Songs from the Mountains (1880). The Voice in the Wild Oak
(Written in the shadow of 1872) Twelve years ago, when I could face High heaven's dome with different eyes— In days full-flowered with hours of grace, And nights not sad with sighs— I wrote a song in which I strove To shadow forth thy strain of woe, Dark widowed sister of the grove!— Twelve wasted years ago. But youth was then too young to find Those high authentic syllables, Whose voice is like the wintering wind By sunless mountain fells; Nor had I sinned and suffered then To that superlative degree That I would rather seek, than men, Wild fellowship with thee! But he who hears this autumn day Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme, Is one whose hair was shot with grey By Grief instead of Time. He has no need, like many a bard, To sing imaginary pain, Because he bears, and finds it hard, The punishment of Cain. No more he sees the affluence Which makes the heart of Nature glad; For he has lost the fine, first sense Of Beauty that he had. The old delight God's happy breeze Was wont to give, to Grief has grown; And therefore, Niobe of trees, His song is like thine own! But I, who am that perished soul, Have wasted so these powers of mine, That I can never write that whole, Pure, perfect speech of thine. Some lord of words august, supreme, The grave, grand melody demands; The dark translation of thy theme I leave to other hands. Yet here, where plovers nightly call Across dim, melancholy leas— Where comes by whistling fen and fall The moan of far-off seas— A grey, old Fancy often sits Beneath thy shade with tired wings, And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits With awful utterings. Then times there are when all the words Are like the sentences of one Shut in by Fate from wind and birds And light of stars and sun, No dazzling dryad, but a dark Dream-haunted spirit doomed to be Imprisoned, crampt in bands of bark, For all eternity. Yea, like the speech of one aghast At Immortality in chains, What time the lordly storm rides past With flames and arrowy rains: Some wan Tithonus of the wood, White with immeasurable years— An awful ghost in solitude With moaning moors and meres. And when high thunder smites the hill And hunts the wild dog to his den, Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill And shriek from glen to glen, As if a frightful memory whipped Thy soul for some infernal crime That left it blasted, blind, and stript— A dread to Death and Time! But when the fair-haired August dies, And flowers wax strong and beautiful, Thy songs are stately harmonies By wood-lights green and cool— Most like the voice of one who shows Through sufferings fierce, in fine relief, A noble patience and repose— A dignity in grief. But, ah! conceptions fade away, And still the life that lives in thee— The soul of thy majestic lay— Remains a mystery! And he must speak the speech divine— The language of the high-throned lords— Who'd give that grand old theme of thine Its sense in faultless words. By hollow lands and sea-tracts harsh, With ruin of the fourfold gale, Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh, Still wail thy lonely wail; And, year by year, one step will break The sleep of far hill-folded streams, And seek, if only for thy sake Thy home of many dreams.
Henry Kendall’s other poems:
