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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Allen Upward

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Baldur

Allen Upward

OLD loves, old griefs, the burthen of old songs

That Time, who changes all things, cannot change:

Eternal themes! Ah, who shall dare to join

The sad procession of the kings of song—

Irrevocable names, that sucked the dregs

Of sorrow from the broken honeycomb

Of fellowship?—or brush the tears that hang

Bright as ungathered dewdrops on a briar?

Death hallows all; but who will bear with me

To breathe a more heartrending lamentation,

To mourn the memory of a love divided

By life, not death, a friend not dead but changed?

Not dead—but what is death? Because I hoard

Immortal love, that withers not, but keeps

Full virtue like some rare medicament

Hoarded for ages in a crystal jar

By wonder-working gnomes; that only waits

The sound of that lost voice, familiar still,

Or sight of face or touch of hand, to bring

Life, like the dawn whose gentle theft unties

The girdle of the petal-folded flowers,

And ravishes their scent before they wake:

My love is like a fountain frozen o’er,

But no returning sun will ever break

The seal of that forbidden spring; no foot

Invade the weed-grown pathway; never kiss

Wake the enchanted beauty of the wood,

And bid the wheels of time revolve again.

Though one should walk the ways of life, and wear

The sweet remembered name, yet he is not

My playmate; no, the boy whom I have loved

Died long ago; the man is nothing but

His aging sepulchre.

And I, even I,

Know in my deepest heart that I am not

The boy who loved him; and I would I were,

With a most bitter longing which there are

No creeds to comfort. Do we madly feign

The soul to be immortal? Fools!—it is not

Even mortal, does not last the little space

The body does, but alters visibly,

And dies a million times ’twixt breath and breath.

Forever and forever and forever

Outgrown and left behind and cast away

The joy that was the blossom of the soul,

And hours that were the butterflies of time.

What though Elysian fields be white with light,

Crowded with glorious forms, and freed from fear

Or spoil or shock, how shall it profit me

Aged with sad hours, to pass to them and meet

Him as he is, removed and fallen and marred?

Hath any God the power to give me back

My boyhood; to undo this growth of years,

In which I lose the sense of what I was,

And take a different nature? We, self-wrapped,

Conjure with dreams of immortality,

And wit not that the spirit is yet more frail

Than that which holds it. Constant is it in nothing

But change; the transmigration of the soul

Goes on from hour to hour, it does not wait

The dissolution of our frame, but is

The law of life, fulfilled in everywise,

And we who fear destruction perish ever.

The soul—that vaulting speck, that busy flame,

That climbing passion-flower, that god, that atom—

It is the seeding-point of forces fed

By earth and air and all we hear and see

And handle. We take life and give it, but

We may not keep it. Sooner might we hope

To clutch the trickling moments in our palm,

Take hold of the eternal pendulum,

And bid the sun of our desire to stand.

Who can take comfort to foresee himself

On unknown stages playing other parts?

It is but treading through a wider maze,

A wearier cycle. Would the butterfly

Feel lesser anguish, as it fell, to know

Some egg in which it wrapped the spark of life

Was ripening in the dark, some day to break

Its natal bonds and walk the earth enrobed

With green and golden fur? Or is it worth

The caterpillar’s knowing, as it shrinks

Within the coffin it has built, and dies

Between the straightening walls, that they shall crack

In ruin days or weeks or ages hence,

And issuing from the dust a thing of light—

Not it—shall drink the morning air and wave

Its crimson banners in the sun?

A life

Of endless deaths, an immortality

Of partings, is it worth being gifted with?

Such is the life of nations; they last on

In plant-like continuity, while the men

Who make them fall like leaves and are renewed.

We call ourselves the English people now,

But they who fought till sundown on that hill

In Sussex all those hundred years ago,

And died where they had fought, and never knew

The end of it, what had they happier been

To hear of the great Charter, and the deeds

Of that famed Parliament that drew the sword

Meteor-like forth in shuddering Europe’s gaze,

And spilt the blood of kings?

Let no man say

Life may yield other loves; because we loved

At that age when to love is to be lost

In them we love, and not with narrow eyes

To purse up faults and merits. In that age

We loved although we knew not how to love,

Before the buds of sense had learnt to give

Their sweetness up in fiery-fatal blooms

And fruit forbidden. Childhood treads the heights

Whither nor friends nor loves of later days

Can reach, when friends are but acquaintances,

And love’s clear stream is muddied o’er with lust.

Forever and forever and forever

Gone are the days and nights of fairyland;

Days that were cups of summer, sacred nights

Too sweet for slumber, hours like tears, on which

The moonbeams peeped between the shuttered blinds

Like children at a feast they cannot share.

(O memories! Oh, to steal from paradise

One more such moment, and then be no more I!)

Those years and loves are gone, not to come back

Till man can turn the wheels of life, and draw

Creation in the thoroughfares of time.