sun

From wrath-red dawn to wrath-red dawn,
The guns have brayed without abate;
And now the sick sun looks upon
The bleared, blood-boltered fields of hate
As if it loathed to rise again.
How strange the hush! Yet sudden, hark!
From yon down-trodden gold of grain,
The leaping rapture of a lark.

A fusillade of melody,
That sprays us from yon trench of sky;
A new amazing enemy
We cannot silence though we try;
A battery on radiant wings,
That from yon gap of golden fleece

In these days of peace and money, free to all the Commonweal,
There are ancient dames in Buckland wearing wedding rings of steel;
Wedding rings of steel and iron, worn on wrinkled hands and old,
And the wearers would not give them, not for youth nor wealth untold.

In the days of black oppression, when the best abandoned hope,
And all Buckland crouched in terror of the prison and the rope,
Many fair young wives in Buckland prayed beside their lonely beds
For the absent ones who knew not where to lay their outlawed heads.

How do we know, by the bank-high river,
Where the mired and sulky oxen wait,
And it looks as though we might wait for ever,
How do we know that the floods abate?
There is no change in the current's brawling--
Louder and harsher the freshet scolds;
Yet we can feel she is falling, falling
And the more she threatens the less she holds,
Down to the drift, with no word spoken,
The wheel-chained wagons slither and slue....
Achtung! The back of the worst is broken!
And--lash your leaders!--we're through--we're through!

When the drums begin to beat
Down the street,
When the poles are fetched and guyed,
When the tight-rope's stretched and tied,
When the dance-girls make salaam,
When the snake-bag wakes alarm,
When the pipes set up their drone,
When the sharp-edged knives are thrown
When the red-hot coals are shown,
To be swallowed by-and-by--
Arre, Brethren, here come I!

Stripped to loin-cloth in the sun,
Search me well and watch me close!
Tell me how my tricks are done--
Tell me how the mango grows!

Why should this flower delay so long
   To show its tremulous plumes?
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song,
   When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
   Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
   Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
   Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
   And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,

I

"O Time, whence comes the Mother's moody look amid her labours,
   As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves?
   Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors,
With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face,
   As of angel fallen from grace?"

II

- "Her look is but her story: construe not its symbols keenly:
   In her wonderworks yea surely has she wounded where she loves.
   The sense of ills misdealt for blisses blanks the mien most
queenly,

It was a wet wan hour in spring,
And Nature met King Doom beside a lane,
Wherein Hodge trudged, all blithely ballading
   The Mother's smiling reign.

   "Why warbles he that skies are fair
And coombs alight," she cried, "and fallows gay,
When I have placed no sunshine in the air
   Or glow on earth to-day?"

   "'Tis in the comedy of things
That such should be," returned the one of Doom;
"Charge now the scene with brightest blazonings,
   And he shall call them gloom."

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.

Sooner or later, in some future date,
(A dreadful secret in the book of Fate)
This hour, for aught all human wisdom knows,
Or when ten thousand harvests more have rose;
When scenes are chang'd on this revolving Earth,
Old empires fall, and give new empires birth;
While other Bourbons rule in other lands,
And, (if man's sin forbids not) other Annes;
While the still busy world is treading o'er
The paths they trod five thousand years before,
Thoughtless as those who now life's mazes run,

"Come and hire me," I cried, while in the morning I was walking on the stone-paved road.
Sword in hand, the King came in his chariot.
He held my hand and said, "I will hire you with my power."
But his power counted for nought, and he went away in his chariot.

In the heat of the midday the houses stood with shut doors.
I wandered along the crooked lane.
An old man came out with his bag of gold.
He pondered and said, "I will hire you with my money."