IN FRONT OF THE LANDSCAPE
72 lines✦
LUNGING and labouring on in a tide of visions,Dolorous and dear,Forward I pushed my way as amid waste watersStretching around,Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscapeYonder and near, Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the uplandFoliage-crowned,Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flatStroked by the light,Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantialMeadow or mound. What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremostUnder my sight,Hindering me to discern my paced advancementLengthening to miles;What were the re-creations killing the daytimeAs by the night? O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,Some as with smiles,Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundledOver the wreckedCheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,Harrowed by wiles. Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them—Halo-bedecked—And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,Rigid in hate,Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,Dreaded, suspect. Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasonsFurther in date;Instruments of strings with the tenderest passionVibrant, besideLamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth’s crustNow corporate. Also there rose a headland of hoary aspectGnawed by the tide,Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood thereGuilelessly glad—Wherefore they knew not—touched by the fringe of an ecstasyScantly descried. Later images too did the day unfurl me,Shadowed and sad,Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,Laid now at ease,Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad browSepulture-clad. So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,Over the leaze,Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;—Yea, as the rhymeSung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbnessCaptured me these. For, their lost revisiting manifestationsIn their own timeMuch had I slighted, caring not for their purport,Seeing behindThings more coveted, reckoned the better worth callingSweet, sad, sublime. Thus do they now show hourly before the intenserStare of the mindAs they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypastBody-borne eyes,Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon themAs living kind. Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, sayingIn their surmise,“Ah—whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing noughtRound him that loomsWhithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,Save a few tombs?”
✦