Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
Poems
(1866)
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About the print version:
POEMS
By
The Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman," etc.
Boston:
Ticknor and Fields.
1866.
Author's Edition.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
TO HENRY BLACKETT, Esq., A TOKEN OF RESPECT AND ESTEEM FROM AUTHOR TO
PUBLISHER.
************
PREFACE.
MANY of these Poems, extending over a period of several years, have
appeared anonymously in Chamber's Journal and elsewhere. The frequent reprinting
of them, here and in America, has induced the author to collect, select, revise,
and claim her errant children.
Whether they were worth collecting, and are really "Poems," public
opinion must decide.
The present edition in the "Blue and Gold" series contains many pieces
not heretofore collected.
CONTENTS.
PHILIP my King
Thoughts in a Wheat-Field
Immutable
Four Years
The Dead Czar
The Wind at Night
A Fable
Labor is Prayer
A Silly Song
In Memoriam
An Honest Valentine
Looking Death in the Face
By the Alma River
Rothesay Bay
Living: after a Death
In our Boat
The River Shore
A Flower of a Day
The Night before the Mowing
Passion Past
October
Moon-Struck. A Fantasy
A Stream's Singing
A Rejected Lover
A Living Picture
Leonora
Plighted
Mortality
Life Returning. After War-Time
My Friend
A Valentine
Grace of Clydeside
To a Beautiful Woman
Mary's Wedding
Between Two Worlds
Cousin Robert
At Last
The Aurora on the Clyde
An Aurora Borealis. Roslin Castle
At the Linn-Side. Roslin
A Hymn for Christmas Morning
A Psalm for New Year's Eve
Faithful in Vanity-Fair. I. And II.
Her Likeness
Only a Dream
To my Godchild Alice
SONNETS.
Resigning
Saint Elizabeth of Bohemia. I. and II.
A Marriage-Table
Michael the Archangel. I. and II.
Beatrice to Dante
Dante to Beatrice
A Question. I. and II.
Angel Faces. I. and II.
Sunday Morning Bells
Coeur de Lion. I. and II.
Guns of Peace
David's Child
A Word in Season
The Path through the Snow
The Path through the Corn
The Good of it. A Cynic's Song
Mine
A Ghost at the Dancing
My Christian Name
A Dead Baby
For Music
The Canary in his Cage
Constancy in Inconstancy
Buried To-day
The Mill
North Wind
Now and Afterwards
A Sketch
The Unknown Country
A Child's Smile
Violets
Edenland
The House of Clay
Winter Moonlight
The Planting
Sitting on the Shore
Eudoxia. First Picture
Eudoxia. Second Picture
Eudoxia. Third Picture
Benedetta Minelli. The Novice
Benedetta Minelli. The Sister of Mercy
A Dream of Death
A Dream of Resurrection
On the Cliff-Top
An Evening Guest
After Sunset
The Garden-Chair. Two Portraits
An Old Idea
Parables
Lettice
A Spirit Present
A Winter Walk
"Will sail To-morrow"
At Even-tide
A Dead Sea-Gull. Near Liverpool
Looking East. In January, 1858
Over the Hills and Far Away
Too Late
Lost in the Mist
Semper Fidelis
One Summer Morning
My Love Annie
Summer Gone
The Voice calling
The Wren's Nest
A Christmas Carol
The Mother's Visits. From the French
A German Student's Funeral Hymn
Westward ho!
POEMS SINCE 1860.
Our Father's Business
An Autumn Psalm for 1860
In the June Twilight
A Man's Wooing
The Cathedral Tombs
When Green Leaves come again
The First Waits
Day by Day
Only a Woman
A "Mercenary" Marriage
Over the Hillside
The Unfinished Book
Twilight in the North
Cathair Fhargus
A True Hero
At the Seaside
Fishermen--not of Galilee
The Golden Island: Arran from Ayr
Fallen in the Night!
A Lancashire Doxology
Year after Year
"Until her Death"
The Lost Piece of Silver
Outward Bound
POEMS.
PHILIP MY KING.
"Who bears upon his baby brow the round
And top of sovereignty."
LOOK at me with thy large brown eyes,
Philip my king,
Round whom the enshadowing purple lies
Of babyhood's royal dignities:
Lay on my neck thy tiny hand
With love's invisible sceptre laden;
I am thine Esther to command
Till thou shalt find a queen-handmaiden,
Philip my king.
O the day when thou goest a wooing,
Philip my king!
When those beautiful lips 'gin suing,
And some gentle heart's bars undoing
Thou dost enter, love-crowned, and there
Sittest love-glorified. Rule kindly,
Tenderly, over thy kingdom fair,
For we that love, ah! we love so blindly,
Philip my king.
Up from thy sweet mouth,--up to thy brow,
Philip my king!
The spirit that there lies sleeping now
May rise like a giant and make men bow
As to one heaven-chosen amongst his peers:
My Saul, than thy brethren taller and fairer
Let me behold thee in future years;--
Yet thy head needeth a circlet rarer,
Philip my king.
--A wreath not of gold, but palm. One day,
Philip my king,
Thou too must tread, as we trod, a way
Thorny and cruel and cold and gray:
Rebels within thee and foes without,
Will snatch at thy crown. But march on, glorious,
Martyr, yet monarch: till angels shout
As thou sit'st at the feet of God victorious,
"Philip the king!"
THOUGHTS IN A WHEAT-FIELD
"The harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels"
IN his wide fields walks the Master,
In his fair fields, ripe for harvest,
Where the evening sun shines slant-wise
On the rich ears heavy bending;
Saith the Master: "It is time."
Though no leaf shows brown decadence,
And September's nightly frost-bite
Only reddens the horizon,
"It is full time," saith the Master,
The wise Master, "It is time."
Lo, he looks. That look compelling
Brings his laborers to the harvest;
Quick they gather, as in autumn
Passage-birds in cloudy eddies
Drop upon the seaside fields;
White wings have they, and white raiment,
White feet shod with swift obedience,
Each lays down his golden palm branch,
And uprears his sickle shining,
"Speak, O Master,--is it time?"
O'er the field the servants hasten,
Where the full-stored ears droop downwards,
Humble with their weight of harvest:
Where the empty ears wave upward,
And the gay tares flaunt in rows:
But the sickles, the sharp sickles,
Flash new dawn at their appearing,
Songs are heard in earth and heaven,
For the reapers are the angels,
And it is the harvest time.
O Great Master, are thy footsteps
Even now upon the mountains?
Are thou walking in thy wheat-field?
Are the snowy-wingèd reapers
Gathering in the silent air?
Are thy signs abroad, the glowing
Of the distant sky, blood-reddened,--
And the near fields trodden, blighted,
Choked by gaudy tares triumphant,--
Sure, it must be harvest time?
Who shall know the Master's coming?
Whether it be at dawn or sunset,
When night dews weigh down the wheat-ears,
Or while noon rides high in heaven,
Sleeping lies the yellow field?
Only, may thy voice, Good Master,
Peal above the reapers' chorus,
And dull sound of sheaves slow falling,--
"Gather all into My garner,
For it is My harvest time."
IMMUTABLE.
"With whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."
AUTUMN to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall,--
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.
Till at the gate of some memorial hour
We pause--look in its sepulchre to find
The cast-off shape that years since we called "I"--
And start, amazed. Yet on! We may not stay
To weep or laugh. All which is past, is past
Even while we gaze the simulated form
Drops into dust, like many-centuried corpse
At opening of a tomb.
Alack, this world
Is full of change, change, change,--nothing but change!
Is there not one straw in life's whirling flood
To hold by, as the torrent sweeps us down,
Us, scattered leaves; eddied and broken; torn
Roughly asunder; or in smooth mid-stream
Divided each from other without pain;
Collected in what looks like union,
Yet is but stagnant chance,--stopping to rot
By the same pebble till the tide shall turn;
Then on, to find no shelter and no rest,
Forever rootless and forever lone.
O God, we are but leaves upon Thy stream,
Clouds on Thy sky. We do but move across
The silent breast of Thy infinitude
Which bears us all. We pour out day by day
Our long, brief moan of mutability
To Thine immutable--and cease.
Yet still
Our change yearns after Thine unchangedness;
Our mortal craves Thine immortality;
Our manifold and multiform and weak
Imperfectness, requires the perfect ONE.
For Thou art ONE, and we are all of Thee;
Dropped from Thy bosom, as Thy sky drops down
Its morning dews, which glitter for a space,
Uncertain whence they fell, or whither tend,
Till the great Sun arising on his fields
Upcalls them all, and they rejoicing go.
So, with like joy, O Light Eterne, we spring
Thee-ward, and leave the pleasant fields of earth,
Forgetting equally its blossomed ...
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