TO E. FITZGERALD

This introduction to the poem that follows was apparently written on or about March 31, 1883, when Fitzgerald was seventy-five years of age. He was rather more than a year older than Tennyson, who was born August 6, 1809. He died June 14, 1883, before the volume containing the poem was published.

OLD FITZ, who from your suburb grange, Where once I tarried for a while, Glance at the wheeling orb of change, And greet it with a kindly smile; Whom yet I see as there you sit

Beneath your sheltering garden-tree, And watch your doves about you flit,

And plant on shoulder, hand, and knee,

Or on your head their rosy feet,
As if they knew your diet spares
Whatever moved in that full sheet
Let down to Peter at his
prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and
grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,

And seem'd at first 'a thing enskied,'
As Shakespeare has it, airy-light

To float above the ways of men, Then fell from that half-spiritual height Chill'd, till I tasted flesh again One night when earth was winter-black, And all the heavens flash'd in frost; And on me, half-asleep, came back That wholesome heat the blood had lost,

And set me climbing icy capes

And glaciers, over which there roll'd

To meet me long-arm'd vines with grapes
Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold
Without, and warmth within me, wrought
To mould the dream; but none can say
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought
Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun

Which cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar; and your Omar drew

Full-handed plaudits from our best In modern letters, and from two,

Old friends outvaluing all the rest, Two voices heard on earth no more; But we old friends are still alive, And I am nearing seventy-four,

While you have touch'd at seventy-five, And so I send a birthday line

Of greeting; and my son, who dipt In some forgotten book of mine

With sallow scraps of manuscript, And dating many a year ago,

Has hit on this, which you will take, My Fitz, and welcome, as I know,

Less for its own than for the sake Of one recalling gracious times,

When, in our younger London days, You found some merit in my rhymes, And I more pleasure in your praise.

Thy torch of life in darkness, rather - thou Rejoicing that the sun, the moon, the stars Send no such light upon the ways of men As one great deed.

Thither, my son, and there Thou, that hast never known the embrace of love, 158 Offer thy maiden life.

This useless hand!
I felt one warm tear fall upon it. Gone!
He will achieve his greatness.
But for me,

I would that I were gather'd to my rest,
And mingled with the famous kings of old,
On whom about their ocean-islets flash
The faces of the Gods-the wise man's
word,

Here trampled by the populace underfoot, There crown'd with worship-and these eyes will find

The men I knew, and watch the chariot whirl

About the goal again, and hunters race 169
The shadowy lion, and the warrior-kings,
In height and prowess more than human,
strive

Again for glory, while the golden lyre
Is ever sounding in heroic ears
Heroic hymns, and every way the vales
Wind, clouded with the grateful incense-
fume

Of those who mix all odor to the Gods
On one far height in one far-shining fire.

And while I fancied that my friend For this brief idyll would require

A less diffuse and opulent end, And would defend his judgment well, If I should deem it over niceThe tolling of his funeral bell

Broke on my Pagan Paradise, And mixt the dream of classic times,

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And all the phantoms of the dream, With present grief, and made the rhymes, That miss'd his living welcome, seem Like would-be guests an hour too late, Who down the highway moving on With easy laughter find the gate

Is bolted, and the master gone.
Gone into darkness, that full light
Of friendship! past, in sleep, away
By night, into the deeper night!
The deeper night? A clearer day

190

HIDE me, mother! my fathers belong'd to the church of old,

I am driven by storm and sin and death to the ancient fold,

I cling to the Catholic Cross once more, to the Faith that saves.

My brain is full of the crash of wrecks, and the roar of waves,

My life itself is a wreck, I have sullied a noble name,

I am flung from the rushing tide of the world as a waif of shame,

I am roused by the wail of a child, and awake to a livid light,

And a ghastlier face than ever has haunted a grave by night.

I never have wrong'd his heart, I have only wounded his pride

Spain in his blood and the Jew - dark-visaged, stately and tall —

A princelier-looking man never stept thro' a prince's hall.

And who, when his anger was kindled, would venture to give him the nay? And a man men fear is a man to be loved by the women, they say.

And I could have loved him too, if the blossom can dote on the blight,

Or the young green leaf rejoice in the frost that sears it at night;

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He would open the books that I prized, and toss them away with a yawn, Repell'd by the magnet of Art to the which my nature was drawn,

The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr'd,

The music that robes it in language beneath and beyond the word!

My Shelley would fall from my hands whea he cast a contemptuous glance From where he was poring over his Tables of Trade and Finance;

My hands, when I heard him coming, would drop from the chords or the keys, But ever I fail'd to please him, however I strove to please

All day long far-off in the cloud of the city, and there

Lost, head and heart, in the chances of dividend, consol, and share — 30 And at home if I sought for a kindly caress, being woman and weak, His formal kiss fell chill as a flake of snow on the cheek.

And so, when I bore him a girl, when I held it aloft in my joy,

He look'd at it coldly, and said to me, 'Pity it is n't a boy.'

would flee from the storm within,

I would make my life one prayer for a soul

that died in his sin,

10

I was the tempter, mother, and mine was the deeper fall;

I will sit at your feet, I will hide my face, I will tell you all.

II

for, glanced at in scorn!

The child that I felt I could die for as

if she were basely born!

I had lived a wild-flower life, I was planted

now in a tomb;

The daisy will shut to the shadow, I closed my heart to the gloom;

I threw myself all abroad - I would play my part with the young

39

I caught the wreath that was flung.