by Grant Allen
I hold that heart full poor that owns its boast
To throb in tune with but one throbbing breast.
Who numbers many friends, loves friendship most;
Who numbers many loves, loves each love best.
FOR A SPECIAL OCCASION
(BOULGE CHURCHYARD, OCT. 5, 1893)
HERE, on Fitzgerald’s grave, from Omar’s tomb,
To lay fit tribute pilgrim singers flock.
Long with a double fragrance let it bloom,
This rose of Iran on an English stock.
THE NEW POETRY
TO RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
MY name is Aphrodite, and my home
Men decked of old in flowery fanes of Greece:
All other gods were born, died, and have peace:
I only spring eternal from the foam;
I still am queen; my reign shall never cease.
One other was not born, nor yet has died;
Pallas, who leapt all armed from Zeus’s head
(Pallas, my foe, a virgin never wed);
We twain sprang not from any mother’s side;
Therefore we live, though other gods be dead.
We twain divide the hearts and loves of men;
For some are strong and cold and heed me not;
And softer some have passionate hearts and hot.
But women cleave to me: where she wins ten,
A thousand lovesome maids fall to my lot.
We twain have war whose term is never said
For all the hearts of men and all their loves.
My throat is warm; it thrills like my own doves’;
And soft as summer breezes do I tread:
Her throat is cold, and like strong winds she moves.
Mine are the gentle lives that yearn to stray,
Heart locked in heart, red lips to pale lips pressed,
Together down smooth paths of wedded rest,
Till crimson memories of departing day
Swathe in voluptuous tints the gorgeous West.
Hers are the sphere-like souls whose boundless view
Can spy the subtle motions of the brain,
Unfold entangled webs of joy and pain,
Or track through varying moods the Good and True.
Them woo I with my amorous lures in vain.
Mine are the hands that limn with cunning stains
The ineffable meekness of Madonna’s face;
That quicken marble limbs to effluent grace:
Mine are the throats that trill forth rippling strains
Of liquid treble, or thunderous floods of bass.
Hers are the piercing orbs whose keener power
Sights starry isles that stud the nebulous main:
Hers are such hands as range the infinite train
Of insect, beast, and bird, of fern and flower.
Them too with dangled lures I woo in vain.
But votaries dearer to her heart than these —
Fingers that know the dainty skill to twine
Blossoms of thought in garlands for her shrine —
Sweet poets, who were once her devotees,
Have I enticed away, and they are mine.
UT FLOS IN SEPTIS
As a lily that lurks half-hid in the innermost nook of a garden,
Whose sinews the showers feed, and the bountiful breezes harden:
And never a heifer there can crop it close with the grasses;
And never a murderous share can crush it to earth as it passes;
But thick with its odorous sighs the wings of the wind are laden,
And it stands a coveted prize for many a lad and maiden:
Until in a luckless day some boy in that innermost bower
Has gathered in wanton play the snow-white virginal flower;
And its stem that the showers fed fades fast, and
its sweet bells languish,
And it hangs its beautiful head in the infinite
weight of its anguish;
And its leaves that were once so fair droop downward, heavily laden,
And never a lad would care for it now, nor ever a maiden:
Such, in the innocent days of her snow-white virginal season,
Is the maiden whom love betrays ere love has spoken his treason:
But when one feverish night has fathered a penitent morrow,
The bloom of her brief delight fades fast into infinite sorrow;
And her eye, that was blithe with joy, with tears
brims, bitterly laden,
For now nor ever a boy will love her, nor ever a maiden.
ONLY AN INSECT
I
ON the crimson cloth
Of my study desk
A lustrous moth
Poised statuesque.
Of a waxen mould
Were its light limbs shaped,
And in scales of gold
Its body was draped:
While its luminous wings
Were netted and veined
With silvery strings,
Or golden grained,
Through whose filmy maze
In tremulous flight
Danced quivering rays
Of the gladsome light.
II
On the desk hard by
A taper burned,
Towards which the eye
Of the insect turned.
In its vague little mind
A faint desire
Rose, undefined,
For the beautiful fire.
Lightly it spread
Each silken van;
Then away it sped
For a moment’s span.
And a strange delight
Lured on its course
With resistless might
Towards the central source:
And it followed the spell
Through an eddying maze,
Till it fluttered and fell
In the deadly blaze.
III
Dazzled and stunned
By the scalding pain,
One moment it swooned,
Then rose again;
And again the fire
Drew it on with its charms
To a living pyre
In its awful arms;
And now it lies
On the table here
Before my eyes
Shrivelled and sere.
IV
As I sit and muse
On its fiery fate,
What themes abstruse
Might I meditate!
For the pangs that thrilled
Through that martyred frame
As its veins were filled
With the scorching flame,
A riddle enclose
That, living or dead,
In rhyme or in prose,
No seer has read.
‘ But a moth,’ you cry,
‘Is a thing so small!’
Ah, yes; but why
Should it suffer at all?
Why should a sob
For the vaguest smart
One moment throb
Through the tiniest heart?
Why in the whole
Wide universe
Should a single soul
Feel that primal curse?
Not all the throes
Of mightiest mind,
Nor the heaviest woes
Of human kind,
Are of deeper weight
In the riddle of things
Than that insect’s fate
With the mangled wings.
V
But if only I
In my simple song
Could tell you the Why
Of that one little wrong,
I could tell you more
Than the deepest page
Of saintliest lore
Or of wisest sage.
For never as yet
In its wordy strife
Could Philosophy get
At the import of life;
And Theology’s saws
Have still to explain
The inscrutable cause
For the being of pain.
So I somehow fear
That in spite of both,
We are baffled here
By this one singed moth.
IN BUSHEY PARK
THE crisp brown leaves break short which way we tread,
The golden faintly shiver overhead;
The lush Virginia creeper drapes the cottage
Aglow with mantling red.
Beneath, the beaded blades are spanned across
By countless dainty webs of silver floss;
While here and there a tiny sunlit brilliant
Twinkles among the moss.
Dear heart, since love first shaped our happier lot,
Some gleams of beauty lurk in every spot
To flood my soul with that divine emotion
I once so vainly sought.
I found it not where solemn Alps and grey
Draw purple glories from the newborn day;
Nor where huge sombre pines loom overhanging
Niagara’s rainbow spray;
Nor in loud psalms whose palpitating strain
Thrills the vast dome of Buonarotti’s fane;
On canvas quick with Sandro’s earnest passion,
Or Titian’s statelier vein.
This mellow autumn morning makes me wise;
Within ourselves the spring of beauty lies;
In thy true tender heart I read the secret,
In thy deep tender eyes.
ANIMALCULAR THEOLOGY
MY DEAR LE GALLIENNE,
I, like you,
A dapper animalcule knew:
A philosophic monad he,
With most succinct theology.
While star on star aloft was hurled,
He crept, with us, on one small world:
About him, secular space lay filled
With myriad orbs that seethed and thrilled.
Vast forces, boundless energies,
Incalculable infinities,
Loomed awesome every starry night
Upon my animalcule’s sight.
Eternities, within, without,
Steeped all my soul in reverent doubt.
I strove to read the Why and How
Of mystic aeons, Then and Now:
I strained my eyes to penetrate
The ultimate atom, uncreate:
I heard the flutter of strange wings,
The infinitesimal pulse of things:
I watched the lurid whirlwinds veer
And eddy down the photosphere:
I pierced through aether to young stars
That blazed in fiery avatars:
With reeling brain I gazed and yearned
To know by what strange power they burned.
Amazed, to me our monad turned.
‘What, don’t you see how all was wrought?’
He cried with smug face undistraught.
‘A bigger monad, just like us,
Through primal chaos waving, thus,
One formless hand, bade all things be;
And lo! the sky, the land, the sea,
The stars, the worlds, and you, and me!’
‘My friend,’ quoth I, ‘that surely seems
A vain conceit of monad dreams,
Too cramped to mirror such great themes:
For why should mites that creep and crawl
On one wee planet of them all
Believe their petty souls rehearse
The drama of the universe?
Why fancy nature’s cosmic plan
Modelled on monad or on man?
Why dream such pygmy brains as these
Can grapple with immensities?
Why make our narrow souls the die
To mould a congruous godhead by,
And deem the sum of things created
By one vast monad animated?
Show me at least some proof, I urge,
Of your amoeboid demiurge.’
‘What! ask for proof!’ he cried aghast.
‘Then has it come to this at last?
Do miscreant mortals dare to flout,
In impious protozoan doubt
(Since men and monads grow so coxy),
Amoebamorphic orthodoxy?
You scorn the wisdom of our sires,
Who took no heed of you dim fires.
The ancient monads of our race
Were quite convinced that time and space,
With mind and matter, light and shade,
All eye hath seen or hand hath weighed,
One archetypal Monad made.
Not theirs to mete the eddying sun;
To plumb the paths where comets run;
To gauge the swift ethereal wave;
To fathom night’s abysmal cave.
Not theirs with studious eye to scan
The long-drawn birth of world or man.
For well they knew the whole was planned
(On lines that monads understand)
By one divine amoeban hand.
If you refuse their creed to swallow,
I hold you flippant, pert, and shallow.
Fie on such heresy and schism!
’Tis sure the rankest atheism!’
I let him say his petulant say;
Then, gently smiling, turned away,
To pit against his hasty guess
The overwhelming consciousness
Of man’s and monad’s littleness;
Against his petty self-wrought Pope,
Micrometer and telescope;
Against his dead ancestral lore,
You starry wastes my eyes explore;
Against his crude divine afflatus,
This spectroscopic apparatus:
Secure that who would read the whole
Must scan it first from pole to pole,
And not expect at once to find
All worlds the mirror of his mind.
TO HERBERT SPENCER
DEEPEST and mightiest of our later seers,
Spencer, whose piercing glance descried afar
Down fathomless rifts of dead unnumbered years
The effulgent waste drift into sun or star,
And through vast wilds of elemental strife
Tracked out the first faint steps of yet unconscious life:
Thy hand has led us through the pathless maze,
Chaotic sights and sounds that throng the brain,
Traced every strand along its tangled ways,
And woven anew the many-coloured skein;
Linked fact to fact in adamantine laws,
And shown through minds and worlds the unity of cause.
Ere thou hadst read the universal plan
Our life was unto us a thing alone:
On this side nature stood, on that side man,
Irreconcilable, as twain, not one:
Thy voice first told us man was nature’s child,
And in one common law proclaimed them reconciled.
No partial system could suffice for thee,
Whose eye has scanned the glittering fields of space,
Gazed through the aeons on the fiery sea,
And caught faint gleams of that ineffable face
Which, clad with earth and heaven and souls of men,
Hides its mysterious shape for ever from our ken.
As insect masons in some coral shoal,
Piling the future mountain toward the sky,
Frame each his cell, unconscious of the whole,
Live each his little life, and toil, and die;
So we, the lesser workers in thy field,
Pile each the tiny heap our narrower range can yield.
But like some mighty architect, thy mind
Works up the rock those lesser builders frame,
With conscious end and purpose clear defined,
In arch and column, toward a single aim,
/> Till joining part to part thy broader soul
Rears high a stately fane, a grand harmonious whole.
Not without honour is the prophet’s name,
Save with his country and his kin in time;
But after years shall noise abroad thy fame,
Above all other fame in prose or rhyme:
For praise is his who builds for his own age,
But he who builds for Time must look to Time for wage.
Yet though thy purer spirit scorns to heed
The vulgar guerdon of a brief renown,
Some little meed, at least, some little meed,
Our age may add to thy more lasting crown.
Accept an unknown singer’s thanks for light
Cast on the dim abyss that bounds our narrow sight.
1789—1848—1870
THE song of nations. Sing and clap your hands:
Burst into blossom, all ye barren lands:
She comes, to break the linked chains asunder,
And snap in twain the adamantine bands.
She came before. Her cruel face and fair
Smote all our breasts with infinite despair:
She passed. The brightness of her lurid beauty
Was fiercer than our dazzled eyes could bear.
She came again. In milder mien she came,
With fruits and flowers crowned, but still the same.
One lurid day crushed down her risen splendour;
She passed in murky clouds of smoke and flame.
Once more, she comes. Surely our hearts are tried,
And every lesser passion cast aside:
Shall she not dwell among us now for ever,
Our one and only love, our deathless bride?
(Paris, 1871.)
PISGAH
ON the Moabite mount we stand,
As stood the prophet of yore,
Looking down on the promised land
That stretches before;
A bountiful land that flows
With milk and honey and wine,
And rich with the wealth that glows
On olive and vine.
Through the wilderness of tears,
Through a desert of thirsty sand,
We have journeyed these many years
Toward the promised land.
Behind us the ages o’erpast
Lie wrapped in a cloudy sheet,
But the promised land at last
Smiles at our feet.
Blest above all that have been
In the ages of old, are we,
For our eyes have dimly seen
What their eyes shall see
Upon whom, in the fulness of light,
Shall the sun of to-morrow be born,
To scatter the shades of the night
With the arrows of mom.
Curst above all that have been
