Henry Kendall: Verses about Evil

Who cometh from fields of the south
With raiment of weeping and woe,
And a cry of the heart in her mouth,
And a step that is muffled and slow?
Her paths are the paths of the sun;
Her house is a beautiful light;
But she boweth her head, and is one
With the daughters of dolour and night.

She is fairer than flowers of love;
She is fiercer than wind-driven flame;
And God from His thunders above
Hath smitten the soul of her shame.

She saith to the bloody one curst
With the fever of evil, she saith
“My sorrow shall strangle thee first
With an agony wilder than death!

“My sorrow shall hack at thy life!
Thou shalt wrestle with wraiths of thy sin,
And sleep on a pillow of strife
With demons without and within!”

She whispers, “He came to the land
A lord and a lover of me—
A son of the waves with a hand
As fearless and frank as the sea.

“On the shores of the stranger he stood
With the sweetness of youth on his face;
Till there started a fiend from the wood,
Who stabbed at the peace of the place!

“Because of the dastardly thing
Thou hast done in the sight of the day,
All horrors that sicken and sting
Shall make thee for ever their prey.

“Because of the beautiful trust
Destroyed by a devil like thee,
Thy bed shall be low in the dust
And my heel as a shackle shall be!

“Because” (and she mutters it deep
Who curseth the coward in chains)
“Thou hast stricken and murdered our sleep,
Thy sleep shall be perished with pains;

“Thy sleep shall be broken and sharp
And filled with fierce spasms and dreams,
And shadow shall haunt thee and harp
On hellish and horrible themes!

“I will set my right hand on thy neck
And my foot on thy body, nor bate,
Till thy name shall become as a wreck
And a byword for hisses and hate!”

Where the sinister sun of the Syrians beat
On the brittle, bright stubble,
And the camels fell back from the swords of the heat,
Came Saul, with a fire in the soles of his feet,
And a forehead of trouble.

And terrified faces to left and to right,
Before and behind him,
Fled away with the speed of a maddening fright
To the cloughs of the bat and the chasms of night,
Each hoping the zealot would fail in his flight
To find him and bind him.

For, behold you! the strong man of Tarsus came down
With breathings of slaughter,
From the priests of the city, the chiefs of the town
(The lords with the sword, and the sires with the gown),
To harry the Christians, and trample, and drown,
And waste them like water.

He was ever a fighter, this son of the Jews -
A fighter in earnest;
And the Lord took delight in the strength of his thews,
For He knew he was one of the few He could choose
To fight out His battles and carry His news
Of a marvellous truth through the dark and the dews,
And the desert lands furnaced!

He knew he was one of the few He could take
For His mission supernal,
Whose feet would not falter, whose limbs would not ache,
Through the waterless lands of the thorn and the snake,
And the ways of the wild - bearing up for the sake
Of a Beauty eternal.

And therefore the road to Damascus was burned
With a swift, sudden brightness;
While Saul, with his face in the bitter dust, learned
Of the sin which he did ere he tumbled, and turned
Aghast at God's whiteness!

Of the sin which he did ere he covered his head
From the strange revelation.
But, thereafter, you know of the life that he led -
How he preached to the peoples, and suffered, and sped
With the wonderful words which his Master had said,
From nation to nation.

Now would we be like him, who suffer and see,
If the Chooser should choose us!
For I tell you, brave brothers, whoever you be,
It is right, till all learn to look further, and see,
That our Master should use us!

It is right, till all learn to discover and class,
That our Master should task us:
For now we may judge of the Truth through a glass;
And the road over which they must evermore pass,
Who would think for the many, and fight for the mass,
Is the road to Damascus.

Because this man fulfilled his days,
Like one who walks with steadfast gaze
Averted from forbidden ways
With lures of fair, false flowerage deep,
Behold the Lord whose throne is dim
With fires of flaming seraphim—
The Christ that suffered sent for him:
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”
Think not that souls whose deeds august
Put sin to shame and make men just
Become at last the helpless dust
That wintering winds through waste-lands sweep!
The higher life within us cries,
Like some fine spirit from the skies,
“The Father’s blessing on us lies—
‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’”

Not human sleep—the fitful rest
With evil shapes of dreams distressed,—
But perfect quiet, unexpressed
By any worldly word we keep.
The dim Hereafter framed in creeds
May not be this; but He who reads
Our lives, sets flowers on wayside weeds—
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”

Be sure this hero who has passed
The human space—the outer vast—
Who worked in harness to the last,
Doth now a hallowed harvest reap.
Love sees his grave, nor turns away—
The eyes of faith are like the day,
And grief has not a word to say—
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”

That fair, rare spirit, Honour, throws
A light, which puts to shame the rose,
Across his grave, because she knows
The son whose ashes it doth keep;
And, like far music, this is heard—
“Behold the man who never stirred,
By word of his, an angry word!—
‘He giveth His beloved sleep.’”

He earned his place. Within his hands,
The power which counsels and commands,
And shapes the social life of lands,
Became a blessing pure and deep.
Through thirty years of turbulence
Our thoughts were sweetened with a sense
Of his benignant influence—
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”

No splendid talents, which excite
Like music, songs, or floods of light,
Were his; but, rather, all those bright,
Calm qualities of soul which reap
A mute, but certain, fine respect,
Not only from a source elect,
But from the hearts of every sect—
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”

He giveth His beloved rest!
The faithful soul that onward pressed,
Unswerving, from Life’s east to west,
By paths austere and passes steep,
Is past all toil; and, over Death,
With reverent hands and prayerful breath,
I plant this flower, alive with faith—
“He giveth His beloved sleep.”

SAID one who led the spears of swarthy Gad,
To Jesse’s mighty son: “My Lord, O King,
I, halting hard by Gibeon’s bleak-blown hill
Three nightfalls past, saw dark-eyed Rizpah, clad
In dripping sackcloth, pace with naked feet
The flinty rock where lie unburied yet
The sons of her and Saul; and he whose post
Of watch is in those places desolate,
Got up, and spake unto thy servant here
Concerning her—yea, even unto me:—
‘Behold,’ he said, ‘the woman seeks not rest,
Nor fire, nor food, nor roof, nor any haunt
Where sojourns man; but rather on yon rock
Abideth, like a wild thing, with the slain,
And watcheth them, lest evil wing or paw
Should light upon the comely faces dead,
To spoil them of their beauty. Three long moons
Hath Rizpah, daughter of Aiah, dwelt
With drouth and cold and rain and wind by turns,
And many birds there are that know her face,
And many beasts that flee not at her step,
And many cunning eyes do look at her
From serpent-holes and burrows of the rat.
Moreover,’ spake the scout, ‘her skin is brown
And sere by reason of exceeding heat;
And all her darkness of abundant hair
Is shot with gray, because of many nights
When grief hath crouched in fellowship with frost
Upon that desert rock. Yea, thus and thus
Fares Rizpah,’ said the spy, O King, to me.”

But David, son of Jesse, spake no word,
But turned himself, and wept against the wall.

We have our Rizpahs in these modern days
Who’ve lost their households through no sin of theirs,
On bloody fields and in the pits of war;
And though their dead were sheltered in the sod
By friendly hands, these have not suffered less
Than she of Judah did, nor is their love
Surpassed by hers. The Bard who, in great days
Afar off yet, shall set to epic song
The grand pathetic story of the strife
That shook America for five long years,
And struck its homes with desolation—he
Shall in his lofty verse relate to men
How, through the heat and havoc of that time,
Columbia’s Rachael in her Rama wept
Her children, and would not be comforted;
And sing of Woman waiting day by day
With that high patience that no man attains,
For tidings, from the bitter field, of spouse,
Or son, or brother, or some other love
Set face to face with Death. Moreover, he
Shall say how, through her sleepless hours at night,
When rain or leaves were dropping, every noise
Seemed like an omen; every coming step
Fell on her ears like a presentiment
And every hand that rested on the door
She fancied was a herald bearing grief;
While every letter brought a faintness on
That made her gasp before she opened it,
To read the story written for her eyes,
And cry, or brighten, over its contents.

Years fifty, and seven to boot, have smitten the children of men
Since sound of a voice or a foot came out of the head of that glen.
The brand of black devil is there—an evil wind moaneth around—
There is doom, there is death in the air: a curse groweth up from the ground!
No noise of the axe or the saw in that hollow unholy is heard,
No fall of the hoof or the paw, no whirr of the wing of the bird;
But a grey mother down by the sea, as wan as the foam on the strait,
Has counted the beads on her knee these forty-nine winters and eight.
Whenever an elder is asked—a white-headed man of the woods—
Of the terrible mystery masked where the dark everlastingly broods,
Be sure he will turn to the bay, with his back to the glen in the range,
And glide like a phantom away, with a countenance pallid with change.
From the line of dead timber that lies supine at the foot of the glade,
The fierce-featured eaglehawk flies—afraid as a dove is afraid;
But back in that wilderness dread are a fall and the forks of a ford—
Ah! pray and uncover your head, and lean like a child on the Lord.

A sinister fog at the wane—at the change of the moon cometh forth
Like an ominous ghost in the train of a bitter, black storm of the north!
At the head of the gully unknown it hangs like a spirit of bale.
And the noise of a shriek and a groan strikes up in the gusts of the gale.
In the throat of a feculent pit is the beard of a bloody-red sedge;
And a foam like the foam of a fit sweats out of the lips of the ledge.
But down in the water of death, in the livid, dead pool at the base—
Bow low, with inaudible breath, beseech with the hands to the face!

A furlong of fetid, black fen, with gelid, green patches of pond,
Lies dumb by the horns of the glen—at the gates of the horror beyond;
And those who have looked on it tell of the terrible growths that are there—
The flowerage fostered by hell, the blossoms that startle and scare.
If ever a wandering bird should light on Gehennas like this
Be sure that a cry will be heard, and the sound of the flat adder’s hiss.
But hard by the jaws of the bend is a ghastly Thing matted with moss—
Ah, Lord! be a father, a friend, for the sake of the Christ of the Cross.

Black Tom, with the sinews of five—that never a hangman could hang—
In the days of the shackle and gyve, broke loose from the guards of the gang.
Thereafter, for seasons a score, this devil prowled under the ban;
A mate of red talon and paw, a wolf in the shape of a man.
But, ringed by ineffable fire, in a thunder and wind of the north,
The sword of Omnipotent ire—the bolt of high Heaven went forth!
But, wan as the sorrowful foam, a grey mother waits by the sea
For the boys that have never come home these fifty-four winters and three.

From the folds of the forested hills there are ravelled and roundabout tracks,
Because of the terror that fills the strong-handed men of the axe!
Of the workers away in the range there is none that will wait for the night,
When the storm-stricken moon is in change and the sinister fog is in sight.
And later and deep in the dark, when the bitter wind whistles about,
There is never a howl or a bark from the dog in the kennel without,
But the white fathers fasten the door, and often and often they start,
At a sound like a foot on the floor and a touch like a hand on the heart.

A SONG that is bitter with grief—a ballad as pale as the light
That comes with the fall of the leaf, I sing to the shadows to-night.

The laugh on the lyrical lips is sadder than laughter of ghosts
Chained back in the pits of eclipse by wailing unnameable coasts.

I gathered this wreath at the close of day that was dripping with dew;
The blossom you take for a rose was plucked from the branch of a yew.

The flower you fancy is sweet has black in the place of the red;
For this is a song of the street—the ballad of larrikin Ned.

He stands at the door of the sink that gapes like a fissure of death:
The face of him fiery with drink, the flame of its fume in his breath.

He thrives in the sickening scenes that the devil has under his ban;
A rascal not out of his teens with the voice of a vicious old man.

A blossom of blackness, indeed—of Satan a sinister fruit!
Far better the centipede’s seed—the spawn of the adder or newt.

Than terror of talon or fang this imp of the alleys is worse:
His speech is a poisonous slang—his phrases are coloured with curse.

The prison, the shackles, and chain are nothing to him and his type:
He sings in the shadow of pain, and laughs at the impotent stripe.

There under the walls of the gaols the half of his life has been passed.
He was born in the bosom of bale—he will go to the gallows at last.

No angel in Paradise kneels for him at the feet of the Lord;
A Nemesis follows his heels in the flame of a sinister sword.

The sins of his fathers have brought this bitterness into his days—
His life is accounted as naught; his soul is a brand for the blaze.

Did ever his countenance change? Did ever a moment supreme
Illumine his face with a strange ineffably beautiful dream?

Before he was caught in the breach—in the pits of iniquity grim,
Did ever the Deity reach the hand of a Father to him?

Behold, it is folly to say the evil was born in the blood;
The rose that is cankered to-day was once an immaculate bud!

There might have been blossom and fruit—a harvest exceedingly fair,
Instead of the venomous root, and flowers that startle and scare.

The burden—the burden is their’s who, watching this garden about,
Assisted the thistle and tares, and stamped the divinity out!

A growth like the larrikin Ned—a brutal unqualified clod,
Is what ye are helping who’d tread on the necks of the prophets of God.

No more than a damnable weed ye water and foster, ye fools,
Whose aim is to banish indeed the beautiful Christ from the schools.

The merciful, wonderful light of the seraph Religion behold
These evil ones shut from the sight of the children who weep in the cold!

But verily trouble shall fall on such, and their portion shall be
A harvest of hyssop and gall, and sorrow as wild as the sea.

For the rose of a radiant star is over the hills of the East,
And the fathers are heartened for war—the prophet, the Saint, and the priest.

For a spirit of Deity makes the holy heirophants strong;
And a morning of majesty breaks, and blossoms in colour and song.

Yea, now, by the altars august the elders are shining supreme;
And brittle and barren as dust is the spiritless secular dream.

It’s life as a vapour shall end as a fog in the fall of the year;
For the Lord is a Father and Friend, and the day of His coming is near.

INTO that good old Hebrew’s soul sublime
The spirit of the wilderness had passed;
For where the thunders of imperial Storm
Rolled over mighty hills; and where the caves
Of cloud-capt Horeb rang with hurricane;
And where wild-featured Solitude did hold
Supreme dominion; there the prophet saw
And heard and felt that large mysterious life
Which lies remote from cities, in the woods
And rocks and waters of the mountained Earth.
And so it came to pass, Elijah caught
That scholarship which gave him power to see
And solve the deep divinity that lies
With Nature, under lordly forest-domes,
And by the seas; and so his spirit waxed,
Made strong and perfect by its fellowship
With God’s authentic world, until his eyes
Became a splendour, and his face was as
A glory with the vision of the seer.
Thereafter, thundering in the towns of men,
His voice, a trumpet of the Lord, did shake
All evil to its deep foundations. He,
The hairy man who ran before the king,
Like some wild spectre fleeting through the storm,
What time Jezreel’s walls were smitten hard
By fourfold wind and rain; ’twas he who slew
The liars at the altars of the gods,
And, at the very threshold of a throne,
Heaped curses on its impious lord; ’twas he
Jehovah raised to grapple Sin that stalked,
Arrayed about with kingship; and to strike
Through gold and purple, to the heart of it.
And therefore Falsehood quaked before his face,
And Tyranny grew dumb at sight of him,
And Lust and Murder raged abroad no more;
But where these were he walked, a shining son
Of Truth, and cleared and sanctified the land.

Not always was the dreaded Tishbite stern;
The scourge of despots, when he saw the face
Of Love in sorrow by the bed of Death,
Grew tender as a maid; and she who missed
A little mouth that used to catch, and cling—
A small, sweet trouble—at her yearning breast;*
Yea, she of Zarephath, who sat and mourned
The silence of a birdlike voice that made
Her flutter with the joy of motherhood
In other days, she came to know the heart
Of Pity that the rugged prophet had.
And when he took the soft, still child away,
And laid it on his bed; and in the dark
Sent up a pleading voice to Heaven; and drew
The little body to his breast; and held
It there until the bright, young soul returned
To earth again; the gladdened woman saw
A radiant beauty in Elijah’s eyes,
And knew the stranger was a man of God.

We want a new Elijah in these days,
A mighty spirit clad in shining arms
Of Truth—yea, one whose lifted voice would break,
Like thunder, on our modern Apathy,
And shake the fanes of Falsehood from their domes
Down to the firm foundations; one whose words,
Directly coming from a source divine,
Would fall like flame where Vice holds festival,
And search the inmost heart of nations; one
Made godlike with that scholarship supreme
Which comes of suffering; one, with eyes to see
The very core of things; with hands to grasp
High opportunities, and use them for
His glorious mission; one, whose face inspired
Would wear a terror for the lying soul,
But seem a glory in the sight of those
Who make the light and sweetness of the world,
And are the high priests of the Beautiful.
Yea, one like this we want amongst us now
To drive away the evil fogs that choke
Our social atmosphere, and leave it clear
And pure and hallowed with authentic light.

To-night a strong south wind in thunder sings
Across the city. Now by salt wet flats,
And ridges perished with the breath of drought,
Comes up a deep, sonorous, gulf-like voice —
Far-travelled herald of some distant storm —
That strikes with harsh gigantic wings the cliff,
Where twofold Otway meets his straitened surf,
And makes a white wrath of a league of sea.
To-night the fretted Yarra chafes its banks,
And dusks and glistens; while the city shows
A ring of windy light. From street to street
The noise of labour, linked to hurrying wheels,
Rolls off, as rolls the stately sound of wave,
When he that hears it hastens from the shore.

To-night beside a moody window sits
A wife who watches for her absent love;
Her home is in a dim suburban street,
In which the winds, like one with straitened breath,
Now fleet with whispers dry and short half-sobs,
Or pause and beat against the showery panes
Like homeless mem’ries seeking for a home.

There, where the plopping of the guttered rain
Sounds like a heavy footstep in the dark,
Where every shadow thrown by flickering light
Seems like her husband halting at the door,
I say a woman sits, and waits, and sits,
Then trims her fire, and comes to wait again.

The chapel clock strikes twelve! He has not come.
The night grows wilder, and the wind dies off
The roads, now turned to thoroughfares of storm,
Save when a solitary, stumbling foot
Breaks through the clamour. Then the watcher starts,
And trembles, with her hand upon the key,
And flutters, with the love upon her lips;
Then sighs, returns, and takes her seat once more.

Is this the old, old tale? Ah! do not ask,
My gentle reader, but across your doubts
Throw shining reasons on the happier side;
Or, if you cannot choose but doubt the man —
If you do count him in your thoughts as one
Who leaves a good wife by a lonely hearth
For more than half the night, for scenes (we’ll say)
Of revelry — I pray you think of how
That wretch must suffer in his waking times
(If he be human), when he recollects
That through the long, long hours of evil feasts
With painted sin, and under glaring gas,
His brightest friend was at a window-sill
A watcher, seated in a joyless room,
And haply left without a loaf of bread.

I, having learnt from sources pure and high,
From springs of love that make the perfect wife,
Can say how much a woman will endure
For one to whom her tender heart has passed.
When fortune fails, and friends drop off, and time
Has shadows waiting in predestined ways —
When shame that grows from want of money comes,
And sets its brand upon a husband’s brow,
And makes him walk an alien in the streets:
One faithful face, on which a light divine
Becomes a glory when vicissitude
Is in its darkest mood — one face, I say,
Marks not the fallings-off that others see,
Seeks not to know the thoughts that others think,
Cares not to hear the words that others say:
But, through her deep and self-sufficing love,
She only sees the bright-eyed youth that won
Her maiden heart in other, happier days,
And not the silent, gloomy-featured man
That frets and shivers by a sullen fire.

And, therefore, knowing this from you, who’ve shared
With me the ordeal of most trying times,
I sometimes feel a hot shame flushing up,
To think that there are those among my sex
Who are so cursed with small-souled selfishness
That they do give to noble wives like you,
For love — that first and final flower of life —
The dreadful portion of a drunkard’s home.

Wizened the wood is, and wan is the way through it;
White as a corpse is the face of the fen;
Only blue adders abide in and stray through it—
Adders and venom and horrors to men.
Here is the “ghost of a garden” whose minister
Fosters strange blossoms that startle and scare.
Red as man’s blood is the sun that, with sinister
Flame, is a menace of hell in the air.
Wrinkled and haggard the hills are—the jags of them
Gape like to living and ominous things:
Storm and dry thunder cry out in the crags of them—
Fire, and the wind with a woe in its wings.
Never a moon without clammy-cold shroud on it
Hitherward comes, or a flower-like star!
Only the hiss of the tempest is loud on it—
Hiss, and the moan of a bitter sea bar.
Here on this waste, and to left and to right of it,
Never is lisp or the ripple of rain:
Fierce is the daytime and wild is the night of it,
Flame without limit and frost without wane!
Trees half alive, with the sense of a curse on them,
Shudder and shrink from the black heavy gale;
Ghastly, with boughs like the plumes of a hearse on them:
Barren of blossom and blasted with bale.

Under the cliff that stares down to the south of it—
Back by the horns of a hazardous hill,
Dumb is the gorge with a grave in the mouth of it
Still, as a corpse in a coffin is still.
Never there hovers a hope of the Spring by it—
Never a glimmer of yellow and green:
Only the bat with a whisper of wing by it
Flits like a life out of flesh and unseen.
Here are the growths that are livid and glutinous,
Speckled, and bloated with poisonous blood:
This is the haunt of the viper-breed mutinous:
Cursed with the curse of weird Catherine Flood.

He that hath looked on it—hurried aghast from it,
Hair of him frozen with horror straightway,
Chased by a sudden strange pestilent blast from it—
Where is the speech of him—what can he say?
Hath he not seen the fierce ghost of a hag in it?
Heard maledictions that startle the stars?
Dumb is his mouth as a mouth with a gag in it—
Mute is his life as a life within bars.
Just the one glimpse of that grey, shrieking woman there
Ringed by a circle of furnace and fiend!
He that went happy and healthy and human there—
Where shall the white leper fly to be cleaned?

Here, in a pit with indefinite doom on it,
Here, in the fumes of a feculent moat,
Under an alp with inscrutable gloom on it,
Squats the wild witch with a ghoul at her throat!
Black execration that cannot be spoken of—
Speech of red hell that would suffocate Song,
Starts from this terror with never a token of
Day and its loveliness all the year long.
Sin without name to it—man never heard of it—
Crime that would startle a fiend from his lair,
Blasted this Glen, and the leaf and the bird of it—
Where is there hope for it, Father, O where?

Far in the days of our fathers, the life in it
Blossomed and beamed in the sight of the sun:
Yellow and green and the purple were rife in it,
Singers of morning and waters that run.
Storm of the equinox shed no distress on it,
Thunder spoke softly, and summer-time left
Sunset’s forsaken bright beautiful dress on it—
Blessing that shone half the night in the cleft.
Hymns of the highlands—hosannas from hills by it,
Psalms of great forests made holy the spot:
Cool were the mosses and clear were the rills by it—
Far in the days when the Horror was not.

Twenty miles south is the strong, shining Hawkesbury—
Spacious and splendid, and lordly with blooms.
There, between mountains magnificent, walks bury
Miles of their beauty in green myrtle glooms.
There, in the dell, is the fountain with falls by it—
Falls, and a torrent of summering stream:
There is the cave with the hyaline halls by it—
Haunt of the echo and home of the dream.
Over the hill, by the marvellous base of it,
Wanders the wind with a song in its breath
Out to the sea with the gold on the face of it—
Twenty miles south of the Valley of Death.

You may have heard of Proclus, sir,
If you have been a reader;
And you may know a bit of her
Who helped the Lycian leader.
I have my doubts -- the head you "sport"
(Now mark me, don't get crusty)
Is hardly of the classic sort --
Your lore, I think, is fusty.

Most likely you have stuck to tracts
Flushed through with flaming curses --
I judge you, neighbour, by your acts --
So don't you damn my verses.

But to my theme. The Asian sage,
Whose name above I mention,
Lived in the pitchy Pagan age,
A life without pretension.

He may have worshipped gods like Zeus,
And termed old Dis a master;
But then he had a strong excuse --
He never heard a pastor.

However, it occurs to me
That, had he cut Demeter
And followed you, or followed me,
He wouldn't have been sweeter.

No doubt with "shepherds" of this time
He's not the "clean potato",
Because -- excuse me for my rhyme --
He pinned his faith to Plato.

But these are facts you can't deny,
My pastor, smudged and sooty,
His mind was like a summer sky --
He lived a life of beauty --

To lift his brothers' thoughts above
This earth he used to labour:
His heart was luminous with love --
He didn't wound his neighbour.

To him all men were just the same --
He never foamed at altars,
Although he lived ere Moody came --
Ere Sankey dealt in psalters.

The Lycian sage, my "reverend" sir,
Had not your chances ample;
But, after all, I must prefer
His perfect, pure example.

You, having read the Holy Writ --
The Book the angels foster --
Say have you helped us on a bit,
You overfed impostor?

What have you done to edify,
You clammy chapel tinker?
What act like his of days gone by --
The grand old Asian thinker?

Is there no deed of yours at all
With beauty shining through it?
Ah, no! your heart reveals its gall
On every side I view it.
A blatant bigot with a big
Fat heavy fetid carcass,
You well become your greasy "rig" --
You're not a second Arcas.
What sort of "gospel" do you preach?
What "Bible" is your Bible?
There's worse than wormwood in your speech,
You livid, living libel!

How many lives are growing gray
Through your depraved behaviour!
I tell you plainly -- every day
You crucify the Saviour!

Some evil spirit curses you --
Your actions never vary:
You cannot point your finger to
One fact to the contrary.

You seem to have a wicked joy
In your malicious labour,
Endeavouring daily to destroy
The neighbour's love for neighbour.

The brutal curses you eject
Make strong men dread to hear you.
The world outside your petty sect
Feels sick when it is near you.

No man who shuns that little hole
You call your tabernacle
Can have, you shriek, a ransomed soul --
He wears the devil's shackle.

And, hence the "Papist" by your clan
Is dogged with words inhuman,
Because he loves that friend of man
The highest type of woman --

Because he has that faith which sees
Before the high Creator
A Virgin pleading on her knees --
A shining Mediator!

God help the souls who grope in night --
Who in your ways have trusted!
I've said enough! the more I write,
The more I feel disgusted.

The warm, soft air is tainted through
With your pernicious leaven.
I would not live ~one hour~ with you
In your peculiar heaven!

Now mount your musty pulpit -- thump,
And muddle flat clodhoppers;
And let some long-eared booby "hump"
The plate about for coppers.

At priest and parson spit and bark,
And shake your "church" with curses,
You bitter blackguard of the dark --
With this I close my verses.

Manasseh, lord of Judah, and the son
Of him who, favoured of Jehovah, saw
At midnight, when the skies were flushed with fire,
The splendid mystery of the shining air,
That flamed above the black Assyrian camps,
And breathed upon the evil hosts at rest,
And shed swift violent sleep into their eyes;
Manasseh, lord of Judah, when he came
To fortify himself upon his throne,
And saw great strength was gathered unto him,
Let slip satanic passions he had nursed
For years and years; and lo! the land that He
Who thundered on the Oriental Mount
Girt round with awful light, had set apart
For Jacob’s seed — the land that Moses strained
On Nebo’s topmost cone to see, grew black
Beneath the shadow of despotic Sin
That stalked on foot-ways dashed with human blood,
And mocked high Heaven by audacious fires;
And as when Storm, that voice of God, is loud
Within the mountained Syrian wilderness,
There flits a wailing through the wilted pines,
So in the city of the wicked king
A voice, like Abel’s crying from the ground,
Made sorrow of the broken evening winds,
And darkness of the fair young morning lights,
And silence in the homes of hunted men.
But in a time when grey-winged Autumn fogs
Shut off the sun from Carmel’s seaward side,
And fitful gusts did speak within the trees
Of rain beyond the waters, while the priests
In Hinnom’s echoing valley offered up
Unhallowed sacrifices unto gods
Of brass and stone, there came a trumpet’s voice
Along the bald, bleak northern flats; and then
A harnessed horseman, riding furiously,
Dashed down the ridge with an exceeding cry
Of “Esarhaddon, Esarhaddon! haste
Away, ye elders, lo, the swarthy foe
Six leagues from hence hath made the land a fire,
And all the dwellers of the hollowed hills
Are flying hitherwards before a flame
Of fifty thousand swords!” At this the men
Of Baal turned about, set face, and fled
Towards the thickets, where the impious king,
Ringed round by grey, gaunt wizards with the brand
Of Belial on their features, cowered low,
And hid himself amongst the tangled thorns
And shivered in a bitter seaborn wind,
And caught the whiteness of a deathly fear.

There where the ash-pale forest-leaves were touched
By Morning’s shining fingers, and the inland depths
Sent out rain-plenished voices west and south,
The steel-clad scouts of Esarhaddon came
And searched, and found Manasseh whom they bound
And dragged before the swart Assyrian king;
And Esarhaddon, scourge of Heaven, sent
To strange Evil at its chiefest fanes,
And so fulfil a dread divine decree,
Took Judah’s despot, fettered hand and foot,
And cast him bleeding on a dungeon floor
Hard by where swift Euphrates chafes his brink
And gleams from cataract to cataract,
And gives the gale a deep midwinter tone.

So fared Manasseh for the sins which brought
Pale-featured Desolation to the tents
Of alienated Judah; but one night,
When ninety moons of wild unrest had passed,
The humbled son of Hezekiah turned
Himself towards the wall, and prayed and wept;
And in an awful darkness face to face
With God, he said — “I know, O Lord of Hosts,
That Thou art wise and just and kind, and I
Am shapen in iniquity; but by
The years of black captivity, whose days
And nights have marked my spirit passing through
Fierce furnaces of suffering, and seen
It groping in blind shadows with a hope
To reach Thy Hand — by these, O Father, these
That brought the swift, sad silver to my head
Which should have come with Age — which came with Pain,
I pray Thee hear these supplications now,
And stoop and lift me from my low estate,
And lend me this once my dominionship,
So I may strive to live the bad Past down,
And lead henceforth a white and wholesome life,
And be thy contrite servant, Lord, indeed!”

The prayer was not in vain: for while the storm
Sang high above the dim Chaldean domes —
While, in the pines, the spirit of the rain
Sobbed fitfully, Jehovah’s angel came
And made a splendour of the dungeon walls,
And smote the bars, and led Manasseh forth
And caught him up, nor set him down again
Until the turrets of Jerusalem
Sprang white before the flying travellers
Against the congregated morning hills.

And he, the broken man made whole again,
Was faithful to his promise. Every day
Thereafter passing, bore upon its wings
Some shining record of his faultless life,
Some brightness of a high resolve fulfilled;
And in good time, when all the land had rest,
He found that he had lived the bad Past down,
And gave God praise, and with his fathers slept.

Thus ends the story of Manasseh. If
This verse should catch the eyes of one whose sin
Lies heavy on his soul; who finds himself
A shame-faced alien when he walks abroad,
A moping shadow when he sits at home;
Who has no human friends; who, day by day,
Is smitten down by icy level looks
From that cold Virtue which is merciless
Because it knoweth not what wrestling with
A fierce temptation means; if such a one
Should read my tale of Hezekiah’s son,
Let him take heart, and gather up his strength,
And step above men’s scorn, and find his way
By paths of fire, as brave Manasseh did,
Up to the white heights of a blameless life;
And it will come to pass that in the face
Of grey old enmities, whose partial eyes
Are blind to reformation, he will taste
A sweetness in his thoughts, and live his time
Arrayed with the efficient armour of
That noble power which grows of self-respect,
And makes a man a pillar in the world.

SING, mountain-wind, thy strong, superior song—
Thy haughty alpine anthem, over tracts
Whose passes and whose swift, rock-straitened streams
Catch mighty life and voice from thee, and make
A lordly harmony on sea-chafed heights.
Sing, mountain-wind, and take thine ancient tone,
The grand, austere, imperial utterance.
Which drives my soul before it back to days
In one dark hour of which, when Storm rode high
Past broken hills, and when the polar gale
Roared round the Otway with the bitter breath
That speaks for ever of the White South Land
Alone with God and Silence in the cold,
I heard the touching tale of Basil Moss,
A story shining with a woman’s love!
And who that knows that love can ever doubt
How dear, divine, sublime a thing it is;
For while the tale of Basil Moss was one
Not blackened with those stark, satanic sins
Which call for superhuman sacrifice,
Still, from the records of the world’s sad life,
This great, sweet, gladdening fact at length we’ve learned,
There’s not a depth to which a man can fall,
No slough of crime in which such one can lie
Stoned with the scorn and curses of his kind,
But that some tender woman can be found
To love and shield him still.


What was the fate
Of Basil Moss who, thirty years ago,
A brave, high-minded, but impetuous youth,
Left happy homesteads in the sweetest isle
That wears the sober light of Northern suns?
What happened him, the man who crossed far, fierce
Sea-circles of the hoarse Atlantic—who,
Without a friend to help him in the world,
Commenced his battle in this fair young land,
A Levite in the Temple Beautiful
Of Art, who struggled hard, but found that here
Both Bard and Painter learn, by bitter ways,
That they are aliens in the working world,
And that all Heaven’s templed clouds at morn
And sunset do not weigh one loaf of bread!
This was his tale. For years he kept himself
Erect, and looked his troubles in the face
And grappled them; and, being helped at last
By one who found she loved him, who became
The patient sharer of his lot austere,
He beat them bravely back; but like the heads
Of Lerna’s fabled hydra, they returned
From day to day in numbers multiplied;
And so it came to pass that Basil Moss
(Who was, though brave, no mental Hercules,
Who hid beneath a calmness forced, the keen
Heart-breaking sensibility—which is
The awful, wild, specific curse that clings
Forever to the Poet’s twofold life)
Gave way at last; but not before the hand
Of sickness fell upon him—not before
The drooping form and sad averted eyes
Of hectic Hope, that figure far and faint,
Had given all his later thoughts a tongue—
“It is too late—too late!”


There is no need
To tell the elders of the English world
What followed this. From step to step, the man—
Now fairly gripped by fierce Intemperance—
Descended in the social scale; and though
He struggled hard at times to break away,
And take the old free, dauntless stand again,
He came to be as helpless as a child,
And Darkness settled on the face of things,
And Hope fell dead, and Will was paralysed.
Yet sometimes, in the gloomy breaks between
Each fit of madness issuing from his sin,
He used to wander through familiar woods
With God’s glad breezes blowing in his face,
And try to feel as he was wont to feel
In other years; but never could he find
Again his old enthusiastic sense
Of Beauty; never could he exorcize
The evil spell which seemed to shackle down
The fine, keen, subtle faculty that used
To see into the heart of loveliness;
And therefore Basil learned to shun the haunts
Where Nature holds her chiefest courts, because
They forced upon him in the saddest light
The fact of what he was, and once had been.

So fared the drunkard for five awful years—
The last of which, while lighting singing dells,
With many a flame of flowers, found Basil Moss
Cooped with his wife in one small wretched room;
And there, one night, the man, when ill and weak—
A sufferer from his latest bout of sin—
Moaned, stricken sorely with a fourfold sense
Of all the degradation he had brought
Upon himself, and on his patient wife;
And while he wrestled with his strong remorse
He looked upon a sweet but pallid face,
And cried, “My God! is this the trusting girl
I swore to love, to shield, to cherish so
But ten years back? O, what a liar I am!”
She, shivering in a thin and faded dress
Beside a handful of pale, smouldering fire,
On hearing Basil’s words, moved on her chair,
And turning to him blue, beseeching eyes,
And pinched, pathetic features, faintly said—
“O, Basil, love! now that you seem to feel
And understand how much I’ve suffered since
You first gave way—now that you comprehend
The bitter heart-wear, darling, that has brought
The swift, sad silver to this hair of mine
Which should have come with Age—which came with Pain,
Do make one more attempt to free yourself
From what is slowly killing both of us;
And if you do the thing I ask of you,
If you but try this once, we may indeed—
We may be happy yet.”


Then Basil Moss,
Remembering in his marvellous agony
How often he had found her in the dead
Of icy nights with uncomplaining eyes,
A watcher in a cheerless room for him;
And thinking, too, that often, while he threw
His scanty earnings over reeking bars,
The darling that he really loved through all
Was left without enough to eat—then Moss,
I say, sprang to his feet with sinews set
And knotted brows, and throat that gasped for air,
And cried aloud—“My poor, poor girl, I will.”
And so he did; and fought this time the fight
Out to the bitter end; and with the help
Of prayers and unremitting tenderness
He gained the victory at last; but not—
No, not before the agony and sweat
Of fierce Gethsemanes had come to him;
And not before the awful nightly trials,
When, set in mental furnaces of flame,
With eyes that ached and wooed in vain for sleep,
He had to fight the devil holding out
The cup of Lethe to his fevered lips.
But still he conquered; and the end was this,
That though he often had to face the eyes
Of that bleak Virtue which is not of Christ
(Because the gracious Lord of Love was one with Him
Who blessed the dying thief upon the cross),
He held his way with no unfaltering steps,
And gathered hope and light, and never missed
To do a thing for the sake of good.
And every day that glided through the world
Saw some fine instance of his bright reform,
And some assurance he would never fall
Into the pits and traps of hell again.
And thus it came to pass that Basil’s name
Grew sweet with men; and, when he died, his end
Was calm—was evening-like, and beautiful.

Here ends the tale of Basil Moss. To wives
Who suffer as the Painter’s darling did,
I dedicate these lines; and hope they’ll bear
In mind those efforts of her lovely life,
Which saved her husband’s soul; and proved that while
A man who sins can entertain remorse,
He is not wholly lost. If such as they
But follow her, they may be sure of this,
That Love, that sweet authentic messenger
From God, can never fail while there is left
Within the fallen one a single pulse
Of what the angels call humanity.