To a mean suburban lodging: on the way To what or where

Not Death, who is old and very wise, can

say:

And you

how should you care

So long as, unreclaimed of hell,
The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,

Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down

To the black job of burking London Town?

NO. V. Allegro maestoso

SPRING winds that blow

As over leagues of myrtle-blooms and may; Bevies of spring clouds trooping slow, Like matrons heavy bosomed and aglow With the mild and placid pride of increase! Nay,

What makes this insolent and comely stream

Of appetence, this freshet of desire

(Milk from the wild breasts of the wilful Day!),

Down Piccadilly dance and murmur and gleam

In genial wave on wave and gyre on gyre? Why does that nymph unparalleled splash

and churn

The wealth of her enchanted urn
Till, over-billowing all between

Her cheerful margents, grey and living green,

It floats and wanders, glittering and fleeing,
An estuary of the joy of being?
Why should the lovely leafage of the Park
Touch to an ecstasy the act of seeing?

- Sure, sure my paramour, my Bride of Brides,

Lingering and flushed, mysteriously abides In some dim, eye-proof angle of odorous dark,

Some smiling nook of green-and-golden shade,

In the divine conviction robed and crowned The globe fulfils his immemorial round But as the marrying-place of all things made!

There is no man, this deifying day,

But feels the primal blessing in his blood.
There is no woman but disdains-
The sacred impulse of the May
Brightening like sex made sunshine through
her veins

To vail the ensigns of her womanhood.
None but, rejoicing, flaunts them as she

And in the knowledge went imparadised! For look! a magical influence everywhere, Look how the liberal and transfiguring air Washes this inn of memorable meetings, This centre of ravishments and gracious greetings,

Till, through its jocund loveliness of length

A tidal-race of lust from shore to shore, A brimming reach of beauty met with strength,

It shines and sounds like some miraculous dream,

Some vision multitudinous and agleam,
Of happiness as it shall be evermore!
Praise God for giving

Through this His messenger among the days

His word the life He gave is thrice-worth living!

For Pan, the bountiful, imperious PanNot dead, not dead, as impotent dreamers feigned,

But the gay genius of a million Mays
Renewing his beneficent endeavour! -
Still reigns and triumphs, as he hath tri-
umphed and reigned

Since in the dim blue dawn of time
The universal ebb-and-flow began,

To sound his ancient music, and prevails,
By the persuasion of his mighty rhyme,
Here in this radiant and immortal street
Lavishly and omnipotently as ever

In the open hills, the undissembling dales, The laughing-places of the juvenile earth. For lo! the wills of man and woman meet, Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared,

As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befell, To share his shameless, elemental mirth In one great act of faith: while deep and

strong,

Incomparably nerved and cheered,

The enormous heart of London joys to beat

To the measures of his rough, majestic song;

The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell That keeps the rolling universe ensphered, And life, and all for which life lives to

long,

Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

UNDER A STAGNANT SKY
(To James McNeill Whistler)
[1892.]

UNDER a stagnant sky,

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,
The River, jaded and forlorn,
Welters and wanders wearily - wretchedly

- on;

Yet in and out among the ribs

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles

Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,

Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,

Lingers to babble to a broken tune

(Once, O, the unvoiced music of my heart!)

So melancholy a soliloquy

It sounds as it might tell

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, The terror of Time and Change and Death, That wastes this floating, transitory world. What of the incantation

That forced the huddled shapes on yonder shore

To take and wear the night

Like a material majesty?

That touched the shafts of wavering fire
About this miserable welter and wash
(River, O River of Journeys, River of
Dreams!)

Into long, shining signals from the panes
Of an enchanted pleasure-house,

Where life and life might live life lost in life

For ever and evermore?

O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O, the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

FRESH FROM HIS FASTNESSES
[1892.]

FRESH from his fastnesses
Wholesome and spacious,

The North Wind, the mad huntsman,
Halloas on his white hounds

Over the grey, roaring

Reaches and ridges,

The forest of ocean,

The chace of the world.

Hark to the peal

Of the pack in full cry,

As he thongs them before him,
Swarming voluminous,
Weltering, wide-wallowing,
Til in a ruining

Chaos of energy,

Hurled on their quarry,

They crash into foam!

O'd Indefatigable,

Time's right-hand man, the sea
Laughs as in joy

From his millions of wrinkles:
Laughs that his destiny,

Great with the greatness
Of triumphing order,
Shows as a dwarf

By the strength of his heart
And the might of his hands.
Master of masters,

O maker of heroes,
Thunder the brave,
Irresistible message:
'Life is worth Living
Through every grain of it,
From the foundations
To the last edge

Of the cornerstone, death.'

SPACE AND DREAD AND THE

DARK

[1892.]

SPACE and dread and the dark-
Over a livid stretch of sky

Cloud-monsters crawling, like a funeral train

Of huge, primeval presences
Stooping beneath the weight

Of some enormous, rudimentary grief;
While in the haunting loneliness

The far sea waits and wanders with a

sound

As of the trailing skirts of Destiny,
Passing unseen

To some immitigable end
With her grey henchman, Death.

What larve, what spectre is this
Thrilling the wilderness to life
As with the bodily shape of Fear?
What but a desperate sense,
A strong foreboding of those dim
Interminable continents, forlorn
And many-silenced, in a dusk
Inviolable utterly, and dead

As the poor dead it huddles and swarms and styes

In hugger-mugger through eternity?

Life-life-let there be life!

Better a thousand times the roaring hours When wave and wind,

Like the Arch-Murderer in flight

From the Avenger at his heel,

Storms through the desolate fastnesses

And wild waste places of the world!

Life-give me life until the end,
That at the very top of being,

The battle-spirit shouting in my blood,
Out of the reddest hell of the fight
I may be snatched and flung
Into the everlasting lull,

The immortal, incommunicable dream.

THE BARON (reads)

"Ah, Phillis! cruel Phillis!
(I heard a Shepherd say,)
You hold me with your Eyes, and yet
You bid me-Go my way!'

'Ah, Colin! foolish Colin!
(The Maiden answered so,)
If that be All, the Ill is small,
I close them-You may go!'

"But when her Eyes she opened, (Although the Sun it shone,)

She found the Shepherd, had not stirred'Because the Light was gone!'

"Ah, Cupid! wanton Cupid!
'Twas ever thus your Way;

When Maids would bid you ply your
Wings,

You find Excuse to stay!"

THE COUNTESS