Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SERE OF THE LEAF, by FRANCIS THOMPSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SERE OF THE LEAF, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Winter wore a flapping wind, and his beard, dis- / entwined
Last Line: She turns; they tremble down. Drift o'er them, dust!'
Subject(s): Tynan, Katharine (1861-1931)


WINTER wore a flapping wind, and his beard, disentwined,
Blew cloudy in the face of the Fall,
When a poet-soul flew South, with a singing in her mouth,
O'er the azure Irish parting-wall.
There stood one beneath a tree whose matted greenery
Was fruited with the songs of birds;
By the melancholy water drooped the slender sedge, its daughter,
Whose silence was a sadness passing words:
He held him very still,
And he heard the running rill,
And the soul-voice singing blither than the birds.

All Summer the sunbeams drew the curtains from the dreams
Of the rose-fay, while the sweet South wind
Lapped the silken swathing close round her virginal repose
When night swathed folding slumbers round her mind.
Now the elf of the flower had sickened in her bower,
And fainted in a thrill of scent;
But her lover of the South, with a moan upon his mouth,
Caught her spirit to his arms as it went:
Then the storms of West and North
Sent a gusty vaward forth,
Sent a skirring desolation, and he went.

And a troop of roving gales rent the lily's silver veils,
And tore her from her trembling leaves;
And the Autumn's smitten face flushed to a red disgrace,
And she grieved as a captive grieves.
Once the gold-barred cage of skies with the sunset's moulted dyes
Was splendorously littered at the even;
Beauty-fraught o'er shining sea, once the sun's argosy
To rich wreck on the Western reefs was driven;
Now the sun, in Indian pall,
Treads the russet-amber fall
From the ruined trees of Heaven.

Too soon fails the light, and the swart boar, night,
Gores to death the bleeding day;
And the dusk has no more a calm at its core,
But is turbid with obscene array.
For the cloud, a thing of ill, dilating baleful o'er the hill,
Spreads a bulk like a huge Afreet
Drifting in gigantic sloth, or a murky behemoth,
For the moon to set her silver feet;
For the moon's white paces,
And its nostril for her traces,
As she urges it with wild witch-feet.

And the stars, forlornly fair, shiver keenly through the air,
All an-aching till their watch be ceased;
And the hours like maimed flies lag on, ere night hatch her golden dragon
In the mold of the upheaved East.
'As the cadent languor lingers after Music droops her fingers
Beauty still falls dying, dying through the days;
But ah!' said he who stood in that Autumn solitude,
'Singing-soul, thou art 'lated with thy lays!
All things that on this globe err
Fleet into dark October,
When day and night encounter, the nights war down the days.

'For the song in thy mouth is all of the South,
Though Winter wax in strength more and more,
And at eve with breath of malice the stained windows of day's palace
Pile in shatters on the Western floor.'
But the song sank down his soul like a Naiad through her pool,
He could not bid the visitant depart;
For he felt the melody make tune like a bee
In the red rose of his heart:
Like a Naiad in her pool
It lay within his soul,
Like a bee in the red rose of his heart.

She sang of the shrill East fled and bitterness surceased: --
'O the blue South wind is musical!
And the garden's drenched with scent, and my soul hath its content,
This eve or any eve at all.'
On his form the blushing shames of her ruby-plumaged flames
Flickered hotly, like a quivering crimson snow:
'And hast thou thy content? Were some rain of it besprent
On the soil where I am drifted to and fro,
My soul, blown o'er the ways
Of these arid latter days,
Would blossom like a rose of Jericho.

'I know not equipoise, only purgatorial joys,
Grief's singing to the soul's instrument,
And forgetfulness which yet knoweth that it doth forget;
But content -- what is content?
For a harp of singeing wire, and a goblet dripping fire,
And desires that hunt down Beauty through the Heaven
With unslackenable bounds, as the deep-mouthed thunder-hounds
Bay at heel the fleeing levin, --
The chaliced lucencies
From pure holy-wells of eyes,
And the bliss unbarbed with pain I have given.

'Is -- O framed to suffer joys! -- thine the sweet without alloys
Of the many, who art numbered with the few?
And thy flashing breath of song, does it do thy lips no wrong,
Nor sear them as the heats spill through?
When the welling musics rise, like tears from heart to eyes,
Is there not a pang dissolved in them for thee?
Does not Song, like the Queen of radiant Love, Hellene,
Float up dripping from a bitter sea?
No tuned metal known
Unless stricken yields a tone,
Be it silver, or sad iron like to me.

'Yet the rhymes still roll from the bell-tower of thy soul,
Though no tongued griefs give them vent;
If they ring to me no gladness, if my joy be sceptred sadness,
I am glad, yet, for thy content.
Not always does the lost, 'twixt the fires of heat and frost,
Envy those whom the healing lustres bless;
But may sometimes, in the pain of a yearning past attain,
Thank the angels for their happiness;
'Twixt the fire and fiery ice,
Looking up to Paradise,
Thank the angels for their happiness.

'The heart, a censered fire whence fuming chants aspire,
Is fed with oozed gums of precious pain;
And unrest swings denser, denser, the fragrance from that censer,
With the heart-strings for its quivering chain.
Yet 'tis vain to scale the turret of the cloud-uplifted spirit,
And bar the immortal in, the mortal out;
For sometime unaware comes a footfall up the stair,
And a soft knock under which no bolts are stout,
And lo, there pleadeth sore
The heart's voice at the door,
"I am your child, you may not shut me out!"

'The breath of poetry in the mind's autumnal tree
Shakes down the saddened thoughts in singing showers,
But fallen from their stem, what part have we in them?
"Nay," pine the trees, "they were, but are not ours."
Not for the mind's delight these sered leaves alight,
But, loosened by the breezes, fall they must.
What ill if they decay? Yet some a little way
May flit before deserted by the gust,
May touch some spirit's hair,
May cling one moment there, --
She turns; they tremble down. Drift o'er them, dust!'





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