Louise Imogen Guiney

“ Hath pastured, from the violent time apart,
And laved in supersensual light the heart
Alone with thy magnificent No More?
Sweet court of roses now, sweet camp of bees!
The hills that lean to thy white bed at dawn,
Hear, for the clash of raging dynasties,
Laughter of boys about a branchy lawn.
Hast thou a stain? Let ivy cover all;
Nor seem of greatness disinhabited,
While spirits in their wonted splendour tread
From close to close, by Wolvesey’s idle wall.
Bright fins against thy lucid water leap,
And nigh thy towers the nesting wood-dove dwell ”

“ To be worth her is my all.
COLUMBA AND THE STORK.
The cliffs of Iona were red, with the moon to lee,
A finger of rock in the infinite wind and the sea;
And white on the cliffs as a volley of spray down-flying,
The beautiful stork of Eiré indriven and dying.
I stole from the choir; I fed him, I bathed his breast,
[39] Till in late sunshine he lifted his wing to the west. ”

“ Reads here the end of Helen, the end of Helen’s Troy.
[43]
OF JOAN’S YOUTH.
I would unto my fair restore
A simple thing:
The flushing cheek she had before!
Out-velveting
No more, no more,
By Severn shore,
The carmine grape, the moth’s auroral wing.
Ah, say how winds in flooded grass
Unmoor the rose;
Or guileful ways the salmon pass
To sea, disclose;
For so, alas,
With Love, alas,
With fatal, fatal Love a girlhood goes.
PASSING THE MINSTER.
Praise to thine awful beauty, praise
And peace, O warden of my ways!
Bid o’er the brow to thee I raise,
Eternal unction fall. ”

“ Fair is the carven hostel, fortunate either guest,
And men of moodier England pass, and hear outside
[40] Fury of toil alone, and fate’s diurnal storm,
Hearts with the King of Saints, hearts beating light and warm! ”

“ Though sea and mount have beauty, and this but what it can,
Thrice fairer than their life the life here battling in the van,
The tragic gleam, the mist and grime,
The dread endearing stain of time,
The sullied heart of man.
Mine is the clotted sunshine, a bubble in the sky,
That where it dare not enter, steals in shrouded passion by ”

“ And down the bank into the lane the primroses do crowd,
All coloured 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 ”