A lost epic and other poems online

A LOST EPIC



A LOST EPIC



AND OTHER POEMS



BY



WILLIAM CANTON




WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXXXVII



SS3
C23Z

Jt



TO
HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN.

1837- -1887

When God enthroned You, fifty years ago,
And the grey Dukes in homage would have knelt,

Yoti rose up to prevent them, blushing

"No,
I am your niece Victoria ! "

England felt

Her heart beat ; England loved You ! It was good
So great a Queen should be a girl so true!



Madam, these Realms praise God and reverence You-
For Fifty Years of Sovereign Womanhood.



A Q1



CONTENTS.



PAGE

A LOST EPIC, I

THROUGH THE AGES. 1 4-

THE DEATH OF ANAXAGORAS, .... 25

THE LATTER LAW, 32

THE GOD AND THE SCHOOLBOY, .... 36

AN INDIAN COWRIE, 4!

THE WOODWELE, ....... 46

PARTING, 49

MORNING, 50

HOW SHOULD YOU MY TRUE LOVE KNOW? . . 52

RINGED WITH BLUE MOUNTAINS, .... 53
THE LEGEND OF THE ARK

I. THE GREAT WITNESS, .... 54

II. THE PENITENT, 6l

III. THE VOICES, 67

IV. THE WATERS, 71



viii Contents.



KOZMA THE SMITH,


73


JOHN CALVIN'S DREAM, .


. . . 82


TWO LIVES, .


88


WAYSIDE VIGNETTES




FLOWER FANCIES, .


90


BEYOND,


91


THE CROW,


92


A DESERTED GARDEN,


93


A BIRD'S FLIGHT,


94


THE WEIR, .


95


JANUARY AND JUNE,


, . . . 96


COCKCROW, .


97


FAIRY HEAVENS,


. . . 98


PINE AND PALM,


100


DAY-DREAMS, .


102


THE BROOK, .


103


LOVE AND LABOUR, .


104


WOODLAND WINDOWS,


. 105


A RUSSIAN GUN,


. . 106


UNDER TWO TREES, .


. 107


ON THE SHORE,


. 108


TWILIGHT MEMORIES,


no


BY MOONLIGHT,


III


IN THE SHADOW,


112


IN THE FALL, .


U3


KARMA,




COMFORT ON PELION,


117



Contents. ix

POEMS OF CHILDHOOD

LAUS INFANTIUM, 150

ANY FATHER, 152

ANY MOTHER, I$3

A PHILOSOPHER, 154

A POET, 156

APPLE-BLOOM AND APPLE, .... l6o

THE WINTER SLEEP, 163

AN APRIL GRIEF, 164

THE GREAT WORLD, l6$

A NEW POET, 169

THE LADDER, 171

THE UPWARD LOOK, 1 72

THE ROBIN, 174

BIRTH AND DEATH, 176

SUSPIRIUM, 178

THE STONE FACE, 179

MAKING MORNING-MIRTH, . . . . . 186

MENA THE LIBYAN, 187

PEARLS AND SIMPLES, 193

CHRISTMAS EVE, 2O$

ANNO DOMINI XXXVII., 211




T



A LOST EPIC.

HIS is his little grandchild ! . . . Run away,
And pluck the gentleman a bunch of
flowers !



A pretty tot ! Poem he never wrote

To match in freshness and in winning grace

That rosy little slip of roguery !

Here are his poems all he gave the world
A crown octavo, thin and printed wide
Forgotten now, but forty years ago
Noted with wonder as a new-seen star,
Deemed sweet as snowdrops after months of snow,
And simple as snowdrops too ! He prized them

not

"The babble o' green fields in his feverish youth ;
Mere chirps and fluted trills because the earth



2 A Lost Epic.

Was sunny and blossom-blithe, and but to live
A very joy ; " for he'd outgrown the broad
Untutored heart of homely man and maid,
And, heedless of the common work-day life
Which prompts the poems all the world can feel,
Could scorn the only pages left to keep
His name in kindly memory.

Take the book ;

And since I prize his gift no doubt, no doubt !
Still, have a more than special care of this !

Four years ago he came and brought the child,
A prattling three-year-old, and lived alone
An aged maid for housekeeper and nurse
In yon small cottage, where the beechwood shrinks
From over-keen blown kisses of the sea.

A tall, mild, wise-eyed, silver-bearded man
The sea-wind scattering down our village street
His sixtieth autumn's crimson leaves he moved
Among us, noting all our seaboard ways,
Stealing our little people's hearts with sweets,
And through the children winning all the wives ;
But when the men, rough storm-flushed fellows,
smiled



A Lost Epic. 3

With slightly pitying, half-amused contempt,
Their homespun wits he startled to respect
By better knowledge of the things they knew,
Till all our ale-house sages, pipe in cheek,
Confessed " the Doctor " knew a sight o' things
Beyond their weather-gage, and last of all
Our gaunt old whaler, ear-ringed and tattooed,
Bragged less of outland folk and foreign ports.
Nay, I, too, when the gracious Sunday bell *
Gathered our village little children all
Around a common knee began to feel
An undefined attraction to the man,
And found my sermon three-parts preached to him ;
While he, with reverend hair and solemn beard,
A sprig or flower-bud at his button-hole,
Would sit, his grandchild's tiny hand in his,
Listening and musing, musing most, I thought,
Patient if not improved, until the close.
I came to like the man who liked him not?
And watched his tall grey figure as he passed
Seaward along the bright side of the street,
Wee flax-head trotting gaily at his side
In crimson .cloak and buckled crimson shoes ;
Watched, and surprised him on the breezy downs
Poring through lenses o'er the silvery frost



4 A Lost Epic.

Of lichens on some ice-scored boulder-stone,
And oft at sunset met, a furlong off,
His spare stretched shadow on the glittering sands,
And then himself the little one asleep,
Nestled in flaxen hair and hoary beard.

The village folk, with that blank bovine stare

Which never seems to see the thing it scans,

Observed and gossiped, wondered, and surmised,

But found no evil in the lonely man

Whose life seemed wholly bound up in his child ;

And, tired of vain conjecture, grew content

To love him merely, and let him hold his way

Mysterious and unquestioned. So the year

From autumn round to autumn rolled ; and then,

Whether it were he felt the social need

Or simply liked me out of liberal heart,

The Doctor lost his strangeness and reserve,

At length cast all the anchors of his trust,

Nor found me lack that gracious temper of youth

Which worships lofty aims in patient lives.

A poet, heart and brain, the man but lived

To write one book which no man yet had dared ;

One life-work, one colossal poem, fraught

With all the joy and travail of mankind,



A Lost Epic.

Enriched with all the lore of all the years

" The Epic of the Pageants of the World."

Smiling, 'twas so he named it for the nonce ;

And truly as he sat in dreamy mood

And sketched the vasty outlines of his theme,

I, grown from very sympathy a bard,

Saw, as he spoke, strange masquerades of Time

Sweep past in awful splendour.



Years had fled,

Ay, forty years of florid life, since first
He planned this large majestic epopee ;
And years must still be spent in search and

thought ;

And years, perchance, in waiting, sail outspread,
To catch the ever-imminent breeze of song ;
Years on the voyage through that sea of dreams ;
Years and the man who had thought and wrought,

too rapt

To note the years, forgot that he was old !
Small wonder ! For his eye, grown keen to scan
The cosmic cycles from the nebular dawn,
Was dulled to human epochs, mortal dates.
Why, Rome was thatched and fenced but yesterday !



6 A Lost Epic.

The Pyramids were reared a year ago ?

Nay, mark, those fiery -blossomed weeds have

flamed

Along the furrows of an Aryan plough ;
These ripples wash the self-same water-line
As when the dwellers on the reed-roofed piles
Moulded clay crescents of the holy Moon !

What pageants these of his ! He spoke of Art ;
And the sea -crinkled, ice-cragged, palm -plumed

world

Spread like a marvellous map before the eye ;
And vaguely seen in dimly shimmering light,
Lo ! Man the Artist wrought. Before his cave
Th' autochthon sketched upon a mammoth's tooth
The picture of a mammoth, chipped the flint
To shape of prehistoric man or beast.
Tribes perished, forests crumbled, sea and land
Changed places, and the stars changed colour and

place

In changing skies, but Man the Artist lived
Scratched, whittled, painted, grew in eye and hand ;
Pictured the river-bluffs, the rocky walls
Of sea-carved creeks, the snow-capped precipice,
The ice-borne boulder on the tropic isle,



A Lost Epic. 7

Till sun and moon, fish, reptile, bird and flower,
Mammal and Man, on ivory, slate, horn, rock,
Ringed with strange zodiacs all the savage globe !
And nations perished, cities rose and fell,
And Man the Artist lived and wrought and throve,
Grew bold in thought and opulent in means,
Survived all wreck, till Titian, Raphael came
For life indeed is short and art is long !

All this was but an episode conceive !
In some transcendent pageant he had named
" The Song of Colour." He began his strain
Far backward in the green Devonian Age,
When no bright blossom hung on any tree
Its crimson petals or its golden bell;
No single fruit gleamed ruddy in the sun,
But all the jungle- waste of primal growth,
Gigantic marestails, ferns, and ancient pines,
Rolled one susurrent sea of endless green ;
And giant May-flies poised on gauzy wing
O'er tepid swamps, and antique grasshoppers
Chirruped the oldest music of the world.
Threading that green and gloomy forest floor,
He marked, as emerald age succeeded age,
The slowly kindling dawn of sylvan love ;



8 A Lost Epic.

The pines and cycads sighed with tender need,
The grasses beckoned with their feathery plumes,
And whispered, " Hasten, sweetest, or we die."
And through the woods for centuries the wind
Drifted the amorous pollen, till the waste
Was checked by Colour, and th' instinctive tree
Hung out its lamps of blossom, wooed and won
The aid of myriad-murmuring insect swarms
In the vast stress and strain of leafy life ;
Hung out its glowing fruit, that beast and bird
Might guard its life, assist its kindly race
In conquest of the hungry continents.
So kindled through the centuries the world !
For love of brilliant food awoke a love
For brilliant mates ; and beetle and butterfly
Changed into creeping gem and fluttering flower,
And feather and fur were shot with luring tints ;
And plucking from the hospitable boughs
A coloured feast, the ancestry of Man
Bequeathed to Man the love of coloured things,
And Man became the Artist.

Such he deemed

The genesis of Art so vast the time,
So slow and subtly intricate the toil,
Ere God could make a Raphael ! Ponder that !



A Lost Epic. 9

Sublime it was but sad, this tardy growth,
This infinite waste of means to shape an end,
This frigid scorn of time, this recklessness
Of life potential and of potent life.
Nature, he felt, was ruthless, tyrannous,
Extravagant of pain ; and in a song,
BLOSSOM AND BABE, he touched the human stop
In the vast organ-music of his theme.

BLOSSOM AND BABE.

O happy little English cot ! O rustic-sweet vignette

Of red brick walls and thatched roof, in apple-
blossom set !

O happy Devon meadows, how you come to me again !

And I am riding as I rode along the cool green lane,

A-dreaming and a-dreaming ; and behold ! I see once
more

The fair young mother with her babe beside the
shaded door.

How bright it was! No blossom trembled in the
hot blue noon,

And grasshoppers were thrilling all the drowsy
heart of June !

O babe upon the bosom, O blossom on the tree !



io A Lost Epic.

And as I passed, the stridulous incessant jangle ran
Along the hedgerow following me, until my brain

began

To mingle in a waking dream the baby at the breast.
The woman and the apple-bloom, the shrilly sounding

pest,
To blend them with that great green age of trees

which never shed

A bell of gold or purple or a petal of white or red,
When all the music of the world a world too young

to sing
Was such a piercing riot made by such an insect

wing.

O babe upon the bosom, O blossom on the tree !

And then I thought of all the ages, all the waste of

power,
That went to tinge one pulpy fruit, to flush one little

flower ;
And just in this same wise, I mused, the Human too

must grow
Through waste of life, through blood and tears,

through centuries of woe,
To reach the perfect -flower and fruit ; for Nature

does not scan,



A Lost Epic. 1 1

More than the individual tree, the individual man;
A myriad blossoms shall be lavished, if but one shall

give
The onward impulse to the thought that Nature

means to live.

O babe upon the bosom, O blossom on the tree !



O fair young mother, far removed from visions of

unrest,
Be happy in the baby blossom flushing at thy

breast !
The bles seder condition thine, that thou canst never

see
The strife, the cruel waste, the cyclic growth in man

and tree ;
That thou canst trust a heart, more kind than ever

Nature shows,
Will gather each baby bloom that falls, will cherish

each that blows ;
Canst need no solace from the faith, that since the

world began
The Brute hath reached the Human through the

martyrdom of man.

O babe upon the bosom, O blossom on the tree I



1 2 A Lost Epic.

Why should I tire you with his dreams ? And yet
To me they bring the saddest hours I know.
His pageant of migrations swarming hosts
Of plant, beast, insect, man, in ceaseless march
Netting with footprints all the restless world
Age after age ; his vision of the tombs
Caves, barrows, rings and avenues of stone,
Ship-mounds and pyramids, by sea-washed shore,
Far inland, by the river, in the waste,
On snow-peaked mountain and on grassy plain,
On continent and isle, here one all lone,
There grouped in multitudes, till all the earth
Seemed one vast graveyard whence the Spirit of

Man

Cried unto God for immortality ;
His pageant of the altars yearning arms
Stretched to the spirits of the kindly dead,
The blood-drenched idols and the shrieking fires,
The magic drums why speak of these, of aught ?
The song of BLOSSOM AND BABE was all he wrote
Of this stupendous Epic of the World.
Last spring he died, left me his grandchild there,
His fossils, books, and manuscripts. The last
I searched with eagerness, and found the song
A single arrow-head in heaps of flakes,



A Lost Epic. 1 3

Notes, observations, comments, chips of thought !

His heart was light unto the last : he felt

A joyous confidence that all was well.

No premonition saddened his decline ;

And, dying, he believed in years of love

To lavish on his poem and his child.

The mighty Epic that had filled his brain,

Absorbed his very being forty years,

He took away with him. A larger life

May yield it larger utterance who can fell ?

Yes, give them to the gentleman, my dear !



THROUGH THE AGES.



*A LEGEND OF A STONE AXE.



O



R the swamp in the forest
The sunset is red ;
And the sad reedy waters,
In black mirrors spread,

Are aflame with the great crimson tree-tops o'er-
head.



By the swamp in the forest
The oak-branches groan,
As the Savage primeval,

With russet hair thrown

O'er his huge naked limbs, swings his hatchet of
stone.



Through the Ages. 1 5

By the swamp in the forest

Sings shrilly in glee
The stark forester's lass

Plucking mast in a tree
And hairy and brown as a squirrel is she !

With the strokes of the flint axe

The blind woodland rings,
And the echoes laugh back as

The sylvan girl sings :

And the Sabre-tooth growls in his lair ere he
springs !

Like two stars of green splendour,

His great eyeballs burn
As he crawls ! Chilled to silence,

The girl can discern

The fierce pantings which thrill through the fronds
of the fern.

And the brown frolic face of
The girl has grown white,
As the large fronds are swayed in

The weird crimson light,

And she sobs with the strained throbbing dumb-
ness of fright.



1 6 Through the Ages.

With his blue eyes agleam, and

His wild russet hair
Streaming back, the Man travails,

Unwarned, unaware

Of the lithe shape that crouches, the green eyes
that glare.

And now, hark ! as he drives with

A last mighty swing
The stone blade of the axe through

The oak's central ring,

From the blanched lips what screams of wild
agony spring !

There's a rush through the fern-fronds

A yell of affright
And the Savage and Sabre-tooth

Close in fierce fight :
And^the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.

On the swamp in the forest
One clear star is shown,
And the reeds fill the night with

A long troubled moan
And the girl sits and sobs in the darkness, alone !



Through the Ages. 17

The great dim centuries of long ago

Sweep past with rain and fire, with wind and snow,

And where the Savage swung his axe of stone

The blue clay silts on Titan trunks o'erthrown,

O'er mammoth's tusks, in river-horse's lair;

And, armed with deer-horn, clad in girdled hair,

A later savage in his hollow tree

Hunts the strange broods of a primeval sea.

And yet the great dim centuries again

Sweep past with snow and fire, with wind and rain

And where that warm primeval ocean rolled

A second forest buds, blooms broad, grows old;

And a new race of prehistoric men

Springs from the mystic soil, and once again

Fades like a wood mist through the woodlands hoar.

For lo ! the great dim centuries once more

With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by ;

And where the forest stood, an empty sky

Arches with lonely blue a lonely land.

The great white stilted storks in silence stand

Far from each other, motionless as stone,

And melancholy leagues of marsh-reeds moan,

And dead tarns blacken 'neath the mournful blue.



1 8 Through the Ages.

The ages speed ! And now the skin canoe

Darts with swift paddle through the drear morass,

But ere the painted fisherman can pass,

The brazen horns ring out ; a thund'rous throng

Bronzed faces, brazen helmets sweeps along,

The silver Eagles flash and disappear

Across the Roman causeway !

Year by year

The dim time lapses till that vesper hour
Broods o'er the summer lake with peaceful power,
When the carved galley through the sunset floats,
The rowers, with chains of gold about their throats,
Hang on their dripping oars, and sweet and clear
The sound of singing steals across the mere,
And rising with glad face and outstretched hand,
" Row, Knights, a little nearer to the land,
And let us hear these monks of Ely sing ; "
Says KNUT, the King.

In the dim years what fateful hour arrives,
And who is this rides Fenward from St Ives ?
A man of massive presence, bluff and stern.
Beneath their craggy brows his deep eyes burn
With awful thoughts and purposes sublime.
The face is one to abash the front of time,



Through the Ages. 19

Hewn of red rock, so vital, even now

One sees the wart above that shaggy brow.

At Ely there in these idyllic days

His sickles reap, his sheep and oxen graze,

And all the ambition of his sober life

Is but to please Elizabeth his wife,

To drain the Fens and magnify the Lord.

So in his plain cloth suit, with close-tucked sword,

OLIVER CROMWELL, fated but unknown,

Rides where the Savage swung his axe of stone.

In the class-room blue-eyed Phemie
Sits, half listening, hushed and dreamy,
To the grey-haired pinched Professor droning to
his class of girls.

And around her in their places
Rows of arch and sweet young faces
Seem to fill the air with colour shed from eyes
and lips and curls !

Eyes of every shade of splendour,
Brown and bashful, blue and tender,
Grey and giddy, black and throbbing with a deep
impassioned light :



2O Through the Ages.

Golden ringlets, raven clusters,
Auburn braids with sunny lustres
Falling on white necks, plump shoulders clothed
in green and blue and white.

And the sun with leafy reflex
Of the rustling linden-tree flecks
All the glass doors of the cases ranged along the
class-room wall

Flecks with shadow and gold the Teacher's
Thin grey hair and worn pinched features, :
And the pupils' heads, and sends a thrill of July
over all.

And the leafy golden tremor
Witches so the blue-eyed dreamer
That the room seems filling straightway with a
forest green and old;

And the grey Professor's speech is
Heard like wind among the beeches
Murmuring wondrous cosmic secrets never quite
distinctly told;



Through the Ages. 2 1

And the girls around seem turning
Into trees laburnums burning,
Graceful ashes, silver birches but through all the
glamour and change

Phemie is conscious that those cases
Hold reliques of vanished races,
The pre-Adamitic fossils of a dead world grim and
strange.

Labelled shells suggest the motion,
Moan, and glimmer of that ocean
Where the belemnites dropped spindles and the
sand-stars shed their rays ;

Monstrous birds stalk stilted by as
She perceives the slab of Trias
Scrawled with hieroglyphic claw - tracks of the
mesozoic days;

And before her she sees dawn a
Pageant of an awful fauna

While across Silurian ages the Professor's lecture
blows.



22 Through the Ages.

All the while a soft and pleasant
Rustle of dresses, an incessant
Buzz of smothered frolic rises underneath his
meagre nose.

And one pretty plague has during
All the class been caricaturing
Her short-sighted good old Master with a world
of wicked zest ;

And the madcaps blush and titter
As they see the unconscious sitter
Sketched as Allophylian Savage spectacled but
much undressed.

But the old man turns the pages
Of the rock-illumined ages,

Tracing from earth's mystic missal the antiquity of
Man :

Not six thousand years but eras.
Ages, eons disappear as

Groping back we touch the system where the Human
first began.



Through the Ages. 23

Centuries, as we retrogress, are
Dwarfed to days, says the Professor,
And our lineage was hoary ere Eve's apple-tree grew
green ;

For the Bee, whose drowsy humming
Was prophetic of Man's coming,
Lies in gem - like tomb of amber, buried in the
Miocene.

At what point Man came, I know not,
Logic proves not, fossils show not,
But his dim remote existence is a fact beyond
dispute.

Look! And from among some thirty
Arrow barbs of quartz and chert he
Takes the flint head of a hatchet, and the girls
grow hushed and mute.

Old, he says, art thou strange stone ! Nor
Less antique thy primal owner !
When the Fens were drained this axe was found
below two forests sunk.



24 Through the Ages.

Underneath a bed of sea day
And two forests this relique lay
Where some Allophylian Savage left it in a half-
hewn trunk!

Does the old Professor notice
Large eyes, blue as myosotis,
Raised to him in startled wonder as those fateful
words are said ?

But for Phemie, through the trees in
Her dream forest, fact and reason
Blend with fancy, and her vision grows complete
and clear and dread :



By the swamp in the forest

The sylvan girl sings
As his flint-headed hatchet

The wild Woodman swings,
But the hatchet cleaves fast in the trunk he has

riven

The Man stands unarmed as the Sabre -tooth
springs !



THE DEATH OF ANAXAGORAS.



"Lampsacum postea profectus, illic diem suum obiit; ubi
rogantibus eum principibus civitatis, Numquid fieri mandaret,
jussisse ferunt ut pueri quotannis quo mense defecisset ludere
permitterentur, servarique et hodie consuetudinem. " DlOG.
LAERT., De Vita Philosoph. ; Anaxagoras.



CLEON of Lampsacus to Pericles :
Of him she banished now let Athens
boast;

Let now th' Athenians raise to him they stoned
A statue; Anaxagoras is dead!



To you who mourn the Master, called him friend,
Beat back th' Athenian wolves who fanged his

throat,

And risked your own to save him, Pericles
I now unfold the manner of his end.






26 The Death of Anaxagoras.

The aged man, who found in sixty years
Scant cause for laughter, laughed before he died
And died still smiling : Athens vexed him not !
Not he, but your Athenians, he would say,
Were banished in his exile !

When the dawn

First glimmers white o'er Lesser Asia,
And little birds are twittering in the grass,
And all the sea lies hollow and grey with mist,
And in the streets the ancient watchmen doze,
The Master woke with cold. His feet were chill
And reft of sense ; and we who watched him knew
The fever had not wholly left his brain,
For he was wandering, seeking nests of birds
An urchin from the green Ionian town
Where he was born. We chafed his clay-cold limbs :
And so he dozed, nor dreamed, until the sun
Laughed out broad day and flushed the garden

gods

Who bless our fruits and vines in Lampsacus.
Feeble, but sane and cheerful, he awoke
And took our hands and asked to feel the sun;
And where the ilex spreads a gracious shade
We placed him, wrapped and pillowed ; and he

heard



The Death of Anaxagoras. 27

The charm of birds, the social whisper of vines,
The ripple of the blue Propontic sea.
Placid and pleased he lay ; but we were sad
To see the snowy hair and silver beard
Like withering mosses on a fallen oak,
And feel that he, whose vast philosophy
Had cast such sacred branches o'er the fields
Where Athens pastures her dull sheep, lay fallen
And never more should know the spring !