Of clasping hands - ah me, I wring
Mine, and in a tremble fling
Downward, downward all this paining!
Partings with the sting remaining,
Meetings with a deeper throe
Since the joy is ruined so,
Changes with a fiery burning,
(Shadows upon all the turning,)
Thoughts of . . . with a storm they came,
Them I have not breath to name :
Downward, downward be they cast
In the pit and now at last
My work beneath the moon is done,
And I shall laugh, at rising sun.
But let me pause or ere I cover
All my treasures darkly over:
I will speak not in thine ears,
Only tell my beaded tears
Silently, most silently.
When the last is calmly told,
Let that same moist rosary
With the rest sepulchred be,
Finished now! The darksome mould
Sealeth up the darksome pit.
I will lay no stone on it,
Grasses I will sow instead,
Fit for Queen Titania's tread;
Flowers, encoloured with the sun,
And at a written upon none;
Thus, whenever saileth by
The Lady World of dainty eye,
Not a grief shall here remain,
Silken shoon to damp or stain :
And while she lisps, "I have not seen
Any place more smooth and clean”..
Here she cometh ! — Ha, ha ! — who
Laughs as loud as I can do?
Six thousand winters make her heart a-cold;
The sceptre slanteth from her palsied hold.
She saith, "'Las me! God's word that I was good'
Is taken back to heaven,
From whence when any sound comes, I am riven
By some sharp bolt; and now no angel would
Descend with sweet dew-silence on my mountains,
To glorify the lovely river fountains
That gush along their side:
O weary change ! — I see instead
This human wrath and pride,
These thrones and tombs, judicial wrong and blood,
And bitter words are poured upon mine head
O Earth! thou art a stage for tricks unholy,
A church for most remorseful melancholy;
Thou art so spoilt, we should forget we had
An Eden in thee, wert thou not so sad !'
Sweet children, I am old! ye, every one,
Do keep me from a portion of my sun.
Give praise in change for brightness!
That I may shake my hills in infiniteness
Of breezy laughter, as in youthful mirth,
To hear Earth's sons and daughters praising Earth."
Whereupon a child began
With spirit running up to man
As by angels' shining ladder,
(May he find no cloud above!)
Seeming he had ne'er been sadder
All his days than now,
Sitting in the chestnut grove,
With that joyous overflow
Of smiling from his mouth o'er brow
And cheek and chin, as if the breeze
Leaning tricksy from the trees
Το part his golden hairs, had blown
Into an hundred smiles that one.
"O rare, rare Earth!" he saith, "I will praise thee presently; Not to-day; I have no breath :
I have hunted squirrels three
Two ran down in the furzy hollow
Where I could not see nor follow,
One sits at the top of the filbert-tree,
With a yellow nut and a mock at me:
Presently it shall be done!
When I see which way these two have run,
When the mocking one at the filbert-top
Shall leap adown and beside me stop,
Then, rare Earth, rare Earth,
Will I pause, having known thy worth,
To say all good of thee!"
Next a lover, with a dream
'Neath his waking eyelids hidden,
And a frequent sigh unbidden,
And an idlesse all the day
Beside a wandering stream,
And a silence that is made
Of a word he dares not say,
Shakes slow his pensive head:
Earth, Earth!" saith he,
"If spirits, like thy roses, grew
On one stalk, and winds austere
Could but only blow them near,
Will the pedant name her next?
Crabbed with a crabbèd text
Sits he in his study nook,
With his elbow on a book,
And with stately crossèd knees,
And a wrinkle deeply thrid
Through his lowering brow,
Caused by making proofs enow
That Plato in "Parmenides "
Meant the same Spinoza did,
Or, that an hundred of the groping
Like himself, had made one Homer,
Homeros being a misnomer.
What hath be to do with praise
Of Earth or aught? Whene'er the sloping
Sunbeams through his window daze
His eyes off from the learned phrase,
Straightway he draws close the curtain.
May abstraction keep him dumb!
Were his lips to ope, 'tis certain
"Derivatum est" would come.
Then a mourner moveth pale
In a silence full of wail,
Raising not his sunken head
Because he wandered last that way
With that one beneath the clay :
Weeping not, because that one,
The only one who would have said
"Cease to weep, beloved!" has gone
Whence returneth comfort none.
The silence breaketh suddenly,
Earth, I praise thee!" crieth he, “Thou hast a grave for also me.”
Ha, a poet! know him by
The ecstasy-dilated eye,
Not uncharged with tears that ran
Upward from his heart of man;
By the cheek, from hour to hour,
Kindled bright or sunken wan
With a sense of lonely power;
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