Reverie.
Below the headland, with its cedar plumes,
A lapse of spacious water twinkles keen;
An ever-shifting play of gleams and glooms,
And flashes of clear green.
The sumach's garnet pennons, where I lie,
Are mingled with the tansy's faded gold;
Fleet hawks are screaming in the light-blue sky
And fleet airs rushing cold.
The plump peach steals the dying rose's red;
The yellow pippin ripens to its fall;
The dusty grapes, to purple fulness fed,
Droop from the garden-wall.
And yet where rainbow foliage crowns the swamp,
I hear in dreams an April robin sing,
And memory, amid this Autumn pomp,
Strays with the ghost of Spring!
p. 4
To the Evening Star.
Again, pale noiseless prophetess of night,
I watch you dawn, your immemorial way,
And watch again your calm immaculate light
Beam wistful on the dying smile of day!
Star wherewith dusk so chastely is impearled,
If that you live for love indeed be true,
This yearning sorrowing sinful weary world
Hath deep unutterable need of you!
Does Love in truth make your white bloom his own
And thrill to blander gleams your luminous breast,
Meek silver lily, blossoming all alone
In those dim flowerless meadows of the West?
Aloof your glimmering kindred burn and beat,
High up in boundless quietudes of space,
And gazing on their dark domain, we meet
The cold and awful infinite face to face!
But you are rich with radiance more divine,
And pulsing as with balmiest pity's birth,
And tenderer, like a star not proud to shine,
And lowlier, like a star that loves the earth!
And I, who watch your splendors quivering clear,
Dream, ere from heavenly distance you depart,
Of some invisible mercy's falling tear,
Of some invisible mercy's throbbing heart!
p. 9
Ivy.
Ill canst thou bide in alien lands like these,
Whose home lies overseas,
Among manorial halls, parks wide and fair,
Churches antique, and where
Long hedges flower in May and one can hark
To carollings from old England’s lovely lark!
Ill canst thou bide where memories are so brief,
Thou that hast bathed thy leaf
Deep in the shadowy past, and known strange things
Of crumbled queens and kings;
Thou whose green kindred, in years half forgot,
Robed the gray battlements of proud Camelot!
Through all thy fibres’ intricate expanse
Hast thou breathed sweet romance;
Ladies that long are dust thou hast beheld
Through dreamy days of eld;
Watched in broad castle-courts the merry light
Bathe gaudy banneret and resplendent knight!
And thou hast seen, on ancient lordly lawns,
The timorous dappled fawns;
Heard pensive pages with their suave lutes play
Some low Provencal lay;
Marked beauteous dames through arrased chambers glide,
With lazy graceful staghounds at their side!
And thou hast gazed on splendid cavalcades
Of nobles, matrons, maids,
Winding from castle gates on breezy morns,
With golden peals of horns,
In velvet and brocade, in plumes and silk,
With falcons, and with palfreys white as milk!
Through convent-casements thou hast peered, and there
Viewed the meek nun at prayer;
Seen, through rich panes dyed purple, gold, and rose,
Monks read old folios;
On abbey- walls heard wild laughs thrill thy vine
When the fat tonsured priests quaffed ruby wine!
O ivy, having lived in times like these,
Here art thou ill at ease;
For thou art one with ages passed away,
We are of yesterday!
Short retrospect, slight ancestry is ours,
But thy dark leaves clothe history’s haughty towers!
pp. 26-27
Hemlocks.
(Terza Rima.)
I knew a forest, tranquil and august,
Down whose green deeps my steps would often stray
When leisure met my life as dew meets dust!
Proud spacious chestnuts verged each winding way,
And hickories in whose dry boughs winds were shrill,
And tremulous white-boled birches. Here, one day,
Strolling beside the scarce-held steed of will,
I found a beautiful monastic grove
Of old primeval hemlocks, living still!
Round it the forest rustled, flashed, and throve,
But here was only silence and much gloom,
As though some sorcerer in dead days had wove,
With solemn charms and muttered words of doom,
A cogent spell that said to time “Depart!”
And locked it in the oblivion of a tomb!
Thick was its floor, where scant ferns dared to start,
With tawny needles, and an old spring lay
Limpid as crystal in its dusky heart!
Vaguely enough can language ever say
What sombre and fantastic dreams, for me,
Held shadowy revel in my thought that day!
How stern similitudes would dimly be
Of painted braves that grouped about their king;
Or how, in crimson firelight, I would see
Some ghostly war-dance whose weak cries took wing
Weirdly away beyond the grove’s dark brink;
Or how I seemed to watch, by that old spring,
The timid phantom deer steal up to drink!
pp. 28-29
Moss.
Strange tapestry, by Nature spun
On viewless looms, aloof from sun,
And spread through lonely nooks and grots
Where shadows reign and leafy rest, —
O moss, of all your dwelling-spots,
In which one are you loveliest?
Is it when near grim roots that coil
Their snaky black through mellow soil?
Or when you wrap, in woodland glooms,
The great prone pine-trunks, rotted red?
Or when you dim, on sombre tombs,
The requiescats of the dead?
Or is it when your lot is cast
In some quaint garden of the past,
On some gray crumbled basin’s brim,
Where mildewed Tritons conch-shells blow,
While yonder, through the poplars prim,
Looms up the turreted château?
Nay, loveliest are you when time weaves
Your emerald films on low dark eaves,
Above where pink porch-roses peer
And woodbines break in fragrant foam,
And children laugh . . . and you can hear
The beatings of the heart of Home!
p. 31
Dew.
Soft tears that Nature keeps to show,
In human way, her joys and pains,
Now shed when summer splendors glow,
Or now when gaudy Autumn reigns!
Chaste pearls, whose lustres love to hide
In deeps of grassy seas for hours!
Dear secrets that the skies confide
To the warm bosoms of the flowers!
Kind almoners, that hold as peers
Proud garden or wild woodland maze!
Beautiful nightly souvenirs
Of all the perished elves and fays!
Cool benedictions of the dawn!
Eve’s lowlier starlight, vague and shy!
Profoundly is my spirit drawn
By your sweet spells to question why
So many hearts, as flowers might do,
Dry lips in thirsting pain must tend,
And though they dumbly plead for dew,
Must die without it in the end!
p. 41
Chiaroscuro.
The garden, with its throngs of drowsy roses,
Below the suave midsummer night reposes,
And here kneel I, whom fate supremely blesses,
In the dim room, whose lamplit dusk discloses
Your two dark stars of eyes, your rippled tresses,
Whose fragrant folds the fragrant breeze caresses!
White flower of womanhood, ah ! how completely,
How strongly, with invisible bonds, yet sweetly,
You bind, as my allegiant love confesses,
You bind, you bend, immutably and meetly,
This soul of mine, that all its pride represses,
A willing falcon in love’s golden jesses!
To me such hours as these I breathe are holy!
I kneel, I tremble, I am very lowly
While this dear consecrated night progresses,
And faint winds through the lattice-vines float slowly
From all high starriest reaches and recesses,
Night’s heavenly but unseen embassadresses!
p. 68
One Night In Seville.
High and yet higher the slow moon arose,
Mounting in majesty full-orbed and fair,
Till loftily o’er Seville’s pale repose
The great Giralda towered in opal air!
With vagueness all the rich-hued roofs were blent;
Scarce might you tell their lilac from their green;
On languorous breezes came the pungent scent
Of odorous alamedas, faintly seen.
Out from the crowded plaza floated light
A peal of mirth or dulcet trill of song,
And brightening softly to the brightening night,
The shadowy Guadalquivir lapsed along!
The flash of teeth, the gleam of combs, the dark
Mantillas, the quaint gear of old and young,
The rustle of fans, the cigarillo’s spark,
The mellow-syllabled Sevillian tongue!
All these in pleasured memory still are fresh,
But ah! that faultless face which came and fled,
Beaming amid its drapery’s dusky mesh
From the dim balcony above my head!
That face which for a fleet while glimmering through
The abundant jasmines, thrilled me with surprise!
A drowsy smile, two dimpling cheeks and two
Fathomless velvet Andalusian eyes!
A face so marvellous that one rash star,
To see of beauty this rare flower and crown,
Leaned out in heaven its golden head too far,
And dropt, a meteor, over Seville town!
pp. 72-73
Perspectives.
How much in life we utterly forget!
How many pangs, how many smiles and tears!
What joy, what pain, what yearning, what regret
Lies lost within the oblivion of dead years!
And journeying on, inexorably fast,
Accomplishing our fated length of days,
We turn to look upon the ample past,
Clothed bafflingly with indeterminate haze!
Its tracts of shadowy vagueness die away
To meet the shadowy sky-line of all thought;
Dreamily neutral, featurelessly gray,
They are not something, neither are they naught!
But here and there, in such clear-seen relief
As scarce the annulling distance may efface,
We mark the rigid outline of some grief,
Like a great tree that overtops its race!
Or yet like quiet hills, not towering high,
Though proudly rounded, we discern, no less,
Joys that with beauteous dominance defy
These ghostly vapors of forgetfulness!
But ah, how lovelier when our eyes have won,
August in retrospect as we recede,
Like some snow-crested mountain bathed in sun,
The pure firm grandeur of some noble deed!
p. 127
Art.
I saw in dreams a shape of mightiest mold,
Wrought from stern bronze and towering in mid-air;
A grand similitude of some goddess, fair
With a beauty radiant yet supremely cold.
She seemed invisible distance to behold,
Nor ever drooped her languorous look to where,
Down-broadening from her pedestal, a stair
Of ample depth imperially outrolled.
And on these haughty steps, crouched suppliantwise,
I saw, at differing intervals apart,
Sad men who seemed to adore, lament, entreat;
And one, a poet, with anguish in his eyes,
Tore from a wound his own red quivering heart
And flung it against the statue’s brazen feet!
p. 161
Sleep.
(For a Picture.)
A yellow sunset, soft and dreamy of dye,
Met sharply by black fluctuant lines of grass;
A river, glimmering like illumined glass,
And narrowing till it ends in distant sky;
Pale scattered pools of luminous rain, that lie
In shadowy amplitudes of green morass;
A crescent that the old moon, as moments pass,
Has turned to a silver acorn hung on high!
Now through this melancholy and silent land
Sleep walks, diaphanous- vestured, vaguely fair.
Within her vaporous robe and one dim hand
Much asphodel and lotus doth she bear,
Going lovely and low-lidded, with a band
Of dull-red poppies amid her dull-gold hair!
p. 163
Maples.
Amid this maple-avenue, on the brow
Of this cool hill, while summer suns were bold,
No gaudier coloring could I then behold
Than the deep green of many a breezy bough;
But up the foliaged vista gazing now,
Where Autumn’s halcyon brilliancies unfold
And opulent scarlet blends with dazzling gold,
I feel my wandering fancy dream of how,
In some old haughty city, centuries since,
Before the coming of some conqueror-prince
Back from famed fights with all his war-worn bands,
While jubilant bells in tower and steeple swung,
Down over sculptured balconies were hung
Great gorgeous tapestries out of Eastern lands!
p. 170
A Cobweb.
Lover devout of many a lonely place,
Mute gossamer guest of dimness and repose,
As loyally as lily or balmy rose
Obey the sunshine, does your delicate lace
Hang sombre filaments where the stealthy pace
Of time’s disfeaturing footstep vaguely goes, —
From shelves that bear old ponderous folios,
To some poor yellowing portrait’s dusty face!
Yet though in solemn nooks you rightly reign,
Here, woven across the green of this fresh vine,
The dignity of your wonted state you lose;
For now the halcyon morning on your skein,
As though to merrily challenge its dark sign,
Strings the warm splendors of her jewelling dews!
p. 171
Thistledown.
Through summer’s gradual death, how sweet a sight
The flowering thistle’s tardy gleam appears,
Her thorny boughs like intricate chandeliers
When lit for festival with soft rosy light!
Yet closelier watching her, to left and right
You see the odorous beauty that she rears
Girt on all sides with countless emerald spears,
Eager the invading hand to pierce or smite!
But when the autumnal trees in ruin glow,
You meet her white ghost wandering to and fro
Aerially upon the fitful blast,
As though the spirit of this proud blossom came
To haunt the world in expiatory shame,
Repentant of her cold imperious past!
p. 174
~ Fawcett, Edgar, Fantasy and Passion, published in 1878.
