Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, AN INFORMAL EPITAPH IN MEMORY OF A YOUNG POET, by VICTOR GUSTAVE PLARR


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

AN INFORMAL EPITAPH IN MEMORY OF A YOUNG POET, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: You who so loved all grey religious things
Last Line: And long and long for your return alone!
Subject(s): Criticism & Critics; Death; Dowson, Ernest (1867-1900); Friendship; Poetry & Poets; Praise; Writing & Writers; Dead, The


You who so loved all grey religious things—
Lands of old saints and graves of bardic kings,
Would you were sitting on this balcony
Round which the great bat floats on stealthy wings.

Would you could gaze with me upon the deep,
Calm, silent harbour lying there asleep—
Would you could gaze and sometimes say a word,
Poet, whose presence in my heart I keep.

Ah yes, to me you sometimes have come back
Along some mystic and nocturnal track,
Friend, and a little while with me have spoken,
Keeping my tortured brain upon the rack,

A strange preoccupation in your eyes,
And in my slumbering wit a wild surmise,
A frenzied search in pigeon-holes of Dream,
Which still no clue, no sesame supplies!

Often, in dreams, to some lone rendezvous,
Some place of ruins and horizons blue,
Seamed with memorial forests and scarred hills,
One travels dear dead faces to review.

Puzzled, in sleep, you say to him or her:
'So thou returnest, long a wanderer!'
Silent and kind, your dead arrive: they rest,
Having performed long journeys, they aver.

If, by the casual opening of a door,
We could have audience of those gone before,—
If, by the sudden turning of a key,
We could resume some thread of talk once more!

Should we be happy, or shrink back in dread
From faces awfully transfigurèd?
Alas, it is a barren, guessing game.
Till we be dead, we shall not know the dead!

Darkling, a shadow in the harbour lake,
A fishing-boat drops out to the night's take.
After the fireworks on regatta night
It seems the ghost of man's primeval ache.

So from the midst of music and of laughter,
Which in Life's village beats from floor to rafter,
Between the shadows of the looming shores
Some mortal ship drops down into Hereafter.

Obscurely silent, into th' outer dark
You lapsed away within your little barque.
Nay, you for such a voyage unprepared
Knew not the shadowy mainsail for your sark.

Oh, suddenly your last long trip you took,
Not as do fishermen, with line and hook,
But with the freightage of your tortured past
And one unlaurelled, lovely poetry-book!

For you, of Waring's stock, how friendly proved
The glamour of these seas, that you so loved,
Whether through Lyonesse unto Land's End
Or round the Armoric Finistère you roved!

For you, a Poet, how the timid West
Proved nurse ! Upon her grey religious breast
What tenderness, and faith, and love, for you
Her storied desolation still expressed!

To-day I toiled with lines that wavered wide,
Or plumbed ten fathom deep in the blue tide,
To hook the monster pollack, but in vain
The fisher's Spartan art I plied and plied.

Were you not with me in the boat to-day?
Your kind eyes, bent near mine across the bay,
Seemed musing on the splintered promontories,
The haunted cliffs of Cornwall, scarpt and grey!

Complex in shadow, mossed with lichen old,
Those headlands on my dreams loom, fold on fold;
I start again before their drifting hues,
Rubies alembicated into gold.

Empurpling deeps of waters far below,
Fringed with the wild foam's upward-drifted snow,
And, far above, deep heaven's empurpled blaze,
The enormous lovely scarps upon me glow.

O painter, dip thy pencil in gold mist,
And fill thy palette full of amethyst,
Take blood, and dusky wine, and emerald dawn,
And paint, and paint, inspired impressionist!

Whether grey Cornish Newlyn be thy home,
Or, like old Claude, thou haunt the fens of Rome,
Thou'lt still be painting at the knell of doom,
Uncaught the splendours of this land of foam!

You, on that other grey Armoric coast,
You, 'passion-tossed and driven from pillar to post,'
The 'sleepy pasture' of dead Breton folk
Called, when you lingered there, 'a poor worn ghost.'

Clad like a fisher in béret and blouse,
Near craggy Finistère you oft would use
Dreaming to sail, like 'Waring,' your strange kin,
Of whom they brought your well-loved Browning news.

There, had you foundered in some whirlpool wide,
Like shelley you had floated with the tide
To the banked sands, where long-tressed peasant people
Had gathered reverent unto your side,

And silently had borne you, crowned with flowers,
To some old ossuary's sea-fronting towers,
Where, shadowed by the swinging votive ships,
You had escaped your last unhappy hours!

Illumined by the red flame's deathless crest
On the worn runic altar, you might rest,
While, in the half-gloom, white-coiffed women would
Mutter their rosaries among the blest.

And we, far-wandering, might sometimes resort
To the wild, beautiful Armoric port,
And by our modern Shelley's grave retire
To muse how Art is long, but Life is short.

Best had due sepulture by you been found
Close to some fox-earth on high heathered ground
Near Cambeak Head, that looks on such a scene
As Claude discovered not all Europe round.

For miles unto the West upleaps the coast
In sheer perspective, until it is lost
Where dim Tintagel beetles o'er the deep,
A vanished glory, a mysterious boast!

Their harps unstrung in nerveless arms, alas,
Hither grey ghosts of poets oft might pass
To pause beside the stone above your head,
Noiseless amid the brake and dewy grass.

Hither blind seers their ghostly way might feel,
And ragged hermits might in spirit steal,
And old crazed saints climb up from tide-girt caves
Now haunted by the shy, half-human seal.

Yet 'twas not here your poet's veins grew cold,
Not here sad stories of your death are told:
London, your birthplace, gathered in her son—
London, where most you dreaded to grow old!

'When I am old,' you sang, and seemed to dread
The gloom of tedious hours that loomed ahead,
Dreaming of withered hands stretched towards the fire
And pale lips mumbling of lov'd poets dead.

To-morrow with Euphrastes I shall fish,
And strive of pollack to achieve a dish.
Euphrastes is a mighty man of science,
And not to talk of letters seems his wish.

Through golden hours in this soft Cornish clime
We float at sea, nor take account of time.
Incessantly we talk, as townsmen will;
We talk of the bacillus—not of rhyme.

The critics seized on you the very day
They laid you deep within your Kentish clay.
That skilled young person who discovered 'Art,'
Proclaimed you Chatterton without delay.

Damn the cheap critics—pardon the brave word!
When clear you sang, the critics never heard:
When best you plied your tongue and used your pen,
They voted you consumptive and absurd.

They talk of the Republic of the Pen,
A commonwealth of kindly, courtly men!
Say rather Literature's a mala vita,
A sort of reticent secret bandit's den,

Where he lives happiest and least accurst
Who asks most thieves to dinner and writes worst,
And all confess themselves in terms of cant
After assassinating some one first.

They called you Chatterton: he too died young!
They wrote of you as though your song were sung
In some back garden of the illiterate,
Or from the social ladder's lowest rung!

To-day the clever quidnuncs all contend
For smatterers: you were not that, O friend!—
To have been nurtured by great Academe,
Stinks in some honest nostrils without end!

To-day we scared a sun-fish on the sea—
A strange and tropic monster floating free
Close to the sunlit surface, nor disturbed
Till the long boat-hook broke his reverie.

Such is the poet; from some alien zone
He floats into the region of things known,
And every bully, imbecile, and quack
Prods him till he darts back into his own.

You were th' instinctive artist without scope,
Horizon, sedulous training, or the hope
Of plaudits, power, emoluments, that give
Life its best slat even to some saintly Pope.

Prone, like to you, with gyved and tortured wrists,
Small poets and obscure idealists
Write on the sand, Oblivion's Juggernaut
Still grinding tow'rd them down life's crowded lists.

'Art for Art's sake'—you chose the better part;
You verily believed in serious Art.
I think at your autopsy they'd have found
The hackneyed phrase engraven on your heart.

You sometimes wearied me by talking much
Of Art—a lame man babbles of his crutch;
I still suspect what savours of a prop,
And yet your art was actual as the Dutch.

Often I peeped of old above the tops
Of blinds that veiled the doors of little shops,
To see if you inside unwisely fed
Like all your kind, who scorn nutritive props.

In one such small taberna—ask not where,
Lest the descriptive writers go and stare—
You, wholly careless in all social arts,
Once flogged yourself into a love-affair!

I hardly think, dear friend, you cared for love:
Before the female eagle you turned dove,
And fled in terror, as the just will do;
But martyrdom you chiefly longed to prove.

And martyrdom you proved, as all men will
Who seek of human love to take their fill,
Forgetting, as idealists forget,
That human love is very human still.

Ah, vanisht friend, the bitter present thing
Is the remembrance of a pleasant spring
When you rejoiced as others all untried,
And hours we spent in kindly mimicking.

Had I then hazarded, 'Suppose me dead,'—
'Now write my funeral verses,' had I said,
How you'd have skitted in an epitaph
The buzzing follies thick about my head!

I write and write: the tall books on the shelves
Laugh with discretion up among themselves,
Watching their dim-eyed owner hourly checked
As in the Mine of Memory he delves.

Books, papers, prints, long hence you may remain
To witness sorry searches, studious pain,
When he, my friend, and I have been forgot,
And ev'n brown fox-marks — — 's poems stain.

A time will come, if one resist the rage
Of climate, sickness, care, when on life's stage
One shall confront the newly-entered masks,
A bent, abnormal buffer sick with age.

What will it matter if one still find friends
And converse which good company attends,
Books, a sufficiency of wine to drink,
And a smooth exit when the drama ends?

But what if friends at length you cannot find,
Nor babbling tongue to bring the past to mind,
Nor kindly hand to smooth a pillow roughened
By feverish Memory's last dream unkind?

Such lone old men I've known—one, two, or three,
To some bright fantasies still held in fee,
But groaning parlously towards the close,
And I have wished that Death would set them free.

Age you forgo: you shall not feel its chill,
The fading senses and the enfeebled will.
Yes, in despite of pain and man's neglect,
Yours was a perfect euthanasia still!

The winter night before you gently died
At least one friend sat listening at your side.
Eager you talked of what you meant to do,
Or over new-found Dickens laughed and cried.

Softly at dawn in that staunch friend's embrace
The Shadow reached your still vivacious face,
And, at the window, so your friend has told,
A little London bird sang mattin grace.

Now it is I who daily speak of you,
And 'twill be I, dear vanished singer, who,
Ageing may tell young inattentive fellows—
'That famous-grown dead singer once I knew!

Nay, once I loved him. Never such another
Gentle, kind confidant and perfect brother.
I have been brotherless; my dwindling race
Fans scant fraternal flames for death to smother.

Now you are gone, I softly make my moan,
And hear the ripple in an undertone
Singing around the harbour plaintively,
And long and long for your return alone!





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