by Grant Allen
And in all the ages shall be,
For the glory our eyes have seen
Cursed are we:
For we know the glory to come,
The joy, and the light, and the love;
But we know that our lips will be dumb
Ere the slow years move.
Deep in the valley below
We see the young men and maids,
Afar from the midday glow,
In the sycamore shades;
And the foot of the dancer trips
In the dell of the coming years,
And the murmur of laughing lips
Falls soft on our ears.
But softer and sweeter still
True love is there to behold;
And none may fetter his will
With law or with gold:
And none may sully his wings
With the deadly taint of lust,
But freest of all free things
He soars from the dust.
Yet we have no share in the soil
Whereto we have led our heirs;
We have borne the brunt of the toil,
But the fruit is theirs.
For the vineyards are goodly and wide
And more than a man may count,
But our grave shall be on the side
Of the Moabite mount.
PESSIMIST
How dreamily the minutes pass
As hand in hand we sit together
Here on this greener knoll of grass,
An islet in the waving mass
Of purple heather.
How vague life’s happiest moments seem,
How keen and sharp and clear its sternest
For joy is like a fitful gleam
Discerned through shadowy mists of dream:
But pain alone is earnest.
Then let me steal one other kiss,
Since earth is not so rich in treasure,
That you and I can lightly miss
A single poignant thrill of this
Its deepest pleasure.
À BAS LA BOURGEOISIE
A PSALM OF THE COMMUNE
ONE race of ruthless spoil our fathers scattered
When thro’ the angry land a frantic nation
Rose in tumultuous mass and fiercely shattered
The iron fetters of its degradation.
Their pitiless blood, rolled without touch of pity,
In that first flush of freedom’s wild commotion,
Down Rhone and Loire, from many a frenzied city,
Encarnadined the purple breast of ocean.
Their stately homes stand empty and forsaken;
But in their stead a younger brood has risen,
Who on the nation’s neck still sit unshaken,
And make our sunny land a groaning prison.
Who piled a newer fane aloft to heaven
Above the smoking shards of old oppression,
In whose unholy precinct, unforgiven,
Still lurks the bastard brood of dead transgression.
Who doomed our men and maids to toilsome labour,
In sunless sheds, like herds of driven cattle;
Who picked our stalwart sons for sword or sabre,
And drained the people’s veins in useless battle.
Whose gilded pride rolled in voluptuous leisure
Through fairest streets that banded toil could fashion:
Who piled them lofty halls of feverish pleasure
To drown remorseful thought in fitful passion.
Whose foul hands soiled our wells of purest waters:
Whose cruel arms in merciless embraces
Made harlots of the dearest of our daughters
And scathed with eaten scars our fairest faces.
Who spared no holiest hope that heart can cherish,
But chose our choicest maiden blood to slaken
Their thirsty lust, and left alone to perish
The weary souls whose sweets their soul had taken.
Rise, Paris, rise, and like ten thousand devils
Shake from thy breast these sons of godless barter;
Feed with the relics of their sumptuous revels
The famished mouths of Belleville and Montmartre.
Glut in a sudden flood of vengeful madness
The lifelong hunger of thy festering malice,
Whose hoarded hate is turned to fiendish gladness
In one deep draught at that ensanguined chalice.
Small matter though thy blood with theirs must mingle,
And though thy children’s wailing drown their dirges:
Take sevenfold vengeance till thy shoulders tingle
Beneath the frantic fury of thy scourges.
Close with thy spoilers in a deadly grapple:
Wreak on their mitred priests thy angry warrant:
Hurl from their bases column, tower, and chapel:
Rain on their palace roofs a fiery torrent:
Wrap in a robe of flame each spot where lingers
The proud memorial of thy ancient story:
Clutch thy own throat with suicidal fingers,
And perish mid the ruins of thy glory.
(Paris, 1871.)
GAMBETTA
(A FALSIFIED PROPHECY)
November 1872
ONCE more she sits upon her ancient throne,
The fair Republic of our steadfast vows;
A Phrygian bonnet binds her ivory brows,
About her neck her knotted hair is blown:
A hundred cities nestle in her lap,
Girt round their stately locks with mural crowns;
The folds of her imperial robe enwrap
A thousand lesser towns.
But by her side in crownless state sits one
Who in her darkest days with noble trust
Raised up her fallen beauty from the dust,
And battled in her cause, her eldest son:
Faithful alone through many a faithless hour,
And proved by stern adversity of old;
Tried in the fiery crucible of power,
And found of truest gold.
When on her neck the despot’s heel was pressed,
His eloquent voice alone rang loud and free
To raise the trumpet cry of liberty
And speed her watchword on from east to west:
And when, like some fierce whirlwind, through the land
The wrathful Teuton swept, he only dared
To hope and act when every heart and hand,
But his alone, despaired.
A poet’s scorn for all the ill that is;
A prophet’s yearning for the distant weal;
A fervent tongue; a heart of fiery zeal
Tempered with fine discretion, these are his:
The earliest herald of that dawning day,
When plans of weighty counsel shall arrange
The younger world, while haste and slow delay
Give place to gentle change.
He first among our chiefs had skill to wrench
The iron pike from Revolution’s hand,
Pluck from her furious clutch the blazing brand,
And wrest the angry axe her fingers clench:
His was the task to raise our slighted laws
Without the murderous arm of anarchy,
Winning at one bold stroke for freedom’s cause
A bloodless victory.
And now, when all our land is calm once more,
Like some fierce Ætna lulled a while to rest,
The fiery waves within whose torrent breast
Surge up to flood afresh the Rhenish shore;
By timid friends and open foes begirt,
We find in him alone of all our men
One man too earnest-minded to desert
One brother citizen.
He still shall guide us toward the distant goal,
Calm with unerring tact our weak alarms,
Train all our yout
h in skill of manly arms,
And knit our sires in unity of soul,
Till bursting iron bars and gates of brass
Our own Republic stretch her arm again
To raise the weeping daughters of Alsace,
And lead thee home, Lorraine.
A VINDICATION
‘Let him, the wiser man who springs
Hereafter, up from childhood shape
His action like the greater ape,
But I was born to other things.’
In Memoriam, cxx.
AH, happy you who know your birth
Has loftier origin than earth:
I would not quench that generous fire,
But rather silently admire:
Yet if another, less in luck,
Amid his random thoughts has struck
Some clue which leads him on to think
Mankind is but the latest link
In being’s endless, widening chain
Through higher types and higher again:
If, after months of patient thought,
His wavering mind is slowly brought
To grasp a simpler, humbler creed,
And deem himself an ape indeed;
Then, having judged the notion true,
What should an ape of spirit do
But manfully resign his dream,
And take his rank in nature’s scheme?
Nor need he, yet, behind him cast
The gathered greatness of the past.
He well may nurse each nobler thrill,
Each holier deed, each purer will.
Since earlier apes have raised their race
So high above its former place,
Why may not he as well aspire
To raise his race some places higher?
To add an atom to the store
Of wisdom heaped by apes before;
To feel within his hungry breast
Some goading spur of grand unrest,
Some glorious aim, in impulse rife,
That urges on to fuller life,
Nor leaves to rust in dull content
The powers a million ages lent.
And surely such an ape as this
May live a life not much amiss;
May love the right, eschew the wrong;
Defend the weaker from the strong;
Teach other after apes to be
Nobler and better far than he;
In spite of calumny and scorn,
Mould younger ages yet unborn
To loftier thoughts and loftier still,
Beyond all human hope or will;
Yet act, himself, his little part
On Nature’s stage, with all his heart,
And show that even an ape may be
A credit to his ancestry.
IN THE NIGHT WATCHES
(INTRODUCTION TO A GROUP OF POEMS STILL MOSTLY UNPUBLISHED)
SERVANT, awake and arise, for the people have slept overlong:
Sing with the tongue that I bid thee a new and unlovable lay:
Sing of a pitiless race, and the blight of a terrible wrong,
Ancient as infinite ages, and young as the morn of to-day.
Sing of the maiden thy sister, whom men thy brothers have sold,
Cast on the merciless world, on the tide of the ravening years:
Bought with a price in the market, and paid with dishonour and gold;
Courted and loved and betrayed, and deserted to desolate tears.
Master, I pray thee, forbear; for some other is fitter than I,
Louder and clearer of tone to declare what thou wilt to the earth.
Mine is a fledgling of song, and its pinions are feeble to fly:
Let me but listen in peace to the minstrels of love and of mirth.
May I not lie in the garden where singers before me have lain,
Set to the sun and the summer, the edge of a flowery slope,
Far from the chills of the north and the whisper of sorrow or pain,
Flooded with violet’s odour and perfume of heliotrope?
May I not nourish my fancy with visions of rapturous bliss,
Resonant echoes of Eden and phantoms of shadowy air?
May I not sing of the sweetness and cover the sting of a kiss?
Tell of the honey of passion, and bury the gall of despair?
Nay, for I bid thee arise with a sword in thy hand for a pen:
Sharp be thy mouth as thou singest, and bitter
the song thou shalt sing,
Weird with the wailing of women and cruel caresses of men.
Others may tell of the honey of passion, but thou of the sting.
Hast thou not heard me of old in the feverish watches of night,
Tossing awake on thy bed, how I whispered my word in thy ear?
Have I not thundered it forth in the street in the fulness of light,
Drowning the clamorous din of the city, and wilt thou not hear?
Now, as I bid thee, arise on the timorous wings of thy song,
Feeble and callow, but stayed by the might of the right for a stay:
Sing of a pitiless race and the blast of a terrible wrong,
Poisonous, fiery, venomous.
Master, I hear and obey.
PASSIFLORA SANGUINEA
ALOOF she stood beneath the pallid glare
That flashed and flickered through that garish bower;
She wore a mystic symbol in her hair —
A crimson passion-flower!
What wayward chance allotted unaware
So apt an emblem of the years that lower
Above her fateful head, and twisted there
That crimson passion-flower?
Ah, innocent face, the blossom that you bear
Fades in the amorous compass of an hour:
Red stains of martyred blood have flecked so fair
Your crimson passion-flower?
Some Judas kiss betrayed you to despair;
Dead thorns and cankered nails shall be your dower:
And with your own blood’s price you bought and wear
That crimson passion-flower.
MYLITTA
AMID the fleeting things whose changes drape
With ever-varying garb God’s hidden shape,
One form unchanged drifts down the eternal channel
Of pitiless years, that mortal hearts escape.
All else that earthly breathes is born and dies;
Old generations fade, new faiths arise;
The empires pass away, the ages perish;
But She lives on, a deathless sacrifice.
On her is laid the chastisement of all;
On her our agonies and anguish fall;
For man’s iniquity and woman’s virtue
She bears the brand and drains the cup of gall.
Crowned with the thorns that lash our sin and pride,
Scourged all day long, and nightly crucified,
Stricken and smitten for the world’s transgression,
She shields the spotless maid and stainless bride.
Not for her sins her comely form is marred,
Her fair brow seared and her bruised shoulders scarred;
Wounded for all, she reaps but scorn and loathing
From those her lifelong pangs and travail guard.
Have none warm hearts, to share her hopes and fears?
Chaste lips, to kiss away her scalding tears?
My sister, feed my mouth with gall and honey
That I may match my music with thy years:
Gall, from the bitter depths of thy disgrace;
Honey, from the sweetness of thy martyred face:
Gall, that my words may bite and sting and wither;
Honey, to touch some lingering spot of grace.
For I have known the burden of thy groans;
For I have felt, at sound of thy soft tones,
The fitful love that melts to deathless pity,
The short desire
that long remorse atones.
First Aphrodite lured me to thy shrine;
I saw and loved that sweet strange form of thine,
The smooth bared breast, the naked limbs and lissom,
The fair, pale cheek, the bright eye fired with wine.
But while my free gaze wandered its full range,
On face and form there fell some blighting change;
The smooth bared breast grew lean, the lithe limbs listless,
The fair cheek wan, the bright eye glazed and strange.
Then all the heated fancy of my youth
Cooled at the solemn sight of that dread truth,
And from the stifled fountain of my passion
Welled forth undying streams of infinite ruth.
Till, gently leaning o’er thy drooping head,
With lips that faltered as they spake, I said,
‘Make me the champion of thy blighted beauty,
That I may face this spell in thy dear stead.’
I spake and quivered: from thy dark grey eyes
Stole down twin glistening drops of glad surprise,
As all the pent-up tenderness of woman
Flushed o’er thy cheek soft gleams of rosier guise.
Sweet sister, faithful to the inborn good,
Unsullied in thy gentle womanhood,
Whose darkened days none else has learned to pity;
Whose scape-goat lot none else has understood:
What sin has blasted thee; what deadly crime
Has poisoned thy young life for endless time?
The sin of love, the crime of trustful beauty,
The guileless innocence of thy maiden prime.
The lily nestling fairest in the glade
Is earliest plucked, and lightly left to fade;
The deepest blushing rose is soonest gathered;
The truest trusting maiden first betrayed.
Yet is the compass of thy faith too great
For lifelong treacheries to desecrate.
God, that a man should know these things, and scorn thee!
God, that a woman should know them not, and hate!
Oh brother men, oh maidens pure and fair,
And happier wives, made glad with matron care
Of tiny pattering feet and baby laughter,
In your wide love has She alone no share?
Have not your hearts leapt forth when o’er the wave
Echoed the faint cry of some hapless slave?
But see, to-day, our sister and our daughter
Sinks at our door, and none will heed or save.
Ah yet, be loth too lightly to despise
One that was precious in His tender eyes
Who came to seek and save the lost and erring;
