Classic Poem

Take back thy song; or let me hear what thou
Heardst anciently from me,
The woman; now
This wassail drift on boughless shores;
Once lyre-veined leading thee
To singing doors
Out of the coiling dark;
Teaching thee hark
Earth's virgin candours, blossomed wonderings,
And sanctities inaudible till strings
Of lyric gentleness
Wooed Heaven to confess
Her world, and I was near,
The earliest listener,
Who of my bosom then made Arcady,
And drew thy forest feet to Castaly.
Take back thy pity. Is it not from man
Who made that world his own?
As barbican
Sends out its darts, and after flings
A dole of myrrh where groan
Is loudest, sings
Thy grace to me, me thus
Unbeauteous
By thee. Uneased thy covenanted bit
From Levite ark till now. Thy judges sit,
Gods ruminant, to keep
Earth pure for dulcet sleep
Of babe and mother. Ay,
Drones yet the lulling lie,
Whilst I, Disease uncinctured, darkly mate
With guard and sentry of thy hierarchate.

Thine ages, are they fair? Shall they yet draw
Child-homage from our eyes?
The woman awe
As her own babe? Far stretch the avid spans
Of fame-drunk emperies,
And all are man's;
But from what tower of praise
Does Justice gaze?
Art is thy boast? " See how we garland her,
The goddess of our hands? " Yea, yea, but where
Is Truth, save by whose breath
Art is a laurelled death?
" Our churches these, and this
Our Holy Writ; there wis
Our altars high, and sanctuarised sod! "
But what, care-taking soul, hast done with God?

The bairning time I knew, the whispering breast,
But in thy world no place
Was for my nest,
Fragrant for perilous brooding pause.
Thou went'st thy pace;
My gathered straws
And grasses cast to dust
To make thy lust
A wayside couch. Deep from the nation's root,
The bower-tree where homes are nesting fruit,
Thy blight creeps up unseen
On bitten way to the green,
Till no hope-banneret
Makes Spring in windy fret
Of flagellant boughs that whip my fingers bare,
Too chill at last to build, to bleed, to care.

Must surge so late with Nature's spawning ruse?
Her stintless passioning
Lest she should lose
The younglet of her dearest pang?
To thee, her tenderling,
She gave lust-fang
To run the jungle's harm;
Now strives thee to disarm,
And fend Life from that weapon lent thy wear
Till thou, forsaking dust, mightst capture her.
What need now of the blood
Whose wasteful plenitude
Swept thee through hostile slime
To shores of light and time,
Man-minim safe mid frost and poison dews
Where naught could live that had not life to lose?
Yet dost thou foster it as thy veined sun;
Thy Heaven and Holy Rood
Build toppling on
Its strifeful hell; root there thy art,
Thy dreams of tenderest bud;
Gaze on the heart
Of its fetidity,
This wreck of me,
And sing. O God, what death in eyes so bound,
They see Life's beauty in her draining wound!
Lay thou the blind thing down
With saurian tusk and bone,
With dust of sworded maw
And peril's fossil claw,
Lest sexton Earth even Man inter, nor trover
Of after-law untomb for Love her Lover!

Her lover yet uncarnate; of thy race
To be; long-dreamed mate
Of her embrace;
Whose godling fruit, too prized, too dear
For bandit breath, shall wait
The Garnerer.
Not then mute, anguished wives,
Dumb in law's gyves,
Shall shrink to mother a soul-famined brood, —
Unbudding sentiencies of flowerhood,
Shut miracles no wand
May touch, that from the hand
Of Toil, the reaver, fall
To dust, their grudged pall,
Leaving imperial web to those who wear
That woof of blood and tears as gossamer.

Not then! Where now the wailing way o'erteems,
And baffled starvelings bar
The way of dreams;
Pouring to Want, grey-veined Disease,
To Greed, and lurking War, —
Brute goblinries
With horde-lip sateless on
God-food dust-thrown, —
Lover and Love shall pass, each babe of theirs,
Darling of Life, born for the higher wars
Where knights of spirit sway,
Summoned to holiest fray
By heralds never bare
To clodded vision. There,
Shriven and sure, the sun-dipped lance shall leap
Till Dream uncorselet clay and put off sleep.

For me one rift! Through this sepultural blight
A breath runs living, new;
Unburdening light
As when the flame-borne prophet on
The Syrian ploughman threw
A people's dawn.
The world is Heaven worth,
The cradle earth
Casts orphanhood, a Bethlehem God-swung
From crimson grapple with his lyric young.
Here triumph I, so low,
Knowing that Lust shall go,
With whited, anarch train, —
Shall pass, this curbless, vain
Usurping deity that would compel
The Mary-longing Love to yet mould Jezebel.
Drug me with life that keeps Death shadow-near
Till I, unfrighted, wake
His charnel fear
In every face that wariful
Meets mine; this bud-mouth make
Unkissable
With kisses; and up-lap
My soul's youth sap
Till 't withers to a clutch about the gold
You think pays all; yet from this reedy mould,
This swamped, unfructant sedge,
Gentility's marsh edge,
I, on free wing, shall take
My swan-course o'er the brake,
Leaving the chanson of thy sin to thee
Who hast not seen, not touched the unstainable me.

Yet art thou dear, O singer! When we rest
Past all Life's hostel doors,
On her home crest;
And 'neath our feet the dark vat night
From pain's crushed star-grapes pours
The climbing light;
There thou, beside me then,
With moteless ken,
Remembering these, thy pity and thy song,
Dropped at the cross where thou didst nail me long,
Shalt sereless 'scape the aim
Of hot, lance-darting shame,
For over thee shall fall
The dawn-tressed coronal
Of Love I then shall be, wrapping thee in
The pity at whose touch dies every sin.