TESS

So thy soul’s meekness shrinks,
Too loth to show her face—
Why should she shun the world?
It is a holy place.

Concealèd to itself
If the flower kept its scent,
Of itself amorous,
Less rich its ornament.

Use—utmost in each kind—
Is beauty, truth in one,
While soul rays light to soul
In one God-linkèd sun.

Lamp-lit faces, to you
What is your starry dew?
Gold flowers of the night blue!

Deep in wet pavement’s slime
Mud-rooted is your fierce prime,
To bloom in lust’s coloured clime.

The sheen of eyes that lust,
Which dew-time made your trust,
Lights your passionless dust.

You are so light and gay,
So slight, sweet maid—
Your limbs like leaves in play,
Or beams that grasses braid;
O! Joys whose jewels pray
My breast to be inlaid.

Frail fairy of the streets;
Strong, dainty lure;
For all men’s eyes the sweets
Whose lack makes hearts so poor;
While your heart loveless beats,
Light, laughing, and impure.

O! Fragrant waft of flesh,
Float through me so—
My limbs are in your mesh,
My blood forgets to flow;
Ah! Lilied meadows fresh,
It knows where it would go.

I did not pluck at all,
And I am sorry now:
The garden is not barred
But the boughs are heavy with snow,
The flake-blossoms thickly fall
And the hid roots sigh, “How long will our flowers be marred?”

Strange as a bird were dumb,
Strange as a hueless leaf.
As one deaf hungers to hear,
Or gazes without belief,
The fruit yearned “Fingers, come!”
O, shut hands, be empty another year.

A little breath can make a prayer,
A little wind can take it
And turn it back again to air:
Then say, why should you make it?

An ardent thought can make a word,
A little ear can hear it,
A careless heart forget it heard:
Then why keep ever near it?

O tender first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
O as the soft and frail lights break
Upon your eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies.

And then, as sleep lies down to sleep
And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
The iron shepherd leads his sheep
To pastures parched whose green is shed.
Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair
And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips,
The ghosts of all the dreams are there,
To fade like passing ships.

Crazed shadows, from no golden body
That I can see, embrace me warm;
All is purple and closed
Round by night’s arm.

A brilliance wings from dark-lit voices,
Wild lost voices of shadows white:
See the long houses lean
To the weird flight.

Star-amorous things that wake at sleep-time
(Because the sun spreads wide like a tree
With no good fruit for them)
Thrill secrecy.

Pale horses ride before the morning,
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
With hoofs shod with venom
And ageless dread;

To breathe on burning emerald grasses
And opalescent dews of the day,
And poison at the core
What smiles may stray.

As the pregnant womb of night
Thrills with imprisoned light,
Misty, nebulous-born,
Growing deeper into her morn,
So man, with no sudden stride,
Bloomed into pride.

In the womb of the All-spirit
The universe lay; the will
Blind, an atom, lay still.
The pulse of matter
Obeyed in awe
And strove to flatter
The rhythmic law.
But the will grew; nature feared,
And cast off the child she reared,
Now her rival, instinct-led,
With her own powers impregnated.

Brain and heart, blood-fervid flowers,
Creation is each act of yours.
Your roots are God, the pauseless cause,
But your boughs sway to self-windy laws.
Perception is no dreamy birth
And magnifies transfigured earth.
With each new light, our eyes receive
A larger power to perceive.

If we could unveil our eyes,
Become as wise as the All-wise,
No love would be, no mystery:
Love and joy dwell in infinity.
Love begets love; reaching highest
We find a higher still, unseen
From where we stood to reach the first;
Moses must die to live in Christ,
The seed be buried to live to green.
Perfection must begin from worst.
Christ perceives a larger reachless love,
More full, and grows to reach thereof.
The green plant yearns for its yellow fruit.
Perfection always is a root,
And joy a motion that doth feed
Itself on light of its own speed,
And round its radiant circle runs,
Creating and devouring suns.

Wreck not the ageing heart of quietness
With alien uproar and rude jolly cries,
Which (satyr-like to a mild maiden’s pride)
Ripen not wisdom but a large recoil;
Give them their withered peace, their trial grave,
Their past youth’s three-scored shadowy effigy.
Mock them not with your ripened turbulence,
Their frost-mailed petulance with your torrid wrath,
When, edging your boisterous thunders, shivers one word
(Pap to their senile sneering, drug to truth,
The feigned rampart of bleak ignorance)
“Experience”—crown of naked majesties,
That tells us naught we know not, but confirms.
O think, you reverend shadowy austere,
Your Christ’s youth was not ended when he died.

I mingle with your bones;
You steal in subtle noose
This lighted dust Jehovah loans
And now I lose.

What will the Lender say
When I shall not be found,
Safe-sheltered at the Judgment Day,
Being in you bound?

He’ll hunt through wards of Heaven,
Call to uncoffined earth
“Where is this soul, unjudged, not given
Dole for good’s dearth?”

And I, lying so safe
Within you, hearing all,
To have cheated God shall laugh,
Freed by your thrall.

They leave their love-lorn haunts,
Their sigh-warm floating Eden;
And they are mute at once,
Mortals by God unheeden,
By their past kisses chidden.

But they have kist and known
Clear things we dim by guesses—
Spirit to spirit grown:
Heaven, born in hand-caresses.
Love, fall from sheltering tresses.

And they are dumb and strange:
Bared trees bowed from each other.
Their last green interchange
What lost dreams shall discover?
Dead, strayed, to love-strange lover.

The moon is in an ecstasy,
It wanes not nor can grow;
The heavens are in a mist of love,
And deepest knowledge know:
What things in nature seem to move
Bear love as I bear love?
And bear my pleasures so?

I bear my love as streams that bear
The sky still flow or shake:
Though deep within, too far on high.
Light blossoms kiss and wake
The waters sooner than the sky;
And if they kiss and die
God made them frail to break.

She bade us listen to the singing lark
In tones far sweeter than its own:
For fear that she should cease and leave us dark
We built the bird a feignèd throne,
Shrined in her gracious glory-giving ways
From sceptred hands of starred humility—
Praising herself the more in giving praise
To music less than she.

As a sword in the sun—
A glory calling a glory—
Our eyes, seeing it run,
Capture its gleam for our story.

Singer, marvellous gleam
Dancing in splendid light,
Here you have brought us our dream—
Ah, but its stay is its flight!

What if you shut your eyes and look,
Yea, look with all the spirit’s eyes,
While mystic unrevealèd skies
Unfold like pages of a book

Wherein new scenes of wonder rare
Are imaged, till the sense deceives
Itself, and what it sees believes—
Even what the soul has pictured there?

Caught still as Absalom,
Surely the air hangs
From the swayless cloud-boughs
Like hair of Absalom
Caught and hanging still.

From the imagined weight
Of spaces in a sky
Of mute chagrin my thoughts
Hang like branch-clung hair
To trunks of silence swung,
With the choked soul weighing down
Into thick emptiness.
Christ, end this hanging death,
For endlessness hangs therefrom!

Invisibly branches break
From invisible trees:
The cloud-woods where we rush
(Our eyes holding so much),
Which we must ride dim ages round
Ere the hands (we dream) can touch,
We ride, we ride—before the morning
The secret roots of the sun to tread—
And suddenly
We are lifted of all we know,
And hang from implacable boughs.

Streaked with immortal blasphemies,
Betwixt His twin eternities
The Shaper of mortal destinies
Sits in that limbo of dreamless sleep,
Some nothing that hath shadows deep.

The world is only a small pool
In the meadows of Eternity,
And men like fishes lying cool;
And the wise man and the fool
In its depths like fishes lie.
When an angel drops a rod
And he draws you to the sky
Will you bear to meet your God
You have streaked with blasphemy?