The Project Gutenberg eBook of Victorian Ode for Jubilee Day, 1897, by Francis Thompson

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Title: Victorian Ode for Jubilee Day, 1897

Author: Francis Thompson

Release Date: April 20, 2011 [EBook #35922]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)

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VICTORIAN ODE

FOR JUBILEE DAY, 1897,

BY

FRANCIS THOMPSON.

Printed for private circulation at

The Westminster Press,

1897.

VICTORIAN ODE.

Night; and the street a corpse beneath the moon,

Upon the threshold of the jubilant day

That was to follow soon;

Thickened with inundating dark

’Gainst which the drowning lamps kept struggle; pole

And plank cast rigid shadows; ’twas a stark

Thing waiting for its soul,

The bones of the preluded pomp. I saw

In the cloud-sullied moon a pale array,

A lengthened apparition, slowly draw;

And as it came,

Brake all the street in phantom flame

Of flag and flower and hanging, shadowy show

Of the to-morrow’s glories, as might suit

A pageant of the dead; and spectral bruit

I heard, where stood the dead to watch the dead,

The long Victorian line that passed with printless tread.

First went the holy poets, two on two,

And music, sown along the hardened ground,

Budded like frequence of glad daisies, where

Those sacred feet did fare;

Arcadian pipe, and psaltery, around,

And stringèd viol, sound

To make for them melodious due.

In the first twain of those great ranks of death

Went one, the impress recent on his hair

Where it was dinted by the laureate wreath:

Who sang those goddesses with splendours bare

On Ida hill, before the Trojan boy;

And many a lovely lay,

Where Beauty did her beauties unarray

In conscious song. I saw young Love his plumes deploy,

And shake their shivering lustres, till the night

Was sprinkled and bedropt with starry play

Of versicoloured light,

To see that poet pass who sang him well;

And I could hear his heart

Throb like the after-vibrance of a bell.

A Strength beside this Beauty, Browning went,

With shrewd looks and intent,

And meditating still some gnarlèd theme.

Then came, somewhat apart,

In a fastidious dream,

Arnold, with a half-discontented calm,

Binding up wounds, but pouring in no balm.

The fervid breathing of Elizabeth

Broke on Christina’s gentle-taken breath.

Rossetti, whose heart stirred within his breast

Like lightning in a cloud, a spirit without rest,

Came on disranked; Song’s hand was in his hair,

Lest Art should have withdrawn him from the band,

Save for her strong command;

And in his eyes high Sadness made its lair.

Last came a shadow tall, with drooping lid,

Which yet not hid

The steel-like flashing of his armèd glance;

Alone he did advance,

And all the throngs gave room

For one that looked with such a captain’s mien:

A scornful smile lay keen

On lips that, living, prophesied of doom.

His one hand held a lightning-bolt, the other

A cup of milk and honey blent with fire;

It seemed as in that quire

He had not, nor desired not, any brother.

A space his alien eye surveyed the pride

Of meditated pomp, as one that much

Disdained the sight, methought; then at a touch,

He turned the heel, and sought with shadowy stride

His station in the dim,

Where the sole-thoughted Dante waited him.

What throngs illustrious next, of Art and Prose,

Too long to tell; but other music rose

When came the sabre’s children: they who led

The iron-throated harmonies of war,

The march resounding of the armèd line,

And measured movement of battalia:

Accompanied their tread

No harps, no pipes of soft Arcadia,

But—borne to me afar—

The tramp of squadrons, and the bursting mine,

The shock of steel, the volleying rifle-crack,

And echoes out of ancient battles dead.

So Cawnpore unto Alma thundered back,

And Delhi’s cannon roared to Gujerat:

Carnage through all those iron vents gave out

Her thousand-mouthèd shout.

As balefire answering balefire is unfurled,

From mountain-peaks, to tell the foe’s approaches,

So ran that battle-clangour round the world,

From famous field to field

So that reverberated war was tossed;

And—in the distance lost—

Across the plains of France and hills of Spain

It swelled once more to birth,

And broke on me again,

The voice of England’s glories girdling in the earth.

It caught like fire the main,

Where rending planks were heard, and broadsides pealed,

That shook were all the seas,

Which feared, and thought on Nelson. For with them

That struck the Russ, that brake the Mutineer,

And smote the stiff Sikh to his knee,—with these

Came they that kept our England’s sea-swept hem,

And held afar from her the foreign fear.

After them came

They who pushed back the ocean of the Unknown,

And fenced some strand of knowledge for our own

Against the outgoing sea

Of ebbing mystery;

And on their banner “Science” blazoned shone.

The rear were they that wore the statesman’s fame,

From Melbourne, to

The arcane face of the much-wrinkled Jew.

Lo, in this day we keep the yesterdays,

And those great dead of the Victorian line.

They passed, they passed, but cannot pass away,

For England feels them in her blood like wine.

She was their mother, and she is their daughter,

This Lady of the water,

And from their loins she draws the greatness which they were.

And still their wisdom sways,

Their power lives in her.

Their thews it is, England, that lift thy sword,

They are the splendour, England, in thy song,

They sit unbidden at thy council-board,

Their fame doth compass all thy coasts from wrong,

And in thy sinews they are strong.

Their absence is a presence and a guest

In this day’s feast;

This living feast is also of the dead,

And this, O England, is thine All Souls’ Day.

And when thy cities flake the night with flames,

Thy proudest torches yet shall be their names.

O royal England! happy child

Of such a more than regal line;

Be it said

Fair right of jubilee is thine;

And surely thou art unbeguiled

If thou keep with mirth and play,

With dance, and jollity, and praise,

Such a To-day which sums such Yesterdays.

Pour to the joyless ones thy joy, thy oil

And wine to such as faint and toil.

And let thy vales make haste to be more green

Than any vales are seen

In less auspicious lands,

And let thy trees clap all their leafy hands,

And let thy flowers be gladder far of hue

Than flowers of other regions may;

Let the rose, with her fragrance sweetened through,

Flush as young maidens do,

With their own inward blissfulness at play.

And let the sky twinkle an eagerer blue

Over our English isle

Than any otherwhere;

Till strangers shall behold, and own that she is fair.

Play up, play up, ye birds of minstrel June,

Play up your reel, play up your giddiest spring,

And trouble every tree with lusty tune,

Whereto our hearts shall dance

For overmuch pleasance,

And children’s running make the earth to sing.

And ye soft winds, and ye white-fingered beams,

Aid ye her to invest,

Our queenly England, in all circumstance

Of fair and feat adorning to be drest;

Kirtled in jocund green,

Which does befit a Queen,

And like our spirits cast forth lively gleams:

And let her robe be goodly garlanded

With store of florets white and florets red,

With store of florets white and florets gold,

A fair thing to behold;

Intrailed with the white blossom and the blue,

A seemly thing to view!

And thereunto,

Set over all a woof of lawny air,

From her head wavering to her sea-shod feet,

Which shall her lovely beauty well complete,

And grace her much to wear.

Lo, she is dressed, and lo, she cometh forth,

Our stately Lady of the North;

Lo, how she doth advance,

In her most sovereign eye regard of puissance,

And tiar’d with conquest her prevailing brow,

While nations to her bow.

Come hither, proud and ancient East,

Gather ye to this Lady of the North,

And sit down with her at her solemn feast,

Upon this culminant day of all her days;

For ye have heard the thunder of her goings-forth,

And wonder of her large imperial ways.

Let India send her turbans, and Japan

Her pictured vests from that remotest isle

Seated in the antechambers of the Sun:

And let her Western sisters for a while

Remit long envy and disunion,

And take in peace

Her hand behind the buckler of her seas,

’Gainst which their wrath has splintered; come, for she

Her hand ungauntlets in mild amity.

Victoria! Queen, whose name is victory,

Whose woman’s nature sorteth best with peace,

Bid thou the cloud of war to cease

Which ever round thy wide-girt empery

Fumes, like to smoke about a burning brand,

Telling the energies which keep within

The light unquenched, as England’s light shall be;

And let this day hear only peaceful din.

For, queenly woman, thou art more than woman;

Thy name the often-struck barbarian shuns;

Thou art the fear of England to her foemen,

The love of England to her sons.

And this thy glorious day is England’s; who

Can separate the two?

She joys thy joys and weeps thy tears,

And she is one with all thy moods;

Thy story is the tale of England’s years,

And big with all her ills, and all her stately goods.

Now unto thee

The plenitude of the glories thou didst sow

Is garnered up in prosperous memory;

And, for the perfect evening of thy day,

An untumultuous bliss, serenely gay,

Sweetened with silence of the after-glow.

Nor does the joyous shout

Which all our lips give out

Jar on that quietude; more than may do

A radiant childish crew,

With well-accordant discord fretting the soft hour,

Whose hair is yellowed by the sinking blaze

Over a low-mouthed sea. Exult, yet be not twirled,

England, by gusts of mere

Blind and insensate lightness; neither fear

The vastness of thy shadow on the world.

If in the East

Still strains against its leash the unglutted beast

Of War; if yet the cannon’s lip be warm;

Thou, whom these portents warn but not alarm,

Feastest, but with thy hand upon the sword,

As fits a warrior race.

Not like the Saxon fools of olden days,

With the mead dripping from the hairy mouth,

While all the South

Filled with the shaven faces of the Norman horde.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Victorian Ode for Jubilee Day, 1897, by Francis Thompson

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