To the happy memory of five
Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning
of Dec. 7th, 1875
I
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones & veins
in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what
with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me
afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and
find thee.
I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue
confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and
hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the
sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of
height:
And the midriff astrain with
leaning of, laced with fire of stress.
The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where
was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the
heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were
dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to
boast,
To flash from the flame to the
flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.
I am soft sift
In an hourglass—at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a
drift,
And it crowds and it combs to the
fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to
a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the
way down from the tall
Fells or flanks of the voel, a
vein
Of the gospel proffer, a
pressure, a principle, Christ's gift.
I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it;
and
Glow, glory in thunder;
Kiss my hand to the
dappled-with-damson west:
Since, tho' he is under the
world's splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed,
stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet
him, and bless when I understand.
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few
know this)
Swings the stroke dealt—
Stroke and a stress that stars
and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts
are flushed by and melt—
But it rides time like riding a
river
(And here the faithful waver, the
faithless fable and miss).
It dates from day
Of his going in Galilee;
Warm-laid grave of a womb-life
grey;
Manger, maiden's knee;
The dense and the driven Passion,
and frightful sweat;
Thence the discharge of it, there
its swelling to be,
Though felt before, though in
high flood yet—
What none would have known of it,
only the heart, being hard at bay,
Is out with it! Oh,
We lash with the best or worst
Word last! How a lush-kept
plush-capped sloe
Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush!—flush the man, the being
with it, sour or sweet,
Brim, in a flash, full!—Hither
then, last or first,
To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s
feet—
Never ask if meaning it, wanting
it, warned of it—men go.
Be adored among men,
God, three-numberéd form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den,
Man's malice, with wrecking and
storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling
of tongue,
Thou art lightning and love, I
found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou
hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most
art merciful then.
With an anvil-ding
And with fire in him forge thy
will
Or rather, rather then, stealing
as Spring
Through him, melt him but master
him still:
Whether at once, as once at a
crash Paul,
Or as Austin, a lingering-out
swéet skíll,
Make mercy in all of us, out of
us all
Mastery, but be adored, but be adored
King.
II
"Some find me a sword; some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood" goes Death
on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But wé dréam we are rooted in
earth—Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us,
we, though our flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that
there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the
blear share come.
On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, tell men
with women,
Two hundred souls in the round—
O Father, not under thy feathers
nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth
the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay
of thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of
rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?
Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and
so the sky keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake,
black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed
quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and
whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making
unchilding unfathering deeps.
She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck—not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of
sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with
her bows and the ride of her keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam
with ruinous shock;
And canvass and compass, the
whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind
her with, these she endured.
Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with
cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone;
And frightful a nightfall folded
rueful a day
Nor rescue, only rocket and
lightship, shone,
And lives at last were washing
away:
To the shrouds they took,—they
shook in the hurling and horrible airs.
One stirred from the rigging to
save
The wild woman-kind below,
With a rope's end round the man,
handy and brave—
He was pitched to his death at a
blow,
For all his dreadnought breast
and braids of thew:
They could tell him for hours,
dandled the to and fro
Through the cobbled foam-fleece,
what could he do
With the burl of the fountains of
air, buck and the flood of the wave?
They fought with God's cold—
And they could not and fell to
the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and
drowned them) or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the
heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman's wailing, the crying
of child without check—
Till a lioness arose breasting
the babble,
A prophetess towered in the
tumult, a virginal tongue told.
Ah, touched in your bower of bone
Are you! turned for an exquisite
smart,
Have you! make words break from
me here all alone,
Do you!—mother of being in me,
heart.
O unteachably after evil, but
uttering truth,
Why, tears! is it? tears; such a
melting, a madrigal start!
Never-eldering revel and river of
youth,
What can it be, this glee? the
good you have there of your own?
Sister, a sister calling
A master, her master and mine!—
And the inboard seas run swirling
and hawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather
sees one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her: she rears
herself to divine
Ears, and the call of the tall
nun
To the men in the tops and the
tackle rode over the storm's brawling.
She was first of a five and came
Of a coifèd sisterhood.
(O Deutschland, double a
desperate name!
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther,
are two of a town,
Christ's lily and beast of the
waste wood:
From life's dawn it is drawn
down,
Abel is Cain's brother and
breasts they have sucked the same.)
Loathed for a love men knew in
them,
Banned by the land of their
birth,
Rhine refused them, Thames would
ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou
Orion of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms
were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved
flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them.
Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ.
Mark, the mark is of man's make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet
himself on his own bespoken,
Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd
and priced—
Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token
For lettering of the lamb's
fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.
Joy fall to thee, father Francis,
Drawn to the Life that died;
With the gnarls of the nails in
thee, niche of the lance, his
Lovescape crucified
And seal of his seraph-arrival!
and these thy daughters
And five-livèd and leavèd favour
and pride,
Are sisterly sealed in wild
waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold
mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.
Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at
rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to
the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng
that catches and quails
Was calling "O Christ,
Christ, come quickly":
The cross to her she calls Christ
to her, christens her wildworst Best.
The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original
Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as
her lover had been?
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then,
altogether, the men
Woke thee with a we are perishing
in the weather of Gennesareth.
Or ís it that she cried for the
crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort
for feeling the combating keen?
For how to the heart's cheering
The down-dugged ground-hugged
grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens
appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height;
or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the
moth-soft Milky way,
What by your measure is the
heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got,
nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?
No, but it was not these.
The jading and jar of the cart,
Time's tasking, it is fathers
that asking for ease
Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing
heart,
Not danger, electrical horror;
then further it finds
The appealing of the Passion is
tenderer in prayer apart:
Other, I gather, in measure her
mind's
Burden, in wind's burly and beat
of endragonèd seas.
But how shall I . . . make me
room there:
Reach me a ... Fancy, come
faster—
Strike you the sight of it? look
at it loom there,
Thing that she ... there then!
the Master,
Ipse, the only one, Christ, King,
Head:
He was to cure the extremity
where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and
dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his
triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.
Ah! there was a heart right
There was single eye!
Read the unshapeable shock night
And knew the who and the why;
Wording it how but by him that
present and past,
Heaven and earth are word of,
worded by?—
The Simon Peter of a soul! to the
blast
Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon
of light.
Jesu, heart's light,
Jesu, maid's son,
What was the feast followed the
night
Thou hadst glory of this nun?—
Feast of the one woman without
stain.
For so conceivèd, so to conceive
thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth
of a brain,
Word, that heard and kept thee
and uttered thee outright.
Well, she has thee for the pain,
for the
Patience; but pity of the rest of
them!
Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer
vein for the
Comfortless unconfessed of them—
No not uncomforted:
lovely-felicitous Providence
Finger of a tender of, O of a
feathery delicacy, the breast of the
Maiden could obey so, be a bell
to, ring of it, and
Startle the poor sheep back! is
the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?
I admire thee, master of the
tides,
Of the Yore-flood, of the year's
fall;
The recurb and the recovery of
the gulf's sides,
The girth of it and the wharf of
it and the wall;
Staunching, quenching ocean of a
motionable mind;
Ground of being, and granite of
it: past all
Grasp God, throned behind
Death with a sovereignty that
heeds but hides, bodes but abides;
With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the
lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the
past-prayer, pent in prison,
The-last-breath penitent
spirits—the uttermost mark
Our passion-plungèd giant risen,
The Christ of the Father
compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.
Now burn, new born to the world,
Doubled-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed,
maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numbered he in three of the
thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his
coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his
own;
A released shower, let flash to
the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.
Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the
heaven-haven of the Reward:
Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish
sóuls!
Let him easter in us, be a
dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear
Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us,
high-priest,
Our hearts' charity's hearth's
fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.
