Priapus Higg <hi rend="i">loquitur</hi>
With fraud the church, the law, the camp are rife,
Nothing but wickedness! O weary life!
I must console me with my neighbour's wife
I have done a few water-colours in my small way lately, and designed five blocks for
Tennyson, some of which are still cutting and maiming. It is a thankless task. After a
fortnight's work my block goes to the engraver, like Agag, delicately, and is hewn to pieces
before the— Lord Harry.
<hi rend="center">Address to the D—L Brothers</hi>
O woodman, spare that block,
O gash not anyhow;
It took ten days by clock,
I'd fain protect it now.
Chorus, wild laughter from Dalziel's workshop
The River's Record
Between Holmscote and Hurstcote
The river-reaches wind,
The whispering trees accept the breeze,
The ripple's cool and kind:
With love low-whispered 'twixt the shores,
With rippling laughters gay,
With white arms bared to ply the oars,
On last year's first of May.
Between Holmscote and Hurstcote
The river's brimmed with rain,
Through close-met banks and parted banks
Now near, now far again:
With parting tears caressed to smiles,
With meeting promised soon,
With every sweet vow that beguiles,
On last year's first of June.
Between Holmscote and Hurstcote
The river's flecked with foam,
'Neath shuddering clouds that hang in shrouds
And lost winds wild for home:
With infant wailings at the breast,
With homeless steps astray,
With wanderings shuddering tow'rds one rest,
On this year's first of May.
Between Holmscote and Hurstcote
The summer river flows
With doubled flight of moons by night
And lilies' deep repose:
With lo! beneath the moon's white stare
A white face not the moon,
With lilies meshed in tangled hair,
On this year's first of June.
Between Holmscote and Hurstcote
A troth was given and riven,
From heart's trust grew one life to two,
Two lost lives cry to Heaven:
With banks spread calm beneath the sky,
With meadows newly mowed,
The harvest paths of glad July,
The sweet school-children's road.
Kelmscott, July 1871
<hi rend="c">THROUGH DEATH TO LOVE</hi>.
Like labour-laden moon-clouds faint to flee
From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,—
Like multiform circumfluence manifold
Of night's flood-tide,—like terrors that agree
Of fire dumb-tongued and inarticulate sea,—
Even such, within some glass dimmed by our breath,
Our hearts discern wild images of Death,
Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.
Howbeit athwart Death's imminent shade doth soar
One Power than flow of stream or flight of dove
Sweeter to glide around, to brood above.
Tell me, my heart,—what angel-greeted door
Or threshold of wing-winnowed threshing-floor
Hath guest fire-fledged as thine, whose
lord is love?
<hi rend="c">THE LOVERS' WALK</hi>.
Sweet twining hedgeflowers wind-stirred in no wise
On this June day; and hand that clings in hand;—
Still glades; and meeting faces scarcely fanned:—
An osier-odoured stream that draws the skies
Deep to its heart; and mirrored eyes in eyes:—
Fresh hourly wonder o'er the summer land
Of light and cloud; and two souls softly spanned
With one o'erarching heaven of smiles and sighs:—
Even such their path, whose bodies lean unto
Each other's visible sweetness amorously,—
Whose passionate hearts lean by Love's high decree
Together on his heart for ever true,
As the white-foaming firmamental blue
Rests on the blue line of a foamless sea.
<hi rend="c">THE DARK GLASS</hi>.
Not I myself know all my love for thee:
How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh
To-morrow's dower by gage of yesterday?
Shall birth, and death, and all dark voids that be
As doors and windows bared to some loud sea,
Lash deaf mine ears and blind my face with spray;
And shall my sense pierce love,—the last relay
And ultimate outpost of eternity?
Lo! what am I to Love, the Lord of all?
One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,—
One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand.
Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call
And veriest touch of powers primordial
That any hour-girt life may understand.
<lb/>
<hi rend="c">HEART'S HAVEN</hi>.
Sometimes she is a child within mine arms,
Cowering beneath dark wings that love must chase,—
With still tears showering and averted face,
Inexplicably filled with faint alarms:
And oft from mine own spirit's hurtling harms
I crave the refuge of her deep embrace,—
Against all ills the fortified strong place
And sweet reserve of sovereign counter-charms.
And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,
Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away
All shafts of shelterless, tumultuous day.
Like the moon's growth, his face gleams through his tune;
And as soft waters warble to the moon,
Our answering kisses chime one roundelay.
<hi rend="c">THE CLOUD CONFINES.</hi>
The day is dark and the night
To him that would search their heart;
No lips of cloud that will part
Nor morning song in the light:
Only, gazing alone,
To him wild shadows are shown,
Deep under deep unknown
And height above unknown height.
Still we say as we go,—
“Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.”
The Past is over and fled;
Named new, we name it the old;
Thereof some tale hath been told,
But no word comes from the dead.
Whether at all they be,
Or whether as bond or free,
Or whether they too were we,
Or by what spell they have sped.
Still we say as we go,—
“Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.”
What of the heart of hate
That beats in thy breast, O Time?—
Red strife from the furthest prime,
And anguish of fierce debate;
War that shatters her slain,
And peace that grinds them as grain,
And eyes fixed ever in vain
On the pitiless eyes of Fate.
Still we say as we go,—
“Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.”
What of the heart of love
That bleeds in thy breast, O Man?—
Thy kisses snatched 'neath the ban
Of fangs that mock them above;
Thy bells prolonged unto knells,
Thy hope that a breath dispels,
Thy bitter forlorn farewells
And the empty echoes thereof.
Still we say as we go,—
“Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.”
The sky leans dumb on the sea,
Aweary with all its wings;
And oh! the song the sea sings
Is dark everlastingly.
Our past is clean forgot,
Our present is and is not,
Our future's a sealed seedplot,
And what betwixt them are we?—
Atoms that nought can sever
“I From one world-circling will,—
To throb at its heart for ever,
Yet never to know it still.
9th August 1871
This is Scott's commentary linking the previous poem text from the next one.
I must have been long in answering, for his next missive is nothing but this—
The lines are left here untitled
There's a Scotch correspondent named Scott
Thinks a penny for postage a lot;
Books, verses, and letters
Too good for his betters
Cannot screw out an answer from Scott.
“One day he [Morris] was here he went for a day's fishing in our punt, the chief
result of which was a sketch I made, inscribed as follows:
Enter Skald, moored in a punt,
And Jacks and Tenches exeunt.
I may, however, make a finale by quoting a distich on his poor lost friend the
Woodchuck, which I have somehow preserved, while losing the leaf of his last letter on
which it must have been written. The title “Parted Love” is chaff
directed to my Sonnets so called, which he held to the highest honour of any poems I had ever
done.
<hi rend="c">PARTED LOVE!</hi>
Oh, how the family affections combat
Within this heart, and each hour flings a bomb at
My burning soul; neither from owl nor from bat
Can peace be to me now I've lost my Wombat.
When I at once lost all my hair after a severe illness, he [DGR] began one [a limerick]:
There's that foolish old Scotchman called Scott,
Who thinks he has hair, but has not.
Another about me has some sense in it; indeed I adopted the second line in beginning to write
these notes, now extended to so many pages:
There's a foolish old Scotchman called Scotus,
Most justly a Pictor Ignotus,
For what he best knew
He never would do,
This stubborn donkey called Scotus.
This I revenged by the following on Gabriel himself:
There's a painter his friends calls G------,
Whose pictures the public ne'er see;
If you want to know why,
It's because he's so shy
To show how funny they be.
The allusion to his determination never to exhibit did not please him; but he made one on
himself severe enough:
There is a poor sneak called Rossetti,
As a painter with many kicks met he—
With more as a man—
But sometimes he ran,
And that saved the rump of Rossetti.
Here is one on our dear learned friend Hüffer, using a jocular pronunciation of
the name current in our circle, which at last made him write his name Hueffer:
There's a solid fat German called Huffer,
Who at anything funny's a duffer:
To proclaim Schopenhauer
From the top of a tower
Will be the last effort of Huffer.
One of the cleverest I remember was the following:
There's the Irishman Arthur O'Shaughnessy,
On the checkboard of poets a pawn is he:
Though bishop or king
Would be rather the thing
To the fancy of Arthur O'Shaughnessy.