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Time and Place
Winter
Winter
Warning of Winter
Give over, now, red roses;
Summer-long you told us,
Urgently unfolding, death-sweet, life-red,
Tidings of love. All’s said. Give over.
Summer-long you placarded
Leafy shades with heart-red
Symbols. Who knew not love at first knows now,
Who had forgot has now remembered.
Let be, let be, lance-lilies,
Alert, pard-spotted, tilting
Poised anthers, flaming; have done flaming fierce;
Hard hearts were pierced long since, and stricken.
Give to the blast your thorn-crowns
Roses; and now be torn down
All you ardent lilies, your high-holden crests,
Havocked and cast to rest on the clammy ground.
Alas, alas, to darkness
Descends the flowered pathway,
To solitary places, deserts, utter night;
To issue in what hidden dawn of light hereafter?
But one, in dead of winter,
Divine Agape, kindles
Morning suns, new moons, light’s starry trophies;
Says to the waste: Rejoice, and bring forth roses;
To the ice-fields: Let here spring thick bright lilies.
Weathered Rocks
Poetry is a music made of images
Worded one in the similitude of another,
Chaining the whole universe to the ecstasies
Of humanity, its anguish and fervour.
But there shall be no equivalent
Of these fire-wrought and water-worn boulders,
Tattoo’d and stained, silvered, denigrated,
Rusted and empurpled by exposure
To ocean-salted south and east winds
Unremittingly sweeping over these headlands;
Since in the bosom of this volcano
The fires abated, died down, and were exhausted,
Fretted by aurelian and grey moulds,
Encrusted with frilled lichens, pale, glaucous;
Giving pittance to lissom tussock grasses
And twisted brambles, from invisible crevasses.
Rock, thorn, cryptogram, each has significance,
Each makes contribution to eternal parabole;
And we are kin, compounded of the same elements,
Alike proceeding to an unknown goal;
And they are secret to themselves as I am secret to myself,
And I think they have no part in my dole;
And shall another estimate the influence
Of mass, form, colour, on individual soul,
Or relate my smitten heart-throb,
Beholding these things, to cosmic diastole?
But deep is the given peace, when informed particular
Has respect unto the dignity of the whole.
May Night
The long nights of late May repose to the soul afford;
First snows are fallen to the base of sentinel mountains,
Lost now by fusion of earth and heaven in northern dusk.
A watch of stars is set exalt in the dark sapphire sky,
Sharp the rays strike upon steel-cold spaces;
The frost-stark city-plain glistens with topaz lights.
Glassy-cold, crystal-cold and still-fast, the quickened air
Smites like musical clang of a bell on exulting spirit,
Sense-apprised but unshackled, but free, in heaven-bound flight.
Beholding the noble universe as many-faceted gem
Fast in a royal crown of power, enhancing its splendour,
Not forlorn in the murky dust of uncharted, anonymous mines.
The rolling worlds in their courses seem, suddenly halted and stayed
By majestical word, to be standing hushed and motionless,
And the populous planet, earth, struck dumb, for a short space.
Here is richness of solitude for tacit work of the mind,
But as singular treasure, prize, soul, this silence,
Lest haply unfulfilled the hour from thee be taken away.
(Even now up-beats the muffled tug of a freight-train
In travail beside the hidden sea; its repercussion
Taps and taps on fragile bowl of mountain quiet.…)
Too soon shall be shown on eastern horizon an urgent sign;
Too soon shall the veil be raised on intricate drama
Wherein to every man is daily allotted his transient part.
But legion stars their vigil do yet maintain on sapphire heights;
The mighty silence is such as of which it is said in the Scripture:
There was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
O radiant night! Here is renewal. Herein is vitality.
Clear from the well of life shall spring the sparkling waters.
Bright, bright are the glittering syllables: Peace, and Perpetual Light.
Envoy
Over and over, carefully to con
‘thy tablets, Memory,’
myself accustomed, the one being gone
who prompted all; night having fallen upon that territory
where, season by season, we had watched unfold
fugitive beauty; impotent and cold
transcriptions, yet these now shall be
thanks for felicity.
