Poems. Volume 1

JOHN LACKLAND

A wicked man is bad enough on earth;
But O the baleful lustre of a chief
Once pledged in tyranny!  O star of dearth
Darkly illumining a nation’s grief!
How many men have worn thee on their brows!
Alas for them and us!  God’s precious gift
Of gracious dispensation got by theft—
The damning form of false unholy vows!
The thief of God and man must have his fee:
And thou, John Lackland, despicable prince—
Basest of England’s banes before or since!
Thrice traitor, coward, thief!  O thou shalt be
The historic warning, trampled and abhorr’d
Who dared to steal and stain the symbols of the Lord!

THE SLEEPING CITY

A Princess in the eastern tale
Paced thro’ a marble city pale,
And saw in ghastly shapes of stone
The sculptured life she breathed alone;

Saw, where’er her eye might range,
Herself the only child of change;
And heard her echoed footfall chime
Between Oblivion and Time;

And in the squares where fountains played,
And up the spiral balustrade,
Along the drowsy corridors,
Even to the inmost sleeping floors,

Surveyed in wonder chilled with dread
The seemingness of Death, not dead;
Life’s semblance but without its storm,
And silence frosting every form;

Crowned figures, cold and grouping slaves,
Like suddenly arrested waves
About to sink, about to rise,—
Strange meaning in their stricken eyes;

And cloths and couches live with flame
Of leopards fierce and lions tame,
And hunters in the jungle reed,
Thrown out by sombre glowing brede;

Dumb chambers hushed with fold on fold,
And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold;
White casements o’er embroidered seats,
Looking on solitudes of streets,—

On palaces and column’d towers,
Unconscious of the stony hours;
Harsh gateways startled at a sound,
With burning lamps all burnish’d round;—

Surveyed in awe this wealth and state,
Touched by the finger of a Fate,
And drew with slow-awakening fear
The sternness of the atmosphere;—

And gradually, with stealthier foot,
Became herself a thing as mute,
And listened,—while with swift alarm
Her alien heart shrank from the charm;

Yet as her thoughts dilating rose,
Took glory in the great repose,
And over every postured form
Spread lava-like and brooded warm,—

And fixed on every frozen face
Beheld the record of its race,
And in each chiselled feature knew
The stormy life that once blushed thro’;—

The ever-present of the past
There written; all that lightened last,
Love, anguish, hope, disease, despair,
Beauty and rage, all written there;—

Enchanted Passions! whose pale doom
Is never flushed by blight or bloom,
But sentinelled by silent orbs,
Whose light the pallid scene absorbs.—

Like such a one I pace along
This City with its sleeping throng;
Like her with dread and awe, that turns
To rapture, and sublimely yearns;—

For now the quiet stars look down
On lights as quiet as their own;
The streets that groaned with traffic show
As if with silence paved below;