Page:Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.djvu/126

Rh And boasting 'I have fairer things than these'

Plashes amidst the billowy apple-trees

His lusty hands, in gusts of scented wind

Swirling out bloom till all the air is blind

With rosy foam and pelting blossom and mists

Of driving vermeil-rain; and, as he lists,

The dainty onyx-coronals deflowers,

A glorious wanton;—all the wrecks in showers

Crowd down upon a stream, and jostling thick

With bubbles bugle-eyed, struggle and stick

On tangled shoals that bar the brook—a crowd

Of filmy globes and rosy floating cloud:—

So those Mermaidens crowded to my rock.

But most in a half-circle watch'd the sun;

And a sweet sadness dwelt on every one;

I knew not why,—but know that sadness dwells

On Mermaids—whether that they ring the knells

Of seamen whelm'd in chasms of the mid-main,

As poets sing; or that it is a pain

To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea,

The miles profound of solid green, and be

With loath'd cold fishes, far from man—or what;—

I know the sadness but the cause know not.

Then they, thus ranged, gan make full plaintively

A piteous Siren sweetness on the sea,

Withouten instrument, or conch, or bell,

Or stretch'd chords tuneable on turtle's shell;

Only with utterance of sweet breath they sung

An antique chaunt and in an unknown tongue.

Now melting upward through the sloping scale

Swell'd the sweet strain to a melodious wail;

Now ringing clarion-clear to whence it rose

Slumber'd at last in one sweet, deep, heart-broken close.

After the relics of his school-poems follow the poems written when an undergraduate at Oxford, of 1862-1868 which there are four in this book—Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 52, all dating about 1866. Of this period some ten or twelve autograph poems exist, the most successful being religious verses worked in Geo. Herbert's manner, and these, I think, have been printed: there are two sonnets in Italian form and Shakespearian mood (refused by 'Cornhill Magazine'); the rest are attempts at