Lonely, Amid The Living Crowds As Dead

      After reading a quite brilliant post by RK on his site, I followed a link to the poem "The Church of a Dream" by the Victorian poet Lionel Johnson (1867-1902). It's a poem of which I'd never heard (though I had read Johnson some years ago for one reason or another), and it's lovely, particularly the last two lines. It made me dig through some of my anthologies to dig up other Johnson poems, in part because it seemed to me so odd that I'd never come across that poem, and to my surprise the poem was not to be found anywhere. It's worthwhile, though, to invoke some of the other poems by Johnson, a poet almost never taught anymore and almost certainly one of those poets bound to fall through the cracks in one's reading. Some of you may find the religiousity of some of the poems discomforting, but I'd suggest that any such discomfort is more a problem on your (our?) part than Johnson's. So, be patient with him, and in some of the poems you might find some lovely imagery and some fine phrasing that is all too rare these days.

Mystic And Cavalier

Go from me; I am one of those, who fall.
What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all,
In my sad company? Before the end,
      Go from me, dear my friend!

Yours are the victories of light: your feet
Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet.
But after warfare in a mourning gloom,
      I rest in clouds of doom.

Have you not read so, looking in these eyes?
Is it the common light of the pure skies,
Lights up their shadowy depths? The end is set:
      Though the end be not yet.

When gracious music stirs, and all is bright,
And beauty triumphs through a courtly night;
When I too joy, a man like other men:
      Yet, am I like them then?

And in the battle, when the horsemen sweep
Against a thousand deaths, and fall on sleep:
Who ever sought that sudden calm, if I
      Sought not? Yet could not die.

Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere:
Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear?
Only the mists, only the weeping clouds:
      Dimness and airy shrouds.

Beneath what angels are at work? What powers
Prepare the secret of the fatal hours?
See! the mists tremble, and the clouds are stirred:
      When comes the calling word?

The clouds are breaking from the crystal ball,
Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall.
When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep,
      My spirit may have sleep.

O rich and sounding voices of the air!
Interpreters and prophets of despair:
Priests of a fearful sacrement! I come,
      To make with you mine home.
                                                (1889)

The Precept Of Silence

I know you: solitary griefs,
Desolate passions, aching hours!
I know you, tremulous beliefs,
Agonized hopes, and ashen flowers!

The winds are sometimes sad to me;
The starry spaces, full of fear:
Mine is the sorrow on the sea,
And mine the sigh of places drear.

Some players upon plaintive strings
Publish their wistfulness abroad:
I have not spoken of these things,
Save to one man, and unto God.
                                                (1893)

The Age Of A Dream

[sometimes dedicated "To Christopher Whall"]

Imageries of dreams reveal a gracious age:
Black armour, falling lace, and altar lights at morn.
The courtesy of Saints, their gentleness and scorn,
Lights on an earth more fair, than shone from Plato's page:
The courtesy of knights, fair calm and sacred rage:
The courtesy of love, sorrow for love's sake borne.
Vanished, those high conceits! Desolate and forlorn,
We hunger against hope for that lost heritage.

Gone now, the carven work! Ruined, the golden shrine!
No more the glorious organs pour their voice divine;
No more rich frankincense drifts through the Holy Place:
Now from the broken tower, what solemn bell still tolls,
Mourning what piteous death? Answer, O saddened souls!
Who mourn the death of beauty and the death of grace.

                                                (1890)

And then there's this poem, a beautiful, sad, haunting piece, which for reasons beyond immediate explanation I admire greatly and thinkn probably more powerful now than it was when it was written, especially in this day and age in which we fortify ourselves against the past with callousness and indifference. The poem was written with an elegaic quality, but it seems to me its mourning is stoic in its own, and more powerful for its memorial of an era more acute to subtlety. Maybe it's me, but I see a correspondence here between the sad woman of Johnson's poem and the singing women in Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West" and Conrad Aiken's The Divine Pilgrim. Whether the latter two poets were rewriting Johnson, I do not know. The beauty of Johnson's poem is its simplicity; even the most immature undergraduate could read this poem and gather its meaning, or so I'd like to think, however naively.

A Stranger

To Will Rothenstein

Her face was like sad things: was like the lights
Of a great city, seen from far off fields,
Or seen from the sea: sad things, as are the fires
Lit in a land of furnaces by night:
Sad things, as are the reaches of a stream
Flowing beneath a golden moon alone.
And her clear voice, full of remembrances,
Came like faint music down the distant air.
As though she had a spirit of dead joy
About her, looked the sorrow of her ways:
If light there be, the dark hills are to climb
First: and if be calm, far over the long sea.
Fallen from all the world apart she seemed,
Into a silence and a memory.
What had the thin hands done, that now they strained
Together in such passion? And those eyes,
What saw they long ago, that now they dreamed
Along the busy streets, blind but to dreams?
Her white lips mocked the world, and all therein:
She had known more than this; she wanted not
This, who had known the past so great a thing.
Moving about our ways, herself she moved
In things done, years remembered, places gone.
Lonely, amid the living crowds as dead,
She walked with wonderful and sad regard:
With us, her passing image: but herself
Far over the dark hills and the long sea.

                                                (1889/97)

More of Johnson's poems-- including a few of the ones included here-- can be found at this site. See also some his more explcitly "Irish" poems here and here. It's a humbling post-script to note that Johnson died at 35, only a mere five years older than myself. I really need to stop observing such things.

      More happily, though: there's precious little better than rediscovering a poet one had long-forgotten, or a poet one had not adequately appreciated before.