"England and Yesterday": A Book of Short Poems. Louise Imogen Guiney

A MEMORY OF A BRECONSHIRE VALLEY.

       I.

       II.

       WRIT IN MY LORD CLARENDON’S “HISTORY OF THE REBELLION.”

       A LAST WORD ON SHELLEY.

       AN EPITAPH FOR WILLIAM HAZLITT.

       EMILY BRONTË.

       PAX PAGANICA.

       VALEDICTION (R. L. S., 1894) .

LONDON:

       SONNETS WRITTEN IN 1889.

       TO HERBERT E. CLARKE.

       Table of Contents

I.

       ON FIRST ENTERING WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

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      Holy of England! since my light is short

      And faint, O rather by the sun anew

      Of timeless passion set my dial true,

      That with thy saints and thee I may consort;

      And wafted in the cool enshadowed port

      Of poets, seem a little sail long due,

      And be as one the call of memory drew

      Unto the saddle void since Agincourt!

      Not now for secular love’s unquiet lease,

      Receive my soul, who, rapt in thee erewhile,

      Hath broken tryst with transitory things;

      But seal with her a marriage and a peace

      Eternal, on thine Edward’s altar-isle,

      Above the stormless sea of ended kings.

II.

       FOG.

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      Like bodiless water passing in a sigh,

      Through palsied streets the fatal shadows flow,

      And in their sharp disastrous undertow

      Suck in the morning sun, and all the sky.

      The towery vista sinks upon the eye,

      As if it heard the horns of Jericho,

      Black and dissolved; nor could the founders know

      How what was built so bright should daily die.

      Thy mood with man’s is broken and blent in,

      City of Stains! and ache of thought doth drown

      The generous light in which thy life began.

      Great as thy dole is, smirchèd with his sin,

      Greater and elder yet the love of man

      Full in thy look, though the dark visor’s down.

III.

       S. PETER-AD-VINCULA.

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      Too well I know, pacing the place of awe,

      Three queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;

      More in his halo, Monmouth’s mocking eye,

      The eagle Essex in a harpy’s claw;

      Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw

      Sundown of Scotland: how with treasons lie

      White martyrdoms; rank in a company

      Breaker and builder of the eternal law.

      Oft as I come, the bitter garden-row

      Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,

      Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,

      Infects me: suddenly must I depart,

      Ere thought of men’s injustice then, and now,

      Add to these aisles one other broken heart.

IV.

       STRIKERS IN HYDE PARK.

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      A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave,

      How slow! but never once they slip the thread.

      Hither, upon the Georgian idlers’ tread,

      Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,

      Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,

      Come men bereft of time, and scant of bread,

      Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,

      Through the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.

      What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange

      Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so,

      The clear Republic waits the general throe,

      Along her noonday mountains’ open range.

      God be with both! for one is young to know

      Her mother’s rote of evil and of change.

V.

       CHANGES IN THE TEMPLE.

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      The cry is at thy gates, thou darling ground,

      Again; for oft ere now thy children went

      Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent

      Some red old alley with a dial crowned;

      Some house of honour, in a glory bound

      With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;

      Some tree, rude-taken from his kingly tent,

      Hard by a little fountain’s friendly sound.

      O for Virginius’ hand, if only that

      Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!

      Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,

      Her walled oasis, and where once it was,

      All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat

      Echo, and ivy, and the loitering moon.

VI.