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- Biographical information
- Autumn
- Because she Would Ask Me Why I Loved her
- Epilogue 1908
- Fire in the Heavens
- I Am Shut out
- Spring Breezes
- Sweet Silence after Bells
- The Wanderer
- The Yellow Gas
Biographical information- Name: Christopher Brennan
Place and date of birth: Sydney (Australia); November 1, 1870
Place and date of death: Sydney (Australia); October 5, 1932 (aged 61)- Because she Would Ask Me Why I Loved her
- If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.
Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.
For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?
Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.
Autumn- Autumn: the year breathes dully towards its death,
Beside its dying sacrificial fire;
The dim world's middle-age of vain desire
Is strangely troubled, waiting for the breath
That speaks the winter's welcome malison
To fix it in the unremembering sleep:
The silent woods brood o'er an anxious deep,
And in the faded sorrow of the sun,
I see my dreams' dead colours, one by one,
Forth-conjur'd from their smouldering palaces,
Fade slowly with the sigh of the passing year.
They wander not nor wring their hands nor weep,
Discrown'd belated dreams! but in the drear
And lingering world we sit among the trees
And bow our heads as they, with frozen mouth,
Looking, in ashen reverie, towards the clear
Sad splendour of the winter of the far south.
Fire in the Heavens- Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
And fire made solid in the flinty stone,
Thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
The breathless hour that lives in fire alone.
This valley, long ago the patient bed
Of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
In stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
Endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.
Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
Is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
That dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless
Some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
In the cicada's torture-point of song.
I Am Shut out- I am shut out of mine own heart
Because my love is far from me,
Nor in the wonders have I part
That fill its hidden empery:
The wildwood of adventurous thought
And lands of dawn my dream had won,
The riches out of Faery brought
Are buried with our bridal sun.
And I am in a narrow place,
And all its little streets are cold,
Because the absence of her face
Has robb'd the sullen air of gold.
My home is in a broader day:
At times I catch it glistening
Thro' the dull gate, a flower'd play
And odour of undying spring:
The long days that I lived alone,
Sweet madness of the springs I miss'd,
Are shed beyond, and thro' them blown
Clear laughter, and my lips are kiss'd:
And here, from mine own joy apart,
I wait the turning of the key: -
I am shut out of mine own heart
Because my love is far from me.
Sweet Silence after Bells- Sweet silence after bells!
Deep in the enamour'd ear
Soft incantation dwells.
Filling the rapt still sphere
A liquid crystal swims,
Precarious yet clear.
Those metal quiring hymns
Shaped ether so succinct:
A while, or it dislimns,
The silence, wanly prinkt
With forms of lingering notes,
Inhabits, close. distinct;
And night, the angel, floats
On wings of blessing spread
O'er all the gather'd cotes
Where meditation, wed
With love, in gold-lit cells,
Absorbs the heaven that shed
Sweet silence after bells.
The Yellow Gas- The yellow gas is fired from street to street
Past rows of heartless homes and hearths unlit,
Dead churches, and the unending pavement beat
By crowds - say rather, haggard shades that flit
Round nightly haunts of their delusive dream,
Where'er our paradisal instinct starves: -
Till on the utmost post, its sinuous gleam
Crawls in the oily water of the wharves;
Where Homer's sea loses his keen breath, hemm'd
What place rebellious piles were driven down -
The priestlike waters to this task condemn'd
To wash the roots of the inhuman town! -
Where fat and strange-eyed fish that never saw
The outer deep, broad halls of sapphire light,
Glut in the city's draught each nameless maw:
-And there, wide-eyed unto the soulless night,
Methinks a drown'd maid's face might fitly show
What we have slain, a life that had been free,
Clean, large, nor thus tormented - even so
As are the skies, the salt winds and the sea.
Ay, we had saved our days and kept them whole,
To whom no part in our old joy remains,
Had felt those bright winds sweeping thro' our soul
And all the keen sea tumbling in our veins,
Had thrill'd to harps of sunrise, when the height
Whitens, and dawn dissolves in virgin tears,
Or caught, across the hush'd ambrosial night,
The choral music of the swinging spheres,
Or drunk the silence if nought else - But no!
And from each rotting soul distil in dreams
A poison, o'er the old earth creeping slow,
That kills the flowers and curdles the live streams,
That taints the fresh breath of re-risen day
And reeks across the pale bewildered moon:
-Shall we be cleans'd and how? I only pray,
Red flame or deluge, may that end be soon!.
Epilogue 1908- The droning tram swings westward: shrill
The wire sings overhead, and chill
Midwinter draughts rattle the glass
That shows the dusking way I pass
To yon four turreted square tower
That still exalts the golden hour
Where youth, initiate once, endears
A treasure richer with the years.
Dim-seen, the upper stories fleet
Along the twisting shabby street;
Beneath, the shop-fronts' cover'd ways
Bask in their lampions' orange blaze,
Or stare phantasmal, weirdly new,
In the electrics' ghastly blue:
And, up and down, I see them go,
Along the windows pleas'd and slow
But hurrying where the darkness falls,
The city's drift of pavement thralls
Whom the poor pleasures of the street
Lure from their niggard homes, to meet
And mix, unknown, and feel the bright
Banality 'twixt them and night:
So, in my youth, I saw them flit
Where their delusive dream was lit;
So now I see them, and can read
The urge of their unwitting need
One with my own, however dark,
And questing towards one mother-ark.
But, past the gin-shop's ochrous flare,
Sudden, a gap of quiet air
And gather'd dark, where, set a pace
Beyond the pavement's coiling race
And mask'd by bulk of sober leaves,
The plain obtruncate chancel heaves,
Whose lancet-windows faintly show
Suffusion of a ruddy glow,
The lamp of adoration, dim
And rich with unction kept for Him
Whom Bethlehem's manger first made warm,
The sweetest god in human form,
Love's prisoner in the Eucharist,
Man's pleading, patient amorist:
And there the sacring laver stands
Where I was brought in pious hands,
A chrisom-child, that I might be
Accepted of that company
Who, thro' their journeying, behold
Beyond the apparent heavens, controu'd
To likeness of a candid rose,
Ascending where the gold heart glows,
Cirque within cirque, the blessed host,
Their kin, their comfort, and their boast.
With them I walk'd in love and awe
Till I was ware of that grim maw
And lazar-pit that reek'd beneath:
What outcast howlings these? what teeth
Gnashing in vain? and was that bliss
Whose counter-hemisphere was this?
And could it be, when times fulfill'd
Had made the tally of either guild,
That this mid-world, dredgd clean in both,
Should no more bar their gruesome troth?
So from beneath that choiring tent
I stepp'd, and tho' my spirit's bent
Was dark to me as yet, I sought
A sphere appeas'd and undistraught;
And found viaticum and goal
In that hard atom of the soul,
That final grain of deathless mind,
Which Satan's watch-fiends shall not find
Nor the seven mills of darkness bruise,
For all permission to abuse;
Stubborn, yet, if one seek aright,
Translucent all within and bright
With sheen that bath no paradigm,
Not where our proud Golcondas brim,
Tho' sky and sea and leaf and flower,
In each rare mood of virtual power,
Sleep in their gems' excepted day:
And so, nor long, the guarded ray
Broke on my eagerness, who brought
The lucid diamond-probe of thought
And, driving it behind, the extreme
Blind vehemence of travailing dream
Against the inhibitory shell:
And found, no grim eternal cell
And presence of the shrouded Norn,
But Eden, clad in nuptial mom,
Young, fair, and radiant with delight
Remorse nor sickness shall requite.
Yes, Eden was my own, my bride;
Whatever malices denied,
Faithful and found again, nor long
Absent from aura of wooing song:
But promis'd only, while the sun
Must travel yet thro' times undone;
And life must guard the prize of youth,
And thought must steward into truth
The mines of magian ore divined
In rich Cipangos of the mind:
And I, that made my high attempt
No bliss whence any were exempt,
Their fellow-pilgrim, I must greet
These listless captives of the street,
These fragments of an orphan'd drift
Whose dower was our mother's thrift,
And, tho' they know it not, have care
Of what would be their loving prayer
If skill bestow'd might,help them heed
Their craving for the simple meed
To be together in the light
When loneliness and dark incite:
Long is the way till we are met
Where Eden pays her hoarded debt
And we are orb'd in her, and she
Hath still'd her hungering to be,
With plentitude beyond impeach,
Single, distinct, and whole in each:
And many anevening hour shall bring
The dark crowd's dreary loitering
To me who pass and see the tale
Of all my striving, bliss or bale,
Dated from either spire that strives
Clear of the shoal of shiftless lives,
And promise, in all years' despite,
Fidelity to old delight.
Spring Breezes- Spring breezes over the blue,
Now lightly frolicking in some tropic bay,
Go forth to meet her way,
For here the spell hath won and dream is true.
O happy wind, thou that in her warm hair
Mayst rest and play!
Could I but breathe all longing into thee,
So were thy viewless wing
As flame or thought, hastening her shining way.
And now I bid thee bring
Tenderly hither over a subject sea
That golden one whose grace hath made me king,
And, soon to glad my gaze at shut of day,
Loosen'd in happy air
Her charmed hair.
The Wanderer- When window-lamps had dwindled, then I rose
And left the town behind me; and on my way
Passing a certain door I stopt, remembering
How once I stood on its threshold, and my life
Was offer'd to me, a road how different
From that of the years since gone! and I had but
To rejoin an olden path, once dear, since left.
All night I have walk'd and my heart was deep awake,
Remembering ways I dream'd and that I chose,
Remembering luridly, and was not sad,
Being brimm'd with all the liquid and clear dark
Of the night that was not stirr'd with any tide;
For leaves were silent and the road gleam'd pale,
Following the ridge, and I was alone with night.
But now 1 am come among the rougher hills
And grow aware of the sea that somewhere near
Is restless; and the flood of night is thinn'd
And stars are whitening. 0, what horrible dawn
will bare me the way and crude lumps of the hills
And the homeless concave of the day, and bare
The ever-restless, ever-complaining sea?.
*
Each day I see the long ships coming into port
And the people crowding to their rail, glad of the shore:
Because to have been alone with the sea and not to have known
Of anything happening in any crowded way,
And to have heard no other voice than the crooning sea's
Has charmed away the old rancours, and the great winds
Have search'd and swept their hearts of the old irksome thoughts:
So, to their freshen'd gaze, each land smiles a good home.
Why envy I, seeing them made gay to greet the shore?
Surely I do not foolishly desire to go
Hither and thither upon the earth and grow weary
With seeing many lands and peoples and the sea:
But if I might, some day, landing I reck not where
Have heart to find a welcome and perchance a rest,
I would spread the sail to any wandering wind of the air
This night, when waves are hard and rain blots out the land.
*
I am driven everywhere from a clinging home,
0 autumn eves! and I ween'd that you would yet
Have made, when your smouldering dwindled to odorous fume,
Close room for my heart, where I might crouch and dreamv
Of days and ways I had trod, and look with regret
On the darkening homes of men and the window-gleam,
And forget the morrows that threat and the unknown way.
But a bitter wind came out of the yellow-pale west
And my heart is shaken and fill'd with its triumphing cry:
You shall find neither home nor rest: for ever you roam
With stars as they drift and wilful fates of the sky!.
*
O tame heart, and why are you weary and cannot rest?
Here is the hearth with its glow and the roof that forbids the rain,
A swept and a garnish'd quiet, a peace: and were you not fain
To be gather'd in dusk and comfort and barter away the rest?.
And is your dream now of riding away from a stricken field
On a lost and baleful eve, when the world went out in rain,
One of some few that rode evermore by the bridle-rein
Of a great beloved chief, with high heart never to yield?.
Was that you? and you ween you are back in your life of old
When you dealt as your pride allow'd and reck'd not of other rein?
Nay, tame heart, be not idle: it is but the ardent rain
That minds you of manhood foregone and the perilous joy of the bold.
*
Once I could sit by the fire hourlong when the dripping caves
Sang cheer to the shelterd, and listen, and know that the woods drank fig
And think of the mom that was coming and how the freshen'd leaves
Would glint in the sun and the dusk beneath would be bright and cool.
Now, when I hear, I am cold within: for my mind drifts wide
Where the blessing is shed for naught on the salt waste of the sea,
On the valleys that hold no rest and the hills that may not abide:
And the fire loses its warmth and my home is far from me.
*
How old is my heart, how old, how old is my heart,
And did 1 ever go forth with song when the morn was new?
I seem to have trod on many ways: I seem to have left
I know not how many homes; and to leave each
Was still to leave a portion of mine own heart,
Of my old heart whose life I had spent to make that home
And all I had was regret, and a memory.
So I sit and muse in this wayside harbour and wait
Till I hear the gathering cry of the ancient winds and again
I must up and out and leave the embers of the hearth
To crumble silently into white ash and dust,
And see the road stretch bare and pale before me: again
My garment and my home shall be the enveloping winds
And my heart be fill'd wholly with their old pitiless cry.
*
I sorrow for youth - ah, not for its wildness (would that were dead!)
But for those soft nests of time that enticed the maiden bloom
Of delight and tenderness to break in delicate air
- 0 her eyes in the rosy face that bent over our first babe!
But all that was, and is gone, and shall be all forgotten;
It fades and wanes even now: and who is there cares but I?
And I grieve for my heart that is old and cannot cease from regret.
Ay, might our harms be haven'd in some deathless heart:
But where have I felt its over-brooding luminous tent
Save in those eyes of delight (and ah! that they must change)
And of yore in her eyes to whom we ran with our childish joy?
0 brother! if such there were and each of us might lead each
To lean above the little pools where all our heart
Lies spilt and clear and shining along the dusky way,
And dream of one that could save it all and salve our ache!.
*
You, at whose table I have sat, some distant eve
Beside the road, and eaten and you pitied me
To be driven an aimless way before the pitiless winds,
How much ye have given and knew not, pitying foolishly!
For not alone the bread I broke, but I tasted too
All your unwitting lives and knew the narrow soul
That bodies it in the landmarks of your fields,
And broods dumbly within your little season:? round,
Where, after sowing, comes the short-lived sunune?s mirth,
And, after harvesting, the winter's lingering dream,
Half memory and,regret, half hope, crouching beside
The hearth that is your only centre of life and dream.
And knowing the world how limitless and the way how long,
And, the home of man how feeble and builded on the winds,
I have lived your life, that eve, as you might never live
Knowing, and pity you, if you should come to know.
*
I cry to you as I pass your windows in the dusk;
Ye have built you unmysterious homes and ways in the wood
Where of old ye went with sudden eyes to the right and left;
And your going was now made safe and your staying comforted,
For the forest edge itself, holding old savagery
In unsearch'd glooms, was your houses' friendly barrier.
And now that the year goes winterward, ye thought to hide
Behind your gleaming panes, and where the hearth sings merrily
Make cheer with meat and wine, and sleep in the long night,
And the uncared wastes might be a crying unhappiness.
But I, who have come from the outer night, I say to you
The winds are up and terribly will they shake the dry wood:
The woods shall awake, hearing them, shall awake to be toss'd and riven,
And make a cry and a parting in your sleep all night
As the wither'd leaves go whirling all night along all ways.
And when ye come forth at dawn, uncomforted by sleep,
Ye shall stand at amaze, beholding all the ways overhidden
With worthless drift of the dead and all your broken world:
And ye shall not know whence the winds have come, nor shall ye know
Whither the yesterdays have fled, or if they were.
*
Come out, come out, ye souls that serve, why will ye die?
Or will ye sit and stifle in your prison-homes
Dreaming of some master that holds the winds in leash
And the waves of darkness yonder in the gaunt hollow of night?
Nay, there is none that rules: all is a strife of the winds
And the night shall billow in storm full oft ere all be done.
For this is the hard doom that is laid on all of you,
To be that whereof ye dream, dreaming against your will.
But first ye must travel the many ways, and your close-wrapt souls
Must be blown thro' with the rain that comes from the homeless dark:
For until ye have had care of the wastes there shall be no truce
For them nor you, nor home, but ever the ancient feud;
And the soul of man must house the cry of the darkling waves
As he follows the ridge above the waters shuddering towards night,
And the rains and the winds that roam anhunger'd for some heart's warmth.
Go: tho' ye find it bitter, yet must ye be bare
To the wind and the sea and the night and the wail of birds in the sky;
Go: tho' the going be hard and the goal blinded with rain
Yet the staying is a death that is never soften'd with sleep.
*
Dawns of the world, how I have known you all,
So many, and so varied, and the same!
Dawns o'er the timid plains, or in the folds
Of the arm'd hills, or by the unsleeping shore;
A chill touch on the chill flesh of the dark
That, shuddering, shrinks from its couch, and leaves
A homeless light, staring, disconsolate,
On the drear world it knows too well, the world
It fled and finds again, its wistful hope
Unmet by any miracle of night,
That mocks it rather, with its shreds that hang
About the woods and huddled bulks of gloom
That crouch, malicious, in the broken combes,
Witness to foulnesses else unreveal'd
That visit earth and violate her dreams
In the lone hours when only evil wakes.
*
What is there with you and me, that I may not forget
But your white shapes come crowding noiselessly in my nights,
Making my sleep a flight from a thousand beckoning hands?
Was it not enough that your cry dwelt in my waking ears
That now, seeking oblivion, I must yet be haunted
By each black maw of hunger that yawns despairingly
A moment ere its whitening frenzy bury it?
0 waves of all the seas, would I could give you peace
And find my peace again: for all my peace is fled
And broken and blown along your white delirious crests!.
*
0 desolate eves along the way, how oft,
Despite your bitterness, was I warm at heart!
Not with the glow of rememberd hearths, but warm
With the solitary unquenchable fire that bums
A flameless heat deep in his heart who has come
Where the formless winds plunge and exult for aye
Among the naked spaces of the world,
Far past the circle of the ruddy hearths
And all their memories. Desperate eves,
When the wind-bitten hills tum'd violet
Along their rims, and the earth huddled her heat
Within her niggard bosom, and the dead stones
Lay battle-strewn before the iron wind
That, blowing from the chill west, made all its way
A loneliness to yield its triumph room;
Yet in that wind a clamour of trumpets rang,
Old trumpets, resolute, stark, undauntable,
Singing to battle against the eternal foe,
The wronger of this world, and all his powers
In some last fight, foredoom'd disastrous,
Upon the final ridges of the world:
A war-wom note, stem fire in the stricken eve,
And fire thro' all my ancient heart, that sprang
Towards that last hope of a glory won in defeat,
Whence, knowing not sure if such high grace befall
At the end, yet I draw courage to front the way.
*
The land I came thro' last was dumb with night,
A limbo of defeated glory, a ghost:
For wreck of constellations flickerd perishing
Scarce sustained in the mortuary air,
And on the ground and out of livid pools
Wreck of old swords and crowns glimmer'd at whiles;
I seem'd at home in some old dream of kingship:
Now it is clear grey day and the road is plain,
I am the wanderer of many years
Who cannot tell if ever he was king
Or if ever kingdoms were: I know I am
The wanderer of the ways of all the worlds,
To whom the sunshine and the rain are one
And one to stay or hasten, because he knows
No ending of the way, no home, no goal,
And phantom night and the grey day alike
Withhold the heart where all my dreams and days
Might faint in soft fire and delicious death:
And saying this to myself as a simple thing
I feel a peace fall in the heart of the winds
And a clear dusk settle, somewhere, far in me.