Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.

Holiday

John Davidson (1857–1909)

LITHE and listen, gentlemen:

Other knight of sword or pen

Shall not, while the planets shine,

Spend a holiday like mine.

Fate and I, we play’d at dice:

Thrice I won and lost the main;

Thrice I died the death, and thrice

By my will I lived again.

First a woman broke my heart

As a careless woman can,

Ere the aureoles depart

From the woman and the man.

Dead of love, I found a tomb

Anywhere: beneath, above,

Worms nor stars transpierced the gloom

Of the sepulchre of love.

Wine-cups were the charnel-lights;

Festal songs, the funeral dole;

Joyful ladies, gallant knights,

Comrades of my buried soul.

Tired to death of lying dead

In a common sepulchre,

On an Easter morn I sped

Upward where the world ’s astir.

Soon I gather’d wealth and friends,

Donn’d the livery of the hour,

And atoning diverse ends

Bridged the gulf to place and power.

All the brilliances of Hell

Crush’d by me, with honey’d breath

Fawn’d upon me till I fell,

By pretenders done to death.

Buried in an outland tract,

Long I rotted in the mould,

Though the virgin woodland lack’d

Nothing of the age of gold.

Roses spiced the dews and damps,

Nightly falling of decay;

Dawn and sunset lit the lamps

Where entomb’d I deeply lay.

My companions of the grave

Were the flowers, the growing grass;

Larks intoned a morning stave;

Nightingales a midnight mass.

But at me, effete and dead,

Did my spirit gibe and scoff:

Then the gravecloth from my head

And my shroud—I shook them off.

Drawing strength and subtle craft

Out of ruin’s husk and core,

Through the earth I ran a shaft

Upward to the light once more.

Soon I made me wealth and friends,

Donn’d the livery of the age;

And atoning many ends,

Reign’d as sovereign, priest, and mage.

But my pomp and towering state,

Puissance and supreme device,

Crumbled on the cast of Fate—

Fate, that plays with loaded dice.

I whose arms had harried Hell

Naked faced a heavenly host:

Carved with countless wounds I fell,

Sadly yielding up the ghost.

In a burning mountain thrown

(Titans such a tomb attain),

Many a grisly age had flown

Ere I rose and lived again.

Parch’d and charr’d I lay; my cries

Shook and rent the mountain-side;

Lustres, decades, centuries

Fled while daily there I died.

But my essence and intent

Ripen’d in the smelting fire;

Flame became my element,

Agony my soul’s desire.

Twenty centuries of Pain

Mightier than Love or Art,

Woke the meaning in my brain

And the purpose of my heart.

Straightway then aloft I swam

Through the mountain’s sulphurous sty:

Not eternal death could damn

Such a hardy soul as I.

From the mountain’s burning crest

Like a god I come again,

And with an immortal zest

Challenge Fate to throw the main.