{"id":558,"date":"2016-10-06T14:05:07","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T14:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/englishlitvictorianmodern\/?post_type=chapter&p=558"},"modified":"2016-10-06T14:05:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T14:05:07","slug":"from-in-memoriam-a-h-h","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-englishlitvictorianmodern\/chapter\/from-in-memoriam-a-h-h\/","title":{"raw":"from In Memoriam A. H. H.","rendered":"from In Memoriam A. H. H."},"content":{"raw":"

Obiit MDCCCXXXIII[footnote]He died in 1883.[\/footnote]\n\nStrong Son of God, immortal Love,\nWhom we, that have not seen thy face,\nBy faith, and faith alone, embrace,\nBelieving where we cannot prove;\n\nThine are these orbs of light and shade[footnote]Sun and moon.[\/footnote];\nThou madest Life in man and brute;\nThou madest Death; and lo, thy foot\nIs on the skull which thou hast made.\n\nThou wilt not leave us in the dust:\nThou madest man, he knows not why,\nHe thinks he was not made to die;\nAnd thou hast made him: thou art just.\n\nThou seemest human and divine,\nThe highest, holiest manhood, thou.\nOur wills are ours, we know not how;\nOur wills are ours, to make them thine.\n\nOur little systems[footnote]Systems of philosophy.[\/footnote]\u00a0have their day;\nThey have their day and cease to be:\nThey are but broken lights of thee,\nAnd thou, O Lord, art more than they.\n\nWe have but faith: we cannot know;\nFor knowledge is of things we see\nAnd yet we trust it comes from thee,\nA beam in darkness: let it grow.\n\nLet knowledge grow from more to more,\nBut more of reverence in us dwell;\nThat mind and soul, according well,\nMay make one music as before[footnote]Before mind and soul came to sing different tunes with the advent of science.[\/footnote],\n\nBut vaster. We are fools and slight;\nWe mock thee when we do not fear:\nBut help thy foolish ones to bear;\nHelp thy vain worlds to bear thy light.\n\nForgive what seem'd my sin in me;\nWhat seem'd my worth since I began;\nFor merit lives from man to man,\nAnd not from man, O Lord, to thee.\n\nForgive my grief for one removed,\nThy creature, whom I found so fair.\nI trust he lives in thee, and there\nI find him worthier to be loved.\n\nForgive these wild and wandering cries,\nConfusions of a wasted youth;\nForgive them where they fail in truth,\nAnd in thy wisdom make me wise.\n\n\u20141849<\/em>.[footnote]The 11 stanzas that Tennyson wrote as a prologue were written after the rest of the poem was complete.[\/footnote]\n\nI<\/strong>\n\nI held it truth, with him who sings\nTo one clear harp in divers tones[footnote]Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).[\/footnote],\nThat men may rise on stepping-stones\nOf their dead selves to higher things.\n\nBut who shall so forecast the years\nAnd find in loss a gain to match?\nOr reach a hand thro' time to catch\nThe far-off interest of tears?\n\nLet Love clasp Grief lest both be drown'd,\nLet darkness keep her raven gloss:\nAh, sweeter to be drunk with loss,\nTo dance with death, to beat the ground,\n\nThan that the victor Hours should scorn\nThe long result of love, and boast,\n'Behold the man that loved and lost,\nBut all he was is overworn.'\n\n\u00a0\n\nII<\/strong>\n\nOld Yew, which graspest at the stones\nThat name the under-lying dead,\nThy fibres net the dreamless head,\nThy roots are wrapt about the bones.\n\nThe seasons bring the flower again,\nAnd bring the firstling to the flock;\nAnd in the dusk of thee, the clock[footnote]The clock of the church tower behind the yew.[\/footnote]\nBeats out the little lives of men.\n\nO, not for thee the glow, the bloom,\nWho changest not in any gale,\nNor branding summer suns avail\nTo touch thy thousand years of gloom[footnote]The yew tree, symbolic of grief, has a very long life.[\/footnote]:\n\nAnd gazing on thee, sullen tree,\nSick for thy stubborn hardihood,\nI seem to fail from out my blood\nAnd grow incorporate into thee.\n\nIII<\/strong>\n\nO Sorrow, cruel fellowship,\nO Priestess in the vaults of Death,\nO sweet and bitter in a breath,\nWhat whispers from thy lying lip?\n\n'The stars,' she whispers, \u2018blindly run[footnote]cf. \u201cPlanets and Suns run blindly thro\u2019 the sky,\u201d Pope, \u201cEssay on Man\u201d, I. 252.[\/footnote];\nA web is wov'n across the sky;\nFrom out waste places comes a cry,\nAnd murmurs from the dying sun:\n\n'And all the phantom, Nature, stands?\nWith all the music in her tone,\nA hollow echo of my own,?\nA hollow form with empty hands.'\n\nAnd shall I take a thing so blind,\nEmbrace her as my natural good;\nOr crush her, like a vice of blood,\nUpon the threshold of the mind?\n\n\u00a0\n\nIV<\/strong>\n\nTo Sleep I give my powers away;\nMy will is bondsman to the dark;\nI sit within a helmless bark,\nAnd with my heart I muse and say:\n\nO heart, how fares it with thee now,\nThat thou should'st fail from thy desire,\nWho scarcely darest to inquire,\n'What is it makes me beat so low?'\n\nSomething it is which thou hast lost,\nSome pleasure from thine early years.\nBreak, thou deep vase of chilling tears,\nThat grief hath shaken into frost!\n\nSuch clouds of nameless trouble cross\nAll night below the darken'd eyes;\nWith morning wakes the will, and cries,\n'Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.'\n\n\u00a0\n\nV<\/strong>\n\nI sometimes hold it half a sin\nTo put in words the grief I feel;\nFor words, like Nature, half reveal\nAnd half conceal the Soul within.\n\nBut, for the unquiet heart and brain,\nA use in measured language lies;\nThe sad mechanic exercise,\nLike dull narcotics, numbing pain.\n\nIn words, like weeds[footnote]Mourning clothes.[\/footnote], I'll wrap me o'er,\nLike coarsest clothes against the cold:\nBut that large grief which these enfold\nIs given in outline and no more.\n\n\u00a0\n\nVI<\/strong>\n\nOne writes, that 'Other friends remain,'\nThat \u2018Loss is common to the race'?\nAnd common is the commonplace,\nAnd vacant chaff well meant for grain.\n\nThat loss is common would not make\nMy own less bitter, rather more:\nToo common! Never morning wore\nTo evening, but some heart did break.\n\nO father, wheresoe'er thou be,\nWho pledgest now thy gallant son;\nA shot, ere half thy draught be done,\nHath still'd the life that beat from thee.\n\nO mother, praying God will save\nThy sailor,\u2014while thy head is bow'd,\nHis heavy-shotted hammock-shroud[footnote]Sailors were often buried in their own hammocks, which were weighted to allow the corpse to sink.[\/footnote]\nDrops in his vast and wandering grave.\n\nYe know no more than I who wrought\nAt that last hour to please him well;\nWho mused on all I had to tell,\nAnd something written, something thought;\n\nExpecting still his advent home;\nAnd ever met him on his way\nWith wishes, thinking, 'here to-day,'\nOr 'here to-morrow will he come.'\n\nO somewhere, meek, unconscious dove[footnote]Tennyson\u2019s sister Emilia (1811-87), who had been engaged to Hallam. She later married Richard Jesse, a British naval officer, and their eldest son was given the names Arthur Henry Hallam.[\/footnote],\nThat sittest ranging golden hair;\nAnd glad to find thyself so fair,\nPoor child, that waitest for thy love!\n\nFor now her father's chimney glows\nIn expectation of a guest;\nAnd thinking \u2018this will please him best,'\nShe takes a riband or a rose;\n\nFor he will see them on to-night;\nAnd with the thought her colour burns;\nAnd, having left the glass, she turns\nOnce more to set a ringlet right;\n\nAnd, even when she turn'd, the curse\nHad fallen, and her future Lord\nWas drown'd in passing thro' the ford,\nOr kill'd in falling from his horse.\n\nO what to her shall be the end?\nAnd what to me remains of good?\nTo her, perpetual maidenhood,\nAnd unto me no second friend.\n\nVII<\/strong>\n\nDark house[footnote]The house at 67 Wimpole Street where Hallam had lived.[\/footnote], by which once more I stand\nHere in the long unlovely street,\nDoors, where my heart was used to beat\nSo quickly, waiting for a hand,\n\nA hand that can be clasp'd no more?\nBehold me, for I cannot sleep,\nAnd like a guilty thing I creep\nAt earliest morning to the door.\n\nHe is not here; but far away\nThe noise of life begins again,\nAnd ghastly thro' the drizzling rain\nOn the bald street breaks the blank day.\n\nVIII<\/strong>\n\nA happy lover who has come\nTo look on her that loves him well,\nWho 'lights and rings the gateway bell,\nAnd learns her gone and far from home;\n\nHe saddens, all the magic light\nDies off at once from bower and hall,\nAnd all the place is dark, and all\nThe chambers emptied of delight:\n\nSo find I every pleasant spot\nIn which we two were wont to meet,\nThe field, the chamber, and the street,\nFor all is dark where thou art not.\n\nYet as that other, wandering there\nIn those deserted walks, may find\nA flower beat with rain and wind,\nWhich once she foster'd up with care;\n\nSo seems it in my deep regret,\nO my forsaken heart, with thee\nAnd this poor flower of poesy\nWhich little cared for fades not yet.\n\nBut since it pleased a vanish'd eye[footnote]Hallam wrote a positive review of Tennyson\u2019s early poems in 1831.[\/footnote],\nI go to plant it on his tomb,\nThat if it can it there may bloom,\nOr, dying, there at least may die.\n\n\u00a0\n\nIX<\/strong>\n\nFair ship, that from the Italian shore[footnote]Hallam\u2019s body was brought back by ship from Trieste, the Italian port.[\/footnote]\nSailest the placid ocean-plains\nWith my lost Arthur's loved remains,\nSpread thy full wings, and waft him o'er.\n\nSo draw him home to those that mourn\nIn vain; a favourable speed\nRuffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead\nThro' prosperous floods his holy urn.\n\nAll night no ruder air perplex\nThy sliding keel, till Phosphor[footnote]The morning star.[\/footnote], bright\nAs our pure love, thro' early light\nShall glimmer on the dewy decks.\n\nSphere all your lights around, above;\nSleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;\nSleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,\nMy friend, the brother of my love;\n\nMy Arthur, whom I shall not see\nTill all my widow'd race be run;\nDear as the mother to the son,\nMore than my brothers are to me.\n\n\u00a0\n\nX<\/strong>\n\nI hear the noise about thy keel;\nI hear the bell struck in the night:\nI see the cabin-window bright;\nI see the sailor at the wheel.\n\nThou bring'st the sailor to his wife,\nAnd travell'd men from foreign lands;\nAnd letters unto trembling hands;\nAnd, thy dark freight, a vanish'd life.\n\nSo bring him; we have idle dreams:\nThis look of quiet flatters thus\nOur home-bred fancies. O to us,\nThe fools of habit, sweeter seems\n\nTo rest beneath the clover sod,\nThat takes the sunshine and the rains,\nOr where the kneeling hamlet drains\nThe chalice of the grapes of God;\n\nThan if with thee the roaring wells\nShould gulf him fathom-deep in brine;\nAnd hands so often clasp'd in mine,\nShould toss with tangle and with shells.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXI<\/strong>\n\nCalm is the morn without a sound,\nCalm as to suit a calmer grief,\nAnd only thro' the faded leaf\nThe chestnut pattering to the ground:\n\nCalm and deep peace on this high wold[footnote]An upland plain.[\/footnote],\nAnd on these dews that drench the furze[footnote]A spiny evergreen shrub.[\/footnote],\nAnd all the silvery gossamers\nThat twinkle into green and gold:\n\nCalm and still light on yon great plain\nThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,\nAnd crowded farms and lessening towers,\nTo mingle with the bounding main:\n\nCalm and deep peace in this wide air,\nThese leaves that redden to the fall;\nAnd in my heart, if calm at all,\nIf any calm, a calm despair:\n\nCalm on the seas, and silver sleep,\nAnd waves that sway themselves in rest,\nAnd dead calm in that noble breast\nWhich heaves but with the heaving deep.\n\nXII<\/strong>\n\nLo, as a dove when up she springs\nTo bear thro' Heaven a tale of woe,\nSome dolorous message knit below\nThe wild pulsation of her wings;\n\nLike her I go; I cannot stay;\nI leave this mortal ark behind,\nA weight of nerves without a mind,\nAnd leave the cliffs, and haste away\n\nO'er ocean-mirrors rounded large,\nAnd reach the glow of southern skies,\nAnd see the sails at distance rise,\nAnd linger weeping on the marge,\n\nAnd saying; \u2018Comes he thus, my friend?\nIs this the end of all my care?'\nAnd circle moaning in the air:\n'Is this the end? Is this the end?'\n\nAnd forward dart again, and play\nAbout the prow, and back return\nTo where the body sits, and learn\nThat I have been an hour away.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXIII<\/strong>\n\nTears of the widower, when he sees\nA late-lost form that sleep reveals,\nAnd moves his doubtful arms, and feels\nHer place is empty, fall like these;\n\nWhich weep a loss for ever new,\nA void where heart on heart reposed;\nAnd, where warm hands have prest and closed,\nSilence, till I be silent too.\n\nWhich weep the comrade of my choice,\nAn awful thought, a life removed,\nThe human-hearted man I loved,\nA Spirit, not a breathing voice.\n\nCome, Time, and teach me, many years,\nI do not suffer in a dream;\nFor now so strange do these things seem,\nMine eyes have leisure for their tears;\n\nMy fancies time to rise on wing,\nAnd glance about the approaching sails,\nAs tho' they brought but merchants' bales,\nAnd not the burthen that they bring.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXIV<\/strong>\n\nIf one should bring me this report,\nThat thou hadst touch'd the land to-day,\nAnd I went down unto the quay,\nAnd found thee lying in the port;\n\nAnd standing, muffled round with woe,\nShould see thy passengers in rank\nCome stepping lightly down the plank,\nAnd beckoning unto those they know;\n\nAnd if along with these should come\nThe man I held as half-divine;\nShould strike a sudden hand in mine,\nAnd ask a thousand things of home;\n\nAnd I should tell him all my pain,\nAnd how my life had droop'd of late,\nAnd he should sorrow o'er my state\nAnd marvel what possess'd my brain;\n\nAnd I perceived no touch of change,\nNo hint of death in all his frame,\nBut found him all in all the same,\nI should not feel it to be strange.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXV<\/strong>\n\nTo-night the winds begin to rise\nAnd roar from yonder dropping day:\nThe last red leaf is whirl'd away,\nThe rooks are blown about the skies;\n\nThe forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,\nThe cattle huddled on the lea;\nAnd wildly dash'd on tower and tree\nThe sunbeam strikes along the world:\n\nAnd but for fancies, which aver\nThat all thy motions gently pass\nAthwart a plane of molten glass[footnote]Calm sea.[\/footnote],\nI scarce could brook the strain and stir\n\nThat makes the barren branches loud;\nAnd but for fear it is not so,\nThe wild unrest that lives in woe\nWould dote and pore on yonder cloud\n\nThat rises upward always higher,\nAnd onward drags a labouring breast,\nAnd topples round the dreary west,\nA looming bastion fringed with fire.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXIX<\/strong>\n\nThe Danube to the Severn[footnote]Hallam died in Vienna, on the Danube River, and was buried in the church at Clevedon on the Severn River in southwest England.[\/footnote]\u00a0gave\nThe darken'd heart that beat no more;\nThey laid him by the pleasant shore,\nAnd in the hearing of the wave.\n\nThere twice a day the Severn fills;\nThe salt sea-water passes by,\nAnd hushes half the babbling Wye,\nAnd makes a silence in the hills.\n\nThe Wye is hush'd nor moved along,\nAnd hush'd my deepest grief of all,\nWhen fill'd with tears that cannot fall,\nI brim with sorrow drowning song.\n\nThe tide flows down, the wave again\nIs vocal in its wooded walls;\nMy deeper anguish also falls,\nAnd I can speak a little then.\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u00a0\n\nXXIV<\/strong>\n\nAnd was the day of my delight\nAs pure and perfect as I say?\nThe very source and fount of Day\nIs dash'd with wandering isles of night.\n\nIf all was good and fair we met,\nThis earth had been the Paradise\nIt never look'd to human eyes\nSince our first Sun arose and set.\n\nAnd is it that the haze of grief\nMakes former gladness loom so great?\nThe lowness of the present state,\nThat sets the past in this relief?\n\nOr that the past will always win\nA glory from its being far;\nAnd orb into the perfect star\nWe saw not, when we moved therein?\n\n\u00a0\n\nXXVII<\/strong>\n\nI envy not in any moods\nThe captive void of noble rage,\nThe linnet born within the cage,\nThat never knew the summer woods:\n\nI envy not the beast that takes\nHis license in the field of time,\nUnfetter'd by the sense of crime,\nTo whom a conscience never wakes;\n\nNor, what may count itself as blest,\nThe heart that never plighted troth\nBut stagnates in the weeds of sloth;\nNor any want-begotten rest.\n\nI hold it true, whate'er befall;\nI feel it, when I sorrow most;\n'Tis better to have loved and lost\nThan never to have loved at all.\n\nXXVIII<\/strong>\n\nThe time draws near the birth of Christ[footnote]As the first Christmas (1833) after Hallam\u2019s death approaches, the poet listens to the church bells from four villages. A.C. Bradley suggests that the second part of \"In Memoriam\" begins here in XXVIII. A Commentary on Tennyson\u2019s In Memoriam.<\/em>[\/footnote]:\nThe moon is hid; the night is still;\nThe Christmas bells from hill to hill\nAnswer each other in the mist.\n\nFour voices of four hamlets round,\nFrom far and near, on mead and moor,\nSwell out and fail, as if a door\nWere shut between me and the sound:\n\nEach voice four changes[footnote]Arrangements of church bell ringing.[\/footnote]\u00a0on the wind,\nThat now dilate, and now decrease,\nPeace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,\nPeace and goodwill, to all mankind.\n\nThis year I slept and woke with pain,\nI almost wish'd no more to wake,\nAnd that my hold on life would break\nBefore I heard those bells again:\n\nBut they my troubled spirit rule,\nFor they controll'd me when a boy;\nThey bring me sorrow touch'd with joy,\nThe merry merry bells of Yule.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXXX<\/strong>\n\nWith trembling fingers did we weave\nThe holly round the Chrismas hearth;\nA rainy cloud possess'd the earth,\nAnd sadly fell our Christmas-eve.\n\nAt our old pastimes in the hall\nWe gambol'd, making vain pretence\nOf gladness, with an awful sense\nOf one mute Shadow watching all.\n\nWe paused: the winds were in the beech:\nWe heard them sweep the winter land;\nAnd in a circle hand-in-hand\nSat silent, looking each at each.\n\nThen echo-like our voices rang;\nWe sung, tho' every eye was dim,\nA merry song we sang with him\nLast year: impetuously we sang:\n\nWe ceased: a gentler feeling crept\nUpon us: surely rest is meet:\n\u2018They rest,' we said, \u2018their sleep is sweet,'\nAnd silence follow'd, and we wept.\n\nOur voices took a higher range;\nOnce more we sang: \u2018They do not die\nNor lose their mortal sympathy,\nNor change to us, although they change;\n\n'Rapt from the fickle and the frail\nWith gather'd power, yet the same,\nPierces the keen seraphic flame\nFrom orb to orb, from veil to veil.'\n\nRise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,\nDraw forth the cheerful day from night:\nO Father, touch the east, and light\nThe light that shone when Hope was born.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXXXIV<\/strong>\n\nMy own dim life should teach me this,\nThat life shall live for evermore,\nElse earth is darkness at the core,\nAnd dust and ashes all that is;\n\nThis round of green, this orb of flame,\nFantastic beauty such as lurks\nIn some wild Poet, when he works\nWithout a conscience or an aim.\n\nWhat then were God to such as I?\n'Twere hardly worth my while to choose\nOf things all mortal, or to use\nA tattle patience ere I die;\n\n'Twere best at once to sink to peace,\nLike birds the charming serpent draws,\nTo drop head-foremost in the jaws\nOf vacant darkness and to cease.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXXXIX<\/strong>\n\nOld warder[footnote]The churchyard yew. This section was written in 1868; cf. II.[\/footnote]\u00a0of these buried bones,\nAnd answering now my random stroke\nWith fruitful cloud and living smoke,\nDark yew, that graspest at the stones\n\nAnd dippest toward the dreamless head,\nTo thee too comes the golden hour\nWhen flower is feeling after flower;\nBut Sorrow?fixt upon the dead,\n\nAnd darkening the dark graves of men,?\nWhat whisper'd from her lying lips?\nThy gloom is kindled at the tips,\nAnd passes into gloom again.\n\n\u00a0\n\nL<\/strong>\n\nBe near me when my light is low,\nWhen the blood creeps, and the nerves prick\nAnd tingle; and the heart is sick,\nAnd all the wheels of Being slow.\n\nBe near me when the sensuous frame\nIs rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;\nAnd Time, a maniac scattering dust,\nAnd Life, a Fury slinging flame.\n\nBe near me when my faith is dry,\nAnd men the flies of latter spring,\nThat lay their eggs, and sting and sing\nAnd weave their petty cells and die.\n\nBe near me when I fade away,\nTo point the term of human strife,\nAnd on the low dark verge of life\nThe twilight of eternal day.\n\nLIV<\/strong>\n\nOh yet we trust that somehow good\nWill be the final goal of ill,\nTo pangs of nature, sins of will,\nDefects of doubt, and taints of blood;\n\nThat nothing walks with aimless feet;\nThat not one life shall be destroy'd,\nOr cast as rubbish to the void,\nWhen God hath made the pile complete;\n\nThat not a worm is cloven in vain;\nThat not a moth with vain desire\nIs shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,\nOr but subserves another's gain.\n\nBehold, we know not anything;\nI can but trust that good shall fall\nAt last\u2014far off\u2014at last, to all,\nAnd every winter change to spring.\n\nSo runs my dream: but what am I?\nAn infant crying in the night:\nAn infant crying for the light:\nAnd with no language but a cry.\n\n\u00a0\n\nLV<\/strong>\n\nThe wish, that of the living whole\nNo life may fail beyond the grave,\nDerives it not from what we have\nThe likest God within the soul[footnote]The inner consciousness\u2014the divine in man [Tennyson\u2019s note].[\/footnote]?\n\nAre God and Nature then at strife,\nThat Nature lends such evil dreams?\nSo careful of the type[footnote]Species; i.e., Nature ensures the preservation of the species but is indifferent to the fate of the individual.[\/footnote]\u00a0she seems,\nSo careless of the single life;\n\nThat I, considering everywhere\nHer secret meaning in her deeds,\nAnd finding that of fifty seeds\nShe often brings but one to bear,\n\nI falter where I firmly trod,\nAnd falling with my weight of cares\nUpon the great world's altar-stairs\nThat slope thro' darkness up to God,\n\nI stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,\nAnd gather dust and chaff, and call\nTo what I feel is Lord of all,\nAnd faintly trust the larger hope[footnote]Tennyson\u2019s son Hallam writes in the biography of his father, \u201c...by \u2018the larger hope\u2019 that the whole human race would through, perhaps, ages of suffering, be at length purified and saved\u201d (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir,<\/em> I, 321-22).[\/footnote].\n\n\u00a0\n\nLVI<\/strong>\n\n'So careful of the type?' but no.\nFrom scarp\u00e8d cliff and quarried stone\nShe[footnote]Nature.[\/footnote]\u00a0cries, \u2018A thousand types are gone[footnote]The new science of geology, particularly in Charles Lyell\u2019s Principles of Geology<\/em> (1830) , which Tennyson had read, was providing evidence that countless forms of life have disappeared from the earth.[\/footnote]:\nI care for nothing, all shall go.\n\n'Thou makest thine appeal to me:\nI bring to life, I bring to death:\nThe spirit does but mean the breath:\nI know no more.' And he, shall he,\n\nMan, her last work, who seem'd so fair,\nSuch splendid purpose in his eyes,\nWho roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,\nWho built him fanes[footnote]Temples.[\/footnote]\u00a0of fruitless prayer,\n\nWho trusted God was love indeed\nAnd love Creation's final law?\nTho' Nature, red in tooth and claw\nWith ravine, shriek'd against his creed?\n\nWho loved, who suffer'd countless ills,\nWho battled for the True, the Just,\nBe blown about the desert dust,\nOr seal'd within the iron hills?\n\nNo more? A monster then, a dream,\nA discord. Dragons of the prime,\nThat tare each other in their slime,\nWere mellow music match'd with him.\n\nO life as futile, then, as frail!\nO for thy voice to soothe and bless!\nWhat hope of answer, or redress?\nBehind the veil, behind the veil.\n\n\u00a0\n\nLIX<\/strong>\n\nO Sorrow, wilt thou live with me\nNo casual mistress, but a wife,\nMy bosom-friend and half of life;\nAs I confess it needs must be;\n\nO Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,\nBe sometimes lovely like a bride,\nAnd put thy harsher moods aside,\nIf thou wilt have me wise and good.\n\nMy centred passion cannot move,\nNor will it lessen from to-day;\nBut I'll have leave at times to play\nAs with the creature of my love;\n\nAnd set thee forth, for thou art mine,\nWith so much hope for years to come,\nThat, howsoe'er I know thee, some\nCould hardly tell what name were thine.\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u00a0\n\nLXVII<\/strong>\n\nWhen on my bed the moonlight falls,\nI know that in thy place of rest\nBy that broad water of the west[footnote]Hallam was buried near the Severn River in southwestern England.[\/footnote],\nThere comes a glory on the walls;\n\nThy marble bright in dark appears,\nAs slowly steals a silver flame\nAlong the letters of thy name,\nAnd o'er the number of thy years.\n\nThe mystic glory swims away;\nFrom off my bed the moonlight dies;\nAnd closing eaves of wearied eyes\nI sleep till dusk is dipt in gray;\n\nAnd then I know the mist is drawn\nA lucid veil from coast to coast,\nAnd in the dark church like a ghost\nThy tablet glimmers to the dawn.\n\n\u00a0\n\nLXXII<\/strong>\n\nRisest thou thus, dim dawn, again[footnote]The first anniversary of Hallam\u2019s death,\u00a0September 15, 1884.[\/footnote],\nAnd howlest, issuing out of night,\nWith blasts that blow the poplar white,\nAnd lash with storm the streaming pane?\n\nDay, when my crown'd estate[footnote]State of happiness.[\/footnote]\u00a0begun\nTo pine in that reverse of doom[footnote]Reversal of fortunes as the result of Hallam\u2019s death.[\/footnote],\nWhich sicken'd every living bloom,\nAnd blurr'd the splendour of the sun;\n\nWho usherest in the dolorous hour\nWith thy quick tears that make the rose\nPull sideways, and the daisy close\nHer crimson fringes to the shower;\n\nWho might'st have heaved a windless flame\nUp the deep East, or, whispering, play'd\nA chequer-work of beam and shade\nAlong the hills, yet look'd the same.\n\nAs wan, as chill, as wild as now;\nDay, mark'd as with some hideous crime,\nWhen the dark hand struck down thro' time,\nAnd cancell'd nature's best: but thou,\n\nLift as thou may'st thy burthen'd brows\nThro' clouds that drench the morning star,\nAnd whirl the ungarner'd sheaf afar,\nAnd sow the sky with flying boughs,\n\nAnd up thy vault with roaring sound\nClimb thy thick noon, disastrous day;\nTouch thy dull goal of joyless gray,\nAnd hide thy shame beneath the ground.\n\n\u00a0\n\nLXXVIII<\/strong>\n\nAgain at Christmas[footnote]The second Christmas (1884) after Hallam\u2019s death.[\/footnote]\u00a0did we weave\nThe holly round the Christmas hearth;\nThe silent snow possess'd the earth,\nAnd calmly fell our Christmas-eve:\n\nThe yule-clog[footnote]Yule log.[\/footnote]\u00a0sparkled keen with frost,\nNo wing of wind the region swept,\nBut over all things brooding slept\nThe quiet sense of something lost.\n\nAs in the winters left behind,\nAgain our ancient games had place,\nThe mimic picture's[footnote]Tableau-vivant; literally, \u201cliving picture,\"\u00a0a silent and motionless group of people arranged to represent a scene or incident.[\/footnote]\u00a0breathing grace,\nAnd dance and song and hoodman-blind.\n\nWho show'd a token of distress?\nNo single tear, no mark of pain:\nO sorrow, then can sorrow wane?\nO grief, can grief be changed to less?\n\nO last regret, regret can die!\nNo\u2014mixt with all this mystic frame,\nHer deep relations are the same,\nBut with long use her tears are dry.\n\nLXXX<\/strong>\n\nIf any vague desire should rise,\nThat holy Death ere Arthur died\nHad moved me kindly from his side,\nAnd dropt the dust on tearless eyes;\n\nThen fancy shapes, as fancy can,\nThe grief my loss in him had wrought,\nA grief as deep as life or thought,\nBut stay'd in peace with God and man.\n\nI make a picture in the brain;\nI hear the sentence that he speaks;\nHe bears the burthen of the weeks\nBut turns his burthen into gain.\n\nHis credit thus shall set me free;\nAnd, influence-rich to soothe and save,\nUnused example from the grave\nReach out dead hands to comfort me.\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u00a0\n\nLXXXVI<\/strong>\n\nSweet after showers[footnote]This poem signals \u201cthe full new life which is beginning to revive in the poet\u2019s heart and to dispel the last shadow of the evil dreams which Nature seemed to lend when he was under the sway of...Doubt and Death\u201d (Bradley, 223).[\/footnote], ambrosial air,\nThat rollest from the gorgeous gloom\nOf evening over brake and bloom\nAnd meadow, slowly breathing bare\n\nThe round of space, and rapt below\nThro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,\nAnd shadowing down the horned flood\nIn ripples, fan my brows and blow\n\nThe fever from my cheek, and sigh\nThe full new life that feeds thy breath\nThroughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,\nIll brethren, let the fancy fly\n\nFrom belt to belt of crimson seas\nOn leagues of odour streaming far,\nTo where in yonder orient star\nA hundred spirits whisper \u2018Peace.'\n\n\u00a0\n\nLXXXIX<\/strong>\n\nWitch-elms that counterchange the floor\nOf this flat lawn with dusk and bright;\nAnd thou, with all thy breadth and height\nOf foliage, towering sycamore;\n\nHow often, hither wandering down,\nMy Arthur found your shadows fair,\nAnd shook to all the liberal air\nThe dust and din and steam of town:\n\nHe brought an eye for all he saw;\nHe mixt in all our simple sports;\nThey pleased him, fresh from brawling courts\nAnd dusty purlieus of the law[footnote]After leaving Cambridge, Hallam became a law student in London.[\/footnote].\n\nO joy to him in this retreat,\nInmantled in ambrosial dark,\nTo drink the cooler air, and mark\nThe landscape winking thro' the heat:\n\nO sound to rout the brood of cares,\nThe sweep of scythe in morning dew,\nThe gust that round the garden flew,\nAnd tumbled half the mellowing pears!\n\nO bliss, when all in circle drawn\nAbout him, heart and ear were fed\nTo hear him, as he lay and read\nThe Tuscan poets[footnote]Dante and Petrarch.[\/footnote]\u00a0on the lawn:\n\nOr in the all-golden afternoon\nA guest, or happy sister, sung,\nOr here she brought the harp and flung\nA ballad to the brightening moon:\n\nNor less it pleased in livelier moods,\nBeyond the bounding hill to stray,\nAnd break the livelong summer day\nWith banquet in the distant woods;\n\nWhereat we glanced from theme to theme,\nDiscuss'd the books to love or hate,\nOr touch'd the changes of the state,\nOr threaded some Socratic dream;\n\nBut if I praised the busy town,\nHe loved to rail against it still,\nFor \u2018ground in yonder social mill\nWe rub each other's angles down,\n\n'And merge,' he said, \u2018in form and gloss\nThe picturesque of man and man.'\nWe talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,\nThe wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,\n\nOr cool'd within the glooming wave;\nAnd last, returning from afar,\nBefore the crimson-circled star\nHad fall'n into her father's grave,\n\nAnd brushing ankle-deep in flowers,\nWe heard behind the woodbine veil\nThe milk that bubbled in the pail,\nAnd buzzings of the honied hours.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXCIII<\/strong>\n\nI shall not see thee. Dare I say\nNo spirit ever brake the band\nThat stays him from the native land\nWhere first he walk'd when claspt in clay?\n\nNo visual shade of some one lost,\nBut he, the Spirit himself, may come\nWhere all the nerve of sense is numb;\nSpirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.\n\nO, therefore from thy sightless range\nWith gods in unconjectured bliss,\nO, from the distance of the abyss\nOf tenfold-complicated change,\n\nDescend, and touch, and enter; hear\nThe wish too strong for words to name;\nThat in this blindness of the frame\nMy Ghost may feel that thine is near.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXCIV<\/strong>\n\nHow pure at heart and sound in head,\nWith what divine affections bold\nShould be the man whose thought would hold\nAn hour's communion with the dead.\n\nIn vain shalt thou, or any, call\nThe spirits from their golden day,\nExcept, like them, thou too canst say,\nMy spirit is at peace with all.\n\nThey haunt the silence of the breast,\nImaginations calm and fair,\nThe memory like a cloudless air,\nThe conscience as a sea at rest:\n\nBut when the heart is full of din,\nAnd doubt beside the portal waits,\nThey can but listen at the gates\nAnd hear the household jar within.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXCV<\/strong>\n\nBy night we linger'd on the lawn,\nFor underfoot the herb was dry;\nAnd genial warmth; and o'er the sky\nThe silvery haze of summer drawn;\n\nAnd calm that let the tapers burn\nUnwavering: not a cricket chirr'd:\nThe brook alone far-off was heard,\nAnd on the board the fluttering urn[footnote]Vessel for boiling water for tea or coffee.[\/footnote]:\n\nAnd bats went round in fragrant skies,\nAnd wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes\nThat haunt the dusk, with ermine capes\nAnd woolly breasts and beaded eyes;\n\nWhile now we sang old songs that peal'd\nFrom knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease,\nThe white kine[footnote]Cows.[\/footnote]\u00a0glimmer'd, and the trees\nLaid their dark arms about the field.\n\nBut when those others, one by one,\nWithdrew themselves from me and night,\nAnd in the house light after light\nWent out, and I was all alone,\n\nA hunger seized my heart; I read\nOf that glad year which once had been,\nIn those fall'n leaves which kept their green,\nThe noble letters of the dead:\n\nAnd strangely on the silence broke\nThe silent-speaking words, and strange\nWas love's dumb cry defying change\nTo test his worth; and strangely spoke\n\nThe faith, the vigour, bold to dwell\nOn doubts that drive the coward back,\nAnd keen thro' wordy snares to track\nSuggestion to her inmost cell.\n\nSo word by word, and line by line,\nThe dead man touch'd me from the past,\nAnd all at once it seem'd at last\nThe living soul was flash'd on mine,\n\nAnd mine in his was wound, and whirl'd\nAbout empyreal heights of thought,\nAnd came on that which is, and caught\nThe deep pulsations of the world,\n\nAeonian music[footnote]Age-old music.[\/footnote]\u00a0measuring out\nThe steps of Time\u2014the shocks of Chance\u2014\nThe blows of Death. At length my trance\nWas cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.\n\nVague words! but ah, how hard to frame\nIn matter-moulded forms of speech,\nOr ev'n for intellect to reach\nThro' memory that which I became:\n\nTill now the doubtful dusk reveal'd\nThe knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,\nThe white kine glimmer'd, and the trees\nLaid their dark arms about the field;\n\nAnd suck'd from out the distant gloom\nA breeze began to tremble o'er\nThe large leaves of the sycamore,\nAnd fluctuate all the still perfume,\n\nAnd gathering freshlier overhead,\nRock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung\nThe heavy-folded rose, and flung\nThe lilies to and fro, and said,\n\n'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away;\nAnd East and West, without a breath,\nMixt their dim lights, like life and death,\nTo broaden into boundless day.\n\n\u00a0\n\nXCVI<\/strong>\n\nYou say, but with no touch of scorn,\nSweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes\nAre tender over drowning flies,\nYou tell me, doubt is Devil-born.\n\nI know not: one[footnote]Hallam.[\/footnote]\u00a0indeed I knew\nIn many a subtle question versed,\nWho touch'd a jarring lyre at first,\nBut ever strove to make it true:\n\nPerplext in faith, but pure in deeds,\nAt last he beat his music out.\nThere lives more faith in honest doubt,\nBelieve me, than in half the creeds.\n\nHe fought his doubts and gather'd strength,\nHe would not make his judgment blind,\nHe faced the spectres of the mind\nAnd laid them: thus he came at length\n\nTo find a stronger faith his own;\nAnd Power was with him in the night,\nWhich makes the darkness and the light,\nAnd dwells not in the light alone,\n\nBut in the darkness and the cloud,\nAs over Sinai's peaks of old,\nWhile Israel made their gods of gold,\nAltho' the trumpet blew so loud.\n\nXCIX<\/strong>\n\nRisest thou thus, dim dawn, again[footnote]September 15, 1835, the second anniversary of Hallam\u2019s death.[\/footnote],\nSo loud with voices of the birds,\nSo thick with lowings of the herds,\nDay, when I lost the flower of men;\n\nWho tremblest thro' thy darkling red\nOn yon swoll'n brook that bubbles fast\nBy meadows breathing of the past,\nAnd woodlands holy to the dead;\n\nWho murmurest in the foliaged eaves\nA song that slights the coming care,\nAnd Autumn laying here and there\nA fiery finger on the leaves;\n\nWho wakenest with thy balmy breath\nTo myriads on the genial earth,\nMemories of bridal, or of birth,\nAnd unto myriads more, of death.\n\nO, wheresoever those may be,\nBetwixt the slumber of the poles,\nTo-day they count as kindred souls;\nThey know me not, but mourn with me.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCIV<\/strong>\n\nThe time draws near the birth of Christ[footnote]The third Christmas since Hallam\u2019s death.[\/footnote];\nThe moon is hid, the night is still;\nA single church[footnote]Waltham Abbey.[\/footnote]\u00a0below the hill\nIs pealing, folded in the mist.\n\nA single peal of bells below,\nThat wakens at this hour of rest\nA single murmur in the breast,\nThat these are not the bells I know[footnote]Tennyson\u2019s family has moved to a new home in Epping, Surrey, where they spent their first Christmas in 1837, four years after Hallam\u2019s death.[\/footnote].\n\nLike strangers' voices here they sound,\nIn lands where not a memory strays,\nNor landmark breathes of other days,\nBut all is new unhallow'd ground.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCV<\/strong>\n\nTo-night ungather'd let us leave\nThis laurel, let this holly stand:\nWe live within the stranger's land,\nAnd strangely falls our Christmas-eve.\n\nOur father's dust is left alone\nAnd silent under other snows:\nThere in due time the woodbine blows,\nThe violet comes, but we are gone.\n\nNo more shall wayward grief abuse\nThe genial hour with mask and mime,\nFor change of place, like growth of time,\nHas broke the bond of dying use.\n\nLet cares that petty shadows cast,\nBy which our lives are chiefly proved,\nA little spare the night I loved,\nAnd hold it solemn to the past.\n\nBut let no footstep beat the floor,\nNor bowl of wassail mantle warm;\nFor who would keep an ancient form\nThro' which the spirit breathes no more?\n\nBe neither song, nor game, nor feast;\nNor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown;\nNo dance, no motion, save alone\nWhat lightens in the lucid east\n\nOf rising worlds by yonder wood.\nLong sleeps the summer in the seed;\nRun out your measured arcs, and lead\nThe closing cycle rich in good.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCVI<\/strong>\n\nRing out, wild bells, to the wild sky,\nThe flying cloud, the frosty light:\nThe year is dying in the night;\nRing out, wild bells, and let him die[footnote]New Year\u2019s resolutions. Tennyson is determined \u201cto re-shape his attitude to Hallam\u2019s death: \u2018let him die\u2026.Year by year, Tennyson\u2019s cause has been to keep Hallam\u2019s memory alive; all of a sudden, he sounds resolved to let his memory fade in the comforting knowledge that he lives forever in Christ\u2019 (\u2018Ring in the Christ that is meant to be\u2019)\u201d (Cash 9).[\/footnote].\n\nRing out the old, ring in the new,\nRing, happy bells, across the snow:\nThe year is going, let him go;\nRing out the false, ring in the true.\n\nRing out the grief that saps the mind,\nFor those that here we see no more;\nRing out the feud of rich and poor,\nRing in redress to all mankind.\n\nRing out a slowly dying cause,\nAnd ancient forms of party strife;\nRing in the nobler modes of life,\nWith sweeter manners, purer laws.\n\nRing out the want, the care, the sin,\nThe faithless coldness of the times;\nRing out, ring out my mournful rhymes,\nBut ring the fuller minstrel in.\n\nRing out false pride in place and blood,\nThe civic slander and the spite;\nRing in the love of truth and right,\nRing in the common love of good.\n\nRing out old shapes of foul disease;\nRing out the narrowing lust of gold;\nRing out the thousand wars of old,\nRing in the thousand years of peace.\n\nRing in the valiant man and free,\nThe larger heart, the kindlier hand;\nRing out the darkness of the land,\nRing in the Christ that is to be.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCVII<\/strong>\n\nIt is the day when he was born[footnote]February 1, Hallam\u2019s birthday.[\/footnote],\nA bitter day that early sank\nBehind a purple-frosty bank\nOf vapour, leaving night forlorn.\n\nThe time admits not flowers or leaves\nTo deck the banquet. Fiercely flies\nThe blast of North and East, and ice\nMakes daggers at the sharpen'd eaves,\n\nAnd bristles all the brakes and thorns\nTo yon hard crescent, as she hangs\nAbove the wood which grides and clangs\nIts leafless ribs and iron horns\n\nTogether, in the drifts that pass\nTo darken on the rolling brine\nThat breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,\nArrange the board and brim the glass;\n\nBring in great logs and let them lie,\nTo make a solid core of heat;\nBe cheerful-minded, talk and treat\nOf all things ev'n as he were by;\n\nWe keep the day. With festal cheer,\nWith books and music, surely we\nWill drink to him, whate'er he be,\nAnd sing the songs he loved to hear.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCVIII<\/strong>\n\nI will not shut me from my kind,\nAnd, lest I stiffen into stone,\nI will not eat my heart alone,\nNor feed with sighs a passing wind:\n\nWhat profit lies in barren faith,\nAnd vacant yearning, tho' with might\nTo scale the heaven's highest height,\nOr dive below the wells of Death?\n\nWhat find I in the highest place,\nBut mine own phantom chanting hymns?\nAnd on the depths of death there swims\nThe reflex of a human face.\n\nI'll rather take what fruit may be\nOf sorrow under human skies:\n'Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,\nWhatever wisdom sleep with thee.\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXV<\/strong>\n\nNow fades the last long streak of snow,\nNow burgeons every maze of quick[footnote]Hawthorn hedge.[\/footnote]\nAbout the flowering squares[footnote]Fields.[\/footnote], and thick\nBy ashen roots the violets blow.\n\nNow rings the woodland loud and long,\nThe distance takes a lovelier hue,\nAnd drown'd in yonder living blue\nThe lark becomes a sightless song.\n\nNow dance the lights on lawn and lea,\nThe flocks are whiter down the vale,\nAnd milkier every milky sail\nOn winding stream or distant sea;\n\nWhere now the seamew[footnote]Seabird.[\/footnote]\u00a0pipes, or dives\nIn yonder greening gleam, and fly\nThe happy birds, that change their sky\nTo build and brood; that live their lives\n\nFrom land to land; and in my breast\nSpring wakens too; and my regret\nBecomes an April violet,\nAnd buds and blossoms like the rest.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXVII<\/strong>\n\nO days and hours, your work is this\nTo hold me from my proper place,\nA little while from his embrace,\nFor fuller gain of after bliss:\n\nThat out of distance might ensue\nDesire of nearness doubly sweet;\nAnd unto meeting when we meet,\nDelight a hundredfold accrue,\n\nFor every grain of sand that runs,\nAnd every span of shade that steals,\nAnd every kiss of toothed wheels,\nAnd all the courses of the suns.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXVIII<\/strong>\n\nCont\u00e8mplate all this work of Time[footnote]The Titan giant Cronus (Saturn) regarded as the god of devouring time.[\/footnote],\nThe giant labouring in his youth;\nNor dream of human love and truth,\nAs dying Nature's earth and lime[footnote]Do not dream that love and fidelity are merely transient things.[\/footnote];\n\nBut trust that those we call the dead\nAre breathers of an ampler day\nFor ever nobler ends. They[footnote]Scientists.[\/footnote]\u00a0say,\nThe solid earth whereon we tread\n\nIn tracts of fluent heat began,\nAnd grew to seeming-random forms,\nThe seeming prey of cyclic storms,\nTill at the last arose the man;\n\nWho throve and branch'd from clime to clime,\nThe herald of a higher race,\nAnd of himself in higher place,\nIf so he type[footnote]Prefigures.[\/footnote]\u00a0this work of time\n\nWithin himself, from more to more;\nOr, crown'd with attributes of woe\nLike glories, move his course, and show\nThat life is not as idle ore,\n\nBut iron dug from central gloom,\nAnd heated hot with burning fears,\nAnd dipt in baths of hissing tears,\nAnd batter'd with the shocks of doom\n\nTo shape and use. Arise and fly\nThe reeling Faun[footnote]Faunus. Also Pan, Roman god of country life, half-beast, half man.[\/footnote], the sensual feast;\nMove upward, working out the beast,\nAnd let the ape and tiger die.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXIX<\/strong>\n\nDoors[footnote]The doors of Hallam\u2019s London house at 67 Wimpole Street, to which Tennyson has returned.[\/footnote], where my heart was used to beat\nSo quickly, not as one that weeps\nI come once more; the city sleeps;\nI smell the meadow in the street;\n\nI hear a chirp of birds; I see\nBetwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn\nA light-blue lane of early dawn,\nAnd think of early days and thee,\n\nAnd bless thee, for thy lips are bland,\nAnd bright the friendship of thine eye;\nAnd in my thoughts with scarce a sigh\nI take the pressure of thine hand.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXX<\/strong>\n\nI trust I have not wasted breath:\nI think we are not wholly brain,\nMagnetic mockeries[footnote]Automatons.[\/footnote]; not in vain,\nLike Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;\n\nNot only cunning casts in clay:\nLet Science prove we are, and then\nWhat matters Science unto men,\nAt least to me? I would not stay.\n\nLet him, the wiser man who springs\nHereafter, up from childhood shape\nHis action like the greater ape,\nBut I was born to other things.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXXIII<\/strong>\n\nThere rolls the deep where grew the tree.\nO earth, what changes hast thou seen!\nThere where the long street roars, hath been\nThe stillness of the central sea.\n\nThe hills are shadows, and they flow\nFrom form to form, and nothing stands;\nThey melt like mist, the solid lands,\nLike clouds they shape themselves and go.\n\nBut in my spirit will I dwell,\nAnd dream my dream, and hold it true;\nFor tho' my lips may breathe adieu,\nI cannot think the thing farewell.\n\n\u00a0\n\nCXXIV<\/strong>\n\nThat which we dare invoke to bless;\nOur dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;\nHe, They, One, All; within, without;\nThe Power in darkness whom we guess,\u2014\n\nI found Him not in world or sun,\nOr eagle's wing, or insect's eye[footnote]Tennyson rejects the argument of God\u2019s existence from the design of nature and hence the need for a designer.[\/footnote],\nNor thro' the questions men may try,\nThe petty cobwebs we have spun.\n\nIf e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,\nI heard a voice \u2018believe no more,'\nAnd heard an ever-breaking shore\nThat tumbled in the Godless deep,\n\nA warmth within the breast would melt\nThe freezing reason's colder part,\nAnd like a man in wrath the heart\nStood up and answer'd \u2018I have felt.'\n\nNo, like a child in doubt and fear:\nBut that blind clamour made me wise;\nThen was I as a child that cries,\nBut, crying, knows his father near;\n\nAnd what I am beheld again\nWhat is, and no man understands;\nAnd out of darkness came the hands\nThat reach thro' nature, moulding men.\n\nCXXX<\/strong>\n\nThy voice is on the rolling air;\nI hear thee where the waters run;\nThou standest in the rising sun,\nAnd in the setting thou art fair.\n\nWhat art thou then? I cannot guess;\nBut tho' I seem in star and flower\nTo feel thee some diffusive power,\nI do not therefore love thee less.\n\nMy love involves the love before;\nMy love is vaster passion now;\nTho' mix'd with God and Nature thou,\nI seem to love thee more and more.\n\nFar off thou art, but ever nigh;\nI have thee still, and I rejoice;\nI prosper, circled with thy voice;\nI shall not lose thee tho' I die.\n\nCXXXI<\/strong>\n\nO living will[footnote]Tennyson equated this with \u201cFree-will, the higher and enduring part of man\u201d (Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir<\/em>, I, 319).[\/footnote]\u00a0that shalt endure\nWhen all that seems shall suffer shock,\nRise in the spiritual rock[footnote]Christ. cf. 1 Corinthians: 10.4[\/footnote],\nFlow thro' our deeds and make them pure,\n\nThat we may lift from out of dust\nA voice as unto him that hears,\nA cry above the conquer'd years\nTo one that with us works, and trust,\n\nWith faith that comes of self-control,\nThe truths that never can be proved\nUntil we close with all we loved,\nAnd all we flow from, soul in soul.\n\n\u00a0\n\n[from Epilogue[footnote]The poem comes full circle with a description of the wedding of Tennyson\u2019s sister Cecilia to Edward Lushington and to the birth which will result from their union.[\/footnote]]\n\n...And rise, O moon, from yonder down,\nTill over down and over dale\nAll night the shining vapour sail\nAnd pass the silent-lighted town,\n\nThe white-faced halls, the glancing rills,\nAnd catch at every mountain head,\nAnd o'er the friths that branch and spread\nTheir sleeping silver thro' the hills;\n\nAnd touch with shade the bridal doors,\nWith tender gloom the roof, the wall;\nAnd breaking let the splendour fall\nTo spangle all the happy shores\n\nBy which they rest, and ocean sounds,\nAnd, star and system rolling past,\nA soul shall draw from out the vast\nAnd strike his being into bounds,\n\nAnd, moved thro' life of lower phase,\nResult in man, be born and think,\nAnd act and love, a closer link\nBetwixt us and the crowning race\n\nOf those that, eye to eye, shall look\nOn knowledge, under whose command\nIs Earth and Earth's, and in their hand\nIs Nature like an open book;\n\nNo longer half-akin to brute,\nFor all we thought and loved and did,\nAnd hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed\nOf what in them is flower and fruit;\n\nWhereof the man, that with me trod\nThis planet, was a noble type\nAppearing ere the times were ripe,\nThat friend of mine who lives in God,\n\nThat God, which ever lives and loves,\nOne God, one law, one element,\nAnd one far-off divine event,\nTo which the whole creation moves.\n\n\u20141833-50, 1850\n<\/p>

\n\n\u00a0\n\n<\/div>","rendered":"

Obiit MDCCCXXXIII[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
\nWhom we, that have not seen thy face,
\nBy faith, and faith alone, embrace,
\nBelieving where we cannot prove;<\/p>\n

Thine are these orbs of light and shade[2]<\/sup><\/a>;
\nThou madest Life in man and brute;
\nThou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
\nIs on the skull which thou hast made.<\/p>\n

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
\nThou madest man, he knows not why,
\nHe thinks he was not made to die;
\nAnd thou hast made him: thou art just.<\/p>\n

Thou seemest human and divine,
\nThe highest, holiest manhood, thou.
\nOur wills are ours, we know not how;
\nOur wills are ours, to make them thine.<\/p>\n

Our little systems[3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0have their day;
\nThey have their day and cease to be:
\nThey are but broken lights of thee,
\nAnd thou, O Lord, art more than they.<\/p>\n

We have but faith: we cannot know;
\nFor knowledge is of things we see
\nAnd yet we trust it comes from thee,
\nA beam in darkness: let it grow.<\/p>\n

Let knowledge grow from more to more,
\nBut more of reverence in us dwell;
\nThat mind and soul, according well,
\nMay make one music as before[4]<\/sup><\/a>,<\/p>\n

But vaster. We are fools and slight;
\nWe mock thee when we do not fear:
\nBut help thy foolish ones to bear;
\nHelp thy vain worlds to bear thy light.<\/p>\n

Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;
\nWhat seem’d my worth since I began;
\nFor merit lives from man to man,
\nAnd not from man, O Lord, to thee.<\/p>\n

Forgive my grief for one removed,
\nThy creature, whom I found so fair.
\nI trust he lives in thee, and there
\nI find him worthier to be loved.<\/p>\n

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,
\nConfusions of a wasted youth;
\nForgive them where they fail in truth,
\nAnd in thy wisdom make me wise.<\/p>\n

\u20141849<\/em>.[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

I<\/strong><\/p>\n

I held it truth, with him who sings
\nTo one clear harp in divers tones[6]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nThat men may rise on stepping-stones
\nOf their dead selves to higher things.<\/p>\n

But who shall so forecast the years
\nAnd find in loss a gain to match?
\nOr reach a hand thro’ time to catch
\nThe far-off interest of tears?<\/p>\n

Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,
\nLet darkness keep her raven gloss:
\nAh, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
\nTo dance with death, to beat the ground,<\/p>\n

Than that the victor Hours should scorn
\nThe long result of love, and boast,
\n‘Behold the man that loved and lost,
\nBut all he was is overworn.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

II<\/strong><\/p>\n

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
\nThat name the under-lying dead,
\nThy fibres net the dreamless head,
\nThy roots are wrapt about the bones.<\/p>\n

The seasons bring the flower again,
\nAnd bring the firstling to the flock;
\nAnd in the dusk of thee, the clock[7]<\/sup><\/a>
\nBeats out the little lives of men.<\/p>\n

O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
\nWho changest not in any gale,
\nNor branding summer suns avail
\nTo touch thy thousand years of gloom[8]<\/sup><\/a>:<\/p>\n

And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
\nSick for thy stubborn hardihood,
\nI seem to fail from out my blood
\nAnd grow incorporate into thee.<\/p>\n

III<\/strong><\/p>\n

O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
\nO Priestess in the vaults of Death,
\nO sweet and bitter in a breath,
\nWhat whispers from thy lying lip?<\/p>\n

‘The stars,’ she whispers, \u2018blindly run[9]<\/sup><\/a>;
\nA web is wov’n across the sky;
\nFrom out waste places comes a cry,
\nAnd murmurs from the dying sun:<\/p>\n

‘And all the phantom, Nature, stands?
\nWith all the music in her tone,
\nA hollow echo of my own,?
\nA hollow form with empty hands.’<\/p>\n

And shall I take a thing so blind,
\nEmbrace her as my natural good;
\nOr crush her, like a vice of blood,
\nUpon the threshold of the mind?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

IV<\/strong><\/p>\n

To Sleep I give my powers away;
\nMy will is bondsman to the dark;
\nI sit within a helmless bark,
\nAnd with my heart I muse and say:<\/p>\n

O heart, how fares it with thee now,
\nThat thou should’st fail from thy desire,
\nWho scarcely darest to inquire,
\n‘What is it makes me beat so low?’<\/p>\n

Something it is which thou hast lost,
\nSome pleasure from thine early years.
\nBreak, thou deep vase of chilling tears,
\nThat grief hath shaken into frost!<\/p>\n

Such clouds of nameless trouble cross
\nAll night below the darken’d eyes;
\nWith morning wakes the will, and cries,
\n‘Thou shalt not be the fool of loss.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

V<\/strong><\/p>\n

I sometimes hold it half a sin
\nTo put in words the grief I feel;
\nFor words, like Nature, half reveal
\nAnd half conceal the Soul within.<\/p>\n

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
\nA use in measured language lies;
\nThe sad mechanic exercise,
\nLike dull narcotics, numbing pain.<\/p>\n

In words, like weeds[10]<\/sup><\/a>, I’ll wrap me o’er,
\nLike coarsest clothes against the cold:
\nBut that large grief which these enfold
\nIs given in outline and no more.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

VI<\/strong><\/p>\n

One writes, that ‘Other friends remain,’
\nThat \u2018Loss is common to the race’?
\nAnd common is the commonplace,
\nAnd vacant chaff well meant for grain.<\/p>\n

That loss is common would not make
\nMy own less bitter, rather more:
\nToo common! Never morning wore
\nTo evening, but some heart did break.<\/p>\n

O father, wheresoe’er thou be,
\nWho pledgest now thy gallant son;
\nA shot, ere half thy draught be done,
\nHath still’d the life that beat from thee.<\/p>\n

O mother, praying God will save
\nThy sailor,\u2014while thy head is bow’d,
\nHis heavy-shotted hammock-shroud[11]<\/sup><\/a>
\nDrops in his vast and wandering grave.<\/p>\n

Ye know no more than I who wrought
\nAt that last hour to please him well;
\nWho mused on all I had to tell,
\nAnd something written, something thought;<\/p>\n

Expecting still his advent home;
\nAnd ever met him on his way
\nWith wishes, thinking, ‘here to-day,’
\nOr ‘here to-morrow will he come.’<\/p>\n

O somewhere, meek, unconscious dove[12]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nThat sittest ranging golden hair;
\nAnd glad to find thyself so fair,
\nPoor child, that waitest for thy love!<\/p>\n

For now her father’s chimney glows
\nIn expectation of a guest;
\nAnd thinking \u2018this will please him best,’
\nShe takes a riband or a rose;<\/p>\n

For he will see them on to-night;
\nAnd with the thought her colour burns;
\nAnd, having left the glass, she turns
\nOnce more to set a ringlet right;<\/p>\n

And, even when she turn’d, the curse
\nHad fallen, and her future Lord
\nWas drown’d in passing thro’ the ford,
\nOr kill’d in falling from his horse.<\/p>\n

O what to her shall be the end?
\nAnd what to me remains of good?
\nTo her, perpetual maidenhood,
\nAnd unto me no second friend.<\/p>\n

VII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dark house[13]<\/sup><\/a>, by which once more I stand
\nHere in the long unlovely street,
\nDoors, where my heart was used to beat
\nSo quickly, waiting for a hand,<\/p>\n

A hand that can be clasp’d no more?
\nBehold me, for I cannot sleep,
\nAnd like a guilty thing I creep
\nAt earliest morning to the door.<\/p>\n

He is not here; but far away
\nThe noise of life begins again,
\nAnd ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
\nOn the bald street breaks the blank day.<\/p>\n

VIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

A happy lover who has come
\nTo look on her that loves him well,
\nWho ‘lights and rings the gateway bell,
\nAnd learns her gone and far from home;<\/p>\n

He saddens, all the magic light
\nDies off at once from bower and hall,
\nAnd all the place is dark, and all
\nThe chambers emptied of delight:<\/p>\n

So find I every pleasant spot
\nIn which we two were wont to meet,
\nThe field, the chamber, and the street,
\nFor all is dark where thou art not.<\/p>\n

Yet as that other, wandering there
\nIn those deserted walks, may find
\nA flower beat with rain and wind,
\nWhich once she foster’d up with care;<\/p>\n

So seems it in my deep regret,
\nO my forsaken heart, with thee
\nAnd this poor flower of poesy
\nWhich little cared for fades not yet.<\/p>\n

But since it pleased a vanish’d eye[14]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nI go to plant it on his tomb,
\nThat if it can it there may bloom,
\nOr, dying, there at least may die.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

IX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fair ship, that from the Italian shore[15]<\/sup><\/a>
\nSailest the placid ocean-plains
\nWith my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
\nSpread thy full wings, and waft him o’er.<\/p>\n

So draw him home to those that mourn
\nIn vain; a favourable speed
\nRuffle thy mirror’d mast, and lead
\nThro’ prosperous floods his holy urn.<\/p>\n

All night no ruder air perplex
\nThy sliding keel, till Phosphor[16]<\/sup><\/a>, bright
\nAs our pure love, thro’ early light
\nShall glimmer on the dewy decks.<\/p>\n

Sphere all your lights around, above;
\nSleep, gentle heavens, before the prow;
\nSleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now,
\nMy friend, the brother of my love;<\/p>\n

My Arthur, whom I shall not see
\nTill all my widow’d race be run;
\nDear as the mother to the son,
\nMore than my brothers are to me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

X<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hear the noise about thy keel;
\nI hear the bell struck in the night:
\nI see the cabin-window bright;
\nI see the sailor at the wheel.<\/p>\n

Thou bring’st the sailor to his wife,
\nAnd travell’d men from foreign lands;
\nAnd letters unto trembling hands;
\nAnd, thy dark freight, a vanish’d life.<\/p>\n

So bring him; we have idle dreams:
\nThis look of quiet flatters thus
\nOur home-bred fancies. O to us,
\nThe fools of habit, sweeter seems<\/p>\n

To rest beneath the clover sod,
\nThat takes the sunshine and the rains,
\nOr where the kneeling hamlet drains
\nThe chalice of the grapes of God;<\/p>\n

Than if with thee the roaring wells
\nShould gulf him fathom-deep in brine;
\nAnd hands so often clasp’d in mine,
\nShould toss with tangle and with shells.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XI<\/strong><\/p>\n

Calm is the morn without a sound,
\nCalm as to suit a calmer grief,
\nAnd only thro’ the faded leaf
\nThe chestnut pattering to the ground:<\/p>\n

Calm and deep peace on this high wold[17]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nAnd on these dews that drench the furze[18]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nAnd all the silvery gossamers
\nThat twinkle into green and gold:<\/p>\n

Calm and still light on yon great plain
\nThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,
\nAnd crowded farms and lessening towers,
\nTo mingle with the bounding main:<\/p>\n

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
\nThese leaves that redden to the fall;
\nAnd in my heart, if calm at all,
\nIf any calm, a calm despair:<\/p>\n

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
\nAnd waves that sway themselves in rest,
\nAnd dead calm in that noble breast
\nWhich heaves but with the heaving deep.<\/p>\n

XII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lo, as a dove when up she springs
\nTo bear thro’ Heaven a tale of woe,
\nSome dolorous message knit below
\nThe wild pulsation of her wings;<\/p>\n

Like her I go; I cannot stay;
\nI leave this mortal ark behind,
\nA weight of nerves without a mind,
\nAnd leave the cliffs, and haste away<\/p>\n

O’er ocean-mirrors rounded large,
\nAnd reach the glow of southern skies,
\nAnd see the sails at distance rise,
\nAnd linger weeping on the marge,<\/p>\n

And saying; \u2018Comes he thus, my friend?
\nIs this the end of all my care?’
\nAnd circle moaning in the air:
\n‘Is this the end? Is this the end?’<\/p>\n

And forward dart again, and play
\nAbout the prow, and back return
\nTo where the body sits, and learn
\nThat I have been an hour away.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tears of the widower, when he sees
\nA late-lost form that sleep reveals,
\nAnd moves his doubtful arms, and feels
\nHer place is empty, fall like these;<\/p>\n

Which weep a loss for ever new,
\nA void where heart on heart reposed;
\nAnd, where warm hands have prest and closed,
\nSilence, till I be silent too.<\/p>\n

Which weep the comrade of my choice,
\nAn awful thought, a life removed,
\nThe human-hearted man I loved,
\nA Spirit, not a breathing voice.<\/p>\n

Come, Time, and teach me, many years,
\nI do not suffer in a dream;
\nFor now so strange do these things seem,
\nMine eyes have leisure for their tears;<\/p>\n

My fancies time to rise on wing,
\nAnd glance about the approaching sails,
\nAs tho’ they brought but merchants’ bales,
\nAnd not the burthen that they bring.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

If one should bring me this report,
\nThat thou hadst touch’d the land to-day,
\nAnd I went down unto the quay,
\nAnd found thee lying in the port;<\/p>\n

And standing, muffled round with woe,
\nShould see thy passengers in rank
\nCome stepping lightly down the plank,
\nAnd beckoning unto those they know;<\/p>\n

And if along with these should come
\nThe man I held as half-divine;
\nShould strike a sudden hand in mine,
\nAnd ask a thousand things of home;<\/p>\n

And I should tell him all my pain,
\nAnd how my life had droop’d of late,
\nAnd he should sorrow o’er my state
\nAnd marvel what possess’d my brain;<\/p>\n

And I perceived no touch of change,
\nNo hint of death in all his frame,
\nBut found him all in all the same,
\nI should not feel it to be strange.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XV<\/strong><\/p>\n

To-night the winds begin to rise
\nAnd roar from yonder dropping day:
\nThe last red leaf is whirl’d away,
\nThe rooks are blown about the skies;<\/p>\n

The forest crack’d, the waters curl’d,
\nThe cattle huddled on the lea;
\nAnd wildly dash’d on tower and tree
\nThe sunbeam strikes along the world:<\/p>\n

And but for fancies, which aver
\nThat all thy motions gently pass
\nAthwart a plane of molten glass[19]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nI scarce could brook the strain and stir<\/p>\n

That makes the barren branches loud;
\nAnd but for fear it is not so,
\nThe wild unrest that lives in woe
\nWould dote and pore on yonder cloud<\/p>\n

That rises upward always higher,
\nAnd onward drags a labouring breast,
\nAnd topples round the dreary west,
\nA looming bastion fringed with fire.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Danube to the Severn[20]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0gave
\nThe darken’d heart that beat no more;
\nThey laid him by the pleasant shore,
\nAnd in the hearing of the wave.<\/p>\n

There twice a day the Severn fills;
\nThe salt sea-water passes by,
\nAnd hushes half the babbling Wye,
\nAnd makes a silence in the hills.<\/p>\n

The Wye is hush’d nor moved along,
\nAnd hush’d my deepest grief of all,
\nWhen fill’d with tears that cannot fall,
\nI brim with sorrow drowning song.<\/p>\n

The tide flows down, the wave again
\nIs vocal in its wooded walls;
\nMy deeper anguish also falls,
\nAnd I can speak a little then.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XXIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

And was the day of my delight
\nAs pure and perfect as I say?
\nThe very source and fount of Day
\nIs dash’d with wandering isles of night.<\/p>\n

If all was good and fair we met,
\nThis earth had been the Paradise
\nIt never look’d to human eyes
\nSince our first Sun arose and set.<\/p>\n

And is it that the haze of grief
\nMakes former gladness loom so great?
\nThe lowness of the present state,
\nThat sets the past in this relief?<\/p>\n

Or that the past will always win
\nA glory from its being far;
\nAnd orb into the perfect star
\nWe saw not, when we moved therein?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XXVII<\/strong><\/p>\n

I envy not in any moods
\nThe captive void of noble rage,
\nThe linnet born within the cage,
\nThat never knew the summer woods:<\/p>\n

I envy not the beast that takes
\nHis license in the field of time,
\nUnfetter’d by the sense of crime,
\nTo whom a conscience never wakes;<\/p>\n

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
\nThe heart that never plighted troth
\nBut stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
\nNor any want-begotten rest.<\/p>\n

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
\nI feel it, when I sorrow most;
\n‘Tis better to have loved and lost
\nThan never to have loved at all.<\/p>\n

XXVIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

The time draws near the birth of Christ[21]<\/sup><\/a>:
\nThe moon is hid; the night is still;
\nThe Christmas bells from hill to hill
\nAnswer each other in the mist.<\/p>\n

Four voices of four hamlets round,
\nFrom far and near, on mead and moor,
\nSwell out and fail, as if a door
\nWere shut between me and the sound:<\/p>\n

Each voice four changes[22]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0on the wind,
\nThat now dilate, and now decrease,
\nPeace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
\nPeace and goodwill, to all mankind.<\/p>\n

This year I slept and woke with pain,
\nI almost wish’d no more to wake,
\nAnd that my hold on life would break
\nBefore I heard those bells again:<\/p>\n

But they my troubled spirit rule,
\nFor they controll’d me when a boy;
\nThey bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
\nThe merry merry bells of Yule.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XXX<\/strong><\/p>\n

With trembling fingers did we weave
\nThe holly round the Chrismas hearth;
\nA rainy cloud possess’d the earth,
\nAnd sadly fell our Christmas-eve.<\/p>\n

At our old pastimes in the hall
\nWe gambol’d, making vain pretence
\nOf gladness, with an awful sense
\nOf one mute Shadow watching all.<\/p>\n

We paused: the winds were in the beech:
\nWe heard them sweep the winter land;
\nAnd in a circle hand-in-hand
\nSat silent, looking each at each.<\/p>\n

Then echo-like our voices rang;
\nWe sung, tho’ every eye was dim,
\nA merry song we sang with him
\nLast year: impetuously we sang:<\/p>\n

We ceased: a gentler feeling crept
\nUpon us: surely rest is meet:
\n\u2018They rest,’ we said, \u2018their sleep is sweet,’
\nAnd silence follow’d, and we wept.<\/p>\n

Our voices took a higher range;
\nOnce more we sang: \u2018They do not die
\nNor lose their mortal sympathy,
\nNor change to us, although they change;<\/p>\n

‘Rapt from the fickle and the frail
\nWith gather’d power, yet the same,
\nPierces the keen seraphic flame
\nFrom orb to orb, from veil to veil.’<\/p>\n

Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,
\nDraw forth the cheerful day from night:
\nO Father, touch the east, and light
\nThe light that shone when Hope was born.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XXXIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

My own dim life should teach me this,
\nThat life shall live for evermore,
\nElse earth is darkness at the core,
\nAnd dust and ashes all that is;<\/p>\n

This round of green, this orb of flame,
\nFantastic beauty such as lurks
\nIn some wild Poet, when he works
\nWithout a conscience or an aim.<\/p>\n

What then were God to such as I?
\n‘Twere hardly worth my while to choose
\nOf things all mortal, or to use
\nA tattle patience ere I die;<\/p>\n

‘Twere best at once to sink to peace,
\nLike birds the charming serpent draws,
\nTo drop head-foremost in the jaws
\nOf vacant darkness and to cease.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XXXIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Old warder[23]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0of these buried bones,
\nAnd answering now my random stroke
\nWith fruitful cloud and living smoke,
\nDark yew, that graspest at the stones<\/p>\n

And dippest toward the dreamless head,
\nTo thee too comes the golden hour
\nWhen flower is feeling after flower;
\nBut Sorrow?fixt upon the dead,<\/p>\n

And darkening the dark graves of men,?
\nWhat whisper’d from her lying lips?
\nThy gloom is kindled at the tips,
\nAnd passes into gloom again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

L<\/strong><\/p>\n

Be near me when my light is low,
\nWhen the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
\nAnd tingle; and the heart is sick,
\nAnd all the wheels of Being slow.<\/p>\n

Be near me when the sensuous frame
\nIs rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
\nAnd Time, a maniac scattering dust,
\nAnd Life, a Fury slinging flame.<\/p>\n

Be near me when my faith is dry,
\nAnd men the flies of latter spring,
\nThat lay their eggs, and sting and sing
\nAnd weave their petty cells and die.<\/p>\n

Be near me when I fade away,
\nTo point the term of human strife,
\nAnd on the low dark verge of life
\nThe twilight of eternal day.<\/p>\n

LIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
\nWill be the final goal of ill,
\nTo pangs of nature, sins of will,
\nDefects of doubt, and taints of blood;<\/p>\n

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
\nThat not one life shall be destroy’d,
\nOr cast as rubbish to the void,
\nWhen God hath made the pile complete;<\/p>\n

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
\nThat not a moth with vain desire
\nIs shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
\nOr but subserves another’s gain.<\/p>\n

Behold, we know not anything;
\nI can but trust that good shall fall
\nAt last\u2014far off\u2014at last, to all,
\nAnd every winter change to spring.<\/p>\n

So runs my dream: but what am I?
\nAn infant crying in the night:
\nAn infant crying for the light:
\nAnd with no language but a cry.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LV<\/strong><\/p>\n

The wish, that of the living whole
\nNo life may fail beyond the grave,
\nDerives it not from what we have
\nThe likest God within the soul[24]<\/sup><\/a>?<\/p>\n

Are God and Nature then at strife,
\nThat Nature lends such evil dreams?
\nSo careful of the type[25]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0she seems,
\nSo careless of the single life;<\/p>\n

That I, considering everywhere
\nHer secret meaning in her deeds,
\nAnd finding that of fifty seeds
\nShe often brings but one to bear,<\/p>\n

I falter where I firmly trod,
\nAnd falling with my weight of cares
\nUpon the great world’s altar-stairs
\nThat slope thro’ darkness up to God,<\/p>\n

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
\nAnd gather dust and chaff, and call
\nTo what I feel is Lord of all,
\nAnd faintly trust the larger hope[26]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LVI<\/strong><\/p>\n

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
\nFrom scarp\u00e8d cliff and quarried stone
\nShe[27]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0cries, \u2018A thousand types are gone[28]<\/sup><\/a>:
\nI care for nothing, all shall go.<\/p>\n

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
\nI bring to life, I bring to death:
\nThe spirit does but mean the breath:
\nI know no more.’ And he, shall he,<\/p>\n

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
\nSuch splendid purpose in his eyes,
\nWho roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
\nWho built him fanes[29]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0of fruitless prayer,<\/p>\n

Who trusted God was love indeed
\nAnd love Creation’s final law?
\nTho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
\nWith ravine, shriek’d against his creed?<\/p>\n

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
\nWho battled for the True, the Just,
\nBe blown about the desert dust,
\nOr seal’d within the iron hills?<\/p>\n

No more? A monster then, a dream,
\nA discord. Dragons of the prime,
\nThat tare each other in their slime,
\nWere mellow music match’d with him.<\/p>\n

O life as futile, then, as frail!
\nO for thy voice to soothe and bless!
\nWhat hope of answer, or redress?
\nBehind the veil, behind the veil.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

O Sorrow, wilt thou live with me
\nNo casual mistress, but a wife,
\nMy bosom-friend and half of life;
\nAs I confess it needs must be;<\/p>\n

O Sorrow, wilt thou rule my blood,
\nBe sometimes lovely like a bride,
\nAnd put thy harsher moods aside,
\nIf thou wilt have me wise and good.<\/p>\n

My centred passion cannot move,
\nNor will it lessen from to-day;
\nBut I’ll have leave at times to play
\nAs with the creature of my love;<\/p>\n

And set thee forth, for thou art mine,
\nWith so much hope for years to come,
\nThat, howsoe’er I know thee, some
\nCould hardly tell what name were thine.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LXVII<\/strong><\/p>\n

When on my bed the moonlight falls,
\nI know that in thy place of rest
\nBy that broad water of the west[30]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nThere comes a glory on the walls;<\/p>\n

Thy marble bright in dark appears,
\nAs slowly steals a silver flame
\nAlong the letters of thy name,
\nAnd o’er the number of thy years.<\/p>\n

The mystic glory swims away;
\nFrom off my bed the moonlight dies;
\nAnd closing eaves of wearied eyes
\nI sleep till dusk is dipt in gray;<\/p>\n

And then I know the mist is drawn
\nA lucid veil from coast to coast,
\nAnd in the dark church like a ghost
\nThy tablet glimmers to the dawn.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LXXII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again[31]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nAnd howlest, issuing out of night,
\nWith blasts that blow the poplar white,
\nAnd lash with storm the streaming pane?<\/p>\n

Day, when my crown’d estate[32]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0begun
\nTo pine in that reverse of doom[33]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nWhich sicken’d every living bloom,
\nAnd blurr’d the splendour of the sun;<\/p>\n

Who usherest in the dolorous hour
\nWith thy quick tears that make the rose
\nPull sideways, and the daisy close
\nHer crimson fringes to the shower;<\/p>\n

Who might’st have heaved a windless flame
\nUp the deep East, or, whispering, play’d
\nA chequer-work of beam and shade
\nAlong the hills, yet look’d the same.<\/p>\n

As wan, as chill, as wild as now;
\nDay, mark’d as with some hideous crime,
\nWhen the dark hand struck down thro’ time,
\nAnd cancell’d nature’s best: but thou,<\/p>\n

Lift as thou may’st thy burthen’d brows
\nThro’ clouds that drench the morning star,
\nAnd whirl the ungarner’d sheaf afar,
\nAnd sow the sky with flying boughs,<\/p>\n

And up thy vault with roaring sound
\nClimb thy thick noon, disastrous day;
\nTouch thy dull goal of joyless gray,
\nAnd hide thy shame beneath the ground.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LXXVIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Again at Christmas[34]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0did we weave
\nThe holly round the Christmas hearth;
\nThe silent snow possess’d the earth,
\nAnd calmly fell our Christmas-eve:<\/p>\n

The yule-clog[35]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0sparkled keen with frost,
\nNo wing of wind the region swept,
\nBut over all things brooding slept
\nThe quiet sense of something lost.<\/p>\n

As in the winters left behind,
\nAgain our ancient games had place,
\nThe mimic picture’s[36]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0breathing grace,
\nAnd dance and song and hoodman-blind.<\/p>\n

Who show’d a token of distress?
\nNo single tear, no mark of pain:
\nO sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
\nO grief, can grief be changed to less?<\/p>\n

O last regret, regret can die!
\nNo\u2014mixt with all this mystic frame,
\nHer deep relations are the same,
\nBut with long use her tears are dry.<\/p>\n

LXXX<\/strong><\/p>\n

If any vague desire should rise,
\nThat holy Death ere Arthur died
\nHad moved me kindly from his side,
\nAnd dropt the dust on tearless eyes;<\/p>\n

Then fancy shapes, as fancy can,
\nThe grief my loss in him had wrought,
\nA grief as deep as life or thought,
\nBut stay’d in peace with God and man.<\/p>\n

I make a picture in the brain;
\nI hear the sentence that he speaks;
\nHe bears the burthen of the weeks
\nBut turns his burthen into gain.<\/p>\n

His credit thus shall set me free;
\nAnd, influence-rich to soothe and save,
\nUnused example from the grave
\nReach out dead hands to comfort me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LXXXVI<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sweet after showers[37]<\/sup><\/a>, ambrosial air,
\nThat rollest from the gorgeous gloom
\nOf evening over brake and bloom
\nAnd meadow, slowly breathing bare<\/p>\n

The round of space, and rapt below
\nThro’ all the dewy-tassell’d wood,
\nAnd shadowing down the horned flood
\nIn ripples, fan my brows and blow<\/p>\n

The fever from my cheek, and sigh
\nThe full new life that feeds thy breath
\nThroughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
\nIll brethren, let the fancy fly<\/p>\n

From belt to belt of crimson seas
\nOn leagues of odour streaming far,
\nTo where in yonder orient star
\nA hundred spirits whisper \u2018Peace.’<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

LXXXIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
\nOf this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
\nAnd thou, with all thy breadth and height
\nOf foliage, towering sycamore;<\/p>\n

How often, hither wandering down,
\nMy Arthur found your shadows fair,
\nAnd shook to all the liberal air
\nThe dust and din and steam of town:<\/p>\n

He brought an eye for all he saw;
\nHe mixt in all our simple sports;
\nThey pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
\nAnd dusty purlieus of the law[38]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n

O joy to him in this retreat,
\nInmantled in ambrosial dark,
\nTo drink the cooler air, and mark
\nThe landscape winking thro’ the heat:<\/p>\n

O sound to rout the brood of cares,
\nThe sweep of scythe in morning dew,
\nThe gust that round the garden flew,
\nAnd tumbled half the mellowing pears!<\/p>\n

O bliss, when all in circle drawn
\nAbout him, heart and ear were fed
\nTo hear him, as he lay and read
\nThe Tuscan poets[39]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0on the lawn:<\/p>\n

Or in the all-golden afternoon
\nA guest, or happy sister, sung,
\nOr here she brought the harp and flung
\nA ballad to the brightening moon:<\/p>\n

Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
\nBeyond the bounding hill to stray,
\nAnd break the livelong summer day
\nWith banquet in the distant woods;<\/p>\n

Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
\nDiscuss’d the books to love or hate,
\nOr touch’d the changes of the state,
\nOr threaded some Socratic dream;<\/p>\n

But if I praised the busy town,
\nHe loved to rail against it still,
\nFor \u2018ground in yonder social mill
\nWe rub each other’s angles down,<\/p>\n

‘And merge,’ he said, \u2018in form and gloss
\nThe picturesque of man and man.’
\nWe talk’d: the stream beneath us ran,
\nThe wine-flask lying couch’d in moss,<\/p>\n

Or cool’d within the glooming wave;
\nAnd last, returning from afar,
\nBefore the crimson-circled star
\nHad fall’n into her father’s grave,<\/p>\n

And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
\nWe heard behind the woodbine veil
\nThe milk that bubbled in the pail,
\nAnd buzzings of the honied hours.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XCIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

I shall not see thee. Dare I say
\nNo spirit ever brake the band
\nThat stays him from the native land
\nWhere first he walk’d when claspt in clay?<\/p>\n

No visual shade of some one lost,
\nBut he, the Spirit himself, may come
\nWhere all the nerve of sense is numb;
\nSpirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.<\/p>\n

O, therefore from thy sightless range
\nWith gods in unconjectured bliss,
\nO, from the distance of the abyss
\nOf tenfold-complicated change,<\/p>\n

Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
\nThe wish too strong for words to name;
\nThat in this blindness of the frame
\nMy Ghost may feel that thine is near.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XCIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

How pure at heart and sound in head,
\nWith what divine affections bold
\nShould be the man whose thought would hold
\nAn hour’s communion with the dead.<\/p>\n

In vain shalt thou, or any, call
\nThe spirits from their golden day,
\nExcept, like them, thou too canst say,
\nMy spirit is at peace with all.<\/p>\n

They haunt the silence of the breast,
\nImaginations calm and fair,
\nThe memory like a cloudless air,
\nThe conscience as a sea at rest:<\/p>\n

But when the heart is full of din,
\nAnd doubt beside the portal waits,
\nThey can but listen at the gates
\nAnd hear the household jar within.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XCV<\/strong><\/p>\n

By night we linger’d on the lawn,
\nFor underfoot the herb was dry;
\nAnd genial warmth; and o’er the sky
\nThe silvery haze of summer drawn;<\/p>\n

And calm that let the tapers burn
\nUnwavering: not a cricket chirr’d:
\nThe brook alone far-off was heard,
\nAnd on the board the fluttering urn[40]<\/sup><\/a>:<\/p>\n

And bats went round in fragrant skies,
\nAnd wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes
\nThat haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
\nAnd woolly breasts and beaded eyes;<\/p>\n

While now we sang old songs that peal’d
\nFrom knoll to knoll, where, couch’d at ease,
\nThe white kine[41]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0glimmer’d, and the trees
\nLaid their dark arms about the field.<\/p>\n

But when those others, one by one,
\nWithdrew themselves from me and night,
\nAnd in the house light after light
\nWent out, and I was all alone,<\/p>\n

A hunger seized my heart; I read
\nOf that glad year which once had been,
\nIn those fall’n leaves which kept their green,
\nThe noble letters of the dead:<\/p>\n

And strangely on the silence broke
\nThe silent-speaking words, and strange
\nWas love’s dumb cry defying change
\nTo test his worth; and strangely spoke<\/p>\n

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
\nOn doubts that drive the coward back,
\nAnd keen thro’ wordy snares to track
\nSuggestion to her inmost cell.<\/p>\n

So word by word, and line by line,
\nThe dead man touch’d me from the past,
\nAnd all at once it seem’d at last
\nThe living soul was flash’d on mine,<\/p>\n

And mine in his was wound, and whirl’d
\nAbout empyreal heights of thought,
\nAnd came on that which is, and caught
\nThe deep pulsations of the world,<\/p>\n

Aeonian music[42]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0measuring out
\nThe steps of Time\u2014the shocks of Chance\u2014
\nThe blows of Death. At length my trance
\nWas cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.<\/p>\n

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
\nIn matter-moulded forms of speech,
\nOr ev’n for intellect to reach
\nThro’ memory that which I became:<\/p>\n

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
\nThe knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
\nThe white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
\nLaid their dark arms about the field;<\/p>\n

And suck’d from out the distant gloom
\nA breeze began to tremble o’er
\nThe large leaves of the sycamore,
\nAnd fluctuate all the still perfume,<\/p>\n

And gathering freshlier overhead,
\nRock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung
\nThe heavy-folded rose, and flung
\nThe lilies to and fro, and said,<\/p>\n

‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;
\nAnd East and West, without a breath,
\nMixt their dim lights, like life and death,
\nTo broaden into boundless day.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

XCVI<\/strong><\/p>\n

You say, but with no touch of scorn,
\nSweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
\nAre tender over drowning flies,
\nYou tell me, doubt is Devil-born.<\/p>\n

I know not: one[43]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0indeed I knew
\nIn many a subtle question versed,
\nWho touch’d a jarring lyre at first,
\nBut ever strove to make it true:<\/p>\n

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
\nAt last he beat his music out.
\nThere lives more faith in honest doubt,
\nBelieve me, than in half the creeds.<\/p>\n

He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
\nHe would not make his judgment blind,
\nHe faced the spectres of the mind
\nAnd laid them: thus he came at length<\/p>\n

To find a stronger faith his own;
\nAnd Power was with him in the night,
\nWhich makes the darkness and the light,
\nAnd dwells not in the light alone,<\/p>\n

But in the darkness and the cloud,
\nAs over Sinai’s peaks of old,
\nWhile Israel made their gods of gold,
\nAltho’ the trumpet blew so loud.<\/p>\n

XCIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again[44]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nSo loud with voices of the birds,
\nSo thick with lowings of the herds,
\nDay, when I lost the flower of men;<\/p>\n

Who tremblest thro’ thy darkling red
\nOn yon swoll’n brook that bubbles fast
\nBy meadows breathing of the past,
\nAnd woodlands holy to the dead;<\/p>\n

Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves
\nA song that slights the coming care,
\nAnd Autumn laying here and there
\nA fiery finger on the leaves;<\/p>\n

Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
\nTo myriads on the genial earth,
\nMemories of bridal, or of birth,
\nAnd unto myriads more, of death.<\/p>\n

O, wheresoever those may be,
\nBetwixt the slumber of the poles,
\nTo-day they count as kindred souls;
\nThey know me not, but mourn with me.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

The time draws near the birth of Christ[45]<\/sup><\/a>;
\nThe moon is hid, the night is still;
\nA single church[46]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0below the hill
\nIs pealing, folded in the mist.<\/p>\n

A single peal of bells below,
\nThat wakens at this hour of rest
\nA single murmur in the breast,
\nThat these are not the bells I know[47]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like strangers’ voices here they sound,
\nIn lands where not a memory strays,
\nNor landmark breathes of other days,
\nBut all is new unhallow’d ground.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CV<\/strong><\/p>\n

To-night ungather’d let us leave
\nThis laurel, let this holly stand:
\nWe live within the stranger’s land,
\nAnd strangely falls our Christmas-eve.<\/p>\n

Our father’s dust is left alone
\nAnd silent under other snows:
\nThere in due time the woodbine blows,
\nThe violet comes, but we are gone.<\/p>\n

No more shall wayward grief abuse
\nThe genial hour with mask and mime,
\nFor change of place, like growth of time,
\nHas broke the bond of dying use.<\/p>\n

Let cares that petty shadows cast,
\nBy which our lives are chiefly proved,
\nA little spare the night I loved,
\nAnd hold it solemn to the past.<\/p>\n

But let no footstep beat the floor,
\nNor bowl of wassail mantle warm;
\nFor who would keep an ancient form
\nThro’ which the spirit breathes no more?<\/p>\n

Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
\nNor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown;
\nNo dance, no motion, save alone
\nWhat lightens in the lucid east<\/p>\n

Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
\nLong sleeps the summer in the seed;
\nRun out your measured arcs, and lead
\nThe closing cycle rich in good.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CVI<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
\nThe flying cloud, the frosty light:
\nThe year is dying in the night;
\nRing out, wild bells, and let him die[48]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
\nRing, happy bells, across the snow:
\nThe year is going, let him go;
\nRing out the false, ring in the true.<\/p>\n

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
\nFor those that here we see no more;
\nRing out the feud of rich and poor,
\nRing in redress to all mankind.<\/p>\n

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
\nAnd ancient forms of party strife;
\nRing in the nobler modes of life,
\nWith sweeter manners, purer laws.<\/p>\n

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
\nThe faithless coldness of the times;
\nRing out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
\nBut ring the fuller minstrel in.<\/p>\n

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
\nThe civic slander and the spite;
\nRing in the love of truth and right,
\nRing in the common love of good.<\/p>\n

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
\nRing out the narrowing lust of gold;
\nRing out the thousand wars of old,
\nRing in the thousand years of peace.<\/p>\n

Ring in the valiant man and free,
\nThe larger heart, the kindlier hand;
\nRing out the darkness of the land,
\nRing in the Christ that is to be.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CVII<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is the day when he was born[49]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nA bitter day that early sank
\nBehind a purple-frosty bank
\nOf vapour, leaving night forlorn.<\/p>\n

The time admits not flowers or leaves
\nTo deck the banquet. Fiercely flies
\nThe blast of North and East, and ice
\nMakes daggers at the sharpen’d eaves,<\/p>\n

And bristles all the brakes and thorns
\nTo yon hard crescent, as she hangs
\nAbove the wood which grides and clangs
\nIts leafless ribs and iron horns<\/p>\n

Together, in the drifts that pass
\nTo darken on the rolling brine
\nThat breaks the coast. But fetch the wine,
\nArrange the board and brim the glass;<\/p>\n

Bring in great logs and let them lie,
\nTo make a solid core of heat;
\nBe cheerful-minded, talk and treat
\nOf all things ev’n as he were by;<\/p>\n

We keep the day. With festal cheer,
\nWith books and music, surely we
\nWill drink to him, whate’er he be,
\nAnd sing the songs he loved to hear.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CVIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will not shut me from my kind,
\nAnd, lest I stiffen into stone,
\nI will not eat my heart alone,
\nNor feed with sighs a passing wind:<\/p>\n

What profit lies in barren faith,
\nAnd vacant yearning, tho’ with might
\nTo scale the heaven’s highest height,
\nOr dive below the wells of Death?<\/p>\n

What find I in the highest place,
\nBut mine own phantom chanting hymns?
\nAnd on the depths of death there swims
\nThe reflex of a human face.<\/p>\n

I’ll rather take what fruit may be
\nOf sorrow under human skies:
\n‘Tis held that sorrow makes us wise,
\nWhatever wisdom sleep with thee.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXV<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now fades the last long streak of snow,
\nNow burgeons every maze of quick[50]<\/sup><\/a>
\nAbout the flowering squares[51]<\/sup><\/a>, and thick
\nBy ashen roots the violets blow.<\/p>\n

Now rings the woodland loud and long,
\nThe distance takes a lovelier hue,
\nAnd drown’d in yonder living blue
\nThe lark becomes a sightless song.<\/p>\n

Now dance the lights on lawn and lea,
\nThe flocks are whiter down the vale,
\nAnd milkier every milky sail
\nOn winding stream or distant sea;<\/p>\n

Where now the seamew[52]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0pipes, or dives
\nIn yonder greening gleam, and fly
\nThe happy birds, that change their sky
\nTo build and brood; that live their lives<\/p>\n

From land to land; and in my breast
\nSpring wakens too; and my regret
\nBecomes an April violet,
\nAnd buds and blossoms like the rest.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXVII<\/strong><\/p>\n

O days and hours, your work is this
\nTo hold me from my proper place,
\nA little while from his embrace,
\nFor fuller gain of after bliss:<\/p>\n

That out of distance might ensue
\nDesire of nearness doubly sweet;
\nAnd unto meeting when we meet,
\nDelight a hundredfold accrue,<\/p>\n

For every grain of sand that runs,
\nAnd every span of shade that steals,
\nAnd every kiss of toothed wheels,
\nAnd all the courses of the suns.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXVIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cont\u00e8mplate all this work of Time[53]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nThe giant labouring in his youth;
\nNor dream of human love and truth,
\nAs dying Nature’s earth and lime[54]<\/sup><\/a>;<\/p>\n

But trust that those we call the dead
\nAre breathers of an ampler day
\nFor ever nobler ends. They[55]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0say,
\nThe solid earth whereon we tread<\/p>\n

In tracts of fluent heat began,
\nAnd grew to seeming-random forms,
\nThe seeming prey of cyclic storms,
\nTill at the last arose the man;<\/p>\n

Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime,
\nThe herald of a higher race,
\nAnd of himself in higher place,
\nIf so he type[56]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0this work of time<\/p>\n

Within himself, from more to more;
\nOr, crown’d with attributes of woe
\nLike glories, move his course, and show
\nThat life is not as idle ore,<\/p>\n

But iron dug from central gloom,
\nAnd heated hot with burning fears,
\nAnd dipt in baths of hissing tears,
\nAnd batter’d with the shocks of doom<\/p>\n

To shape and use. Arise and fly
\nThe reeling Faun[57]<\/sup><\/a>, the sensual feast;
\nMove upward, working out the beast,
\nAnd let the ape and tiger die.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXIX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Doors[58]<\/sup><\/a>, where my heart was used to beat
\nSo quickly, not as one that weeps
\nI come once more; the city sleeps;
\nI smell the meadow in the street;<\/p>\n

I hear a chirp of birds; I see
\nBetwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
\nA light-blue lane of early dawn,
\nAnd think of early days and thee,<\/p>\n

And bless thee, for thy lips are bland,
\nAnd bright the friendship of thine eye;
\nAnd in my thoughts with scarce a sigh
\nI take the pressure of thine hand.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXX<\/strong><\/p>\n

I trust I have not wasted breath:
\nI think we are not wholly brain,
\nMagnetic mockeries[59]<\/sup><\/a>; not in vain,
\nLike Paul with beasts, I fought with Death;<\/p>\n

Not only cunning casts in clay:
\nLet Science prove we are, and then
\nWhat matters Science unto men,
\nAt least to me? I would not stay.<\/p>\n

Let him, the wiser man who springs
\nHereafter, up from childhood shape
\nHis action like the greater ape,
\nBut I was born to other things.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXXIII<\/strong><\/p>\n

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
\nO earth, what changes hast thou seen!
\nThere where the long street roars, hath been
\nThe stillness of the central sea.<\/p>\n

The hills are shadows, and they flow
\nFrom form to form, and nothing stands;
\nThey melt like mist, the solid lands,
\nLike clouds they shape themselves and go.<\/p>\n

But in my spirit will I dwell,
\nAnd dream my dream, and hold it true;
\nFor tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,
\nI cannot think the thing farewell.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

CXXIV<\/strong><\/p>\n

That which we dare invoke to bless;
\nOur dearest faith; our ghastliest doubt;
\nHe, They, One, All; within, without;
\nThe Power in darkness whom we guess,\u2014<\/p>\n

I found Him not in world or sun,
\nOr eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye[60]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nNor thro’ the questions men may try,
\nThe petty cobwebs we have spun.<\/p>\n

If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
\nI heard a voice \u2018believe no more,’
\nAnd heard an ever-breaking shore
\nThat tumbled in the Godless deep,<\/p>\n

A warmth within the breast would melt
\nThe freezing reason’s colder part,
\nAnd like a man in wrath the heart
\nStood up and answer’d \u2018I have felt.’<\/p>\n

No, like a child in doubt and fear:
\nBut that blind clamour made me wise;
\nThen was I as a child that cries,
\nBut, crying, knows his father near;<\/p>\n

And what I am beheld again
\nWhat is, and no man understands;
\nAnd out of darkness came the hands
\nThat reach thro’ nature, moulding men.<\/p>\n

CXXX<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
\nI hear thee where the waters run;
\nThou standest in the rising sun,
\nAnd in the setting thou art fair.<\/p>\n

What art thou then? I cannot guess;
\nBut tho’ I seem in star and flower
\nTo feel thee some diffusive power,
\nI do not therefore love thee less.<\/p>\n

My love involves the love before;
\nMy love is vaster passion now;
\nTho’ mix’d with God and Nature thou,
\nI seem to love thee more and more.<\/p>\n

Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
\nI have thee still, and I rejoice;
\nI prosper, circled with thy voice;
\nI shall not lose thee tho’ I die.<\/p>\n

CXXXI<\/strong><\/p>\n

O living will[61]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0that shalt endure
\nWhen all that seems shall suffer shock,
\nRise in the spiritual rock[62]<\/sup><\/a>,
\nFlow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,<\/p>\n

That we may lift from out of dust
\nA voice as unto him that hears,
\nA cry above the conquer’d years
\nTo one that with us works, and trust,<\/p>\n

With faith that comes of self-control,
\nThe truths that never can be proved
\nUntil we close with all we loved,
\nAnd all we flow from, soul in soul.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

[from Epilogue[63]<\/sup><\/a>]<\/p>\n

...And rise, O moon, from yonder down,
\nTill over down and over dale
\nAll night the shining vapour sail
\nAnd pass the silent-lighted town,<\/p>\n

The white-faced halls, the glancing rills,
\nAnd catch at every mountain head,
\nAnd o'er the friths that branch and spread
\nTheir sleeping silver thro' the hills;<\/p>\n

And touch with shade the bridal doors,
\nWith tender gloom the roof, the wall;
\nAnd breaking let the splendour fall
\nTo spangle all the happy shores<\/p>\n

By which they rest, and ocean sounds,
\nAnd, star and system rolling past,
\nA soul shall draw from out the vast
\nAnd strike his being into bounds,<\/p>\n

And, moved thro' life of lower phase,
\nResult in man, be born and think,
\nAnd act and love, a closer link
\nBetwixt us and the crowning race<\/p>\n

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
\nOn knowledge, under whose command
\nIs Earth and Earth's, and in their hand
\nIs Nature like an open book;<\/p>\n

No longer half-akin to brute,
\nFor all we thought and loved and did,
\nAnd hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
\nOf what in them is flower and fruit;<\/p>\n

Whereof the man, that with me trod
\nThis planet, was a noble type
\nAppearing ere the times were ripe,
\nThat friend of mine who lives in God,<\/p>\n

That God, which ever lives and loves,
\nOne God, one law, one element,
\nAnd one far-off divine event,
\nTo which the whole creation moves.<\/p>\n

\u20141833-50, 1850\n<\/p>\n

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Candela Citations<\/h3>\n\t\t\t\t\t
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