Poems - Arnold Matthew

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      What mortal, when he saw,

       Life’s voyage done, his heavenly Friend,

       Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly—

       “I have kept uninfringed my nature’s law;

       The inly-written chart thou gavest me,

       To guide me, I have steered by to the end”?

      Ah! let us make no claim,

       On life’s incognizable sea,

       To too exact a steering of our way;

       Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim,

       If some fair coast has lured us to make stay,

       Or some friend hailed us to keep company.

      Ay! we would each fain drive

       At random, and not steer by rule.

       Weakness! and worse, weakness bestowed in vain!

       Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive;

       We rush by coasts where we had lief remain:

       Man cannot, though he would, live chance’s fool.

      No! as the foaming swath

       Of torn-up water, on the main,

       Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar

       On either side the black deep-furrowed path

       Cut by an onward-laboring vessel’s prore,

       And never touches the ship-side again;

      Even so we leave behind,

       As, chartered by some unknown Powers,

       We stem across the sea of life by night,

       The joys which were not for our use designed—

       The friends to whom we had no natural right,

       The homes that were not destined to be ours.

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      Who taught this pleading to unpractised eyes?

       Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom?

       Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?

       Who massed, round that slight brow, these clouds of doom?

      Lo! sails that gleam a moment, and are gone;

       The swinging waters, and the clustered pier.

       Not idly earth and ocean labor on,

       Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near.

      But thou, whom superfluity of joy

       Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain,

       Nor weariness, the full-fed soul’s annoy,

       Remaining in thy hunger and in thy pain;

       Thou, drugging pain by patience; half averse

       From thine own mother’s breast, that knows not thee;

       With eyes which sought thine eyes thou didst converse,

       And that soul-searching vision fell on me.

      Glooms that go deep as thine, I have not known;

       Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.

       Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own;

       Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.

      What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?

       His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,

       Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?

       —Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.

      Some exile’s, mindful how the past was glad?

       Some angel’s, in an alien planet born?

       —No exile’s dream was ever half so sad,

       Nor any angel’s sorrow so forlorn.

      Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh

       Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore;

       But in disdainful silence turn away,

       Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?

      Or do I wait, to hear some gray-haired king

       Unravel all his many-colored lore;

       Whose mind hath known all arts of governing,

       Mused much, loved life a little, loathed it more?

      Down the pale cheek, long lines of shadow slope,

       Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give.

       —Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope,

       Foreseen thy harvest, yet proceed’st to live.

      O meek anticipant of that sure pain

       Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn!

       What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain?

       What heavens, what earth, what suns, shalt thou discern?

      Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,

       Match that funereal aspect with her pall,

       I think thou wilt have fathomed life too far,

       Have known too much—or else forgotten all.

      The Guide of our dark steps, a triple veil

       Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps;

       Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale

       Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.

      Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,

       Not daily labor’s dull, Lethæan spring,

       Oblivion in lost angels can infuse

       Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing;

      And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may,

       In the thronged fields where winning comes by strife;

       And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,

       Some reaches of thy storm-vexed stream of life;

      Though that blank sunshine blind thee; though the cloud

       That severed the world’s march and thine, be gone;

       Though ease dulls grace, and wisdom be too proud

       To halve a lodging that was all her own—

      Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,

       Oh, once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain!

       Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,

       And wear this majesty of grief again.

       Table of Contents

      Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows

       Like the wave;

       Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.

       Love lends life a little grace,

       A few sad smiles; and then

       Both are laid in one cold place—

       In the grave.

      Dreams dawn and fly,

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