Coventry Patmore - The Unknown Eros

‘Many speak wisely, some inerrably:
Witness the beast who talk’d that should have bray’d,
And Caiaphas that said
Expedient ’twas for all that One should die;
But what avails
When Love’s right accent from their wisdom fails,
And the Truth-criers know not what they cry!
Say, wherefore thou,
As under bondage of some bitter vow,
Warblest no word,
When all the rest are shouting to be heard?
Why leave the fervid running just when Fame
’Gan whispering of thy name
Amongst the hard-pleased Judges of the Course?
Parch’d is thy crystal-flowing source?
Pierce, then, with thought’s steel probe, the trodden ground,
Till passion’s buried floods be found;
Intend thine eye
Into the dim and undiscover’d sky
Whose lustres are the pulsings of the heart,
And promptly, as thy trade is, watch to chart
The lonely suns, the mystic hazes and throng’d sparkles bright
That, named and number’d right
In sweet, transpicuous words, shall glow alway
With Love’s three-stranded ray,
Red wrath, compassion golden, lazuline delight.’
Thus, in reproof of my despondency,
My Mentor; and thus I:
O, season strange for song!
And yet some timely power persuades my lips.
Is’t England’s parting soul that nerves my tongue,
As other Kingdoms, nearing their eclipse,
Have, in their latest bards, uplifted strong
The voice that was their voice in earlier days?
Is it her sudden, loud and piercing cry,
The note which those that seem too weak to sigh
Will sometimes utter just before they die?
Lo, weary of the greatness of her ways,
There lies my Land, with hasty pulse and hard,
Her ancient beauty marr’d,
And, in her cold and aimless roving sight,
Horror of light;
Sole vigour left in her last lethargy,
Save when, at bidding of some dreadful breath,
The rising death
Rolls up with force;
And then the furiously gibbering corse
Shakes, panglessly convuls’d, and sightless stares,
Whilst one Physician pours in rousing wines,
One anodynes,
And one declares
That nothing ails it but the pains of growth.
My last look loth
Is taken; and I turn, with the relief
Of knowing that my life-long hope and grief
Are surely vain,
To that unshapen time to come, when She,
A dim, heroic Nation long since dead,
The foulness of her agony forgot,
Shall all benignly shed
Through ages vast
The ghostly grace of her transfigured past
Over the present, harass’d and forlorn,
Of nations yet unborn;
And this shall be the lot
Of those who, in the bird-voice and the blast
Of her omniloquent tongue,
Have truly sung
Or greatly said,
To shew as one
With those who have best done,
And be as rays,
Thro’ the still altering world, around her changeless head.
Therefore no ’plaint be mine
Of listeners none,
No hope of render’d use or proud reward,
In hasty times and hard;
But chants as of a lonely thrush’s throat
At latest eve,
That does in each calm note
Both joy and grieve;
Notes few and strong and fine,
Gilt with sweet day’s decline,
And sad with promise of a different sun.
’Mid the loud concert harsh
Of this fog-folded marsh,
To me, else dumb,
Uranian Clearness, come!
Give me to breathe in peace and in surprise
The light-thrill’d ether of your rarest skies,
Till inmost absolution start
The welling in the grateful eyes,
The heaving in the heart.
Winnow with sighs
And wash away
With tears the dust and stain of clay,
Till all the Song be Thine, as beautiful as Morn,
Bedeck’d with shining clouds of scorn;
And Thou, Inspirer, deign to brood
O’er the delighted words, and call them Very Good.
This grant, Clear Spirit; and grant that I remain
Content to ask unlikely gifts in vain.

Well dost thou, Love, thy solemn Feast to hold
In vestal February;
Not rather choosing out some rosy day
From the rich coronet of the coming May,
When all things meet to marry!
O, quick, praevernal Power
That signall’st punctual through the sleepy mould
The Snowdrop’s time to flower,
Fair as the rash oath of virginity
Which is first-love’s first cry;
O, Baby Spring,
That flutter’st sudden ’neath the breast of Earth
A month before the birth;
Whence is the peaceful poignancy,
The joy contrite,
Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight,
That burthens now the breath of everything,
Though each one sighs as if to each alone
The cherish’d pang were known?
At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart,
With it the Blackbird breaks the young Day’s heart;
In evening’s hush
About it talks the heavenly-minded Thrush;
The hill with like remorse
Smiles to the Sun’s smile in his westering course;
The fisher’s drooping skiff
In yonder sheltering bay;
The choughs that call about the shining cliff;
The children, noisy in the setting ray;
Own the sweet season, each thing as it may;
Thoughts of strange kindness and forgotten peace
In me increase;
And tears arise
Within my happy, happy Mistress’ eyes,
And, lo, her lips, averted from my kiss,
Ask from Love’s bounty, ah, much more than bliss!
Is’t the sequester’d and exceeding sweet
Of dear Desire electing his defeat?
Is’t the waked Earth now to yon purpling cope
Uttering first-love’s first cry,
Vainly renouncing, with a Seraph’s sigh,
Love’s natural hope?
Fair-meaning Earth, foredoom’d to perjury!
Behold, all-amorous May,
With roses heap’d upon her laughing brows,
Avoids thee of thy vows!
Were it for thee, with her warm bosom near,
To abide the sharpness of the Seraph’s sphere?
Forget thy foolish words;
Go to her summons gay,
Thy heart with dead, wing’d Innocencies fill’d,
Ev’n as a nest with birds
After the old ones by the hawk are kill’d.
Well dost thou, Love, to celebrate
The noon of thy soft ecstasy,
Or e’er it be too late,
Or e’er the Snowdrop die!