Alfred Noyes

“ There, as his lengthening shadow had drawn my gaze,
He seemed himself a shadow of vaster things,
A still dark portent of those moving worlds
Whose huge events, unseen and far away,
Had led him thither; and, as he once had shaped
Their course, now shaped his destiny and doom.
He had ranged all art, all science. He had shaped
Kingdoms and kings, by virtue of his part
In the one all-shaping Mind. Had he not lived,
The world that never knows its noblest powers
Had moved, with half mankind, another way. ”

“ The life that all earth’s great ones would despise—
All these, perhaps, were needed, as the hand
That led you, first, in childhood to the hills.
You’ll see strange links, threads of effect and cause,
In complicated patterns, growing clear [133]
And binding all these memories, each to each,
And all in one; how one thing led to another,
My simples to your love of plants and flowers,
And this to your new interest in the haunts
That please them best—the kinds of earth, the rocks,
And minerals that determine where they grow,
Foster them, or reject them. ”

“ And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing
At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin
Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds
They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey.
He saw how, in their war against the world,
Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed
The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing
With its four petals among so many flowers,
Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds
With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts
Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk,
Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf ”

“ Turning through darkness to create the world.
He saw the creatures of a thousand æons
Rise, in six days, out of the mire and clay,
Pawing for freedom. With the great blind power
Of his own song, he riveted one more clasp,
Though wrought of fabulous gold, on that dark Book,
Not to be loosed for centuries.
Nearer yet,
Goethe, the torch of science in his own hand,
Poet and seeker, pressed into the dark,
Caught one mysterious gleam from flower and leaf, [17]
And one from man’s own frame, of that which binds
All forms of life together. ”

“ And, from among the Muses in the dark,
A woman’s voice, a voice in ecstasy,
As if a wound should bless the sword that made it,
Breathed through the night the music of their law:
Close not thine eyes in sleep
Till thou hast searched thy memories of the day,
Graved in thy heart the vow thou didst not keep,
And called each wandering thought back to the way.
Pray to the gods! Their aid,
Their aid alone can crown thy work aright;
Teach thee that song whereof all worlds were made;
Rend the last veil, and feed thine eyes with light. [48]
Naught shall deceive thee, then. ”

“ A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords,
Resolved them into an infinite harmony.
Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh
Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind,
And leapt to victory in self-conquering love?
What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot
In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh;
In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs
Who daily die ”

“ Our happiness till we lose it? You’ll remember
Those Georgics—the great praise of Science, Jean!
And that immortal picture of the bees!
No doubt you have chosen rightly. For myself,
I know, at least, where healing dittany grows,
And where earth’s beauty hides in its dark heart
An anodyne, at last, for all our pain. [132]
And one thing more I have learned, and see with awe
On every side, more clearly, that on earth
There’s not one stone, one leaf, one creeping thing,
No; nor one act or thought, but plays its part
In the universal drama. ”

“ They change their borders. Where the seas are now
Mountains will rise; and, where the land was, once,
The dark Atlantic ends the world for man.
But all these changes are not wrought by chance.
They follow a great order. It may be [35]
That all things are repeated and reborn;
And, in their mighty periods, men return
And pass through their forgotten lives anew.
It may be; for, at times, the mind recalls—
Or half recalls—the turning of a road,
A statue on a hill, a passing face....
It may be; for our universe is bound
In rhythm; and the setting star will rise. ”

“ It had crept on a little; and strangely there [147]
New beauty, like the smile on truth’s hard face,
Gleamed on them. Never did bracken and hart’s tongue ferns
Whisper a tale like those whose dauntless roots
Were creviced in that grim rock. They tracked it up
Through heather and thyme. They saw what human eyes
Had seen for ages, yet had never seen,—
The tall green hill, a great truncated cone,
Robed in wild summer and haunted by the bee,
But shaped like grey engravings that they knew
Of Etna and Vesuvius. ”

“ In their pain
—Pain pitiable, a torment of the mind—
A bitter memory burned, of how he sued
To join that golden brotherhood in vain.
For when the Master saw him, he discerned
A spirit in darkness, violent, empty of thought,
But full of shallow vanity, cunning lies,
Intense ambition.
All now was turned to hate;
Hate the destroyer of men, the wrecker of cities,
The last disease of nations; hate, the fire [39]
That eats away the heart; hate, the lean rat
That gnaws the brain, till even reason glares
Like madness through blind eyes ”

“ The lie may steal an hour.
The truth has living roots, and they strike deep.
A moment’s glory kills the rootless flower,
While the true stem is gathering strength in sleep. [60]
Out of this earth, this dust,
Out of this flesh, this blood, this living tomb;
Out of these cosmic throes of wrath, and lust,
Breaks the lost splendour from the world’s blind womb.
Courage, O conquering soul!
For all the boundless night that whelms thee now,
Though suns and stars into oblivion roll,
The gods abide, and of their race art thou. II. THE EXILE
Time dwindled to a shadow. ”

“ With Shadow-of-a-Leaf, and seen that lifeless brine,
Rocks where no mollusc clung, nor seaweed grew;
Could he have heard a whisper,—Only wait.
Be patient. On one sure and certain day,
Out of the natural changes of these rocks
And seas, at last, a great ship will go by;
Cities will dusk that heaven; and you shall see [272]
Two lovers pass, reading one printed book,
The Paradiso....
Would he have been so sure
That Nature had no miracles in her heart
More inconceivably shattering to the mind
Than madness ever dreamed? ”

“ Unchangeable for ever, till, all at once,
It plunges into a soft resisting sea
Of planet-girdling air, and burns with heat,
And bursts into a blaze, while far below,
Two lovers, in a world beyond its ken,
Look from a little window into the night
And see a falling star.
By such wild light,
An image of his own ambiguous “chance,”
Which was not “chance,” but governed by a law
Unknown, too vast for men to comprehend
(Too vast for any to comprehend but One,
Breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, who in each part discerns
Its harmony with the whole) , at last the clue
Flashed on him.... ”

“ The long dark shadows of ash and pine began
To shrink, as though the rising of the sun
Menaced, not only shadows, but the world.
A frightened bird flew, crying, and scattering dew
Blindly away; though, on this dawn of dawns,
Nothing had changed. The Golden Brotherhood stole
Up through the drifts of wet rose-laurel bloom
As on so many a dawn for many a year,
To make their morning vows.
They thronged the porch, [31]
The lean athletes of truth, trained body and mind,
For their immortal trial. ”

“ White, violet, saffron, like another dawn.
...
Before them, through the temple’s fragrant gloom,
The Muses, in their dim half-circle, towered;
And, in the midst, over the smouldering myrrh,
The form of Hestia.
In her mighty shadow,
Pythagoras, with a scroll in his right hand,
Arose and spoke.
“Our work is well-nigh done.
Our enemies are closing round us now.
I have given the sacred scrolls into the hands
Of Lysis; and, though all else be destroyed,
If but a Golden Verse or two live on
In other lands, and kindle other souls
To seek the law, our work is not in vain. ”

“ And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown,
Moved in unerring order, and by a law [319]
That bound all heights and depths of the universe,
In an unbroken unity. By what Power?
There was one Power, one only known to man,
That could determine action. Herschel knew it;
The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand
And lets it fall, the living personal Will. ”

“ Which out of her teeming womb at last brought forth
Creatures that loved and sinned, laughed, wept and prayed,
Died, and returned to the unknown Power that made them; [19]
Earth, and that tale of men, the kings of thought,
Who strove to read her secret in the rocks,
And turned, amid wild calumny and wrong,
The lucid sword-like search-beams of the mind
On the dark passion that through uncounted æons
Crept, fought, and climbed to the celestial gates,
Three gates in one, one heavenly gate in three,
Whose golden names are Beauty, Goodness, Truth. ”

“ Who haunts the mind of man with dark refrains;
Or those deep poets who foretell in verse
The restoration of the world’s great Year.
Time never fails. Not Tanais, or the Nile
Can flow for ever. They spring up and perish;
But, after many changes, it may be
These, too, return, with Egypt and her kings.”
He paused a moment; then compassion, grief,
Wonder and triumph, like one music, spoke
Farewell to shadows, from his own deep soul
Rapt, in pure vision, above the vanishing world: [36]
“The torrents drag the rocks into the sea.
The great sea smiles, and overflows the land. ”

“ Giulio.
All genius is capricious. You’ll admit
That men who lived like beasts have painted well.
The Stranger.
Yes; but not greatly, except when their own souls
Have gripped the beast within them by the throat,
And risen again to reassert the law.
Giulio.
Art lives by its technique, a fact the herd [107]
Will never understand. A noble soul
Is useless, if it cannot wield a brush.
The Stranger.
May not technique include control and judgment?
Alone, they are not enough; but, for the heights,
More is required, not less. I’d even add
Some factors you despise.
Giulio. ”

“ The ethereal realm of wonder; and still lures
The spirit of man on more adventurous quests
Into the wildest mystery of all,
The miracle of reality, which he shares.
But O, what art could guide me through that maze? [15]
What kingly shade unlock the music sealed
In that dread volume?
Sons of an earlier age,
Poet and painter stretched no guiding hand.
Even the gaunt spirit, whom the Mantuan led
Through the dark chasms and fiery clefts of pain,
Could set a bound to his own realms of night,
Enwall then round, build his own stairs to heaven,
And slept now, prisoned, in his own coiling towers.... ”

“ Is pent in one smooth acorn. So each life,
In little, retold the tale; each separate man
Was, in himself, the world’s epitome,
A microcosm, wherein who runs may read
The history of the whole; from the first seed
Enclosed in the blind womb, until life wake
Through moons or æons of embryonic change
To human thought and love, and those desires
Which still grope upward, into the unknown realms
As far beyond us now as Europe lay
From the first life that crawled out of the sea.
There lies our hope; but O, the endless way! ”

“ Like Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that not a cloud can sail
Across a summer sky, but plays its part.
There’s not a shadow drifting on the hills,
Or stain of colour where the sun goes down,
Or least bright flake upon the hawk-moth’s wing
But that great drama needs them.
The wild thrush,
The falling petal, the bubble upon the brook,
Each has its cue, to sing, to fall, to shine,
And exquisitely responds. The drunken bee
Blundering and stumbling through a world of flowers [180]
Has his own tingling entrances, unknown
To man or to himself ”

“ The stately fabric of the old creation
Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod,
Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king,
Captive and conqueror, all must own alike
Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts
By the red life that flowed through all their veins
From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one
In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms
Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths [238]
That saw and heard and hungered like his own,
His mother Earth reclaimed him.
Back and back,
He traced them, till the last faint clue died out
In lifeless earth and sea. ”

“ The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth,
Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool,
This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head.
Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it—
I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern
The true gigantic drama of those hours
Among the quiet hills as, one by one, [237]
His facts fell into place; their broken edges
Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic,
And, slowly, the new picture of the world,
Emerging in majestic pageantry
Out of the primal dark, before him grew;
Grew by its own inevitable law ”

“ As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe,
That scene preparing, the interweaving clues
Whose inconceivable intricacy at length, [294]
By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze
Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought
Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street,
Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”—
“No, I leave Oxford now.”—
“The enemy means
To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”—
“If you say that, I stay.” ”

“ Of mortal love, terrestrial grief and pain,
Into our own lost realm.”
His dark eyes flashed.
He lifted his proud head as one who heard
Strains of immortal music even now.
He towered among the Muses in the dusk,
And then, as though he, too, were carved in stone,
And all their voices breathed through his own voice,
“Fear nothing now,” he said. “Our foes can steal
The burdens we lay down, but nothing more. [34]
All that we are we keep. They strike at shadows
And cannot hurt us. ”