Studies in Song Part 7

_A PARTING SONG._

(To a friend leaving England for a year's residence in Australia.)

These winds and suns of spring That warm with breath and wing The trembling sleep of earth, till half awake She laughs and blushes ere her slumber break, For all good gifts they bring Require one better thing, For all the loans of joy they lend us, borrow One sharper dole of sorrow, To sunder soon by half a world of sea Her son from England and my friend from me.

Nor hope nor love nor fear May speed or stay one year, Nor song nor prayer may bid, as mine would fain, The seasons perish and be born again, Restoring all we lend, Reluctant, of a friend, The voice, the hand, the presence and the sight That lend their life and light To present gladness and heart-strengthening cheer, Now lent again for one reluctant year.

So much we lend indeed, Perforce, by force of need, So much we must; even these things and no more The far sea sundering and the sundered sh.o.r.e A world apart from ours, So much the imperious hours, Exact, and spare not; but no more than these All earth and all her seas From thought and faith of trust and truth can borrow, Not memory from desire, nor hope from sorrow.

Through bright and dark and bright Returns of day and night I bid the swift year speed and change and give His breath of life to make the next year live With sunnier suns for us A life more prosperous, And laugh with flowers more fragrant, that shall see A merrier March for me, A rosier-girdled race of night with day, A goodlier April and a tenderer May.

For him the inverted year Shall mark our seasons here With alien alternation, and revive This withered winter, slaying the spring alive With darts more sharply drawn As nearer draws the dawn In heaven transfigured over earth transformed And with our winters warmed And wasted with our summers, till the beams Rise on his face that rose on Dante's dreams.

Till fourfold morning rise Of starshine on his eyes, Dawn of the spheres that brand steep heaven across At height of night with semblance of a cross Whose grace and ghostly glory Poured heaven on purgatory Seeing with their flamelets risen all heaven grow glad For love thereof it had And lovely joy of loving; so may these Make bright with welcome now their southern seas.

O happy stars, whose mirth The saddest soul on earth That ever soared and sang found strong to bless, Lightening his life's harsh load of heaviness With comfort sown like seed In dream though not in deed On sprinkled wastes of darkling thought divine, Let all your lights now shine With all as glorious gladness on his eyes For whom indeed and not in dream they rise.

As those great twins of air Hailed once with oldworld prayer Of all folk alway faring forth by sea, So now may these for grace and guidance be, To guard his sail and bring Again to brighten spring The face we look for and the hand we lack Still, till they light him back, As welcome as to first discovering eyes Their light rose ever, soon on his to rise.

As parting now he goes From snow-time back to snows, So back to spring from summer may next year Restore him, and our hearts receive him here, The best good gift that spring Had ever grace to bring At fortune's happiest hour of star-blest birth Back to love's homebright earth, To eyes with eyes that commune, hand with hand, And the old warm bosom of all our mother-land.

Earth and sea-wind and sea And stars and sunlight be Alike all prosperous for him, and all hours Have all one heart, and all that heart as ours.

All things as good as strange Crown all the seasons' change With changing flower and compensating fruit From one year's ripening root; Till next year bring us, roused at spring's recall, A heartier flower and goodlier fruit than all.

_March 26, 1880._

BY THE NORTH SEA

TO WALTER THEODORE WATTS.

'We are what suns and winds and waters make us.'--LANDOR.

_Sea, wind, and sun, with light and sound and breath The spirit of man fulfilling--these create That joy wherewith man's life grown pa.s.sionate Gains heart to hear and sense to read and faith To know the secret word our Mother saith In silence, and to see, though doubt wax great, Death as the shadow cast by life on fate, Pa.s.sing, whose shade we call the shadow of death.

Brother, to whom our Mother as to me Is dearer than all dreams of days undone, This song I give you of the sovereign three That are as life and sleep and death are, one: A song the sea-wind gave me from the sea, Where nought of man's endures before the sun._

BY THE NORTH SEA

I.

1.

A land that is lonelier than ruin; A sea that is stranger than death: Far fields that a rose never blew in, Wan waste where the winds lack breath; Waste endless and boundless and flowerless But of marsh-blossoms fruitless as free: Where earth lies exhausted, as powerless To strive with the sea.

2.

Far flickers the flight of the swallows, Far flutters the weft of the gra.s.s Spun dense over desolate hollows More pale than the clouds as they pa.s.s: Thick woven as the weft of a witch is Round the heart of a thrall that hath sinned, Whose youth and the wrecks of its riches Are waifs on the wind.

3.

The pastures are herdless and sheepless, No pasture or shelter for herds: The wind is relentless and sleepless, And restless and songless the birds; Their cries from afar fall breathless, Their wings are as lightnings that flee; For the land has two lords that are deathless: Death's self, and the sea.

4.

These twain, as a king with his fellow, Hold converse of desolate speech: And her waters are haggard and yellow And cra.s.s with the scurf of the beach: And his garments are grey as the h.o.a.ry Wan sky where the day lies dim; And his power is to her, and his glory, As hers unto him.

5.

In the pride of his power she rejoices, In her glory he glows and is glad: In her darkness the sound of his voice is, With his breath she dilates and is mad: 'If thou slay me, O death, and outlive me, Yet thy love hath fulfilled me of thee.'

'Shall I give thee not back if thou give me, O sister, O sea?'

6.

And year upon year dawns living, And age upon age drops dead: And his hand is not weary of giving, And the thirst of her heart is not fed: And the hunger that moans in her pa.s.sion, And the rage in her hunger that roars, As a wolf's that the winter lays lash on, Still calls and implores.

7.

Her walls have no granite for girder, No fortalice fronting her stands: But reefs the bloodguiltiest of murder Are less than the banks of her sands: These number their slain by the thousand; For the ship hath no surety to be, When the bank is abreast of her bows and Aflush with the sea.

8.

No surety to stand, and no shelter To dawn out of darkness but one, Out of waters that hurtle and welter No succour to dawn with the sun But a rest from the wind as it pa.s.ses, Where, hardly redeemed from the waves, Lie thick as the blades of the gra.s.ses The dead in their graves.

9.

A mult.i.tude noteless of numbers, As wild weeds cast on an heap: And sounder than sleep are their slumbers, And softer than song is their sleep; And sweeter than all things and stranger The sense, if perchance it may be, That the wind is divested of danger And scatheless the sea.

10.

That the roar of the banks they breasted Is hurtless as bellowing of herds, And the strength of his wings that invested The wind, as the strength of a bird's; As the sea-mew's might or the swallow's That cry to him back if he cries, As over the graves and their hollows Days darken and rise.

11.

As the souls of the dead men disburdened And clean of the sins that they sinned, With a lovelier than man's life guerdoned And delight as a wave's in the wind, And delight as the wind's in the billow, Birds pa.s.s, and deride with their glee The flesh that has dust for its pillow As wrecks have the sea.

12.

When the ways of the sun wax dimmer, Wings flash through the dusk like beams; As the clouds in the lit sky glimmer, The bird in the graveyard gleams; As the cloud at its wing's edge whitens When the clarions of sunrise are heard, The graves that the bird's note brightens Grow bright for the bird.