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IN MEMORIAM A.H.H.
[Arthur Hugh Hallam]
OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII.
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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- LXXXI.
- Could I have said while he was here,
- 'My love shall now no further range;
- There cannot come a mellower change,
- For now is love mature in ear.'
- Love, then, had hope of richer store:
- What end is here to my complaint?
- This haunting whisper makes me faint,
- 'More years had made me love thee more.'
- But Death returns an answer sweet:
- 'My sudden frost was sudden gain,
- And gave all ripeness to the grain,
- It might have drawn from after-heat.'
- LXXXII.
- I wage not any feud with Death
- For changes wrought on form and face;
- No lower life that earth's embrace
- May breed with him, can fright my faith.
- Eternal process moving on,
- From state to state the spirit walks;
- And these are but the shatter'd stalks,
- Or ruin'd chrysalis of one.
- Nor blame I Death, because he bare
- The use of virtue out of earth:
- I know transplanted human worth
- Will bloom to profit, otherwhere.
- For this alone on Death I wreak
- The wrath that garners in my heart;
- He put our lives so far apart
- We cannot hear each other speak.
- LXXXIII.
- Dip down upon the northern shore,
- O sweet new-year delaying long;
- Thou doest expectant nature wrong;
- Delaying long, delay no more.
- What stays thee from the clouded noons,
- Thy sweetness from its proper place?
- Can trouble live with April days,
- Or sadness in the summer moons?
- Bring orchis, bring the foxglove spire,
- The little speedwell's darling blue,
- Deep tulips dash'd with fiery dew,
- Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire.
- O thou, new-year, delaying long,
- Delayest the sorrow in my blood,
- That longs to burst a frozen bud
- And flood a fresher throat with song.
- LXXXIV.
- When I contemplate all alone
- The life that had been thine below,
- And fix my thoughts on all the glow
- To which thy crescent would have grown;
- I see thee sitting crown'd with good,
- A central warmth diffusing bliss
- In glance and smile, and clasp and kiss,
- On all the branches of thy blood;
- Thy blood, my friend, and partly mine;
- For now the day was drawing on,
- When thou should'st link thy life with one
- Of mine own house, and boys of thine
- Had babbled 'Uncle' on my knee;
- But that remorseless iron hour
- Made cypress of her orange flower,
- Despair of Hope, and earth of thee.
- I seem to meet their least desire,
- To clap their cheeks, to call them mine.
- I see their unborn faces shine
- Beside the never-lighted fire.
- I see myself an honour'd guest,
- Thy partner in the flowery walk
- Of letters, genial table-talk,
- Or deep dispute, and graceful jest;
- While now thy prosperous labour fills
- The lips of men with honest praise,
- And sun by sun the happy days
- Descend below the golden hills
- With promise of a morn as fair;
- And all the train of bounteous hours
- Conduct by paths of growing powers,
- To reverence and the silver hair;
- Till slowly worn her earthly robe,
- Her lavish mission richly wrought,
- Leaving great legacies of thought,
- Thy spirit should fail from off the globe;
- What time mine own might also flee,
- As link'd with thine in love and fate,
- And, hovering o'er the dolorous strait
- To the other shore, involved in thee,
- Arrive at last the blessed goal,
- And He that died in Holy Land
- Would reach us out the shining hand,
- And take us as a single soul.
- What reed was that on which I leant?
- Ah, backward fancy, wherefore wake
- The old bitterness again, and break
- The low beginnings of content.
- LXXXV.
- This truth came borne with bier and pall,
- I felt it, when I sorrow'd most,
- 'Tis better to have loved and lost,
- Than never to have loved at all-
- O true in word, and tried in deed,
- Demanding, so to bring relief
- To this which is our common grief,
- What kind of life is that I lead;
- And whether trust in things above
- Be dimm'd of sorrow, or sustain'd;
- And whether love for him have drain'd
- My capabilities of love;
- Your words have virtue such as draws
- A faithful answer from the breast,
- Thro' light reproaches, half exprest,
- And loyal unto kindly laws.
- My blood an even tenor kept,
- Till on mine ear this message falls,
- That in Vienna's fatal walls
- God's finger touch'd him, and he slept.
- The great Intelligences fair
- That range above our mortal state,
- In circle round the blessed gate,
- Received and gave him welcome there;
- And led him thro' the blissful climes,
- And show'd him in the fountain fresh
- All knowledge that the sons of flesh
- Shall gather in the cycled times.
- But I remained, whose hopes were dim,
- Whose life, whose thoughts were little worth,
- To wander on a darkened earth,
- Where all things round me breathed of him.
- O friendship, equal poised control,
- O heart, with kindliest motion warm,
- O sacred essence, other form,
- O solemn ghost, O crowned soul!
- Yet none could better know than I,
- How much of act at human hands
- The sense of human will demands
- By which we dare to live or die.
- Whatever way my days decline,
- I felt and feel, tho' left alone,
- His being working in mine own,
- The footsteps of his life in mine;
- A life that all the Muses decked
- With gifts of grace, that might express
- All comprehensive tenderness,
- All-subtilising intellect:
- And so my passion hath not swerved
- To works of weakness, but I find
- An image comforting the mind,
- And in my grief a strength reserved.
- Likewise the imaginative woe,
- That loved to handle spiritual strife,
- Diffused the shock thro' all my life,
- But in the present broke the blow.
- My pulses therefore beat again
- For other friends that once I met;
- Nor can it suit me to forget
- The mighty hopes that make us men.
- I woo your love: I count it crime
- To mourn for any overmuch;
- I, the divided half of such
- A friendship as had master'd Time;
- Which masters Time indeed, and is
- Eternal, separate from fears:
- The all-assuming months and years
- Can take no part away from this:
- But Summer on the steaming floods,
- And Spring that swells the narrow brooks,
- And Autumn, with a noise of rooks,
- That gather in the waning woods,
- And every pulse of wind and wave
- Recalls, in change of light or gloom,
- My old affection of the tomb,
- And my prime passion in the grave:
- My old affection of the tomb,
- A part of stillness, yearns to speak:
- 'Arise, and get thee forth and seek
- A friendship for the years to come.
- 'I watch thee from the quiet shore;
- Thy spirit up to mine can reach;
- But in dear words of human speech
- We two communicate no more.'
- And I, 'Can clouds of nature stain
- The starry clearness of the free?
- How is it? Canst thou feel for me
- Some painless sympathy with pain?'
- And lightly does the whisper fall;
- ''Tis hard for thee to fathom this;
- I triumph in conclusive bliss,
- And that serene result of all.'
- So hold I commerce with the dead;
- Or so methinks the dead would say;
- Or so shall grief with symbols play
- And pining life be fancy-fed.
- Now looking to some settled end,
- That these things pass, and I shall prove
- A meeting somewhere, love with love,
- I crave your pardon, O my friend;
- If not so fresh, with love as true,
- I, clasping brother-hands aver
- I could not, if I would, transfer
- The whole I felt for him to you.
- For which be they that hold apart
- The promise of the golden hours?
- First love, first friendship, equal powers,
- That marry with the virgin heart.
- Still mine, that cannot but deplore,
- That beats within a lonely place,
- That yet remembers his embrace,
- But at his footstep leaps no more,
- My heart, tho' widow'd, may not rest
- Quite in the love of what is gone,
- But seeks to beat in time with one
- That warms another living breast.
- Ah, take the imperfect gift I bring,
- Knowing the primrose yet is dear,
- The primrose of the later year,
- As not unlike to that of Spring.
- LXXXVI.
- Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
- That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
- Of evening over brake and bloom
- And meadow, slowly breathing bare
- The round of space, and rapt below
- Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
- And shadowing down the horned flood
- In ripples, fan my brows and blow
- The fever from my cheek, and sigh
- The full new life that feeds thy breath
- Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death,
- Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
- From belt to belt of crimson seas
- On leagues of odour streaming far,
- To where in yonder orient star
- A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'
- LXXXVII.
- I past beside the reverend walls
- In which of old I wore the gown;
- I roved at random thro' the town,
- And saw the tumult of the halls;
- And heard one more in college fanes
- The storm their high-built organs make,
- And thunder-music, rolling, shake
- The prophet blazon'd on the panes;
- And caught one more the distant shout,
- The measured pulse of racing oars
- Among the willows; paced the shores
- And many a bridge, and all about
- The same gray flats again, and felt
- The same, but not the same; and last
- Up that long walk of limes I past
- To see the rooms in which he dwelt.
- Another name was on the door:
- I linger'd; all within was noise
- Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys
- That crash'd the glass and beat the floor;
- Where once we held debate, a band
- Of youthful friends, on mind and art,
- And labour, and the changing mart,
- And all the framework of the land;
- When one would aim an arrow fair,
- But send it slackly from the string;
- And one would pierce an outer ring,
- And one an inner, here and there;
- And last the master-bowman, he,
- Would cleave the mark. A willing ear
- We lent him. Who, but hung to hear
- The rapt oration flowing free
- From point to point, with power and grace
- And music in the bounds of law,
- To those conclusions when we saw
- The God within him light his face,
- And seem to lift the form, and glow
- In azure orbits heavenly wise;
- And over those ethereal eyes
- The bar of Michael Angelo.
- LXXXVIII.
- Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
- Rings Eden thro' the budded quicks,
- O tell me where the senses mix,
- O tell me where the passions meet,
- Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
- Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
- And in the midmost heart of grief
- Thy passion clasps a secret joy:
- And I-my harp would prelude woe-
- I cannot all command the strings;
- The glory of the sum of things
- Will flash along the chords and go.
- LXXXIX.
- Witch-elms that counterchange the floor
- Of this flat lawn with dusk and bright;
- And thou, with all thy breadth and height
- Of foliage, towering sycamore;
- How often, hither wandering down,
- My Arthur found your shadows fair,
- And shook to all the liberal air
- The dust and din and steam of town:
- He brought an eye for all he saw;
- He mixt in all our simple sports;
- They pleased him, fresh from brawling courts
- And dusty purlieus of the law.
- O joy to him in this retreat,
- Immantled in ambrosial dark,
- To drink the cooler air, and mark
- The landscape winking thro' the heat:
- O sound to rout the brood of cares,
- The sweep of scythe in morning dew,
- The gust that round the garden flew,
- And tumbled half the mellowing pears!
- O bliss, when all in circle drawn
- About him, heart and ear were fed
- To hear him, as he lay and read
- The Tuscan poets on the lawn:
- Or in the all-golden afternoon
- A guest, or happy sister, sung,
- Or here she brought the harp and flung
- A ballad to the brightening moon:
- Nor less it pleased in livelier moods,
- Beyond the bounding hill to stray,
- And break the livelong summer day
- With banquet in the distant woods;
- Whereat we glanced from theme to theme,
- Discuss'd the books to love or hate,
- Or touch'd the changes of the state,
- Or threaded some Socratic dream;
- But if I praised the busy town,
- He loved to rail against it still,
- For 'ground in yonder social mill
- We rub each other's angles down,
- 'And merge' he said 'in form and gloss
- The picturesque of man and man.'
- We talk'd: the stream beneath us ran,
- The wine-flask lying couch'd in moss,
- Or cool'd within the glooming wave;
- And last, returning from afar,
- Before the crimson-circled star
- Had fall'n into her father's grave,
- And brushing ankle-deep in flowers,
- We heard behind the woodbine veil
- The milk that bubbled in the pail,
- And buzzings of the honied hours.
- XC.
- He tasted love with half his mind,
- Nor ever drank the inviolate spring
- Where nighest heaven, who first could fling
- This bitter seed among mankind;
- That could the dead, whose dying eyes
- Were closed with wail, resume their life,
- They would but find in child and wife
- An iron welcome when they rise:
- 'Twas well, indeed, when warm with wine,
- To pledge them with a kindly tear,
- To talk them o'er, to wish them here,
- To count their memories half divine;
- But if they came who past away,
- Behold their brides in other hands;
- The hard heir strides about their lands,
- And will not yield them for a day.
- Yea, tho' their sons were none of these,
- Not less the yet-loved sire would make
- Confusion worse than death, and shake
- The pillars of domestic peace.
- Ah dear, but come thou back to me:
- Whatever change the years have wrought,
- I find not yet one lonely thought
- That cries against my wish for thee.
- XCI.
- When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
- And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
- Or underneath the barren bush
- Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;
- Come, wear the form by which I know
- Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
- The hope of unaccomplish'd years
- Be large and lucid round thy brow.
- When summer's hourly-mellowing change
- May breathe, with many roses sweet,
- Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
- That ripple round the lonely grange;
- Come: not in watches of the night,
- But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
- Come, beauteous in thine after form,
- And like a finer light in light.
- XCII.
- If any vision should reveal
- Thy likeness, I might count it vain
- As but the canker of the brain;
- Yea, tho' it spake and made appeal
- To chances where our lots were cast
- Together in the days behind,
- I might but say, I hear a wind
- Of memory murmuring the past.
- Yea, tho' it spake and bared to view
- A fact within the coming year;
- And tho' the months, revolving near,
- Should prove the phantom-warning true,
- They might not seem thy prophecies,
- But spiritual presentiments,
- And such refraction of events
- As often rises ere they rise.
- XCIII.
- I shall not see thee. Dare I say
- No spirit ever brake the band
- That stays him from the native land
- Where first he walk'd when claspt in clay?
- No visual shade of some one lost,
- But he, the Spirit himself, may come
- Where all the nerve of sense is numb;
- Spirit to Spirit, Ghost to Ghost.
- O, therefore from thy sightless range
- With gods in unconjectured bliss,
- O, from the distance of the abyss
- Of tenfold-complicated change,
- Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
- The wish too strong for words to name;
- That in this blindness of the frame
- My Ghost may feel that thine is near.
- XCIV.
- How pure at heart and sound in head,
- With what divine affections bold
- Should be the man whose thought would hold
- An hour's communion with the dead.
- In vain shalt thou, or any, call
- The spirits from their golden day,
- Except, like them, thou too canst say,
- My spirit is at peace with all.
- They haunt the silence of the breast,
- Imaginations calm and fair,
- The memory like a cloudless air,
- The conscience as a sea at rest:
- But when the heart is full of din,
- And doubt beside the portal waits,
- They can but listen at the gates,
- And hear the household jar within.
- XCV.
- By night we linger'd on the lawn,
- For underfoot the herb was dry;
- And genial warmth; and o'er the sky
- The silvery haze of summer drawn;
- And calm that let the tapers burn
- Unwavering: not a cricket chirr'd:
- The brook alone far-off was heard,
- And on the board the fluttering urn:
- And bats went round in fragrant skies,
- And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes
- That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
- And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;
- While now we sang old songs that peal'd
- From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease,
- The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
- Laid their dark arms about the field.
- But when those others, one by one,
- Withdrew themselves from me and night,
- And in the house light after light
- Went out, and I was all alone,
- A hunger seized my heart; I read
- Of that glad year which once had been,
- In those fall'n leaves which kept their green,
- The noble letters of the dead:
- And strangely on the silence broke
- The silent-speaking words, and strange
- Was love's dumb cry defying change
- To test his worth; and strangely spoke
- The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
- On doubts that drive the coward back,
- And keen thro' wordy snares to track
- Suggestion to her inmost cell.
- So word by word, and line by line,
- The dead man touch'd me from the past,
- And all at once it seem'd at last
- The living soul was flash'd on mine,
- And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
- About empyreal heights of thought,
- And came on that which is, and caught
- The deep pulsations of the world,
- Æonian music measuring out
- The steps of Time-the shocks of Chance-
- The blows of Death. At length my trance
- Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.
- Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
- In matter-moulded forms of speech,
- Or ev'n for intellect to reach
- Thro' memory that which I became:
- Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd
- The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
- The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
- Laid their dark arms about the field:
- And suck'd from out the distant gloom
- A breeze began to tremble o'er
- The large leaves of the sycamore,
- And fluctuate all the still perfume,
- And gathering freshlier overhead,
- Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung
- The heavy-folded rose, and flung
- The lilies to and fro, and said
- 'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away;
- And East and West, without a breath,
- Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
- To broaden into boundless day.
- XCVI.
- You say, but with no touch of scorn,
- Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes
- Are tender over drowning flies,
- You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
- I know not: one indeed I knew
- In many a subtle question versed,
- Who touch'd a jarring lyre at first,
- But ever strove to make it true:
- Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
- At last he beat his music out.
- There lives more faith in honest doubt,
- Believe me, than in half the creeds.
- He fought his doubts and gather'd strength,
- He would not make his judgment blind,
- He faced the spectres of the mind
- And laid them: thus he came at length
- To find a stronger faith his own;
- And Power was with him in the night,
- Which makes the darkness and the light,
- And dwells not in the light alone,
- But in the darkness and the cloud,
- As over Sinaï's peaks of old,
- While Israel made their gods of gold,
- Altho' the trumpet blew so loud.
- XCVII.
- My love has talk'd with rocks and trees;
- He finds on misty mountain-ground
- His own vast shadow glory-crown'd;
- He sees himself in all he sees.
- Two partners of a married life-
- I look'd on these and thought of thee
- In vastness and in mystery,
- And of my spirit as of a wife.
- These two-they dwelt with eye on eye,
- Their hearts of old have beat in tune,
- Their meetings made December June,
- Their every parting was to die.
- Their love has never past away;
- The days she never can forget
- Are earnest that he loves her yet,
- Whate'er the faithless people say.
- Her life is lone, he sits apart,
- He loves her yet, she will not weep,
- Tho' rapt in matters dark and deep
- He seems to slight her simple heart.
- He thrids the labyrinth of the mind,
- He reads the secret of the star,
- He seems so near and yet so far,
- He looks so cold: she thinks him kind.
- She keeps the gift of years before,
- A wither'd violet is her bliss:
- She knows not what his greatness is,
- For that, for all, she loves him more.
- For him she plays, to him she sings
- Of early faith and plighted vows;
- She knows but matters of the house,
- And he, he knows a thousand things.
- Her faith is fixt and cannot move,
- She darkly feels him great and wise,
- She dwells on him with faithful eyes,
- 'I cannot understand: I love.'
- XCVIII.
- You leave us: you will see the Rhine,
- And those fair hills I sail'd below,
- When I was there with him; and go
- By summer belts of wheat and vine
- To where he breathed his latest breath,
- That City. All her splendour seems
- No livelier than the wisp that gleams
- On Lethe in the eyes of Death.
- Let her great Danube rolling fair
- Enwind her isles, unmark'd of me:
- I have not seen, I will not see
- Vienna; rather dream that there,
- A treble darkness, Evil haunts
- The birth, the bridal; friend from friend
- Is oftener parted, fathers bend
- Above more graves, a thousand wants
- Gnarr at the heels of men, and prey
- By each cold hearth, and sadness flings
- Her shadow on the blaze of kings:
- And yet myself have heard him say,
- That not in any mother town
- With statelier progress to and fro
- The double tides of chariots flow
- By park and suburb under brown
- Of lustier leaves; nor more content,
- He told me, lives in any crowd,
- When all is gay with lamps, and loud
- With sport and song, in booth and tent,
- Imperial halls, or open plain;
- And wheels the circled dance, and breaks
- The rocket molten into flakes
- Of crimson or in emerald rain.
- XCIX.
- Risest thou thus, dim dawn, again,
- So loud with voices of the birds,
- So thick with lowings of the herds,
- Day, when I lost the flower of men;
- Who tremblest thro' thy darkling red
- On yon swoll'n brook that bubbles fast
- By meadows breathing of the past,
- And woodlands holy to the dead;
- Who murmurest in the foliaged eaves
- A song that slights the coming care,
- And Autumn laying here and there
- A fiery finger on the leaves;
- Who wakenest with thy balmy breath
- To myriads on the genial earth,
- Memories of bridal, or of birth,
- And unto myriads more, of death.
- O wheresoever those may be,
- Betwixt the slumber of the poles,
- To-day they count as kindred souls;
- They know me not, but mourn with me.
- C.
- I climb the hill: from end to end
- Of all the landscape underneath,
- I find no place that does not breathe
- Some gracious memory of my friend;
- No gray old grange, or lonely fold,
- Or low morass and whispering reed,
- Or simple stile from mead to mead,
- Or sheepwalk up the windy wold;
- Nor hoary knoll of ash and haw
- That hears the latest linnet trill,
- Nor quarry trench'd along the hill
- And haunted by the wrangling daw;
- Nor runlet tinkling from the rock;
- Nor pastoral rivulet that swerves
- To left and right thro' meadowy curves,
- That feed the mothers of the flock;
- But each has pleased a kindred eye,
- And each reflects a kindlier day;
- And, leaving these, to pass away,
- I think once more he seems to die.
to Verse CI.
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