Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

Ah! must

Designer infinite!—

Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
And now my heart is a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver

Upon the sighful branches of my mind.

Such is; what is to be?

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds:
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;
But not ere him who summoneth

I first have seen, enwound

With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea; "And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

'Strange, piteous, futile thing!

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said) "And human love needs human meriting:

How hast thou merited

Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only. Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,

But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come."

Halts by me that footfall;

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly? "Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."

FROM "SISTER SONGS," 1895

A kiss? for a child's kiss?

Aye, goddess, even for this.
Once, bright Sylviola! in days not far,
Once in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt
My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant—
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,

I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark

Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny;
Stood bound and helplessly

For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour

In night's slow-wheeled car;

Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length

From under the dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.

Then came there past

A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering!-
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live;

E

Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee

The heart of childhood, so divine for me;
And her, through what sore ways,

And what unchildish days,

Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee

Her, child! and innocency,

And spring, and all things that have gone from me,
And that shall never be;

All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss,
Came with thee to my kiss.

And ah! so long myself had strayed afar
From child and woman, and the boon earth's green,
And all wherewith life's face is fair beseen;
Journeying its journey bare

Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun
Unkissed of one;

Almost I had forgot

The healing harms,

And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that
Authentic cestus of two girdling arms;
And I remembered not

The subtle sanctities which dart
From childish lips' unvalued precious brush,
Nor how it makes the sudden lilies push

Between the loosening fibres of the heart.
Then, that thy little kiss
Should be to me all this,

Let workaday wisdom blink sage lids thereat;
Which towers a flight three hedgerows high, poor bat!
And straightway charts me out the empyreal air.

Its chart I wing not by, its canon of worth

Scorn not, nor reck though mine should breed it mirth;
And howso thou and I may be disjoint,

Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point

Over the covert where

Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!

THE END OF IT

(From New Poems, 1897)

She did not love to love; but hated him
For making her to love, and so her whim
From passion taught misprision to begin;
And all this sin

Was because love to cast out had no skill
Self, which was regent still.

Her own self-will made void her own self's will.

JOHN DAVIDSON

[JOHN DAVIDSON, born 1857 and educated at Edinburgh University (1876–7), was for some years a schoolmaster. His first publication was Bruce, a poetic drama (1886). In 1889 he came to London, where he lived by his pen as journalist and writer of fiction. Fleet Street Eclogues (1893, John Lane) first made his reputation as a poet. He was granted a Civil List Pension in 1906. He was found drowned at Penzance in 1909. His output was large. The author of a number of volumes of verse, he was also responsible for many novels and plays.]

To one at least of the definitions of poetry does the work of John Davidson correspond. It is a criticism of life, a series of essays in human values. What, he asks, is the real worth of this mode of thought, of this course of action? How far are the world's accepted standards absolutely valid? These are the questions he puts and answers, sometimes in philosophical narratives, sometimes in more directly discursive dialogues and soliloquies. The greater part of Davidson's work is frankly didactic. He is without that disinterested passion for pure psychology which led Browning to expound so many contradictory philosophies of life, simply because the mind of men had conceived them and that all mental activity, as such, deserves consideration. Davidson is a moralist, not a psychologist. He always sets out to prove something, and each poem is an argument in support of his general philosophy. "It has been said: Ye must be born again.

I say to you: Men must be that they are."

In these lines Davidson has given expression to the fundamental article of his creed. His poems are the elaboration of this theme. There is no one infallible prescription which a man must follow in order to lead a good life. Salvation is to be found in the untrammelled development of personality; there are as many roads to it as there are individuals seeking it. The traditional prejudices of thought, the conditions of modern life, at once artificial and sordid, are fetters which cramp human growth, which, worn long enough, will dwarf and distort the spirit of man. We must away with these, says Davidson. Men must be free to work out their own salvation unhindered by an artificial complication of circumstances.