Search Options

SONNETS

CLEAVE THOU THE WAVES.

• CLEAVE thou the waves that weltering to and fro
• Surge multitudinous. The eternal Powers
• Of sun, moon, stars, the air, the hurrying hours,
• The winged winds, the still dissolving show
• Of clouds in calm or storm, for ever flow
• Above thee; while the abysmal sea devours
• The untold dead insatiate, where it lowers
• O’er glooms unfathomed, limitless, below.

• No longer on the golden‐fretted sands,
• Where many a shallow tide abortive chafes,
• Mayst thou delay; life onward sweeping blends
• With far‐off heaven: the dauntless one who braves
• The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands,
• The elements sustain: cleave thou the waves.

HOPE.

• ALL treasures of the earth and opulent seas,
• Metals and odorous woods and cunning gold,
• Fowls of the air and furry beasts untold,
• Vineyards and harvest fields and fruitful trees
• Nature gave unto Man; and last her keys
• Vouched passage to her secret ways of old
• Whence knowledge should be wrung, nay power to mould
• Out of the rough, his occult destinies.

• But tired of these he craved a wider scope:
• Then fair as Pallas from the brain of Jove
• From his deep wish there sprang, full‐armed, to cope
• With all life’s ills, even very death in love,
• The only thing man never wearies of—
• His own creation—visionary Hope.

THE DEAD.

• THE dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
• Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
• They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
• And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
• Our perishable bodies are the mould
• In which their strong imperishable will—
• Mortality’s deep yearning to fulfil—
• Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.

• Vibrations infinite of life in death,
• As a star’s travelling light survives its star!
• So may we hold our lives, that when we are
• The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
• They shall not drag us to their judgment bar,
• And curse the heritage which we bequeath.

TIME’S SHADOW.

• THY life, O Man, in this brief moment lies:
• Time’s narrow bridge whereon we darkling stand,
• With an infinitude on either hand
• Receding luminously from our eyes.
• Lo, there thy Past’s forsaken Paradise
• Subsideth like some visionary strand,
• While glimmering faint, the Future’s promised land,
• Illusive from the abyss, seems fain to rise.

• This hour alone Hope’s broken pledges mar,
• And joy now gleams before, now in our rear,
• Like mirage mocking in some waste afar,
• Dissolving into air as we draw near.
• Beyond our steps the path is sunny‐clear,
• The shadow lying only where we are.

A SYMBOL.

• HURRYING for ever in their restless flight
• The generations of earth’s teeming womb
• Rise into being and lapse into the tomb
• Like transient bubbles sparkling in the light;
• They sink in quick succession out of sight
• Into the thick insuperable gloom
• Our futile lives in flashing by illume—
• Lightning which mocks the darkness of the night.

• Nay—but consider, though we change and die,
• If men must pass shall Man not still remain?
• As the unnumbered drops of summer rain
• Whose changing particles unchanged on high,
• Fixed, in perpetual motion, yet maintain
• The mystic bow emblazoned on the sky.

SUFFERING.

• OH ye, all ye, who suffer here below,
• Schooled in the baffling mystery of pain,
• Who on life’s anvil bear the fateful strain,
• Wrong as forged iron, hammered blow on blow.
• Take counsel with your grief, in that you know,
• That he who suffers suffers not in vain,
• Nay, that it shall be for the whole world’s gain,
• And wisdom prove the priceless price of woe.

• Thus in some new‐found land where no man’s feet
• Have trod a path, bold voyagers astray,
• May fall foredone by torturing thirst and heat:
• But from the impotent body of defeat—
• The winners spring who carve a conquering way—
• Measured by milestones of their perished clay.

ANAΛKH.

• LIKE a great rock which looming o’er the deep
• Casts his eternal shadow on the strands,
• And veiled in cloud inexorably stands,
• While vaulting round his adamantine steep
• Embattled breakers clamorously leap,
• Sun‐garlanded and hope‐uplifted bands,
• But soon with waters shattered in the sands
• Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:

• So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate!
• For still our eager hearts exultant beat,
• Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate,
• And dashing break against thy marble feet.
• But would Hope’s rainbow‐aureole round us fleet,
• Without these hurtling shocks of man’s estate?

SLEEP.

• LOVE‐CRADLING Night, lit by the lucent moon,
• Most pitiful and mother‐hearted Night!
• Blest armistice in life’s tumultuous fight,
• Resolving discords to a spheral tune!
• When tired with heat and strenuous toil of noon,
• With ceaseless conflict betwixt might and right,
• With ebb and flow of sorrow and delight,
• Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon:

• To thee, O star‐eyes comforter, we creep,
• Earth’s ill‐used step‐children to thee make moan,
• As hiding in thy dark skirts’ ample sweep;
• —Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own;
• For dunned by Death, to whom we owe its loan,
• Give us, O Night, the interest paid in sleep.

DEAD LOVE.

• MOTHER of the unfortunate, mystic form,
• Who calm, immutable, like oldest fate,
• Sittest, where through the sombre swinging gate
• Moans immemorial life’s encircling storm.
• My heart, sore stricken by grief’s leaden arm,
• Lags like a weary pilgrim knocking late,
• And sigheth—toward thee staggering with its weight—
• Behold Love conquered by thy son, the worm!

• He stung him mid the roses’ purple bloom,
• The Rose of roses, yea, a thing so sweet,
• Haply to stay blind Change’s flying feet,
• And stir with pity the unpitying tomb.
• Here, take him, cold, cold, heavy and void of breath!
• Nor me refuse, O Mother almighty, death.

DESPAIR.

• THY wings swoop darkening round my soul, Despair!
• And on my brain thy shadow seems to brood
• And hem me round with stifling solitude,
• With chasms of vacuous bloom which are thy lair.
• No light of human joy, no song or prayer,
• Breaks ever on this chaos, all imbrued
• With heart’s‐blood trickling from the multitude
• Of sweet hopes slain, or agonising there.

• Lo, wilt thou yield thyself to grief, and roll
• Vanquished from thy high seat, imperial brain,
• And abdicating turbulent life’s control,
• Be dragged a captive bound in sorrow’s chain?
• Nay! though my heart is breaking with its pain,
• No pain on earth has power to crush my soul.

TO MEMORY.

• OH in this dearth and winter of the soul,
• When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
• Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
• Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall—
• Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
• On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
• One leaf, one blossom from that far‐off spring
• When love’s auroral light lay over all.

• Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill
• Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years
• May, like the gusty south, breathe o’er the chill
• Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears,
• Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain,
• Will deem, perchance, Love’s springtide come again.

SAVING LOVE.

• WOULD we but love what will not pass away!
• The sun that on each morning shines as clear
• As when it rose first on the world’s first year;
• The fresh green leaves that rustle on the spray.
• The sun will shine, the leaves will be as gay
• When graves are full of all our hearts held dear,
• When not a soul of those who loved us here,
• Not one, is left us—creatures of decay.

• Yea, love the Abiding in the Universe
• Which was before, and will be after us.
• Nor yet for ever hanker and vainly cry
• For human love—the beings that change or die;
• Die—change—forget: to care so is a curse,
• Yet cursed we’ll be rather than not care thus.

HAUNTED STREETS.

• LO, haply walking in some clattering street—
• Where throngs of men and women dumbly pass,
• Like shifting pictures seen within a glass
• Which leave no trace behind—one seems to meet,
• In roads once trodden by our mutual feet,
• A face projected from that shadowy mass
• Of faces, quite familiar as it was,
• Which beaming on us stands out clear and sweet.

• The face of faces we again behold
• That lit our life when life was very fair,
• And leaps our heart toward eyes and mouth and hair:
• Oblivious of the undying love grown cold,
• Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould,
• We stretch out yearning hands and grasp—the air.

MOTHERHOOD.

• FROM out the front of being, undefiled,
• A life hath been upheaved with struggle and pain;
• Safe in her arms a mother holds again
• That dearest miracle—a new‐born child.
• To moans of anguish terrible and wild—
• As shrieks the night‐wind through an ill‐shut pane—
• Pure heaven succeeds; and after fiery strain
• Victorious woman smiles serenely mild.

• Yea, shall she not rejoice, shall not her frame
• Thrill with a mystic rapture! At this birth,
• The soul now kindled by her vital flame
• May it not prove a gift of priceless worth?
• Some saviour of his kind whose starry fame
• Shall bring a brightness to the darkened earth.

THE AFTER‐GLOW.

• IT is a solemn evening, golden‐clear—
• The Alpine summits flame with rose‐lit snow
• And headlands purpling on wide seas below,
• And clouds and woods and arid rocks appear
• Dissolving in the sun’s own atmosphere
• And vast circumference of light, whose slow
• Transfiguration—glow and after‐glow—
• Turns twilight earth to a more luminous sphere.

• Oh heart, I ask, seeing that the orb of day
• Has sunk below, yet left to sky and sea
• His glory’s spiritual after‐shine:
• I ask if Love, whose sun hath set for thee,
• May not touch grief with his memorial ray,
• And lend to loss itself a joy divine?

TO THE OBELISK

DURING THE GREAT FROST, 1881.

• THOU sign‐post of the Desert! Obelisk,
• Once fronting in thy monumental pride
• Egypt’s fierce sun, that blazing far and wide,
• Sheared her of tree and herb, till like a disk
• Her waste stretched shadowless, and fraught with risk
• To those who with their beasts of burden hied
• Across the seas of sand until they spied
• Thy pillar, and their flagging hearts grew brisk:

• Now reared beside out Thames so wintry grey,
• Where blocks of ice drift with the drifting stream,
• Thou risest o’er the alien prospect! Say,
• Yon dull, blear, rayless orb whose lurid gleam
• Tinges the snow‐draped ships and writhing steam,
• Is this the sun which fired thine orient day?

MANCHESTER BY NIGHT.

• O’ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
• Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
• Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
• Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
• Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars:
• And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines
• Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines
• The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.

• Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
• Each other in the fateful strife for breath,
• And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
• Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
• Are swathed within the universal hush,
• As life exchanges semblances with death.

THE RED SUNSETS, 1883.

• THE twilight heavens are flushed with gathering light,
• And o’er wet roofs and huddling streets below
• Hang with a strange Apocalyptic glow
• On the black fringes of the wintry night.
• Such bursts of glory may have rapt the sight
• Of him to whom on Patmos long ago
• The visionary angel came to show
• That heavenly city built of chrysolite.

• And lo, three factory hands begrimed with soot,
• Aflame with the red splendour, marvelling stand,
• And gaze with lifted faces awed and mute.
• Starved of earth’s beauty by Man’s grudging hand,
• O toilers, robbed of labour’s golden fruit,
• Ye, too, may feast in Nature’s fairyland.

THE RED SUNSETS, 1883.

• THE boding sky was charactered with cloud,
• The scripture of the storm—but high in air,
• Where the unfathomed zenith still was bare,
• A pure expanse of rose‐flushed violet glowed
• And, kindling into crimson light, o’erflowed
• The hurrying wrack with such a blood‐red glare,
• That heaven, igniting, wildly seemed to flare
• On the dazed eyes of many an awe‐struck crowd.

• And in far lands folk presaged with blanched lips
• Disastrous wars, earthquakes, and foundering ships,
• Such whelming floods as never dykes could stem,
• Or some proud empire’s ruin and eclipse:
• Lo, such a sky, they cried, as burned o’er them
• Once lit the sacking of Jerusalem!

THE SLEEPING BEAUTY.

• THERE was intoxication in the air;
• The wind, keen blowing from across the seas,
• O’er leagues of new‐ploughed land and heathery leas,
• Smelt of wild gorse whose gold flamed everywhere.
• And undertone of song pulsed far and near,
• The soaring larks filled heaven with ecstasies,
• And, like a living clock among the trees,
• The shouting cuckoo struck the time of year.

• For now the Sun had found the earth once more,
• And woke the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss;
• Who thrilled with light of love in every pore,
• Opened her flower‐blue eyes, and looked in his.
• Then all things felt life fluttering at their core—
• The world shook mystical in lambent bliss.

THE ROBIN REDBREAST.

• THE year’s grown songless! No glad pipings thrill
• The hedge‐row elms, whose wind‐worn branches shower
• Their leaves on the sere grass, where some late flower
• In golden chalice hoards the sunlight still.
• Our summer guests, whose raptures used to fill
• Each apple‐blossomed garth and honeyed bower,
• Have in adversity’s inclement hour
• Abandoned us to bleak November’s chill.

• But hearken! Yonder russet bird among
• The crimson clusters of the homely thorn
• Still bubbles o’er with little rills of song—
• A blending of sweet hope and resignation:
• Even so, when life of love and youth is shorn,
• One friend becomes its last, best consolation.

A WINTER LANDSCAPE.

• ALL night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight,
• Fell the wild‐whirling, vague, chaotic snow,
• Till every landmark of the earth below,
• Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight
• Were blotted out by the bewildering white.
• And winds, now shrieking loud, now whimpering low,
• Seemed lamentations for the world‐old woe
• That death must swallow life, and darkness light.

• But all at once the rack was blown away,
• The snowstorm hushing ended in a sigh;
• Then like a flame the crescent moon on high
• Leaped forth among the planets; pure as they,
• Earth vied in whiteness with the Milky Way:
• Herself a star beneath the starry sky.

ON THE LIGHTHOUSE AT ANTIBES.

• A STORMY light of sunset glows and glares
• Between two banks of cloud, and o’er the brine
• Thy fair lamp on the sky’s carnation line
• Alone on the lone promontory flares:
• Friend of the Fisher who at nightfall fares
• Where lurk false reefs masked by the hyaline
• Of dimpling waves, within whose smile divine
• Death lies in wait behind Circean snares.

• The evening knows thee ere the evening star;
• Or sees that flame sole Regent of the bight,
• When storm, hoarse rumoured by the hills afar,
• Makes mariners steer landward by thy light,
• Which shows through shock of hostile nature’s war
• How man keeps watch o’er man through deadliest night.

BEAUTY.

• EVEN as on some black background full of night
• And hollow storm in cloudy disarray,
• The forceful brush of some great master may
• More brilliantly evoke a higher light;
• So beautiful, so delicately white,
• So like a very metaphor of May,
• Your loveliness on my life’s sombre grey
• In its perfection stands out doubly bright.

• And yet your beauty breeds a strange despair,
• And pang of yearning in the helpless heart;
• To shield you from time’s fraying wear and tear,
• That from yourself yourself would wrench apart,
• How save you, fairest, but to set you where
• Mortality kills death in deathless art?

IN THE ST. GOTTHARDT PASS.

• THE storm which shook the silence of the hills
• And sleeping pinnacles of ancient snow
• Went muttering off in one last thunder throe
• Mixed with a moan of multitudinous rills;
• Yea, even as one who has wept much, but stills
• The flowing tears of some convulsive woe
• When a fair light of hope begins to glow
• Athwart the gloom of long remembered ills:

• So does the face of this scarred mountain height
• Relax its stony frown, while slow uprolled
• Invidious mists are changed to veiling gold.
• Wild peaks still fluctuate between dark and bright,
• But when the sun laughs at them, as of old,
• They kiss high heaven in all embracing light.

CAGNES.

ON THE RIVIERA.

• IN tortuous windings up the steep incline
• The sombre street toils to the village square,
• Whose antique walls in stone and moulding bear
• Dumb witness to the Moor. Afar off shine,
• With tier on tier, cutting heaven’s blue divine,
• The snowy Alps; and lower the hills are fair,
• With wave‐green olives rippling down to where
• Gold clusters hang and leaves of sunburnt vine.

• You may perchance, I never shall forget
• When, between twofold glory of land and sea,
• We leant together o’er the old parapet,
• And saw the sun go down. For, oh, to me,
• The beauty of that beautiful strange place
• Was its reflection beaming from your face.

HEART’S‐EASE.

• AS opiates to the sick on wakeful nights,
• As light to flowers, as flowers in poor men’s rooms,
• As to the fisher when the tempest glooms
• The cheerful twinkling of his village lights;
• As emerald isles to flagging swallow flights,
• As roses garlanding with tendrilled blooms
• The unweeded hillocks of forgotten tombs,
• As singing birds on cypress‐shadowed heights,

• Thou art to me—a comfort past compare—
• For thy joy‐kindling presence, sweet as May,
• Sets all my nerves to music, makes away
• With sorrow and the numbing frost of care,
• Until the influence of thine eyes’ bright sway
• Has made life’s glass go up from foul to fair.

UNTIMELY LOVE.

• PEACE, throbbing heart, nor let us shed one tear
• O’er this late love’s unseasonable glow;
• Sweet as a violet blooming in the snow,
• The posthumous offspring of the widowed year
• That smells of March when all the world is sere,
• And, while around the hurtling sea‐winds blow—
• Which twist the oak and lay the pine tree low—
• Stands childlike in the storm and has no fear.

• Poor helpless blossom orphaned of the sun,
• How could it thus brave winter’s rude estate?
• Oh love, more helpless, why bloom so late,
• Now that the flower‐time of the year is done?
• Since thy dear course must end when scarce begun,
• Nipped by the cold touch of relentless fate.

THE PASSING YEAR.

• NO breath of wind stirs in the painted leaves,
• The meadows are as stirless as the sky,
• Like a Saint’s halo golden vapours lie
• Above the restful valley’s garnered sheaves.
• The journeying Sun, like one who fondly grieves,
• Above the hills seems loitering with a sigh,
• As loth to bid the fruitful earth good‐bye,
• On these hushed hours of luminous autumn eves.

• There is a pathos in his softening glow,
• Which like a benediction seems to hover
• O’er the tranced earth, ere he must sink below
• And leave her widowed of her radiant Lover,
• A frost‐bound sleeper in a shroud of snow,
• While winter winds howl a wild dirge above her.

CHRISTMAS EVE.

• ALONE—with one fair star for company,
• The loveliest star among the hosts of night,
• While the grey tide ebbs with the ebbing light—
• I pace along the darkening wintry sea.
• Now round the yule‐log and the glittering tree
• Twinkling with festive tapers, eyes as bright
• Sparkle with Christmas joys and young delight,
• As each one gathers to his family.

• But I—a waif on earth where’er I roam—
• Uprooted with life’s bleeding hopes and fears
• From that one heart that was my heart’s sole home,
• Feel the old pang pierce through the severing years,
• And as I think upon the years to come
• That fair star trembles through my falling tears.

THE EVENING OF THE YEAR.

• WAN mists enwrap the still‐born day;
• The harebell withers on the heath;
• And all the moorland seems to breathe
• The hectic beauty of decay.
• Within the open grave of May
• Dishevelled trees drop wreath on wreath;
• Wind‐wrung and ravelled underneath
• Waste leaves choke up the woodland way.

• The grief of many partings near
• Wails like an echo in the wind:
• The days of love lie far behind,
• The days of loss lie shuddering near.
• Life’s morning‐glory who shall bind?
• It is the evening of the year.

NEW YEAR’S EVE.

• ANOTHER full‐orbed year hath waned to‐day,
• And set in the irrevocable past,
• And headlong whirled long Time’s winged blast
• My fluttering rose of youth is borne away:
• Ah rose once crimson with the blood of May,
• A honeyed haunt where bees would break their fast,
• I watch thy scattering petals flee aghast,
• And all the flickering rose‐lights turning grey.

• Poor fool of life! plagued ever with thy vain
• Regrets and futile longings! were the years
• Not cups o’erbrimming still with gall and tears?
• Let go thy puny personal joy and pain!
• If youth with all its brief hope disappears,
• To deathless hope we must be born again.

NIRVANA.

• DIVEST thyself, O Soul, of vain desire!
• Bid hope farewell, dismiss all coward fears;
• Take leave of empty laughter, emptier tears,
• And quench, for ever quench, the wasting fire
• Wherein this heart, as in a funeral pyre,
• Aye burns, yet is consumed not. Years on years
• Moaning with memories in thy maddened ears—
• Let at thy word, like refluent waves, retire.

• Enter thy soul’s vast realm as Sovereign Lord,
• And, like that angel with the flaming sword,
• Wave off life’s clinging hands. Then chains will fall
• From the poor slave of self’s hard tyranny—
• And Thou, a ripple rounded by the sea,
• In rapture lost be lapped within the All.