Читать книгу The Poems of Madison Cawein. Volume 2 (of 5) - Cawein Madison Julius - Страница 55

We, whom God sets a task,

Striving, who ne’er attain,

We are the curst!—who ask

Death, and still ask in vain.

We, whom God sets a task.

All, all are shadows. All must pass

As writing in the sand or sea:

Reflections in a looking-glass

Are not less permanent than we.

The days that mold us—what are they?

That break us on their whirling wheel?

What but the potters! we the clay

They fashion and yet leave unreal.

Linked through the ages, one and all,

In long anthropomorphous chain,

The human and the animal

Inseparably must remain.

Within us still the monstrous shape

That shrieked in air and howled in slime,

What are we?—partly man and ape—

The tools of fate, the toys of time!

Vased in her bedroom window, white

As her glad girlhood, never lost,

I smelt the roses—and the night

Outside was fog and frost.

What though I claimed her dying there!

God nor one angel understood

Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair

Had changed to snow her blood.

She had been mine so long, so long!

Our harp of life was one in word—

Why did death thrust his hand among

The chords and break one chord!

What lily lilier than her face!

More virgin than her lips I kissed!

When morn, like God, with gold and grace,

Broke massed in mist! broke massed in mist!

The face that I said farewell to,

Pillowed a flower on flowers,

Comes back, with its eyes to tell to

My soul what my heart should quell to

Calm, that is mine at hours.

Dear, is your soul still daggered

There by something amiss?

Love—is he ever laggard?

Hope—is her face still haggard?

Tell me what it is!

You, who are done with to-morrow!

Done with these worldly skies!

Done with our pain and sorrow!

Done with the griefs we borrow!

Joys that are born of sighs!

Must we say “gone forever?”

Or will it all come true?

Does mine touch your thought ever?

And, over the doubts that sever,

Rise to the fact that ’s you?

Love, in my flesh so fearful,

Medicine me this pain!—

Love, with the eyes so tearful,

How can my soul be cheerful,

Seeing its joy is slain!…

Gone!—’t was only a vision!—

Gone! like a thought, a gleam!—

Such to our indecision

Utter no empty mission;—

Truth is in all we dream!

There are shadows that compel us,

There are powers that control:

More than substance these can tell us,

Speaking to the human soul.

In the moonlight, when it glistened

On my window, white of glow,

Once I woke and, leaning, listened

To a voice that sang below.

Full of gladness, full of yearning,

Strange with dreamy melody,

Like a bird whose heart was burning,

Wildly sweet it sang to me.

I arose; and by the starlight,

Pale beneath the summer sky,

There I saw it, full of far light,—

My dead joy go singing by.

In the darkness, when the glimmer

Of the storm was on the pane,

Once I sat and heard a dimmer

Voice lamenting in the rain.

Full of parting and unspoken

Heartbreak, faint with agony,

Like a bird whose heart was broken,

Moaning low it cried to me.

I arose; and in the darkness,

Wan beneath the winter sky,

There I saw it, cold to starkness,—

My dead love go wailing by.

So long it seems since last I saw her face,

So long ago it seems,

Like some sad soul in unconjectured space,

Still seeking happiness through perished grace

And unrealities, a little while

Illusions lead me, ending in the smile

Of Death, triumphant in a thorny place,

Among Love’s ruined roses and dead dreams.

Since she is gone, no more I feel the light,—

Since she has left all dark,—

Cleave, with its revelation, all the night.

I wander blindly, on a crumbling height,

Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones

Of Life, where Hope, amid Life’s skulls and bones,

With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,

Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.

Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o’erawe,—

Now she is gone from me,—

Questions God’s justice that seems full of flaw,

As is His world, where misery is law,

And all men fools, too willing to be slaves.—

My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,

The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,

And all is night and I no longer see.

Ridged and bleak the gray, forsaken

Twilight at the night has guessed;

And no star of dusk has taken

Flame unshaken in the west.

All day long the woodlands, dying,

Moaned, and drippings as of grief

Rained from barren boughs with sighing

Death of flying twig and leaf.

Ah, to live a life unbroken

Of the flings and scorns of fate!

Like that tree, with branches oaken,

Strength’s unspoken intimate.—

Who can say that we have never

Lived the life of plants and trees?—

Not so wide the lines that sever

Us forever here from these.

Colors, odors, that are cherished,

Haply hint we once were flowers:

Memory alone has perished

In this garnished world that’s ours.

Music,—that all things expresses,

All for which we’ve sought and sinned,—

Haply in our treey tresses

Once was guesses of the wind.

But I dream!—The dusk, dark braiding

Locks that lack both moon and star,

Deepens; and, the darkness aiding,

Earth seems fading, faint and far.

And within me doubt keeps saying—

“What is wrong, and what is right?

Hear the cursing! hear the praying!

All are straying on in night.”

The soul, like Earth, hath silences

Which speak not, yet are heard:

The voices mute of memories

Are louder than a word.

Theirs is a speech which is not speech;

A language that is bound

To soul-vibrations, vague, that reach

Deeper than any sound.

No words are theirs. They speak through things,

A visible utterance

Of thoughts—like those some sunset brings,

Or withered rose, perchance.

The heavens that once, in purple and flame,

Spake to two hearts as one,

In after years may speak the same

To one sad heart alone.

Through it the vanished face and eyes

Of her, the sweet and fair,

Of her the lost, again shall rise

To comfort his despair.

And so the love that led him long

From golden scene to scene,

Within the sunset is a tongue

That speaks of what has been.—

How loud it speaks of that dead day,

The rose whose bloom is fled!

Of her who died; who, clasped in clay,

Lies numbered with the dead.

The dead are dead; with them ’tis well

Within their narrow room;—

No memories haunt their hearts who dwell

Within the grave and tomb.

But what of those—the dead who live!

The living dead, whose lot

Is still to love—ah, God forgive!—

To live and love, forgot!

The night is wild with rain and sleet;

Each loose-warped casement claps or groans:

I hear the plangent woodland beat

The tempest with long blatant moans,

Like one who fears defeat.

And sitting here beyond the storm,

Alone within the lonely house,

It seems that some mesmeric charm

Holds all things—even the gnawing mouse

Has ceased its faint alarm.

And in the silence, stolen o’er

Familiar objects, lo, I fear—

I fear—that, opening yon door,

I ’ll find my dead self standing near,

With face that once I wore.

The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts:

The flue moans; all its gorgon throat

One wail of winds: ancestral dusts,—

Which yonder Indian war-gear coat

With gray, whose quiver rusts,—

Are shaken down.—Or, can it be,

That he who wore it in the dance,

Or battle, now fills shadowy

Its wampumed skins? and shakes his lance

And spectral plume at me?—

Mere fancy!—Yet those curtains toss

Mysteriously as if some dark

Hand moved them.—And I would not cross

The shadow there, that hearthstone’s spark,

A glow-worm sunk in moss.

Outside ’t were better!—Yes, I yearn

To walk the waste where sway and dip

Deep, dark December boughs—where burn

Some late last leaves, that drip and drip

No matter where you turn.

Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,

Fills oozy footprints—but the blind

Night there, though like the frown of God,

Presents no fancies to the mind,

Like those that have o’erawed.—

The months I count: how long it seems

Since summer! summer, when with her,

When on her porch, in rainy gleams

We watched the flickering lightning stir

In heavens gray as dreams.

When all the west, a sheet of gold,

Flared,—like some Titan’s opened forge,—

With storm; revealing, manifold,

Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,

Where thunder-torrents rolled.

Then came the wind: again, again

Storm lit the instant earth—and how

The forest rang with roaring rain!—

We could not read—where is it now?—

That tale of Charlemagne:

That old romance! that tale, which we

Were reading; till we heard the plunge

Of distant thunder sullenly,

And left to watch the lightning lunge,

And storm-winds toss each tree.

That summer!—How it built us there,

Of sorcery and necromance,

A mental-world, where all was fair;

A land like one great pearl, a-trance

With lilied light and air.

Where every flower was a thought;

And every bird, a melody;

And every fragrance, zephyr brought,

Was but the rainbowed drapery

Of some sweet dream long sought.

’Mid which we reared our heart’s high home,

Fair on the hills; with terraces,

Vine-hung and wooded, o’er the foam

Of undiscovered fairy seas,

All violet in the gloam.

O land of shadows! shadow-home,

Within my world of memories!

Around whose ruins sweeps the foam

Of sorrow’s immemorial seas,

To whose dark shores I come!

How long in your wrecked halls, alone

With ghosts of joys must I remain?

Between the unknown and the known,

Still hearing through the wind and rain

My lost love moan and moan.

Wild weather. The lash of the sleet

On the gusty casement, clapping—

The sound of the storm like a sheet

My soul and senses wrapping.

Wild weather. And how is she,

Now the rush of the rain falls serried

There on the turf and the tree

Of the place where she is buried?

Wild weather. How black and deep

Is the night where the mad winds scurry!—

Do I sleep? do I dream in my sleep

That I hear her footsteps hurry?

Hither they come like flowers—

And I see her raiment glisten,

Like the robes of one of the hours

Where the stars to the angels listen.

Before me, behold, how she stands!

With lips high thoughts have weighted,

With testifying hands,

And eyes with glory sated.

I have spoken and I have kneeled:

I have kissed her feet in wonder—

But, lo! her lips—they are sealed,

God-sealed, and will not sunder.

Though I sob, “Your stay was long!

You are come,—but your feet were laggard!—

With mansuetude and song

For the heart your death has daggered.”

Never a word replies,

Never, to all my weeping—

Only a sound of sighs,

And of raiment past me sweeping....

I wake; and a clock tolls three—

And the night and the storm beat serried

There on the turf and the tree

Of the place where she is buried.