John Le Gay Brereton: Verses about Joy

His shatter’d Empire thunders to the ground:
A myriad hearts peal laughter as it falls,
While red flags flutter on its ruined walls
And living joy darts all the world around.
The imperial criminal, naked and uncrowned,
Breathing a shuddering air of curses, crawls,
Baffled and beaten, from his gorgeous halls,
While Vengeance halloos lapdog, cur and hound.

Behold the arrogant humbled, and rejoice
The grasping hand holds naught but flying dust,
And Envy meets the pitiless grin of Fate.
Take warning of your own heart’s inward voice,
Bid your own soul be humble and distrust
The yelping promises of greed and hate.

OUR little queen of dreams,
Our image of delight,
Which whitens east and gleams
And beckons from the height,
Takes on her human form—is here in mortal sight.

We two have loved her long,
Have known her eyes for years;
We worshipped her with song
The spirit only hears,
And now she comes to us new-washed with blood and tears.

Her radiant self she veils
With vesture meet for earth,
And, knowing all, inhales
The lethal air of birth,
And wakes to restless dreams of misery and mirth.

The fogs of learning rise
And hide the light above,
But in her steadfast eyes
Will shine the light of love,
Which many a gloomy dale may know the gladness of.

What gift is ours to give,
What truth is ours to teach
That she may learn to live
With joy within her reach?
We can but let her learn the sound of human speech.

By custom-fettered fools
Her freedom will be blamed,
Because by sleepy rules
Her soul shall be untamed,
And she will front the sun brown-skinned and unashamed.

Her kinship she will know
With beast and rock and tree,
Wherever she may go
The sky her home will be,
The winds will be her mates,
her crooning nurse the sea.

While to the clarion blown by Marlowe's breath
Tall Tragedy tramped by in hues of death,
And Shakespeare yet was tuning string by string,
With English hawthorn crowned, in that glad spring
When bright clouds melted in a sky serene,
Romance moved lightly to the pipe of Greene.
As fresh as buds half-open, pure as dew,
Two damsels came in forefront of her crew,
One native to the hedgerows and the meads,
The keeper's lass, in simple country weeds,
Her firm white arms, as delicate as silk,
Below her smock-sleeve shining wet with milk;
No marvel the young noble learnt to woo
A maid so merry and frank and homely true.
The other with sad mien, though yet a bride,
Clad in man's raiment softly stole aside
And grieved that he who should have been her stay
Would privily have done her life away,
For still his crime with bloodshot eyeballs grim
And dripping fangs turned back and hunted him.
Cast off, contemned and hated, stabbed, discrowned,
Still in her heart wide realm for him she found,
When earth and love and joy seemed to his hand,
Gripped madly, a waning measure of slipping sand.
Though lust and murder made of him a slave,
Her love set free, her purity forgave.
Humbled and hopeless, all his sins confessed,
By miracle his contrite soul was blessed,
And heavy tolling of those haunted days
Was turned to golden peals of joyous praise.
Ah, but this woeful lady, lily-pale,
Is no mere vision drifting through a tale;
The sad sweet picture of the patient Queen
Betrays the rebel heart of Robert Greene.

From every quarter we,
Who bent the trembling knee
And cowered or grovelled prostrate day and night,
Now come once more to sing
A dirge before thee, King,
Once more with earnest heart to do thee right.

Have we not hailed thee God?
Our weary feet have trod
The vasty barren sands and treacherous ice,
With many a bitter cry,
To pile thine altar high
With pallid human hearts in sacrifice.

We hated thee and came
With eyes of shifty shame,
With heavy steel above the craven breast,
Yet evermore we did
The ill thy servants bid,
For everywhere thy might was manifest.

At thy sibilant word
We were filled with distrust,
And we glared on each other,
All horribly stirred
Against sister and brother;
Our green hopes were wilted and riven, our red-running blood was as dust.

And a foul poison ran
Through the veins of the world,
And we waited and wondered.
By magical ban
We were cruelly sundered,
Then a maniac hatred upcaught us and deep into hell we were hurled.

We have crept to thee, God,
In the day of thy wrath,
We have wept, we have fasted,
We have crimsoned the sod
That thy worship has blasted,
And have seen thee stalk pale and triumphant where nations fell flat in thy path.

Yet out of the dust and the flame,
The squalor and muddle of crime,
A red waving blossom there came
And a scent on the tempest of time.
Heroic and splendid, we threw
Our lives to be oil in the fire,
But a marvel of fellowship grew
As the blaze bickered broader and higher,
And the soul of a people stood up, and spoke to us all from the pyre.

And lo, we are come to thy shrine,
O God, but we ask for no grace,
For our hearts are made glad with a wine
That is death to the craven and base,
And thy shrine shall be burnt for our mirth
And thine altar be turned to thy bier,
For, if Love be our Lord upon earth,
What corner is left for thee here?
The veil of thy temple is rent—and behold, thou hast vanished, O Fear!

When I was but a little boy
Who hunted in the wood
To scare or mangle or destroy
A freakish elemental joy
That tasted life and found it good

I hardly heard the awful ban
That mutters round the free,
But followed where the waters ran,
And wondered when the pipe of Pan
Shook silence with its minstrelsy.

Where sun-spray glittered on my limbs
I danced, and laughed, and trilled
My happy incoherent hymns,
Sped only by the whirling whims
With which my eager heart was filled.

The wind was glad and so was I;
My soul lay open wide,
Reflecting all the starry sky;
The swallows called to me to fly;
I dreamed of how the fishes glide.

But while my errant feet were set
On mosses cool and sweet,
The great grey phantoms brooding met
Within the shades, and cast a net
With dreary charms about my feet.

They pent me in a barren place,
A city, so they said,
Of gallant wonder-working grace
But haunted, haunted by a race
Of rigid unperceptive dead.

With sightless eyes they pored on books,
And scrawled on many a sheet
Their regimental strokes and hooks,
And stalked about with pompous looks,
Top-hatted, in the civil street.

I strove to flee, but everywhere
Met solid-seeming walls;
And yet I knew the world was fair,
And, hearkening well, heard, even there,
A bird and distant waterfalls.

And love which I had scarcely known
Leaped upward as I heard;
I blessed the creek, the mossy stone,
The fern along the gully strown,
The little beasts, the piping bird.

Could walls o'ermaster one who knew
The world of outer light?
The very shadow that they threw
Was tindured with a deeper blue
Because the quickening sun was bright.

I laughed aloud, as one who leaps
Against a curling wave,
And, as a widening ripple creeps,
A shudder caught the stony steeps,
And life shook, laughing, in the grave.

“O phantoms, who are you to fix
Eternal towers of pride?”
I mocked at their fantastic tricks,
I thrust my fingers through the bricks
And felt the flowers the other side.

I pricked my pointed ears to hear
The love-song of the bird,
And dear was every note, and dear
The myriad sounds that echoed near
The magically chorus'd word.

I saw the fading phantoms glare;
Their tones to silence hissed.
The walls bulged, brightening everywhere,
And thinned and melted in the air
To ragged streams of rosy mist.

Trill, happy bird, for ever trill,
For I have learned to bless
The great grey shades whose thwarted will
Turned earth to heaven; and I am still
A dweller in the wilderness