Mathilde Blind: Verses about Parting

The year is on the wing, my love,
With tearful days and nights;
The clouds are on the wing above
With gathering swallow-flights.

The year is on the wing, my sweet,
And in the ghostly race,
With patter of unnumbered feet,
The dead leaves fly apace.

The year is on the wing, and shakes
The last rose from its tree;
And I, whose heart in parting breaks,
Must bid adieu to thee.

Divest thyself, O Soul, of vain desire!
Bid hope farewell, dismiss all coward fears;
Take leave of empty laughter, emptier tears,
And quench, for ever quench, the wasting fire
Wherein this heart, as in a funeral pyre,
Aye burns, yet is consumed not. Years on years
Moaning with memories in thy maddened ears--
Let at thy word, like refluent waves, retire.

Enter thy soul's vast realm as Sovereign Lord,
And, like that angel with the flaming sword,
Wave off life's clinging hands. Then chains will fall
From the poor slave of self's hard tyranny--
And Thou, a ripple rounded by the sea,
In rapture lost be lapped within the All.

W.K.C.--3rd MARCH, 1879.

'A free man thinks of nothing so little as of death; and his wisdom is a meditation, not of death, but of life.' --Spinoza.

'DRAW back the curtain, wife,' he said;
And, dying, raised his feeble head,
As all his gathered soul leaped sheer
Into his waning eyes, and yearned
After the journeying sun which turned
Towards that other hemisphere.

Then, as its incandescent bulk
Sank slowly, like the foundering hulk
Of some lone burning ship at sea,
His life set with it--bright as brief--
In that invincible belief
Of Man's august supremacy.

Truth's vanward hero! Calmly brave
Fronting the dumb unfathomed grave
With unintimidated eyes;
Though not for him, beyond its night,
Resuscitated Hope alight
Prescient, on peaks of Paradise.

And like some solemn parting word
From one belovèd friend on board
Bound for some undiscovered shore,
To one who stands with straining gaze
To catch the last look of a face
Which he may see, ah never more--

So, ere he drifted to the deep
Unknowable, the utter sleep,
Out, out beyond life's harbour bar,
He whispered, 'Perfect! no one knows
How perfect!' and his eyes did close
Even like a sun-extinguished star.

His eyes did close: I held his hand:
I loved, so came to understand
The inmost working of his mind;
Yea, in that clasp, I know not how,
Did not his life of life then flow
Through mine, while mine was left behind?

I know not how, and yet it seems
As in some prank of shifting dreams,
That it was I who died, not he:
And then again, I know not how,
I feel new powers upheave and glow,
And all his life that stirs in me.

I am no longer what I was;
My nature is the pictured glass,
Where he who lived lives on and on;
All ye who loved him, ye may see
His spirits still investing me,
As moonlight but reflects the sun.

For ever deepening grows his sway:
A voice cries in me night and day:
'He'll never die to me, his wife;
In our strong love death hath no part;
I hold and fold him in my heart--
There he shall live while I have life.'

SHE sat by the wayside and wept, where roses, red roses and white,
Lay wasted and withered and sere, like her life and its ruined delight;
Like chaff blown about in the wind whirled roses, white roses and red,
And pale, on night's threshold, the moon bent over the day that was dead.

She sat by the wayside and wept; far over the desolate plain
A noise as of one that is weeping re-echoed in wind and in rain,
And the long dim line of the spectral poplars with dolorous wail
Nodded their bald-headed tops as they chattered with cold in the gale.

She sat by the wayside and wept in a passion of vain desire,
And her weak heart fluttered and failed like the flame of a faltering fire,
Fluttered and failed in her breast like the broken wing of a bird
When its feathers are dabbled with gore, and the low last gurgle is heard.

And behold, like balm on her soul, while she sat by the wayside and wept,
There came a forgetting of sorrow, a lulling of grief, and she slept;
Yea, like the wings of a dove when cooing it broods on the nest,
So the wings of slumber about her assuaged and filled her with rest.

And a light that was not the sun's nor the moon's light illumined her brain;
From afar in the country of dreams three maidens stole over the plain,
Three loveliest maidens they were, like roses, red roses and white;
And behold the earth and the heavens were glorified in their light.

And the first of the maidens was fair, as fair as the blue-kirtled Spring,
When she comes with a snowfall of blossoms and a rustling of birds on the wing,
When a glimmer of green like a tide rolls over the woodland and vales,
And odours are blown on the winds with the song of the nightingales.

The second was loftier of stature, a huntress of grief;
The wilderness glowed as she passed and broke into blossom and leaf;
Yea, it seemed that her upturned eyes, with their fathomless gaze,
Could pierce to the shining stars through the veil of the noonday blaze.

But the third was a splendour incarnate, a luminous form,
Thrilling with raptures that keep the heart of the cold earth warm,
Who hidden far in the mystical glory of quivering rays
Sets the whole world on fire for an absolute sight of her face.

But darkling ever they see her, and ever as through a veil,
For if naked she lightens upon them, their lives must shrivel and fail,
Must fail and shrivel consumed by that burst of insufferable light,
As a tree set on fire by lightning which burns to the ground in a night.

The first one kissed her cheek, her cheek grew pallid and wan:
'Goodbye,' she cried, 'we must part; I am Youth, and I follow the sun;
I am Youth, and I love to build in the heart that is buoyant and gay;
Goodbye, we shall meet not again,' she cried, as she fluttered away.

The second she kissed her eyes, then the glamour went out of their gaze,
Through the magical show she beheld life staring her straight in the face;
With a terrible Gorgon stare that turned her heart into stone--
'Adieu,' she sighed, 'I am Hope, all is over between us and done.'
The third one she kissed her lips, and the kiss was a quenchless fire,
It burned up her life like a victim's in the flames of a funeral pyre--
'Farewell,' she wailed, 'I am Love,' and her wings were spread as for flight--
It seemed like the wail of the wind as they left her alone with the night.