Roden Noel

“ Whom now a delicate cloud receives from view,
A cool, soft, delicate cloud, we name dim Death!
O pure white lamb-lily, inhaling breath
From spiritual ether among bowers
Of evergreen in the ever-living flowers,
Yonder aloft upon the airy height,
Mine eyes may scarce arrive at thy still light!
Wandering ever higher, oh, farewell!
Wilt thou the dear God tell
We loved thee well,
While He would lend thee? Why may we not follow?
Do thou remember us in our dim hollow! ”

“ Loathsome with low lust, anguish, desolation!
Until awakes Man's mournful generation
From the colossal ruin of lost life;
And lo! his infinite, opening eyes are rife
With hunger for eternal days, and good,
Piteously craved as necessary food!
Reveal from whence the holy hunger comes!
For all the mute onlookers turn their thumbs
Doomward around the immense arena spaces,
As Man, the victim, peers in their dread faces,
Implacable, though all the beauty-flower
Of the young gladiator plead with power! ”

“ Men deem life not fled, dear,
Deem my life not fled,
Tho' I with thee am dead, dear,
I with thee am dead,
O my little child!
What is the grey world, darling,
What is the grey world,
Where the worm is curled, darling,
The deathworm is curled? ”

“ Once more he is the child, the blithe boy-lover,
Who lay concealed below life's lavish later growth.
And though the soul bewildered err from life to life,
She shall possess them all in God, afar from mortal strife! ”

“ Ourselves are the foundation stone;
If thought fail, the world is gone;
All were ruined, wanting one.
But all the valley sings!
Nature rises on immortal wings!
And soaring, lo! she sings! she sings!
There is no death! ”

“ Perish, my bauble crown, my toy,
All the science, all the sway,
Power to mould the world my way,
Persuade to beauty the dull clay!
Take all; but leave, ah! leave my boy,
Give me back my life, my joy! ”

“ One pure white Light is over all,
One Spirit-Pulse serene,
Who when we rise, and when we fall,
Unmoved approves the scene.
For Love is Lord from Heaven to Hell,
Walks our red waves of sorrow;
Love weeps beside us; all is well ”

“ Refuse foul is food for a fair supernal flower;
Blaspheme not the rank soil where a pure blossom springs;
For blossom soars away in a singing-bird's blithe pinion,
And bird yields a meek life for a spiritual king's. ”

“ I cannot find my child.
The infinite blank spaces
Are weighing on my soul,
Gloom reigns in their dumb faces,
And there is no goal!
My hand is on the hollow,
Where I dreamed a heart;
The world is dead ”

“ Sorrow and Wrong are pangs of a new birth:
All we who suffer bleed for one another;
No life may live alone, but all in all;
We lie within the tomb of our dead selves,
Waiting till One command us to arise. ”

“ One drop of earth's pale vintage can so brim
A human want we counted infinite,
Or one defeat so daunt the whim to fight,
That how God's armies fare concerns him not,
If he may lie at ease, and idly rot!
Shall one, whose mind co-operates to found
The vision of a world with ne'er a bound,
Merge into some mere image, or a feeling
From forth an alien spirit swiftly stealing?
Material appearance can be naught,
Save in a human, or a foreign thought. ”

“ His spirit-robes far floating, a dim grey,
Sombre with forest, pallid with the moon,
His kingly crest snow-gleaming to the stars.
Pan is not dead! He lives! He lives for ever!
These awful Demiurgic Powers named Nature
Nourish, involve a half-alive, blind soul,
A human soul, who fondly deems them dead.
Surely the Lord is making us alive! ”

“ The sun-god lies not dead within the shroud,
Tho' shorn of beams he dwindle in a cloud.
Yea, all the vaster souls in whom we fell
By right divine will rouse them from their hell,
To claim the royal heritage of sons. ”

“ With all these who love him
A brief while ago,
Heaven's joy above him,
Our joy below!
Ah! may you be merry
While one is lost,
In his dear bosom the
Terrible frost?
Smile we who bury
All we love most? ”

“ If a low strain of music sails
Among melodious hills and dales,
When a white lamb or kitten leaps,
Or star, or vernal flower peeps,
When rainbow dews are pulsing joy,
Or sunny waves, or leaflets toy,
Then he who sleeps
Softly wakes within my heart ”

“ God would be the devil,
Love and Truth were dead,
Man a maniac, mooning
A moment plausibly,
Joy an idiot fooling,
And life Death's leprosy!
No! no! no!
An Eye rules the wild sea
Of human misery! ”

“ IV.
"Measure him for his coffin,"
He heard a stranger say;
And then he broke to laughing,
"God! measure my poor clay,
And shut me in my coffin,
A soul gone grey!
For hope lies dead,
Life is fled." ”

“ Where youth's high hope to order the wild world?
A once-bright banner, mouldering and furled!
The stern resolve to mould a world within?
Dead in deep jungles of inveterate sin!
Or may the race prove conqueror, tho' we fall? ”

“ Often we dim discern; but where the woods
No longer in their colonnades of gloom
Involve our path, beyond the precipice,
Behold! how all the regions of the north,
Height, depth, and breadth, are held, filled, dominated
By one supreme pale presence, Monte d'Oro! ”

“ And rings, and rings!
Ah! Nature never would have power
To breath such ecstasy of flower,
Vernal songs of happy birds,
The young rill's delicious words,
No iris hues might bring to birth,
No heart were hers for any mirth,
If he were turned to common earth! ”

“ And our beloved in Thine embrace?
We dream a dream of cold white death,
And all our being shuddereth.
Ah! when may we interpret, Lord,
The meaning of Thy mystic Word?
Death is very pitiful,
Death for a dear child! ”

“ From the cool of air or rain;
Every sweet sound grew still,
Every fair colour pale,
When his life began to wane!
They may never live again!
A child's voice and visage will
Evermore about me fail ”

“ Thou should have laid me my in quiet grave,
Sorrowing calm;
And I with folded palm.
But now above thine own behold I rave!
With all thy life before thee so to die,
Unseasonably!
"Whom the gods love die young;" ”

“ They overhang deep, forest-filled ravines
Wandering seaward; whose dim serpentine
Night ever hears a solemn utterance
Of torrents, with deep monotone attuned
To these wind-oracles of ancient pine. ”

“ Dead worlds, like shrivelled leaves, fell low
From Life’s uprooted tree!
How shall I name Thee, Thou Supreme?
Hate, Treachery, or Crime? ...
... When may we rise from our dark dream
Beyond the bounds of Time? ... ”

“ Nor any God may torture us with false hopes of release!"
I spake again to Time:
"Thou liest in thy throat
All may change, or fall, or climb,
Yet all lives self-retained in change, tho' never so remote. ”

“ Wherewith He endows them, grim and cold, and rife
With cruel humour, with insane, fierce relish
For wine of anguish wrung from tortures hellish
Of souls and bodies! lo! we all pass by,
Saluting Cæsar, men who are to die! ”

“ Ere they vanished, in the empty chamber kneeling.
I yielded Him my child.
⁠And I felt a little babe may on a stranger
For a while a fondling joy confer,
Yet if he hear the low tone of his mother,
He will bound away to her.
Were we high and pure enough to be the guardians
Of a heavenly soul so pure and high?
God, who lent our bird out of His bosom,
Recalls him to the sky!
If He brought him to us, He can keep him
Safer than our foolish feeble care ”

“ Fairy horns have faintly made;
A cloud of snow
Softly blow
On the blue verge of the form so white,
Delicate curl
In a windy whirl;
But man, be far from the holy height
Soil no fair fields of frosty light! ”

“ Or poor and starved, and wanting
The soul's holier wealth,
Inheritors of sorrow,
By leaguering ills deformed,
Plague-smitten soul and body,
Poor hearts love never warmed,—
With all the angels tarry ”

“ Floating fair into sunny sky,
Evanishing away,
Praying the pine-veiled heights to fly,
Dark furrowed heights of grey;
"Away! away!"
"Our roots are deep, we may not die,"
Stern crags responded wearily ”

“ Early Primrose.
There was a paly primrose,
Budding very early
In the little garden,
When he lay so ill.
"Do you think I may be
Well enough to go there
When the flower opens,
Papa?" he asked of me. ”