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THE UNKNOWN EROS

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“Deliciae meae esse cum filiis hominum.”

PROV. VIII. 31.

PROEM

   ‘Many speak wisely, some inerrably:

Witness the beast who talk’d that should have bray’d,

And Caiaphas that said

Expedient ’twas for all that One should die;

But what avails

When Love’s right accent from their wisdom fails,

And the Truth-criers know not what they cry!

Say, wherefore thou,

As under bondage of some bitter vow,

Warblest no word,

When all the rest are shouting to be heard?

Why leave the fervid running just when Fame

’Gan whispering of thy name

Amongst the hard-pleased Judges of the Course?

Parch’d is thy crystal-flowing source?

Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe, the trodden ground,

Till passion’s buried floods be found;

Intend thine eye

Into the dim and undiscover’d sky

Whose lustres are the pulsings of the heart,

And promptly, as thy trade is, watch to chart

The lonely suns, the mystic hazes and throng’d sparkles bright

That, named and number’d right

In sweet, transpicuous words, shall glow alway

With Love’s three-stranded ray,

Red wrath, compassion golden, lazuline delight.’

   Thus, in reproof of my despondency,

My Mentor; and thus I:

   O, season strange for song!

And yet some timely power persuades my lips.

Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue,

As other Kingdoms, nearing their eclipse,

Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strong

The voice that was their voice in earlier days?

Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry,

The note which those that seem too weak to sigh

Will sometimes utter just before they die?

   Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways,

There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard,

Her ancient beauty marr’d,

And, in her cold and aimless roving sight,

Horror of light;

Sole vigour left in her last lethargy,

Save when, at bidding of some dreadful breath,

The rising death

Rolls up with force;

And then the furiously gibbering corse

Shakes, panglessly convuls’d, and sightless stares,

Whilst one Physician pours in rousing wines,

One anodynes,

And one declares

That nothing ails it but the pains of growth.

   My last look loth

Is taken; and I turn, with the relief

Of knowing that my life-long hope and grief

Are surely vain,

To that unshapen time to come, when She,

A dim, heroic Nation long since dead,

The foulness of her agony forgot,

Shall all benignly shed

Through ages vast

The ghostly grace of her transfigured past

Over the present, harass’d and forlorn,

Of nations yet unborn;

And this shall be the lot

Of those who, in the bird-voice and the blast

Of her omniloquent tongue,

Have truly sung

Or greatly said,

To shew as one

With those who have best done,

And be as rays,

Thro’ the still altering world, around her changeless head.

   Therefore no ’plaint be mine

Of listeners none,

No hope of render’d use or proud reward,

In hasty times and hard;

But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throat

At latest eve,

That does in each calm note

Both joy and grieve;

Notes few and strong and fine,

Gilt with sweet day’s decline,

And sad with promise of a different sun.

   ’Mid the loud concert harsh

Of this fog-folded marsh,

To me, else dumb,

Uranian Clearness, come!

Give me to breathe in peace and in surprise

The light-thrill’d ether of your rarest skies,

Till inmost absolution start

The welling in the grateful eyes,

The heaving in the heart.

Winnow with sighs

And wash away

With tears the dust and stain of clay,

Till all the Song be Thine, as beautiful as Morn,

Bedeck’d with shining clouds of scorn;

And Thou, Inspirer, deign to brood

O’er the delighted words, and call them Very Good.

This grant, Clear Spirit; and grant that I remain

Content to ask unlikely gifts in vain.


The Unknown Eros

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