Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) (14 page)

This hour has been an hour! Another smile?

If you would sit thus by me every night

I should work better, do you comprehend?

I mean that I should earn more, give you more.

See, it is settled dusk now; there’s a star;

Morello’s gone, the watch-lights show the wall,

[210] The cue-owls speak the name we call them by.

Come from the window, love, – come in, at last,

Inside the melancholy little house

We built to be so gay with. God is just.

King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights

When I look up from painting, eyes tired out,

The walls become illumined, brick from brick

Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold,

That gold of his I did cement them with!

Let us but love each other. Must you go?

[220] That Cousin here again? he waits outside?

Must see you – you, and not with me? Those loans?

More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?

Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?

While hand and eye and something of a heart

Are left me, work’s my ware, and what’s it worth?

I’ll pay my fancy. Only let me sit

The grey remainder of the evening out,

Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly

How I could paint, were I but back in France,

[230] One picture, just one more – the Virgin’s face,

Not yours this time! I want you at my side

To hear them – that is, Michel Agnolo –

Judge all I do and tell you of its worth.

Will you? Tomorrow, satisfy your friend.

I take the subjects for his corridor,

Finish the portrait out of hand – there, there,

And throw him in another thing or two

If he demurs; the whole should prove enough

To pay for this same Cousin’s freak. Beside,

[240] What’s better and what’s all I care about,

Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff!

Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he,

The Cousin! what does he to please you more?

I am grown peaceful as old age tonight.

I regret little, I would change still less.

Since there my past life lies, why alter it?

The very wrong to Francis! – it is true

I took his coin, was tempted and complied,

And built this house and sinned, and all is said.

[250] My father and my mother died of want.

Well, had I riches of my own? you see

How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot.

They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they died:

And I have laboured somewhat in my time

And not been paid profusely. Some good son

Paint my two hundred pictures – let him try!

No doubt, there’s something strikes a balance. Yes,

You loved me quite enough, it seems tonight.

This must suffice me here. What would one have?

[260] In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance –

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem,

Meted on each side by the angel’s reed,

For Leonard, Rafael, Agnolo and me

To cover – the three first without a wife,

While I have mine! So – still they overcome

Because there’s still Lucrezia, – as I choose.

Again the Cousin’s whistle! Go, my Love.

In a Year

I

Never any more,

While I live,

Need I hope to see his face

As before.

Once his love grown chill,

Mine may strive:

Bitterly we re-embrace,

Single still.

II

Was it something said,

[10] Something done,

Vexed him? was it touch of hand,

Turn of head?

Strange! that very way

Love begun: I as little understand

Love’s decay.

III

When I sewed or drew,

I recall

How he looked as if I sung,

[20] – Sweetly too.

If I spoke a word,

First of all

Up his cheek the colour sprung,

Then he heard.

IV

Sitting by my side,

At my feet,

So he breathed but air I breathed,

Satisfied!

I, too, at love’s brim

[30] Touched the sweet:

I would die if death bequeathed

Sweet to him.

V

‘Speak, I love thee best!’

He exclaimed: ‘Let thy love my own foretell!’

I confessed: ‘Clasp my heart on thine

Now unblamed, Since upon thy soul as well

[40] Hangeth mine!’

VI

Was it wrong to own,

Being truth?

Why should all the giving prove

His alone?

I had wealth and ease,

Beauty, youth:

Since my lover gave me love,

I gave these.

VII

That was all I meant,

[50] – To be just,

And the passion I had raised,

To content.

Since he chose to change

Gold for dust,

If I gave him what he praised

Was it strange?

VIII

Would he loved me yet,

On and on,

While I found some way undreamed

[60] – Paid my debt!

Gave more life and more,

Till, all gone,

He should smile ‘She never seemed

Mine before.

IX

‘What, she felt the while,

Must I think?

Love’s so different with us men!’

He should smile:

‘Dying for my sake –

[70] White and pink!

Can’t we touch these bubbles then

But they break?’

X

Dear, the pang is brief,

Do thy part,

Have thy pleasure! How perplexed

Grows belief!

Well, this cold clay clod

Was man’s heart:

Crumble it, and what comes next?

[80] Is it God?

Cleon

‘As certain also of your own poets have said’
–

Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,

Lily on lily, that o’erlace the sea,

And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps ‘Greece’) –

To Protus in his Tyranny: much health!

They give thy letter to me, even now:

I read and seem as if I heard thee speak.

The master of thy galley still unlades

Gift after gift; they block my court at last

And pile themselves along its portico

[10] Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee:

And one white she-slave from the group dispersed

Of black and white slaves (like the chequer-work

Pavement, at once my nation’s work and gift,

Now covered with this settle-down of doves),

One lyric woman, in her crocus vest

Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands

Commends to me the strainer and the cup

Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine.

[20] Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence!

For so shall men remark, in such an act

Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,

Thy recognition of the use of life;

Nor call thy spirit barely adequate

To help on life in straight ways, broad enough

For vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest.

Thou, in the daily building of thy tower, –

Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil,

Or through dim lulls of unapparent growth,

Or when the general work ’mid good acclaim

[30] Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect, –

Didst ne’er engage in work for mere work’s sake –

Had’st ever in thy heart the luring hope

Of some eventual rest a-top of it,

Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed,

Thou first of men mightst look out to the East:

The vulgar saw thy tower, thou sawest the sun.

For this, I promise on thy festival

To pour libation, looking o’er the sea,

Making this slave narrate thy fortunes, speak

[40] Thy great words, and describe thy royal face –

Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most,

Within the eventual element of calm.

Thy letter’s first requirement meets me here.

It is as thou hast heard: in one short life

I, Cleon, have effected all those things

Thou wonderingly dost enumerate.

That epos on thy hundred plates of gold

Is mine, – and also mine the little chant,

So sure to rise from every fishing-bark

[50] When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net.

The image of the sun-god on the phare,

Men turn from the sun’s self to see, is mine;

The Poecile, o’er-storied its whole length,

As thou didst hear, with painting, is mine too.

I know the true proportions of a man

And woman also, not observed before;

And I have written three books on the soul,

Proving absurd all written hitherto,

And putting us to ignorance again.

[60] For music, – why, I have combined the moods,

Inventing one. In brief, all arts are mine;

Thus much the people know and recognize,

Throughout our seventeen islands. Marvel not.

We of these latter days, with greater mind

Than our forerunners, since more composite,

Look not so great, beside their simple way,

To a judge who only sees one way at once,

One mind-point and no other at a time, –

Compares the small part of a man of us

[70] With some whole man of the heroic age,

Great in his way – not ours, nor meant for ours.

And ours is greater, had we skill to know:

For, what we call this life of men on earth,

This sequence of the soul’s achievements here

Being, as I find much reason to conceive,

Intended to be viewed eventually

As a great whole, not analysed to parts,

But each part having reference to all, –

How shall a certain part, pronounced complete,

[80] Endure effacement by another part?

Was the thing done? – then, what’s to do again?

See, in the chequered pavement opposite,

Suppose the artist made a perfect rhomb,

And next a lozenge, then a trapezoid –

He did not overlay them, superimpose

The new upon the old and blot it out,

But laid them on a level in his work,

Making at last a picture; there it lies.

So, first the perfect separate forms were made,

[90] The portions of mankind; and after, so,

Occurred the combination of the same.

For where had been a progress, otherwise?

Mankind, made up of all the single men, –

In such a synthesis the labour ends.

Now mark me! those divine men of old time

Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point

The outside verge that rounds our faculty;

And where they reached, who can do more than reach?

It takes but little water just to touch

[100] At some one point the inside of a sphere,

And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest

In due succession: but the finer air

Which not so palpably nor obviously,

Though no less universally, can touch

The whole circumference of that emptied sphere,

Fills it more fully than the water did;

Holds thrice the weight of water in itself

Resolved into a subtler element.

And yet the vulgar call the sphere first full

[110] Up to the visible height – and after, void;

Not knowing air’s more hidden properties.

And thus our soul, misknown, cries out to Zeus

To vindicate his purpose in our life:

Why stay we on the earth unless to grow?

Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out,

That he or other god descended here

And, once for all, showed simultaneously

What, in its nature, never can be shown,

Piecemeal or in succession; – showed, I say,

[120] The worth both absolute and relative

Of all his children from the birth of time,

His instruments for all appointed work.

I now go on to image, – might we hear

The judgement which should give the due to each,

Show where the labour lay and where the ease,

And prove Zeus’ self, the latent everywhere!

This is a dream: – but no dream, let us hope,

That years and days, the summers and the springs,

Follow each other with unwaning powers.

[130] The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far,

Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock;

The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe;

The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet;

The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers;

That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave,

Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds,

Refines upon the women of my youth.

What, and the soul alone deteriorates?

I have not chanted verse like Homer, no –

[140] Nor swept string like Terpander, no – nor carved

And painted men like Phidias and his friend:

I am not great as they are, point by point.

But I have entered into sympathy

With these four, running these into one soul,

Who, separate, ignored each other’s art.