The Wooden Horse

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 287, 24 February 1928, Page 14

The Wooden Horse

/in Occasional Column And with ts eat lies about his wooden horse Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course. — J. E. Flecker . Twice within a weevK i have been asked to place the lines “For God still giveth His beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wiils, so best,” each questioner half hesitating and half rejecting the suggestion that they came from “some where In the Bible.” No, they no more come from the Bible than “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” which is Sterne, or I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so. For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a spin; A little soul for a little bears up this ' corpse which is man. So long I endure, no longer; and lajgli not again, neither weep. For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep, which fa Swinburne, comes from the Bible; and yet they all with ter. thousand quiet or ringing splendours of prose and poetry, come from the Bfbfe. Pn case there are searchers

irarching in vain for the exact source of the lines, it may he as well to give ft here. They come from a poem by Henrietta Huxley, written on Browning’s funeral. When her husband, the great scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, died, he asked .hat they should be engraved on his tombstone; and they have their separate currency probably from that fact. A volume of selections from Henrietta Huxley’s verse, with three poems by Huxley himself, was published perhaps 15 or 20 years ago. As it has not been reprinted, one may deduce that not nany people prefer her to John Oxenham, which is a pity. This day within the Abbey, where of old Our Kings are sepulchred, a king of song. Browning, among his peers is laid to rest, Borne to the tomb by loving hearts, and stoled In shining raiment that his geniss wove. No lingering sickness his, with swift surprise Death flashed the Light Eternal in his eyes And blinded Life. In this way he was blest. Perhaps in some far star he now has met Hrs rose of love, his ne’er forgotten wife. In life past death the passion of his life. And they again as once in spirit blent Look thro* the veil this day and hear the fret Of many feet, the swelling music spent On mourning listeners. With voices low Chanting her hymn, the boys sing as they go, •He giveth His beloved sleep.’* What tho’ The perishable forms these two once wore Tn different lands lie sundered by the sea; Their spirits smile at this oar fond regret; •What matters anything since we have met?” They radiant sing together. Oh, what Can love, long parted, from the Eternal crave? And if there be nc meeting past the grave. If all is darkness, silence yet, *tis rest. Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, For God still giveth His beloved sleep. And if an endless sleep He wills—so best. Once the mood of epitaph, dirge and elegy catches one—and how easy the yielding to it, as it laps one round, sadly and gently —it is like the lover in the poem by Bridges: “I have thee by the hands, and will not let thee go.” Mrs H xley s poem turned up by coincidence in a week when Humbert Wolfe's “Others Abide” had already fent me from “Golden lads and girls all must. As chimney sweepers, come to dust” to “Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee”— So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing,— Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed ! Propping thy wise, sad head. Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing. So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee? To a world, do I think, that rights the distaste of this? The vision of which I miss. Who weep for the body, and wish hut to warm thee and awaken thee? Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark. Unwilling, alone we embark. And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us. It Is from Bridges's “On a Dead Child.” One section of Mr Wolfe's book — translations from the Greek Anthology—consists of those epitaphs the brevity of which, carved on the little space of a stone, gave us the brevity of verse epigram, piercing in a different way. and so the word itself a new for once thg epigram was

tlmus on "The Dead Neat-herd”: Unshepherded his cattle wander home Knee-deep through snow-drifts. But Thurimachus Sleeps underneath the oak, He will not come This night, or any night, to comfort us. And Pompeius’s, “To Lais Dead”: Lais, who gathered in her narrow hands Hie lilies in all beauty’s fairyland, Has cried the long farewell to love’s delight, To tears and strife, and, in the lampless night, Sees not where high in heaven their courses run The golden-bitted stallions of the sun. And Sappho’s “Timas”: For Timas, that Persephone unwed Lit to the dusty bridal of the dead, The girls who loved her cut their hain and bring This fallen gold, as a last offering. And, lastly, Meleager’s “Irrepar».W* Rose”: Heliodora, this last offering. Poured out from t.he cup of tears, to you I bring Tears on the earth, tears on the grave, the tears Of love, of longing, and all the remembered years, These hitter tears, where in the dark your grace Scatters its unseen alms of loveliness. Rose of the heart, irreparable rose That Death has plucked untimely, thus she goes, And thus, oh earth, of whom all beauty is part, Take this bright flower, and fold her to your heart! Everyone knows Cory’s “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,” lovely throughout, but loveliest of all in its second stanza: And now that thou art lying, my dear old (Parian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long, ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take, and there, miraculously, gleams again through his weeping the smile of Callimachus, remembering “how often you and I had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.” But there is another translation of Cory’s, called “Remember,” from a Greek epigram—and the author of that Greek epigram was Cory! (Is there in English another poem, translated from a foreign original by tho same writer?) Here it is: You conic not, as aforetime, to the headstone every day, And J. who died, I do not chide because, my friend, you play', in playing, think of him who once was kind and dear, And, if you see a beauteous thing, just say, he is nut here. Sir Edward Cook pointed out a few years ago how sharp a contrast there is between the “virile sanity, through all its tenderness,” of Cory’s imitation of the Greek manner of restrained pathos, and the “morbid note” of Christina Rossetti’s “exquisite lines,” also called “Remember”: Remember me when I am gone away Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand. Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay. Remember me when no more day by day You’ll tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understand Tt will be late to counsel then or pray. Yet if you should forget me for a wh ife And afterwards remember, do' not grieve; For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had. Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad. But I think I have a warmer approval for “exquisite” applied to that than for “morbid.” Is that “morbid”

which haunts the heart, stirring equally its longing for remembrance and its aching sense of unworthiness? Christina Rossetti played once more, with lighter fingers, this sad air of remembering and forgetting after death: When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cypress tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet, And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not sec the shadows, 1 shall not feel the rain, I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain; And dreaming though the twilight That does not rise nor set, Haply I may remember. And haply may forget. Did ever poet title and close his last book w’ith more sombre aptnesa than A. E. Housman? The title ia “Last Poems,” the last lines of the last poem are: To air, my ditty, To earth, I. J. H. E. S.