Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

English Poetry III: From Tennyson to Whitman.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

649. Maud

Part II

“THE FAULT was mine, the fault was mine”—

Why am I sitting here so stunn’d and still,

Plucking the harmless wild-flower on the hill?—

It is this guilty hand!—

And there rises ever a passionate cry

From underneath in the darkening land—

What is it, that has been done?

O dawn of Eden bright over earth and sky,

The fires of Hell brake out of thy rising sun,

The fires of Hell and of Hate;

For she, sweet soul, had hardly spoken a word,

When her brother ran in his rage to the gate;

He came with the babe-faced lord;

Heap’d on her terms of disgrace,

And while she wept, and I strove to be cool,

He fiercely gave me the lie,

Till I with as fierce an anger spoke,

And he struck me, madman, over the face,

Struck me before the languid fool,

Who was gaping and grinning by:

Struck for himself an evil stroke;

Wrought for his house an irredeemable woe

For front to front in an hour we stood,

And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke

From the red-ribb’d hollow behind the wood,

And thunder’d up into Heaven the Christless code,

That must have life for a blow.

Ever and ever afresh they seem’d to grow.

Was it he lay there with a fading eye?

“The fault was mine,” he whisper’d, “fly!”

Then glided out of the joyous wood

The ghastly Wraith of one that I know;

And there rang on a sudden a passionate cry,

A cry for a brother’s blood:

It will ring in my heart and my ears, till I die, till I die.

Is it gone? my pulses beat—

What was it? a lying trick of the brain?

Yet I thought I saw her stand,

A shadow there at my feet,

High over the shadowy land.

It is gone; and the heavens fall in a gentle rain,

When they should burst and drown with deluging storms

The feeble vassals of wine and anger and lust,

The little hearts that know not how to forgive:

Arise, my God, and strike, for we hold Thee just,

Strike dead the whole weak race of venomous worms,

That sting each other here in the dust;

We are not worthy to live.

SEE what a lovely shell,

Small and pure as a pearl,

Lying close to my foot,

Frail, but a work divine,

Made so fairily well

With delicate spire and whorl,

How exquisitely minute,

A miracle of design!

What is it? a learned man

Could give it a clumsy name.

Let him name it who can,

The beauty would be the same.

The tiny cell is forlorn,

Void of the little living will

That made it stir on the shore.

Did he stand at the diamond door

Of his house in a rainbow frill?

Did he push, when he was uncurl’d,

A golden foot or a fairy horn

Thro’ his dim water-world?

Slight, to be crush’d with a tap

Of my finger-nail on the sand,

Small, but a work divine,

Frail, but of force to withstand,

Year upon year, the shock

Of cataract seas that snap

The three-decker’s oaken spine

Athwart the ledges of rock,

Here on the Breton strand!

Breton, not Briton; here

Like a shipwreck’d man on a coast

Of ancient fable and fear—

Plagued with a flitting to and fro,

A disease, a hard mechanic ghost

That never came from on high

Nor ever arose from below,

But only moves with the moving eye,

Flying along the land and the main—

Why should it look like Maud?

Am I to be overawed

By what I cannot but know

Is a juggle born of the brain?

Back from the Breton coast,

Sick of a nameless fear,

Back to the dark sea-line

Looking, thinking of all I have lost;

An old song vexes my ear;

But that of Lamech is mine.

For years, a measureless ill,

For years, for ever, to part—

But she, she would love me still;

And as long, O God, as she

Have a grain of love for me,

So long, no doubt, no doubt,

Shall I nurse in my dark heart,

However weary, a spark of will

Not to be trampled out.

Strange, that the mind, when fraught

With a passion so intense

One would think that it well

Might drown all life in the eye,—

That it should, by being so over-wrought,

Suddenly strike on a sharper sense

For a shell, or a flower, little things

Which else would have been past by!

And now I remember, I,

When he lay dying there,

I noticed one of his many rings

(For he had many, poor worm) and thought

It is his mother’s hair.

Who knows if he be dead?

Whether I need have fled?

Am I guilty of blood?

However this may be,

Comfort her, comfort her, all things good,

While I am over the sea!

Let me and my passionate love go by,

But speak to her all things holy and high,

Whatever happens to me!

Me and my harmful love go by;

But come to her waking, find her asleep,

Powers of the height, Powers of the deep,

And comfort her tho’ I die.

COURAGE, poor heart of stone!

I will not ask thee why

Thou canst not understand

That thou art left for ever alone:

Courage, poor stupid heart of stone.—

Or if I ask thee why,

Care not thou to reply:

She is but dead, and the time is at hand

When thou shalt more than die.

O THAT ’twere possible

After long grief and pain

To find the arms of my true love

Round me once again!

When I was wont to meet her

In the silent woody places

By the home that gave me birth,

We stood tranced in long embraces

Mixt with kisses sweeter sweeter

Than anything on earth.

A shadow flits before me,

Not thou, but like to thee;

Ah Christ, that it were possible

For one short hour to see

The souls we loved, that they might tell us

What and where they be.

It leads me forth at evening,

It lightly winds and steals

In a cold white robe before me,

When all my spirit reels

At the shouts, the leagues of lights,

And the roaring of the wheels.

Half the night I waste in sighs,

Half in dreams I sorrow after

The delight of early skies;

In a wakeful doze I sorrow

For the hand, the lips, the eyes,

For the meeting of the morrow

The delight of happy laughter,

The delight of low replies.

’Tis a morning pure and sweet

And a dewy splendour falls

On the little flower that clings

To the turrets and the walls;

’Tis a morning pure and sweet,

And the light and shadow fleet;

She is walking in the meadow,

And the woodland echo rings;

In a moment we shall meet;

She is singing in the meadow,

And the rivulet at her feet

Ripples on in light and shadow

To the ballad that she sings.

Do I hear her sing as of old,

My bird with the shining head,

My own dove with the tender eye?

But there rings on a sudden a passionate cry,

There is some one dying or dead,

And a sullen thunder is roll’d;

For a tumult shakes the city,

And I wake, my dream is fled;

In the shuddering dawn, behold,

Without knowledge, without pity,

By the curtains of my bed

That abiding phantom cold.

Get thee hence, nor come again,

Mix not memory with doubt,

Pass, thou deathlike type of pain,

Pass and cease to move about,

’Tis the blot upon the brain

That will show itself without.

Then I rise, the eavedrops fall,

And the yellow vapours choke

The great city sounding wide;

The day comes, a dull red ball

Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke

On the misty river-tide.

Thro’ the hubbub of the market

I steal, a wasted frame,

It crosses here, it crosses there,

Thro’ all that crowd confused and loud

The shadow still the same;

And on my heavy eyelids

My anguish hangs like shame.

Alas for her that met me,

That heard me softly call,

Came glimmering thro’s the laurels

At the quiet evenfall,

In the garden by the turrets

Of the old manorial hall.

Would the happy spirit descend,

From the realms of light and song,

In the chamber or the street,

As she looks among the blest,

Should I fear to greet my friend

Or to say “Forgive the wrong,”

Or to ask her, “Take me, sweet,

To the regions of thy rest”?

But the broad light glares and beats,

And the shadow flits and fleets

And will not let me be;

And I loathe the squares and streets,

And the faces that one meets,

Hearts with no love for me:

Always I long to creep

Into some still cavern deep,

There to weep, and weep, and weep

My whole soul out to thee.

DEAD, long dead,

Long dead!

And my heart is a handful of dust,

And the wheels go over my head,

And my bones are shaken with pain,

For into a shallow grave they are thrust,

Only a yard beneath the street,

And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat,

The hoofs of the horses beat,

Beat into my scalp and my brain,

With never an end to the stream of passing feet,

Driving, hurrying, marrying, burying,

Clamor and rumble, and ringing and clatter,

And here beneath it is all as bad

For I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;

To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?

But up and down and to and fro,

Ever about me the dead men go;

And then to hear a dead man chatter

Is enough to drive one mad.

Wretchedest age, since Time began,

They cannot even bury a man;

And tho’ we paid our tithes in the days that are gone,

Not a bell was rung, not a prayer was read;

It is that which makes us loud in the world of the dead;

There is none that does his work, not one;

A touch of their office might have sufficed,

But the churchmen fain would kill their church,

As the churches have kill’d their Christ.

See, there is one of us sobbing,

No limit to his distress;

And another, a lord of all things, praying

To his own great self, as I guess;

And another, a statesman there, betraying

His party-secret, fool, to the press;

And yonder a vile physician, blabbing

The case of his patient—all for what?

To tickle the maggot born in an empty head,

And wheedle a world that loves him not,

For it is but a world of the dead.

Nothing but idiot gabble!

For the prophecy given of old

And then not understood,

Has come to pass as foretold;

Not let any man think for the public good,

But babble, merely for babble.

For I never whisper’d a private affair

Within the hearing of cat or mouse,

No, not to myself in the closet alone,

But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house;

Everything came to be known:

Who told him we were there?

Not that gray old wolf, for he came not back

From the wilderness, full of wolves, where he used to lie;

He has gather’d the bones for his o’ergrown whelp to crack;

Crack them now for yourself, and howl, and die.

Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip,

And curse me the British vermin, the rat;

I know not whether he came in the Hanover ship,

But I knows that he lies and listens mute

In an ancient mansion’s crannies and holes:

Arsenic, arsenic, sure, would do it,

Except that now we poison our babes, poor souls!

It is all used up for that.

Tell him now; she is standing here at my head;

Not beautiful now, not even kind;

He may take her now; for she never speaks her mind,

But is ever the one thing silent here.

She is not of us, as I divine;

She comes from another stiller world of the dead,

Stiller, not fairer than mine.

But I know where a garden grows,

Fairer than aught in the world beside,

All made up of the lily and rose

That blow by night, when the season is good,

To the sound of dancing music and flutes:

It is only flowers, they had no fruits,

And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;

For the keeper was one, so full of pride,

He linkt a dead man there to a spectral bride;

For he, if he had not been a Sultan of brutes,

Would he have had that hole in his side?

But what will the old man say?

He laid a cruel snare in a pit

To catch a friend of mine one stormy day;

Yet now I could even weep to think of it;

For what will the old man say

When he comes to the second corpse in the pit?

Friend, to be struck by the public foe,

Then to strike him and lay him low,

That were a public merit, far,

Whatever the Quaker holds, from sin;

But the red life spilt for a private blow—

I swear to you, lawful and lawless war

Are scarcely even akin.

O me, why have they not buried me deep enough?

Is it kind to have made me a grave so rough,

Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?

Maybe still I am but half-dead;

Then I cannot be wholly dumb:

I will cry to the steps above my head,

And somebody, surely, some kind heart will come

To bury me, bury me

Deeper, ever so little deeper.

MY life has crept so long on a broken wing

Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear,

That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing:

My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year

When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs,

And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer

And starry Gemini hang like glorious crowns

Over Orion’s grave low down in the west,

That like a silent lightning under the stars

She seem’d to divide in a dream from a band of the blest,

And spoke of a hope for the world in the coming wars—

“And in that hope, dear soul, let trouble have rest,

Knowing I tarry for thee,” and pointed to Mars,

As he glow’d like a ruddy shield on the Lion’s breast.

And it was but a dream, yet it yielded a dear delight

To have look’d, tho’ but in a dream, upon eyes so fair,

That had been in a weary world my one thing bright;

And it was but a dream, yet it lighten’d my despair

When I thought that a war would arise in defence of the right,

That an iron tyranny now should bend or cease,

The glory of manhood stand on his ancient height,

Nor Britain’s one sole God be the millionaire:

No more shall commerce be all in all, and Peace

Pipe on her pastoral hillock a languid note,

And watch her harvest ripen, her herd increase,

Nor the cannon-bullet rust on a slothful shore,

And the cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat

Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.

And as months ran on and rumour of battle grew,

“It is time, it is time, O passionate heart,” said I

(For I cleaved to a cause that I felt to be pure and true),

“It is time, O passionate heart and morbid eye,

That old hysterical mock-disease should die.”

And I stood on a giant deck and mix’d my breath

With a loyal people shouting a battle-cry,

Till I saw the dreary phantom arise and fly

Far into the North, and battle, and seas of death.

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims

Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,

Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!

Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire;

For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still

And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind

It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;

I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,

I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.