Sonett-Forum

Influences

I

When in the waking visions of the night
I travel back the miles my feet have worn
Since with a cry my spirit was reborn,
There stirs again the anguish and delight

Felt first as each new vista on the sight
Swam in the luminous duskiness of morn,
And the soul quested down the long leagues, torn
With its own thirst for vision and more light.

One realm in thought I near with awe profound,
Where hangs the Slav for ever on his tree,
Bedewed with sorrow, with contrition crowned,

And thorns of perfected humility,
The holy flowering of that cursed ground;
And at the mighty portals Titans three.


II

Russia, thy bitter sorrows partly spring
From the deep cleavage which, as with a knife,
Severs what is most native in the life
From what thy troubled history doth bring

Out of dark days that threatened once to wring
That life itself from thee. The very strife
That heals our Europe through thy pains, is rife
With thine own Tragedy, still on the wing.

Here stand thine institutes, designed to sway
A local life within thee, Zemstvo, Mir,
And Duma, people's parliaments; and here

The iron empire with the feet of clay,
That froward issue of the Olden day
When Ivan's legions laid the Tartar spear.


III

The other cause behind the ages lies,
A-swelter in the elemental yeast,
Where yet thou lay'st fermenting for the feast
Of nationality, thine opening eyes

Turned longingly to where the sun doth rise,
And thy great spirit, when the ferment ceased,
For euer oriented to the East,
Mysterious, helpless, beautiful and wise.

Thence while the bitter ages onward run,
And the fierte West doth rend a path through time,
Thou for the nations from the healing sun

Draw'st healing still, and in the teeth of crime
Provest by many a bloodless victory won,
Than this world's pride of power Love more sublime.


IV

Who is it loometh o'er the Steppes at e'en,
A giant from the sunrise of man's race,
Statured of eld, that immemorial face
Hewn out of Ararat, in which we glean,

And in the froward, patriarchal mien,
An old tale told in many a furrowed trace,
Moulded before the Sphynx erouched in her place,
By passion uncontrollable and clean.

For he hath sat with Abram in the tent,
And gazed an Hebron, till the blue heaven broke
Over them into stars. Then he went on

Down all the ages ageless and unbent,
Till in this later world of lesser folk
'Mongst men he towers the eternal Mastodon.


V

And all that man hath felt since man hath known
Life first within him, aye, and woman too,
Coneeived and manifolded in him, drew
To limitless creation, widely sown

On teaming soil o'er which his breath had blown.
Magnificently carnal, through and through.
Each taste of the green earth, the brown, he knew,
And tasted deep, and joyed, and made his own:

The boundless steppe, to which the sky bends down,
The forest where the eternal shadows sleep,
The sowing and the mowing and the frost;

The village and the pleasures of the town,
And birth and death and love, and the starred deep
Of heaven by night; and here his soul was lost!


VI

Tolstoy is great in art, in thought not great.
Yet his thought troubles, oft-times shivering through
With icy barb the best that thought can do.
And when we ponder o'er his latter state,

And note its argument, backed by the fate
That marked his greatness down, we feel here too
That Something elemental, vast and true
To which all things at length capitulate.

And ye who sadly ponder to behold
The ruin of such greatness, grieved to see
How the child in him acted, thought and spoke,

Perchance will wonder, when the tale is told,
Whether 'twas not a mightier Thing than he
On which the Titan stumbled when he broke.


VII

So Tolstoy passed, and passing left behind
Not great themes only, but himself a great
And tragic Theme. Another shares his state,
Supreme within the kingdom of the mind,

As he where soul and body meet, combined
In lovely earth-forms. Dostoievsky, late
Thou cam'st into thine own, thy bitter fate
To be an exile; for the world is blind.

But in thy mantic cavern, undismayed
Amongst thy spirits, named and known so well,
Each a familiar, and thyself a shade,

By whitest light of heaven, by reddest hell,
Unscorched, unblinded, wrapt yet unafraid,
And true to thine own Passion, thou dost dwell.


VIII

Deep-sounding, subtle, pitiful, profound,
Dredger of human nature, versed in crime,
Mated with every grief, who in the slime
Divinest well where purest pearls abound;

Where darkness mostly reigneth thou dost found
A kingdom of the light, 0 soul sublime,
Most pure, most Christ-like spirit of thy time;
And where thy feet have trod is holy ground—

Holy, yet haunted, and a realm of fright,
Not to be traversed but with flying feet,
And beating heart and racing brain alight

With fire from hell, and heated with hell's heat,
Till in the cooler spaces of the night
The o'erwrought spirit finds a safe retreat.


IX

Here is thy limit, mightiest of thine age
An under- and an over-world to paint,
Peopled with epileptic and with saint,
The murderer's, ogre's, and the gambler's rage:

Too much of fever in thee to assuage
Our average human restlessness, the taint
Of a charmed subtlety oft rendering faint
The sense of man's salvation in thy page.

Perchance in thy heroic spirit, fraught
With too much tragedy, the causes lie;
That spirit unembittered, overwrought,

In which a something fitful we descry,
A fretfulness, as in thine image caught
By Sonia Kovalevsky's soulful eye.


X

Turgenev, gentlest of the sons of pain,
Who in a line, as Homer wont, distillest
The essence of all pathos, thou who fillest
A human place 'twixt the Cyclopean twain,

'Tis not with hell-fire driven o'er the brain,
Nor stretched titanic canvas that thou thrillest,
But by the plotted garden-space thou tillest,
Making man's middle courses thy domain.

Here once more we discern how still great art
Meets nature greatly. Elemental powers
Pulse in thy perfect pages. Souls depart

With awe upon them to the silent bowers.
The world is ever with thee, its great heart
Laid to thy beating own, as thine to ours.


XI

Wordsworth, above all poets in thee I find
What in the greatest we too seldom see,
The crowning virtue of tranquillity,
Effectual o'er the sorrows of the mind.

Others to gain such peace have left behind
This hard world for the realm of fantasie,
Or in a past remote found sanctuary,
Or in the end thought's burden have resigned.

One above all by daily struggle rose
Into a blue empyrean of the brain,
Self-mastering might, yet such as never knows

The deeper calm that masters. There remain
Nature's anointed dynasts. Only those
Whose peace is fundamental truly reign.


XII

Of these thou art. And, Wordsworth, it is not
That thou hast missed man's feverish heritage.
Strange passions thou hast known, and noble rage,
Nor in Romance an anodyne hast sought.

And if to souls in trouble thou hast brought
Strength and relief, 'tis not thy sauntering page,
Nor oft-times common theme that doth assuage
The anguish of the Spirit overwrought.

Rather it is that, deeply moved, thou sink'st
Deeply in nature's homeliness, thy rime
Plain as her face; but, stooping as thou drink'st,

The eternal from beyond the hills of Time
Is an thee ere thou know'st it, and thou link'st
Thy being with it, suddenly sublime.


XIII

Herein is thy celestial wisdom shown,
That thou, divining Godhead scarce concealed
In nature's plain immediacy, dost yield
To her the soul of poetry and thine own.

Until thou cam'st no son of time had known
The measure of the glory now revealed
In common things, the beauty of the field,
The moving grace of planet and of stone.

What bliss it was to feel as at the first,
But with that insight now supremely thine,
The trailing elouds upon a world accurst

In all their fresh and pristine splendour shine;
While into that familiar face there burst
The Sexpression of the Countenance divine.


XIV

Sweetly at length, like faithful love abused
By cold neglect, in this domed interval
Of silent time returns with soft footfall
The echo of a music long disused.

Ah me, before such strains I stand accused,
So early known, and then my all in all,
And with the magie of the morning's call
And ethos of my children interfused -

A nameless sense of youth that will not die,
While Homer's volleying dactyls surging send
The music. of the wind-entangled seas

Around the world, and as the billows fly,
Shouldering each other shorewards, metely blend
His harping with the thunderous centuries.


XV

Oft have I risen before the night hath flown,
To catch the hour of deepest silence sweet,
And through that hush to list in my retreat
The solemn voice of AEschylus intone,

His great Iambic, till the tale hath grown
Into a passion over me, where meet
Huge forms archaic, and on stately feet
Move to swift doom in AEginetan stone.

High over all in simple grandeur bold,
With crest on crest against the morning skies,
Yet in eternal shadow, I behold

The massif of the Agamemnon rise,
And through its marble caverns shuddering hear
The haunting voice of Clytaemnestra's fear.


XVI

—Infatuate queen, who oft as lingering day
Rounds to his close, and passion's hour is nigh,
Through Atreus' halls an soundless foot doth hie,
And from the tower the purpling east survey-

Lest in the still and fearful night's thick play,
While by her beating side doth sweltering lie
Sallow AEgisthus with the hawking eye,
Swift Fate prepare a swifter stroke than they;

And while love's maddening vintage they partake,
A sudden flame should redden all the land,
And beacon call to beacon, where they break

From the lone watchman an the AEgean strand.
"The ship! the ship ! His ship comes tossing o'er
The wine-dark sea. The King is at the door,"


XVII

I paced entranced the mourne, melodious shore
Where Sophocles unwinds with matehless art
Life's tangled error, pondering in my heart
The tragic theme that middle diction bore -

The end not hopeless, when, all wanderings o'er,
By still Colonus in that place apart
The thunder rolled, and while the earth did start,
The old man of the sorrows was no more.

And I have felt the moving of the strings
Beneath the fingers of that troubled soul,
Third in the triple dynasty of kings,

Whose tenderness, beyond his art's control,
Over life's mutilated torso wrings
Fierce protest, agonizing for the Whole.


XVIII

One scene, Euripides, throughout the years
Clings to the moving skirts of memory,
Among the images of things that lie
In beauty perfected, too deep for tears.

'Tis where, to still his faithful matron's fears
Through lonely days and nights of agony,
Having fulfilled his roving chivalry,
At length the Paladin of eld appears,

Thy Herakles; and wife and children stand
'Neath that majestic manhood pure from blame;
The basket circulates from hand to hand.

When of a sudden—He was not the same.
There could no more, but with the dripping sword.
And all that ruth impounded in a word!


XIX

White still that music pealed an alien strain
Broke boisterous into sudden interplay,
Troubling the soul with laughter and dismay;
And chattering drolls appeared, expressly plain,

And tingling to the immemorial vein
Of the obscene in all things formed of clay.
There pausing on the turmoiled seene that lay
Before my eyes, a light broke on my brain,

And vast Aristophanie laughter shook
Each nerve within me, and a hand did part
Some far-back curtain of the soul, and took

A portion of my years; and I did start,
Divining art's new purport, to rebuke
And humanize the stiffly pure of heart.


XX

It were not well with man did he not feel
At home with his own nature, all we are
Conspiring with our angel and our star
To keep our being whole, or, broken, heal,

Lest in some faulted mould the soul congeal.
And oft-times 'tis the Highest that doth mar
The Perfect in us, straining us too far,
And overreaching Justice. Hence the peal

Of that great cacinnation echoing woke
Appreciation of the lofty use
Of comedy, to shake the settling soul

Out of itself. The Elemental spoke,
And something broadened in me. The recluse
Unstiffened, and I felt my nature whole.


XXI

Justice! the very sound brings back the throes
Of that tremendous season when Youth sees
His world collapse, and besten to his knees
He takes the bolt of doubt, all that he knows,

That he knows nothing. Underneath the blows
Of thought I laboured long in labouring seas,
Pledging my soul to rnartyred Socrates ;
And o'er night's face the star of Plato rose.

This much of truth. I still divined, that here
Was internecine conflict; only doubt
Strained to the uttermost a path could clear

To that last Deep where wind and tide give out,
And freighted Time drops softly out to sea,
A moving image of Eternity.


XXII

Who to the visions of immortal Thought,
Engendered by the music of the mind—
First in that place where our poor human kind
Sit in the cave and watch the shadows wrought

By firelight on the wall, obscurely caught;
Then luring on to where the soul, half blind,
Turns from the Splendour which itself divined
With kinglier toil a loftier art hath brought,

Than Plato? Who more haunted by the light
Hath ever yet Bone coasting with the sun,
Or in the deep and constellated night,

Claimed from the spheres their voices as they run?
Or soaring where the Eternal Glories shine
Hath stretched to earth a more majestic line?


XXIII

As deeply versed in that infinitude
Where man his doom within himself doth find
By no strait pedagogy, but divined
Through some more massive sense of True and Good,

A kind of Inspiration, the soul's food,
Derived from far, and working still behind
All conscious reason, till the labouring mind
'Neath that profounder suasion sinks subdued.

So Plato's thought grows cosmic, by its own
Illumination led and mystified,
And haunted by a voice of purer tone

Than reason's groping motion e'er supplied;
The beam refracted by the Forms and shown
As coloured light wherein the soul is dyed.


XXIV

Thus do the greatest ever by sheer might
Of natural penetration find their way
Into the Innermost, where Being's ray
Burns unendurable, and in that light

Their own with nature's majesty unite
To one high rhythm, stupendous interplay
Of Thought and Being, perioded, gray
With shadow, with serenest sunshine bright.

So that old man of Koenigsberg profound,
By night revolving two infinities,
And so Spinoza, when his spirit found

Intellect into Intuition rise,
Envisaging ereation from above,
Where knowledge takes the perfect form of Love?


XXV

But thy peculiar greatness more than these,
By thinking pregnant with creative art,
Subduing chance and moulding part to part,
Hath Cosmic in it, Plato, harmonies

That wake the dim immortal memories
We bring from the Eternal, whence we start
The round of Being, bearing in our heart
The echoes of the everlasting seas.

Here stands no accidental word. And so,
While theme with theme grows twisted and entwined,
Is freedom perfected. We gaze, and lo,

The argument is off before the wind,
Like some great trireme tacking endlessly,
Yet ever headed for Eternity.