Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. (1833–1908). A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. 1895.
Henry Clarence Kendall 1841–82The Voice in the Wild Oak
T
High heaven’s dome with different eyes,
In days full-flowered with hours of grace,
And nights not sad with sighs,
I wrote a song in which I strove
To shadow forth thy strain of woe,
Dark widowed sister of the grove—
Twelve wasted years ago.
Those high authentic syllables
Whose voice is like the wintering wind
By sunless mountain fells;
Nor had I sinned and suffered then
To that superlative degree
That I would rather seek, than men,
Wild fellowship with thee.
Thy more than deep autumnal rhyme,
Is one whose hair was shot with gray
By grief instead of time.
He has no need, like many a bard,
To sing imaginary pain,
Because he bears, and finds it hard,
The punishment of Cain.
Which makes the heart of Nature glad;
For he has lost the fine first sense
Of beauty that he had.
The old delight God’s happy breeze
Was wont to give, to grief has grown;
And therefore, Niobe of trees,
His song is like thine own.
Have wasted so these powers of mine,
That I can never write that whole,
Pure, perfect speech of thine.
Some lord of words august, supreme,
The grave, grand melody demands;
The dark translation of thy theme
I leave to other hands.
Across dim melancholy leas—
Where comes by whistling fen and fall
The moan of far-off seas—
A gray old Fancy often sits
Beneath thy shade with tired wings,
And fills thy strong, strange rhyme by fits
With awful utterings.
Are like the sentences of one
Shut in by fate from wind and birds
And light of stars and sun!
No dazzling dryad, but a dark
Dream-haunted spirit, doomed to be
Imprisoned, cramped in bands of bark,
For all eternity.
At Immortality in chains,
What time the lordly storm rides past
With flames and arrowy rains:
Some wan Tithonus of the wood,
White with immeasurable years—
An awful ghost, in solitude
With moaning moors and meres!
And hunts the wild dog to his den,
Thy cries, like maledictions, shrill
And shriek from glen to glen,
As if a frightful memory whipped
Thy soul for some infernal crime
That left it blasted, blind, and stripped—
A dread to Death and Time!
And flowers wax strong and beautiful,
Thy songs are stately harmonies
By wood-lights green and cool,
Most like the voice of one who shows
Through sufferings fierce, in fine relief,
A noble patience and repose—
A dignity in grief.
And still the life that lives in thee,
The soul of thy majestic lay,
Remains a mystery!
And he must speak the speech divine,
The language of the high-throned lords,
Who ’d give that grand old theme of thine
Its sense in faultless words.
With ruin of the fourfold gale,
Where sighs the sedge and sobs the marsh,
Still wail thy lonely wail;
And, year by year, one step will break
The sleep of far hill-folded streams,
And seek, if only for thy sake,
Thy home of many dreams.