Richard Le Gallienne

“ THE FAITHFUL LOVER All beauty is but thee in echo-shapes,
No lovely thing but echoes some of thee,
Vainly some touch of thy perfection apes,
Sighing as fair as thou thyself to be;
Therefore, be not disquieted that I
On other forms turn oft my wandering gaze,
Nor deem it anywise disloyalty:
Nay! 'tis the pious fervour of my eye,
That seeks thy face in every other face.
As in the mirrored salon of a queen,
Flashes from glass to glass, as she walks by,
In sweet reiteration still—the queen!
So is the world for thee to walk in, sweet;
But to see thee is all things to have seen. ”

“ Your shadow, like a rose's, on the grass
Where your feet pass.
The shadow of the dimple in your chin,
The shadow of the lashes of your eyes,
As on your cheek, soft as a moth, it lies;
And, as a church, I softly enter in
The solemn twilight of your mighty hair,
Down falling there.
These are Love's shadows, Love knows none but these:
Shadows that are the very soul of light,
As morning and the morning blossom bright,
Or jewelled shadows of moon-haunted seas;
The darkest shadows in this world of ours
Are made of flowers. ”

“ Still thine and mine,
A golden house;
And, perchance, e'er the winter that takes all,
I, there alone in the deep listening wood,
Shall hear thy lost foot-fall,
And, scarce believing the beatitude,
Shall know thee there,
Wild heart to wild heart pressed,
And wrap me in the splendour of thine hair,
And laugh within thy breast.
THE ROSE HAS LEFT THE GARDEN The Rose has left the garden,
Here she but faintly lives,
Lives but for me,
Within this little urn of pot-pourri
Of all that was
And never more can be,
While her black berries harden
On the wind-shaken tree. ”

“ Falernian, true Massic, the gods' own vintages,
Lakes thou hast swallowed deep enough galleys tall to float;
Wildness, wonder, wisdom, all, drunkenness divine,
All that dreams within the grape, madness too, were thine.
Time it is to go and sleep—draw the curtains close—
Tender strings shall lull thee still, mellow flutes be blown,
Still the spring shall shower down on thy couch the rose,
Still the laurels crown thine head, where thou dreamest alone.
Thou didst play, and thou didst eat, thou hast drunken deep,
Time at last it is to go, time it is to sleep. ”

“ BALLADE OF THE OLDEST DUEL IN THE WORLD A battered swordsman, slashed and scarred,
I scarce had thought to fight again,
But love of the old game dies hard,
So to't, my lady, if you're fain!
I'm scarce the mettle to refrain,
I'll ask no quarter from your art—
But what if we should both be slain!
I fight you, darling, for your heart.
I warn you, though, be on your guard,
Nor an old swordsman's craft disdain,
He jests at scars—what saith the Bard?
Love's wounds are real, and fierce the pain;
If we should die of love, we twain! ”

“ No man shall 'scape: be it for joy or woe,
Each is the thrall of some predestined face
Divinely doomed to work his overthrow,
Transiently fair, as flowers in gardens blow,
Then fade, and charm no more our listless eyes;
But some fair faces ever fairer grow—
Beware of the dead face that never dies.
No snare young beauty for thy manhood lays,
No honeyed kiss the girls of Paphos know,
Shall hold thee as the silent smiling ways
Of her that went—yet only seemed to go—
With April blossoms and with last year's snow ”

“ Thee, like a perfumed torch in the dim air
Lethean and the eyeless halls of death,
Would I relume; the cresset of thine hair,
Furiously bright, should stream across the gloom,
And thy deep violet eyes again should bloom.
Methinks that but a pinch of thy wild dust,
Blown back to flame, would set our world on fire;
Thy face amid our timid counsels thrust
Would light us back to glory and desire,
And swords flash forth that now ignobly rust;
Maenad and Muse, upon thy lips of flame.
Madness too wise might kiss a clod to fame. ”

“ AS IN THE WOODLAND I WALK As in the woodland I walk, many a strange thing I learn—
How from the dross and the drift the beautiful things return,
And the fires quenched in October in April reburn;
How foulness grows fair with the stern lustration
of sleets and snows,
And rottenness changes back to the breath and the cheek
of the rose,
And how gentle the wind that seems wild to each blossom
that blows ”

“ The music ended, she is thine no more.
In her Eternal Beauty bends o'er thee,
Be thou content;
She is the evening star in thy hushed lake
Mirrored,—be glad;
A soul-less creature of the element,
Nor good, nor bad;
That which thou callest to in the far skies
Comes to thee in her eyes;
That thou mayst slake
Thy love of lilies, lo! her breasts! Be wise,
Ask not that she, as thou, should human be,
She that doth smell so sweet of distant heaven ”

“ Then your letter came with this last good-by—
And I sat splendidly down to die.
Nor Duty, nor Death, would have aught of me:
"He is Love's," they said, "he cannot be ours;"
And your laugh pursued me o'er land and sea,
And your face like a thousand flowers.
"Tis her gown!" I said to each rustling tree,
"She is coming!" I said to the whispered showers;
But you came not again, and this letter of yours
Is all that endures—all that endures. ”

“ For each thus makes me more and more thy lover.
LOVE'S TENDERNESS Deem not my love is only for the bloom,
The honey and the marble, that is You;
Tis so, Belovéd, common loves consume
Their treasury, and vanish like the dew.
Nay, but my love's a thing that's far more true;
For little loves a little hour hath room,
But not for us their brief and trivial doom,
In a far richer soil our loving grew,
From deeper wells of being it upsprings;
Nor shall the wildest kiss that makes one mouth,
Draining all nectar from the flowered world,
Slake its divine unfathomable drouth ”

“ A mystic masterpiece of rose and pearl.
Her grief and joy alike have turned to gold,
And tears and laughter mingled to one end,
With alchemy of living manifold:
If Life so wrought, shall Death be less a friend?
Nay, earth to heaven shall give the fairest face,
Dimming the haughty beauties of the sky;
Would I could see her softly take her place,
Sweeping each splendour with her queenly eye! ”

“ LOVE'S PROUD FAREWELL I am too proud of loving thee, too proud
Of the sweet months and years that now have end,
To feign a heart indifferent to this loss,
Too thankful-happy that the gods allowed
Our orbits cross,
Beloved and lovely friend;
And though I wend
Lonely henceforth along a road grown gray,
I shall not be all lonely on the way,
Companioned with the attar of thy rose,
Though in my garden it no longer blows. ”

“ And sister unto all of these is she,
Whose face, as theirs, none reads; whose heart none knows;
Whose words are as the wind's words, and whose ways,
O lover, learn,
Swerve not, or turn
Aside for prayers, or broken-hearted praise:
The young moon looks not back as on she goes.
On their own terms, O lover!—Girl, Moon, Rose.
A WARNING We that were born, beloved, so far apart,
So many seas and lands,
The gods, one sudden day, joined heart to heart,
Locked hands in hands,
Distance relented and became our friend,
And met, for our sakes, world's end with world's end. ”

“ Tranced mid the rainbows of her gleaming bowers,
Or the hushed temples of her pillared trees;
Summer has scarce such soft and silent hours,
Autumn has no such antic wizardries.
Yea! he that takes her to his bosom knows,
Lost in the magic crystal of her eyes,
Upon her vestal cheek a fairer rose,
What rapture and what passionate surprise
Awaits his kiss beneath her mask of snows,
And what strange fire beneath her pallor lies.
Beauty is hers all unconfused of sense,
Lustral, austere, and of the spirit fine ”

“ Sadly sinks the lingering sun that like a lover rose,
One by one each woodland thing loses heart and goes.
Back along the woodland, all the day is dead,
All the green has turned to gray, and all the gold to lead ”

“ The grass comes surging on.
These ghostly things that in November died,
How come they thus again adream with pride?
I saw the Red Rose lying in her tomb,
Yet comes she lovelier back, a redder rose;
What paints upon her cheek this vampire bloom?
Belovéd, when to the dark thy beauty goes,
Thee too will Spring re-lume?
Verily, nothing dies; a brief eclipse
Is all; and this blessed union of our lips
Shall bind us still though we have lips no more:
For as the Rose and as the gods are we,
Returning ever ”

“ The world exists and vanishes in you!
Tis not a lover's fancy; ask the sky
If all its stars depend not, even as I,
Upon your eyelids, when they open or close;
And let the garden answer with the rose. ”

“ O generous giver of thy perfect kiss?
Thou gavest me thy lips, thine eyes, thine hair;
I brought thee worship—was it not thy due?
If thou art cruel—still art thou not fair?
Roses thou gavest—shalt thou not bring rue?
Alas! have I not brought thee sorrow too?
How dare I face the future and its drouth,
Missing that golden honeycomb thy mouth?
Kiss and make up—'tis the wise ancient way;
Back to my arms, O bountiful deep breast!
No more of words that know not what they say;
To kiss is wisdom—folly all the rest. ”

“ For this is Love's own resurrection day,
Bring we the honeyed cakes, the sacred wine,
And myrtle garlands on his altars lay:
O Thou, beloved alike of Proserpine
And Aphrodite, to our prayers incline;
Be thou propitious to this love of ours,
And we, the summer long, shall bring thee flowers.
NATURE THE HEALER When all the world has gone awry,
And I myself least favour find
With my own self, and but to die
And leave the whole sad coil behind,
Seems but the one and only way ”

“ Oases green arise, and camel-bells;
For in the long adventure of your eyes
Are all the wandering ways to Paradise.
Existence, in your being, comes and goes;
What were the garden, love, without the rose? ”

“ The earth with a thousand hands its sunlit ruin receives,
And out of the wreck of its glory each secret artist weaves
Splendours anew and arabesques and tints on his swaying loom,
Soft as the eyes of April, and black as the brows of doom,
And the fires give back in blue-eyed flowers the woodland
they consume ”

“ Without that last wild dying thought of thee.
TO A BEAUTIFUL OLD LADY (To the Sweet Memory of Lucy Hinton)
Say not—"She once was fair;" because the years
Have changed her beauty to a holier thing,
No girl hath such a lovely face as hers,
That hoards the sweets of many a vanished spring,
Stealing from Time what Time in vain would steal,
Culling perfections as each came to flower,
Bearing on each rare lineament the seal
Of being exquisite from hour to hour. ”

“ And you that love her with brag of your all-conquering thew,
What, in the eyes of the gods, tall though you be, are you?
You and she are no more—yea! a little less than we;
And what is left of our loving is little enough to see;
Sweet the relics thereof—a rose, a letter, a glove—
That in the end is all that remains of the mightiest love.
Six-foot two! what of that? for Death is taller than he;
And, every moment, Death gathers flowers as fair as she ”

“ What else?" she smiled and said.
Fair-weather wives are any man's to find,
The pretty sisters of the butterfly,
Gay when the sun is out, and skies are kind;
The daughters of the rainbow all may win—
Pity their lovers when the sun goes in!
Her smiles are brightest 'neath the stormiest sky—
Thrice blest and all unworthy I!
BURIED TREASURE When the musicians hide away their faces,
And all the petals of the rose are shed,
And snow is drifting through the happy places,
And the last cricket's heart is cold and dead;
O Joy, where shall we find thee? ”

“ Over all those old misgivings of the heart,
Growing pains of love and lover;
Life's fun begins, its fevers over—
Life was such a serious business at the start!
Garners full, life's grain and chaff we have sifted ”

“ Pierce through the webs in nether darkness spun,
Soul of man's soul, his sentinel upon
The ramparts of the world: Ah! France, 'twas well
This soldier with the sword of Gabriel
Was yours and ours in all that dire duresse,
This soldier, gentle as a child, that here
Stands shy and smiling 'mid a world's caress—
Marshal of France, yet still the Musqueteer. ”

“ MAN, THE DESTROYER O spirit of Life, by whatsoe'er a name
Known among men, even as our fathers bent
Before thee, and as little children came
For counsel in Life's dread predicament,
Even we, with all our lore,
That only beckons, saddens and betrays,
Have no such key to the mysterious door
As he that kneels and prays. ”

“ Nor is it my own dear
Always I sing:
But, as a scrivener in the market-place,
I sit and write for lovers, him or her,
Making a song to match each lover's case—
A trifling gift sometimes the gods confer! ”

“ Gentle, resistless, welling, welling, welling;
Through what blind ways, we know not whence
You darkling come to dance and dimple—
Strange little spring!
Nature hath no such innocence,
And no more secret thing—
So mysterious and so simple ”