Louisa Sarah Bevington
Key-notes
(1879)
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About the print version:
Key-Notes
by
L.S. Bevington
London
C. Kegan Paul & Co.,
1, Paternoster Square 1879
**************
Why hear I the same sense from countless differing voices, and read one
never quite expressed fact in endless picture-language? . . . The secret of
heaven is kept from age to age. . . It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler
than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides, and the rising and setting of
autumnal stars. Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads when once the
penetrating Key-Note of nature and spirit is sounded--the earth-beat, sea-beat,
heart-beat which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of
blood, and the sap of trees.
--EMERSON.
Dedication.
TO A. W.
To you, first found, when out of empty days
My heart ached youthfully for earnest aim--
For sympathy with hunger of its cry--
For echo of its better discontent--
To you whom quite I reverence and trust,
Aimée, most patient listener, most true friend,
I send some key-notes of life's journeying moods
As voice on voice awakened in my soul,
Responsive to fresh visions and new springs.
Touched one by one they scarcely modulate,--
These several strains; no hint connects their tones;
This half effaces that with new intent;
And yet the sum of them together cast
Makes just one questioning dissonance, such chord
As symbolises best unfinished life,
Unanswered askings, and unyielded hope;
But tends, prophetic, toward a tarrying close
In chastened minor.
Aimée, you have heard
These songs spring singly from me through the years
Since the fresh mornings when my spirit went
In girlhood's blindness to its own unsight,
Thoughtful, and little learnèd, up and down
Among its guesses, groping for a truth
Half in heart hunger, half in earnest act
Of young thought-energy, that needs must win
Its own conviction from what page of life
It opens at; and deems that page the whole.
From then, when truth alone seemed worth my will,
Till now, when every truth seems valueless
Save as it fosters in the mood of man
The growth and fruiting of persistent good:--
Fair happiness that ever lifeward tends,
Holding affection social; nor reacts
In any lessened aptitude for joy:--
From then till now, from dawn till more than noon,
So far, still singing, I have found my way.
And there were seasons. First, the frosty chill
That kept the buds asleep, when theories
Bristled, clear out-lined, in such lucid air
As breathed no breath to melt them into life.
Then wakening spring, when heart first questioned head,
And raindrops split the sunlight into hues.
After, those fiercer noons and lurid nights,
Tense with the testing of all theory;
When many a pallid, passionless, plain truth
Philosophy could swear to showed obverse
As bloodless irony 'mong human things.
Later, the autumn mellowness, and fruit
That taught the year the meaning of her life.
And now, at last, a folding of the hands
And waiting of the will while, quietly,
Old loves, old certainties, old sorrows die,
And leave deposit softly in my soul
To enrich the sources of a future spring.
Such parable, my Aimée, gives to you
My clustered key-notes, and their story too;
And if not quite their meaning, only so
Because no heart may, quite, another know.
Yet take them, dear, and let them tribute be
For the sweet, patient faithfulness you've shown to me.
Contents.
Upward
January
Unto This Present
Morning
Afternoon
Twilight
Midnight
February
Two Songs--I. With the Tide
Two Songs--II. Up Stream
Page x
Sonnet
March
A Song of Silence
Easter
April
Temptation
Drifting
A Fragment
The Motto
May
A Test
"Who Will Show Us Any Good"
The Song-Bird, and the Fairy
Sonnet
June
The Stammerer
Sonnet
A Modern Moral
Summer Song
July
The Fatalist
Sonnet
Roses
August
Far And Near
The Story of a Scarlet Flower
For Woman's Sake
Eclipse
September
Love and Pride
My Flower
October
An Old Thought, Thought Anew
Unfulfilled
November
Deprecation
December
Listening
UPWARD.
WHAT is the tireless key
Of the unheard chorus of things?
Of the ceaseless autumns and springs?
Of the ebbing and flowing sea?
Answer: that we may join in thy chorus, Eternity!
What shall we do to-day
To lessen the total strife?
To forward the total life?
To help the worlds on their way?
To live by the last-learnt law is more than to praise or to pray.
Why is the fit thing best?
Why is the best thing fit?
We work, and we cease from it:--
Do we work for work, or for rest?
Daily the light comes up in the east to hide in the west.
Never, never in sight
The Perfect we long to see,
The Perfect we long to be,
The final, immutable Right.
Nay, for the Perfect grows, with growth that is infinite;
Over the verges fair
Of the best we can feel and think;
Ever just over the brink
Of the best we can do and dare;
Till we ask--"Are there ends at all to purposes everywhere?"
From stars in the solemn sky,
From the tender flower at my feet,
Certain, and grave, and sweet,
Comes the same eternal reply--
"Upward! O child of man! for Progress doth never die.
"Then lend thy will and thy song
"To the thing that must surely be;
"For so shall thy life be free,
"And so shall thy speech be strong,
"And thy Will be one with the law that beckons the worlds along."
JANUARY.
(A SONNET.)
AWAY into the past the minutes slide,
Dies the old year and dies my old distress,
Comes the new year and comes new blessedness,
And every sheathèd bud a hope doth hide.
And every little life may well abide
What yet remains of winter, and caress
Its prison-walls confidingly, and bless
Kind sternnesses that sway the seasons' tide.
For tender is the clasp wherewith the snow
Clasps the sad earth of winter; very fair
The faint blue chillness of the moonlit air
In frost-bound midnight. I will rise, and go
Out in the herald hush where stars move slow,
And wait the new year's calm birth-moment there.
UNTO THIS PRESENT.
I.
FREE, and yet fast; fast, and for ever free:
Led in the line of law to liberty,
Sweeping the spirals of invariant space,
On flees the little earth around her sun.
For ever tending to his fiery breast,
For ever tending to the outer cold;
So held, unfettered, 'twixt her two desires
From either doom; and of her impotence
Driven, where hindrances are least, along
The curves of gentler possibility.
O little planet! fated to be free,
And have thy leisure for an æon's space
To bud, and bloom, and grow a teeming thing;
Cooling, yet lifewards; darkening into sight
That wakes in many eyes of many lives,
And lights the living into wider light;--
O little planet! Chariot of mankind,
Force-drifted from impalpability
Into thy rounded being, and the form
Thy children know thee by,--how sternly kind
Is force, new-differenced as Life, as Love,
As fitness for a freedom yet to be.
Free, and yet fast; fast, and for ever free!
Thy history is writ in parable:
Man's tale is one with thine, O little world of man!
II.
I looked into the green sea yesterday
And dreamt in outline of that sum of Cause
Which brought it there, and me to watch it curl
Its never sleeping mystery to my feet.
Although so far agone as now appears
Like never, yet I think there was an hour
Down the dim reaches of a cosmic Past,
'Ere the beginnings of the growth of things,
When Fact stayed, poised and centred everywhere;
And for one pregnant moment of suspense
The awful Infinite had nought to do:--
When universal forces nowhere clashed,
And all through space hung equal formlessness:
When, wrecked, some all-dissolvèd, older Past
Yielded its untired atoms for new work--
Or play--at system-churning; till there went
Slow, doubtful whirlings through immensity,
And sameness grew new focussed, here or there,
With glimmering, gassy nuclei. So, anon,
These, settling into fluid balls of fire,
Flung forth, all wildly spinning into space,
Planets, and these, all spinning, flung their moons;
Until, among an unguessed myriad more
This little thing we live to call our world
Grew individual, and puny shone
Among the millions: thence, self-centred, rolled,
An isle of gleaming chaos through the cycled years.
III.
The young world's radiance ebbed away to night,
And a slow-settling darkness veiled her curves,
As she a vaporous mantle for awhile
Drew round her broodingly. And in that gloom
The mystery, Motion, learned a strange new art
In subtle particles. Change after change
Smaller and stiller grew, and more complex
As Life began in darkness. For 'twas then
Under a heaven all murky with ...
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