Sonnets

Enamoured architect OF AIRY RHYME ENAMOURED architect of airy rhyme, Build as thou wilt; heed not what each man says: Good souls, but innocent of dreamers’ ways, Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time; Others, beholding how thy turrets climb ’Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; But most beware of those who come to praise. O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all; Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame, Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given: Then, if at last the airy structure fall, Dissolve, and vanish—take thyself no shame. They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. REMINISCENCE THOUGH I am native to this frozen zone That half the twelvemonth torpid lies, or dead; Though the cold azure arching overhead And the Atlantic’s never-ending moan Are mine by heritage, I must have known Life otherwhere in epochs long since fled; For in my veins some Orient blood is red, And through my thought are lotus blossoms blown. I do remember … it was just at dusk, Near a walled garden at the river’s turn (A thousand summers seem but yesterday!), A Nubian girl, more sweet than Khoorja musk, Came to the water-tank to fill her urn, And, with the urn, she bore my heart away! OUTWARD BOUND I LEAVE behind me the elm-shadowed square And carven portals of the silent street, And wander on with listless, vagrant feet Through seaward-leading alleys, till the air Smells of the sea, and straightway then the care Slips from my heart, and life once more is sweet. At the lane’s ending lie the white-winged fleet. O restless Fancy, whither wouldst thou fare? Here are brave pinions that shall take thee far— Gaunt hulks of Norway; ships of red Ceylon; Slim-masted lovers of the blue Azores! ’T is but an instant hence to Zanzibar, Or to the regions of the Midnight Sun; Ionian isles are thine, and all the fairy shores! ANDROMEDA THE SMOOTH-WORN coin and threadbare classic phrase Of Grecian myths that did beguile my youth, Beguile me not as in the olden days: I think more grief and beauty dwell with truth. Andromeda, in fetters by the sea, Star-pale with anguish till young Perseus came, Less moves me with her suffering than she, The slim girl figure fettered to dark shame, That nightly haunts the park, there, like a shade, Trailing her wretchedness from street to street. See where she passes—neither wife nor maid; How all mere fiction crumbles at her feet! Here is woe’s self, and not the mask of woe: A legend’s shadow shall not move you so! THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY FOREVER am I conscious, moving here, That should I step a little space aside I pass the boundary of some glorified Invisible domain—it lies so near! Yet nothing know we of that dim frontier Which each must cross, whatever fate betide, To reach the heavenly cities where abide (Thus Sorrow whispers) those that were most dear, Now all transfigured in celestial light! Shall we indeed behold them, thine and mine, Whose going hence made black the noonday sun?— Strange is it that across the narrow night They fling us not some token, or make sign That all beyond is not Oblivion. SLEEP WHEN to soft sleep we give ourselves away, And in a dream as in a fairy bark Drift on and on through the enchanted dark To purple daybreak—little thought we pay To that sweet bitter world we know by day. We are clean quit of it, as is a lark So high in heaven no human eye can mark The thin swift pinion cleaving through the gray. Till we awake ill fate can do no ill, The resting heart shall not take up again The heavy load that yet must make it bleed; For this brief space the loud world’s voice is still, No faintest echo of it brings us pain. How will it be when we shall sleep indeed?