Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

“ The stars’ deep looks are wont to melt
Upon my soul, the very suit
Of this unearthly wooer—felt
So clearly pleading—I have knelt
Full oft, most dreading to pollute
The holy rapture with a sigh?
And doth not every accent nigh
Consume each Past to a thin shred;
While endless visions glorify
My sight, and haloes touch my head?
Yea, mystic consummation! yea,
O Wondrous suitor,—whosoe’er
Thou art; that in such mighty way,
In distant realms, athwart the air
And lands and seas, with all things fair,
Hast wooed me even till this day;—
It seems thou drawest near to me ”

“ That so transfigures all the day with light,
And gives my heart already such a thrill
As if She smiled at me:”—my Love, ’twas you
I saw then, dreamed of, waited for; ’twas you;
My heart attests it, looking on you now.—
So this of mine is such a perfect love{156}
You see, it could not change nor turn away;—
It is the only love God made for you,
As you He made for me and from the first
Revealed to me. Therefore it cannot be
That you are false to me,—that I no way
Can save and keep you mine—you whom He gave
To me for ever, to be brought as mine
Before Him at the last. ”

“ All men so smoothly cheated of their own!—
And when I slay this dragon, I have all.
I cannot stir now. Many a knotted tress
Is on me, like a thousand-threaded chain
Twined many times about my limbs. I dream
No more: I feel her small and gliding hands
Seek mine; and while the burning rapid words
Her full heart furnishes hiss in mine ear,
My sight is peering blindly through the dark
Of her vast hair—a cavernous abyss
Of blackness traversed by mad shooting sparks
Or fearful gleams of blood.—What things she says!
“—Let this be as it were my bridal night,
If you doubt all the Past. ”

“ Who in my memories art become divine—
Dost thou remember now those years of old
When out of all thine own life thou didst mould
This life and breathe thy heart in this of mine,
Winning, for faith in that fair work of thine,
To rest and be in heaven?—Alas, behold!—
Another woman coming after thee
Hath had small pity,—with a wanton kiss
Hath quite consumed my heart and ruined this
The life that was thy work: O, Mother, see;
Thou hast lived all in vain, done all amiss;
Come down from heaven again, and die with me! ”

“ Thine am I to the last!
“My feet are like two liquid flames that leap
For joy at thee; I feel thy spirit sweep—
Yea, like a southern wind—
Through all the enchanted fibres of my soul;
I am a harp o’er which thy vast breaths roll,
And one day thou shalt break me: none shall find
A wreck of me behind.
“And now all palpitating, O I pray
Thy utmost passion while I cry—away
With all Love’s enemies!
A man—borne up between the closing wings
Of two eternities of unknown things,
May catch this seraph charmer as he flies,
And hold him till he dies;{130} ”

“ You cannot will your heart to any man
But you must seek, for very wantonness—
As tempts the snake within you—just the straight
Betrayal of that man—his love, his faith,
As though you had not willed yourself at first:
And if you did not this somehow, your life
Would seem to you a nipped and withered thing,
Your beauty good for nought. You are made so.{160}
—Therefore, my Love, I will not let you wake.
Nay—though you are so pure now and have sworn—
Lest you betray me as you did last time,
And times before that, having sworn as now.
But you are mine—my beautiful, my own! ”

“ Outside the circle where this molten love
Of her whole smile is showered upon me,
And know her no more his now than mine then.
But what do I here with a thought like this?
Those men I deemed my rivals—what are they
To me now? Why I could put them to shame
And taunt them now myself for insolent
Pretenders who have never known what ’tis
To conquer love.—Ay, what compared with me
Seem all the famous lovers of great queens
Or splendid cruel mistresses, whose woes—
Deceived, betrayed, reviled—have made them shine
With some bright share of every age’s tears? ”

“ To give and take away; you have all love;
Your beauty is to man’s heart as the sun
That doles out day and night to the whole earth;
You have strange gifts of passion and sweet words:
In truth you are right splendid,—and well fit,{159}
I think, to be the leman of a god;
But all too fair, and yet not good enough,
To be the spouse and helpmate of one man.
—For this: there is a serpent in you hid;
It dwells in the invisible of thought,
Or crouches in some corner of your heart,
Or is engendered in the ardent flame
Of your quick passions,—where, it matters not ”

“ And Death stood near him on my wedding day,
And blanched his forehead with a fatal breath.
I loved to feel his weak arm lean on mine,
Yea, and to give him rest,
Bidding his pale and languid face recline
Softly upon my shoulder or my breast,—
Thinking, alas, how sweet
To hold his spirit in my arms so press’d,
That even Death’s hard omens I might cheat.{19}
I found his drooping hand the warmest place
Here where my warm heart is;
I said, “Dear love, what thoughts are in thy face?
Has Death as fair a bosom, then, as this?” ”

“ And thought if love had been—had been quite love,
One little thing in each man’s life for bliss,
Then had the grief been paid with sweet enough
And a lost crown forgotten for a kiss;{103}
While now, as though men played with fall and rise
Of mere base monies of the common mart,
To-day they strove for love as for a prize,
To-morrow compassed fame with every art;
And one who should but half trust any face
Of seeming fame, or follow love too well,
To set his heart a moment in love’s place—
That man should fall,—yea, even as he fell. ”

“ A TROTH FOR ETERNITY.
—SO, Woman! I possess you. Yes, at length.
Once wholly and for ever you are mine!
That cursèd burden on my memory,
Your whole past life’s betrayal—let it go:
Ay, let it perish, and, for me at least,
Let life begin this moment, though we die
But three hours hence!
Is this your little voice
My Love, enthralling, winning my whole faith
With mere increasing sweetness in its tones,
Dissolving, exorcising, as it used,{142}
Ah too infallibly, the phantom thing,
The doubt, the dread within me? ”

“ Right fair in the heart’s past,
—Till tones, that seem to start
From the shadows in the room,
Move round about the heart,
And a love-glow fills the gloom;
And her soul seems to look out
As from dim and distant eyes,
And a shade of lips to pout
With some remnant of her sighs.
And often too, in the night,
The flame in famished eyes
Re-kindles an old delight
At some dream-sight of her;
The heart with tremulous stir
Lives a moment and then dies. ”

“ Fierce is thy burning till the day is done;
But thou shalt burn mere grass and leaves, while I
Shall burn the hearts of men up everyone.”
O fair and dreadful is the maid who dwells
Between the two seas at the Dardanelles:
As fair and dread as in the ancient years;
And still the world is fillèd with her spells,
O sons of men, that toil, and love with tears! ”

“ And roll down bleared roads to each distance
Of past desolation and years;
Till they cover the place of each sorrow,
And leave you no Past and no morrow:
For what man is able to master
And stem the great Fountain of Tears?
But the floods of the tears meet and gather;
The sound of them all grows like thunder:
—O into what bosom, I wonder,
Is poured the whole sorrow of years?
For Eternity only seems keeping
Account of the great human weeping:
May God then, the Maker and Father—
May He find a place for the tears!
{170} LOVE AFTER DEATH. ”

“ But I who teach it thee and She my love?
And therefore, fear thou nowise to express,
Touching her hair, how much its every tress
Doth shine above all gold that the sun yields
And the fair colour of the harvest fields:
But scarce shalt thou be slow to praise, I guess,
Soon as thou know’st what spell her beauty wields. ”

“ Has fallen through: there shalt thou dance no more;
And Herod is a worm now. In thy place,
—Salome, Viper!—do thy coils yet keep
That woman’s flesh they bore with such a grace?
Have thine eyes still the love-lure hidden deep,
The ornament of tears, they could not weep? ”

“ Shall God have care for this and this
—Flowers that miss
The love that gathers and that saves?
For these graves,
Shall love to be, or love that’s past,
Safe above,
Be less than perfected at last,
Less than Love? ”

“ My eyes unclose and feel no need to weep;
But, in the corner of the narrow room,
Behold Love’s spirit standeth, with the bloom
That things made deathless by Death’s self may keep.
O what a change! for now his looks are deep,
And a long patient smile he can assume:
While Memory, in some soft low monotone,
Is pouring like an oil into mine ear
The tale of a most short and hollow bliss,
That I once throbbed indeed to call my own,
Holding it hardly between joy and fear,—
And how that broke, and how it came to this.
{171} SOWN SEED.
I WANDERED dreaming through a mead ”

“ On a mere hope of love dwindled to this—
To fall some fair waste moment at her side
And feel perhaps a tear or even a kiss;
Since surely, in some waste of day or night,
He thought, the face of love out of the Past,
With look of his, should rise up in her sight
And make some kind of pleading at the last. ”

“ Creeps through and through;—go on, she cannot hear—
The things it sings are death and love; ay, love
That death keeps true;—She sleeps, she cannot hear.
There is no sort of madness in my brain;
But rather a great strength, a calm, as though
A more than human spirit dwelt with mine. ”

“ That dwells in that fair realm of thine.{45}
O thou my Destiny! O thou
My own—my very Love—my Lord!
Whom from the first day until now
My heart, divining, hath adored
So perfectly it hath abhorred
The tie of each frail human vow—
O I would whisper in thine ear—
Yea, may I not, once, in the clear
Pure night, when, only, silver shod
The angels walk?—thy name, I fear
And love, and tremble saying—GOD! ”

“ Wherein are songs of unseen birds,
And whispers of delicious words
More sweet than any man hath said
Of all the living or the dead.
—O, the incomparable love
Of him, my Lover!—O, to tell
Its way and measure were above
The throbbing chords of speech that swell
Within me!—Doth it not excel
All other, sung or written of?
Yea now, O all ye fair mankind—
Consider well the gracious line
Of those your lovers; call to mind
Their love of you, and ye shall find
Not one among them all like mine.{38} ”

“ To put away this tender flower-thing,
This love that is thy bliss?
Dost thou think thou canst live indeed, and dare
The joyless remnant of pale days, the bare
Hard tomb, and feed through cold eternities
Thy heart without one kiss? ”

“ Untarnished, perfect, for you have not sinned;
’Tis I have sinned,—not being strong at once
To save both pure in you. Did not your lips
Completely make you mine of your own will?
Did you not swear yourself to me at first,
Yea, in God’s name, before him? So that I—
Yes, I, have let you, all against your heart,
Be brought to do sad things you would have shunned;
Because I had the way, and used it not,
To keep you from them.—Ah, I curse myself!
—My own, my Love!—those gentle words of yours,
Those promises—repeat them; yes, once more:{157}
You will be mine ”

“ Toward you, resting like Christ’s love
On your head.
O the splendid purple niche
Deep and rich,
Stained of the colour of your soul
Strong and whole,
Full of the prevalence of prayers
And piteous plaint
You made for men and sins all theirs
{186} —You a saint!
The niche a little narrow: well,
As the cell
Your world, your body—all things seen—
Must have been
About the soul that day by day
Groped and felt
To God’s own house and found the way
As you knelt:
In an attitude of prayer
O how fair! ”

“ The pricking of a half-numbed wound through sleep,
The constant teazing of a wingéd thing,
The bitterness wherewith some ceaseless fang
Of life gnaws through, and breaks our dream of it—
Some such pursues and racks me. But ’tis well:
I know the dream is mine to make my own ”

“ To love you by; for all my sun, my light,
My flowers, my world would be the saddest blank,{155}
The day you were not; you have these in you,
And are yourself in them; and, on the day
You go, you take them all away with you;
And so ’twas you I saw when I saw them
And said:—“That Lady mine shall have a head
Like yonder drooping lily on whose white
The summer’s breath may never set a stain;
And She shall have a heaven for her hair
As deep, and dark, and splendid, as the one
I dream beneath ”

“ Behold They come—renewed and quick—
The splendid fearful herds that stray
By midnight, when tempestuous moons
Light them to many a shadowy prey,
And earth beneath the thunder swoons.
—O who at any time hath seen
Sight all so fearful and so fair,
Unstricken at his heart with keen
Whole envy in that hour to share{59}
Their unknown curse and all the strength
Of the wild thirsts and lusts they know,
The sharp joys sating them at length,
The new and greater lusts that grow? ”

“ And life never to end their days or nights.{91}
And well they knew Hephæstus where, hard by,
He stood, inglorious, daring all their eyes:
The gods all beautiful—they laughed on high
At him, his woes and all his blasphemies.
But surely never was there such a play
For mirth of idle gods!—Nor such a shame
Ever become of love, as on that day
In sight of all the gods their love became! ”