Classic Poem

Margaret's Room

MARGARET [ alone, singing to her harp ].
Too soothe and mild your lowland airs
For one whose hope is gone:
I'm thinking of a little tarn,
Brown, very lone.

Would now the tall swift mists could lay
Their wet grasp on my hair,
And the great natures of the hills
Round me friendly were.

In vain! — For taking hills your plains
Have spoilt my soul, I think;
But would my feet were going down
Towards the brown tarn's brink.

Is this a sin? Sure no one but my heart
Can tell the truth of my longing for the tarn.
Best pray again, perhaps; I am tired of prayer.

MARGARET . You! —
Why are you in my privacy?
PRINCE . Sweet, pardon;
Your father gave me leave to you.
MARGARET . He has
Invented a new plague then, you?
PRINCE . He knows
I love you —
MARGARET . And he looks to work your love
Upon my soul tormenting, as he swears
To work his wheels and pincers on my flesh?
PRINCE . The fierce old man your father spake me then,
Not sweet maid Margaret. Why are you grown
Unkind to love? I come to take you hence.
Soon as I heard the King to this sad isle
Had forced you, hastily and alone I followed.
O, I will never use horse so again!
And I was wondering, all the time I rode,
How I could bear to cripple him, my best.
But there was nothing in mine ears but wings
Of a buzzing fear, and I was stung in the soul
Poisonously by a breese, infecting me
To fever with its fed offal, — noisome talk,
Rank common news of you, — dear Heaven, of you!
Of your new faith, and of your dungeoning here,
Your father's loathing; but the worst was, none
For certain knew whether the shivering death,
The only thing alive in these rotten fens,
Had laid his nasty hand on you. But now
You'll come with me out of this misery.
Nature lies down a lazar here; the air
Is rank with her disease, and the brass sun
Cannot be virtuous to the sodden land.
All day there is no little noise of life,
The green is only wickedness of a fester.
You are of the hills: will you not see how wrong
To give such a life as yours to the waste swamp?
MARGARET . What help for me? Is not this my father's house?
PRINCE . Yes, and an ill one! As I took the broken causey,
That seemed a mouldering spine across the marsh,
An old thrawn death, unsepulchred, of a dragon, —
In the half-light the low unshapen heap
Lookt like a sleeping effet in his form
Among the lifeless bogs, hating the world,
Immemorially alone, — the son, I thought,
Of these green bones I tread on; a dull sea moaned
Along the mudflats, as he yearned in dreams
To be less loathly. These earth-builded walls
Keep not the evening fogs out, but they crawl
Through crevices and dim the candle flames,
And hang like aguish dreams about your bed.
O, are you shivering? Am I too late?
Come back with me to the salt sunny sands,
The upland winds, the rains, and valley mists,
And pines.
MARGARET . You could have moved me once.
PRINCE . Not now?
Did that wild wizard whom your father killed,
Who taught you how to make his love turn hate,
That Christian whose loose lore is so unkind,
Teach you to hate the earth, — larch-woods when spring
Flings on them sudden green, and the high heaven
Is blue behind? — or plough-fields when the share
Turns the good-smelling soil? or apple-orchards?
Or to hate love?
MARGARET . Yes, to hate love and lovers.
But not the earth, I think. And sometimes longing
Will come upon me for the open air,
For sunbeams which no rotting vapours swarm,
For starry nights; — grey statures here of fog,
With held-up arms, guesst by the waving sleeve,
Stalk round the house all night, whose monstrous breathing
Kills those weak-flamed lamps. Often the quags
Call with a doleful voice, or shake as though
Somewhat beneath them stirred. — But you, if all
Who ought to love me hate, why do you love?
PRINCE . Have you no mirror?
MARGARET . Alas, is it that?
PRINCE . Come with me now! Into the hills!
MARGARET . The hills!
(I thank thee, God!) — No, friend, and no. But you,
Get you among the upland health of our hills,
That lift above the surface of earth's sound,
Where the stream's trouble seems a kind of quiet,
And news of lowland life break up on the cliffs,
Sheer rampired down to the meads, to nothing more
Than spray of noise, so thin, — the valley's mowing,
Sheep-washing, a white stir, sound weaker there
Than when a breeze, like a spent bird, his wings
Shuts, and settles upon the whinberries
And ligs there, a caress. And take this with you —
I love you not, and I loathe having loved.
Now go, and quickly. Why does he not go?
PRINCE . Will you not hear my sorrow first?
MARGARET . I know it, —
Love, and love forsworn, and love unquit,
And love again.
PRINCE . Ay, there is that for me,
But therewithal another and a greater.
MARGARET . Greater?
PRINCE . Lend me your harp. Have you forgot,
Margaret, how pleasantly we spent out love?
MARGARET . I pray you not remember it.
PRINCE . This only.
We had a charm against the common life,
That — as a pedlar weary with the road,
Eyes daft with the long whiteness, all adust,
And with his pack quite overdone, may meet
Golden delight, the fragrance of the gorse,
And cheat his thirst, — made glamour be about us,
Tales of the Gods on earth. And gladly you
Then listened, when I, telling of the Gods,
With speaking mixt with harp-playing contrived
Pleasure for you.
MARGARET . It was a sin in me.
PRINCE . But hear a last tale of the Gods we loved.
'Twill falter and be wayward; for my thought
Is set amid new matters where I go
Starless and fooled; as if on a mountain side
Mist took away the light, and the ground began
To live beneath my feet and writhe, and boulders
Knew how to move, and with a soundless gait
Walkt hulking through the gloom. So shall I be
In this tale of the ending of the Gods:
Yet hear me through. It is of you besides.
I saw you first in the wet primrose-month;
With thin white dress and yellow clinging hair,
You seemed to move through the warm drenching rain
A cloud slid out of the dawn to roam the hills,
Forgetting to melt its fleece to shower-drops,
Still wearing sun it caught an hour agone.
Gods! that was a maid ye might have loved
When you were young-limb'd; — then, for now no more,
I think, for you is pour'd deathless liquor
When, crowned with festival, the brotherhood
Of Gods carouses, and Fate bears the wine
Till in each beaker brimming with red darkness
Coils and shakes a spirit of golden light,
Immortal youth, caught from an early sun.
(Down on to earth the fragrance of the spilth
Stoopt, and as fire takes hold upon the silver,
Youth of the Gods did take that early world,
And the air tasted of Heaven's holiday.)
But the slave Fate who serves Gods, hating them,
Visited the lean Hours in that cave
Where the Gods kept them mewed, brewing of Time,
And found them huddled to their witch-work, bought
Their service, promising they should pour out all
The mischief in their urns of bitter years
Upon the innocent world. From them he fetched
Skill'd poison, phial'd cunning, wise disaster,
Stronger than kind of Gods, and with this stew
Hemlockt the wine of Heaven, gave them drink
Age unawares, managing all their nerves,
Unfitting for rule. Out of their blue halls,
Out of the morning and the roofless air,
Out of their ample kingship, they must slink
Into a burial dark and shameful, far
From the sun's mastery, and the stare of day,
Thickets of stars, and windy plains of sky,
Where slope space reaches the lower lifelessness;
Deep overwhelmed in some deaf pond of dull
Inactive element, that stagnates close
Against the old and still uncleaned disorder,
Where the thick cold and slime of ungenerate dark
Glues up immortal sense and ken divine;
Often their drowned agony shall heave
Large sobs from under, till the shoulder'd pit
Plunges, the blind cumber of the useless mire;
Unpitied doom; there shall no sight win through
The blear confusion of that clime to find
Their deathless dying, nor trust in them, men's prayers,
Come to their low disease, — without a heed
In that forgetful delf swallow'd. Only,
When with a golden footing on the seas
Summer goes forth, and tranced waves follow her,
Talking their wide blue meanings at her heels
Murmurous, or lift white kisses to her ankles,
Now for the morning fisher-fleet that rows
To take the freak-backt mackerel, an acre
Threshing with plenty, silver'd with playing sides.
It shall not be for ease amid the toil
Of oars and seine to join in the old round,
Lifting their thoughts to the unlabour'd ones:
" Sing, brothers, sing: for in the middle bay
The gannet stoop upon the silly crew;
Behind the shoal the leaping porpoise prey,
And we shall hawl a many fish to-day;
But this large weather the Gods share with you:
Be happy, for the good Gods are happy too."
Not June, but the black nether winter is
Henceforward the Gods' long season. Spring,
The same young mad amazement, shall begin;
But there will be a want in Aprils now,
And when the neighbours greet, it is not thus:
" Are not the Gods down here to-day? You know
There is no greenness up in Heaven, they say.
But it is best, these days, even if one
Have the dawn for a place, and the winds for roads,
To be afoot on grass. And I dare swear
The cuckoo-flower down in my water-meadow
Has made a test of whiteness for the side
(In Heaven unquestion'd) of a goddess young.
And see the light upon the cowslip-brede?
One of our worships hath his deity.
Put off there, for that beauty seemed enough
Endowment for one being; what makes a god
They have, the flowers; he'll take it back ere noon;
Meantime, 'tis in my field. Ay, all the herb
Is fresh from the treading of some holiness."
But no such visitings now; and we shall know
Dimly 'tis ill with the Gods. Yea, though the hutch
And stifle of their piteous school lies where
Our day shows but a little cloudy wheel,
Their grief shall come between the sun and earth,
A hint of shame dissolved in the golden light.
And soon our prayers, into the yards of Heaven
And awning-coolth that flatters o'er them coming
With reverences ready, are taken there
In desolateness, come whimpering back to us,
Unentertained; for no blithe speech of the Gods
Heard they along the passages of Heaven.
And if some, bold with the much need they carry,
Search and cry for the Gods, they'll find them fought
With sickness, held down as if knelt upon,
Over their beauty hateful pain written
Slandering, — ay, that beauty which aloft
Crowned the world's beauty striving up like fire
Away from coals and dross, till in the Gods
To pure flame won, golden, not mixt with time:
That beauty killed and turned to dingy tarnish.
Whose were the arms that late managed the sun,
The hands that could have jarred the starry gear?
The Gods'? but soon they'll have too weak a scope
To daunt the plagues sordid like flies about them.
Destiny is an older thing than Gods:
When that blind power abhors them, they are naught,
So now; and from her house in the night she has
Let loose the living storms there denn'd, uncaged
The wings of blights, unstabled pests of demons,
Enlarged new spawn from out the breeding deep,
All to harm the good Gods. See you not now,
Watcher on Heaven's tower, dun afar off
Strange horrible weather smoking into the light,
The muster of her swarms? 'Tis she has sent
A siege to Heaven, vext already and scared:
Flights of insolence, pester of wild ghosts,
Tongue-still'd over the walls with moony stare
To gnarl upon the session of blencht Gods,
Ring their fear with a hedge of gleeful faces,
Mocking silently. This is for Heaven; but earth
Has too their practice, as that some in flesh
Must sheathe the broad destruction of their vans,
Fold up the hovering of fledge iron noise,
Case their claw'd hatred smoothly, lodge in souls
Human their purposes. And one, the worst
Whelpt in the cellars of destiny's lone house,
Chose this slim beauty, wherein our quick Truth
More native than in sunlight seemed, this girl
As shed for his rough horror. Who dare think
Her voice now does to cover a fiend's bleating? —
That body which I love so well is now
An inn of villainy for Gods and men?
Ah, Gods! Last year perhaps a certain scorn
Took you, when leaning o'er men's business
Down from your builded privacy. How blame
The poor deluded Gods, so wholly at ease?
But now there is a labour and a sweat,
Panting, despair, ready for you, — a hunt
Now straining at you, soon to be unleasht,
Gaped throats, fangs unlipt, many-footed fear.
Here's one will clap her hands, here 's one will laugh
At that day's sport, when from the opened gloom —
The low, slough-moated mews of natures bad —
Out of their famine leaping come Fate's dogs
To pull down Gods in the white day; for still
Some keen permitted Evil o'ertakes Good.
The kennelled Evil howls and hungers long,
But Good at last is thrown among the jaws
As carrion to be scavenged up by Evil,
And the wincing air (so rumour'd of that greed)
Peals to beast-laughter. Here 's one will laugh with Evil.
Ah, but my heart, my heart, is it so well? —
These hides, mudded from lairs in the bottom-world,
Pitching a tented doom round Heaven town
Of wicked reek, that throws, so wide it is,
A tawny malady on the white streets? —
These swift clemm'd curses having leave to hound
Divinity? — they all enlargement get,
But cover is the thing for Gods, to whom
All question is the day, unanswerable.
Which of them ever thought to have a need
Of Death? — the famous frequent roads he hath made
Downwards, the gates that shut out noise, — a jest
In Heaven. " Not for us," they said; and still
The darkness Death has built around his rest
Is nowhere hinged for them, and the main roads,
So straight and easy trodden of us men,
Slide from the feet of Gods, bewilderment;
No alley goes to refuge from the mouths;
Only for them is shelter in the wide
Flat unseen marches of nonentity,
The unmeasured place, where Wisdom never comes,
And Power sickens, failure, and all unhealth;
To lodge with half-made things, forgotten stuff
That should be dead but lives unkind, crude fleshes
Unkneaded into form, or if in form,
Infamous, ribaldries of the Power that makes.
They are among the vermin, none so worthless
As these new sins, the Gods; themselves unchanged,
But that unsensed outer Mood, beyond
This round of caused things (yet all within
As air is in the flame), changed. The event
Of its Existence flows away from them,
A tide pouring into new Law, and they
Are left behind, shipwreckt in the dark,
Sunder'd from any voice of the living waters,
Deserted by their holiness, sifted out,
Drained off like lees, they who once were Heaven,
Become suddenly bad and the waste of the world,
Given to the unspeakable murder of old hell.
And nevermore their hair shall feel the stir
Of fellowly winds, nor see they blue again.
But Fate, enfranchis'd from the Gods' good rule,
Now gets to work. Now what the Gods would make
Of Man shatters, the subtle singleness,
The new rare thing their skill, spanning all life,
Had sometimes won from its diverseness, as we
From many wires a tune; and though Man stopt.
In divine memories had linger'd on
That wonder of humanity, at last
A just psaltery, toucht into a song.
Fate with malicious fingers breaks the intent,
And 'tis enough for him if the poor ado
(So close to the dirt now) of life's multitude
Make him a foolish, cruel, useless game.
Destiny made all bad, ugly: the Gods
Came, and with craft fashion'd her thought to good,
Earth and men's minds; they go, these Gods, and all
Slips back to its old rankness, earth and men's minds.
And does this gladden Margaret? — she whose eyes,
As open pools, in the grey hour before
Morning, expect the day and wait, assured,
To have their patient ken fill'd up with blue —
Waited for wonder and the fearful joy
When she should meet One at a riding's turn
Long known in worship darkly, while the green wood,
Sacred of Him like burning, thrilled and glowed
A temple of emerald flame around. — But then,
That curst old man, that Christian!

Ah, Margaret,
Although your use is to turn mankind from gods,
I yet must love you. Ay, now I see you here
Pale, slender, hunger-eyed, in this mean room, —
Ah, what hath blent the morning in your eyes? —
My love is fiercer grown. Come to me, love!
Although you hate my gods, remember love.
MARGARET . Remember love? Ah, but when I left you
There was something rended in my breast, that still
Aches, — as you know a wound that has catcht cold
Will keep all nerves astretch upon sense, quivering
In subtle shifting harmonies of pain.
So that rude snatch did play upon my heart-strings,
And still they tremble to the same dull tune,
And still the same loud pain is going through me.
But yet I may not hate my grief. They say
God loves a soul all anguish.
PRINCE . Does he so?
Loves he mine then, think you? — and belike
When he has gotten lordship wide enough
He'll make the world all anguish, and then love it?
Is it a good thing to be loved by him?
And when he has finisht hunting our poor Gods,
And when his hounds, his pack of merciless Hours,
Have got them down, he'll love them in their pain?
This is a god to worship, who loves anguish!
MARGARET . Why do you stay here?
PRINCE . I must have your love.
I will not take your mild unheartfelt No.
There is an insane thing struggling in me, —
I know it not, but it is stronger than I.
MARGARET . There's many more will love you, for you are
(Forgive me, God!) most beautiful. For me,
I have a lover — but you would not understand.
Enough I cannot love you. Go, beseech you.
PRINCE . What is this smoke that in the moonlight swims,
So hampering the air with pleasantness?
Its silvered fragrance fills the room.
MARGARET . My prayers
Just ended. Incense my master gave me,
And bad me use it of an evening so.
PRINCE . O maidenly cunning! 'tis some lusty herb
You burnt. What's this it 's doing to my love?
You knew it maddened like this? —
MARGARET . What? Leave me.
PRINCE . Aha, I see. Indeed I lackt in this.
My love was clean; you'ld have it luxury?
'Twas done, was it not, lest I should be too slow?
Your coy denials are to prick it on?
If this is of your master's teaching, sure
He had some knowledge beside of heavenly things.
What, you do mean mere lewdness? —
Well, I am changed. Come, yield thee, then.
MARGARET . Go, Prince,
Before I curse thee for thy beastly words.
PRINCE . Come, girl, enough. You see I take your wish.
I'll do it, and then loathe you for 't. Or — go?
Ay, to the dark old King. This matter is,
I see, for him to know. For as we talkt
I somehow felt there was a thing kept hid
Behind his mannerly speech. And suddenly
It tare the curtain of his sorrowful words,
The unkind inhabitant of his nature, lookt
Into mine eyes impudent, ay, and gleeful,
As if it had found a means for its device.
And, as the hag is like the maid, a face
Burnt in the joys of fiendish clips, that crime
Was like what once was love for you. In truth
The horror I saw sitting in his mind
Then quite o'er-came my wit to grasp, for I
Never before had seen a father's hate,
And knew it not. Now its intent I see,
This, — you have skilfully cheated him you make
Much of your chastity: therefore most glad
Were he if you dishonoured were. But now,
It seems you are not quite so nice as he
Reckoned. The shame he would have forced on you
You have already wreakt upon yourself.
And yet perhaps I do him wrong. I am
Dismayed, my reason thrown, shamefully caught
In your fine wickedness, wilily noosed and lasht,
And the wise doors he kept outrage behind
(The squinting lechery of snouts and manes)
To starve, and put crazed faces to the grids,
Set wide; and jails of filthy-gesturing thoughts
Go loud through my brain, speaking tongues of hell;
As you would have them, setting me on to do
Beastliness. Wait you here. I fetch the King.
To him look innocent of your hopes.
MARGARET [ kneels ]. No!
Fetch not my father here! Is this your love?
PRINCE . Whether 'tis love or hatred now I know not,
What care you? Lust is the thing for you.
MARGARET . Hear me, O God.
I have been lesson'd all imperfectly
In thy saint knowledge; for they killed the man,
Horribly killed the weak old man who brought
News of thee here, ere he could kindly lead
My limping wit into thy council-place.
All I have learnt of thee is, I am thine
(My father hates me for it). Art thou not mine?
Strangely thou doest all thy purposes,
Little the mention I have heard of thee;
But is it not mislikely for thy weal
That I have beauty?
When I was heathen, I thought it good; but now
Take it from me, O God! Send now thy power here
Or surely thou and I be sorely used.
In all this place we twain are quite alone,
And many are against us. Well for us
It were, if thou couldst make me laidly now.
Is it not easy for thee to spoil thy work? —
Sluice on my beauty shame, and ugly scalds;
Or change me altogether, turn this body
Into a strangeness, make me mixture, laughter, —
But pardon this wild talk; I am unhinged.
Pardon that then fear jumpt upon my will
And rode it down, so that I cringed my knees
That once I sware only to thee should crook.
Only in this thing have me in thy heed,
Undo the strictness which the slow-skill'd years
Use in their duty, and all harms they have
Set by for me, now and at once unloose
Banded upon me, confusing this young flesh,
Unsettling from its many keeps my beauty.
Am I not loved enough for this? O then
I'ld have thee wroth, so thou bruise out my beauty
Ay me, I fear — O God, I loved him once —
O swift, swift, my part done, thine yet remains;
Do some horrour upon me, send some worm
Of eager malady to crawl my skin
Tracking, or blow uncleanness on it, of sores
Or vile obliterating rash, furfair
Stiff in a stark mask. Hear me, O God!

GOD speaks

I hear thee.
MARGARET . Is it God
Speaks words strangely into me, larger than aught
My knowledge took before, and without sound?
GOD . I have been listening all this while, my friend.
MARGARET . Give me some other shape, that to this prince
I be not lewdness nor a drunkenness
Making him brutishly insult on thee.
I would no longer be thus dangerous,
Thus beautiful.
GOD . Simple this prayer is, smelling sweet to me,
Therefore I take it and begin my power.
Yea, I will largely let thee out of here,
Of being beautiful, otherwise tiring thee.
Thou shalt appear as God, and the glory of God.
These two, when they shall look upon thy form,
Shall be alone when I unmake the world.
The appearance of the earth shall fail to them,
And the great sides of the world flinch and crack open,
Spilling my glory out of its splitten hidings:
I now put off the nature of the world.
For long enough have I been matter, speed
And business of forces, place and time,
The roomy play of motes through the wide stress
Of fine tense ether, building minds and worlds.
But suddenly the whole kind of things appears
Like scale upon the molten Real, soon
Riving apieces, running, all unfixt,
Out of dimension into God. And this
Eternity, scattered with starry troubles,
Becomes a firth of glory, till again
I am a deed, a strength wielding stuff,
And out of the tide lifteth another shore.
So shalt thou look; for I will lend thee all
My latter anger. Then the orderly stars
Shall be a tumult of small crass, a scurf
Worn for an instant by the fire divine;
And all the many powers of the world
A spray like smoke driven before my face.
God, when all the multitudinous flow
Of Being sets backward to him; God, when He
Is only Glory, is before these two;
And nowhere is there aught but God and these.
They are not safe. When no identity
Can be outside my state; when mind, nor sun,
Nor commonalty of suns, nor oldest fate,
But disarrangeth, mixing into Me;
Loose as a flame all fastened surety;
They are not separate: their confined selfs
Shall burst their bands and squander into naught;
For all untimely here these two shall come
Alone into the doom, the present God.
THE PRINCE [ without ]. Now, thou innocent foxery, weeping art thou?
Take heart, I am not gone;
But since thy wish is so, (for the sorrowing king
Tells me the naughty warlock taught thee lusts)
For thee I will be foul, and do a thing
Detestable to me yesterday. — Besides,
It is not Margaret, only a fiend
That wears her flesh.
This is strange here;
Can I exist as well as Holiness?
I? — I have forgotten what was " I ."
There is no more a thing that saith, I am;
There is nought to take my senses working. — Death,
I hope; I am abominable here.
THE KING [ without ]. It should be done by now. I gave drink
Metheglin spiced with hot infamous drugs.
I mingled in her foolish incense too
Powders that wake wild lust: the air is well
Infected, — yet he left her safe untoucht
The first time: now I think she is tamed indeed. —
Laughable was it how the wicked steam
Workt in his blood —
A spell! O that a craft,
Made of loose evils outside Nature, should
More excellent than Nature be.
The curst thing uses me as sun a vapour; —
Curse thee, and this almighty Hell leagued with thee.