Note: “1897” is handwritten at the bottom of the page.
POEMS
BY THE LATE
JOHN LUCAS TUPPER
SELECTED AND EDITED BY
WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
LONDON, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY
MDCCCXCVII
Note: The book's call number and library stamp appear on the bottom of the page.
CHISWICK PRESS:—CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT,
CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
Note: Page numbers are aligned in a column under the heading “PAGE” on this and the next page.
Books and writings about the
“Præraphaelite Brother-
hood,” which was established in
the autumn of 1848, are
by this time tolerably numerous. Among them, here and
there, occurs the name of John Lucas Tupper, and some
faint suggestion of who he was and
what he did. The
time seems to have come at last for impressing his name
more
definitely upon the public memory, and for indi-
cating—and indeed, I think,
proving—that he was a
man with a very considerable poetic gift of his own, and
highly deserving of explicit and honourable record.
I will only cite one testimony to John Tupper's claims
as a poet. In the book
which I published in 1895—“
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, his Family Letters, with a Memoir
”—
occurs a note to the following effect:
“There was a little
lyric of Tupper's on the Garden of Eden in
ruinous
decay, of which Dante Rossetti thought very highly. He
compared it to
Ebenezer Jones's lyric, ‘When the world
is burning’; and said
that, had it been the writing of
Edgar Poe, it would have enjoyed world-wide
celebrity.”
1
I include this poem in the
present selection, though it
was, I believe, published in a review soon after the date
of Mr. Tupper's death.
Transcribed Footnote (page [vii]):
1 Vol. i., p. 151.
John Lucas Tupper was born in London in or about
1826. It may perhaps be as well
to say at the outset
that he had no sort of
de facto connection with
Martin
Farquhar Tupper, the author of “Proverbial Philosophy,”
although it is said that the two men were “eleventh
cousins.” His
father was a lithographic and general
printer in the city of London, and the business is
still
kept up by two of John's brothers. John Tupper, ex-
hibiting an early bias
towards the arts of design, became a
student at the Royal Academy. He was, I think,
rather
undecided for a while whether he should take to painting
or to sculpture;
ultimately he settled upon the latter. In
the Academy classes he become known to the
young
artists who formed the Præraphaelite Brotherhood—
Millais, Holman Hunt, Woolner, Stephens, Collinson,
and Dante Rossetti: Hunt and
Stephens, and after a
time Rossetti, more particularly knew him well. My
own
introduction to him may have taken place early in
1849; by that date, without abandoning
the sculptural
profession, he had shunted himself off into a special line
of work,
being installed as anatomical draughtsman at
Guy's Hospital—an employment for
which he was ex-
ceptionally well qualified. As a young man he exhibited
a few
sculptural works at the Royal Academy, and per-
haps elsewhere—works showing
advanced studentship and
the severest tenets of truthful rendering—but nothing
of
his ever fixed the public attention. The tendency of his
mind was certainly
quite as much scientific as artistic;
and, though I conceive him to have been fully
capable of
producing sound works of art, had circumstances been
favourable, he did
in fact pass through life without realiz-
ing anything considerable in sculpture, if we
except the
life-sized statue of Linnæus in the Oxford
University
Museum—a work of the most conscientious order in
realism in
intention and unsparing precision of detail.
Quitting Guy's Hospital in 1863, Mr. Tupper received,
in March 1865, the
appointment of Master of the classes
for geometrical or scientific drawing at Rugby
School;
where he was distinguished for solid and ingenious learn-
ing, zealous
devotion to his work, and successful train-
ing of his pupils. He married in 1871 (the
last day of
the year), and has left a widow and two children. At
Rugby he died on
September 29th 1879. His health
had for some years been precarious, more especially after
a very dangerous illness of a spasmodic or convulsive
kind which attacked him in
Florence in 1869, when I
was his travelling-companion.
A man of stricter principle than John Tupper, more
bent upon doing right, more
honourable in act, more
tenacious of the truth as he discerned it, has not been
known to me. He was not without ambition, founded
upon a well-justified, but always very
modest, consious-
ness of abilities—scientific, artistic, speculative,
poetical;
and yet was content with his rather secluded and incon-
spicious lot in
life. He was a steadfast and affectionate
friend, as no one knows better than myself.
Even before I knew him in 1849, Tupper had written
a good deal of verse. The
Præraphaelite magazine,
“The Germ,” issued in 1850, and printed by the Tupper
firm, contains the following
contributions of his: in verse,
“A Sketch from Nature,”
“Viola and Olivia,” and two
humorous sketches,
“An Incident in the Siege of Troy,”
and
“Smoke” ; in prose,
“The Subject in Art.”
Perhaps one of the most marked symptoms of the
poetical temperament is an acute susceptibility to impres-
sions.
A scene or an object in nature, a human person-
ality or passion, is discerned, and
discerned with peculiar
vividness; but the matter does not remain there—the
perception of the eye and mind becomes an impression on
the whole individuality of
the poet, the nutriment of his
emotion, and of his fancy or imagination, which swathe
it like a lambent flame. That which entered into him as
a perception issues forth as
a transmuted entity—real, and
also visionary. I apprehend that this poetical
quality is
strongly, and even rather abnormally, marked in the verse
of John Tupper.
There is also, in various instances, a
true lyrical impetus, and a certain cosmic feeling,
to
which his peculiar turn for science (contemplated rather
in the abstract than
merely physically) contributed. A
repugnance to some aspects of modernism, whether in
the domain of physics or of mind, will be observed here
and there. A few of the
poems now collected are
humorous (these are grouped together in the latter half
of
the volume): they have, I think, a genuine mingling
of oddity and sprightliness, or what
we call quaintness.
The general tone and tenor of Tupper's poetry is summed
up not
inaptly in his sonnet “To Annie” (his wife),
where he speaks of
himself as singing of
- “Rarest things
- That make the earth a perfume and a song,
- And of vague solace of imaginings.”
John Tupper did not during his lifetime publish any
volume of verse; and it
appears to me that, after the
date of
“The Germ,” scarcely anything
of his, in the
poetic form, got into print, even in magazines etc. He
left, however, a substantial bulk of verse, which his widow
copied out—no light task. Her copies form the manu-
scripts which have come
into my hands. Some of the
pieces, besides being confusedly jotted down by himself,
had obviously not received his final revision; and I have
thought it not only a right but
a duty to rectify here and
there some stumble of metre or of diction, or some lapse
of rhyme. The reader may rely upon it that what I have
thus done is really a trifle, and
not such as to impair in
any appreciable degree the authenticity of the work. In
fact, while I should have regarded it as unkind to the
memory of my old friend to omit
doing what I have
done, I should have deemed it impertinence to go beyond
this narrow
limit.
Mr. Tupper was the author of two published books:
in each instance he wrote under
the fancy name of
“Outis.” These are “The True Story of Mrs.
Stowe” (concerning Lord Byron), and (1869) “Hiatus,
or the Void in Modern
Education”: the latter received
at the time some fair amount of press notice. There are
several MS. poems besides those which I have as yet
examined; also a prose story and
various papers on scien-
tific and other subjects. Possibly some of these may yet
see
the light of publication.
In the present volume I have added a few notes, but
only where there were some
allusions etc. which seemed
not likely to explain themselves. The dates appended to
the poems are mostly correct, but sometimes only approxi-
mate.
W. M. Rossetti.
London,
November 1896.
- 'Twas a god-haunted meadow, grassed and wide;
- Poplars grew on the eastern side,
- The brown wood rose behind.
- It was not low, it was not high,
- For the woods all round went higher: the sky
- Was next to these; and the sunset blind
- Tore through the deepest forestry.
- There was no empty plain for the eye
- To wander over, remote or nigh.
-
10There was no ground but the meadow grass;
- Dusk woods walled out the world somewhere—
- Away where no one strove to pass;
- And whether there was another sky
- Or other earth we did not care.
- The sky and the meadow belonged to each other,
- The life that I led to me was new
- In a world that was new, and the wonder grew,
- As the flowers every day
- Changed their array,
-
20Or changed into berry and fruit the flower.
- Through the long day and hour by hour
- I could talk and play and talk with my mother.
- And oh it was glad when the evening came
- To sit by the small lamp's flickering flame,
- And read of a world that was more than a name,
- And less than a substance. The histories passed
- Of Noah and Enoch and Solomon,
- Of Theseus, Alcides and Telamon,
- And haunters of forest and fountain and sod.
-
30I grew up in love without method amassed,
- Loving, hating, desiring, and wondering,
- A haunter of autumn and haunter of spring,
- And sometimes conceiving I might be a god.
1846.
- I will not come to thee,
- Although my eyes are tranced
- And full of thy dear face.
- And on this side the day of doom
- We shall not meet, because the world
- Works change on what it wears away.
- For I design to think of thee
- Only as now I think, and so
- To think of thee until I die.
-
10For thou to me a sunrise art,
- To which a thousand drops of dew
- Belong and thousand flowers,—
- Which when the thousand drops of dew
- And when the thousand flowers are not,
- Is not the same sunrise.
- Thou art to me a sound of bells
- At night—a moment of the night
- When winds lift sound away.
- Thou art to me the crystal song
-
20Of thrushes to the stars ere morn,
- While yet the lawns are white;
- Or nightingale's song poured away
- Profuse with thunder standing near,
- To keep the long night wild;
- Or else a sempiternal sky
- With nine blue stars in rocking leaves,
- And a little golden mood.
1846.
- Listen ! a sweet bird singing now,
- Although it is not light;
- He sits on yon acacia bough
- To watch the wane of night.
- O mystery of mysteries!
- What are these festivals and cries
- Of birds, of flowers in summer weather?
- Badly the dull ear keeps together
- Notes flung down from the plectral rod,
-
10That thrills all nature with the beat
- Of mystic life announcing God,
- And wakes the ever active heat
- Through earth, and tunes the ether-string
- That throbs in colour, to make sing
- The undulous sea of charmèd air.
- What shall be deemed of life? O where
- Begin its vague interpreting?
- Ere night steps down the western stair,
- The stir comes over all—along
-
20Our forest tops no lack of song:
- All flowers resume their colours fair
- When the Light-god comes, and on the string
- Whereon he does his messaging
- Vibrate their answer keen and clear.
- And I, a mere spectator here
- Without a function, fear to call
- In worship to the Spirit of all.
- My tongue would scream a note of woe
- At dissonance from nature so;
-
30My voice would be a leaden pall
- Upon the glad flowers' golden glow.
- A million king-cups mean to flare
- Bright eyes to heaven, which turns to flash
- A sun back. There will be a clash
- Of jubilant branches in the air,
- And out of earth will rise a breath
- Of gladness, and the only death
- Lurks in my heart—no other-where?
- Resolve the mystery; bring me aid,
-
40Strange Spirit! Dwelleth harmony
- With one? And now thy thought hath made
- The shadow of death be dead in me.
- Strangely I rise to a ministry—
- The mountain pine hath nothing said.
1846.
- Beneath the eye of evening, plain
- The sleepy hills are lying:
- Fields are green from recent rain,
- Green the rugged grassy lane.
- And how have I wrought on, who die,
- Now die, wrung brain in vain
- Striving to find them living! Dying,
- Look, they come again—
- The common, and the children playing
-
10With hoop and bat and bow, the straying
- Lambs beyond. So pass them by:
- We left them; and we leave them; try
- For flowers this rugged grassy lane.
- Look, your flowers again!
- Why, the flowers you wore for hours—
- Not one withered—as I gave them
- You, who lost them. I, who have them,
- I, who brook no coy gainsaying,
- Now have all: the children playing—
-
20All, the sun, the grass, the flowers;
- Time—its minutes, hours remain:
- I feel the minutes throb again;
- Moans the bee, and thrills the bird;
- Glimmer sunlit grass and flower;
- Flies the white cloud fringed with rain.
- So you droop your eyelids lower,
- And we have no whisper heard:
- So we feel no pain.
- And we shut the prison house;
-
30Outside—world, and inside—brain,
- Weary world, dark, onerous!
- All is here—
- A sunset clear:
- Eyes clear of scorn, grass fresh with rain.
- We'll not wake again!
1846.
- Over the evening-misty hills
- White villas in the stare of the sun:
- The heads of elms and chestnuts dun
- Take tawny fire, each one by one;
- February is not done,
- Although the grass is soft and green,
- And warm air blows and flows between
- These blind bare arms that trees uprear
- To feel for summer somewhere near.
-
10Sitting upon the stile, I fain
- Would fancy summer up the lane,
- Where both the hedges rusty grey
- With blackthorn bushes say me nay.
- The winter time has left its stain
- Of snow upon the thorn and rain
- Upon the pales. Like black hairs turning
- Grey, it has a look of yearning
- Back to youth again.
- Oak trees nigh, non 'gainst the sky,
-
20But how black and bare and knotted,
- And the sunset clings on high
- To the summer mockery
- Mournfully bedropped and dotted
- Where the ivy dangles by.
- And I cannot draw my eyes
- From the bare sun-gilded trees,
- Because it seems as by degrees
- An old grey man is standing there
- Letting some damsel trick his hair
-
30As gaily as the sun decks these,
- While he bears all without surprise.
- And when into the west at last
- I turn, the day is sinking fast;
- The sun has gapped the hedge with light,
- Laid fervid fire on thousand sprays,
- Shooting shadows thousand ways
- Until they vanish. But the white
- Slow mists have muffled up the night,
- And all is changed; for now the air
-
40Is chilly, and the moon has shone
- Down dimly on the sea unknown,
- With sunk rocks visible here and there,
- Whereon one cloud-ship sails alone.
1850.
- Fold up her fan: it will not stir
- The air for her.
- Outside acacias wave and whirr,
- Fanning breaths that pass
- From earth to heaven—and what, alas!
- Do we with fans?
- Also these rings, now? Talismans
- Perchance—keep them. We must dispense
- With much now useless: whence
-
10A use for what
she will not use?
- Little things that did amuse,
- Employ her daily, no—
- Perhaps they should not go;
- But all her wardrobe, straight
- Hide it. Or, wait—
- The sofa with her work thereon
- Must not begone:
- These tables—she was wont to arrange
- Their ornaments. The Grange
-
20Will vanish altogether so.
- Trees hold her accents; grass blades know
- Her footstep; garden knots, and flowers
- Within doors, watered with her hands.
- Alas, she leaves us nothing ours
- Unsignatured! Dim seas and lands
- Remote we needs must seek to be
- Remindless of her. For I see
- As yet no fleeting cloud along
- The rounding verge, hear no faint song
-
30Of wind or bird that doth not say,
- “In such attire, on such a day
- She pointed, listened.”
- The dumb ground,
- Blind sky, are witnesses around.
- The chiming hours will speak in round
- That still she hither goes and there;
- Her chamber window would not dare
- Be bright with daylight if she were
- Not in her chamber; every stair
-
40In the still house expects her foot:
- And I am conscious, when the mute
- Midnight affirms she sleeps, the morn
- Will ask for her. To live, and scorn
- These witnesses in dumb array?
- No—all must go or all must stay.
Sept. 1850.
- No more—no more! It will not sound!
- The strings relapse with shattering jar,
- And leave their mournful whisper. Far
- That harp hath travelled over ground
- Rugged and smooth—a long way round.
- The plectrum now, till music rings!
- I feel its weight how dead and cold!
- And wonder who could be so bold
- As touch with it these delicate strings,
-
10To force out such faint sorrowings.
- Sorrowings, submissive, like a wife
- To rugged brute intoxicate—
- Or flowers, to winds infuriate,
- That shed their perfume with their life
- Upon the senseless northern knife.
- O harp! if I were born anew,
- And thou unruined mine again,
- The mosses of the calmest rain,
- The offspring of the sweetest dew,
-
20Should be too hard, too hard for you.
- But something culled from thistle down,
- From cygnet plume, or sleepy owl,
- With moultage of the eider-fowl,
- Wherewith a queen fay lines her crown,
- Would shield thee from the loud renown;
- Cradle thee soft in solitude,
- With nothing save they will to creep
- Self-stirred, in cadence faint or deep,
- Through thine own strings in thine own mood,
-
30Unquestioned of the multitude.
- Low down within some mountain dell
- Where comes not sun, nor wind, and where
- Grows dream-like up that maiden-hair
- That knows the ghostly twilights well,
- There shouldst thou throb inaudible.
1850.
- There are rows of poplars
- Down the garden walks;
- There are cedars standing
- On the dewy lawns;
- They have waited many
- Mornings of the Spring;
- Many swallows fly there,
- Many birds sing;
- And now is the Summer.
-
10Here be great white lilies
- Leaning down their stalks.
- The roses like lamps
- Standing on their stems,
- Burning out their spirit
- From morning unto even,
- Are dying and born,
- And all the perfume given
- Is given to waste.
- The flowers upon the trees
-
20Are mixed with withered flowers,
- And black shrivelled seeds
- Of last year's growing.
- There is no knowing
- How long time ago—
- If there were hours
- And flowers did grow—
- A hand took the flowers.
- Cystus, anemone,
- Olive and myrtle,
-
30Cypress and cinnamon,
- Orange and lime,
- Go high or low;
- And the wandering vine
- And ivies entwine,
- And stretch at the bough,
- The bough of the pine.
- The palm tree is weeping,
- The gums ever dropping,
- The long lawns sleeping,
-
40Nothing is dying,
- Growth is not stopping.
- Cumbered with nothing,
- The low lawns are lying
- In their green clothing.
-
He must be coming,
- These must be waiting.
- Are the bees not humming?
- Are they not translating
- The golden pollen
-
50From flower to flower?
- Are they not debating
- In converse sullen
- About the hour?
1851.
- Still the great sun gets up and holds a light
- That men may see what ugly things they do;
- And still the pendent plummet hangeth true;
- And still the sky is sempiternal blue:
- And man gets older, and there cometh night.
- The wind was talking in the poplar trees
- Over my head, and in this fashion still.
- Nor heard I, for the running of the rill,
- The chirp of grasshoppers that count and shrill
-
10Some anguished minutes; but I knew of these
- And all the other pain-enforcèd voice
- Of swallow, or expostulating bee;
- Because there was no creature I could see,
- Or animal, or wind, or shaken tree,
- That deemed the sun had reason to rejoice.
- Trust me, the river gurgled chokingly,
- The mill went jarring round, and blear and dun
- Clouds in the eye of the insulting sun
- Escaped towards the west: and one by one
-
20Hot sheep rose up, then sank along the lea;
- As if they had not rightly settled which,
- Motion or rest, were painfuller; and still
- The light was everywhere, with prying skill
- Demonstrating a present, visible ill,
- Though it might lurk in furrow or in ditch:—
- Showing the lizard murdered by the rat,
- The spider, with his prey, tongued by a toad,
- The caterpillar writhing at the goad
- Of tugging emmets, black into the road,
-
30The chafer by the cow's hoof trodden flat.
- Death everywhere, or pain!—until one deemed
- The blessedest of all things must be sleep:
- A rest that would continue calm and deep
- (Although this shepherd will betray his sheep
- Unto the slaughterer). And then it seemed,
- As I was walking round that labouring mill,
- There came a young girl with a lamb to play,
- And she had many flowers with bloom a day
- But dare not, though we love them, longer stay,
-
50Because the hours are ravenous to kill,
- And eat up all:—which, entering not the head
- Of this poor child, had almost changed my mind,
- To find a happiness I could not find
- Attend such blindness.—But the mill was blind,
- Whirled round its sail, and struck her lamb stone dead.
- So then I said, “Go home, die in your bed;
- Sleep first, the only peace before you die!”
- The sail went round, and all the wind did sigh:
- The poplars whispering contumeliously
-
60“Of winds below, and calm heaven overhead!”
1856.
Note: An editorial note by WMR with regard to this poem is included on
page 101.
- I saw a youth walking upon the hills
- In the breme Lapland morning, while the sun
- Not swerving upward (as a swallow turns
- That has not rested on the earth) emblazed
- The close fur wrapping him with gold that rippled
- I' the flying wind: what time I certified
- His cap of fox-skin, and his coat of deer:
- And, as he walked, how he would stay his step,
- Against the unconquered wind to scrutinize
-
10The ground with flowers and rare growths mottled o'er
- In that high region; and the rocks and pools
- Sucked there by spongy herbage—not as a girl
- Culling wild flowers, who looks for these alone,
- But taking with a wide glance all that was
- As each a limb of one great animal.
- For whether it were moss or flower or fern,
- Or fungus growth of rottenness, the bare
- Bleached jaw-bone of some stag, or wind-bleached rock,
- Or raven's wing in rocky cleft, or foot
-
20Of hare the eagle-owl left, nesting close:
- Each sang keen notes of one great anthem still,
- Of which the dominant (man, in health, disease,
- Or death) rang joyous, with a cry that rent
- The harmony up through sunny air to heaven.
- Grandly he walked, or grander stood, the wind
- Passing, and great thoughts passing on more swift
- Within him, what the world had been and was;
- While in his hand the flower, held listlessly,
- I saw he saw not, for his soul was rapt—
-
30As one who has fasted feels a lightness go
- Throughout his frame, conversing more with air
- Than solid earth, and running seems to fly.
- I saw him hovering about that hill
- Like an alighted eagle, staring round
- A strange world with a glory in his gaze:
- A visitant who momently we fear
- Even while we gaze may find his task complete,
- And merge into the skies in mystery.
1858.
“The fairies feed on scent.”
(Supper
Conversation.)
- You say that fairies feed on scent:
- And then you stay, and check your speech
- For fear lest you should seem to reach
- Too near the faëry land;—
- Too near the spirit-realm for each
- To fathom what the fancy meant:
- You knew we should not understand.
- And so it was, with eyes down bent,
- You said “'Twas thus with fairies,
when
-
10
They lived at least,” nor answer then
- Followed the argument.
- But I have had a fancy since,
- Dreaming or musing a vague hour,
- That raised up many a faëry flower
- Cradling its faëry queen and prince
- At banquet there: and I can say
- The fairies feed thus to this day.
- Nor need you much misgive the event
- When next you teach us faëry lore,
-
20For fairies are not less, but more
- (So thrive they on this subtile scent);
- If
you expound their nourishment
- To our dull ears, that doubt at first,
- All too terrestrially nursed
- To know of spirits till we hear
- That voice, and see those eyes, fine Faye,
- That lift our earthly lids halfway
- Till into faëry lands we peer.
- Those eyes that beam the very light—
-
30The hue that only flowers can bring:
- That mouth, the honied murmuring
- Of bees enamoured in their flight!
- We listen, and we gaze, and fight
- In vain against this lore you teach,
- Because those faëry lips that preach
- Must feed on perfume day and night.
- Alas for me who have been nursed
- Ever with spirits (bad or good)!
- 'Twere hard if I not understood
-
40The faintest whisper of their wings—
- The scent which hints their presence first.
- But ah! when some world-fatted calf
- Wakens to first vague glimmerings
- Of soul beneath your reasonings—
- Then, Mab, I see your eyelids laugh!
- As when the half-god Orpheus stood
- Steeped to the soul in ecstasy
- Of expectation strained to see,
- What melody would do with wood.
-
50I fancy how the harp-string stopt
- Just as the trees began to prance;
- Fancy the muttered words he dropt,
- “I might have known that they would dance.”
July 1859.
- It was a fervid Summer's eve;
- And deep in Penge's woodbine bowers,
- I walked to wear away the hours,
- And snatch a short reprive
- From that unending coil the world
- Kept dinning in mine ears and head:
- And now the latest sun-glance red
- The twilight sky impearled.
- The blaze upon the forest spread
-
10Was golden-misty, splendent-dead;
- The sounds that in the wood were heard
- Were those the ringdove and the bird
- Of night and sorrow alternate
- To any ear that listens late,—
- Listens what nature doth alone
- When men are sleep-o'erthrown.
- I saw a Lady in the wood
- Come watering every tree and herb,
- And fixing such as winds disturb
-
20With storm-blast over-rude.
- She closed the cups of hundred flowers,
- She held a starlight lantern dim
- To those whose stalk is slight and slim
- Throughout the silent hours.
- She wakened mouse and hedgehog's sight,
- Enkindled many a glow-worm spark,
- And showed the mole in chamber dark
- A transitory light;
- Until a rustling stirring soon
-
30Went through the leaves across the ground;
- And listening silence pressed around
- To pry into night's noon.
- Myriads were moving and awake,
- Myriads were moving to and fro;
- Whisperings along the ground did go,
- And grass and leaflets shake.
- The stars were twinkling in and out:
- The Lady ever with her hand
- Tree, bush, herb, floweret, leaflet, fanned,
-
40And showered their scents about.
- Then from the holt my footsteps went
- In wonder-silent shrinking awe;
- For still where last I trod I saw
- She raised the grass down bent.
- And she caresses every blade,
- And lifts up every floweret's head,
- Whatever with unheedful tread
- I trod on and God made.
1859.
Note: Library stamp appears at bottom of page
- If, when I lay me down to sleep,
- This night I lose my wonted breath,
- And pale and silent pass away
- To some undreamed-of realm of death;
- I wonder, love, if I would keep
- Remembrance of this mortal sphere—
- If that which is so dear to life
- Would be to shadowy death as dear.
- Could I not wed my faith with that,
-
10To love you so were naught of bliss.
- We soon shall know! Sit near me—here
- We have not long to love and kiss!
- You wear a rose-bud in your hair;
- Is it the one you wore last June?
- The moon comes with the sunset. Look!
- It has the shape of last year's moon.
- There's no one coming, 'twas a bird
- The same that swung on cherry boughs
- Last year, and chirped and twittered so
-
20About the garden and the house.
- Hark how the marvelous music floats,
- Beyond the elms by Arthur's Grange:
- The bird is young, the song is old;
- Shapes, but not spirits, suffer change.
- What was I saying? Love shall last,
- And never old and tarnished grow?
- Dear heart, I think to those who love
- All things in Nature promise so.
1859.
- No word of question would I ask:
- I would not learn in this dim world
- Thy doom, or move aside the mask,
- And find, as I have found before,
- Beneath this flower the worm up-curled
- That eats my flowers for evermore.
- But now, before the ensanguined worm
- That kills thy beauty leaves his nest;
- And ere I probe the inward germ
-
10And look down on a blinding blight—
- Shall I be grudged an hour of rest,
- An hour of rest in fate's despite?
- To lie entranced and sing the songs
- Appointed for the bower of God—
- To drink the grandeur that belongs
- To summer suns and golden moons—
- The opiate languor roses nod
- On the faint wind till he too swoons?
- And that bemisted odour breathed
-
20From golden-centred lilies? Deep
- Now grows the charm; and interwreathed
- With rings of radiance, lo, these brows
- Are aching through a weight of sleep
- Thy presence breathes among the boughs,—
- Hanging on pendent bud and bell,
- Charmed leaf, and fruit, and list'ning bird,
- That dare not let its warble swell
- Because the blank chasm widens round,
- Engirding, till thy lips have stirred,
-
30Silence, at watch for that sole sound.
- Because the summer-bee will pause
- Within the cactus' fulgid glare;
- The wasp stand still in the hot air;
- And down the deep white calla cup
- There will not rise the soft applause
- Until thou lift thine eyelids up.
- So demons whisper woe in vain!
- For I have neither ear nor sight.
- I dream here on the edge of night;
-
40Here where the calm cold ghosts have passed
- A girdle round the placid plain
- To hold the charmèd sunset fast.
1859.
- O get ye into the boat with me
- For I am the witch of the winding Rhine—
- And ye shall see
- How sleepily
- The lights that fly
- Across the sky
- Under the run of the river shine.
- And ye shall see how winsomely
- The flowers do grow beneath the river:
-
10Marvel to see
- What things they be
- That grow so low
- Where no winds blow,
- And waters stream on on for ever.
- The stars are out, the stars are in,
- The moon in here and there on the stream;
- And let it glimmer
- In sheen or dimmer,
- There's nothing ye
-
20In the waters see
- That's half so empty as life's thin dream.
- Lispeth and lappeth the wave on the boat,
- For I am the witch of the winding Rhine,
- I lived with you
- In sun and dew,
- Wind, ice, and snow,
- And only know
- There was nothing real in that life of mine.
- Wherefore in—into the boat with me;
-
30On the surface go and the current under,
- And under and deeper
- Where never a sleeper
- (Who dreams more true
- Than all of you)
- Was wakened even by loudest thunder.
1860.
- O sun, has earth no influence
- To win thee back in time of spring?
- And heed'st thou not the year's intense
- Desire, the eager blossoming,
- The yearning of the birds to sing
- Bewrayed by this vain fluttering?
- I hear the blackbird, and anon
- The thrush—but oh their hearts are faint,
- And there's a chilly twitter on
-
10The pear tree. 'Tis thy turn to paint
- Some cloud with crimson now: the quaint
- Spring pageant waits for thee alone.
- I've walked the garden three times round,
- Have questioned with the bustling ants,
- And solitary bee that chants
- A dismal drone—we cannot find
- What keeps thee all so long behind;—
- The seeds are swollen in the ground.
- And cumbrous forms of life have changed
-
20To comelier, demanding wings.
- The secret motion of the Spring's
- Desire anew hath atoms ranged,
- And even now the whisperings
- Of life pervade the germ of things.
- That gold-striped snail I could but spare
- A fortnight since for promising
- The early coming of the spring,
- Although he makes the gardens bare,
- Hath closed the gummy shutters fast
-
30Against this snowing eastern blast.
- And were it not the faithful birds
- Persist to say, O cruel sun,
- That springtime must be—is begun,
- I would believe, with snail, and herds
- There sheltering beside the wall,
- That we shall see no spring at all.
- And, by some error unobserved
- Before, December followeth
- On April's heel, with winter-breath
-
40To blow out all the golden lamps,
- And starry flowers whose stems unnerved
- Hang sidewise in the freezing damps—
- I would believe; but that the thrush
- Says resolutely still “the Spring!”
- With faith so firm against this rush
- Of winter wind that rocks him now,
- That hoping spring, he dares to sing,
- Without a leaf upon the bough.
- And, if you listen, you shall hear
-
50How he has clothed, in ecstasy,
- With summer leaves each garden tree,
- And brought a heated atmosphere
- To that pale calm which keeps afloat
- The thrillings of his evening throat.
- Dear bird, (if thou art nothing more
- Than what we see—a three years thing,)
- With faith so firm thou canst defy
- Thy present, and thy future sing
- So gladly, I would fain that I
-
60Had something of thy prophet lore:
- For I am pined with sorrowing:
- The present presses me so sore,
- And of my future, less or more,
- I cannot augur anything
- With thy large faith, but beat the floor
- Of hopeless human reasoning.
1860.
- Not any fragrance blown from flowers,
- Not any growth of summer hours,
- Nor all the whispers of the sea,
- Kissed by relenting winds;
- Nor that thrilled bliss the mountain finds
- By Dian nightly visited;—
- Only the rapture of the dead,
- Voyaging the unvoyaged sea
- To its mysterious shore, may be
-
10The rapture that thy beauty breeds in me.
- Death-craving stars that passionately
- Burn and die,
- And they that listen
- The music of the amethystine
- Turning heavens eternally,
- Are all too ardent or too cold—
- For lo, thy beauty, like the radiance rolled
- Out of yon closing sunset gates of gold,
- Rains soft upon the spirit and wraps it fold in fold.
-
20O lady, what is this thou art on earth?
- A vision of the unvexed world, a dream
- Of the eternal peace, where sorrow and sin
- And failure, and the aching spirit's dearth
- No more will enter in?
- Yea, thou art mocking us—before the time
- Tormenting us—a cruel clearest gleam
- Of heaven too high to climb!
- Or rather is it, this world sleepy grown,
- And cumbered in sciential self-conceit,
-
30Needs a reminder of forgotten love?
- Wherefore thou with gentle feet
- Hast journeyed here in person of love's own
- Sweet spirit to reprove.
- The nightingale hath fled into the grove,
- The skylark telleth to the fainting stars
- What no brain dreameth of,
- The lily breathes her joy. And yet ye groan
- Within your prison-bars
- Of knowledge, whereas love may here be seen and known.
1860.
- Come a little way on the lea, Mary.
- Let us, at least, say our good-bye;
- That fervid gaze of fire that burns the west
- Turns to the cold star in the sky.
- The merle and the mavis lingering
- With music till the daylight die,
- And small birds weary with sleepy eye that sing,
- Grudge not the time for their good-bye.
1860.
- The clouds are heaped: the winds have blown
- The wandering flock in a fleecy sea,
- And left clear space for the moon, alone
- Descending to the level lea
- Where stands a black rude Rocking Stone.
- In her clear path circling down,
- Growing broader gradually,
- Staring on the level lea,
- Standing on the Rocking Stone;
-
10She shall sink down suddenly,
- Yet she pauses drowsily—
- A final linger ere she fall:
- Hearken now the clear wind call!
- To the bare wolds calleth he:
- The moon hears not his song.
- For a giant lies along,
- Sleeping in the shadow, rocking
- Like one sleeping, but the mocking
- Moon says he will not awake
-
20As of old his thirst to slake.
- Musing yet upon this stone?
- Can she even see the stain
- Of what he will not drink again—
- Is it not his elbow-bone
- She slideth down?
- Was the giant arm upthrown
- In his first sleep; does he never
- More unbend it, rocking ever?
- Circling him with golden ring
-
30She answers, “Once a king.”
- The moon knows what a god he was,
- And she knows how deadly deep
- He lieth in petrific sleep:
- And she knows each god that has
- Slept since his time, and count will take
- Of other gods of rarer make:
- These gods of vapour, and of gas,
- And lightning, these that lure the mass
- To worship them, that spout and shake
-
40Their periods, and pass.
1860.
- I heard the wheel that clattered still,
- And on the common where I stood
- Was little sign of human ill,
- Nor hint that pestilence could brood
- Where shadows wrapped the distant wood.
- And many a white-faced village post
- That here and there, with chain between,
- Gave stir of life to all the green,
- Said nothing of the hearse that crossed
-
10A while ago. And you had been
- Persuaded all the village throve
- In life and health, and that the trees
- Which stand so stately in the grove
- Were fanned by no dead airs that seize
- At midnight on pale mouths we love.
- I had been reading, half the day,
- Of wondrous change by science wrought:
- But here the children seemed to play
- As hitherto, and art had brought
-
20No sweetness to the blackbird's lay;
- Nor any solemn-suited thought
- To infants who would play no more
- A bow-shot from the accustomed door
- Because a mother's life was not.
- And nature moved as heretofore.
1861.
- Ho! singing high on the hill,
- Ah! singing under the vale.
- Fleet sun and shadow
- Move over the meadow,
- Nothing abiding still;
- The cattle, cloud, wind-moving:
- A laughing on hill and in gale,
- A voice in the valley reproving
- And laughing and loving at shepherds' will.
-
10Sing me, you thrush in the elm,
- A single song and stay;
- The song-waves overwhelm,
- Over the meadows all day
- Move sun and shadow—nay,
- Rest, rest!
- There is aching in the breast
- Whatever idle shepherds say.
- And the perdurable green
- Of holly, and the running river,
-
20And the ash that holds its mast,
- Will they last?
- When we have passed, and shiver
- In the wood's serene,
- Whose branches dream and grieve?
- Whereof it were not good
- Ye shepherds understood,
- Dreaming on November eve.
1867.
- Love, when I meet thee face to face,
- I feel thou art not of my race;
- I know thy language is not mine,
- Or only so in the hollow sign
- The lips make. Of my world of things
- Thou hast no care or questionings,
- Nor I of thine.
- What words are said between us twain
- I strive to recollect, in vain.
-
10Such merest sounds the words we say,
- Our souls might be in separate spheres
- That own another night and day;
- Thy smile, God knows, may count for tears!
- And with thy smile, and with thy sighs,
- A subtle effluence of thine eyes,
- And a dim woven atmosphere
- Around me when thy voice is near,
- My spirit is taken swooning-wise
- As death would take it, swathed in sleep.
-
20Fatal enchantress, take thy spell,
- Spell passion-deep
- From off me, for I love not thee—
- I know thee not—thy heart can tell
- Thou know'st not me.
- What converse can be ours this way?
- More natural to sit dumb and stare,
- As two strange creatu