Arthur Henry Adams: Verses about Nature

Alchemist of melody,
dropp by dropp distilling!
Hidden high on some tall tree,
Alchemist of melody;
With your liquid minstrelsy
All the forest filling:
Alchemist of melody,
dropp by dropp distilling!

The steady soaking of the rain,
The bush all sad and sombre;
The trees are weeping in their pain,
Dank leaves the ground encumber.
A dismal ghost of silence strays
From shade to dusky daylight;
O'er all a whispered horror weighs,
Like mist athwart the grey light.
A frightened robin in the ferns
Peeks fearfully and lonely,
But back to comfort him returns
The drip of rain-drops only.
The fern-fronds shiver when they feel
Cold foot-prints press like mist, as
Dim forms beneath the creepers steal
And vanish in the vistas.

WHAT though the neutral sea sever us twain?
In the still night your soul in mine I take;
Your eyes, hilarious with passion, wake,
And love's delirium is mine again,
When all your body's warmth swirled in my brain—
Your face uplifted like a pallid lake
Where in my eager lips their thirst could slake,
With deep-sighed, langourous kisses, keener than pain.
Then suddenly through passion's rosy mists
A shudder trickled, like a stream of blood:
In a grim pause we felt and understood.
The everlasting war that was our fate—
The pitiless struggle and primeval hate
Of old implacable antagonists.

A NEW land, like a stainless flower set
In the green foliage of the waving sea;
Or like a maiden whose fair heart is free,
Whose honest eyes with no sad tears are wet,
Whose bosom has no passion to forget,
But thrills and lifts exuberant, as she
Voices some sudden-flooding melody!
A land of strength, life, vigour, youth—and yet
An old land, grey as I, her child, am grey;
Filled with the whispers of old thoughts that stir
And wake, like shadows of the past that play
Deep in the beauty of a child's grave eyes,
And show beneath life's gladness glancing there
The pathos of a hundred histories.

SO I have kissed you! And this hour is mine.
Its light along the level future lasts,
It crowns a drab eternity of Pasts!
Here soul and soul have crossed the border-line
Of self, and merged. No years can e'er untwine
This hour from us! What though to-morrow casts
The memory out, and your cold glance contrasts
With this day's rich red lips, need I repine?
No. I have kissed you! And the brief warm flower
Born of our lips perfumes eternity.
From the long loneliness that silently
Stretches behind, before, I am content
To cull this blossom of one perfect hour—
To snatch one star from Time's deep firmament!

There are only two things in the world—
The storm in the air and the stretch of green leaves;
The flesh of the forest that quivers and heaves
As the blast on its bosom is hurled.
Above is the whip of the wind
That scourges the cowering forest beneath:
The Storm spits the hiss of the hail from his teeth,
And leaves the world writhing behind!
Like a beast that is bound in a cage
When the keeper's lash lights and the keeper's goad stings,
Each tree his great limbs to his torturer flings
In a groaning and impotent rage.
As the leaves to a fiercer gust lean
The wind throws their undersides upward to sight,
And the foam of the forest-sea flashes to white
Out over full fathoms of green.

IN a crooked angle
Of a garden bower,
'Neath a weedy tangle
Grew a modest flower;
Unpretending, unoffending,
Gifted but with fancy,
Unassuming in his blooming
Grew that modest pansy.
Ah! pansy, pansy,
Hope springs anew;
But fancy, fancy,
Never comes true.
Comes a maiden bashful,
Wandering here and there,
With her silken sash full
Of roses rich and rare;
Slow she takes them, dewless shakes them
In her shapely fingers,
While to choose some for her bosom
Lazily she lingers.
Ah! pansy, pansy,
Modest in hue;
Sweet fancy, fancy,
Never comes true.

With a lover's anguish
For her glance he sought,
On her breast to languish
Was his daring thought;
If he perished by her cherished,
Life was worth the leaving;
But she passes 'midst the grasses,
And she leaves him grieving!
Ah! pansy, pansy,
Sorrow for you;
But fancy, fancy,
Never comes true.

SO now she lies silent and sweet
With white flowers at her head and feet,
And she, the fairest flower, between.
The bud that with her bosom's swell
In dear delight once rose and fell
Now wafts her all it has to tell,
And wonders why she sleeps serene.
And yet in life how small a part,
With pretty face and petty heart,
She played! And in that form so fair
There never dwelt a deep desire,
Her bosom never thrilled a-fire:
She loved too lightly e'en to tire—
And all my heart was meant for her.
Was there a soul within those eyes
That seemed to speak my dear surmise,
That with no tears were ever wet?
Through life she laughed her careless way,
She knew not sorrow or dismay—
And I have sorrowed day by day,
While those pale lips are smiling yet!
And so she lies on her small bed,
With white flowers at her feet and head,
And she, the fairest flower between!

In life how false the little rôle —
The peerless face, the paltry soul!
But she is perfect now—the whole
Pale blossom of the Might-Have-Been.

DAY has fled to the west afar,
Where no shadows or sorrows are;
O'er earth's radiant western rim
God has gathered the day to him.
Hush! the river of night is here,
Flowing silently, cool and clear,
With its mystical thoughts that throng
And its silences deep as song.
Babe of my bosom, sleep;
Tender, sweet blossom, sleep!
Hearts may ache
While the long hours go creeping;
Hearts may break
While my baby is sleeping;
Never wake,
Though thy mother is weeping;
Babe of my bosom, sleep!
Sleep! the silence is all around,
Save the sighings that are not sound,
Where the wind in the branches weaves
Mystic melodies through the leaves;
Or the far-away murmurings
Like the stir of an angel's wings.
Only night is about us now—
Child, the earth is as tired as thou.

Babe of my bosom, sleep;
Tender, sweet blossom, sleep!
Hearts may ache
While the long hours go creeping,
Hearts may break
While my baby is sleeping:
Never wake.
Though thy mother is weeping;
Babe of my bosom, sleep!

NOT he who sings smooth songs that soothe—
Sweet opiates that lull asleep
The sorrow that would only weep;
There are some spirit-stains so deep
That only tears may wash away.
Not he whose lays thrill fiercely till
The soul is sick with surfeiting,
Such passion flies, and leaves its sting,
Till through the body quivering
The wearied dull pain throbs again.
Not he whose glad voice says “Rejoice!”
For whom no clouds o'ercast the sky;
Whose god is in his heaven so high
That this dull world he come not nigh:
Life is no sun-kissed optimist!
But he who Sorrow's presence knows,
Who hears the minor chords beneath
The song of life, and feels the breath
Upon his cheek of quiet death,
Yet stirs and sings of life and love.
Who in his suffering yet can sing;
With that calm pathos in his face—
The hopeless yearning of the race—
Can chant the faith that holds its place,
Upsurging through each sore heart's speech;

Who, though his heart bleed, onward leads;
Who knows eternal is our quest,
Yet bids us toil and strive—not rest—
Who looks life o'er and takes its best—
This is the poet to be yet!

I.
AS some faint wisp of fragrance, floating wide—
A pennant-perfume on the evening air—
From a walled garden, flower-filled and fair,
To drape a sudden beauty long denied
Upon life's highway desolate and dried—
So come you to me, as I, unaware,
Bend my strict eyes upon my pathway bare;
But at your presence straight I turn aside,
And passing in the garden see uncurled
The heart of hidden beauty in the world,
And love as life's one blossom is revealed.
My backward glance your floating tresses blind,
About my struggling hopes your white arms wind,
And I have yielded—but how sweet to yield!

II.
Yet, in the prison of the garden bound,
The sluggish perfumes o'er my spirit fall,
And I lie languid in their sweetness' thrall,
Beneath the fragrance of much beauty drowned:
When through the fountain's murmur—lo, a sound
Insistent and reproachful! O'er the wall
Drops a faint echo of the Earth's deep call,
And I leap upright from the rose-strewn ground.
Outside the bracing wind sings, clean and chill;
Outside are tasks to do, blows to be struck;
And I must toil the dreary highway till
It broadens to the fields of death. Yet, ere
I leave for aye your perfumed close, I pluck
A shrivelled blossom that I kiss and wear.

ON the grey levels of the plain of life
When, slowly swirled,
The moving hills of morning mist
Hedged in the world—
While yet undared the path of toil and strife,
I found a friend
Whose faith I pictured would persist
Until the end.
Then peered the stooping sun across the plain—
The world he kissed;
In sudden glory shimmering
Flamed all the mist!
The sullen Darkness carried off his slain,
And straight away,
Like a forefinger beckoning,
The white road lay.
Her hand in mine, upon the path we pressed;
Together shared
The flowers we plucked—to find them pain;
And forward fared
Till we stood radiant on the mountain crest;
And still ahead,
Dipping to pleasant depths of plain,
The white road led.
But when I urged her onward to the end
Her heart peered out

Upon the road's unswerving leap
In dizzy doubt.
“Nay, we have reached the highest, why descend?”
Her lips demurred—
And with us, gazing at the steep,
There stood a third.
Her eyes clasped his in an embrace of love.
Said they: “No more;
Here on the crest is our abode,
Our journey o'er;
The goal for you!” So, leaving them above,
I went alone—
And still the arrow of the road
Sped on, straight on!
But darker and more desolate the way,
Until I turned—
Lo, in the halo of the sun
The lovers burned,
High on the mountain-top! Ah, what if they,
By passion kissed,
The goal of life and love have won,
And I have missed?

THE infinite garden of the sea is His
To play in. Gravely smiling He resigns
To man his choice—this rugged plot of earth,
Watches man tear it with his deep canals,
Wound it with iron rails, scar it with roads,
And spot its pleasant freshness with the sore
Of festering cities, oozing heavy smoke.
He sees and He forgives. Then gently takes
His pliant sea into His yearning hands—
As an old mother might caress a doll
When all her sons are dead—and wistfully
He moulds it. O, that He might so thrust man—
That interloping soul of stubbornness—
The solitary irreconcilable
Of His subservient Universe—within
The grim, unalterable grooves of law!
But, ah! the sea, the fecund woman-sea,
Is His to fashion as He wills! He girds
It round with whitely gleaming paths of beach;
Then, at His word, the blossoms of the spray
Rise on their swaying wave-stalks, bloom and break,
And scatter desolate petals on the foam.
League-long His flower-bordered avenues
In bending sward of blossom run. Lo, now
A winter comes unwonted, heaping high

His garden world with snow of wasted blooms.
Or Spring sweeps in resistless, and the sea
Shimmers—an orchard in her nuptial white!
And sometimes He will smooth His garden plot,
And cover with trim tapestry of grass
Its restless beauty, till there shyly break
The daisies through, like pale hands timorous
And fragile, groping blindly to the sun.
Sometimes he plans great curving pathways, where
'Neath sullen shoulders of cool greenery
The shadows crouch, and high above the sun
Whispers his sunny secrets to the boughs
That sway and ripple everlastingly.
And sometimes, hidden by a moving ridge
From ships that flit like furtive white moths by,
The Master of the garden gravely walks
The cool green paths in reverie along:
Ah, what if I could turn into that lane
Of pulsing wave, and see Him pacing there,
As once of old they saw Him, with that look
Of wistful sadness on His old kind face!

ONCE more this Autumn-earth is ripe,
Parturient of another type.

While with the Past old nations merge
His foot is on the Future’s verge.

They watch him, as they huddle, pent,
Striding a spacious continent,

Above the level desert’s marge
Looming in his aloofness large.

No flower with fragile sweetness graced—
A lank weed wrestling with the waste;

Pallid of face and gaunt of limb,
The sweetness withered out of him;

Sombre, indomitable, wan,
The juices dried, the glad youth gone.

A little weary from his birth,
His laugh the spectre of a mirth,

Bitter beneath a bitter sky,
To Nature he has no reply.

Wanton, perhaps, and cruel. Yes,
Is not his sun more merciless?

So drab and neutral is his day,
He finds a splendour in the grey,

And from his life’s monotony
He draws a dreary melody.

When earth so poor a banquet makes
His pleasures at a gulp he takes;

The feast is his to the last crumb:
Drink while he can…the drought will come.

His heart a sudden tropic flower,
He loves and loathes within an hour.

Yet you who by the pools abide,
Judge not the man who swerves aside;

He sees beyond your hazy fears;
He roads the desert of the years;

Rearing his cities in the sand,
He builds where even God has banned;

With green a continent he crowns,
And stars a wilderness with towns;

With paths the distances he snares;
His gyves of steel the great plain wears.

A child who takes a world for toy,
To build a nation or destroy,

His childish features frozen stern,
His manhood’s task he has to learn—

From feeble tribes to federate
One white and peace-encompassed State.

But if there be no goal to reach?…
The track lies open, dawns beseech!

Enough that he lay down his load
A little farther on the road.

So, toward undreamt-of destinies
He slouches down the centuries.

NOW that our pathways sever here,
And mine slopes down across the night,
Whence I shall see you burning clear
A beacon on the mountain-height—
Now that our pathways sever here,
I have no kiss, I have no tear.
Your eyes my lonely world have lit
With sunset peace that lingers yet,
And on my gladdened heart is writ
No shade of blame, and no regret.
Your eyes my sombre world have lit,
And made a new world out of it.
Your soul is woven, strand and strand,
With mine across the woof of Time;
Your fingers trickle from my hand—
Yet where you go my soul shall climb.
Our souls are woven, strand with strand;
Think you the pattern was not planned?
Love finds a solace in regret—
With the rich past I am content
You dare not ask me to forget;
With memories I am opulent.
Love finds this solace in regret:
What solace if we had not met?

The richest guerdon of this earth
You gave me like a flower to wear;
My heart is dowered beyond dearth,
A treasure through the dark I bear—
The richest guerdon of this earth,
The knowledge of one woman's worth.
The flower of your dear love is dead;
But Springs come ever with the years:
I asked you for your heart: instead
You gave me more, you gave your tears!
The blossom of your love is dead;
But all its fragrance is not fled.
Our ways lie solitary, long,
And we have done with halt and rest;
On to the goal the others throng,
No longer may we fare abreast.
Our ways lie solitary, long,
Yet through my sorrow laughs this song:—
Our pathways only now begin
To close the circle in, complete,
Until our purpose we shall win,
Until again, far off, we meet.
Our pathways only now begin
To narrow, narrow, narrow in!

The race is ready to be run,
But clear and certain is our quest;
Your heart the prize that will be won.
This dallying was but a test
To try us ere the race be run.
Now—now the journey is begun!
Chance is not chance—but very wise.
I might have missed you blindly. Lo,
The countersign! Without disguise,
The soul I seek at last I know.
Chance is not chance—but very wise.
We part, that we may recognise.

A LONE rose in a garden burned—a quivering flame,
But yesterday blindly from out the bud it came;
And now an envious wind with itching fingers leant
And touched its lingering beauty, and the petals went
Upon the twilight tossing swift,
Like little dusky boats adrift.
Then in the birth and doom of that brief rose I saw
The long unrolling of creation's one vast law.
All things were blossom, and God thrilled at that flower's birth
As when from night-sheathed chaos broke this blossom-earth.
For God no large or little knows—
A universe slept in the rose.
The scattered star-mist, that dishevelled trails through Space,
Hears the low whisper of the Spring, and to its place
Whirls vastly, and its bulk with aching life is torn,
And with a pang that shakes all Space a sun is born
But God on it bestows the heed
He gives to any wayside weed.
About it bloom the planets, like a pageantry
Of rival blossoms in a garden-galaxy.
They break and wane and wither, till upon some earth,

Faded and chill and shrunken, a pallid thing has birth;
And on a world weary with strife
Creeps forth the efflorescence Life.
Strange vegetations fiercely bloom and fall from sight;
Monsters uncouth are spawned, and sink into the night;
Huge mountains blossom white beneath the ocean spray;
Vast tropics glow where once the glacier-ice held sway—
Till, like a lichen on the stone,
Comes Man, bearing a soul unknown.
The lichen spreads, and civilisations grow forlorn,
Bloom once, and, dying, blight the place where they were born.
Incomparable, unique, each in lone splendour burns;
Each bears one perfect grace that nevermore returns.
Ah! gone is sculptured Egypt—gone
The blossom that was Babylon!
The lotus of the East, the Grecian lily cold—
Each blossoms only one new beauty to unfold.

And this rich rose, the West, that opens now so vast,
Shall tell its message, then upon the night be cast.
But still God scatters through the gloom
New seeds whence nobler flowers shall bloom.
And æons rise and fade, and still the petal-years
Fall from the trembling stem of Time, that proudly rears
Space, like the last huge blossom of the far-thrown seed;
And Space itself shall wither like a trampled weed.
But in the void the Sower still
Scatters new seed, until—until…

They lie unwatched, in waste and vacant places,
In sombre bush or wind-swept tussock spaces,
Where seldom human tread
And never human trace is—
The dwellings of our dead!
No insolence of stone is o'er them builded;
By mockery of monuments unshielded,
Far on the unfenced plain
Forgotten graves have yielded
Earth to free earth again.
Above their crypts no air with incense reeling,
No chant of choir or sob of organ pealing;
But ever over them
The evening breezes kneeling
Whisper a requiem.
For some the margeless plain where no one passes,
Save when at morning far in misty masses
The drifting flock appears.
Lo, here the greener grasses
Glint like a stain of tears!

For some the quiet bush, shade-strewn and saddened,
Whereo'er the herald tui, morning-gladdened,
Lone on his chosen tree,
With his new rapture maddened,
Shouts incoherently.
For some the gully where, in whispers tender,
The flax-blades mourn and murmur, and the slender
White ranks of toi go,
With drooping plumes of splendour,
In pageantry of woe.
For some the common trench where, not all fameless,
They fighting fell who thought to tame the tameless,
And won their barren crown;
Where one grave holds them nameless—
Brave white and braver brown.
But in their sleep, like troubled children turning,
A dream of mother-country in them burning,
They whisper their despair,
And one vague, voiceless yearning
Burdens the pausing air …

“ Unchanging here the drab year onward presses;
No Spring comes trysting here with new-loosed tresses ,
And never may the years
Win Autumn's sweet caresses —
Her leaves that fall like tears .
And we would lie 'neath old-remembered beeches ,
Where we could hear the voice of him who preaches
And the deep organ's call ,
While close about us reaches
The cool, grey, lichened wall .”
But they are ours, and jealously we hold them;
Within our children's ranks we have enrolled them,
And till all Time shall cease
Our brooding bush shall fold them
In her broad-bosomed peace.
They came as lovers come, all else forsaking,
The bonds of home and kindred proudly breaking;
They lie in splendour lone—
The nation of their making
Their everlasting throne!

A PAIR of lovers in the street!
I dare not mock: with reverence meet
My unforgetting heart I cheat.

Ah, God, spare me—so soon again
At the barred door to beat in vain,
And find their dalliance such fierce pain!

I, yearning up from Hell’s abyss,
See, dreaming through their worlds of bliss,
This Dante and his Beatrice!

For these the distant goal have won
For which God made the plasm and sun;
His patient labouring is done.

For these each Spring has been a bride,
And lonely worlds were spawned and died.
Chaos for them in birth-throes cried.

Far out in seas of Space forlorn
This crescent wave was slowly born
That thunders on the beach of morn.

Ah, they, so soon to be meshed in
The web of splendour, silken-thin,
The nebulae were set to spin!

Up the long path from joy to joy
Love led the way. Can aught destroy
The task that was the stars’ employ?

Their ecstasy to God is more
Than Lucifer at Heaven’s door
Entreating pardon for his war.

These two are gods, for, by love swayed,
They have God’s special task essayed,
And new worlds for their gladness made.

This little hour so lightly given
Makes earth too mean a place to live in,
And broken toys His Hell and Heaven.

All Time, expectant of their bliss,
Hangs fearful. Space through her abyss
Shudders if they this hour should miss.

For if their kiss they went without,
The stars would be a raining rout,
And time in anguish flicker out.

About God’s room from star to sun
A stealthy slippered Thing would run,
Quenching cold tapers one by one.

But they have kissed. Eternity,
Like a great clock, beats steadily
For these mazed fools—but not for me!

Of God’s wide universe the strands
They hold within their clinging hands;
The stars march on at their commands.

So from this moment blossom free
New universes tirelessly—
Aeons of unguessed ecstasy!

But I can only bow and beat
Vain hands about God’s mercy-seat,
And, still remembering, still entreat.

Surely my penance is complete!
The rack turns grimly when I meet
A pair of lovers on the street

MAORILAND, my mother!
Holds the earth so fair another?
O, my land of the moa and Maori ,
Garlanded grand with your forests of kauri ,
Lone you stand, only beauty your dowry ,
Maoriland, my mother!
Older poets sing their frozen
England in her mists enshrouded;
Newer lands my Muse has chosen,
'Neath a Southern sky unclouded;
Set, a solitary gem,
In Pacific's diadem.
Land of rugged white-clad ranges,
Standing proud, impassive, lonely;
Ice and snow, where never change is,
Save the mighty motion only
Where through valleys seared and deep
Slow the serpent glaciers creep.
Land of silent lakes that nestle
Deep as night, girt round with forest;
Water never cut by vessel,
In whose mirror evermore rest
Green-wrapt mountain-side and peak,
Reddened by the sunset's streak.

Land of forests richly sweeping,
By the rata's red fire spangled;
Where at noonday night is sleeping,
Where, beneath the creepers tangled,
Come the tui's liquid calls
And the plash of waterfalls.
Land where fire from Earth's deep centre
Fights for breath in anguish furied,
Till she from the weight that pent her
Flings her flames out fiercely lurid;
Where the geysers hiss and seethe,
And the rocks groan far beneath.
Land of tussocked plain extending
In the distant blue to mingle,
Where wide rivers sigh unending
Over weary wastes of shingle;
Cold as moonlight is their flow
From the glacier-ice and snow.
Land where torrents pause to dally
'Neath the toi's floating feather,
Where the flax-blades in the valley
Whisper stealthily together,
And within the cabbage-trees
Hides the dying evening breeze.

Land where all winds whisper one word,
“Death!”—though skies are fair above her.
Newer nations white press onward:
Her brown warriors' fight is over—
One by one they yield their place,
Peace-slain chieftains of her race.
Land where faces find no furrow,
With the flush of life elated;
Where no grief is, save the sorrow
Of a pleasure that is sated;
Land of children lithe and slim,
Fresh of face and long of limb.
Land of fair enwreathëd cities,
Wide towns that the green bush merge in;
Land whose history unwrit is—
Memory hath no chaster virgin!
Land that is a starting place
For a newer, nobler race.
Maoriland, my mother!
Holds the Earth so fair another?
O, my land of the moa and Maori ,
Garlanded grand with your rata and kauri ,
Lone you stand, only beauty your dowry ,
Maoriland, my mother!

Wellington.
HERE, where the surges of a world of sea
Break on our bastioned walls with league-long sweep,
Four fair young queens their lonely splendour keep,
Each in a city throned. The first is she
Whose face is arrogant with empery;
Her throne from out the wounded hill-side steep
Is rudely fashioned, and beneath her creep
The narrow streets; and, stretching broad and free,
Like a green-waving meadow, lies the bay,
With blossom-sails and flower-wavelots flecked.
Elate she stands; her brown and windblown hair
Haloes a face with virgin freshness fair,
As she receives, exuberant, erect,
The stubborn homage that her sisters pay.


Dunedin.
And one is fair and winsome, and her face
Is strung with winter's kisses, and is yet
With winter's tears of parting sorrow wet;
And all her figure speaks of bonny grace.
High on the circling hills her seat has place,
Within a bower of the green bush set;
And 'neath her feet the city slopes—a net
Of broad-büilt streets and green-girt garden space.

Above her high the suburbs climb to crown
Her city's battlements; and in her thrall
Lie sleeping fiords, and forests call her queen.
About her waist she winds a belt of green,
And on her gleaming city looking down,
She hears the Siren South for ever call.

Christchurch.
And one within a level city lies;
To whose tree-shaded streets and squares succeed;
A vista of white roads and bordering meads,
Until each suburb in the great plain dies.
The clustering spires to crown her fair head rise,
And for a girdle round her form she leads
The Avon, green with waving river-weeds
And swept with swaying willows. And her eyes
Are quiet with a student's reverie;
And in the hair that clouds her dreaming face
There lurks the fragrance of some older place,
And memories awake to die again,
As, confident and careless, glad and sorrow-free
She waits, queen of the margeless golden plain.

Auckland.
Set all about with walls, the last fair queen
Over a tropic city holds her sway;
Her throne on sleeping Eden, whence through grey
And red-strewn roads and gleaming gardens green
The city wanders on, and seems to lean
To bathe her beauty in the cool, clear bay,
That out past isle and islet winds its way
To the wide ocean. In her hair a sheen
Of sunlight lives; her face is sweetly pale—
A queen who seems too young and maidenly,
Her beauty all too delicate and frail,
To hold a sway imperious. But forth
From deep, dark eyes, that dreaming seem to be,
There shine the strength and passion of the North.

THE WIDE sun stares without a cloud:
Whipped by his glances truculent
The earth lies quivering and cowed.
My heart is hot with discontent:
I hate this haggard continent.

But over the loping leagues of sea
A lone land calls to her children free:
My own land holding her arms to me—
But oh, the long loping leagues of sea.

The grey old city is dumb with heat;
No breeze comes leaping, naked, rude,
Adown the narrow, high-walled street;
Upon the night thick perfumes brood:
The evening oozes lassitude.

But over the edges of my town,
Swept in a tide that ne’er abates,
The riotous breezes tumble down;
My heart looks home, looks home where waits
The Windy City of the Straits!

The land lies desolate and stripped;
Across its waste has thinly strayed
A tattered host of eucalypt
From whose gaunt uniform is made
A ragged penury of shade.

But over my isles the forest drew
A mantle thick—save where a peak
Shows his grim teeth a-snarl—and through
The filtered coolness creek and creek,
Tangled in ferns, in whispers speak.

And there the placid great lakes are;
And brimming rivers proudly force
Their ice-cold tides. Here, like a scar,
Dry-lipped, a withered water-course
Crawls from a long-forgotten source.

My glance, home-gazing, scarce discerns
This listless girl, in whose dark hair
A starry red hibiscus burns;
Her pallid cheeks are like a pair
Of nuns, bloom-ravished, yet so fair.

And like a sin her warm lips flame
In her wan face; swift passions brim
In those brown eyes too soft for blame;
Her form is sinuous and slim—
That lyric line of breast and limb!

But one there waits whose brown face glows,
Whose cheeks with Winter’s kisses smart—
The flushing petals of a rose.
Of earth and sun she is a part;
Her brow is Greek and Greek her heart.

At love she laughs a faint disdain;
Her heart no weakly one to charm;
Robust and fragrant as the rain,
The dark bush soothed her with his balm,
The mountains gave her of their calm.

Her fresh young figure, lithe and tall,
Her radiant eyes, her brow benign,
She is the peerless queen of all—
The maid, the country, that I shrine
In this far-banished heart of mine!

And over the loping leagues of green
A lone land waits with a hope serene—
My own land calls like a prisoner queen—
But oh, the long loping leagues between!

THEY drew him from the darkened room,
Where, swooning in a peace profound,
Beneath a heavy fragrance drowned
Her grey form glimmered in the gloom.
Death smoothed from her each sordid trace
Of Life; at last he read the scroll;
For all the meaning of her soul
Flowered upon her perfect face.
“In other worlds her soul finds scope;
Her spirit lives; she is not dead,”
In his dulled ear they said and said,
Suave-murmuring the ancient Hope.
“You loved her; she was worthy love.
Think you her spheral soul can cease?
Nay, she has ripened to release
From this bare earth, and waits above.”
His brain their clamour heard aloof;
He, too, had said the self-same thing;
But now his heart was quivering
For more than comfort—parched for proof.
He put them from him. “Let me be;
You proffer in my bitter need
The coward comfort of a creed
That tears her soul apart from me.

“She waits in no drear Heaven afar.
Her woman's soul in all its worth,
Yearning for me, for homely earth,
No gates of beaten gold could bar.
“No, she is near me, ever close;
One with the world, but free again;
One with the breezes and the rain;
One with the mountain and the rose.
“She knows me not; her voice is dumb;
But aching through the twilight peers,
And, unremembering, yet with tears,
She strives to say she cannot come.
“Yes, she is changed, but not destroyed;
The words that were her soul are hushed;
The gem that was her heart is crushed—
Its fragments white stars in the void.
“And I shall see her in disguise;
In the grey vistas of the street
A face that hints of her I meet;
Whispers her soul from alien eyes.
“In Time's great garden, spring on spring,
The blossoms glow; then at a breath
Their petals flutter down to death—
Ah love, how brief your blossoming!

“Death has but severed part from part.
Borne on an ever-moving air
The fragrance of her life somewhere
Freshens some lonely wistful heart!
“No word of hers can God forget;
Her laughter Time dare not disperse;
It shakes the tense-strung universe,
And with the chord it trembles yet.
“Each mood of hers, each fancy slight,
In deep pulsations, ring on ring,
Dilating, ever-widening,
Ripples across the outer night.
“Her life with deathless charm was fraught,
And God with smiles remembers now
The puzzled pucker of her brow
Ruffled with sudden gusts of thought.
“And in His cosmic memory wise
Still live her subtle features thin,
Her dear iconoclastic chin,
The grave enigma of her eyes.
“And if beyond she might draw breath.
And know that I was not with her,
The wistful eyes of her despair
Would be more desolate than death.

“But not to meet her in the wide
Night-spaces I must wander through;
To kiss the pretty pout I knew,
And nevermore to hear her chide;
“To speak those childish words that were
So foolish-sweet, so passionate-wise;
Her subtle fragrance recognise
And hear the whispers of her hair! …
“Her sun has set; but still, sublime,
She is a star, of God a part;
She is a petal at the heart
Of the eternal flower of Time.
“I triumph so beyond regret,
I win her immortality:
Where, Death, your vaunted victory?
Where, Grave, your sting? And yet—and yet——!”

FOR nine drear nights my darling has been dead;
And ah, dear God! I cannot dream of her!
Now I shall see her always lying white—
A frozen flower beneath a snow of flowers,
Drowned in a sea of fragrance. I shall hear
In every silence of the coming years
Only the muffled horror from the room
Where I had left my little child asleep—
And found a nameless thing shut in and sealed…
And I shall never feel her breath that kissed
Me closer than her lips did; for the thick,
Dead perfume of slow-drooping flowers has drawn
A veil across my memory.…She is dead;
For nine drear nights I have not dreamed of her.
When, all a tangle of wee clambering limbs,
And little gusts of laughter and of tears,
Sun-flecked and shadow-stricken every hour,
She played about me, I could lie all night
And dream of her. She came in wondrous ways,
Hiding behind the dark to startle me;
Then leaping down the vistas of the night,
And yielding all her wistful soul to me
With kisses tenderer and words more sweet
Than that mad, random vehemence of love
She lavished on me through her laughing day.

And now she has been dead nine dreary nights,
And ah, dear God! I cannot dream of her!
Her idle hoop is hung against the wall,
And in the dusk her cherished garments seem
As if still warmed with all her eager life.
And here the childish story that she wrote
Herself, and never finished;—how one day
With puzzled pucker of her brow she stopped
Mid-sentence! as if God had gravely held
A finger up to hush her, and she knew
She was to keep His secrets;—soon, so soon,
Perhaps He whispered low, she would know all.
And now she has been dead nine long sad nights;
And ah, dear God! I cannot dream of her!
So I shall see her always lying white—
A frozen flower beneath a snow of flowers,
Drowned in a sea of fragrance. Now it seems
As if the memories I hold of her
Have shrivelled with the lilies that she loved
And lay with on her little narrow bed.
And now she will not murmur through my dreams
Those faint, strange words that mean so much in dreams,
And wither with the morn. I lie awake
And whisper to my hopes, “To-night I'll hear
Her petulant hands knock at my dreams' shut gate;

And oh, the gladness when I let her in!
Hush! what a patter of impatient feet
Down the long staircase of the stars!” And then
I sleep, and with an endless weariness
I grope among the spaces of the dark
For rhythm of her unresting feet, or touch
Of her caressing fingers, or the kiss
And whisper of her little self-willed curls;
But never lifts her laugh across the dark,
And never may I smooth her wilful curls,
And when I wake again I see her yet,
So pitifully thin and chill and straight,
Who used to be all curves—a living flame!
For nine drear nights my darling has been dead,
And till I die I cannot dream of her.
Perhaps she aches to come, shut in her grave—
So deep to dig to hide that tender form!
Dear God! she is too frail and weak to climb
The horror of those walls that hedge her in;
And when you call her to you let me be
Close by her side to lift her little feet
Up to the grass and sunshine of this world,
That lacking her is now so desolate.
So I have called and called…she does not come.
And yet I know the way into my heart
She has not quite forgotten…She does not come.
And now for nine drear nights she has been dead;
And ah, dear God! I cannot dream of her!

To You.
SO you have come at last!
And we nestle, each in each,
As leans the pliant sea in the clean-curved limbs of her lover the beach;
Merged in each other quite,
Clinging, as in the tresses of trees dallies the troubadour night;
Faint as a perfume, soft as wine,
Yielding as moonlight—mine, all mine—
So I have found you at last!
I dreamed; we dare not meet:
The time is yet too soon;
Swept with the tumult of perfect love, our souls from this life would swoon—
For the fusion of our lives
Is the sole great goal to which the vast creation vaguely drives;
And only when I kiss your face
Shall the last great trumpet shatter Space—
I dreamed; we dare not meet!
Yet somewhere, hungry-eyed,
You lie and listen with tears,
Clogged with the flesh, and dulled with the sodden heritage of the years.
And I am alien, lone,

Hedged with the palisades of self, shut in—a soul unknown.
You, fashioned for me from Time's first day,
I, moulded for you ere that dawn was grey,
Wait hidden, hungry-eyed!
I lie in the lonely night;
And you?—perhaps so near
That if I should whisper your sweet soul-name you would joyously leap and hear!
And yet perhaps so far,
Drowned in the cosmic mist beyond the swirl of the farthest star;
But over the universe yawning between,
With wistful eyes you listen and lean,
Alone in the lonely night!
Perhaps your thirsty arms
Some stranger youth entwine,
And you will yield him thin, faint kisses, thinking his lips are mine;
He thinking that unawares
He has caught, as once in a dream he caught, that miracle-glance of hers.
The pathos of the thing that seems!
Each clasping memories, kissing dreams.
In passionate-thirsty arms!

So you will yearn through life,
Or maybe you did not wait:
You married him, and his neutral smile you learnt to sullenly hate;
Or you have lived a lie,
And drank the mockery of his lips, believing that he was I.
You dreamed, content that you loved him true,
But the soul of your soul was dead to you—
So I must yearn through life!
Or, starving and passionate still,
To your dreams you were bravely true;
You told the Night your secrets drear, and he laughed back at you;
And even when you dreamed
You heard his merciless laughter ring, and you sprang awake and screamed;
Till Age kissed you with a kiss that sears,
And you faded and withered with the years,
Starving and passionate still!
But, hush! I had almost heard:
Last night I dreamed your name;
Like the soft, white tread of a faint, cool cloud to my desolate sky it came;
Like a moth it drifted away,

And into the flame of the dawn it fluttered, dying into the day.
Yet the wind in the whispering leaves
The moan of your sobbing weaves—
Hush! I had almost heard.
Yet I should know your face!
As mine, all mine, I claim
That coil of hair that over your bosom smoulders— a yellow flame;
And the cool, dim-curtained eyes,
The crescent of your imperious chin, and the little moist mouth that cries.
I have heard through the din of the years
Your voice, with its tincture of tears—
Yes, I remember your face!
Once in the drifting crowd
I thought I had found a clue—
A pale face pealed like an organ-note, and yet— oh! my heart—not you!
She had your look, the same
Ineffable sorrow of glad young eyes; but all the rest was shame.
Perhaps she saw—for her eyes were wet—
In me the soul she had one time met
In eternity's drifting crowd!

Perhaps 't is the desert of years
That severs each from each,
And out of the cavernous centuries to each other we blindly reach.
You blossomed so long ago
That only the Dawn and the Spring remember, and little, so little, they know!
You wait on the hill of the first white morn,
Straining dead eyes to me, unborn,
Across the desert of years.
Or when I am dead at last,
And my sovereignty have won,
As merged in the dust of the gradual Past, unliving, I live on,
You will rise with some far-off Spring,
And back to the drear, dead days that were mine your piteous glance will fling.
But, hush! I shall come in the rain-kissed night
And whisper the words of our marriage-rite—
So I shall find you at last!
Yet if we met.…
I dreamed; we dare not meet.

BLUE, the wreaths of smoke, like drooping banners
From the flaming battlements of sunset
Hung suspended; and within his whare
Hipe, last of Ngatiraukawa's chieftains,
Lay a-dying! Ringed about his death-bed,
Like a palisade of carven figures,
Stood the silent people of the village—
Warriors and women of his hapu—
Waiting. Then a sudden spilth of sunlight
Splashed upon the mountain-peak above them,
And it blossomed redly like a rata.
With his people and the twilight pausing;
Withering to death in regal patience,
Taciturn and grim, lay Hipe dying.
Shuddering and green, a little lizard
Made a ripple through the whare's darkness,
Writhing close to Hipe! Then a whisper
On the women's dry lips hesitated
As the ring of figures fluttered backwards;
“ 'T is the Spirit-Thing that comes to carry
Hipe's tardy soul across the waters
To the world of stars!” And Hipe, grimly,
Felt its hungry eyes a-glitter on him;
Then he knew the spirit-world had called him;
Knew the lizard-messenger must hasten,
And would carry back a soul for answer.

Twenty days in silence he had listened,
Dumb with thoughts of death, and sorely troubled
For his tribe left leaderless and lonely.
Now like sullen thunder from the blackness
Of the whare swept a voice untinctured
With a stain of sickness; and the women,
Breaking backwards, shrieked in sudden terror,
“ 'T is the weird Thing's voice, the greenish lizard,
All-impatient for the soul of Hipe!”
But the warriors in the shadow straightened
Drooping shoulders, gripped their greenstone meres,
And the rhythmic tumult of the war-dance
Swept the great pah with its throbbing thunder:
While their glad throats chanted, “E, 't is Hipe!
Hipe's voice that led us in the battle;
Hipe, young, come back to lead us ever!”
“Warriors and women of my hapu,”
Whirled the voice of Hipe from the darkness,
“I have had communion with the spirits;
Listen while I chant the song they taught me!
“I have seen the coming end of all things,
Seen the Maori shattered 'neath the onrush
Of the white-faced strangers. Like the flashing
Of the Sun-God through the ranks of darkness,
Like the Fire-God rippling through the forest,
Like the winter's silent blight of snowflakes—
Lo, the strange outbreak of pallid blossoms!—

Sweeps this surging wave of stranger-faces,
Frothing irresistibly upon us.
“Lo, the Pakeha shall come and conquer;
We have failed; the Gods are angry with us.
See, the withered autumn of our greatness!
“Old ancestral myths and sacred legends
That we deemed immortal—(priest and wizard
Died, and yet their stories, like a river,
Through the long years ran on, ever changeless!)—
Shall be buried; and the names long given
To each hill, and stream, and path and gully,
Shall be like a yesterday forgotten,
Blown like trembling froth before the sea-breeze.
“And the gods that people all our islands—
This great sea of presences immortal,
Living, real, alert for charm or evil,
Hurrying in every breeze, and haunting,
Heavy-winged, the vistas of the forest,
Deluging the daylight with their presence,
Teeming, flooding, brimming in the shadows—
Shall be banished to their spirit-regions,
And the world be lorn of gods and lonely.
“And the Maori shall no long time linger
Ere, a tardy exile, he shall journey
To the under-world. Yet he shall never
Break before this influx, but shall fight on

Till, a mangled thing, the tide o'erwhelm him.
And my tribe, the mighty Ngatiraukawa,
Had they left one worthy chieftain only
Who could lead my people on to victory,
Who could follow where my feet have trodden,
Might yet rear their name into a pillar
Carved with fame, until their stubborn story
From the mists of legend broke tremendous.
Flaming through the chilly years to follow
With a sunset-splendour, huge, heroic!
“Yes, the time is yours to rear a nation
From one conquering tribe, the Ngatiraukawa;
But my pah is leaderless and lonely;
I am left, the last of Maori chieftains;
And the gods have called me now to lead them
In their mighty battles! There is no one
Worthy now to wield my dying mana!”
So he ceased, and tremulous the silence
Sighed to voice in one long wail of sorrow.
So; it was the truth that Hipe taught them:
None was left to lead them on to victory;
None could follow where his feet had trodden.
Then by name old Hipe called the chieftains—
Weakling sons of that gaunt wrinkled giant,
Stunted saplings blanching in the shadow
Of the old tree's overarching greatness.
One by one he called them, and they shivered,

For they knew no answer to his question,
“Can you lead my people on to victory?
Can you follow where my feet have trodden?”
One by one a great hope burned within them,
And their feeble hearts beat fast and proudly;
One by one a chill of terror took them,
And the challenge on their lips was frozen.
Then the old chief in his anger chaunted
Frenziedly a song of scorn of all things,
And the frightened people of the village—
Warriors and women of his hapu—
Quavered into murmurs 'neath the whirlwind
Of his lashing words; and then he fretted
Into gusts of anger; and the lizard
Made a greenish ripple in the darkness,
Shuddering closer to him. And the people
Bending heard a whisper pass above them,
“Is there none to lead you on to victory,
None to follow where my feet have trodden?”
Lo, a sudden rumour from the edges
Of the silent concourse, where the humblest
Of the village crouched in utter baseness—
There among the outcasts one leapt upright,
Clean-limbed, straight and comely as a sunbeam.
Eager muscles clad in tawny velvet,
Eyes aflash with prescience of his power,
Yet a boy, untried in warriors' warfare,

Virgin to the battle! And untroubled
Rang a daring voice across the darkness,
“Yes, my people, one there is to lead you;
I dare point you on to fame and victory,
I dare tread where Hipe's feet have trodden.
Yea,” and prouder sang the voice above them,
“I can promise mightier fame unending;
I shall lead where Hipe dared not tempt you;
I shall make new footprints through the future—
I, the youth Te Rauparaha, have spoken!”
On the boy who braved them stormed the people,
Swept with fear and anger, and they clamoured,
“Who so proudly speaks, though not a chieftain?
Rank and name and fame he has none; how then
Dare he lead when sons of chieftains falter?”
But the boy leapt forward to the whare,
Clean-limbed, straight and comely as a sunbeam,
Eager muscles clad in tawny velvet,
Eyes aflash with prescience of his power,
Swinging high the mere he had fashioned
Out of wood, and carven like a chieftain's—
Aye, and with the toy had slain a foeman!
Flinging fiery speech out like a hailstorm,
“If ye choose me chieftain I shall lead you
Down to meet the white one on the sea-coast,
Where his hordes shall break like scattered billows
From our wall of meres. Him o'erwhelming,

I shall wrest his flaming weapons from him,
Fortify for pah the rugged island
Kapiti; then like a black-hawk swooping
I shall whirl upon the Southern Island,
Sweep it with my name as with a tempest,
Overrun it like the play of sunlight,
Sigh across it like a flame, till Terror
Runs before me shrieking! And our pathway
Shall be sullen red with flames and bloodshed,
And shall moan with massacre and battle!
“Quenching every foe, beneath my mana
Tribe shall stand with tribe, till all my nation
Like a harsh impassive wall of forest
Imperturbably shall front the strangers;
And with frown inscrutable shall wither
All this buzz and stir of stinging insects
That persist about us; then our islands
Garlanded with peace are ours for ever!
“Then the name of me, Te Rauparaha,
And the tribe I lead, the Ngatitoa,
Shall be shrined in sacred myth and legend
With the glamour of our oft-told prowess
Wreathed about them! Think, we shall be saviours
Of a race, a nation! And this island
We have sown so thick with names—each hillock,
Glen and gully, stream and tribal limit—
Shall for ever blossom like a garden

With the liquid softness of their music!
And the flute shall still across the evening
Lilt and waver, brimming with love's yearning!
And the exiled gods and banished spirits
Shall steal back to people all our islands
With their sea of presences immortal,
Living, real, alert for charm or evil,
Hurrying in every breeze and haunting,
Heavy-winged, the vistas of the forest,
Deluging the daylight with their presence,
Teeming, flooding, brimming in the shadows,
Till the world, a tawny world of gladness,
Shall no more of gods be lorn and lonely!
I, the youth Te Rauparaha, have spoken!”
Hipe heard, and, dying, cried in triumph,
“Warriors and women of my hapu,
He shall lead you, he, Te Rauparaha!
He shall do the things that he has promised.
He may fail; but think how grand his failure!
He alone can lift against the tempest
That proud head of his, and hugely daring,
God-like, hugely fail, or hugely conquer!”
Still he spoke, but suddenly the lizard
Made a greenish ripple through the darkness,
And was gone! Upon the long lone journey
To Te Reinga and the world of spirits
It had started with the soul of Hipe!

Then the plaintive wailing of the women
Quavered through the darkness, and a shudder
Took the slaves that in a horror waited
For the mercy of the blow to send them—
Ah! the sombre, slowly-stepping phalanx—
To the twilight world with Hipe's spirit.