author:James Thomson

“ This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,
⁠We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
⁠In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.
We finish thus; and all our wretched race
Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
⁠To other beings, with their own time-doom:
Infinite æons ere our kind began;
Infinite æons after the last man
⁠Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb. ”

“ A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave
Upgathered thus in thy divine embrace,
Upon mine eyes thy soft mesmeric hand,
While wreaths of opiate odour interlace
About my pulseless brow; babe-pure and bland,
Passionless, senseless, thoughtless, let me dream
Some ever-slumbrous, never-varying theme,
Within the shadow of thy Timeless Land.
That when I thus have drunk my inmost fill
Of perfect peace, I may arise renewed;
In soul and body, intellect and will,
Equal to cope with Life whate'er its mood;
To sway its storm and energise its calm ”

“ Cast in some hope, you enter with the rest.
This is Pandora's box; whose lid shall shut,
And Hell-gate too, when hopes have filled it; but
They are so thin that it will never glut.
I stood a few steps backwards, desolate;
And watched the spirits pass me to their fate,
And fling off hope, and enter at the gate.
When one casts off a load he springs upright,
Squares back his shoulders, breathes will all his might,
And briskly paces forward strong and light:
But these, as if they took some burden, bowed ”

“ Athwart the great cathedral's cloistered square,
And slowly vanish from the moonlit air.
Then I would follow in among the last:
⁠And in the porch a shrouded figure stood,
Who challenged each one pausing ere he passed,
⁠With deep eyes burning through a blank white hood:
Whence come you in the world of life and light
To this our City of Tremendous Night?—
From pleading in a senate of rich lords
For some scant justice to our countless hordes
Who toil half-starved with scarce a human right:
I wake from daydreams to this real night. ”

“ Then turning to the right resumed his march,
⁠And travelled street and lanes with wondrous strength,
Until on stooping through a narrow arch
⁠We stood before a squalid house at length:
He gazed, and whispered with a cold despair,
Here Hope died, starved out in its utmost lair.
When he had spoken thus, before he stirred,
⁠I spoke, perplexed by something in the signs
Of desolation I had seen and heard
⁠In this drear pilgrimage to ruined shrines:
Where Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed,
Can Life still live? By what doth it proceed? ”

“ Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom.
And even thus, what weary way were planned,
⁠To seek oblivion through the far-off gate
Of birth, when that of death is close at hand!
⁠For this is law, if law there be in Fate:
What never has been, yet may have its when;
The thing which has been, never is again.
XIX.
The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
⁠With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides
Vague-sounding through the City's sleepless sleep,
⁠Is named the River of the Suicides ”

“ So shall this single, self-impelling piece
Of mechanism from lone labour cease,
Resolving into union with the Whole.
Our Mother feedeth thus our little life,
That we in turn may feed her with our death:
The great Sea sways, one interwoven strife,
Wherefrom the Sun exhales a subtle breath,
To float the heavens sublime in form and hue,
Then turning cold and dark in order due
Rain weeping back to swell the Sea beneath.
One part of me shall feed a little worm,
And it a bird on which a man may feed;
One lime the mould, one nourish insect-sperm ”

“ The weak, the weary, and the desolate,
The poor, the mean, the outcast, the opprest,
All trodden down beneath the march of Fate,
Thou gatherest, loving Sister, to thy breast,
Soothing their pain and weariness asleep;
Then in thy hidden Dreamland hushed and deep
Dost lay them, shrouded in eternal rest.
O sweetest Sister, and sole Patron Saint
Of all the humble eremites who flee
From out life's crowded tumult, stunned and faint,
To seek a stern and lone tranquillity
In Libyan wastes of time: my hopeless lise
With famished yearning craveth rest from strife ”

“ Four mermen come from out the deep-sea dells,
And whisper to them, and they all turn pale:
Then through the hyaline a voice of wail,
With passionate gestures, "Ever alas for woe!
A rumour cometh down the Ocean-flow,
A word calamitous! that we shall be
All disinherited from the great sea:
Our tail with which like fishes we can swim
Shall split into an awkward double-limb,
And we must waddle on the arid soil,
And build dirt-huts, and get our food with toil,
And lose our happy, happy lives!" And so
These gentle creatures wept "Alas for woe!" ”

“ Wherever men are gathered, all the air
⁠Is charged with human feeling, human thought;
Each shout and cry and laugh, each curse and prayer,
⁠Are into its vibrations surely wrought;
Unspoken passion, wordless meditation,
Are breathed into it with our respiration;
⁠It is with our life fraught and overfraught.
So that no man there breathes earth's simple breath,
⁠As if alone on mountains or wide seas ”

“ The chambers of the mansion of my heart,
In every one whereof thine image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.
The inmost oratory of my soul,
Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
I kneel beside thee and I clasp the cross,
With eyes forever fixed upon that face,
So beautiful and dreadful in its calm. ”

“ And showeth man most utterly beguiled,
⁠To those who haunt that sunless City's range;
That he bemoans himself for aye, repeating
How Time is deadly swift, how life is fleeting,
⁠How naught is constant on the earth but change. ”

“ First Thou, O priestess, prophetess, and queen,
Our Lady of Beatitudes, first Thou:
Of mighty stature, of seraphic mien,
Upon the tablet of whose broad white brow
Unvanquishable Truth is written clear,
The secret of the mystery of our sphere,
The regnant word of the Eternal Now.
Thou standest garmented in purest white;
But from thy shoulders wings of power half-spread
Invest thy form with such miraculous light
As dawn may clothe the earth with: and, instead
Of any jewel-kindled golden crown,
The glory of thy long hair flowing down
Is dazzling noonday sunshine round thy head. ”

“ Fulfils with awe the soul's despair unweeping:
Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
⁠Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!
Yet as in some necropolis you find
⁠Perchance one mourner to a thousand dead,
So there: worn faces that look deaf and blind
⁠Like tragic masks of stone.With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
⁠Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head. ”

“ Her heart beats the measure that keeps her feet dancing,
Dancing along like a wave o'the sea;
Her heart pours the sunshine with which her eyes glancing
Light up strange faces in looking for me.
The strange faces brighten in meeting her glances;
The strangers all bless her, pure, lovely, and free:
She fancies she walks, but her walk skips and dances,
Her heart makes such music in coming to me. ”

“ The water and the wine most pure and sweet,
Your stomach soon must loathe all drink and meat.
Life liveth but in Life, and doth not roam
To other realms if all be well at home:
"Solid as ocean-foam," quoth ocean-foam. ”

“ Immutable for all of all our legions
Through all the centuries and in all the regions,
⁠Not of your speed and variance we complain.
We do not ask a longer term of strife,
⁠Weakness and weariness and nameless woes;
We do not claim renewed and endless life
⁠When this which is our torment here shall close,
An everlasting conscious inanition!
We yearn for speedy death in full fruition,
⁠Dateless oblivion and divine repose.
XIV.
Large glooms were gathered in the mighty fane,
⁠With tinted moongleams slanting here and there ”

“ With such a living light these dead eyes shine,
⁠These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gaze
We read a pity, tremulous, divine,
⁠Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:
Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;
There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,
⁠They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.
If we could near them with the flight unflown,
⁠We should but find them worlds as sad as this,
Or suns all self-consuming like our own
⁠Enringed by planet worlds as much amiss:
They wax and wane through fusion and confusion ”

“ Your thoughts come dreaming through my soul,
And nestle past recapture.
As I lie, as I lie,
The hours fold their wings beneath the sky;
As you lean, as you lean,
In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene. ”

“ The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless,
The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless,
⁠The unsexed skeleton mocks shroud and pall.
I have seen phantoms there that were as men
⁠And men that were as phantoms flit and roam;
Marked shapes that were not living to my ken,
⁠Caught breathings acrid as with Dead Sea foam:
The City rests for man so weird and awful,
That his intrusion there might seem unlawful,
⁠And phantoms there may have their proper home. ”

“ Ignorant and wild as they?
Sciences and arts, by which
Man makes Nature's poor life rich,
Dominates the world around,
Proves himself its King self-crowned,
She knew nothing of them, she
Knew not even what they be! ”

“ A sense more tragic than defeat and blight,
⁠More desperate than strife with hope debarred,
More fatal than the adamantine Never
Encompassing her passionate endeavour,
⁠Dawns glooming in her tenebrous regard:
The sense that every struggle brings defeat
⁠Because Fate holds no prize to crown success ”

“ So she grew holier day by day,
While he grew all the other way.
She left him: she had done her part
To wean from sin his sinful heart,
But all in vain; her presence might
Make him a murderer some mad night. ”

“ Would his song of the wine advance a note?
Will you puff out the music that sways the whirl,
Or dance and make love with a pretty girl?
Who shall the great battle-story write?
Not the hero down in the thick of the fight. ”

“ By life's sore burthens all-too-much oppressed,
With visions of tranquillity supreme;
So, self-sufficing, grand and bland and blest,
He dwelt enthroned, and whoso gazed did seem
Endowed with death-calm life in long unwistful dream.
IV.
While others fumed and schemed and toiled in vain
To mould the world according to their mood,
He did by might of perfect faith refrain
From any part in such disturbance rude.
The world, he said, indeed is very good,
Its Maker surely wiser far than we ”

“ She clasped that corpse-like me, and they were borne
Away, and this vile me was left forlorn;
I know the whole sea cannot quench that heart,
Or cleanse that brow, or wash those two apart:
⁠They love; their doom is drear,
⁠Yet they nor hope nor fear ”

“ Pitcher never lacketh more,
Arm is never tired to pour:
Honey, water, milk, or wine
Mingle with the draught divine,
Drink it pure, or drink it not;
Each is free to choose his lot:
Am I old? or am I cold? ”

“ Who in so many years have seen
And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are good or bad,
When well or ill, he slowly said;
When sad or glad, when sane or mad,
And when they sleep alive or dead. ”

“ And then he bestowed a free pyre
That the works might have plenty of fire,
And also to cure the pain
Of the headache called thought in the brain:
Truth is a very bad thing
To bring as a gift for our king. ”

“ The strong shall strive,-may they be victors crowned;
The wise still seek,—may they at length find Truth;
The young still hope,-may purest love be found
To make their age more glorious than their youth. ”

“ Suns, moons, earth, stars sweep through the vast profound,
Wrapt in a golden mist-light warm and dim,
Rolled in a volume of triumphant sound;
So in that laughter's joy the whole world carolled round. ”

“ Therefore this one prayer I breathe,—
⁠That you yet may worthy prove
Of the heirlooms they bequeath
⁠Who have loved you with such love:
Fairest land while land of slaves
Yields their free souls no fit graves. ”

“ Whereon the curtain murmured back,
Some change is on us, good or ill;
Behind me and before is black
As when those human things lie still:
But I have seen the darkness grow
As grows the daylight every morn ”

“ To her own minstrelsy.
Love with swift rapture cried,
Dear Life, thou art my bride!
Whereto, with fearless pride,
Dear Love, indeed thy bride!
All the earth's fruit and flowers,
All the world's wealth are ours ”

“ Of violent change death often brings,
From good to bad, from bad to worse;
XX.
They get to know each other well,
To feel at home and settled down;
Death bursts among them like a shell,
And strews them over all the town. ”

“ More powerfully than tongues can prate;
Though life be torture through and through,
Man is but weak to plain of fate:
The drear path crawls on drearier still
To wounded feet and hopeless breast? ”

“ And men regard with passionate awe and yearning
The mighty marching and the golden burning,
⁠And think the heavens respond to what they feel.
Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dream,
⁠Are glorified from vision as they pass
The quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;
⁠Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glass
To restless crystals; cornice, dome, and column
Emerge from chaos in the splendour solemn ”

“ In that trance of perfect love and bliss serene.
VIII.
The water is cool and sweet and pure,
The water is clear as crystal;
And water's a noble liquid, sure;—
But look at my pocket-pistol!
Tim Boyland gave it me, one of two
The rogue brought back from Dublin;
With a jar of the genuine stuff: hurroo!
How deliciously it comes bubblin'!
It is not brandy, it is not wine,
It is Jameson's Irish Whisky:
It fills the heart with joy divine,
And it makes the fancy frisky.
All other spirits are vile resorts,
Except its own Scotch first cousin ”