“Shes somewhere in the sunlight strong, / Her tears are in the falling rain, / She calls me in the winds soft song, / And with the flowers she comes again.”
SPIRIT OF SADNESS
She loved the Autumn, I the Spring,
Sad all the songs she loved to sing;
And in her face was strangely set
Some great inherited regret.
Some look in all things made her sigh,
Yea! sad to her the morning sky:
'So sad! so sad its beauty seems'--
I hear her say it still in dreams.
But when the day grew grey and old,
And rising stars shone strange and cold,
Then only in her face I saw
A mystic glee, a joyous awe.
Spirit of Sadness, in the spheres
Is there an end of mortal tears?
Or is there still in those great eyes
That look of lonely hills and skies?
AN INSCRIPTION
Precious the box that Mary brake
Of spikenard for her Master's sake,
But ah! it held nought half so dear
As the sweet dust that whitens here.
The greater wonder who shall say:
To make so white a soul of clay,
From clay to win a face so fair,
Those strange great eyes, that sunlit hair
A-ripple o'er her witty brain,--
Or turn all back to dust again.
Who knows--but, in some happy hour,
The God whose strange alchemic power
Wrought her of dust, again may turn
To woman this immortal urn.
SONG
She's somewhere in the sunlight strong,
Her tears are in the falling rain,
She calls me in the wind's soft song,
And with the flowers she comes again.
Yon bird is but her messenger,
The moon is but her silver car;
Yea! sun and moon are sent by her,
And every wistful waiting star.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, AN ELEGY; AND OTHER POEMS ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark.
“A womans beauty is one of her great missions”
They are 'sacred,'--which means that we ought to be ashamed to mention
them, however reverent our intention. Motherhood, it would appear, is not,
as one had regarded it, a sanctifying privilege, but a shameful
disability, of which not the Immaculate Conception, but the ignoble
service for the 'purification' of women, is the significant symbol. It
behoves not only the unmarried, but the married mothers, so to speak, to
wear farthingales upon the subject, and pretend, with as grave a face as
possible, that babies are really found under cabbages, or sent parcel
post, on application, by her Majesty the Queen.
How long are we to retain the pernicious fallacy that sacredness is a
quality inhering not in the sacred object itself, but in the superstitious
'decencies' that swaddle it, or that we best reverence such sacred object
by a prurient prudish conspiracy of silence concerning it?
Then there is, it would also appear, a particular indignity, from the new
virago's point of view, in the assumption that a woman's beauty is one of
her great missions, or the supposition that she takes any such pride in it
herself as man has from time immemorial supposed. No sensible woman, we
have been indignantly assured, ever plays at Narcissus with her mirror.
That all women find such pleasure in their reflections no one would think
of saying. How could they, poor things? One is quite ready to admit that
probably our virago looks in her glass as seldom as possible. But all
sensible women that are beautiful as well should take joy in their own
charms, if they have any feelings of gratitude towards the supernal powers
which might have made them--well, more advanced than beautiful, and given
them a head full of cheap philosophy instead of a transfiguring head of
hair.
No one wants a woman to be silly and vain about her beauty. But vanity and
conceit are qualities that exist in people quite independently of their
gifts and graces. The ugly and stupid are perhaps more often conceited
than the beautiful or the clever,--vain, it would appear, of their very
ugliness and stupidity.
“The cry of the Little Peoples goes up to God in vain, / For the world is given over to the cruel sons of Cain.”
Of this O will ye rob us,--with a foolish mighty hand,
Add with such cruel sorrow, so small a land to your land?
So might a boy rejoice him to conquer a hive of bees,
Overcome ants in battle,--we are scarcely more mighty than these--
So might a cruel heart hear a nightingale singing alone,
And say, "I am mighty! See how the singing stops with a stone!"
Yea, he were mighty indeed, mighty to crush and to gain;
But the bee and the ant and the bird were the mighty of brain.
And what shall you gain if you take us and bind us and beat us with
thongs,
And drive us to sing underground in a whisper our sad little songs?
Forbid us the very use of our heart's own nursery tongue--
Is this to be strong, ye nations, is this to be strong?
Your vulgar battles to fight, and your grocery conquests to keep,
For this shall we break our hearts, for this shall our old men weep?
What gain in the day of battle--to the Russ, to the German, what gain,
The Czech, and the Pole, and the Finn, and the Schleswig Dane?
The Cry of the Little Peoples goes up to God in vain,
For the world is given over to the cruel sons of Cain;
The hand that would bless us is weak, and the hand that would break us
is strong,
And the power of pity is nought but the power of a song.
The dreams that our fathers dreamed to-day are laughter and dust,
And nothing at all in the world is left for a man to trust;
Let us hope no more, or dream, or prophesy, or pray,
For the iron world no less will crash on its iron way;
Yea! nothing is left but to watch, with a helpless, pitying eye,
The kind old aims for the world, and the kind old fashions die.
THE ILLUSION OF WAR
War
I abhor,
And yet how sweet
The sound along the marching street
Of drum and fife, and I forget
Wet eyes of widows, and forget
Broken old mothers, and the whole
Dark butchery without a soul.
Without a soul--save this bright drink
Of heady music, sweet as hell;
And even my peace-abiding feet
Go marching with the marching street,
For yonder, yonder goes the fife,
And what care I for human life!
“What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?”
For, whether it be he or she,
A David or a Dorothy,
'As mother fair,' or 'father wise,'
Both when it's 'good,' and when it cries,
One thing is certain,--it will be
_Our_ little babe.
MISCELLANEOUS
THE HOUSE OF VENUS
Not that Queen Venus of adulterous fame,
Whose love was lust's insatiable flame--
Not hers the house I would be singer in
Whose loose-lipped servants seek a weary sin:
But mine the Venus of that morning flood
With all the dawn's young passion in her blood,
With great blue eyes and unpressed bosom sweet.
Her would I sing, and of the shy retreat
Where Love first kissed her wondering maidenhood,
And He and She first stood, with eyes afraid,
In the most golden House that God has made.
SATIETY
The heart of the rose--how sweet
Its fragrance to drain,
Till the greedy brain
Reels and grows faint
With the garnered scent,
Reels as a dream on its silver feet.
Sweet thus to drain--then to sleep:
For, beware how you stay
Till the joy pass away,
And the jaded brain
Seeketh fragrance in vain,
And hates what it may not reap.
WHAT OF THE DARKNESS?
What of the darkness? Is it very fair?
Are there great calms and find ye silence there?
Like soft-shut lilies all your faces glow
With some strange peace our faces never know,
With some great faith our faces never dare.
Dwells it in Darkness? Do you find it there?
Is it a Bosom where tired heads may lie?
Is it a Mouth to kiss our weeping dry?
Is it a Hand to still the pulse's leap?
Is it a Voice that holds the runes of sleep?
Day shows us not such comfort anywhere.
Dwells it in Darkness? Do you find it there?
Out of the Day's deceiving light we call,
Day that shows man so great and God so small,
That hides the stars and magnifies the grass;
O is the Darkness too a lying glass,
Or, undistracted, do you find truth there?
What of the Darkness? Is it very fair?
AD CIMMERIOS
(_A Prefatory Sonnet for_ SANTA LUCIA_, the Misses Hodgkin's
Magazine for the Blind)_
We, deeming day-light fair, and loving well
Its forms and dyes, and all the motley play
Of lives that win their colour from the day,
Are fain some wonder of it all to tell
To you that in that elder kingdom dwell
Of Ancient Night, and thus we make assay
Day to translate to Darkness, so to say,
To talk Cimmerian for a little spell.
“Wild oats will get sown some time, and one of the arts of life is to sow them at the right time”
But tenderness, gentleness, affection, even
self-sacrifice,--these may be parts of love; but they are merely the
crude untransformed ingredients of a love such as you feel for your
wife, and such as I know she feels for you."
"She still loves me, then," he said pitifully; "she hasn't fallen in
love with you."
"No fear," I answered; "no such luck for me. If she had, I'm afraid I
should hardly have been talking to you as I am at this moment. If a
woman like Rosalind, as I call her, gave me her love, it would take
more than a husband to rob me of it, I can tell you."
"Yes," he repeated, "on my soul, I love her. I have never been false
to her, in my heart; but--"
"I know all about it," I said; "may I tell you how it all
was,--diagnose the situation?"
"Do," he replied; "it is a relief to hear you talk."
"Well," I said, "may I ask one rather intimate question? Did you ever
before you were married sow what are known as wild oats?"
"Never," he answered indignantly, flashing for a moment.
"Well, you should have done," I said; "that's just the whole trouble.
Wild oats will get sown some time, and one of the arts of life is to
sow them at the right time,--the younger the better. Think candidly
before you answer me."
"I believe you are right," he replied, after a long pause.
"You are a believer in theories," I continued, "and so am I; but you
can take my word that on these matters not all, but some, of the old
theories are best. One of them is that the man who does not sow his
wild oats before marriage will sow them afterwards, with a whirlwind
for the reaping."
Orlando looked up at me, haggard with confession.
"You know the old story of the ring given to Venus? Well, it is the
ruin of no few men to meet Venus for the first time on their marriage
night. Their very chastity, paradoxical as it may seem, is their
destruction. No one can appreciate the peace, the holy satisfaction of
monogamy till he has passed through the wasting distractions, the
unrest of polygamy. Plunged right away into monogamy, man,
unexperienced in his good fortune, hankers after polygamy, as the
monotheistic Jew hankered after polytheism; and thus the monogamic
young man too often meets Aphrodite for the first time, and makes
future appointments with her, in the arms of his pure young wife.
“Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders than any other agency in the world”
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.
It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.
There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.
A wholesome oblivion of ones neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.
