The Unknown Eros. Coventry Patmore

thee as sad and sick and dying,

      And only so, nightly for all one year,

      Did thee, my own most Dear,

      Possess,

      In gay, celestial beauty nothing coy,

      And felt thy soft caress

      With heretofore unknown reality of joy.

      But, in our mortal air,

      None thrives for long upon the happiest dream,

      And fresh despair

      Bade me seek round afresh for some extreme

      Of unconceiv’d, interior sacrifice

      Whereof the smoke might rise

      To God, and ’mind him that one pray’d below.

      And so,

      In agony, I cried:

      ‘My Lord, if thy strange will be this,

      That I should crucify my heart,

      Because my love has also been my pride,

      I do submit, if I saw how, to bliss

      Wherein She has no part.’

      And I was heard,

      And taken at my own remorseless word.

      O, my most Dear,

      Was’t treason, as I fear?

      ’Twere that, and worse, to plead thy veiled mind,

      Kissing thy babes, and murmuring in mine ear,

      ‘Thou canst not be

      Faithful to God, and faithless unto me!’

      Ah, prophet kind!

      I heard, all dumb and blind

      With tears of protest; and I cannot see

      But faith was broken.  Yet, as I have said,

      My heart was dead,

      Dead of devotion and tired memory,

      When a strange grace of thee

      In a fair stranger, as I take it, bred

      To her some tender heed,

      Most innocent

      Of purpose therewith blent,

      And pure of faith, I think, to thee; yet such

      That the pale reflex of an alien love,

      So vaguely, sadly shown,

      Did her heart touch

      Above

      All that, till then, had woo’d her for its own.

      And so the fear, which is love’s chilly dawn,

      Flush’d faintly upon lids that droop’d like thine,

      And made me weak,

      By thy delusive likeness doubly drawn,

      And Nature’s long suspended breath of flame

      Persuading soft, and whispering Duty’s name,

      Awhile to smile and speak

      With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine;

      Thy Sister sweet,

      Who bade the wheels to stir

      Of sensitive delight in the poor brain,

      Dead of devotion and tired memory,

      So that I lived again,

      And, strange to aver,

      With no relapse into the void inane,

      For thee;

      But (treason was’t?) for thee and also her.

      XII.  MAGNA EST VERITAS

         Here, in this little Bay,

      Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

      Where, twice a day,

      The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

      Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

      I sit me down.

      For want of me the world’s course will not fail:

      When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;

      The truth is great, and shall prevail,

      When none cares whether it prevail or not.

      XIII.  1867. 1

         In the year of the great crime,

      When the false English Nobles and their Jew,

      By God demented, slew

      The Trust they stood twice pledged to keep from wrong,

      One said, Take up thy Song,

      That breathes the mild and almost mythic time

      Of England’s prime!

      But I, Ah, me,

      The freedom of the few

      That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,

      Can song renew?

      Ill singing ’tis with blotting prison-bars,

      How high soe’er, betwixt us and the stars;

      Ill singing ’tis when there are none to hear;

      And days are near

      When England shall forget

      The fading glow which, for a little while,

      Illumes her yet,

      The lovely smile

      That grows so faint and wan,

      Her people shouting in her dying ear,

      Are not two daws worth two of any swan!

         Ye outlaw’d Best, who yet are bright

      With the sunken light,

      Whose common style

      Is Virtue at her gracious ease,

      The flower of olden sanctities,

      Ye haply trust, by love’s benignant guile,

      To lure the dark and selfish brood

      To their own hated good;

      Ye haply dream

      Your lives shall still their charmful sway sustain,

      Unstifled by the fever’d steam

      That rises from the plain.

      Know, ’twas the force of function high,

      In corporate exercise, and public awe

      Of Nature’s, Heaven’s, and England’s Law

      That Best, though mix’d with Bad, should reign,

      Which kept you in your sky!

      But, when the sordid Trader caught

      The loose-held sceptre from your hands distraught,

      And soon, to the Mechanic vain,

      Sold the proud toy for nought,

      Your charm was broke, your task was sped,

      Your beauty, with your honour, dead,

      And though you still are dreaming sweet

      Of being even now not less

      Than Gods and Goddesses, ye shall not long so cheat

      Your hearts of their due heaviness.

      Go, get you for your evil watching shriven!

      Leave to your lawful Master’s itching hands

      Your unking’d lands,

      But keep, at least, the dignity

      Of deigning not, for his smooth use, to be,

      Voteless,

1

In this year the middle and upper classes were disfranchised by Mr. Disraeli’s Government, and the final destruction of the liberties of England by the Act of 1884 rendered inevitable.