Xvi

SPACE and dread and the dark— Over a livid stretch of sky Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train Of huge, primeval presences Stooping beneath the weight Of some enormous, rudimentary grief; While in the haunting loneliness The far sea waits and wanders with a sound As of the trailing skirts of Destiny, Passing unseen To some immitigable end With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this Thrilling the wilderness to life As with the bodily shape of Fear? What but a desperate sense, A strong foreboding of those dim Interminable continents, forlorn And many-silenced, in a dusk Inviolable utterly, and dead As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life—life—let there be life! Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind, Like the Arch-Murderer in flight From the Avenger at his heel, Storm through the desolate fastnesses And wild waste places of the world!

Life—give me life until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle-spirit shouting in my blood, Out of the reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The immortal, incommunicable dream.

XVII CARMEN PATIBULARE To H. S.

TREE, Old Tree of the Triple Crook And the rope of the Black Election, ’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule Can never achieve perfection: So ‘It’s O, for the time of the new Sublime And the better than human way, When the Rat (poor beast) shall come to his own And the Wolf shall have his day!’

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam And the power of provocation, You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit Till your fruit is mere stupration: And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise, And how can we choose but fall, So long as the Hangman makes us dread, And the Noose floats free for all?’

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign And the trick there’s no recalling, They will haggle and hew till they hack you through And at last they lay you sprawling: When ‘Hey! for the hour of the race in flower And the long good-bye to sin!’ And for the lack the fires of Hell gone out Of the fuel to keep them in!’

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough And the ghastly Dreams that tend you, Your growth began with the life of Man, And only his death can end you. They may tug in line at your hempen twine, They may flourish with axe and saw; But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs In the living rock of Law.

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork, When the spent sun reels and blunders Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit As it seethes in spate and thunders, Stern on the glare of the tortured air Your lines august shall gloom, And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed In the ruining roar of Doom.

XVIII I. M. MARGARET EMMA HENLEY (1888–1894)

WHEN you wake in your crib, You, an inch of experience— Vaulted about With the wonder of darkness; Wailing and striving To reach from your feebleness Something you feel Will be good to and cherish you, Something you know And can rest upon blindly: O, then a hand (Your mother’s, your mother’s!) By the fall of its fingers All knowledge, all power to you, Out of the dreary, Discouraging strangenesses Comes to and masters you, Takes you, and lovingly Woos you and soothes you Back, as you cling to it, Back to some comforting Corner of sleep.

So you wake in your bed, Having lived, having loved; But the shadows are there, And the world and its kingdoms Incredibly faded; And you group through the Terror Above you and under For the light, for the warmth, The assurance of life; But the blasts are ice-born, And your heart is nigh burst With the weight of the gloom And the stress of your strangled And desperate endeavour: Sudden a hand— Mother, O Mother!— God at His best to you, Out of the roaring, Impossible silences, Falls on and urges you, Mightily, tenderly, Forth, as you clutch at it, Forth to the infinite Peace of the Grave.

October 1891

XIX I. M. R. L. S. (1850–1894)

O, TIME and Change, they range and range From sunshine round to thunder!— They glance and go as the great winds blow, And the best of our dreams drive under: For Time and Change estrange, estrange— And, now they have looked and seen us, O, we that were dear, we are all-too near With the thick of the world between us.

O, Death and Time, they chime and chime Like bells at sunset falling!— They end the song, they right the wrong, They set the old echoes calling: For Death and Time bring on the prime Of God’s own chosen weather, And we lie in the peace of the Great Release As once in the grass together.

February 1891