Louise Imogen Guiney

“ And down the bank into the lane the primroses do crowd,
All colored like the twilight moon, and spreading like a cloud!
’Tis the time o’ the year, in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The downs are dripping nightly, the breathèd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly north, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.
’Tis the time o’ the year I turn upon the height
To watch from my harrow the dance of going light ”

“ Keep, Time, in dark Soho, what once was Hazlitt,
Seeker of Truth, and finder oft of Beauty;
Beauty ’s a sinking light, ah, none too faithful;
But Truth, who leaves so here her spent pursuer,
Forgets not her great pawn: herself shall claim it.
Therefore sleep safe, thou dear and battling spirit,
Safe also on our earth, begetting ever
Some one love worth the ages and the nations!
Nothing falls under to thine eyes eternal.
Sleep safe in dark Soho: the stars are shining,
Titian and Wordsworth live; the People marches. ”

“ As dew before the cloud,
10 The guilty glory passed
Of the proud.
Boy Kenelm has the song,
Saint Kenelm has the bower;
His thorn a thousand years
Is in flower!
Vergniaud in the Tumbril
I
THE wheels are silent, the cords are slack,
The terrible faces are surging back.
France, they too love thee! bid that keep plain;
The wrath and carnage I stayed afar
Colleagues of my white conscience are:
Accept my slayers, accept me slain!
Shed for days, in its olden guise
The quiet delicate snake-skin lies
To cheat a boy on his woodland stroll:
What if he crush it? ”

“ Face-deep in nimble water, seem to hold
In hope’s own weather their autumnal hue.
There is no wind, no star, no sense of dew,
But the thin vapors gird the mountain old,
And the moon, risen before the west is cold,
Pale with compassion slopes into the blue.
Under the shining dark the day hath passed
Shining; so even of thee was home bereaved,
Thou dear and pensive spirit! overcast
Hardly at all, but drawn from light to light,
Who in the doubtful hour, and unperceived,
Rebuked adoring hearts with change and flight. ”

“ For we were tameless travellers from our birth;
Arise against thy narrow door of earth,
And keep the watch for me.
A Seventeenth-Century Song
SHE alone of Shepherdesses
With her blue disdayning eyes,
Wo’d not hark a Kyng that dresses
All his lute in sighes:
Yet to winne
Katheryn,
I elect for mine Emprise.
None is like her, none above her,
Who so lifts my youth in me,
That a littel more to love her
Were to leave her free! ”

“ Long in a book, were scarce more fine and clear.
Frost, and sad light, and windless atmosphere
Have breathed on them, and of their frailties made
Beauty more sweet than summer’s builded shade,
Whose green domes fall, to bring this wonder here. ”

“ On loud little water floating half of an April night,
Fled from the ear in music, fled from the eye in light, 19
Dear and stainless heart of a boy! No sweeter thing can be
Drawn to the quiet centre of God who is our sea;
Whither, thro’ troubled valleys, we also follow thee.
Friendship Broken
I
WE chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend,
Pacing the twilight out beneath an oak,
Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke
Strange things and deep as any poet penned,
Such truth as never truth again can mend,
Whatever arts we win, what gods invoke ”

“ Here lies one in the earth who scarce of the earth was moulded,
Wise Æthalides’ son, himself no lover of study, 51
Cnopus, asleep, indoors: the young invincible runner.
They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave we made him,
Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare and beautiful iris,
Stop short, full of delight, and shout forth: “See, it is Cnopus
Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to Chalcis!” ”

“ Honora with her dimpled throat, Honora with her pail,
Hey, but there ’s many a March for me, and many and many a lass!
I fall to work and song again, and let Honora pass.
The Japanese Anemone
ALL summer the breath of the roses around
Exhales with a delicate, passionate sound;
And when from a trellis, in holiday places,
They croon and cajole, with their slumberous faces,
A lad in the lane must slacken his paces. ”

“ The primitive light in which thy life began;
Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,
Greater and elder yet the love of man
Full in thy look, tho’ the dark visor ’s down.
St. Peter-ad-Vincula
TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe,
Three queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
More in his halo, Monmouth’s mocking eye,
The eagle Essex in a harpy’s claw;
Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
Sundown of Scotland: how with treasons lie
White martyrdoms; rank in a company
Breaker and builder of the eternal law. ”

“ Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
The clear Republic waits the general throe,
Along her noonday mountains’ open range.
God be with both! for one is young to know
The other’s rote of evil and of change. ”

“ Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, 57
Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve. ”

“ Me, deep-tressèd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping! 52XI
As wind that wasteth the unmarried rose,
And mars the golden breakers in the bay,
Hurtful and sweet from heaven forever blows
Sad thought that roughens all our quiet day ”

“ There, in each year’s auguster light,
Lean in, and loose their red and white,
Like apple-blossoms strewn
Upon his burial-stone.
For nothing more, the ages thro’,
Can nature or the nation do
For him who helped retrieve
Our life, as we believe ”

“ And to his fathers’ grave.
8 A Ballad of Kenelm “In Clent cow-batch, Kenelm King born Lieth under a thorn.”
IT was a goodly child,
Sweet as the gusty May;
It was a knight that broke
On his play,
A fair and coaxing knight:
“O little liege!” said he,
“Thy sister bids thee come
After me.
“A pasture rolling west
Lies open to the sun,
Bright-shod with primroses
Doth it run ”