SONNETS.
CLEAVE THOU THE WAVES.
CLEAVE thou the waves that weltering to and fro
Surge multitudinous. The eternal Powers
Of sun, moon, stars, the air, the hurrying hours,
The winged winds, the still dissolving show
Of clouds in calm or storm, for ever flow
Above thee; while the abysmal sea devours
The untold dead insatiate, where it lowers
O’er glooms unfathomed, limitless, below.
No longer on the golden‐fretted sands,
Where many a shallow tide abortive chafes,
Mayst thou delay; life onward sweeping blends
With far‐off heaven: the dauntless one who braves
The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands,
The elements sustain: cleave thou the waves.
MANCHESTER BY NIGHT.
O’ER this huge town, rife with intestine wars,
Whence as from monstrous sacrificial shrines
Pillars of smoke climb heavenward, Night inclines
Black brows majestical with glimmering stars.
Her dewy silence soothes life’s angry jars:
And like a mother’s wan white face, who pines
Above her children’s turbulent ways, so shines
The moon athwart the narrow cloudy bars.
Now toiling multitudes that hustling crush
Each other in the fateful strife for breath
And, hounded on by diverse hungers, rush
Across the prostrate ones that groan beneath,
Are swathed within the universal hush,
As life exchanges semblances with death.
TO THE OBELISK DURING THE GREAT FROST, 1881.
THOU sign‐post of the Desert! Obelisk,
Once fronting in thy monumental pride
Egypt’s fierce sun, that blazing far and wide,
Sheared her of tree and herb, till like a disk
Her waste stretched shadowless, and fraught with risk
To those who with their beasts of burden hied
Across the seas of sand until they spied
Thy pillar, and their flagging hearts grew brisk:
Now reared beside our Thames so wintry gray,
Where blocks of ice drift with the drifting stream,
Thou risest o’er the alien prospect! Say,
Yon dull, blear, rayless orb whose lurid gleam
Tinges the snow‐draped ships and writhing steam,
Is this the sun which fired thine orient day?
TO MEMORY.
OH in this dearth and winter of the soul,
When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall—
Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
One leaf, one blossom from that far‐off spring
When love‐s auroral light lay over all.
Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill
Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years
May, like the gutsy south, breathe o’er the chill
Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears,
Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain,
Will deem, perchance, Love’s springtide come again.
DESPAIR.
THY wings swoop darkening round my soul, Despair!
And on my brain thy shadow seems to brood
And hem me round with stifling solitude,
With chasms of vacuous gloom which are thy lair.
No light of human joy, no song or prayer,
Breaks ever on this chaos, all imbrued
With heart’s‐blood trickling from the multitude
Of sweet hopes slain, or agonizing there.
Lo, wilt thou yield thyself to grief, and roll
Vanquished from thy high seat, imperial brain;
And abdicating turbulent life’s control,
Be dragged a captive bound in sorrow’s chain?
Nay! though my heart is breaking with its pain,
No pain on earth has power to crush my soul.
SLEEP.
LOVE‐CRADLING Night, lit by the lucent moon,
Most pitiful and mother‐hearted Night!
Blest armistice in life’s tumultuous fight,
Resolving discords to a spheral tune!
When tired with heat and strenuous toil of noon,
With ceaseless conflict betwixt might and right,
With ebb and flow of sorrow and delight,
Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon,
To thee, O star‐eyed comforter, we creep,
Earth’s ill‐used step‐children to thee make moan,
As hiding in thy dark skirts’ ample sweep;
—Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own;
For dunned by Death, to whom we owe its loan,
Give us, O Night, the interest paid in sleep.
HAUNTED STREETS.
LO, haply walking in some clattering street—
Where throngs of men and women dumbly pass,
Like shifting pictures seen within a glass
Which leave no trace behind—one seems to meet,
In roads once trodden by our mutual feet,
A face projected from that shadowy mass
Of faces, quite familiar as it was,
Which beaming on us stands out clear and sweet.
The face of faces we again behold
That lit our life when life was very fair,
And leaps our heart toward eyes and mouth and hair:
Oblivious of the undying love grown cold,
Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould,
We stretch out yearning hands and grasp—the air.
ΑΝΑΓΚΗ.
LIKE a great rock which looming o’er the deep
Casts his eternal shadow on the strands,
And veiled in cloud inexorably stands,
While vaulting round his adamantine steep
Embattled breakers clamorously leap,
Sun‐garlanded and hope‐uplifted bands,
But soon with waters shattered in the sands
Slowly recoiling back to ocean creep:
So sternly dost thou tower above us, Fate!
For still our eager hearts exultant beat,
Borne in the hurrying tide of life elate,
And dashing break against thy marble feet.
But would Hope’s rainbow aureole round us fleet,
Without these hurtling shocks of man’s estate?
THE DEAD.
THE dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
Our perishable bodies are the mould
In which their strong imperishable will—
Mortality’s deep yearning to fulfil—
Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.
Vibrations infinite of life in death,
As a star’s travelling light survives its star!
So may we hold our lives, that when we are
The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
They shall not drag us to their judgment bar,
And curse the heritage which we bequeath.
CHRISTMAS EVE.
ALONE—with one fair star for company,
The loveliest star among the hosts of night,
While the grey tide ebbs with the ebbing light—
I pace along the darkening wintry sea.
Now round the yule‐log and the glittering tree
Twinkling with festive tapers, eyes as bright
Sparkle with Christmas joys and young delight,
As each one gathers to his family.
But I—a waif on earth where—er I roam—
Uprooted with life’s bleeding hopes and fears
From that one heart that was my heart’s sole home,
Feel the old pang pierce through the severing years,
And as I think upon the years to come
That fair star trembles through my falling tears.
NEW YEAR’S EVE.
ANOTHER full‐orbed year hath waned to‐day,
And set in the irrevocable past,
And headlong whirled along Time‐s winged blast
My fluttering rose of youth is borne away:
Ah rose once crimson with the blood of May,
A honeyed haunt where bees would break their fast,
I watch thy scattering petals flee aghast,
And all the flickering rose‐lights turning grey.
Poor fool of life! plagued ever with thy vain
Regrets and futile longings! were the years
Not cups o’erbrimming still with gall and tears?
Let go thy puny personal joy and pain!
If youth with all its brief hope disappears,
To deathless hope we must be born again.