spilling her costly
cosmetics,
Swept the implacable, lean
Horde of ascetics.
Darkness they spread over earth,
Sorrow and fasting of faces;
Mute was the music of mirth,
Hushed was the chorus of Graces;
Back to the womb of the wave,
Terrible, beautiful, mighty,
Back with the boons that she gave
Sank Aphrodite.
Down the abysses of time
Rolled the unchangeable ages,
Reft of the glory of rhyme
Graven in passionate pages;
Sad was the measure, and cold,
Dead to the language of kisses;
Sadly the centuries rolled
Down the abysses.
Now in the ends of the earth
Tenderer singers and sweeter,
Smit with a ravening dearth,
Cry on the goddess and greet her;
Cry with their rapturous eyes
Flashing the fire of emotion;
Call her again to arise
Fresh from the ocean.
Hot as of old are their songs,
Breathing of odorous tresses,
Murmur of amorous tongues,
Ardour of fervid caresses;
Trilled with a tremulous mouth
Into the ear of the corner,
Warm as the breath of the South,
Soft as the Summer.
Under the depth of the wave,
Hearing their passionate numbers,
Piercing her innermost cave,
Waken her out of her slumbers,
Soothed with the sound of their strain,
Beautiful, merciful, mighty,
Back to the nations again
Comes Aphrodite.
SUNDAY AT BRAEMAR
ALONE amid the solemn heathy desert
Whose bleak brown sides o’erhang Braemar,
I sit, this misty Scottish August Sabbath,
High up the spurs of Lochnagar.
Above, fierce swirls of moaning autumn weather
Drive on thin wreaths of vaporous cloud;
While, hanging low, the blight that dims the background
Spreads o’er heaven’s face its sullen shroud.
Beneath me heaves afar one solid ocean,
Wave after wave of moor and ben,
Flung seething up in granite-crested billow,
Or sunk in troughs of sweeping glen.
No laughing eye of silver-rippled lakelet,
But black expanse of peaty loch,
Whose moody depths unstirred obscurely mirror
Fantastic forms of gaunt grey rock.
No golden croft or grassy-tedded homestead;
No close-cropped lawn of ruddled sheep;
But holt and hurst where roam high-antlered faces,
And purple moors where grey grouse creep.
While here and there some low-browed, turf-built shieling
Peeps out through friths of fir or birk,
Where frowns, austere, elect, the shingled steeple
That tops some sombre granite kirk.
But leagues between, a vagrant sunbeam flashes
On palace wall or castled pride,
Thronged with gay-kilted crowds whose lairdly pleasures
Spread Libyan desert far and wide.
Who thrust across wild waves of western ocean
Disacred remnants of great clans;
Who gave to fir and whins and forest roamers
The generous haughs that once were man’s.
As dazed I scan this weary waste of heather,
And desolate haunts of bird or deer,
And lonely homes of selfish Saxon splendour,
A southern cry rings in my ear.
A cry that, bursting from ten thousand bosoms,
Awoke from midnight into noon
Marseille, Bordeaux, Saint Etienne, Lyon, Paris,
With lips that shrieked ‘Vive la Commune!’
My thirsty vision pants for sunlit waters,
And luscious glebe of vine-clad lands,
And chanted psalms of universal freedom,
And sacred grasp of brotherly hands:
Pants to behold the ruddy Highland ranger,
With fair-cheeked sons of English soil,
Linked to the sunburnt throng of southern cities
In one vast commonwealth of toil:
Banded to break the pride of hoarded treasure,
Or insolent boast of lordly birth:
To fling the equal boon of freeborn manhood
Through all the spreading skirts of earth:
No longer with the red right hand of slaughter,
Nor eyes made drunk with blood and wine;
But sober sweat of brows whose slow endeavour
Piles surely up the grand design:
Not eager to forestall in raw impatience
The lagging wheels of distant years,
But planning well a deep-set revolution,
Unstained by blot of blood or tears.
Till once again that holy cry re-echo
From mightier crowds and louder still,
Through ocean-sundered streets, with happier auspice
Of undivided human will:
And once again this dreary Scottish landscape
With golden dimples smile afar,
Spreading the nobler wealth of happy harvests
High up the slopes of Lochnagar:
While, side by side, the men of many nations
Blend in one boundless league and free,
As Thames and Seine, St. Lawrence, Nile, and
Ganges
Mingle in one illimitable sea.
THE FIRST IDEALIST
A JELLY-FISH swam in a tropical sea,
And he said, ‘This world it consists of Me:
There’s nothing above and nothing below
That a jelly-fish ever can possibly know
(Since we’ve got no sight, or hearing, or smell),
Beyond what our single sense can tell.
Now, all that I learn from the sense of touch
Is the fact of my feelings, viewed as such.
But to think they have any external cause
Is an inference clean against logical laws.
Again, to suppose, as I’ve hitherto done,
There are other jelly-fish under the sun,
Is a pure assumption that can’t be backed
By a jot of proof or a single fact.
In short, like Hume, I very much doubt
If there’s anything else at all without.
So I come at last to the plain conclusion,
When the subject is fairly set free from confusion,
That the universe simply centres in Me,
And if I were not, then nothing would be.’
That minute, a shark, who was strolling by,
Just gulped him down, in the twink of an eye
And he died, with a few convulsive twists.
But, somehow, the universe still exists.
FOR AMY LEVV’S URN
THIS bitter age that pits our maids with men
Wore out her woman’s heart before its time:
Too wan and pale,
She strove to scale
The icy peaks of unimagined rhyme.
There, worlds broke sunless on her frighted ken;
The mountain air struck chill on her frail breath:
Fainting she fell, all weary with her climb,
And kissed the soft, sweet lips of pitying death.
A PRAYER
A CROWNED Caprice is god of this world;
On his stony breast are his white wings furled.
No ear to listen, no eye to see,
No heart to feel for a man hath he.
But his pitiless arm is swift to smite;
And his mute lips utter one word of might,
Mid the clash of gentler souls and rougher,
‘Wrong must thou d
o, or wrong must suffer.’
Then grant, oh dumb blind god, at least that we
Rather the sufferers than the doers be.
IN CORAL LAND
A TINY fay
Deep nestling lay
In a purple bay
Unruffled
On whose crystal floor
The distant roar
From the surf-bound shore
Was muffled.
With his fairy wife
He passed his life
Undimmed by strife
Or quarrel;
And the live-long day
They would merrily play
Through a labyrinth gay
With coral.
They loved to dwell
In a pearly shell,
And to deck their cell
With amber:
Or amid the caves
That the ripplet laves
And the beryl paves
To clamber.
By the limpet’s home
And the vaulted dome
Where the starfish roam
They’d linger;
In the mackerel’s jaw
And the lobster’s claw
They’d push and withdraw
A finger.
And queer little things
With filmy wings
And floating strings
To guide them,
Of softest mould,
In swarms untold,
Tumbled and rolled
Beside them.
On a darting shrimp
Our frolicsome imp
With bridle of gimp
Would gambol;
Or astride on the back
Of a sea-horse black
(As a gentleman’s hack)
He’d amble.
Of emerald green
And sapphire’s sheen
He made his queen
A tiar;
And the merry two
Their whole life through
Were as happy as you
And I are.
But if you say
You think this lay
Of the tiny fay
Too silly,
Let it have such praise
As my eye betrays
To your own sweet gaze,
My Millie!
For a man, he tries,
And he toils and sighs,
To be mighty wise
And witty;
But a dear little dame
Has enough of fame
If she wins the name
Of pretty.
AN ANSWER
‘But there! no man ever loved any woman well enough to love
her only.’ — Extract from a Letter.
THE shallow pool, content to woo the charms
Of one coy mead, gapes dry in August days:
The mightiest ocean winds enamoured arms
Round countless capes in deep caressing bays.
