Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE WANDERER, by NORMAN ROWLAND GALE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE WANDERER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Which way soever you present
Last Line: In the humbly beautiful gardens of beautiful souls.
Subject(s): Redemption


WHICH way soever you present
Your lovely self, in any spot,
You bring to me delightedness; as when you lean
Against the bare and disciplined apricot,
To smile it into buds; and tell how in the year
That last we spent in flying round the sun
It bore so large and prosperous a family—
No fewer than seventy-three!—
And voice a hope that in the coming prime
Of apricots the bounteousness of that time
Will be repeated for your friends and you
In days renowned for gold and white and blue.
To see you in the early April light,
Affectionate to all the plants that make
The garden's general bliss,
And kneeling down to kiss
The crown imperial's baby height,
Or whispering incantations to a blossom still
Kept prisoner by a leisure-loving daffodil,
Is of itself a garden such as might provoke
A god to bite his underlip beneath an Olympian oak.

Or when you run,
As Atalanta knew not how,
On hearing that a nightingale
Upon the bridal hawthorn's quivering bough,
Tired of the fast of stillness, drowning the voice
Of Prudence, though aware of you and me,
Conveys his heart to song with reckless bravery;
Believing that the very moon's a bird
Desirous to be heard,
And venturing wife and eggs to fling into the sky
The first and loudest word.
The moon is silent, and the nightingale wins;
But more I gain than ever he can gain,
For I can watch you, lovely as you are,
Grow lovelier in the rain
Of ecstasies;
Till, using flesh and blood and tune
And secrets far too old to be ancestral lore,
Methinks Creation, as fondling a delicate leaf,
Re-touches you:
That curve of lip was never so before;
And never was the whiteness of your face so warm;
And never did your far-come eyes outpour
Such streams of worship; never with so wild a grace
Your tidal heart thus beat upon the loosening cliffs of lace.

Or when at evenfall you sit
And share yourself with ivory notes,
Till sound is edged as sharply as a sword,
And cleaves my bosom for a spirit that floats
Out of a ravished heaven—a Shape to flit
Among my griefs and bid them learn of it.
What you are then no language may reveal;
Words blunder down like jointless gods
Along the old-fashioned footpaths of the world,
And lie in the dust of failure, past accord.
How then shall you be measured, if earthly joys
And heaven and angels prove as weak as toys
To serve for measures?
You seem to be escaping while you stay
Contented here;
You move within a shroud
Of guardian cloud,
Yet shine more brightly than a day
Supremely clear;
Your movements as you breathe away the hours
Among the attendant flowers
Inform the butterflies in motion there
How best to weave in the fine silk of the air
A pattern never copied otherwhere,
And make me sorrow for the poets whose song,
For lack of revelation such as mine,
Bore but a poverty of Nymphs and Naiads along.

Which way soever you present
Your lovely self, you bring to me
A blessedness innocent of fire.
'Tis not for maids like you that Orpheus sounds
His heart upon a lyre.
Ten thousand lilied queens have died to make you such
As Purity almost doubts to be her child;
Till now, too fine to be desired,
And but to be admired
As loveliness conquering loveliness;
Unmeet for earth, unmeet for Heaven;
Mysteriously far from marriage-bed
And cradle here, from holidays and fragrances
In Paradise,
You cause me wonder how you chance to be
A contradiction of mortality
Disguised as mortal, showing earth-sweet eyes,
And lifting up a delicate earth-sweet head,
yet seeming to prove by unexplainable signs,
Not wittingly given,
That when you travel away you will not pause
Till you can fold your wings at last in a heaven beyond our Heaven.

Refreshment comes whenever I can be
A watcher of your strong fragility,
Without a pang of sense to urge
My spirit to decline from spirit to flesh;
Amazed to see you give to common things
Of everyday life the gift of wings.
You walk as if about to rise
Above the earth and swim the skies.
By many lovely signallings we guess
How you, a fragile wanderer, came
Faring most leisurely along a wilderness
With stars for gold oases,
Through silvermist continents freaked with flowers
Of comets blooming as they fly;
Till here at last, made weary by the foam
Of nebula, you chose a home,
Consenting to be pressed
Against a mother's breast,
And growing, befriended by the magic and the mild,
A hallowed child,
Searching for absent flowers upon the height,
And wondering at the tinge of darkness in our light.
My hearthstone could not bear your tread;
'Twould crumble 'neath the lightness; and my house
Would burn to ashes in your purity.
I will not ask the God beyond our God
Who let you go to gather dreams
Among immensities,
And dignify this fair but feverish earth
Upon your knees,
To touch you with the warmness of mankind,
That fixes at the cradle-point the Pole of Love
And makes the heart perceive, the eyes become as blind;
For all the air around you seems to beat
With news of Passion's irretrievable defeat.
You stand for wisdom hidden from the wise;
For flashing in the dark; for such a mirth
As still demands an altar in the eyes;
And heavens more lucid than the heaven we prize.
All who have known you shall proclaim
The beauty of your sojourning here;
Your style and name
Shall be the food of Legend, and in ages yet to fall
The children shall be told how once there came,
Out of a heaven lovelier than the heaven commonly preached
As the soul's abiding-place,
A wanderer lit by a grace
That was then for the first time reached.
At the velvety end of day
In many a girl's soft eyes
Your memoried star shall arise;
And much that was lost to the home from which you strayed
Shall evermore blossom with fragrant appeal and delight
In the humbly beautiful gardens of beautiful souls.





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