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SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP




  SONNETS
  FROM A PRISON CAMP

  BY ARCHIBALD ALLAN BOWMAN

  LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD, W.
  NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY. MCMXIX




  _Printed in Great Britain
  by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_




FOREWORD


For allowing this slight volume to see the light of day I have but one
excuse to offer. The situation to which these verses are the emotional
reaction represents a very real and serious piece of experience. It
is no mere poetical exaggeration to say that in the first days of
captivity at least, the writing of the sonnets was a labour that “stood
between my soul and madness,” and I cannot help feeling that what,
under one of the heaviest blows that can befall a soldier, has meant so
much to me, may have in it something that will raise it at times above
the personal to the level of general human interest.

It ought to be a pleasure to acknowledge generosity in an enemy; and
I wish to express my indebtedness to Captain Hohnholz, Commandant of
the Prison-Camp at Hesepe, to whose kindness I owe it that I am able to
offer the sonnets as they stand for publication.


  Offizier--Gefangenenlager
    HESEPE, _17th August 1918_




PROEM


    He who hath never from behind toothed wire
    Glimpsed, helpless, freedom’s waiting amplitude,
    Hath never watched, fast rooted where he stood
    The embers of another day expire
    In glory welling westward, like the pyre
    Of some spent viking whom the Atlantic flood
    Bears dwindling into that infinitude
    That great souls end in; then around the fire
    Of his own musings, lodering through the bars
    Of a shrunk life, hath sought awhile to limn
    His lost felicity--can ne’er divine
    The vastness of the common things that line
    Life’s banked horizon, nor hath learned to rim
    Infinity with galaxies of stars.

      RASTATT, _26th April 1918_




CONTENTS


                               PAGE

  IN THE FIELD                    1

  THE NADIR                      19

  ON THE MARCH                   23

  RASTATT                        33

  HESEPE                         45

  THOUGHTS OF HOME               55

  INFLUENCES                     63

  WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS          91

  ENGLAND AND OXFORD            107

  HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE       117

  INTERLUDE                     123

  ENGLAND                       129




SONNETS FROM A PRISON CAMP




IN THE FIELD




I


    Two hours before the mist of morning paled
    Beneath a sun that never showed his flame,
    And spectral day stole on the world with shame,
    Into the night unsentinelled there sailed
    The whistling murder, sudden. Sudden wailed
    Shrapnel, and breaking cloud, began to claim
    Window and tile down clattering from the frame
    Into the littered causeway. Dreamers quailed,
    And propped themselves to listen, or rising, crept
    From corridors by fitful candle; then
    Gathered scared children down the winding stair,
    And only whispers passed where no one slept.
    And thought drew rein, surmising wildly, when
    The guns spoke murder over doomed Estaires.

                                                   RASTATT, _27th April_




II


    “Stand to!” The warning word was hardly said,
    And had not moved a man, when round and round
    Forthwith the steaming kettles came to ground,
    And the men swarmed to dip their hasty bread,
    A soldier’s morning bite. Still overhead
    Murder flew hurtling, shell by shell, and found
    Earth in some rearward purlieu, quenched in sound.
    Breakfast began, but not a man was fed
    Ere the growled “Fall in” menacingly proved
    The dog’s bone kinsman to a soldier’s meal.
    We mustered, lowering, hungry. The ranks grew;
    And it was seen the world again had moved,
    As at the impulse of a groaning wheel,
    Unto some issue, from that first “Stand to!”

                                                   RASTATT, _27th April_




III


    Unto some issue, Whither? No one dreamed
    What menace crouched behind that bankèd mist,
    Massing to bear down on us. No one wist
    What power that shrapnel covered as it screamed
    Futilely overhead. Scarce more it seemed
    Than many a day had happed, of trials the least,
    Vexatious interruption of a feast,
    A broken night, a day spoiled ere it gleamed.
    But still the thickening barrage combed the air;
    Still whistling shrapnel sputtered into smoke;
    And momently the cobbled roadway shook
    With sickening thud where freighted monsters took
    The earth with double thunder. Here and there
    Blood trickled into hollows. No one spoke.

                                                   RASTATT, _27th April_




IV


    The bridge across the Lys! A slender thread
    To bind or bar thy holders to their own;
    But one span, small and narrow, lightly thrown
    Over these sullen waters, lightly shed.
    Upon thy planks the heavy-booted tread
    Of men who seemed with sudden trouble grown
    Haggard. “What are you?” “Durhams.” “What is known?”
    “Our billet down, our officers are dead.
    We seek a new position further on.”
    Position! Little recked they then how steep
    The way, how sure the ending. They were gone,
    And the keen harvester prepared to reap
    In fresh fields. The mourne blanket of the dawn
    Gathered the Durhams to eternal sleep.

                                                   RASTATT, _28th April_




V


    The Church of Nouveau Monde! Lead on. ’Tis there
    We concentrate. There hung in the void street
    A local silence, which our sudden feet
    With lesser clangour startled in its lair,
    While, strangely, not the brood that racked the air
    Could break the boding hush of that retreat.
    So in a thunder-storm the quickened beat
    Of one’s own startled pulses may impair
    The silence of a room which the onfall
    Of shafted noise o’erhead left deadly still.
    Perchance the mind doth place as on some plan
    The figured sounds which figured space do fill,
    Far or more near. ’Tis sure the hodding van
    Broke forward into silence virginal.

                                                   RASTATT, _29th April_




VI


    Waiting! A soldier’s sacrament of strain,
    The eager cup of poising destiny,
    That may not pass from him till it is dry,
    And Death with peace, or Life unveils with pain.
    Full many in this demented play must drain
    That cup but once. Full many a soul must try
    Its sharpness, till numbed sense hath lost the lie
    Of a life’s landscape, smitten from the brain.
    Then in a falling twilight of the mind
    Their way into that temple oft they grope,
    Where from the true, strong human hand doth slip
    Life’s vesture of live colours, meaning, hope,
    Purpose and fear, leaving dumb wont behind,
    While the word “Fate” drops dreaming from the lip.

                                                   RASTATT, _29th April_




VII


    What of our comrades in the forward post?
    The fog of war but deepened with the day.
    We knew that in that troubled ocean lay
    Uncharted shoals, blind rocks, and treacherous coast.
    And what of yonder never-ending host
    Of wan, unwounded Portuguese? Ah, stay,
    Pale sergeant. Do you bleed? You came that way?
    What is the tidings? Is the front line lost?
    “Nothing is known of posts that lie before
    Laventie. At the cross-roads hellish fire
    Has cut them off who shouldered the first load.”
    Can they live through it? “They can not retire,
    Nor can you reinforce. I know no more
    But this. No living thing comes down that road.”

                                                   RASTATT, _30th April_




VIII


    Still waiting! And the oozing hours have crept
    The morning out in vapour shot with fire,
    That struck now here now there in random ire
    Bloodily something human down, yet kept
    Alone stagnation at arm’s length. Men leapt
    Suddenly to their feet, smit with a dire
    Surmise, collapsed, and huddled in the mire.
    No whisper passed. Some seemed as though they slept.
    Only the stolid bearers wound about,
    Shouldering their still and dabbled burdens white;
    Or sharply a familiar voice rang out,
    Comfortingly peremptory: “All right?
    Then keep together. Lie low. Do not doubt.
    The hour will surely come when we shall fight.”

                                                   RASTATT, _29th April_




IX


    Does the first softening of the season break
    The winter of Glenogle? Do the sighs
    Of wooing spring bid curling brackens rise
    On hillsides out of nothing for love’s sake?
    How sweet it is to think that harebells shake
    Over Green Lowther, where the shadow lies
    Far in the Enterkin, beneath blue skies;
    In trance to see the catkined willows quake,
    Where April stirs along Loch Lomond side;
    To watch the sands of Morar gently take
    The Atlantic swell that softly combs the Isles;
    And through the gorgeous portals of the Clyde
    To hear at dawn the thudding paddle wake
    The ever-brooding silence of the Kyles.

                                                   RASTATT, _29th April_




X


    There is a stillness in the heart of sound,
    How dire soever, if unloosed too long.
    There is a time for pause in every song,
    And in the whirling cyclone’s heady round
    A core of peace. So the taut soul is bound
    With iron girdle, and with leathern thong
    To the acute wheel of the sense’s wrong
    Only until the creaking spring is wound.
    Then softening come sweet phantoms of far things,
    Peopling the vacancy with joys unspent,
    And visions of fair spaces left behind,
    As if the genius of the place had wings,
    And in the migratory hour were sent
    To haunt awhile the silence of the mind.

                                                   RASTATT, _30th April_




XI


    Back from it, back! The quelling mandate rang,
    As the mad moment swooped upon the dream.
    Straight heathered hillside, mountain, loch, and stream
    Flashed out of sight, and but the shrapnel sang,
    And greater guns with stunning double clang
    Rocked the earth under us. It well might seem
    All hell was in the air--not without gleam
    Of hope, the worst might prove the final pang.
    Men crouched together, shaken as they took
    That presence far too massive for their fear,
    A quivering sense that something tidal welled
    Over their perfect helplessness, and shook
    The core of being; yet that being held.
    We knew a limber clattered to the rear.

                                                   RASTATT, _30th April_




XII


    ’Twixt Nouveau Monde and Laventie there lies
    A breastwork, where the clearing tempest found
    Tossed remnants of the cyclone come to ground,
    Part English, Portuguese in part. The skies
    Brightened, the housing spirit to entice
    Into the air; the string its length unwound,
    And nightmare, having pinioned, now unbound
    Our helplessness. The hour had come to rise.
    Alas, the lifting battle-fog proclaimed
    The line was gone, with those who bore the brunt.
    Our comrades, whom the fierce Valkyries claimed,
    Closing upon them in the bloody hunt;
    And Verey lights at hand too well explained
    The long and boding silence of the front.

                                                   RASTATT, _30th April_




XIII


    Gray figures stealing, and a headlong dash
    From hedge to house, from house again to hedge,
    And fifty rifles levelled on the ledge!
    One instant on the aim, and then, the crash!
    He went to earth, and vanished in a flash.
    And there once more was house, and there was hedge,
    With sprouting field, and farm, and ditch with sedge,
    And crop-head pollard row and leafless ash--
    A cheerless landscape gray, and the profound
    Loneliness of the battlefield. The next
    Moment trench-mortar shells were on our head;
    Another, and the day was sealed and fixed
    On front and flank. Among the stricken dead,
    One in the skull, behind, his summons found.

                                                      RASTATT, _1st May_




XIV


    --Found it behind, while yet his soul was set
    And his eyes eager with the death he planned
    For his foe forward, where he stood and manned
    His gun upon the roaring parapet.
    We knew the sign, the closing of the net,
    The baying of the pack on every hand,
    Terror of isolation. Still it fanned
    Some flame within. We were not conquered yet.
    Circled with unseen fire, we only heard
    The bullets whistle round us, only saw
    The solitude of battle. Nothing stirred.
    And yet, unseen, we felt his forces draw
    Upon us, earthed at length where earth had lured
    Treacherously to cover. We endured.

                                                      RASTATT, _1st May_




XV


    A man dashed in among us and caught breath.
    A sergeant, resolute and silent, one
    That we who knew him trusted. He had run
    As men run only in the face of death,
    Yet had not fled. What is it that he saith?
    “The game is all but up, the end begun.
    Live men we shall not see another sun.
    Laventie North has fallen, a feast of death.
    ’Tis your turn, sir. Your left is in the air,
    And through the breach, five hundred yards away,
    His fours have marched on Sailly and Estaires.”
    Column of fours? No! Then God save the day!
    These breastwork trenches!--’Twas as if there snapped
    Some devilish mechanism on us--trapped!

                                                   RASTATT, _30th April_




XVI


    How it befel?--The overreaching arm,
    Bombs; and he was among us. In his plan
    Surprise completed what surprise began.
    The treacherous shelter of a too-near farm,
    A ditch along a road, a false alarm,
    Thirty yards of the open; in the van
    A desperado running--How he ran!--
    And the pack had us. Hands up and disarm!
    --It is the end of all, the bitter end,
    The unpardonable, though ineluctable,
    A breach in life no living now will mend;
    The sin that sinned not; fell not, yet a fall.
    One thought burned in the brain: How dear it cost
    England to gain what I this day have lost!

                                                      RASTATT, _1st May_




THE NADIR




I


    There is no moment in the life of man
    More potent to subdue the stuff that binds
    His manhood into one than that which finds
    The work the founders of his race began,
    And centuries enlarged, until its span
    Encompasses a nation, bodies, minds
    And institutions, scattered to the winds
    Out of his life, of which it held the plan.
    And with the sense of something sacred sold,
    His heritage, and branded with the crime
    Against the ages, from the lowest pit,
    Gathered for judgment meet, his eyes behold,
    Tier after tier upon the banks of time,
    The generations of his fathers sit.

                                                      RASTATT, _1st May_




II


    One moment and his reeling world has rolled
    Back into ages now no longer fit
    For human dwelling. Here exalted sit
    The cruel strong, and, with the cunning bold,
    Possess the meek’s inheritance, and hold
    The good man in subjection--ages knit
    With blood and iron, and with arson lit,
    Crusted with murder, wanton, fierce and cold.
    And England, who so mightily championeth
    That freedom forced from us (our guards were met,
    And we went, speechless--to a living death)
    --England--a new light breaking on me, set
    My brain aworking--England lives! The breath
    That moment spared I hold for England yet!

                                                      RASTATT, _1st May_




ON THE MARCH




I


    Never wound cortège more exceeding slow,
    Nor mourners to more melancholy tones,
    Than that wan wending, musicked by the moans
    Of wounded men, whom pity bade us show
    That much of tenderness. Nor friend nor foe
    Spoke in the heavy language of these groans,
    But stark mankind, whose utter anguish owns
    A common nature, in a common woe.
    Full many a mile of weary footing sore,
    By miry side tracks, not unkindly led;
    And each unwounded man his burden bore
    On stretcher or in blanket, ransacked bed,
    Duck-board uprooted, hand-cart, unhinged door.
    We left behind the dying and the dead.

                                                      RASTATT, _2nd May_




II


    Hour followed hour, and slowly on we wound,
    Till wan day turned to front the gradual west;
    And with day’s waning waned the dream of rest
    For the worn bearers, whom the twilight found
    Voyaging no-man’s gray, wide-watered ground,
    Their shoulders bowed and aching backs distressed;
    Isthmused between deep pools, and sorely pressed
    To foot the flanks of many a slippery mound;
    While floundering convoys, till the light was gone,
    Across the perilous space their drivers nurse,
    Limber and gun, by frighted horses drawn,
    Whose plunging swerve that bogged their burdens worse,
    Provoked Teutonic fury, well laid on
    With sounding whipcord and sonorous curse.

                                                      RASTATT, _2nd May_




III


    And darkness fell, and a great void of space,
    As if to bar our further going on,
    Unfeatured, huge, gloomed o’er us. No light shone.
    Strength, too, scarce held sufficient now to trace
    The squalid reaches of this dismal place;
    And silence settled near and far upon
    That vacancy at length--our last guide gone.
    Night hid each from his comrade, face from face.
    As is a voyage through the uncharted waste
    Of seas, unpiloted by any star,
    Alone, unmooned, uncomforted, unplanned;
    So forward still in silent pain we paced,
    Nor light of moon nor pharos gleamed from far
    Across the boding gloom of that lost land.

                                                      RASTATT, _3rd May_




IV


    We came to Aubers at the dead of night,
    And found the semblance of that circled hell,
    Which Dante once, damnation’s pains to tell,
    Paced out in darkness, agony and fright.
    In that blank lazarette no kindly light
    On bending form of nurse or surgeon fell,
    But darkness and barred doors proclaimed too well
    The piteous end of long-endured plight.
    No room was there in stable or in stall,
    Nor roof to shelter cattle while they eat,
    Where wounded men could shelter from the blight
    Of the foul dew that drizzling covered all.
    But in the open and the squelching street
    We left them to endure the drenching night.

                                                      RASTATT, _3rd May_




V


    There is a garden where the whispering breeze
    Perchance has wooed the lilacs in the spring,
    Where still perchance at dawn a few birds sing,
    And love goes nesting in the willow-trees.
    But night’s ear now caught other sounds than these,
    And darkness, bending, shrouded with his wing
    What from an iceberg scalding tears might wring,
    The glowing core of any furnace freeze.
    Thick as the crimsoned leaves of autumn fall,
    And crimsoned, too, and torn, and crushed as they
    (’Twas the wet hand that told it) over all,
    Moaning and writhing in their pain they lay;
    And none to turn their faces to the wall,
    And none to close their eyes, and none to pray.

                                                      RASTATT, _4th May_




VI


    So where the wide and shallow beaches bound
    The ceaseless moiling of the North Sea hoar,
    And on the sands the rounding billows pour
    Their majesty of waters to the ground;
    As one by one the rising breakers pound
    The beaten salt sands of the yeasty shore,
    Their bursting charges’ momentary roar
    Dies in a background of prevailing sound--
    Thus hour by hour the moaning did prevail
    Over night’s stillness, rose, and swelled, and died
    In the sad level of a murmuring wail,
    Like ocean’s moan with voices multiplied
    Along the reaches of the sounding graile,
    The west wind wrestling with the flowing tide.

                                                      RASTATT, _5th May_




VII


    The last march opened with the sudden blaze
    Of howitzers upon the face of night,
    Waving us onward ere the laggard light
    Of morning broke down transport-crowded ways.
    Next to the first was this the bitterest phase
    Of our humiliation. Yet ’tis right
    To chronicle some kindness, and requite
    Our armed custodians with this word of praise.
    By Fournes, by Haubourdin, the endless reel
    Of marching men ran out its windings slow,
    Till near day’s end, nigh broken on the wheel
    Of hunger, and scarce longer fit to go,
    Within the moated Citadel of Lille
    The sharper pang gave place to deeper woe.

                                                      RASTATT, _5th May_




VIII


    --The deep woe of the mind when prison walls
    First darken it with shadow, throbbing hot
    To meet the outrage, as the bolts are shot,
    The locks ground home, and the long silence falls.
    And next a settling helplessness appals
    The sinking soul, as if that hour should blot
    One’s name out of the Book, as if one caught
    Of life’s retreat the hurrying last footfalls.
    Where once a vision smiled of rankèd days
    Drawn on life’s vista’d curtain rich and vast,
    Only a gulf now yawns. Of all the plays
    Played out in visions, we have played the last.
    The future bankrupt, ’tis the present pays;
    And of life’s triple span, remains--the Past.

                                                      RASTATT, _5th May_




RASTATT




I


    Yet morning comes with pageantry of fire,
    And evening falls with majesty of flame,
    And every hour hath something to reclaim
    The waste of life, slow wilting behind wire.
    It were a doleful dungeon that could tire
    Nature’s incessant carefulness to shame
    Sheer stalemate from each thing that lives, and claim
    All motion for her universal choir.
    Thus day by dreary day the chargèd hours
    Pass influence from the sweetness of the hills
    Across these cages, and the scent of flowers
    Is wafted, and the fragrant dew distils,
    And unimaginable stir of powers
    From the deep sense of woods divinely thrills.

                                                      RASTATT, _7th May_




II


    Two silent influences mainly move
    The captive’s mind, not wholly sunk in sloth,
    Nor lost in carnal craving--dangers both
    That to the core the sterling manhood prove.
    One is the sense of shrinkage, of the groove
    In which the soul enshuttled--O how loth!--
    Feels stoppage of life’s pulse, arrested growth,
    Heart-sickness which no medicine can remove.
    The other wakens when departing night
    Throws up the windows of the spacious morn
    Upon a new day pulsing with new light;
    And from the hill the hunter with his horn
    Sends down imagined valleys strains that smite
    The spirit with the sense of something born.

                                                      RASTATT, _7th May_




III


    Within these cages day by day we pace
    The bitter shortness of the meted span;
    And this and that way variously we plan
    Our poor excursions over the poor place,
    Cribbed to extinction. Yet remains one grace.
    For neither bars nor tented wire can ban
    Full many a roving glance that dares to scan
    The roomy hill, and wanders into space.
    Yea, and remains for ever unrepealed
    And unimpaired the free impetuous quest
    Of the mind’s soaring eye, at length unsealed
    To the full measure of a life possessed
    Awhile, but never counted, now revealed
    Inestimable, wonderful, unguessed.

                                                      RASTATT, _7th May_




IV


    The long day waned beneath refulgent skies,
    And evening sunshine bathed the hilltops round,
    Where on the sudden from the level ground
    Pine-vestured, solemn, summit by summit rise
    The tops of the Black Forest. Wistful eyes
    Wandered from peak to peak, as if to sound
    Their mystery, if perchance there might be found
    Some healing essence there, some glad surprise.
    Long strove the puzzled spirit, vainly yearned
    Into that alien soul to force its way;
    When suddenly--the mystic rune was learned!
    And in an upland glen remote and gray
    There moved a presence known and last discerned
    In Glendaruel on a morn of May.

                                                      RASTATT, _7th May_




V


    O May! O month of months divinely dear,
    Which severest, amidst the toil and strife
    Of Nature’s round, as with a glittering knife,
    A perfect segment from the varying year!
    Month of entrancing spaces, wide and clear,
    Calling us to the open, thick with life,
    All leaf and lamb and freshness, welling, rife
    With blossom--can it be that thou art here?
    O that it were in some sweet Scottish strath,
    Backed by the mountains, watered, green and wide,
    Where the Tay laves in shallow crystal bath
    His pebbles, or the Forth’s meandering tide
    Receives Dumyat’s shadow o’er his path,
    And young light breaks down Ochill’s mottled side.

                                                      RASTATT, _8th May_




VI


    As the lone searcher, crouching o’er his glass,
    Beside the window while the light is high,
    Doth moved therein the forms of things descry
    Invisible else to common vision crass;
    Spirilla, the amœba’s sprawling mass,
    With gliding infusoria sailing by--
    And marks each vestige with entranced eye,
    Glimmer, emerge and clear, dissolve and pass;
    So in that optic lens, where never yet
    The sun prevailed, beneath my prison wall,
    One-windowed to the past, but brightly lit
    By the eye’s own pure light, a swarm of small
    And fleeting memories, else forgotten, flit,
    Trivial, yet entrancing to recall.

                                                      RASTATT, _9th May_




VII


    Oft at the hour when night’s aërial spring
    Waters with dew the beauty of the morn,
    What time another rosy day is born,
    Along these lanes the echoing footsteps ring
    Of marching men, who to their marching sing,
    Deep-voiced, light-hearted. Yet they do not scorn
    Due pause and measure, and the theme well-worn
    From the full heart of Germany they bring.
    But we, whose fathers once in songs as fine
    Unburdened hearts as full, and with the power
    Of our dear country pulsing in each line,
    Scorn to remember England, and to our
    Incomparable heritage of song
    Prefer the tinkle of some mean ding-dong.

                                                      RASTATT, _9th May_




VIII


    All is not well with England. Her great heart
    Beats faultily and to no music set.
    She hath her moods, suspicions, and doth fret
    The daylong hour, by night doth toss and start.
    Oft she stands dreaming in the crowded mart.
    ’Tis true that this distemper doth not yet
    The deeper functions of her life beset,
    And mightily she plays her mighty part.
    Yet sometimes in this tempest the heart fears
    Whether, so faulted, the old anchor grips.
    And shall we find, we ask, when the sky clears,
    England still mightier than England’s slips?
    Let our own past proclaim it. Let the years
    Advance and set their trumpets to their lips.

                                                      RASTATT, _9th May_




IX


    The root of our infirmity is found
    In English liberty, grandly achieved,
    Yet little understood and ill conceived,
    And sprouting rank from the uncultured ground.
    Too much the thought prevails that man unbound
    Is man made free, a life oft unretrieved
    From chaos by a content; undeceived
    Only when licence runs the ship aground.
    O England! Mother! whom thine every child
    Loves, surely, to the last, forgive that some
    Must fear the loss of thy benignant strength
    Through the mind’s error--lest, too freely wild,
    Thy liberty of indifference become
    A liberty of impotence at length.

                                                      RASTATT, _9th May_




X


    There is no single foot of English soil,
    Howe’er defaced, that is not holy ground.
    There is no spot where great souls more abound,
    Or where man’s greatness is more truly royal.
    Who hath o’ertopped our Shakespeare? Who by toil
    Of kingly thought more lofty, more profound,
    Than Newton e’er from heaven’s majestic round
    Brought home at night a more stupendous spoil?
    One thing I find not well. In our reserve
    We oft-times cloak our excellence, ashamed
    Not of our imperfections, but our Best;
    And what is finest, most our own, we serve
    In some mean dish, or pass it by unclaimed,
    Leaving the noble in us unexpressed.

                                                      RASTATT, _9th May_




HESEPE




I


    A lonely camp and small amidst the miles
    Of the Westphalian plain, where islanded
    In the green waste our simple lives are led
    Out of the troubled world. Here morning smiles
    Splendidly, and the mustering twilight wiles
    To a strange sense of peace consummated
    Over these low-hung woods, where setting red
    And oval the sun the yearning eye beguiles.
    Then as the white and sheeted vapour steals
    Along the flats lagoon-like, comes a breath
    Of anguish from the void, where still is hurled
    Nation on nation; and the spirit feels
    A tidal presence of o’erwhelming death
    Stir through this weird backwater of the world.

                                                      HESEPE, _19th May_




II


    How hard it is to think upon this shoal
    Of Inanition that the world’s ablaze.
    How hard to link these lazy summer days
    With ends and issues that will not unroll
    Their length in æons--mankind’s furthest goal,
    Perpending in the thick and murderous haze
    Of yonder battle-hurricane that lays
    Legions to rest till the last tattoo roll.
    On sun-beat sand the busy ants deploy;
    Industrious spiders ply their little looms;
    With brush and pencil or with book we toy.
    The quiet evening nears; the beetle booms.
    God blazes at the world. Hell gapes for joy.
    And Europe whitens with those nameless tombs.

                                                      HESEPE, _30th May_




III


    Scanted of life and vented on this shore,
    Where but the salt and sailless ocean plies
    His tide of time with soulless fall and rise,
    We conn the unfeatured waste from pole to pole.
    Daily the gray remorseless waters roll
    Out of the blank of gray remorseless skies,
    And nothing happens. Then we close sick eyes,
    And sadly the soul communes with the soul--
    When often o’er night’s face a sudden glow
    Of Boreal splendour palpitating plays,
    And the long runners, shaking tress-like, show
    Our life’s plan in a vision which betrays
    Our secrets to our pillows; and we know
    Our selves more clearly than in happier days.

                                                      HESEPE, _4th June_




IV


    When in this deep Re-entrant’s sullen shade,
    What hour night’s middle watches change reliefs,
    The mind compiles the roster of its griefs,
    Before the inward eye there oft parade
    Life’s serried loves, appointed and arrayed
    For high inspection, potentates and chiefs,
    And armed retainers whom some bond enfeoffs,
    And all precisely marshalled grade by grade.
    Then we discern at length where each doth stand,
    In front or rear, and what the rank they bear;
    The acquainted Mass, the Intimates, the band
    Of such as do the forward stations share.
    And last the One with none on either hand.
    And thou art She, whose ring and seal I wear.

                                                      HESEPE, _4th June_




V


    What time in empty hour awhile relaxed,
    Around my cage’s circuit I have paced,
    Sunk in myself, and broodingly have traced
    These late appalling issues, I have taxed
    My country with a weakening will: “Thou slack’st
    Thy effort, England.” Then some sight hath braced
    My soul, and from my mind the doubt effaced.
    England, it is not energy thou lack’st!
    I felt it when one morn there sudden flew
    Around the camp new life and boisterous cheer,
    Unlike the mood of those who hitherto
    Our wants supplied, and something did endear
    The noise of labour to us, and we knew
    That English orderlies at length were here.

                                                     HESEPE, _20th June_




VI


    My Countrymen! The years that have gone by
    Since Hengist came with Horsa from the sea,
    Find the same substance in you, fiercely free,
    Yet of that fundamental liberty,
    The soul’s state, oft unable to descry
    The deeper import, your simplicity,
    Your limit, only natural chivalry
    Redeeming what your insight doth deny.
    Unskilled to conn the inwardness of things,
    There is a health about you keeps you clean,
    Derisive of all high pretence that chimes
    Not with your plainness, sound. Your laughter rings
    Over hard toil, and all things grandly mean
    Your humour shatters, punctures, or sublimes.

                                                     HESEPE, _22nd June_




VII


    With little tasks we wile the hours away,
    Each bringing shyly forth his piteous store
    Of erudition, oft-times dubious lore,
    Since memory cupboards all we dare to say.
    One tells us how to mine, one how to lay
    A crop of good Rhodesian maize. Nay more,
    The skirts of metaphysics we explore,
    And touch the dread fringe of psychology.
    O to be hidden here amongst the seams
    Of History’s garment, while the whole world rocks
    Upon its base! When every day that gleams
    Tells us that England still against all shocks
    Raises her front; and starting from our dreams,
    Each morning Hesepe the lonely mocks!

                                                      HESEPE, _30th May_




THOUGHTS OF HOME




I


    As are the features of some well-loved face,
    On which a life’s prolixity is writ
    In moving characters much conned and fit
    Across a single soulful ground to trace
    Feeling and thought and purpose, like the grace
    Which motion adds to loveliness (there flit
    The spirit’s shades, and there the lamp is lit
    That lights twin souls to a lifelong embrace);
    So to the city-dweller hath the town,
    Much conned, its moving physiognomy,
    Which oft in exile, as the sun goes down,
    Teams in the caverned dusk of memory
    With haunting visions of dear streets, that crown
    Night’s sorrow with entrancing imagery.

                                                      HESEPE, _19th May_




II


    Does the slant touch of early light awake
    The sirens on the Clyde, and fling the door
    Wide on the city’s rousing all-day roar?
    Are the streets well a-clatter? Do they break
    From tram and train, that travelling host, and take
    The town by storm? Does gathering traffic pour
    Over the tide-line of night’s silent shore,
    Into the spaces, till the cobbles quake?
    While down the river, crowded to the brink
    With huddled shipyards, many a loaded quay,
    Ten hundred thousand volleying hammers clink;
    And the slow homing liner booms to see
    The ever-coiling waters still a-wink
    With mirrored shipping freighted for the sea.

                                                      HESEPE, _19th May_




III


    Ah me, I dream of what they do at home
    This Sabbath sunrise of the early prime!
    The slumbering city waking to the chime
    Of opening church-bells, when the sun hath clomb
    Full half-way up the hollow of heaven’s dome;
    The leisured family muster, the sublime
    Jollity and the uplift of the time
    That sets the week-worn spirit free to roam;
    The walking to the kirk, the solemn hour
    With the Creator, lapsing at the close
    Into the sweet expansiveness that plays
    Round the church door, when from the too tense power
    Of prayer and praise the natural spirit flows
    Back to its level.--That was in past days.

                                                      HESEPE, _19th May_




IV


    What do they do _to-day_? What form of fear
    Haunts the now voided chambers of their life,
    Troubling its ancient tenor, parent, wife,
    Survivors of the broken circle dear
    In the old home enisled, as in some drear
    Interspace of existence, till the strife
    Is overblown, and but the echoes rife
    Volley adown the days still left them here?
    How they must suffer!--Yet these later shocks
    Displace not from my brain the life it knew
    Before the Power that our planned journey mocks,
    Over our faring war’s dark glory drew;
    And when my miser mind its store unlocks,
    It takes out treasures rather old than new.

                                                      HESEPE, _20th May_




V


    So thus I picture it, not as life lies
    Now writhing, but as when the days and nights
    Followed each other in unmarked delights;
    Nor noted we the measure of the prize
    Till all was over. Now the spirit cries,
    What time encroaching Inanition blights,
    For but the phantom of its past, and fights
    Extinction with its memories. Let them rise!
    Let me dissemble that as in past days
    The crystal fountain with delicious flow
    Of bursting social joy unconscious plays
    Over the garden close, where row by row
    The flowers of life in such profusion blaze
    That their own loveliness they do not know.

                                                      HESEPE, _20th May_




VI


    Day follows night, and night returns to day
    Through all the enchanting stages of the spring;
    And exile lengthens out to months that fling
    Their shadow further, and my life grows gray;
    Grays even with the sun’s increasing ray;
    While forward still the heading heats do wing
    Into the year, that softly rounds his ring
    To midsummer, and June is on the way:
    The perfect season, when the hawthorn blows
    Down cream-white Scottish hedges, and the spent
    Airs of the evening gently swaying close
    Tired eyes upon it, heavy with its scent;
    While on the Downs the beating sunlight glows,
    And sends the wildering roses over Kent.

                                                      HESEPE, _21st May_




INFLUENCES




I


    When in the waking visions of the night
    I travel back the miles my feet have worn
    Since with a cry my spirit was reborn,
    There stirs again the anguish and delight
    Felt first as each new vista on the sight
    Swam in the luminous duskiness of morn,
    And the soul quested down the long leagues, torn
    With its own thirst for vision and more light.
    One realm in thought I near with awe profound,
    Where hangs the Slav for ever on his tree,
    Bedewed with sorrow, with contrition crowned,
    And thorns of perfected humility,
    The holy flowering of that cursed ground;
    And at the mighty portals Titans three.

                                                      HESEPE, _21st May_




II


    Russia, thy bitter sorrows partly spring
    From the deep cleavage which, as with a knife,
    Severs what is most native in thy life
    From what thy troubled history doth bring
    Out of dark days that threatened once to wring
    That life itself from thee. The very strife
    That heals our Europe through thy pains, is rife
    With thine own Tragedy, still on the wing.
    Here stand thine institutes, designed to sway
    A local life within thee, Zemstvo, Mir,
    And Duma, people’s parliaments; and here
    The iron empire with the feet of clay,
    That froward issue of the Olden day
    When Ivan’s legions laid the Tartar spear.

                                                      HESEPE, _22nd May_




III


    The other cause behind the ages lies,
    A-swelter in the elemental yeast,
    Where yet thou lay’st fermenting for the feast
    Of nationality, thine opening eyes
    Turned longingly to where the sun doth rise,
    And thy great spirit, when the ferment ceased,
    For ever oriented to the East,
    Mysterious, helpless, beautiful and wise.
    Thence while the bitter ages onward run,
    And the fierce West doth rend a path through time,
    Thou for the nations from the healing sun
    Draw’st healing still, and in the teeth of crime
    Provest by many a bloodless victory won,
    Than this world’s pride of power Love more sublime.

                                                      HESEPE, _22nd May_




IV


    Who is it loometh o’er the Steppes at e’en,
    A giant from the sunrise of man’s race,
    Statured of eld, that immemorial face
    Hewn out of Ararat, in which we glean,
    And in the froward, patriarchal mien,
    An old tale told in many a furrowed trace,
    Moulded before the Sphynx crouched in her place,
    By passion uncontrollable and clean.
    For he hath sat with Abram in the tent,
    And gazed on Hebron, till the blue heaven broke
    Over them into stars. Then he went on
    Down all the ages ageless and unbent,
    Till in this later world of lesser folk
    ’Mongst men he towers the eternal Mastodon.

                                                      HESEPE, _23rd May_




V


    And all that man hath felt since man hath known
    Life first within him, aye, and woman too,
    Conceived and manifolded in him, drew
    To limitless creation, widely sown
    On teaming soil o’er which his breath had blown.
    Magnificently carnal, through and through.
    Each taste of the green earth, the brown, he knew,
    And tasted deep, and joyed, and made his own:
    The boundless steppe, to which the sky bends down,
    The forest where the eternal shadows sleep,
    The sowing and the mowing and the frost;
    The village and the pleasures of the town,
    And birth and death and love, and the starred deep
    Of heaven by night; and here his soul was lost!

                                                      HESEPE, _23rd May_




VI


    Tolstoy is great in art, in thought not great.
    Yet his thought troubles, oft-times shivering through
    With icy barb the best that thought can do.
    And when we ponder o’er his latter state,
    And note its argument, backed by the fate
    That marked his greatness down, we feel here too
    That Something elemental, vast and true
    To which all things at length capitulate.
    And ye who sadly ponder to behold
    The ruin of such greatness, grieved to see
    How the child in him acted, thought and spoke,
    Perchance will wonder, when the tale is told,
    Whether ’twas not a mightier Thing than he
    On which the Titan stumbled when he broke.

                                                      HESEPE, _24th May_




VII


    So Tolstoy passed, and passing left behind
    Not great themes only, but himself a great
    And tragic Theme. Another shares his state,
    Supreme within the kingdom of the mind,
    As he where soul and body meet, combined
    In lovely earth-forms. Dostoievsky, late
    Thou cam’st into thine own, thy bitter fate
    To be an exile; for the world is blind.
    But in thy mantic cavern, undismayed
    Amongst thy spirits, named and known so well,
    Each a familiar, and thyself a shade,
    By whitest light of heaven, by reddest hell,
    Unscorched, unblinded, wrapt yet unafraid,
    And true to thine own Passion, thou dost dwell.

                                                      HESEPE, _26th May_




VIII


    Deep-sounding, subtle, pitiful, profound,
    Dredger of human nature, versed in crime,
    Mated with every grief, who in the slime
    Divinest well where purest pearls abound;
    Where darkness mostly reigneth thou dost found
    A kingdom of the light, O soul sublime,
    Most pure, most Christ-like spirit of thy time;
    And where thy feet have trod is holy ground--
    Holy, yet haunted, and a realm of fright,
    Not to be traversed but with flying feet,
    And beating heart and racing brain alight
    With fire from hell, and heated with hell’s heat,
    Till in the cooler spaces of the night
    The o’erwrought spirit finds a safe retreat.

                                                      HESEPE, _27th May_




IX


    Here is thy limit, mightiest of thine age
    An under- and an over-world to paint,
    Peopled with epileptic and with saint,
    The murderer’s, ogre’s, and the gambler’s rage:
    Too much of fever in thee to assuage
    Our average human restlessness, the taint
    Of a charmed subtlety oft rendering faint
    The sense of man’s salvation in thy page.
    Perchance in thy heroic spirit, fraught
    With too much tragedy, the causes lie;
    That spirit unembittered, overwrought,
    In which a something fitful we descry,
    A fretfulness, as in thine image caught
    By Sonia Kovalevsky’s soulful eye.

                                                      HESEPE, _28th May_




X


    Turgenev, gentlest of the sons of pain,
    Who in a line, as Homer wont, distillest
    The essence of all pathos, thou who fillest
    A human place ’twixt the Cyclopean twain,
    ’Tis not with hell-fire driven o’er the brain,
    Nor stretched titanic canvas that thou thrillest,
    But by the plotted garden-space thou tillest,
    Making man’s middle courses thy domain.
    Here once more we discern how still great art
    Meets nature greatly. Elemental powers
    Pulse in thy perfect pages. Souls depart
    With awe upon them to the silent bowers.
    The world is ever with thee, its great heart
    Laid to thy beating own, as thine to ours.

                                                      HESEPE, _21st May_




XI


    Wordsworth, above all poets in thee I find
    What in the greatest we too seldom see,
    The crowning virtue of tranquillity,
    Effectual o’er the sorrows of the mind.
    Others to gain such peace have left behind
    This hard world for the realm of fantasie,
    Or in a past remote found sanctuary,
    Or in the end thought’s burden have resigned.
    One above all by daily struggle rose
    Into a blue empyrean of the brain,
    Self-mastering might, yet such as never knows
    The deeper calm that masters. There remain
    Nature’s anointed dynasts. Only those
    Whose peace is fundamental truly reign.

                                                      HESEPE, _30th May_




XII


    Of these thou art. And, Wordsworth, it is not
    That thou hast missed man’s feverish heritage.
    Strange passions thou hast known, and noble rage,
    Nor in Romance an anodyne hast sought.
    And if to souls in trouble thou hast brought
    Strength and relief, ’tis not thy sauntering page,
    Nor oft-times common theme that doth assuage
    The anguish of the spirit overwrought.
    Rather it is that, deeply moved, thou sink’st
    Deeply in nature’s homeliness, thy rime
    Plain as her face; but, stooping as thou drink’st,
    The eternal from beyond the hills of Time
    Is on thee ere thou know’st it, and thou link’st
    Thy being with it, suddenly sublime.

                                                      HESEPE, _31st May_




XIII


    Herein is thy celestial wisdom shown,
    That thou, divining Godhead scarce concealed
    In nature’s plain immediacy, dost yield
    To her the soul of poetry and thine own.
    Until thou cam’st no son of time had known
    The measure of the glory now revealed
    In common things, the beauty of the field,
    The moving grace of planet and of stone.
    What bliss it was to feel as at the first,
    But with that insight now supremely thine,
    The trailing clouds upon a world accurst
    In all their fresh and pristine splendour shine;
    While into that familiar face there burst
    The expression of the Countenance divine.

                                                      HESEPE, _31st May_




XIV


    Sweetly at length, like faithful love abused
    By cold neglect, in this domed interval
    Of silent time returns with soft footfall
    The echo of a music long disused.
    Ah me, before such strains I stand accused,
    So early known, and then my all in all,
    And with the magic of the morning’s call
    And ethos of my children interfused--
    A nameless sense of youth that will not die,
    While Homer’s volleying dactyls surging send
    The music of the wind-entangled seas
    Around the world, and as the billows fly,
    Shouldering each other shorewards, metely blend
    His harping with the thunderous centuries.

                                                      HESEPE, _8th June_




XV


    Oft have I risen before the night hath flown,
    To catch the hour of deepest silence sweet,
    And through that hush to list in my retreat
    The solemn voice of Æschylus intone,
    His great Iambic, till the tale hath grown
    Into a passion over me, where meet
    Huge forms archaic, and on stately feet
    Move to swift doom in Æginetan stone.
    High over all in simple grandeur bold,
    With crest on crest against the morning skies,
    Yet in eternal shadow, I behold
    The massif of the _Agamemnon_ rise,
    And through its marble caverns shuddering hear
    The haunting voice of Clytæmnestra’s fear.

                                                      HESEPE, _9th June_




XVI


    --Infatuate queen, who oft as lingering day
    Rounds to his close, and passion’s hour is nigh,
    Through Atreus’ halls on soundless foot doth hie,
    And from the tower the purpling east survey--
    Lest in the still and fearful night’s thick play,
    While by her beating side doth sweltering lie
    Sallow Ægisthus with the hawking eye,
    Swift Fate prepare a swifter stroke than they;
    And while love’s maddening vintage they partake,
    A sudden flame should redden all the land,
    And beacon call to beacon, where they break
    From the lone watchman on the Ægean strand.
    “The ship! the ship! His ship comes tossing o’er
    The wine-dark sea. The King is at the door.”

                                                      HESEPE, _9th June_




XVII


    I paced entranced the mourne, melodious shore
    Where Sophocles unwinds with matchless art
    Life’s tangled error, pondering in my heart
    The tragic theme that middle diction bore--
    The end not hopeless, when, all wanderings o’er,
    By still Colonus in that place apart
    The thunder rolled, and while the earth did start,
    The old man of the sorrows was no more.
    And I have felt the moving of the strings
    Beneath the fingers of that troubled soul,
    Third in the triple dynasty of kings,
    Whose tenderness, beyond his art’s control,
    Over life’s mutilated torso wrings
    Fierce protest, agonizing for the Whole.

                                                     HESEPE, _10th June_




XVIII


    One scene, Euripides, throughout the years
    Clings to the moving skirts of memory,
    Among the images of things that lie
    In beauty perfected, too deep for tears.
    ’Tis where, to still his faithful matron’s fears
    Through lonely days and nights of agony,
    Having fulfilled his roving chivalry,
    At length the Paladin of eld appears,
    Thy Herakles; and wife and children stand
    ’Neath that majestic manhood pure from blame;
    The basket circulates from hand to hand.
    When of a sudden--_He was not the same_.
    There could no more, but with the dripping sword.
    And all that ruth impounded in a word!

                                                     HESEPE, _10th June_




XIX


    While still that music pealed an alien strain
    Broke boisterous into sudden interplay,
    Troubling the soul with laughter and dismay;
    And chattering drolls appeared, expressly plain,
    And tingling to the immemorial vein
    Of the obscene in all things formed of clay.
    There pausing on the turmoiled scene that lay
    Before my eyes, a light broke on my brain,
    And vast Aristophanic laughter shook
    Each nerve within me, and a hand did part
    Some far-back curtain of the soul, and took
    A portion of my years; and I did start,
    Divining art’s new purport, to rebuke
    And humanize the stiffly pure of heart.

                                                     HESEPE, _11th June_




XX


    It were not well with man did he not feel
    At home with his own nature, all we are
    Conspiring with our angel and our star
    To keep our being whole, or, broken, heal,
    Lest in some faulted mould the soul congeal.
    And oft-times ’tis the Highest that doth mar
    The Perfect in us, straining us too far,
    And overreaching Justice. Hence the peal
    Of that great cachinnation echoing woke
    Appreciation of the lofty use
    Of comedy, to shake the settling soul
    Out of itself. The Elemental spoke,
    And something broadened in me. The recluse
    Unstiffened, and I felt my nature whole.

                                                     HESEPE, _11th June_




XXI


    Justice! the very sound brings back the throes
    Of that tremendous season when Youth sees
    His world collapse, and beaten to his knees
    He takes the bolt of doubt, all that he knows,
    That he knows nothing. Underneath the blows
    Of thought I laboured long in labouring seas,
    Pledging my soul to martyred Socrates;
    And o’er night’s face the star of Plato rose.
    This much of truth I still divined, that here
    Was internecine conflict; only doubt
    Strained to the uttermost a path could clear
    To that last Deep where wind and tide give out,
    And freighted Time drops softly out to sea,
    A moving image of Eternity.

                                                     HESEPE, _12th June_




XXII


    Who to the visions of immortal Thought,
    Engendered by the music of the mind--
    First in that place where our poor human kind
    Sit in the cave and watch the shadows wrought
    By firelight on the wall, obscurely caught;
    Then luring on to where the soul, half blind,
    Turns from the Splendour which itself divined--
    With kinglier toil a loftier art hath brought,
    Than Plato? Who more haunted by the light
    Hath ever yet gone coasting with the sun,
    Or in the deep and constellated night,
    Claimed from the spheres their voices as they run?
    Or soaring where the Eternal Glories shine
    Hath stretched to earth a more majestic line?

                                                     HESEPE, _13th June_




XXIII


    As deeply versed in that infinitude
    Where man his doom within himself doth find
    By no strait pedagogy, but divined
    Through some more massive sense of True and Good,
    A kind of Inspiration, the soul’s food,
    Derived from far, and working still behind
    All conscious reason, till the labouring mind
    ’Neath that profounder suasion sinks subdued.
    So Plato’s thought grows cosmic, by its own
    Illumination led and mystified,
    And haunted by a voice of purer tone
    Than reason’s groping motion e’er supplied;
    The beam refracted by the Forms and shown
    As coloured light wherein the soul is dyed.

                                                     HESEPE, _14th June_




XXIV


    Thus do the greatest ever by sheer might
    Of natural penetration find their way
    Into the Innermost, where Being’s ray
    Burns unendurable, and in that light
    Their own with nature’s majesty unite
    To one high rhythm, stupendous interplay
    Of Thought and Being, perioded, gray
    With shadow, with serenest sunshine bright.
    So that old man of Koenigsberg profound,
    By night revolving two infinities,
    And so Spinoza, when his spirit found
    Intellect into Intuition rise,
    Envisaging creation from above,
    Where knowledge takes the perfect form of Love.[1]

                                                     HESEPE, _14th June_

[1] The “Amor Dei intellectualis.”




XXV


    But thy peculiar greatness more than these,
    By thinking pregnant with creative art,
    Subduing chance and moulding part to part,
    Hath Cosmic in it, Plato, harmonies
    That wake the dim immortal memories
    We bring from the Eternal, whence we start
    The round of Being, bearing in our heart
    The echoes of the everlasting seas.
    Here stands no accidental word. And so,
    While theme with theme grows twisted and entwined,
    Is freedom perfected. We gaze, and lo,
    The argument is off before the wind,
    Like some great trireme tacking endlessly,
    Yet ever headed for Eternity.

                                                     HESEPE, _14th June_




WATCHWORDS AND MAXIMS




I


    “Live dangerously.” No braver mandate yet,
    Nietzsche, nor charged with finer lightning ran
    Around the world. And true it is the man
    Who hath no menace in him, nor hath met
    A threatening Universe with counter-threat
    Is caitiff still. In those who lead the van
    The Headlong is the guide to each new plan,
    While lances leap, spears break, the ground is wet.
    One prayer I prayed: “Lord, if Thou hast discerned
    Within me ought of manliness, enroll
    Thy servant with the fighters, who have earned
    Their manhood’s charter where the thunders roll
    Over the field, that so I may have learned
    To taste this Element, and know my soul.”

                                                      HESEPE, _6th June_




II


    There comes to me a memorable thought
    Borne on that voice, which like some wandering gleam
    Brings freshness into Hegel’s well-worn theme
    From Naples lately, Croce, he who taught
    That Art’s true nature is not to be sought
    In what is fitted only to redeem
    By strict initiation souls who dream
    Of beauty in some crafty pattern wrought,
    But in the apt Expression, wheresoe’er
    Expression apt is found, the Inward still
    Externalizing till the soul declare
    The thing within it, and divinely fill
    With sound or sign the habitable air--
    A language universal as man’s will.

                                                     HESEPE, _18th June_




III


    Thus language is the type wherein revealed
    Art’s universal function we behold,
    In sensuous forms appropriate to unfold
    Whate’er of meaning Individuals yield:
    A doctrine this which doth enlarge the field
    To every man who in himself doth hold
    But speech enough a simple thought to mould
    In words well wedded to the sense concealed.
    --Doubtless a truth, though strained beyond the Norm,
    If still the theme, with varying purport fraught,
    Loses itself entirely in the Form,
    And ugliness and beauty count for naught;
    And yet a truth, although a truth in part,
    All art expression, not all expression art.

                                                     HESEPE, _18th June_




IV


    The Import counts. All great art greatly deals
    With themes not insignificant. The less
    Gives lesser art, howe’er the form express
    The sense of that the artist thinks or feels.
    And wonderful it is how life reveals
    The great theme near at hand, did we but press
    Our lives less fiercely, and our souls possess,
    When stirred, until the fitting word congeals.
    Art should not fail among us. All have eyes
    Which bring the star-sown heavens nightly home,
    And there are ever winds about the world.
    And no man but hath felt the mysteries
    Of birth and wedlock and death’s solemn gloam,
    Or seen the petals of a rose uncurled.

                                                     HESEPE, _19th June_




V


    Of Tragedy the essence and the goal
    Is Vindication. Fear and pity close
    The tale with mourning, but the issue shows
    The moral order master of man’s soul.
    And as its slow and solemn waters roll
    Thunderingly through the scenes, a sense there grows
    Of some high Presence working in these throes,
    Whose Being is the topic and the whole.
    Thus not these personal griefs alone comprise
    The theme of Tragedy, that theme more vast
    Than its own content, deeper than the sighs
    Of the doomed Titan hounded home at last--
    The Universe in action, and the cries
    Of Cosmic Vengeance closing with the Past.

                                                      HESEPE, _25th May_




VI


    “Gehorsam.” It is seldom that one hears
    The German tongue commended. Yet I find
    No spell more swift, more potent to unbind
    The spirit’s shades in some fine phrase that clears
    An entrance to the import of the years,
    Where speech, unwinding as thought’s coils unwind,
    Makes landfall, and companioning man’s mind,
    Ends in the Innermost, whereto he steers.
    And many a haunting solitary sound
    In that strange tongue, with doubling content fraught,
    Booms at the ear of conscience, whose profound
    Responses in that energy are caught,
    And Teuton loyalty, that holds its ground,
    Sweeps Europe still, and sets a world at naught.

                                                      HESEPE, _4th July_




VII


    Two other words contrasting well distil
    In two clear drops of sound significant,
    And flavoured to the thought, the crowning want
    That mars our enterprise--the English will,
    Steadfast of purpose, but unsteady still
    In the particular. Strange humours haunt
    The earnestness of battle, and we flaunt
    The eccentric in us even as we kill.
    A nobly erring pride is here, disdain
    Of death--and duty, when that duty chimes
    Not with our liking; and our stubbornness
    Wants sternness in it to perfect the grain.
    Of late to tragic heights the contrast climbs,
    Which “Ernst” and “Eigensinnigkeit” express.

                                                      HESEPE, _5th July_




VIII


    Compel them to be free! A true word there
    Thou minted’st, Rousseau--half the human race
    Still unaspiring to that crowning grace,
    Still disinclined the easy yoke to wear.
    Oh, that at length our people would but dare
    To look their cancer fiercely in the face,
    Consenting on the foul and rotting place
    The short sharp anguish of the knife to bear.
    For there are powers upon us that still sap
    Our liberty and drain our manhood dry,
    Which if we clear not speedily, mayhap
    Our twilight follows and the end is nigh;
    Or else there rise a Strong One who will clap
    The Teuton iron on us, and we die.

                                                      HESEPE, _7th July_




IX


    As when along a level land we pace,
    The scene, from where our forward-moving feet
    Touch ground, to where the earth and heaven greet,
    Seems to revolve in some vast wheel’s embrace,
    Whose spoke-wise turning slow the eye can trace
    From near-by hedges, wayside trees, that fleet
    With rick and steading by, till all lines meet
    And motion dwindles in far distant space--
    There haply some majestic mountain mass
    By contrast travels with us as we go,
    And doth across the spirit, as we pass,
    The feeling of its omnipresence throw--
    So o’er man’s fleeting and particular fate
    For ever omnipresent broods the State.

                                                     HESEPE, _30th June_




X


    Unto man’s spirit thou art closely bound
    By natural drift and consanguinity,
    But more by long companionship, the tie
    That holds you twain together tightly wound
    First in his infancy, where thou art found
    Like some great watchdog that doth panting lie
    Stretched by his infant master, his dull eye
    Wakeful, his sharp ear cocked at every sound.
    Nay, for the bond is closer, ’twas thy face
    Bent over him at birth; thy kindly pains
    Steadied his childish feet. Nor can we trace
    What in his blood derives not from thy veins
    By long transfusion unprecipitate,
    Alive, organically intimate.

                                                     HESEPE, _19th July_




XI


    Suppose a race (the vision first I saw
    Among the dark stern reasonings of Kant)
    Resolved its past for ever to recant,
    And from its island borders to withdraw:
    No man shall move--I heard that doom with awe--
    Until the wretched, last, lorn miscreant
    By shameful death full reparation grant
    To the offended majesty of Law.
    So as man’s coming race prepares to leave
    The Island of its Present, where to-day
    Europe in crime lies sweltering, and to cleave
    A fresh path through the portals of the Day,
    At History’s bar the nations duly lined
    Await their judgment. Some remain behind.

                                                      HESEPE, _7th July_




XII


    One thing upon the tablet of the mind
    By fire should be imprinted. Nations stand
    Only as to the touch of that great Hand
    Their substance answers, which when it outlined
    A cosmos on the waters, and designed
    Earth’s granite frame, and sundered sea and land,
    Laid in man’s heart a Law, more deeply planned
    Than that of nations, compassing his kind.
    And in that Law eternal stands revealed
    How by self-abnegation man at length
    Comes to himself, how to the meek is sealed
    The habitable earth, how human strength
    Is perfected in weakness, into dross
    Earth’s glory sinks confronted with Christ’s cross.

                                                     HESEPE, _25th July_




XIII


    Protector of the spirit, who by night
    With hands bent round it lanthorn-like dost frame
    Against the wind a shelter for its flame,
    Thyself a thing of spirit and a light,
    The Commonwealth! Yet in thy sovereign right
    Thou may’st not unrebuked, unchallenged claim
    To be the First and Last, a holier Name
    Than thine intoning from a higher height.
    For blood is on thy hand and on thy head,
    And war’s black cloud upon thy deep dark brow;
    And in thy shadow Socrates lies dead.
    And though awhile it needs must be that thou
    For man’s unrighteousness shalt legislate,
    Man’s righteousness will yet become thy Fate.

                                                     HESEPE, _17th July_




ENGLAND AND OXFORD




I


    Line after line the tale beneath the pen
    Moves on, and rodent Time with tireless tooth
    Works o’er our portion, till one day forsooth
    We tread the cool gray shadow, ageing men.
    This change I mark, and sadly pondering then
    Catch the soul’s murmur, accented with ruth:
    “Oh, let me hear upon the lips of youth
    ‘Eothen’ and ‘Eothen’ once again!”
    And Oxford, oh, do thou with soulful toil,
    While o’er our folk tumultuous ages throng,
    Mounted at night as o’er some priceless spoil,
    For us the fineness of this cult prolong,
    Still nurturing in our sweet English soil
    That glory from the Morningland of song.

                                                      HESEPE, _8th June_




II


    Yet, Oxford, it is better thou should’st know
    That eyes which love thee in thy culture see
    The withering curse of long sterility.
    Rooted in England, thou hast ceased to grow
    Together with her growth. Thy waters flow
    Not with her broadening current to the sea,
    But murmuring their delicious melody
    They wander forth and wist not where they go.
    And thus thy fine-edged spirit, which in high
    Disdain hath never paltered with the pelf
    Of modern rapine, doth too often fly
    To endless crochets, wayward as an elf,
    Self-humouring and posturing and shy,
    And broods apart and lives unto itself.[2]

                                                      HESEPE, _8th June_

[2] It is hoped that it may not be thought too much of a liberty in an
outsider to criticize anything so esoteric as the Oxford culture; but
if so I should reply that it is just this esoteric quality which I wish
to criticize. Admiration for Oxford and love of England alike compel me
to deplore the fact that so typical a _product_ of our national life
should be so little _representative_.




III


    None than thyself more royally to-day
    Hath given to England in her hour of need.
    In every field where England’s children bleed
    Thine own have there more richly bled than they.
    And Oxford still incarnadines the clay
    To such a sanctity as doth o’erplead
    The voice of censure, silenced by the deed
    Of the great heart that laid them where they lay.
    ’Tis their’s, that murmur fluttering from the marge
    Of thither Acheron, where their cares they ply
    In deathless death: “O Mother mine, enlarge
    Thy life to England’s. Thou hast learned to die.
    But while thy life thou dost so grandly give,
    One thing thou lackest, Oxford: learn to live!”

                                                      HESEPE, _8th June_




IV


    There is one source alone which can supply
    New life and impulse. ’Tis a voice that rolls
    Half inarticulate in English souls,
    From field and mine and factory, where they ply
    The single talent Fate did not deny,
    Their labour. Now they hear upon the shoals
    Of a sad life that there are other goals
    To man’s existence than they yet descry;
    And, scarcely yet discerned, they deeply feel
    A presence over them, a haunting sense
    Of music in the world, whose echoes steal
    Unto them from the spheres, where in the immense
    Circle of night and day the planets keep
    Measure and watch, while mortals toil and weep.

                                                     HESEPE, _15th June_




V


    Thine be it to direct their steps aright
    Unto that bourne which doth not cease to haunt.
    They cry for it, not knowing what they want,
    Or what for man is best--the use of sight;
    Some inkling of the precious power of light,
    To glorify a mean existence gaunt,
    And check the bitter self-inflicted taunt
    That nothing worthy calls them home at night.
    And thou can’st set them questing, make them feel
    The nearness of true knowledge, where it lies
    In common things with which they daily deal,
    Yet ending in the Splendour of the skies;
    Or teach them in shunned volumes to detect
    The simplicity of letters unsuspect.

                                                     HESEPE, _16th June_




VI


    Yet--for the kindly Mother may not quit
    Her cloistered sanctuary, where from the height
    Of scholarship’s remoteness day and night
    She strains truth’s fabric--it is those who sit
    A season at her feet, and learn to fit
    Their spirits to her own, who must requite
    These lofty cares, and carry out the light,
    And serve it round, and tend its burning, lit.
    But thine, O Kindly Mother, first to prove
    Thy ministers, and having chosen, tune,
    Bringing thy spirit o’er them, till they move
    Like one at thy behest--as to the moon,
    Passing soft influence from the quiet skies,
    The oceans with their weight of waters rise.

                                                     HESEPE, _16th June_




VII


    One thing must be thine instant, anxious care,
    Which on thine honour thou dar’st not refuse.
    Long time our people now the habit lose
    Of speech consecutive (which man should wear
    Upon him like a garment, fit and fair)
    And through some faulting of the brain abuse
    Thought’s flowing vesture of a thousand hues,
    Oft shorn to shreds, all fluttering in the air.
    I mark and grieve; for in this lost control
    We trace the weakness of these breathless times,
    When man no longer keeps his nature whole,
    Nor governs his spirit; and it chimes
    With the unruly in us, deadliest threat
    Our English liberty hath fronted yet.

                                                     HESEPE, _17th June_




VIII


    It is not for art’s sake this precious dower
    Of speech must be renewed, but for the sake
    Of life within. The expression doth not break
    Silence in vain, but with reflexive power
    To vitalize its source, and parting shower
    New riches on the donor. Thus we take
    Life’s counterthrust upon our souls, and shake
    The vessel, lest by standing Being sour.
    All life’s a language; but ’tis not enough
    To launch forth with it wildly into space,
    Adding one atom to the blinding drain,
    A pitiable froth-bell in the trough
    Of each new cause, wherein the striving race
    Tries issue with stern time--perchance in vain.

                                                     HESEPE, _20th June_




HOME THOUGHTS ONCE MORE




I


    A week of nights and days once more brings round
    The Sabbath tide; and once again the heart
    Sets yearningly to homewards. Do they part
    At the church door to-day, as when the stound
    Of disillusioned fancy last unbound
    Memory’s deep wound, and in the bitter smart
    The vision vanished? Ah, the shadows start
    To life again across the haunted ground;
    The kindly farewells said, the sauntering walk
    Home through the sun-baked streets, by twos and twos,
    The friendly flow of pleasant secular talk,
    And personalities and trivial news.
    And the long winding prospect of the day,
    The feast of children yet shall wile away.

                                                   HESEPE, _26-27th May_




II


    ’Tis July, and a sunny stillness broods
    On our magnificent England. Misty skies
    Break into blue, and ripening harvests rise
    Over her bosom. Her majestic woods
    Ripple and sway before the varying moods
    Of the west wind. The roses sacrifice
    In every garden to the sun. There lies
    Deep peace o’er all: no sound profane intrudes.
    Far in the north the solemn mountains keep
    A sanctuary amongst the shades that dwell
    In the deep gloom of haunted Highland glens,
    Where silence awes, and where for ever sleep
    In lochs unfathomed and inscrutable
    The shadows of the everlasting Bens.

                                                      HESEPE, _2nd July_




III


    There is another England, that which feeds
    Our sinews where the champing engines chide
    Beneath the settled darkness that doth hide
    Earth’s stricken face from Rotherham to Leeds.
    Deep in that gloom the blinding furnace bleeds
    A molten treasure: England is supplied;
    A million hammers roar along the Clyde;
    The transport of a million men proceeds.
    And all this horror of the work of man,
    Effacing God, I magnify and bless--
    The way that leads out leading also through,
    While God goes round to compass His great plan,
    And out of ashes and of hideousness
    By curse of toil Creation blooms anew.

                                                      HESEPE, _3rd July_




INTERLUDE




I


    My hundredth sonnet! Here I pause to brood
    A little by myself upon the theme
    Ere once again with the meandering stream
    Of my own thoughts I move. And it were good
    To give thanks for the labour that hath stood
    Between my soul and madness, like a gleam
    Of sunlight in the darkness of the dream
    Which passes over me, else scarce withstood.
    Wonderful is it how the heart o’erwrought
    Unloads in song, life’s passionate rebound
    ’Gainst agonies whose barb alone hath brought
    This bird of sorrows fluttering to the ground,
    And with these wild and wandering flowers of thought
    The portion of a prisoner metely crowned.

                                                     HESEPE, _23rd June_




II


    I ponder on the form, and truth to tell,
    ’Twere scarcely to be deemed a sonnet chain
    Which did not in its forged length contain
    Some turn contemplative, where for a spell
    The smith might lay his hammer by, to dwell
    Upon the pattern, lest the octet strain
    The content, or the sextet court in vain
    A bigger thought than it can compass well.
    And oft when to the varying interplay
    Of partnered sounds I strive thought’s flower to train
    Upon this trellis, the perplexing way
    By lucky chance of rime lies sudden plain,
    And I cry out with Agathon: τέχνη
    τύχην ἔστερξε καὶ τύχη τέχνην.

                                                     HESEPE, _23rd June_




III


    Yet the sport wind that doubling oft blows home
    Some welcome unforeseen felicity,
    Is but, within the dreams of poesie,
    Life’s average accident, which all who roam
    The spacious earth, or try the beckoning foam
    Of some unvisited soul-haunting sea,
    May count on as their portion--even as we
    Who chance a star or two in this weird gloam.
    Hence as in all high toil which must be traced
    In long-drawn sequence, linking part to part,
    Not chance nor inspiration can fulfil
    The welded whole, nor vanquish that distaste
    Which ever comes with pause; but sovereign Art
    Herself must bow to man’s more sovereign Will.

                                                     HESEPE, _24th June_




IV


    So forward still, might but my strength avail
    Out of the brooding darkness of my plight,
    Each day to bring one glimmering shaft of light,
    Each night to add some fragment to the tale,
    That so I sleep. Else o’er my dreams prevail
    These sorrows, or within me hour-long smite
    The hammers of the brain, and turn the night
    Into a thing to make man’s reason fail.
    --A little further; for the thoughts still rise
    Over me like a soughing wind, that blows
    From where the surges boom along the graile
    Of the world’s misery under lowering skies,
    --A little further and my task I close,
    Lest twilight overtake me and I stale.

                                                     HESEPE, _25th June_




ENGLAND




I


    England, the strain of weakness in thee shows
    Like to some fell distemper which doth threat
    Thy noble life with blight, and doth beget
    Many malignant sores. The evil flows
    Not from one source, but gradually grows
    With thine own growth of years, wherein are met
    All the deep instincts that did ever fret
    The soul of freedom against freedom’s foes.
    But whatsoe’er the form, the effect is one;
    Some great cause grandly tried and bravely lost,
    Some work of beauty marred upon the loom,
    And at the final reckoning, something done,
    Yet at a bitter and a fearful cost--
    In broken hearts and many a needless tomb.

                                                     HESEPE, _25th June_




II


    I heard it in the strife of other days;
    It reached me in my home across the sea,
    That the great soul that made my England free,
    And now must make her perfect, idly plays
    With the tremendous issue; that they raise
    Sedition’s banner with impunity,
    And legislators, hot with laboured plea,
    Pile law on law, while Law herself decays.
    It is the everlasting cloud that dwells
    Upon the summit, compassed in one word,
    Disruption, whose deep thunder as it swells
    Unnerves us, and arrests the falling sword,
    Even to this hour, when but to differ spells
    Lese-majesty, and loyalty means accord.

                                                     HESEPE, _25th June_




III


    Man lives by love. The state subsists by Law.
    And in these sacred islands east and west,
    Constant of late the Beast its scaly breast
    Half rears from earth, and with its unclean paw
    And bloody fang a-work, and dripping jaw,
    Offers at England. It is time this pest
    Were exorcised, and Unrest laid to rest,
    With all that dares to hold thee not in awe.
    So thou deal’st faithfully with God and man;
    With man, who prays thee, England, but to place
    Thy heavy hand on all that doth immerse
    The god-like in him, and distort his plan;
    With God, who made thee regent for a space
    Over a portion of His Universe.

                                                      HESEPE, _1st July_




IV


    England, I trust thee. What thy soul hath planned
    Will be performed; and towards that last long end
    Thou hast not wavered since thou first did’st send
    Ship hot on ship, by freemen freely manned,
    Over the sea to France’s sacred strand.
    Faithful thou art, and knowest well to blend
    Patience with resolution, and to lend
    To thy heart’s aim thy gauntleted right hand.
    This in the main. And yet the enterprise
    Articulated, mocks the purposed whole
    With fitful effort; and the dread doth loom,
    As each fresh crisis darkens all the skies,
    That the Disruptive in thy restless soul,
    Become habitual, is become thy doom.

                                                     HESEPE, _28th June_




V


    Forget it, England, that this Tempest finds
    Thy life at home with troubles overrun,
    Issues unsettled, justice to be done,
    And dark distrust corrupting all men’s minds.
    Trust England, all her sons. Her millstone grinds
    Slowly perchance; but while in heaven the sun
    Endureth, while their rounds the planets run,
    Her word is bond, and what she binds she binds.
    And England, see thou that these debts are paid!
    Be firmly true to thine own children. Stand
    For justice. Let these arms aside be laid.
    And in our dear inviolable land
    None but thyself go armed--the only blade
    Out of its sheath, that flashing in thy hand.

                                                     HESEPE, _28th June_




VI


    Until the day that England’s sons shall learn
    Not in that instant only when there burst
    Thunders upon her to place England first,
    But steadily, and in her face discern
    The hunger-look of one who still doth yearn
    Over the children whom her breast hath nursed;
    The long look of a mother, and her thirst
    To see her children’s eyes that look return--
    Not till the day when o’er our local strife
    The feeling of our nationality
    Shall rise spontaneous as our English Life,
    Outsoaring every animosity
    By sheer force of its grandeur--shall we see
    The truth come home and our free England free.

                                                     HESEPE, _29th June_




VII


    Have you e’er thought, you people, have you thought
    How great a thing it is in these great days
    But to belong to England? The world stays
    Upon the event. ’Twas English armies caught
    The onfall of the Cyclone. While they fought,
    The world forbore to breathe. Stern Fate delays
    The issue; but that service and its praise
    While England lives will never be forgot.
    There was an honour that the ages kept
    For English arms from immemorial time,
    While yet the chivalry of nations slept
    With mastodon and mammoth in the slime.
    The æons rolled. Fate nodded. England woke.
    The hour boomed forth. ’Twas England took the stroke.

                                                      HESEPE, _1st July_




VIII


    Let every child of England every day,
    While o’er the world these battle-thunders roll,
    Enter into the silence of his soul,
    And there communing with his conscience say:
    “I am a child of England, and I pray
    That with a single eye and one fixed goal,
    Thou grant me, God, to give my being whole
    To England in her hour of agony.
    Chasten me to the greatness of my fate;
    And, self-divided, make me one again,
    That, as to this last rally congregate
    The last stern remnants of my countrymen,
    Thou may’st behold Thy England move as one,
    Swift, final, justified of every son.”

                                                      HESEPE, _2nd July_




IX


    There have been moments haunted by the sound
    Of riot in our midst and foul rapine,
    Which, with more wealth, still makes our lives more mean,
    When I have asked: “If one who strove to ground
    Our life afresh should cast his eyes around
    Amongst the people, one great class to glean
    Out of the whole, that should keep England clean,
    Where should this pure, effectual class be found?”
    No answer came from those who still divide
    The old tradition of a worn-out past.
    I asked the Church: the labouring lost replied;
    For these the Publican. And at the last
    I looked into the honest eyes of youth,
    And knew--the exceeding bitterness of truth.

                                                      HESEPE, _5th July_




X


    My countrymen, if while upon the brink
    Of this Penultimate of Destiny,
    The world with gathered sinews, anxiously
    Craning upon the plunge, awaits the wink
    Of swithering Mars, I could but make you think
    A wildish thought on purpose, it would be
    That England in a night beneath the sea
    Should like some greater Krakatoa sink.
    Then while to water and oblivion
    The great ship heels majestically down,
    Ask ye what world it were in which the dawn
    Sparkled no more on Ocean’s jewelled crown,
    But in that place where England used to be
    Spouted and plashed the insufferable sea.

                                                      HESEPE, _9th July_




XI


    Can it be thought, or can the thought be borne,
    That for a single hour beneath the sun
    Earth shall endure, when England’s day is done?
    A world without an England! Yea, but shorn
    Of the divinest gem her breast hath worn,
    What most she makes for--doomed thenceforth to run
    Blind, lost, and calling for that treasured One,
    Through star-sown space, unfathomably mourne!
    Never again the liquid air to breathe
    On a May morn among the Mendip Hills;
    Never to watch the green Atlantic seethe
    Around the Lizard, while the Severn fills;
    Never to hear the quivering strings that hung
    The speech of Chatham on the English tongue!

                                                     HESEPE, _10th July_




XII


    ’Tis not these Islands sundered from the Deep
    By many a winding and melodious strand,
    Lovely as when they issued from the Hand
    That bade the Shannon from his cradle leap;
    That smoothed the Cotswolds to the wandering sheep,
    And spread the waters o’er the Solway sand,
    And motioned where Ben Cruachan should stand,
    And in his shadow laid Loch Awe to sleep;
    ’Tis not these shimmering woods of oak and beech,
    Nor these green shires, each in its golden frame,
    Like pictures hanging side by side, and each
    Entangled with the music of its name--
    Not all this weight of glory passing speech
    Full measure of the English soul can claim.

                                                     HESEPE, _11th July_




XIII


    England is England’s history, that great dome
    Which ever us and our immortal dead
    Draws shadow, while men’s common lives are led,
    Strange thought! in that superb half-light, half-gloam.
    And all who dwell in England, all who roam
    The seas on great emprise inherited,
    Gazing into that fulness overhead,
    Behold a sanctuary and a home.
    England’s a spirit that doth interfuse
    Whate’er is of her, every form wherein
    Herself she reincarnates, all that strews
    Her bosom and her years, and works within,
    And spreads, and wells, and sinks, and overflows;
    And how to know her only Spirit knows.

                                                     HESEPE, _12th July_




XIV


    And in that spirit interpenetrate
    The numberless appealing strains that bring
    The look of England into everything
    That she hath looked on till the night grew late;
    Where, as amongst the four gray seas she sate,
    And mused upon it, she hath felt the ring
    That bound her to her narrow island spring,
    And something passed, and passing made her great.
    And Empire mustered round her. Ere she knew
    Her state, her hour was on her once again.
    Herseemed that something winged from her flew.
    Herseemed as though the feet of marching men
    Bore past her to a music never mute
    While England proudly takes that proud salute.

                                                     HESEPE, _12th July_




XV


    It is her destiny. She seems to sleep.
    She dreams; and nodding, world on world is born.
    For her the splendour of an eastern morn
    The Coromandel sands profusely steep;
    The rocks of Aden sentinel the deep.
    Her paths are round the Cape and round the Horn.
    And where the sun goes down in seas of corn
    Across the West their way her children reap.
    Thus ere she hath outdreamt herself, the wheels
    Of her achievement on their axle-trees
    Have turned without her; and upon her steals
    A sense of waking amidst unknown seas;
    And wondering at her motherhood, she feels
    The greatness of the Thing upon her knees.

                                                     HESEPE, _13th July_




XVI


    Soul of an empire that hath far outrun
    Thy purpose, England! thou who in the shade
    Of thy maturing years thyself had’st laid
    To rest amongst thy flocks--and lo! the sun
    Set never more upon thee! One by one
    The nations place them at those feet which strayed
    Into the Innermost, where worlds are made,
    And bless the Mother saw their race begun.
    England, it must be that thou hast been sent
    Some quest beyond thy vision to fulfil;
    That, Mother of the Mighty, thou art meant
    To be the Organ of a Mightier still;
    And, while the final End we may not see,
    We feel ’tis holier than or they or thee.

                                                     HESEPE, _14th July_




XVII


    My country! To the height of this great thought,
    With all that in thee is, with all the weight
    Of thy self-consciousness, though born full late,
    Upon thee, and thy thronging memories fraught
    With germinating dreams, still to be brought
    Unto fruition--chastened, consecrate
    To the high calling of the Perfect State,
    Thou must arise, or, failing, come to naught.
    The Organ of the Highest! pre-ordained
    To execute the fateful judgment, planned
    From the Beginning by the Power that deigned
    First to create in air and sea and land
    Each thing that breathes and seeks its daily food,
    And having formed, pronounced Creation good.

                                                     HESEPE, _15th July_




XVIII


    Not to prevail by measure of thy might
    O’er might that measures scarcely less than thine,
    Bathing the naked world in blood and brine,
    Till nature turns and sickens at the sight
    --All but her vultures, gloating o’er the fight;
    And the sun rages daily down the line
    That doth compel his radiancy divine
    So fair a world to such a doom to light--
    Nay, be thy function rather to disperse
    The shouldering elements, that so the core
    Of pure light in this glimmering universe
    May by its motion kindling more and more
    The look and loveliness of Spirit bring
    Into the face of every living thing.

                                                     HESEPE, _16th July_




XIX


    The Hittite is no longer. Babylon
    Has gone into the silence of the sand.
    Mirage-like in the Syrian desert stand
    The pillars of Palmyra. Greece is gone.
    And where for generations softly shone
    The drowsy Pax Romana, sea and land
    Mouth at the fragile landmarks Hadrian planned.
    The State departs for ever: Man lives on.
    And England, would’st thou live, it can but be
    As thou, a spirit, in the restlessness
    Of thine abundant strength on land and sea
    Becom’st the spirit’s vehicle and dress,
    Attaining in the measure of thy span
    The spirit’s measure in the Perfect Man.

                                                     HESEPE, _21st July_




XX


    Man, little man, whose sun hath not declined,
    Pale man with spirit written on his face,
    Punched out of clay, and pitched on some mean place,
    A breath of being battling with the wind,
    A prisoner on Time’s floating isle confined,
    Yet in himself encompassing all space,
    While with the regal gesture of his race
    He sweeps Eternity into his mind!
    The Spirit! The Encompasser! O thou,
    England my country, could I but behold
    The steadiness of spirit on thy brow,
    Could’st thou _encompass_ spirit, I should hold
    Thee master of the Future as the Past,
    The immortal, perfect nation--and the last.

                                                     HESEPE, _21st July_




XXI


    Thou hast vast life in thee, howe’er uncouth,
    And, unenlightened, dost possess the art
    To feel the fairway home without the chart,
    And erring still, inclinest still to truth.
    The sense of justice and the sense of ruth
    Are not yet dead within thee, and thy part
    It is to be magnanimous. Thy heart
    Bounds to the fulness of perpetual youth.
    And while the shadows deepen into gloam,
    And while the long years whiten on thy head,
    Thy freshness fails not. Thou bring’st nightly home
    The sense that thou hast earned a dreamless bed.
    The solemn Abbey, and the whispering Dome
    Open to-day to take thy Immortal Dead.

                                                     HESEPE, _22nd July_




XXII


    --Our own Immortals! Ours while we can keep
    An isle of quiet for you ’neath the hoar
    Shade of the Minster, where the Nation bore
    Your mortal relics weeping. Rest you deep!
    Rest! And while children’s children softly weep
    Over you, and the great rose windows pour
    A glory round, at peace for evermore
    In marble and in alabaster sleep!
    --Knowing your England! Knowing that while Time
    Tries men by fire, these men will not recede
    From where their fathers of the early prime
    Led them by generations great in deed
    To deeds still greater, where on fields sublime
    The freeborn sons of England bled--and bleed!

                                                     HESEPE, _25th July_




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


Influences, XX: spelling error in “cachinnation” corrected.

England, XIV: stray period removed.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77636 ***