Sydney Jephcott

Chaucer

O gracious morning eglantine,
Making the far old English ways divine!
Though from thy stock our mateless rose was bred,
Staining the world's skies with its red,
Our garden gives no scent so fresh as thine,
Sweet, thorny-seeming eglantine.

White Paper

Smooth white paper 'neath the pen;
 Richest field that iron ploughs,
Germinating thoughts of men,
 Though no heaven its rain allows;

Till they ripen, thousand fold,
 And our spirits reap the corn,
In a day-long dream of gold;
 Food for all the souls unborn.

Like the murmur of the earth,
 When we listen stooping low;
Like the sap that sings in mirth,
 Hastening up the trees that grow;

Evermore a tiny song
 Sings the pen unto it, while
Thought's elixir flows along,
 Diviner than the holy Nile.

Greater than the sphering sea,
 For it holds the sea and land;
Seed of all ideas to be
 Down its current borne like sand.

How our fathers in the dark
 Pored on it the plans obscure,
By star-light or stake-fires stark
 Tracing there the path secure.

The poor paper drawn askance
 With the spell of Truth half-known,
Holds back Hell of ignorance,
 Roaring round us, thronged, alone.

O white list of champions,
 Spirit born, and schooled for fight,
Mailed in armour of the sun's
 Who shall win our utmost right!

Think of paper lightly sold,
 Which few pence had made too dear
On its blank to have enscrolled
 Beatrice, Lucifer, or Lear!

Think of paper Milton took,
 Written, in his hands to feel,
Musing of what things a look
 Down its pages would reveal.

O the glorious Heaven wrought
 By Cadmean souls of yore,
From pure element of thought!
 And thy leaves they are its door!

Light they open, and we stand
 Past the sovereignty of Fate,
Glad amongst them, calm and grand,
 The Creators and Create!

Splitting

Morning.

 Out from the hut at break of day,
 And up the hills in the dawning grey;
With the young wind flowing
From the blue east, growing
 Red with the white sun's ray!

 Lone and clear as a deep-bright dream
 Under mid-night's and mid-slumber's stream,
Up rises the mount against the sunrise shower,
Vast as a kingdom, fair as a flower:
 O'er it doth the foam of foliage ream

 In vivid softness serene,
 Pearly-purple and marble green;
Clear in their mingling tinges,
Up away to the crest that fringes
 Skies studded with cloud-crags sheen.

Day.

 Like birds frayed from their lurking-shaw,
 Like ripples fleet 'neath a furious flaw,
The echoes re-echo, flying
Down from the mauls hot-plying;
 Clatter the axes, grides the saw.

 Ruddy and white the chips out-spring,
 Like money sown by a pageant king;
The free wood yields to the driven wedges,
With its white sap-edges,
 And heart in the sunshine glistening.

 Broadly the ice-clear azure floods down,
 Where the great tree-tops are overthrown;
As on through the endless day we labour;
The sun for our nearest neighbour,
 Up o'er the mountains lone.

 And so intensely it doth illume,
 That it shuts by times to gloom;
In the open spaces thrilling;
From the dead leaves distilling
 A hot and harsh perfume.

Evening.

 Give over! All the valleys in sight
 Fill, fill with the rising tide of night;
While the sunset with gold-dust bridges
The black-ravined ridges,
 Whose mighty muscles curve in its light.

 In our weary climb, while night dyes deep,
 Down the broken and stony steep,
How our jaded bodies are shaken
By each step in half-blindness taken —
 One's thoughts lie heaped like brutes asleep.

 Open the door of the dismal hut,
 Silence and darkness lone were shut
In it, as a tidal pool, until returning
Night drowns the land, — no ember's burning, —
 One is too weary the food to cut.

 Body and soul with every blow,
 Wasted for ever, and who will know,
Where, past this mountained night of toiling,
Red life in its thousand veins is boiling,
 Of chips scattered on the mountain's brow?

Home-woe

The wreckage of some name-forgotten barque,
 Half-buried by the dolorous shore;
 Whereto the living waters never more
 Their urgent billows pour;
But the salt spray can reach and cark —

So lies my spirit, lonely and forlorn,
 On Being's strange and perilous strand.
 And rusted sword and fleshless hand
 Point from the smothering sand;
And anchor chainless and out-worn.

But o'er what Deep, unconquered and uncharted,
 And steering by what vanished star;
 And where my dim-imagined consorts are,
 Or hidden harbour far,
From whence my sails, unblessed, departed,

Can memory, nor still intuition teach.
 And so I watch with alien eyes
 This World's remote and unremembered skies;
 While around me weary rise
The babblings of a foreign speech.

A Ballad of the last King of Thule

There was a King of Thule
 Whom a Witch-wife stole at birth;
In a country known but newly,
 All under the dumb, huge Earth.

That King's in a Forest toiling;
 And he never the green sward delves
But he sees all his green waves boiling
 Over his sands and shelves;

In these sunsets vast and fiery,
 In these dawns divine he sees
Hy-Brasil, Mannan and Eire,
 And the Isle of Appletrees;

He watches, heart-still and breathless,
 The clouds through the deep day trailing,
As the white-winged vessels gathered,
 Into his harbours sailing;

Ranked Ibis and lazy Eagles
 In the great blue flame may rise,
But ne'er Sea-mew or Solan beating
 Up through their grey low skies;

When the storm-led fires are breaking,
 Great waves of the molten night,
Deep in his eyes comes aching
 The icy Boreal Light.

. . . . .

O, lost King, and O, people perished,
 Your Thule has grown one grave!
Unvisited as uncherished,
 Save by the wandering wave!

The billows burst in his doorways,
 The spray swoops over his walls! —
O, his banners that throb dishonoured
 O'er arms that hide in his halls —

Deserved is your desolation! —
 Why could you not stir and save
The last-born heir of your nation? —
 Sold into the South, a slave

Till he dies, and is buried duly
 In the hot Australian earth —
The lorn, lost King of Thule,
 Whom a Witch-wife stole at birth.

A Fragment

But, under all, my heart believes the day
Was not diviner over Athens, nor
The West wind sweeter thro' the Cyclades
Than here and now; and from the altar of To-day
The eloquent, quick tongues of flame uprise
As fervid, if not unfaltering as of old,
And life atones with speed and plenitude
For coarser texture. Our poor present will,
Far in the brooding future, make a past
Full of the morning's music still, and starred
With great tears shining on the eyelids' eaves
Of our immortal faces yearning t'wards the sun.