Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward: Verses about Life

'We're all for love,' the violins said.

-Sidney Lanier

Do I love you? Do I love you?
Ask the heavens that bend above you
To find language and to prove you
If they love the living sun.
Ask the burning, blinded meadows
If they love the falling shadows,
If they hold the happy shadows
When the fervid day is done.


Ask the blue-bells and the daisies,
Lost amid the hot field-mazes,
Lifting up their thirsty faces,
If they love the summer rains.
Ask the linnets and the plovers,
In the nest-life made for lovers,
Ask the bees and ask the clovers-
Will they tell you for your pains?


Do I, Darling, do I love you?
What, I pray, can that behoove you?
How in Love's name can I move you?
When for Love's sake I am dumb!
If I told you, if I told you,
Would that keep you, would that hold you,
Here at last where I enfold you?
If it would-Hush! Darling, come!

The shadows watch about the house;
Silent as they, I come.
Oh, it is true that life is deaf,
And not that death is dumb.


The Christmas thrill is on the earth,
The stars throb in the sky.
Love listens in a thousand homes,-
The Christmas bells ring by.


I cross the old familiar door
And take the dear old chair.
You look with desolated eyes
Upon me sitting there.


You gaze and see not, though the tears
In gazing burn and start.
Believe, the living are the blind,
Not that the dead depart.


A year ago some words we said
Kept sacred 'twixt us twain,
'T is you, poor Love, who answer not,
The while I speak again.


I lean above you as before,
Faithful, my arms enfold.
Oh, could you know that life is numb,
Nor think that death is cold!


Senses of earth, how weak ye are!
Joys, joys of Heaven how strong!
Loves of the earth, how short and sad,
Of Heaven how glad and long!


Heart of my heart! if earth or Heaven
Had speech or language fine
Enough, or death or life could give
Me symbol, sound, or sign


To reach you-thought, or touch, or eye,
Body or soul-I 'd die
Again, to make you understand:
My darling! This is I!

Of Guinevere from Arthur separate,
And separate from Launcelot and the world,
And shielded in the convent with her sin,
As one draws fast a veil upon a face
That 's marred, but only holds the scar more close
Against the burning brain-I read to-day
This legend; and if other yet than I
Have read, or said, how know I? for the text
Was written in the story we have learned,
Between the ashen lines, invisible,
In hieroglyphs that blazed and leaped like light
Unto the eyes. A thousand times we read;
A thousand turn the page and understand,
And think we know the record of a life,
When lo! if we will open once again
The awful volume, hid, mysterious,
Intent, there lies the unseen alphabet-
Re-reads the tale from breath to death, and spells
A living language that we never knew.


This that I read was one short song of hers,
A fragment, I interpret, or a lost
Faint prelude to another-missing too.
She sang it (says the text) one summer night,
After the vespers, when the Abbess passed
And blessed her; when the nuns were gone, and when
She, kneeling in her drowsy cell, had said
Her prayers (poor soul!), her sorrowful prayers, in which
She had besought the Lord, for His dear sake,
And love and pity of His Only Son,
To wash her of her stain, and make her fit
On summer nights, behind the convent bars
And on stone-floors, with bruisèd lips, to pray
Away all vision but repentance from
Her soul.


When, kneeling as she was, her limbs
Refused to bear her, and she fell afaint
From weariness and striving to become
A holy woman, all her splendid length
Upon the ground, and groveled there, aghast
That buried nature was not dead in her,
But lived, a rebel through her fair, fierce youth;
Aghast to find that claspèd hands would clench;
Aghast to feel that praying lips refused
Like saints to murmur on, but shrank
And quivered dumb. 'Alas! I cannot pray!'
Cried Guinevere. 'I cannot pray! I will
Not lie! God is an honest God, and I
Will be an honest sinner to his face.
Will it be wicked if I sing? Oh! let
Me sing a little, of I know not what;
Let me just sing, I know not why. For lips
Grow stiff with praying all the night.
Let me believe that I am happy, too.
A blessèd blessèd woman, who is fit
To sing because she did not sin; or else
That God forgot it for a little while
And does not mind me very much.
Dear Lord,'
(Said Guinevere), 'wilt thou not listen while
I sing, as well as while I pray? I shall
Feel safer so. For I have naught to say
God should not hear. The song comes as the prayer
Doth come. Thou listenest. I sing.'…


Purple the night, and high were the skies, and higher
The eyes that leaned like the stars of my soul, to me.
Whom loveth the Queen? Him who hath right to crown her.
Who but the King is he?


Sultry the day, and gold was the hair, and golden
The mist that blinded my soul away from me.
Dethroned for a dream, for a gleam, for a glance, for a color,
How could the crownèd be?


Life goeth by like a deed, nor returneth forever.
Death cometh on, fleet-footed as pity should be.
Hush! When she waketh at last and looketh about her,
Whom will a woman see?


Thus in her cell,
Deep in the summer night, sang Guinevere-
A little, broken, blind, sweet melody-
And then she kneeled upon the convent floor,
And, peaceful, finished all her prayer and slept;
For she had naught to say God might not hear.

prologue


Who shall tell the story
As it was?
Write it with the heart's blood?
(Pale ink, alas!)
Speak it with the soul's lips,
Or be dumb?
Tell me, singers fled, and
Song to come!


No answer; like a shell the silence curls,
And far within it leans a whisper out,
Breathless and inarticulate, and whirls
And dies as dies an ailing dread or doubt.


And I-since there is found none else than I,
No stronger, sweeter voice than mine, to tell
This tale of love that cannot stoop to die-
Were fain to be the whisper in the shell;


Were fain to lose and spend myself within
The sacred silence of one mighty heart,
And leaning from it, hidden there, to win
Some finer ear that, listening, bends apart.


'Fly for your lives!' The entrails of the earth
Trembled, resounding to the cry,
That, like a chasing ghost, around the mine
Crept ghastly: 'The pit 's on fire! Fly!'


The shaft, a poisoned throat whose breath was death,
Like hell itself grown sick of sin,
Hurled up the men; haggard and terrible;
Leaping upon us through the din


That all our voices made; and back we shrank
From them as from the starting dead;
Recoiling, shrieked, but knew not why we shrieked;
And cried, but knew not what we said.


And still that awful mouth did toss them up:
'The last is safe! The last is sound!'
We sobbed to see them where they sunk and crawled,
Like beaten hounds, upon the ground.


Some sat with lolling, idiot head, and laughed;
One reached to clutch the air away
His gasping lips refused; some cursed; and one
Knelt down-but he was old-to pray.


We huddled there together all that night,
Women and men from the wild Town;
I heard a shrill voice cry, 'We all are up,
But some-ye have forgot-are down!'


'Who is forgot?' We stared from face to face;
But answering through the dark, she said
(It was a woman): 'Eh, ye need not fret;
None is forgot except the dead.


'The buried dead asleep there in the works-
Eh, Lord! It must be hot below!
Ye'll keep 'em waking all the livelong night,
To set the mine a-burning so!'


And all the night the mine did burn and burst,
As if the earth were but a shell
Through which a child had thrust a finger-touch,
And, peal on dreadful peal, the bell,


The miner's 'larum, wrenched the quaking air;
And through the flaring light we saw
The solid forehead of the eternal hill
Take on a human look of awe;


As if it were a living thing, that spoke
And flung some protest to the sky,
As if it were a dying thing that saw,
But could not tell, a mystery.


The bells ran ringing by us all that night.
The bells ceased jangling with the morn.
About the blackened works,-sunk, tossed, and rent,-
We gathered in the foreign dawn;


Women and men, with eyes askance and strange,
Fearing, we knew not what, to see.
Against the hollowed jaws of the torn hill,
Why creep the miners silently?


From man to man, a whisper chills: 'See, see,
The sunken shaft of Thirty-one!
The earth, a traitor to her trust, has fled
And turned the dead unto the sun.


'And here-O God of life and death! Thy work,
Thine only, this!' With foreheads bare,
We knelt, and drew him, young and beautiful,
Thirty years dead, into the air.


Thus had he perished; buried from the day;
By the swift poison caught and slain;
By the kind poison unmarred, rendered fair
Back to the upper earth again-


The warm and breathing earth that knew him not;
And men and women wept to see-
For kindred had he none among us all-
How lonely even the dead may be.


We wept, I say; we wept who knew him not;
But sharp, a tearless woman sprang
From out the crowd (that quavering voice I knew),
And terrible her cry outrang:


'I pass, I pass ye all! Make way! Stand back!
Mine is the place ye yield,' she said.
'He was my lover once-my own, my own;
Oh, he was mine, and he is dead!'


Women and men, we gave her royal way;
Proud as young joy the smile she had.
We knew her for a neighbor in the Town,
Unmated, solitary, sad.


Youth, hope, and love, we gave her silent way,
Calm as a sigh she swept us all;
Then swiftly, as a word leans to a thought,
We saw her lean to him, and fall


Upon the happy body of the dead-
An aged woman, poor and gray.
Bright as the day, immortal as young Love,
And glorious as life, he lay.


Her shrunken hands caressed his rounded cheek,
Her white locks on his golden hair
Fell sadly. 'O love!' she cried with shriveled lips,
'O love, my love, my own, my fair!


'See, I am old, and all my heart is gray.
They say the dead are aye forgot-
There, there, my sweet! I whisper, leaning low,
That all these women hear it not.


'Deep in the darkness there, didst think on me?
High in the heavens, have ye been true?
Since I was young, and since you called me fair,
I never loved a man but you.


And here, my boy, you lie, so safe, so still'-
But there she hushed; and in the dim,
Cool morning, timid as a bride, but calm
As a glad mother, gathered him


Unto her heart. And all the people then,
Women and men, and children too,
Crept back, and back, and back, and on,
Still as the morning shadows do.


And left them in the lifting dawn-they two,
On her sad breast, his shining head
Stirred softly, as were he the living one,
And she had been the moveless dead.


And yet we crept on, back, and back, and on.
The distance widened like the sky,
Between our little restlessness,
And Love so godlike that it could not die.