Madeleine in Church

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saintStands nearer than God stands to our distress,And one small candle shines, but not so faintAs the far lights of everlastingnessI’d rather kneel than over there, in open dayWhere Christ is hanging, rather prayTo something more like my own clay,Not too divine;For, once, perhaps my little saintBefore he got his niche and crown,Had one short stroll about the town;It brings him closer, just that taintAnd anyone can wash the paintOff our poor faces, his and mine!

Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy,as good as gold,But still, with just the proper traceOf earthliness on his shining wedding face;And then gone suddenly blank and oldThe hateful day of the divorce:Stuart got his, hands down, of courseCrowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse:But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,--He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.It seems too funny all we other ripsShould have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnablyKeep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.--It’s funny too, how easily we sink,One might put up a monument, I thinkTo half the world and cut across it “Lost at Sea!”I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night--No, it’s no use this penny light--Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown--The trees of Calvary are where they were,When we are sure that we can spareThe tallest, let us go and strike it downAnd leave the other two still standing there.I, too, would ask Him to remember meIf there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.

Oh! quiet Christ who never knewThe poisonous fangs that bite us throughAnd make us do the things we do,See how we suffer and fight and die,How helpless and how low we lie,God holds You, and You hang so high,Though no one looking long at You,Can think You do not suffer too,But, up there, from your still, star-lighted treeWhat can You know, what can You really seeOf this dark ditch, the soul of me!

We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sitWatching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burningin the sun,Without paying so heavily for itThat joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn childwere almost one.I could hardly bearThe dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums inthe dusk,The thick, close voice of musk,The jessamine music on the thin night air,Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere--The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scentof my own hair,Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep tothe high seatOf laughing gods, and then blow down and beatMy soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses ofthe street.I think my body was my soul,And when we are made thusWho shall controlOur hands, our eyes, the wandering passion ofour feet,Who shall teach usTo thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhapsin death,When the race is run,And it is forced from us with our last breath“Thy will be done”?If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame,bloodless things.As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings.Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!The temperate, well-worn smileThe one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:And afterwards the child’s, for a little while,With its unknowing and all-seeing eyesSo soon to change, and make you feel how quickThe clock goes round. If one had learned the trick--(How does one though?) quite early on,Of long green pastures under placid skies,One might be walking now with patient truth.What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth,When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?

There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen,With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat,The dainty head held high against the painted greenAnd throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughtyand half sweet.Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply SpringTo me to-day: a radiance on the wall,So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thingBeside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,Sapless and lined like a dead leaf,All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!

And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair--Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay--?Or could--with any one of the old crew,But oh! these boys! the solemn wayThey take you and the things they say--This “I have only as long as you”When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two--Although at heart perhaps--God! if it wereOnly the face, only the hair!If Jim had written to me as he did to-dayA year ago--and now it leaves me cold--I know what this means, old, old, old!Et avec ça--mais on a vécu, tout se paie.

That is not always true: there was my Mother--(we at least thedead are free!)Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am,Monty too;The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hellso patiently;The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me--andwhat of me?But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No,one cannot seeHow it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the childwho went or never came;Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun ofany darkened day,Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees oflast year’s May,No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday;For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way,The shadows are never the same.

“Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags--Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flockof baa-ing sheep:Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn thebleating soul in us to rags,For so He giveth His beloved sleep.Oh! He will take us stripped and done,Driven into His heart. So we are won:Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlastingwings--I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of brokenthings.

But I shall not be in them. Let Him takeThe finer ones, the easier to break.And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours,the perfumes,Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms,In silks and in gem-like wines;Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shinesAnd overhead the lancet-window glowsWith golds and crimsons you could almost drinkTo know how jewels taste, just as I used to thinkThere was the scent in every red and yellow roseOf all the sunsets. But this place is grey,And much too quiet. No one here,Why, this is awful, this is fear!Nothing to see, no face.Nothing to hear except your heart beating in spaceAs if the world was ended. Dead at last!Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast.These to go on with and alone, to the slow end:No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend:Out of the long procession, black or white or redNot one left now to say “Still I am here, then see you, dear, layhere your head.”Only the doll’s house looking on the ParkTo-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lightsout, very dark.With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids’footsteps overhead,Then utter silence and the empty world--the room--the bed--

The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries outin me,But nearly: very soon to beA handful of forgotten dust--There must be someone. Christ! there must,Tell me there will be someone. Who?If there were no one else, could it be You?

How old was Mary out of whom you castSo many devils? Was she young or perhaps for yearsShe had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that mangoing pastTill suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s houseAnd stood and looked at You through tears.I think she must have known by thoseThe thing, for what it was that had come to her.For some of us there is a passion, I supposeSo far from earthly cares and earthly fearsThat in its stillness you can hardly stirOr in its nearness, lift your hand,So great that you have simply got to standLooking at it through tears, through tearsThen straight from these there broke the kiss,I think You must have known by thisThe thing, for what it was, that had come to You:She did not love You like the rest,It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best,She gave you something altogether new.And through it all, from her, no word,She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard:Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair,Or by the wet cheek lying there,And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all throughthe dayThat You can change the things for which we care,But even You, unless You kill us, not the way.

This, then was peace for her, but passion too.I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew,The only one that I would care to takeInto the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards,to wake.Almost as happy as the carven deadIn some dim chancel lying head by headWe slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through--One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind ourlips was endless life,Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Areyou there?”And lie still, listening to the wind outside, amongthe firs.

So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her ofnight and day,It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither lifenor death nor any other thing can take away:But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dreamcould she have cared so much?She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards,but first, the touch.

And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneaththe treesOf Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyesfor tears,And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did,remember these,Though they lived there a thousand years.Outside, too gravely looking at me, He seems to stand,And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit cameUnwillingly back, what could it claimOf those calm eyes, that quiet speech,Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach,The scarred, not quite human hand?--Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginingsWhen it has learned so long not to think, not to be,Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of thingsThat I shall not see!

I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head:When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead:And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bedThinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said,He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt! And most of all in Holy WeekWhen there was no one else to seeI used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly,If He had ever seemed to notice meOr, if, for once, He would only speak.