1. |
The Soul's Expression
02:37
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With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And only answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,—as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.
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2. |
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3. |
Metamorphism
02:48
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Is this the sea?
This calm emotionless bosom,
Serene as the heart of a converted Magdalene ––
Or this?
This lisping, lulling murmur of soft waters
Kissing a white beached shore with tremulous lips;
Blue rivulets of sky gurgling deliciously
O’er pale smooth-stones ––
This too?
This sudden birth of unrestrained splendour,
Tugging with turbulent force at Neptune’s leash;
This passionate abandon,
This strange tempestuous soliloquy of Nature,
All these –– the sea?
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4. |
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Unknown to you, I walk the cheerless shore
The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine,
May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war,
Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine,
That I have sought, reflected in the blue
Of these sea depths, some shadow of your eyes;
Have hoped the laughing waves would sing of you,
But this is all my starving sight descries—
I.
Far out at sea a sail
Bends to the freshening breeze,
Yields to the rising gale,
That sweeps the seas;
II.
Yields, as a bird wind-tossed,
To saltish waves that fling
Their spray, whose rime and frost
Like crystals cling
III.
To canvas, mast and spar,
Till, gleaming like a gem,
She sinks beyond the far
Horizon’s hem.
IV.
Lost to my longing sight,
And nothing left to me
Save an oncoming night,—
An empty sea.
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5. |
Moorland Night
03:30
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My face is against the grass - the moorland grass is wet -
My eyes are shut against the grass, against my lips there are the little blades,
Over my head the curlews call, And now there is the night wind in my hair;
My heart is against the grass and the sweet earth, - it has gone still, at last;
It does not want to beat any more,
And why should it beat?
This is the end of the journey.
The Thing is found.
This is the end of all the roads -
Over the grass there is the night-dew
And the wind that drives up from the sea along the moorland road,
I hear a curlew start out from the heath
And fly off calling through the dusk,
The wild, long, rippling call -:
The Thing is found and I am quiet with the earth;
Perhaps the earth will hold it or the wind, or that bird's cry,
But it is not for long in any life I know. This cannot stay,
Not now, not yet, not in a dying world, with me, for very long;
I leave it here:
The Thing is found
And one day the wet grass may give it back -
One day the quiet earth may give it back -
The calling birds may give it back as they go by -
To someone walking on the moor who starves for love and will not know
Who gave it to all these to give away;
Or, if I come and ask for it again
Oh! then, to me.
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The Quarantettes Vancouver, British Columbia
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