Francis Thompson

“ On heaven’s blank leaf seem pressed and flattenèd;
Or rather, to my sombre thoughts replying,
Of plumes funereal the thin effigies;
That hour when all old dead things seem most dead,
And their death instant most and most undying,
That the flesh aches at them; there stirred in me
The babe of an unborn calamity,
Ere its due time to be deliverèd.
Dead sorrow and sorrow unborn so blent their pain,
That which more present was were hardly said,
But both more now than any Now can be. ”

“ The still-born day and parchèd fields of night,
That my old way of song, no longer fair,
For lack of serene care,
Is grown a stony and a weed-choked plot,
Thou only know’st aright,
Thou only know’st, for I know not.
How many songs must die that this may live!
And shall this most rash hope and fugitive,
p. 52Fulfilled with beauty and with might
In days whose feet are rumorous on the air,
Make me forget to grieve
For songs which might have been, nor ever were? ”

“ O peace, my songs, nor stir ye any wing!
For lo, the thunder hushing all the grove,
And did Love live, not even Love could sing.
And, Lady, thus I dare to say,
Not all with you is passed away!
For your love taught me this:—’tis Love’s true praise
To be, not staff, but writ of worthy days;
And that high worth in love unfortunate
Should still remain it learned in love elate.
Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright;
Beyond your highness, still I follow height;
Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view,
Beyond your trueness, Lady, Truth stands true. ”

“ He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
p. 136Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
And yet is he successive unto nothing
But patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty, and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;—even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess—‘It is enough.’ The world left empty
What that poor mouthful crams. ”

“ On heaven’s high palimpsest, and no man sees,
Nor any therein Daniel; I do hear
From the revolving year
A voice which cries:
‘All dies;
Lo, how all dies! O seer,
And all things too arise:
p. 57All dies, and all is born;
But each resurgent morn, behold, more near the Perfect Morn.’
Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast
Of Fortune’s game, and the iniquitous hour,
Whose falcon soul sits fast,
And not intends her high sagacious tour
Or ere the quarry sighted; who looks past
To slow much sweet from little instant sour,
And in the first does always see the last. ”

“ Thine own self couldst thou read;
Thy bliss
Within thee is.
Compost of Heaven and mire,
Slow foot and swift desire!
Lo,
To have Yes, choose No;
Gird, and thou shalt unbind;
Seek not, and thou shalt find;
To eat,
Deny thy meat;
p. 65And thou shalt be fulfilled
With all sweet things unwilled:
So best
God loves to jest
With children small—a freak
Of heavenly hide-and-seek
Fit
For thy wayward wit,
Who art thyself a thing
Of whim and wavering ”

“ Love dies, Love dies, Love dies—ah, Love is dead!
Sad Love in life, sore Love in agony,
Pale Love in death; while all his offspring songs,
Like children, versed not in death’s chilly wrongs,
About him flit, frighted to see him lie
So still, who did not know that Love could die.
One lifts his wing, where dulls the vermeil all
Like clotting blood, and shrinks to find it cold,
And when she sees its lapse and nerveless fall
Clasps her fans, while her sobs ooze through the webbèd gold. ”

“ A lonely man, oppressed with lonely ills,
And all the glory fallen from my song,
Here do I walk among the windy hills,
The wind and I keep both one monotoning tongue.
Like grey clouds one by one my songs upsoar
Over my soul’s cold peaks; and one by one
They loose their little rain, and are no more ”

“ Fresh from thy craftship, like the lilies’ coats,
But foist’st us off
With hasty tarnished piecings negligent,
Snippets and waste
From old ancestral wearings,
That have seen sorrier usage; remainder-flesh
After our father’s surfeits; nay with chinks,
Some of us, that if speech may have free leave
Our souls go out at elbows. We are sad
With more than our sires’ heaviness, and with
More than their weakness weak; we shall not be
Mighty with all their mightiness, nor shall not
Rejoice with all their joy. Ay, Mother! Mother! ”

“ Yet lofty Love being dead thus passeth base—
There is a soul of nobleness which stays,
The spectre of the rose: be comforted,
Songs, for the dust that dims his sacred head!
The days draw on too dark for Song or Love ”

“ Than the snow-cloistered penance of the seed.
’Tis the weak flesh reclaiming
Against the ordinance
Which yet for just the accepting spirit scans.
Earth waits, and patient heaven,
Self-bonded God doth wait
Thrice-promulgated bans
Of his fair nuptial-date.
And power is man’s,
With that great word of ‘wait,’
To still the sea of tears,
And shake the iron heart of Fate.
In that one word is strong
p. 55An else, alas, much-mortal song;
With sight to pass the frontier of all spheres,
And voice which does my sight such wrong. ”

“ From artful prompting of love’s artless thought
Her lowly loveliness teach her to adorn,
When thy plumes shiver against the conscious gates of morn!
And so the love which is thy dower,
Earth, though her first-frightened breast
Against the exigent boon protest,
(For she, poor maid, of her own power
Has nothing in herself, not even love,
But an unwitting void thereof) ,
Gives back to thee in sanctities of flower ”

“ No rift disturbs the heavy shade and chill,
Save one, where the charred firmament lets through
The scorching dazzle of Heaven; ’gainst which the hill,
Out-flattened sombrely,
Stands black as life against eternity.
Against eternity?
A rifting light in me
Burns through the leaden broodings of the mind:
O blessèd Sun, thy state
Uprisen or derogate
Dafts me no more with doubt; I seek and find.
If with exultant tread
Thou foot the Eastern sea,
Or like a golden bee
Sting the West to angry red,
Thou dost image, thou dost follow
That King-Maker of Creation,
p. ”

“ Strew thy feet’s failing thicklier than their might,
Who dost but hood thy glorious eyes with night,
And vex the heels of all the yesterdays?
Lo! this loud, lackeying praise
Will stay behind to greet the usurping moon,
When they have cloud-barred over thee the West.
Oh, shake the bright dust from thy parting shoon!
The earth not pæans thee, nor serves thy hest,
Be godded not by Heaven! ”

“ Go down not unresurgent to the dust.
Yea, not a kiss which I have given,
But shall triúmph upon my lips in heaven,
Or cling a shameful fungus there in hell.
p. 31Know’st thou me not, O Sun? Yea, well
Thou know’st the ancient miracle,
The children know’st of Zeus and May;
And still thou teachest them, O splendent Brother,
To incarnate, the antique way,
The truth which is their heritage from their Sire
In sweet disguise of flesh from their sweet Mother. ”

“ In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy;
Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee,
Children, and the sweet-essenced body of woman;
Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot,
But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe
New from their mother’s morning bosom. So I,
Risen from thee, restless winnower of the heaven,
p. ”

“ What thou art toilèd in her sweet, wild spell.
Do they strow for thy feet
A little tender favour and deceit
Over the sudden mouth of hidden hell?—
As more intolerable
Her pit, as her first kiss is heavenlier-sweet.
Are they, the more thou sigh,
Still the more watchful-cruel to deny?—
Know this, that in her service thou shalt learn
How harder than the heart of woman is
The immortal cruelty
Of the high goddesses. ”

“ Of the high-tided man; skull-housèd asp
That stings the heel of kings; true Fount of Youth,
Where he that dips is deathless; being’s drone-pipe;
Whose nostril turns to blight the shrivelled stars,
And thicks the lusty breathing of the sun;
Pontifical Death, that doth the crevasse bridge
To the steep and trifid God; one mortal birth
p. 147That broker is of immortality.
Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-motherlike,
To turn thy weanlings’ mouth averse, embitter’st
Thine over-childed breast. ”

“ Whose fluid undulations round the world a girdle keep,
p. 199And through the vasty heavens, which by its surges are washed young,
Its infinite volutions roll, enlarging as they throng,
Even to the profound arcane, whose ultimate chasms sombre
Its shattered flood englut with time, with space and form and number.
Like to another atmosphere with thin o’erflowing robe,
The hymn eternal covers all the inundated globe:
And the world, swathed about with this investuring symphony,
Even as it trepidates in the air, so trepidates in the harmony. ”

“ Slid to her waist.
p. 185‘WHERETO ART THOU COME?’ ‘Friend, whereto art thou come?’ Thus Verity;
Of each that to the world’s sad Olivet
Comes with no multitude, but alone by night,
Lit with the one torch of his lifted soul,
Seeking her that he may lay hands on her;
Thus: and waits answer from the mouth of deed.
Truth is a maid, whom men woo diversely;
This, as a spouse; that, as a light-o’-love,
To know, and having known, to make his brag.
But woe to him that takes the immortal kiss,
And not estates her in his housing life,
Mother of all his seed! ”

“ The wall to me has freshness like a scent,
And takes half animate the air,
Making one life with its green moss and stain;
And life with all things seems too perfect blent
For anything of life to be aware. ”

“ From distances of distance drifting its lone flight,
Down the arcane where Night would perish in night,
p. 22Like a god’s loosened locks slips undulously:
Music that is too grievous of the height
For safe and low delight,
Too infinite,
For bounded hearts which yet would girth the sea! ”

“ The earth a living and a radiant thing—
And leave her corpse in our strained, cheated arms?
Lo ever thus, when Song with chorded charms
Draws from dull death his lost Eurydice,
Lo ever thus, even at consummating,
Even in the swooning minute that claims her his,
Even as he trembles to the impassioned kiss
Of reincarnate Beauty, his control
Clasps the cold body, and foregoes the soul!
Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life’s weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
p. 118And all we long for mortal? ”

“ The one voice uttereth: Nature! and the other voice: Humanity!
Then I alit in reverie; for my ministering sprite
Alack! had never yet deployed a pinion of an ampler flight,
p. 203Nor ever had my shadow endured so large a day to burn:
And long I rested dreaming, contemplating turn by turn
Now that abyss obscure which lurked beneath the water’s roll,
And now that other untemptable abyss which opened in my soul.
And I made question of me, to what issues are we here,
Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear;
What doth the soul; to be or live if better worth it is ”

“ Nought here but I and my dreams shall know the secret of this thing:—
p. 172For ever the songs I sing are sad with the songs I never sing,
Sad are sung songs, but how more sad the songs we dare not sing!
Ah, the ill that we do in tenderness, and the hateful horror of love!
It has sent more souls to the unslaked Pit than it ever will draw above. ”

“ Short arm needs man to reach to Heaven,
So ready is Heaven to stoop to him. ”

“ Stern Truth takes flesh in shows of lovely feature.
p. 189HOUSE OF BONDAGE I
When I perceive Love’s heavenly reaping still
Regard perforce the clouds’ vicissitude,
That the fixed spirit loves not when it will,
But craves its seasons of the flawful blood;
When I perceive that the high poet doth
Oft voiceless stray beneath the uninfluent stars,
That even Urania of her kiss is loath,
And Song’s brave wings fret on their sensual bars ”

“ Hiding from the shock of Day,
For the sun’s uprising-sound:
Dare not issue from the ground
At the tumults of the Day,
So fearfully the sun doth sound
Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay. ”

“ Exhaled like an unconscious thought
When poets, dreaming unperplexed,
Dream that they dream of nought.
Nature one hour appears a thing unsexed,
Or to such serene balance brought
p. 15That her twin natures cease their sweet alarms,
And sleep in one another’s arms. ”

“ In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore.
IV
With sweet-panged singing,
Sang she through a dream-night’s day;
That the bowers might stay,
Birds bate their winging,
Nor the wall of emerald float in wreathèd haze away. ”

“ Beyond human thought
In the thunder-spout of Him,
Until thy being dim,
And be
Dead deathlessly.
Stoop, stoop; for thou dost fear
The nettle’s wrathful spear,
So slight
Art thou of might!
Rise; for Heaven hath no frown
When thou to thee pluck’st down,
Strong clod!
The neck of God.
p. 67ASSUMPTA MARIA
‘Thou needst not sing new songs, but say the old.’—Cowley. ”

“ Who teacheth; nor who doth, from wise in heart.
p. 224ENVOY Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play;
Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow:
And some are sung, and that was yesterday,
And some unsung, and that may be to-morrow.
Go forth; and if it be o’er stony way,
Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow:
And it was sweet, and that was yesterday,
And sweet is sweet, though purchasèd with sorrow. ”