Wilfred Campbell

“ Came the far-off neigh of a horse, and a mad joy leaped to my veins,
And a thought curled into my heart as a serpent coils into a flower;
And I turned me, and left them there in their foolish love and their slumber
That my hot heart hissed was their last.
Then hurrying out of the door that flapped in the night-wind I fled,
With a pent-up hunger of hate that maddened to burst from its sluices,
And came to a place on the plain far up and out from the village,
Where tethered in rows of hurdles, champing and restless and neighing,
Half a thousand horses were herded under the night. ”

“ And I was young and filled with love of life,
And fear of ugly death as some weird black,
The enemy of love and youth and joy;
A lonely, ruined bridge at edge of night,
Fading in blackness at the outer end.
And those were cold, stern men I went with there,
Who held their lives as men do hold a gift
Not worth the keeping; men who told dread tales,
That made a madness in me of that waste
And all its hellish, lonely solitude,
And set my heart abeating for the south,
Until that awful desolation ringed
My reason round, and shrunk my fearful heart. ”

“ Words, words are empty; were life built on words,
How rich the poor would grow, the weak be strong,
[Pg 101] The hateful loving, and the scornful weak!—
The king would be a peasant, and the poor
A king in his own right; the murderer, red
From his foul guilt, would pass to God’s own breast,
And all damned things, long damned of earth’s consent,
And some dread law much older far than we,
Would blossom righteous under heaven’s face.
Still fared we north across that frozen waste
Of icy horror ringed with awful night,
To seek the living in a world of death ”

“ Not that we hate our brothers to the south,
They are our fellows in the speech of mouth,
They are our wedded kindred, our own blood,
The same world-evils we and they withstood,
Our aims are theirs, one common future good—
Not that we hate them, but that there doth lie
Within our hearts a golden fealty
To Britain, Britain, Britain, till the world doth die.
And him we send thee as our greatest son,
The people’s choice, to whose firm hand is given
[Pg 72] The welfare of our country under heaven;
No truer son hast thou in all thy coasts,
No wiser, kindlier, stronger, Britain boasts ”

“ Have ridden them down, ’mid the shriekings and groanings of anguish,
Blotting them out with their loves and their hates into blackness.
Ha! Ha! ride, ride, my beauties, my terrible tramplers!
Pound, pound into dust the mother, the child, and the husband!
Pound, pound to the pulse of my hate that exults in your thunders!
Ha! Over the little ones nestled to suckle the bosom,
Over the man that I loved, we thunder, we thunder!
Over the woman I hate with the flame of her hair on his bosom ”

“ Yea, back of all this muffled dread
Perchance some splendor rifts the dark.
[Pg 119]
Yea, though no magic reach its gleams,
Nor heart of doubting prove it true,
Old house, beloved, of my dead dreams,
While I go forth from love and you.
[Pg 120]
Phaethon
I Phaethon: dwelling in that golden house,
Which Hephaistos did build for my great sire,
Old Helios, king of glowing heaven and day;
Knowing this life but mortal in its span,
Hedged in by puling youth and palsied age,
Where poor men crawl like insects, knowing pain
And mighty sorrow to the gates of death ”

“ A road by which love-hungered souls may fare
Past hate and doubt, to heaven and God above.”
So calleth it ever upward unto me:
It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors:
It echoes all along the sapphire floors:
Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars,
It fills the vastness of eternity ”

“ Plodding the dreary years that wend their round,
Aping the sleeping sensual life of beasts,
Fearful of all things, dreading mostly death,
Past pain and age and all their miseried end,
Where all must rot, who smile and weep and sleep,
And be a part of all this grim corruption.
Nay, better to me than the long-measured draught,
Trickling out through many anxious years,
Iron-eaten, haggard, to the place of death—
To drain my flagon of life in one glad draught,—
To live, to love, aspire, and dare all things ”

“ For that dread land began to close us in,
With cold and hunger, bit at our poor limbs,
Till life grew there a feeble, flickering flame,
Amid the snows and ice-floes of that land.
Then ten days crept out shrunk and gray and wan,
With nothing but the lonely, haunted waste.
Then spake the leader, “If in five more days!”
Then parcelled out those five gray, haggard days,
While life to me grew like an ebbing tide,
That surged far out from some dread death-like strand. ”

“ Lithe and supple my limbs as the sinuous serpent,
And quick as the eye and the tongue of the serpent mine anger
That flashed out the fire of my hate on the scorn of my scorners.
But hate soon softened to love, as fire into sunlight,
When my eyes met the eyes of the chieftain, my lord, and my master.
[Pg 57]
Sweet as the flowers that bloom on the blossoming prairie,
Gladder than voices of fountains that dance in the sunlight,
Were the new and tremulous fancies that dwelt in my bosom ”

“ And, maddening, day’s red coursers thundered on,
Uncurbed, unguided by my palsied hand.
Then with loud ruin, blundering from the bridge,
Through space went swaying, now high up, now down,
[Pg 127] Scattering conflagration and fierce death
O’er earth’s shrunk verges where their scorchings scarred.
Time fled in terror, forests shrivelled up,
Ocean drew back in shudderings to his caves,
Huge mountains shook and rumbled to their base,
Great streams dried up, old cities smoked and fell,
And all life met confusion and despair,
And dread annihilation. ”

“ With the lonely night, in a wheeling mist,
Went round by river and hill.
And Jacob strove as the dying strive,
In the woe of that awful place.
Yea, he fought with the desperate soul of one
Who fights in evil case:
And he called aloud in the pauses dread,
“O give me sight of thy face.
“Yea, speak thy name, what art thou, spirit,
Or man, or devil, or God?
[Pg 25] Yea, speak thy name!” But no voice came,
From heaven or deep or sod:
And the spirit of Jacob clave to his flesh
As the dews in a dried-up clod. ”

“ The dew-wet road in ruddy sunlight gleams,
The sweet, cool earth, the clear blue heaven on high.
Across the morn a carolling school-boy goes,
Filling the world with youth to heaven’s stair;
Some chattering squirrel answers from his tree;
But down beyond the headland, where ice-floes
Are great in winter, pleading in mute prayer,
A dead, drowned face stares up immutably. ”

“ Neck and neck in the wake of my hate, that ever before us
Clamors from heaven to hell in its terrible vengeance!
With neck outstretched and mad eyes agleam in the moonlight,
I see on ahead the sleeping huts in the moonlight.
[Pg 64]
Ha! Ha! they will rest well under the sleep that we bring them! ”

“ With glinting hoofs, that clanged the azure bridge
That arched from dawning up to flaming noon.
Dauntless my soul, and fiery-glad my heart,
And “vastness,” “vastness,” sang through all my being,
As gloved with adamant I guided on
The day’s red coursers up their flaming hill,
To reach the mighty keystone of the day. ”

“ To drink her melody free.
And the creatures of earth would creep from their haunts
To stare with their wilding eyes,
To hearken those rhythms of earth’s romance,
That never the ear of mortal hath heard;
Till the elfin squirrels would caper and dance,
And the hedgehog’s sleepy and shy surprise
Would grow to the thought of a bird.
And the pale wood-flowers from their cradles of dew
Where they rocked them the whole night long,
While the dark wheeled round and the stars looked through
Into the great wood’s slumbrous breast,
[Pg 22] Till the gray of the night like a mist outblew ”

“ Greatness more great than all her greatness that hath been,
Under thy sceptre the outmost continents hang,
And trackless oceans thunder out their surges.
These are thy realms. Never in earth’s old story
Hath queen of earthly realm owned such resplendent glory.
Not golden Homer such wondrous kingdoms sang.
Round earth’s wide girdle thy mighty empire verges,
Out-splendoring all prophecy of olden days;
[Pg 73] Thou, latest and greatest on that throne whose base
Withstood the shock of centuries, still withstands
The lowering hate of Europe’s iron bands ”

“ Then all the world grew red and the sun as a furnace,
And I raved till I knew no more for a horrible season.
Then I arose, and stood like one in a dream
Who, after long years of forgetting, sudden remembers
[Pg 61] The dread wild cry of a wrong that clamors for righting ”

“ Till my heart is water and woe.”
“Nay, nay,” cried Jacob, “we strive, we twain,
Till the mists of dawning blow.”
Then spake that other, “I hate thee not,
My spirit is spent, alas,
Thou art a very lion of men ”

“ She peers so still as she counts her cost,
With the whaups low calling over the moors,
“Woe, woe, for the great ones she hath lost.”
[2] Colin Campbell, Hero of Lucknow.
[3] Sir Donald Mackay, first Lord Reay, whose Mackay Dutch regiment was famous in the thirty years war. ”