Evensong
(Holy Trinity Church.)
THE hectic autumn's dilatory fire
Has turned this lime tree to a sevenfold brand,
Which, self consuming, lights the sunless land,
A death to which all poet souls aspire.
Above the graves, where all men's vain desire
Is hushed at last as by a Mother's hand,
And, Time confounded, Love's blank records stand,
The Evensong swells from the pulsing choir.
What incommunicable presence clings
To this grey church and willowy twilight stream?
Am I the dupe of some delusive dream?
Or, like faint fluid phosphorent rings
On refluent seas, doth Shakespeare's spirit gleam
Pervasive round these old familiar things?
poem by Mathilde Blind
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The New Proserpine
WHERE, countless as the stars of night,
The daisies made a milky way
Across fresh lawns, and flecked with light,
Old Ilex groves walled round with bay,--
I saw thee stoop, oh lady sweet,
And with those pale, frail hands of thine
Gather the spring flowers at our feet,
Fair as some late-born Proserpine.
Yea, gathering flowers, thou might'st have been
That goddess of the ethereal brow,
Revisiting this radiant scene
From realm of dolorous shades below.
Thou might'st have been that Queen of Sighs,
Love-bound by Hades' dreadful spell;
For veiled within thy heaven-blue eyes,
There lay the Memory of Hell.
Villa Pamfili Doria.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Robin Redbreast
The year's grown songless! No glad pipings thrill
The hedge-row elms, whose wind-worn branches shower
Their leaves on the sere grass, where some late flower
In golden chalice hoards the sunlight still.
Our summer guests, whose raptures used to fill
Each apple-blossomed garth and honeyed bower,
Have in adversity's inclement hour
Abandoned us to bleak November's chill.
But hearken! Yonder russet bird among
The crimson clusters of the homely thorn
Still bubbles o'er with little rills of song--
A blending of sweet hope and resignation:
Even so, when life of love and youth is shorn,
One friend becomes its last, best consolation.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Cagnes
ON THE RIVIERA.
In tortuous windings up the steep incline
The sombre street toils to the village square,
Whose antique walls in stone and moulding bear
Dumb witness to the Moor. Afar off shine,
With tier on tier, cutting heaven's blue divine,
The snowy Alps; and lower the hills are fair,
With wave-green olives rippling down to where
Gold clusters hang and leaves of sunburnt vine.
You may perchance, I never shall forget
When, between twofold glory of land and sea,
We leant together o'er the old parapet,
And saw the sun go down. For, oh, to me,
The beauty of that beautiful strange place
Was its reflection beaming from your face.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Lost Treasure
THE autumn day steals, pallid as a ghost,
Along these fields and man-forsaken ways;
And o'er the hedgerows bramble-knotted maze
The whitening locks of Old Man's Beard are tost.
Here, shrunk by centuries of fire and frost,
A crab tree stands where--lingering gossip says--
In ocean-moated England's golden days,
Great treasure, in a frolic, once was lost.
Here--fresh from fumes of some Falstaffian bout,
When famous champions, fired by many a bet,
Had drained huge bumpers while the stars would set--
Beneath its reeling branches by the way,
Till twice twelve hours of April bloom were out--
Locked in oblivion--Shakespeare lost a day.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Red Sunsets II, 1883
THE boding sky was charactered with cloud,
The scripture of the storm--but high in air,
Where the unfathomed zenith still was bare,
A pure expanse of rose-flushed violet glowed
And, kindling into crimson light, o'erflowed
The hurrying wrack with such a blood-red glare,
That heaven, igniting, wildly seemed to flare
On the dazed eyes of many an awe-struck crowd.
And in far lands folk presaged with blanched lips
Disastrous wars, earthquakes, and foundering ships,
Such whelming floods as never dykes could stem,
Or some proud empire's ruin and eclipse:
Lo, such a sky, they cried, as burned o'er them
Once lit the sacking of Jerusalem!
poem by Mathilde Blind
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Shakespeare
YEARNING to know herself for all she was,
Her passionate clash of warring good and ill,
Her new life ever ground in Death's old mill,
With every delicate detail and en masse,--
Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass,
That Time, to work out her unconscious Will,
Once wrought the Mind which she had groped for still,
And she beheld herself as in a glass.
The world of men, unrolled before our sight,
Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall
And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height
Stand faithfully recorded, great and small;
For Shakespeare was, and at his touch, with light
Impartial as the Sun's, revealed the All.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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To Memory
Oh in this dearth and winter of the soul,
When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall--
Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
One leaf, one blossom from that far-off spring
When love's auroral light lay over all.
Bring but one pansy: haply so the thrill
Of poignant yearning for those glad dead years
May, like the gusty south, breathe o'er the chill
Of frozen grief, dissolving it in tears,
Till numb Hope, stirred by that warm dropping rain,
Will deem, perchance, Love's springtide come again.
poem by Mathilde Blind
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As Many Stars
AS many stars as are aglow
Deep in the hollows of the night
As many as the flowers that blow
Beneath the kindling light;
As many as the birds that fly
Unpiloted across the deep;
As many as the clouds on high,
And all the drops they weep;
As many as the leaves that fall
In autumn, on the withering lea,
When wind to thundering wind doth call,
And sea calls unto sea;
As many as the multitude
Of quiet graves, where mutely bide
The wicked people and the good,
Laid softly side by side;--
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Once on a Golden Day
Once on a golden day,
In the golden month of May,
I gave my heart away--
Little birds were singing.
I culled my heart in truth,
Wet with the dews of youth,
For love to take, forsooth--
Little flowers were springing.
Love sweetly laughed at this,
And between kiss and kiss
Fled with my heart in his:
Winds warmly blowing.
And with his sun and shower
Love kept my heart in flower,
As in the greenest bower
Rose richly glowing.
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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