free-verse237 lines
A Memorial
by Sir John Collings Squire(F.T.)
The cord broke, and the tent
Slipped, and the silken roof
Lay prone beneath the viewless hoof
Of the deliberate firmament.
Yet cared we not; how should we care?
Knowing that labourless now he breathes
A golden paradisal air
Where with more certain craft he wreathes
Bright braids of words more wise and fair
Than ever his earthly fabrics were,
That his unwavering eyes made fresh,
Purged and regarbed in fadeless flesh,
What he then darkly guessed behold,
And watch with an abiding joy
The eternal mysteries unfold
Which do his now transfigured songs evermore employ.
Brother, yet great thy power;
Thou stood'st as on a tower
Small 'neath the stars yet high above the fields;
In thy alembic song
Imagination strong
Distilled what essences the quest to mortals yields.
This thy reward well-won,
For every morning's sun
Found thy heart's firm allegiance still unshaken;
No temporal ache or smart
Drave Beauty from thy heart,
And by thy mighty mistress never wast forsaken.
Yes; for though stringent was the test,
When that thy trial was bitterest,
Steadfast thou did'st remain; unshod
The harrows of Pain thy feet once trod,
Humiliate as thy sad song tells
Before the vault's white sentinels.
Friendless and faint thou sojourned'st there,
A bowed, brave, timid wanderer,
A lonely nomad of the spirit,
Who did a triple curse inherit,
Hunger, regret and memory.
Yet never did they vanquish thee;
When nighest broken, most alone,
Thy unassuag'd thoughts could clamber
To beauty on her ageless throne;
Thou wert as one in torture chamber
Who sees the blue through an open casement
And hammers his soul to endure the time
Of his corporeal abasement;
Nor writhed'st at thine or others' fault,
But with grim tenderness did salt
Thy cicatrices with a rhyme.
Not the most sable flame of gloom
Could penetrate thy inmost room;
But through the walls thy spirit sucked
Into that cloistral hermitage
Stray lovely things, moonbeams and snows
The far sky shed into thy cage,
And, from the very gutter plucked,
A lost and mired campestral rose.
Ended that purgatorial period,
Filled was thy wallet and thy feet were shod,
The leaden weights were moved, the rack withdrawn,
Thou didst traverse the dewy fields of dawn,
Watch sunsets blazoning over upland turf,
Pull poppies from the frontiers of the surf,
Dwelled'st with love and human eyes
Vigilant, calm and wise.
But still as when thy bark did ride
Derelict on the city's tide,
As then for penury now for pride
Thy bodily senses were denied;
Though they cried out and would not sleep,
Ascetic thou didst armour them
Lest acid pleasure should eat thine art's pure gem.
Hourly the tempter's ambuscades
But thou didst guard the gates and keep
Thy senses' hungry colonnades
Accessible but to Beauty's ministers,
Unlit by any ruby flame but hers.
Immuring so thy spirit eager
Within a body frail and meagre,
Far from the meads of earthly milk and honey,
Yet franchised of more wondrous territories,
Like those poor Bedouin of Arabia the Stony
Who roam spare-fed and hollow-eyed but free
By day to wander and by night to camp
In vast serenity,
Compassed by God's great silent glories
The sun's gold splendour and the moon's white lamp,
Folded and safe from harm
Beneath the mighty sky's protecting arm.
Ha! but the Titan's ardour
Wherewith thou scour'dst the vast,
To spoil the starry larder
Of fruits of heavenly taste!
Urania's fiercest servant,
With thirst as furnace fervent
And serene burning brow,
Worthy of thy great lineage, thou
Drankest without a shudder
In proud humility
Milk from that vast prim'val udder
That swells for such as thee,
Milk from the fountains of the Universe
That cowards deem infected with a curse,
That flushes him who drinks
Nor shrinks
The exalted anguish of diurnal draughts
To a clear vision, more intolerable
In its blissful pain, than love's most ardent shafts,
Of the seats where she doth dwell,
She, whom thou didst confess
Enticed
Thee hot to her throne to press
For the greater glory of Christ
To uplift the curtains of her closed eyes.
Not all was for thy learning
Nor any mortal's else;
Only for thy discerning
Sporadic syllables
Of those supernal glances
Coffer of which her marble countenance is,
Yet vain was not the adventure,
Reluctant though the prize,
Thou gainedst a debenture
On the fringe of Beauty's eyes;
Such fragmentary trophy
As some cross-tunic'd knight
From Saladin or Sophy
May have won in sword's despite,
Not the dear polar shrines
Held captive by the Paynim
But still as fruit of wars
Some stone from Sion's lines,
Some relic that might sain him
Of life's uncounted scars.
Self-dedicated anchorite,
Never disdainful of the dust,
But conscious of the overcoming night
That must engulph the blooms and berries of lust,
And unforgetful of the enveloping day beyond;
Though a sweet show was spread for thy delight
Resolved not to be so fond
As, in ephemeral gauds caparisoned,
To station feet upon a world of vapour
Soft as a dream and fleeting as a taper;
Thou thoughtest nevertheless that thou shouldst occupy
Thyself, as it seemed to thee, most worthily
Until the rapid hour when thou shouldst die;
So, in a world of seemings,
Of shadows and of dreamings,
Busied thyself to fashion and record
Unto the greater glory of thy Lord,
For thy proud lady Beauty His
Most excellent and humble handmaid is.
Says one thy service was too ceremonial,
Thy vestments irised overmuch, thy ritual
Too elaborate and thy rubric too obscure,
Therefore thy gift of chant and orison
Beneath the perfect service men have done.
O but thy notes were pure,
And in a day like this we now endure
No fault it was in thee to set thy camp
Remote, aloof, aloof,
In a far fastness proof
'Gainst the mephitic odours of the swamp.
Which being so, no gain
'Twere to explain
An exquisiteness too meticulous;
Let us but say it pleased thee thus,
Dowered with imagination heavy-fruited,
To raise a column garlanded and fluted
For Him thy heavenly abacus.
This was thine offering thou didst make
In founded hope that He
The craftsman's best would take
Well knowing its unobscure sincerity.
The cord broke and the tent
Slipped and the silken roof
Lay prone beneath the viewless hoof
Of the deliberate firmament.
We still in this terrene abode
Forlorn must tread the difficult road,
And all meek thanks and all belief
Hardly suffice to rampart grief.
For gone is Beauty's votary apostolic
And are her temples now delivered over
To blindworms and libidinous goats that frolic
In places hallowed by that celestial lover.
Save only two or three
With undivided minds like thee,
None now remains that girds
The peregrinal loin,
None reverent of Beauty's holy tongue,
But counterfeiters of her imaged coin,
Iconoclasts, breakers of carven words,
Seekers of worthless treasure in the dung,
Mock mages and cacophonous charlatans,
And pismire artisans
Labouring to make
Such mirrored replicas of Nature's face
As might the surface of a stagnant lake.
Yet we should anger not,
Nor let that be forgot,
The testament of stateliest worth
He left us when he fled the earth.
The mausoleum made of rhyme,
Fair in its unfrequented field,
Which shall invulnerably shield
His memory to the end of Time;
The house with curtain-flaming halls
And roof of gold and jewelled walls
For which the fisher sank his net
Into the deepest pools of speech,
Scooping rich conchs and ribbons wet
That a less venturous could not reach,
The hunter tracked the metaphor
On many a foamy silver coast
A hundred leagues beyond the most
Fabulous Tellurian shore.
Magnificent he was and mild,
Glad to be still and glad to speak,
Daring yet delicate as a child,
Faithful, compassionate and holy,
And, being human, strong and weak,
And full of hope and melancholy.
No more than we, able to shed
Man's nature he inherited,
Neither sin's garrison to kill,
Yet at the last with constancy so great
As the world's vanities to abnegate,
Sternly to will the sacrifice of will
Upon the altars of the Uncreate,
So that he lived before he died
As one who hourly to himself denied
All joys save those that cannot pall,
Who having nothing yet had all.