Wessex Poems and Other Verses

THE DANCE AT THE PHŒNIX

 
To Jenny came a gentle youth
From inland leazes lone,
His love was fresh as apple-blooth
By Parrett, Yeo, or Tone.
And duly he entreated her
To be his tender minister,
And call him aye her own.
 
 
Fair Jenny’s life had hardly been
A life of modesty;
At Casterbridge experience keen
Of many loves had she
From scarcely sixteen years above;
Among them sundry troopers of
The King’s-Own Cavalry.
 
 
But each with charger, sword, and gun,
Had bluffed the Biscay wave;
And Jenny prized her gentle one
For all the love he gave.
She vowed to be, if they were wed,
His honest wife in heart and head
From bride-ale hour to grave.
 
 
Wedded they were.  Her husband’s trust
In Jenny knew no bound,
And Jenny kept her pure and just,
Till even malice found
No sin or sign of ill to be
In one who walked so decently
The duteous helpmate’s round.
 
 
Two sons were born, and bloomed to men,
And roamed, and were as not:
Alone was Jenny left again
As ere her mind had sought
A solace in domestic joys,
And ere the vanished pair of boys
Were sent to sun her cot.
 
 
She numbered near on sixty years,
And passed as elderly,
When, in the street, with flush of fears,
One day discovered she,
From shine of swords and thump of drum.
Her early loves from war had come,
The King’s-Own Cavalry.
 
 
She turned aside, and bowed her head
Anigh Saint Peter’s door;
“Alas for chastened thoughts!” she said;
“I’m faded now, and hoar,
And yet those notes – they thrill me through,
And those gay forms move me anew
As in the years of yore!”.
 
 
’Twas Christmas, and the Phœnix Inn
Was lit with tapers tall,
For thirty of the trooper men
Had vowed to give a ball
As “Theirs” had done (’twas handed down)
When lying in the selfsame town
Ere Buonaparté’s fall.
 
 
That night the throbbing “Soldier’s Joy,”
The measured tread and sway
Of “Fancy-Lad” and “Maiden Coy,”
Reached Jenny as she lay
Beside her spouse; till springtide blood
Seemed scouring through her like a flood
That whisked the years away.
 
 
She rose, and rayed, and decked her head
Where the bleached hairs ran thin;
Upon her cap two bows of red
She fixed with hasty pin;
Unheard descending to the street,
She trod the flags with tune-led feet,
And stood before the Inn.
 
 
Save for the dancers’, not a sound
Disturbed the icy air;
No watchman on his midnight round
Or traveller was there;
But over All-Saints’, high and bright,
Pulsed to the music Sirius white,
The Wain by Bullstake Square.
 
 
She knocked, but found her further stride
Checked by a sergeant tall:
“Gay Granny, whence come you?” he cried;
“This is a private ball.”
– “No one has more right here than me!
Ere you were born, man,” answered she,
“I knew the regiment all!”
 
 
“Take not the lady’s visit ill!”   U
pspoke the steward free;
“We lack sufficient partners still,
So, prithee let her be!
”They seized and whirled her ’mid the maze,
And Jenny felt as in the days
Of her immodesty.
 
 
Hour chased each hour, and night advanced;
She sped as shod with wings;
Each time and every time she danced —
Reels, jigs, poussettes, and flings:
They cheered her as she soared and swooped,
(She’d learnt ere art in dancing drooped
From hops to slothful swings).
 
 
The favourite Quick-step “Speed the Plough” —
(Cross hands, cast off, and wheel) —
“The Triumph,” “Sylph,” “The Row-dow-dow,”
Famed “Major Malley’s Reel,”
“The Duke of York’s,” “The Fairy Dance,”
“The Bridge of Lodi” (brought from France),
She beat out, toe and heel.
 
 
The “Fall of Paris” clanged its close,
And Peter’s chime told four,
When Jenny, bosom-beating, rose
To seek her silent door.
They tiptoed in escorting her,
Lest stroke of heel or clink of spur
Should break her goodman’s snore.
 
 
The fire that late had burnt fell slack
When lone at last stood she;
Her nine-and-fifty years came back;
She sank upon her knee
Beside the durn, and like a dart
A something arrowed through her heart
In shoots of agony.
 
 
Their footsteps died as she leant there,
Lit by the morning star
Hanging above the moorland, where
The aged elm-rows are;
And, as o’ernight, from Pummery Ridge
To Maembury Ring and Standfast Bridge
No life stirred, near or far.
 
 
Though inner mischief worked amain,
She reached her husband’s side;
Where, toil-weary, as he had lain
Beneath the patchwork pied
When yestereve she’d forthward crept,
And as unwitting, still he slept
Who did in her confide.
 
 
A tear sprang as she turned and viewed
His features free from guile;
She kissed him long, as when, just wooed,
She chose his domicile.
She felt she could have given her life
To be the single-hearted wife
That she had been erstwhile.
 
 
Time wore to six.  Her husband rose
And struck the steel and stone;
He glanced at Jenny, whose repose
Seemed deeper than his own.
With dumb dismay, on closer sight,
He gathered sense that in the night,
Or morn, her soul had flown.
 
 
When told that some too mighty strain
For one so many-yeared
Had burst her bosom’s master-vein,
His doubts remained unstirred.
His Jenny had not left his side
Betwixt the eve and morning-tide:
– The King’s said not a word.
 
 
Well! times are not as times were then,
Nor fair ones half so free;
And truly they were martial men,
The King’s-Own Cavalry.
And when they went from Casterbridge
And vanished over Mellstock Ridge,
’Twas saddest morn to see.
 

THE CASTERBRIDGE CAPTAINS
(KHYBER PASS, 1842)

A Tradition of J. B. L – , T. G. B – , AND J. L –

 
Three captains went to Indian wars,
And only one returned:
Their mate of yore, he singly wore
The laurels all had earned.
 
 
At home he sought the ancient aisle
Wherein, untrumped of fame,
The three had sat in pupilage,
And each had carved his name.
 
 
The names, rough-hewn, of equal size,
Stood on the panel still;
Unequal since. – “’Twas theirs to aim,
Mine was it to fulfil!”
 
 
– “Who saves his life shall lose it, friends!”
Outspake the preacher then,
Unweeting he his listener, who
Looked at the names again.
 
 
That he had come and they’d been stayed,
’Twas but the chance of war:
Another chance, and they’d sat here,
And he had lain afar.
 
 
Yet saw he something in the lives
Of those who’d ceased to live
That sphered them with a majesty
Which living failed to give.
 
 
Transcendent triumph in return
No longer lit his brain;
Transcendence rayed the distant urn
Where slept the fallen twain.
 

A SIGN-SEEKER

 
I mark the months in liveries dank and dry,
The noontides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.
 
 
I view the evening bonfires of the sun
On hills where morning rains have hissed;
The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.
 
 
I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,
The cauldrons of the sea in storm,
Have felt the earthquake’s lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snow-cones are.
 
 
I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,
The coming of eccentric orbs;
To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.
 
 
I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;
Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;
Death’s soothing finger, sorrow’s smart;
– All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.
 
 
But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense —
Those sights of which old prophets tell,
Those signs the general word so well,
Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my long suspense.
 
 
In graveyard green, behind his monument
To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,
Wearing his smile, and “Not the end!”
Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;
 
 
Or, if a dead Love’s lips, whom dreams reveal
When midnight imps of King Decay
Delve sly to solve me back to clay,
Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;
 
 
Or, when Earth’s Frail lie bleeding of her Strong,
If some Recorder, as in Writ,
Near to the weary scene should flit
And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.
 
 
– There are who, rapt to heights of trancéd trust,
These tokens claim to feel and see,
Read radiant hints of times to be —
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.
 
 
Such scope is granted not to lives like mine..
I have lain in dead men’s beds, have walked
The tombs of those with whom I’d talked,
Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,
 
 
And panted for response.  But none replies;
No warnings loom, nor whisperings
To open out my limitings,
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.
 

MY CICELY
(17–)

 
“Alive?” – And I leapt in my wonder,
Was faint of my joyance,
And grasses and grove shone in garments
Of glory to me.
 
 
“She lives, in a plenteous well-being,
To-day as aforehand;
The dead bore the name – though a rare one —
The name that bore she.”
 
 
She lived.. I, afar in the city
Of frenzy-led factions,
Had squandered green years and maturer
In bowing the knee
 
 
To Baals illusive and specious,
Till chance had there voiced me
That one I loved vainly in nonage
Had ceased her to be.
 
 
The passion the planets had scowled on,
And change had let dwindle,
Her death-rumour smartly relifted
To full apogee.
 
 
I mounted a steed in the dawning
With acheful remembrance,
And made for the ancient West Highway
To far Exonb’ry.
 
 
Passing heaths, and the House of Long Sieging,
I neared the thin steeple
That tops the fair fane of Poore’s olden
Episcopal see;
 
 
And, changing anew my onbearer,
I traversed the downland
Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains
Bulge barren of tree;
 
 
And still sadly onward I followed
That Highway the Icen,
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex
O’er lynchet and lea.
 
 
Along through the Stour-bordered Forum,
Where Legions had wayfared,
And where the slow river upglasses
Its green canopy,
 
 
And by Weatherbury Castle, and thencefrom
Through Casterbridge held I
Still on, to entomb her my vision
Saw stretched pallidly.
 
 
No highwayman’s trot blew the night-wind
To me so life-weary,
But only the creak of the gibbets
Or waggoners’ jee.
 
 
Triple-ramparted Maidon gloomed grayly
Above me from southward,
And north the hill-fortress of Eggar,
And square Pummerie.
 
 
The Nine-Pillared Cromlech, the Bride-streams,
The Axe, and the Otter
I passed, to the gate of the city
Where Exe scents the sea;
 
 
Till, spent, in the graveacre pausing,
I learnt ’twas not my Love
To whom Mother Church had just murmured
A last lullaby.
 
 
– “Then, where dwells the Canon’s kinswoman,
My friend of aforetime?” —
(’Twas hard to repress my heart-heavings
And new ecstasy.)
 
 
“She wedded.” – “Ah!” – “Wedded beneath her —
She keeps the stage-hostel
Ten miles hence, beside the great Highway —
The famed Lions-Three.
 
 
“Her spouse was her lackey – no option
’Twixt wedlock and worse things;
A lapse over-sad for a lady
Of her pedigree!”
 
 
I shuddered, said nothing, and wandered
To shades of green laurel:
Too ghastly had grown those first tidings
So brightsome of blee!
 
 
For, on my ride hither, I’d halted
Awhile at the Lions,
And her – her whose name had once opened
My heart as a key —
 
 
I’d looked on, unknowing, and witnessed
Her jests with the tapsters,
Her liquor-fired face, her thick accents
In naming her fee.
 
 
“O God, why this seeming derision!”
I cried in my anguish:
“O once Loved, O fair Unforgotten —
That Thing – meant it thee!
 
 
“Inurned and at peace, lost but sainted,
Were grief I could compass;
Depraved – ’tis for Christ’s poor dependent
A cruel decree!”
 
 
I backed on the Highway; but passed not
The hostel.  Within there
Too mocking to Love’s re-expression
Was Time’s repartee!
 
 
Uptracking where Legions had wayfared,
By cromlechs unstoried,
And lynchets, and sepultured Chieftains,
In self-colloquy,
 
 
A feeling stirred in me and strengthened
That she was not my Love,
But she of the garth, who lay rapt in
Her long reverie.
 
 
And thence till to-day I persuade me
That this was the true one;
That Death stole intact her young dearness
And innocency.
 
 
Frail-witted, illuded they call me;
I may be.  ’Tis better
To dream than to own the debasement
Of sweet Cicely.
 
 
Moreover I rate it unseemly
To hold that kind Heaven
Could work such device – to her ruin
And my misery.
 
 
So, lest I disturb my choice vision,
I shun the West Highway,
Even now, when the knaps ring with rhythms
From blackbird and bee;
 
 
And feel that with slumber half-conscious
She rests in the church-hay,
Her spirit unsoiled as in youth-time
When lovers were we.