Alfred Noyes

“ Were gathered there together in the fairy forest bowers{167}
With all their globed and radiant wings to make a star for Peterkin,
The star that shone upon the East, a star that still is ours,
Whene’er we hang our stockings up, a star of wings for Peterkin.
Then all, in one great flash, was gone—
A voice cried, “Hush, all’s well!”
And we stood dreaming there alone,
In darkness. Who can tell
The mystic quiet that we felt,
As if the woods in worship knelt,
Far off we heard a bell
Tolling strange human folk to prayer
Through fields of sunset-coloured air. ”

“ For Peterkin, oh Peterkin,
The cry was in our ears,
A fairy clamour, clear and thin
From lands beyond the years;
A wistful note, a dying fall
As of the fairy bugle-call
Some dreamful changeling hears,
And pines within his mortal home
Once more through fairy-land to roam.
We left behind the pleasant row
Of cottage window-panes,
The village inn’s red-curtained glow,
The lovers in the lanes;
And stout of heart and strong of will{85}
We climbed the purple perfumed hill,
And hummed the sweet refrains
Of fairy tunes the tall thin man
Taught us of old in Old Japan. ”

“ Songs that are dearer than all our words
With a love that is clear as the dawn.
What should a dreamer devise,
In the depths of his wayward will,
To deepen the gleam of your eyes
Who can dance with the Sun-child still?
Yet you glanced on his lonely way,{173}
You cheered him in dream and deed,
And his heart is o’erflowing, o’erflowing to-day
With a love that—you never will need.
What can a pilgrim teach
To dwellers in fairy-land?
Truth that excels all speech
You murmur and understand!
All he can sing you he brings ”

“ And taken him away again, our merry little Peterkin;
He’ll be frightened all alone; we’ll find him if we can;
Come and look for Peterkin, poor little Peterkin.{70}
No one would believe us if we told them what we know,
Or they wouldn’t grieve for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin;
If they’d only watched us roaming through the streets of Miyako,
And travelling in a palanquin where parents never go,
And seen the golden gardens where we wandered once with Peterkin,
And smelt the purple orchards where the cherry-blossoms blow,
They wouldn’t mourn for Peterkin, merry little Peterkin. ”

“ Said Peterkin was fast asleep
Beneath a cold and ugly heap
Of earth and stones and grass.
It was a splendid place for play,
That churchyard, on a summer’s day;
A splendid place for hide-and-seek
Between the grey old stones;
Where even grown-ups used to speak
In awestruck whispering tones;{86}
And here and there the grass ran wild
In jungles for the creeping child,
And there were elfin zones
Of twisted flowers and words in rhyme
And great sweet cushions of wild thyme. ”

“ And your home in Fairy-land.{153}
Dickory Dock, I’m as good as a clock, d’you hear my swivels chime?
To and fro as I come and go, I keep eternal time.
O, little Bo-peep, if you’ve lost your sheep and don’t know where to find ’em,
Leave ’em alone and they’ll come home, and carry their tails behind ’em.
And See-Saw; Margery Daw; there came the chorussing shout,
As the swing-boats answered the roaring tune of the rollicking roundabout;
Dickory, dickory, dickory, dock, d’you hear my swivels chime?
Swing; swing; you’re as good as a king if you keep eternal time. ”

“ Hang it by the wooden sword we made for little Peterkin!{71}
He was once our trumpeter, now his bugle’s dumb,
Pile your arms beneath it, for the owlet light is come,
We’ll wander through the roses where we marched of old with Peterkin,
We’ll search the summer sunset where the Hybla beehives hum,
And—if we meet a fairy there—we’ll ask for news of Peterkin.
He was once our cabin-boy and cooked the sweets for tea;
And O, we’ve sailed around the world with laughing little Peterkin ”

“ And lo, the glistening fairy-host stood there arrayed for fight,
In arms of rose and green and gold, to lead us on to Peterkin.
And all around us, rippling like a pearl and opal sea,
The host of fairy faces winked a kindly hint of Peterkin;
And all around the rosy glade a laugh of fairy glee
Watched spider-streamers floating up from fragrant tree to tree{126}
Till the moonlight caught the gossamers and, oh we wished for Peterkin!
Each rope became a rainbow; but it made us ache to see
Such a fairy forest-pomp without explaining it to Peterkin. ”

“ As the great grey-bearded ogre stood beside his open door;
But an echo seemed to answer from a land beyond the sky—
Won’t you walk into my parlour? said the spider to the fly!
Then we looked a little closer at the ogre as he stood
With his great red eyeballs glowing like two torches in a wood,{109}
And his mighty speckled belly and his dreadful clutching claws,
And his nose—a horny parrot’s beak, his whiskers and his jaws;
Yet he seemed so sympathetic, and we saw two tears descend,
As he murmured, “I’m so ugly, but I’ve lost my dearest friend! ”

“ A child was born in Bethlehem; ah, hear my fairy fable;
For I have seen the King of Kings, no longer thronged with angel wings,
But croodling like a little babe, and cradled in a stable.
The wise men came to greet him with their gifts of myrrh and frankincense,—{157}
Gold and myrrh and frankincense they brought to make him mirth;
And would you know the way to win to little brother Peterkin,
My childhood’s heart shall guide you through the glories of the earth.
A child was born in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem, in Bethlehem;
The wise men came to welcome him: a star stood o’er the gable ”

“ As he took our hands and kissed them, saying, Father loves your Peterkin!{128}
So out they sprang, on either side,
A light fantastic fairy guide,
To lead us to the land unknown
Where little Peterkin was gone;
And, as we went with timid pace,
We saw that every fairy face
In all that moonlit host was wet
With tears: we never shall forget
The mystic hush that seemed to fade
Away like sound, as down the glade
We passed beyond their zone of light.
Then through the forest’s purple night
We trotted, at a pleasant speed,
With gay Pease-blossom and Mustard-seed. ”

“ Which wise men find in every place—
The Temple of the Smallest Flower.
And there—alas—our fairy friends
Whispered, “Here our kingdom ends:
You must enter in alone,
But your souls will surely show
Whither Peterkin is gone
And the road that you must go:
We, poor fairies, have no souls! ”

“ Like an echo in a cave
Where young mermen sound their shells,
Like the wind across a grave
Bright with scent of lily-bells.
Like a fairy hunter’s horn
Sounding in some purple glen
Sweet revelly to the morn
And the fairy quest again:
Then, all round it surged a song
We could never understand
Though it lingered with us long,
And it seemed so sad and grand.
Song
Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn,
Summon the day of deliverance in:
We are weary of bearing the burden of scorn{104}
As we yearn for the home that we never shall win ”

“ On a springing spray;
Or when the witch that lives in gloomy caves
And creeps by night among the graves
Calls a cloud across the day;
Cease we never our fairy song,
March we ever, along, along,
Down the dale, or up the hill,
Singing, singing still.
And suddenly the Hermit turned and ran with all his might
Through the back-door of his parlour as we thought of little Peterkin;{125}
And the great grey roof was shattered by a shower of rosy light,
And the spider-house went floating, torn and tattered through the night
In a flight of prismy streamers, as a shout went up for Peterkin ”

“ The first, white, fairy gates;
And, oh, how shocked they are to find
That truths are false when left behind!
Do you remember all the tales
That Tusitala told,
When first we plunged thro’ purple vales
In quest of buried gold?
Do you remember how he said
That if we fell and hurt our head
Our hearts must still be bold,
And we must never mind the pain
But rise up and go on again?
Do you remember? yes ”

“ I hope, therefore, that I may be pardoned, in these hurried days, for pointing out that the two poems are not to be{xiii} taken merely as fairy-tales, but as an attempt to follow the careless and happy feet of childhood back into the kingdom of those dreams which, as we said above, are the sole reality worth living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic jests—if any care to call them so—for which mankind has endured so many triumphant martyrdoms that even amidst the rush and roar of modern materialism they cannot be quite forgotten. ”

“ Oh, grown-ups cannot understand
And grown-ups never will,
How short’s the way to fairy-land
Across the purple hill:
They smile: their smile is very bland,
Their eyes are wise and chill; ”

“ All the fairy tales were true,
And home the heart of fairyland.
EPILOGUE
>Carol, every violet has
Heaven for a looking-glass!
Every little valley lies
Under many-clouded skies;
Every little cottage stands
Girt about with boundless lands ”

“ The convict on the treadmill and the infant with a sum,
For it teaches you to try again until your kingdom’s come!
The monarch dawdled in that hole for centuries of time
Until my own twin-brother rose and showed him how to climb:
He showed him how to swing and sway upon a tiny thread{114}
Across a mighty precipice, and light upon his head
Without a single fracture and without a single pain
If he only did it frequently and tried and tried again:”
And once again the whisper like a moral wandered by,
Perseverance is a virtue, said the spider to the fly. ”

“ It is a perilous adventure—the writing of a preface, however brief, to one’s own poems. For one may be tempted to re-state matters that could find their full elucidation only in the verses themselves. Tennyson once remarked that poetry is like shot silk, glancing with many colours; and any attempt to define its meanings is as great a mistake as the attempt of nineteenth-century materialism to enclose the infinite universe in its logical nut-shells. ”

“ So polite as Pease-blossom, but then who could be
Quite such a debonair fairy as he?
We never could tell you one-half that we heard
And saw on that journey. For instance, a bird
Ten times as big as an elephant stood
By the side of a nest like a great thick wood:
The clouds in glimmering wreaths were spread{131}
Behind its vast and shadowy head
Which rolled at us trembling below. (Its eyes
Were like great black moons in those pearl-pale skies.) ”

“ If the feet of childhood are set dancing in them, it was because as children we are best able to enter into that Kingdom of Dreams which is also the only true, the only real, Kingdom. The first tale, for instance, must not be taken to have any real relation to Japan. It belongs—as the Spectator put it—to the kind of dreamland which an imaginative child might construct out of the oddities of a willow-pattern plate, and it differs chiefly from Wonderlands of the Lewis Carrol type in a certain seriousness behind its fantasy. ”

“ I tell you most lymphatic’ly, I’ve yearnings in my soul,”—
And right along his parrot’s beak we saw the tear-drops roll;
He’s an arrant sentimentalist, we heard a distant sigh,
Won’t you weep upon my bosom? said the spider to the fly.
“If you’d dreamed my dreams of beauty, if you’d seen my works of art,{110}
If you’d felt the cruel hunger that is gnawing at my heart,
And the grief that never leaves me and the love I can’t forget,
(For I loved with all the letters in the Chinese alphabet!)
Oh, you’d all come in to comfort me: you ought to help the weak ”

“ While dear Pease-blossom before him swam
On a billow of lovely moonlit song,{132}
Telling us why they had left their home
In Sherwood, and had hither come
To dwell in this magical scented clime,
This dim old Forest of sweet Wild Thyme.
“Men toil,” he said, “from morn till night
With bleeding hands and blinded sight
For gold, more gold! They have betrayed
The trust that in their souls was laid;
Their fairy birthright they have sold
For little disks of mortal gold ”

“ The tales are ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’; but—as a kinder critic has remarked—‘we ourselves are made of that stuff.’ It is perhaps because these poems are almost light enough for a nonsense-book that I feel there is something in them more elemental, more essential, more worthy of serious consideration, than the most ponderous philosophical poem I could write. They are based on the fundamental and very simple mystery of the universe—that anything, even a grain of sand, should exist at all. ”

“ Set clear of all irrelevancies, that is the simple problem that has been puzzling all the ages; and it is well sometimes to forget our accumulated ‘knowledge’ and return to it in all its childish naïveté. It is well to face that inconceivable miracle, that fundamental impossibility which happens to have been possible, that contradiction in terms, that fundamental paradox, for which we have at best only a cruciform symbol, with its arms pointing in opposite{xii} directions and postulating, at once, an infinite God. ”

“ Critics, you have been so kind,
I would not have you think me blind
To all the wisdom that you preach;
Yet before I strictlier run
In straiter lines of chiselled speech,
Give me one more hour, just one
Hour to hunt the fairy gleam
That flutters through this childish dream. ”

“ Rose o’er us; then a voice we knew
Softly and gently spoke—
“See, they are sleeping by the side
Of that dear little one—who died.”
{169} PART V
THE HAPPY ENDING
We told dear father all our tale
That night before we went to bed,
And at the end his face grew pale,
And he bent over us and said
(Was it not strange?) he, too, was there,
A weary, weary watch to keep
Before the gates of the City of Sleep;
But, ere we came, he did not dare
Even to dream of entering in,
Or even to hope for Peterkin.
He was the poor blind man, he said,
And we—how low he bent his head! ”