Olive Tilford Dargan

“ BALLAD
When I with Death have gone on quest,
And grief is mellowed in your breast;
When you do nothing fret
If jest come gently in with tea,
And Purr is stroked for want of me;
When thought robust bestirs your mind,
And with a candid start you find
The world must move
To living love
And you forthright on travel set;
I do not ask you strive to keep
Awake the woe that winks for sleep,
Or swell the lessening tear;
I do not ask; dear to me still
May be the eyes regret would fill;
[32] And, sooth, in vain I'd Nature sue
To go a little out for you ”

“ War's passion beat, and woe's sad chorus past,
And all her song pure-winnowed, clear at last,
Pouring the music of her happy moons!
Then moved his lips, but yet unborn is he
Who may with their resound make sweet his own;
He who shall come as morning walks the sea,
Mate of the Wind when all her harps are one;
So much we know by frail yet quenchless light
That creeps through shadows of our lute-poor night,—
The brave rose-glimmers of his singing dawn. ”

“ And blossom lips of tulip trees are meeting overhead,
But never shall a tear fall for their love spent and dead.
[69] Doves are building yonder in that clump of maples deep,
Do maple leaves come soonest for they love to hide
The earliest nest and hear the first faint cheep
Telling them of joy too dear, too sweet to bide?
The joy that was my own, Jim, when our birdling came,
Telling me that love is never spent and dead,—
Though you left the tears to me, and left to me the shame,—
For the wildwood broke in blossoms round my bed,
And the fairest on my bosom laid its stainless head. ”

“ Shall thrill beneath her feet that lyric spring
From ventured crest to crest. Strong, masterless,
She, last in freedom, as the first shall sing,
[72] Who, great in freedom, takes by Love her place,
Wife, mother,—more, her starward moving self—the race.
Ay, ye shall come, ye spirits girt with light
That falls o'er heaven's hills from dawn to be;
Ye warders in the planet house of night,
Gliding to unguessed doors with prophet key,
And out where dim paths stir with minstrelsy
Wordless and strange to man until your clear
Doubt-shriven strain interprets to the clay. ”

“ Where eyes see not the end, or tears that stain
The joy of him who conquers by defeat;
Or this dark sea whose heart doth climb and beat
The stones that make no sign, then falls again.
Cry with the night and wrestle with the wave,
Ye two-edged winds that cut this shore and me;
I warm me still with thinking of a grave
That can not hold the dust's eternal part;
For here across the centuries and the sea,
A dead hand lies like flame upon my heart. ”

“ That woof of blood and tears as gossamer.
Not then! Where now the wailing way o'erteems,
And baffled starvelings bar
The way of dreams;
Pouring to Want, grey-veined Disease,
To Greed, and lurking War,—
Brute goblinries
With horde-lip sateless on
God-food dust-thrown,—
Lover and Love shall pass, each babe of theirs,
Darling of Life, born for the higher wars
Where knights of spirit sway,
Summoned to holiest fray
[82] By heralds never bare
To clodded vision. There,
Shriven and sure, the sun-dipped lance shall leap
Till Dream uncorselet clay and put off sleep. ”

“ There's one comes often as the sun
And fills my room with morning; comes with step
Light as a youth's that joy has hurried home.
If he should greet my cheek, so might a wind
Blow roses till they touch, silk leaf to leaf,
And on their beauty leave no deeper dye ”

“ The light about me is of regions where
Cold peaks are blue against a colder sky,
And in the dusk-line where begins the Doubt
Men call the Known, we stand in wingless pause,
Unheavened weariness in untaught feet,
And in our hearts sad longing for the fire
Of stars from whence we came. "The earth," he says,
And warms in his my hand amazed to lie
In strange, near comfort,—blossom of first pain.
Then low we dip into the clinging night
That is the Lethe of God-memories ”

“ The rose and leaf on eager boughs
Unvestalled them of dew-writ vows,
And I as light as leaf and rose
Danced to the summer's close.
Now every tree is weary grown,
Of singing birds there is not one;
All, all the world droops into grey,—
O piper Love, must thou yet play?
The wildest note of all he blew,
And fast my worn feet flew.
[7] Old is the year, the leaf and rose
Are long, long gone ”

“ Her eyes an angel's were, if angels' can
Be thousand times more fair than dream can tell;
Unfalling tears they held, yet so could please
They might have hermits made forget their knees
And kings find out they had them, such their spell.
[98] Above her forehead hovered close a star,
Like spirit guard, whose ever-changing ray
Was fed with fires of sacrifice that are
Love's life,—the offerings earth lovers lay
Upon her shrine, and as they pale or glow
She smiles or droops as this true star doth show,—
Or dim or bright as serve we or betray. ”

“ Slowly the boughs disappear and the leaves reach out
Like the drowning hands of children,
Till a grey blur quivers cold
Where the green grace drank of the sun.
So now, as I gaze, the morrows
Creep weaving and winding their mist
Round the beauty of her who sings.
They hide the soft rings of her hair,
Dear as a child's curling fingers;
They shut out the trembling sun of eyes
That are deep as a bending mother's;
And her bridal body is scarfed with their chill.
For old and old is the story;
Over and over I listen to murmurs
That are always the same in these towns that sleep ”

“ Feeleth earth's breathing woe,
And his vow is made;
"Ye shall pass, ye shadows, yea;
And life, as the sun, be free;
The God in me saith!"
And the shadows go;
For joy is the breath
Of eternity,
And sorrow the sigh of a day.
[66]
IN THE BLUE RIDGE
The mountain night is shining, Jim of Tellico,
Shining so it hurts the heart to see
The gleam upon the laurel leaf, the locust shaking snow
To the rippling Nantahala that is laughing up to me,
Hurts till the cry comes and the big tears are free. ”

“ When men of labour shall be men of dream,
With hand seer-guided, knowing Deity
That breathes in sonant wood and fluting stream,
Shapes too the wheel, the shaft, the shouldering beam,
Nor ceased to build when Magian toil began
To lift its towered world. What chime supreme
Shall turn our tuneless march to music when
Sings the achieving God in conscious hearts of men! ”

“ And beg Him bless you, bless you ever, Jim of Tellico!
[70]
YE WHO ARE TO SING
O silence of all silences, where wait
Fame's unblown years whose choir my soul would greet!
Graves, nor dead Time, are sealed so dumb in fate,
For Death and Time must pass on echoing feet.
No grass-locked vault, no sculptured winding-sheet,
No age-embalmèd hour with mummied wing,
Is bosomed in such stillness, vast, complete,
As wraps the future, and no prayer may bring
From that unfathomed pause one minstrel murmuring.
Yet never earth a lyreless dawn shall know ”

“ And Pain's hot wings fold down o'er hushèd woes.
And if ere morn thou choosest me to free,
Let it not be, dear jailer, through the door
That timeward opes, but to eternity
Set thou the soul that needs thee nevermore;
So I from sleep to death may softly wend
As one would pass from gentle friend to friend.
[48]
"LE PENSEUR"
Warm in this marble, that is stone no more,
Life at wound-pause lifts ear to woundless mind ”

“ And like true knights whose queen no laggard knows,
Forth gently shall my love-bid fancies ride
To serve thy heart, and bring thy wishes in;
And shuttling rhyme a web shall make thee then
Whilst thou dost gaze, nor thy poor weaver chide. ”

“ Break as thread the steel-drawn strands,
[74] Graves no longer over-awe,
Dust is dust and men are men;
A living tongue again gives living law.
Trophies ours by gold and gun,
Little treasures, houses,—nay,
Guerdons of our dearest fight,
Now are fuel for his sun,
And the dreams that lit the night
Burn as candles in the day. ”

“ These brooding boughs and grey-lit forest wings,
Nor know if thou deniest
My destiny and race,
Man's goalward falterings,
To sing the perfect joy that lay
Along the path we missed somewhere,
That led thee to thy home in air,
While we, soil-creepers, bruise our way
Toward heights and sunrise bounds
That wings may know nor feet may win
For all their scars, for all their wounds ”

“ Hidden and heavenly,
That leaves no trace of thorn?
Star-flower, keep thy sky;
If man must climb, let him go up to thee;
A daisy may be nearer God than he—
Than I.
II
What crime was hers, that she lies hushed,
Dead with the price, while you and I,
With lifted head, walk sinless by?
Pause then,—but spare
That easy tear; the tale I'll bare. ”

“ As the tears in my eyes bring the stars a-swimming down.
Mother sits and cries, with my baby on her knee;
Father curses deep, a-breathing hard your name;
[67] But never do I hear and never do I see,
I with my head low, working out my shame,
Eyes burning dry and my heart like a flame;
For I hate you then—I hate you, Jim of Tellico,
And grip my needle tighter, every stitch a sin,
The hate growing bigger till the thing I sew
Seems a shroud I'm glad a-making just to lay you in. ”

“ The bower-tree where homes are nesting fruit,
Thy blight creeps up unseen
On bitten way to the green,
[79] Till no hope-banneret
Makes Spring in windy fret
Of flagellant boughs that whip my fingers bare,
Too chill at last to build, to bleed, to care.
Must surge so late with Nature's spawning ruse?
Her stintless passioning
Lest she should lose
The younglet of her dearest pang?
To thee, her tenderling,
She gave lust-fang
To run the jungle's harm;
Now strives thee to disarm,
And fend Life from that weapon lent thy wear
Till thou, forsaking dust, mightst capture her. ”

“ Lingers for man, inescapable, won.
"Not here, nor yet there,"
Cried the waves that fled,
"Shall ye set us a snare.
Motion is breath of us,
Stillness is death of us;
We live as we run,
We pause and are sped!" ”

“ An unresolving fire,
Till beacon hearts make it their own
And men are lit with man's desire.
I mourn no Gilead fair,
Back to my own I speed,
And all my tears are falling where
They sell the sun for bread. ”

“ Yet gleamèd here no crown or mounted throne.
The music budded till it dropped soft showers;
All things to other changed, though here no mage;
Clouds turned to light, and light to sweeter powers,
And chance and change to all was privilege ”

“ And here wouldst lie, by Fame's bent gleaners shunned,
But came unto thy dust
A swaggerer, perdy!
Who cried "A horse, a horse!" and straight
Thou wert abroad again on kingly feet
To tread eternity.
[53]
OLD FAIRINGDOWN
Soft as a treader on mosses
I go through the village that sleeps;
The village too early abed,
For the night still shuffles, a gipsy,
In the woods of the east,
And the west remembers the sun.
Not all are asleep; there are faces
That lean from the walls of the gardens ”