The Mystic's Vision
Ah! I shall kill myself with dreams!
These dreams that softly lap me round
Through trance-like hours in which meseems
That I am swallowed up and drowned;
Drowned in your love, which flows o'er me
As o'er the seaweed flows the sea.
In watches of the middle night,
'Twixt vesper and 'twist matin bell,
With rigid arms and straining sight,
I wait within my narrow cell;
With muttered prayers, suspended will,
I wait your advent--statue-still.
Across the convent garden walls
The wind blows from the silver seas;
Black shadow of the cypress falls
Between the moon-meshed olive-trees;
Sleep-walking from their golden bowers,
Flit disembodied orange flowers.
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Invocation
JUNE, 1866.
BREATHE thro' me in music,
Spirit of the time!
Pregnant with the future,
Spirit of the time!
As the west wind sougheth,
Through the swaying pine,
Sweep tho' all my branches
With thy song divine.
Nations now are rolling
Onward, as the sea
Which the moon upheaveth,
Thus upheaved by thee.
Muffled mutt'ring groweth
Louder on the air!
Like a lion roaring,
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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I Charge You
I charge you, O winds of the West, O winds with the wings of the dove,
That ye blow o'er the brows of my Love, breathing low that I sicken for love.
I charge you, O dews of the Dawn, O tears of the star of the morn,
That ye fall at the feet of my love with the sound of one weeping forlorn.
I charge you, O birds of the Air, O birds flying home to your nest,
That ye sing in his ears of the joy that for ever has fled from my breast.
I charge you, O flowers of the Earth, O frailest of things, and most fair,
That ye droop in his path as the life in me shrivels consumed by despair.
O Moon, when he lifts up his face, when he seeth the waning of thee,
A memory of her who lies wan on the limits of life let it be.
Many tears cannot quench, nor my sighs extinguish, the flames of love's fire,
Which lifteth my heart like a wave, and smites it, and breaks its desire.
I rise like one in a dream when I see the red sun flaring low,
That drags me back shuddering from sleep each morning to life with its woe.
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Mirror Of Diana
Popular Name for Lake Nemi.
SHE floats into the quiet skies,
Where, in the circle of hills,
Her immemorial mirror fills
With light, as of a Virgin's eyes
When, love a-tremble in their blue,
They glow twin violets dipped in dew.
Mild as a metaphor of Sleep,
Immaculately maiden-white,
The Queen Moon of ancestral night
Beholds her image in the deep:
As if a-gaze she beams above
Lake Nemi's magic glass of love.
White rose, white lily of the vale,
Perfume the even breath of night;
In many a burst of sweet delight
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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L'Envoi
Thou art the goal for which my spirit longs;
As dove on dove,
Bound for one home, I send thee all my songs
With all my love.
Thou art the haven with fair harbour lights;
Safe locked in thee,
My heart would anchor after stormful nights
Alone at sea.
Thou art the rest of which my life is fain,
The perfect peace;
Absorbed in thee the world, with all its pain
And toil, would cease.
Thou art the heaven to which my soul would go!
O dearest eyes,
Lost in your light you would turn hell below
To Paradise.
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Perfect Union
W.K.C.--3rd MARCH, 1879.
'A free man thinks of nothing so little as of death; and his wisdom is a meditation, not of death, but of life.' --Spinoza.
'DRAW back the curtain, wife,' he said;
And, dying, raised his feeble head,
As all his gathered soul leaped sheer
Into his waning eyes, and yearned
After the journeying sun which turned
Towards that other hemisphere.
Then, as its incandescent bulk
Sank slowly, like the foundering hulk
Of some lone burning ship at sea,
His life set with it--bright as brief--
In that invincible belief
Of Man's august supremacy.
Truth's vanward hero! Calmly brave
Fronting the dumb unfathomed grave
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Desert
Uncircumscribed, unmeasured, vast,
Eternal as the Sea;
What lacks the tidal sea thou hast--
Profound stability.
Beneath the sun that burns and brands
In hushed Noon's halting breath,
Calm as the Sphinx upon thy sands
Thou art--nay, calm as death.
The desert foxes hide in holes,
The jackal seeks his lair;
The sombre rocks, like reddening coals,
Glow lurid in the glare.
Only some vulture far away,
Bald-headed, harpy-eyed,
Flaps down on lazy wing to prey
On what has lately died.
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Prelude
What a twitter! what a tumult! what a whirr of wheeling wings!
Birds of Passage hear the message which the Equinoctial brings.
Birds of Passage hear the message and beneath the flying clouds,
Mid the falling leaves of autumn, congregate in clamorous crowds.
Shall they venture on the voyage? are the nestlings fledged for flight;
Fit to face the fluctuant storm-winds and the elemental night?
What a twitter! what a tumult! to the wild wind's marching song
Multitudinous Birds of Passage round the cliffs of England throng.
And o'er tempest-trodden Ocean, cloud-entangled day and night,
Birds on birds, in corporate motion, wing a commonwealth in flight.
Waves, like hollow graves beneath them, hoarsely howling, yawn for prey;
And the welkin glooms above them shifting formless, grey in grey.
And across the Bay of Biscay on undaunted wing they flee,
Where mild seas move musically murmuring of the Odyssey;
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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A Bridal In The Bois De Boulogne.
HOW the lilacs, the lilacs are glowing and blowing!
And white through the delicate verdure of May
The blossoming boughs of the hawthorn are showing,
Like beautiful brides in their bridal array;
With cobwebs for laces, and dewdrops for pearls,
Fine as a queen's dowry for workaday girls.
In an aisle of Acacias enlaced and enlacing,
Where the silvery sunlight tunnels the shade,
Where snowflakes of butterflies airily chasing
Each other in trios flash down the arcade:
Arrayed in white muslin the wedded bride
Looks fresh as a daisy, the groom by her side.
The guests flitted round her with light-hearted laughter;
They hunted the slipper, they kissed the ring;
Of days gone before and of days coming after
They thought of no more than the bird on the wing.
Were the loves and the laughter and lilacs of May,
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Moon of Ramadân
The sunset melts upon the Nile,
The stony desert glows,
Beneath heaven's universal smile,
One burning damask rose;
And like a Peri's pearly boat,
No longer than a span,
Look, faint on fiery sky afloat,
The Moon of Ramadân.
Our boat drifts idly with the Stream,
Our boatmen ship the oar;
Vistas of endless temples gleam
On either topaz shore;
And swimming over groves of Palm,
A crescent weak and wan,
There steals into the perfect calm
The Moon of Ramadân.
All nature seems to bask in peace
And hush her lowest sigh;
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poem by Mathilde Blind
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