Rejected Sonnets

By Victor B. Neuburg

Published in the Agnostic Journal

London, England

24 November 1906

(page 332)

Anima Abitura

How stern and strong the sense that still doth brood;

Grief's heavy-lidded, luminous, clouded eyes

In pain and wonder half materialise

From out of the dark the spirit that is woo'd

By silence from the world's deep solitude;

As a dank vapour from the earth doth rise

Death's presence, while the living angel flies.

Invisibly downward o'er the house imbued.

Now faintlier with the elemental strife.

Silence and light make him who passes mute;

No word he knows, no word is his to say,

But, hovering o'er the broken house of life,

He sees its runs in the light of day,

And lo! the flower of life in death hath root.

James Thompson [B. V.]

Singer of Dürer's matchless Queen of Pain,

Incomparable song was thine to pour

Into thy starless heaven; let them adore

The sunshine who have never known blind rain

And stormy skies; who never loved in vain

Know not the enchanted land of Nevermore

Where darkness broods in sorrow, and the roar

Breaks louder on the strand of life's dark main.

Son of the luminous Dark, intensest woe

Loosened thy tongue; thy drooping lips have paid

The debt of agony that thou did'st owe

To the sad earth that bore thee: thou art laid

Within her bosom. Be thou not afraid,—

Not any pain is thine e'er more to know.

Herrick

Lyrist light-lipped, half Pagan, half devout,

With smiling scholar-eyes, the centuries

Bear thy bright notes upon the fragrant breeze;

Thou standest yet thy garden's gate without,—

Fair Julian, sweet Bianca, swell the rout

Of maidens laughing 'neath green summer-trees;

Gentle Perilia will thy hands swift seize,

In mirthful grace leading thee all about.

The sweet-browed Horace lived again in thee;—

Fair Devon held the famous Sabine farm:

Thy mellow'd singing lends the minstrelsy

Of England's golden age a silver charm,—

Thy lips the easy notes still yielding free,

A laughing English maiden on each arm.

May but thou arisen, and dost brood

In happy wonder o'er the railing earth,

Thine eyes alight with pity and with mirth

Within thy heaven's joyous solitude,

Whence earth and all her wonders may be viewed,

In all their littleness and all their girth

Passing the gates of death, the gates of birth:

Wilt thou again be tempted to intrude?

Methinks some future day shall see thee born

Purged of thy halo, with sunlit eyes,

And lips Apollo symbol'd to the morn,—

Some happier planet ruling in thy skies,

And, save for thy forgetting, yet more wise

Thou when thou passèd'st onward so forlorn.

Psyche [original note]

Burns

The rapturous sense of full-strung youth, the glow

Of lyric ardour and of love untamed

Within thy swelling bosom rose and flamed,

Now as the sun-light bright, now fierce as tow

Swift-burning; but thy golden songs' swift flow

Brought quenching to thy fire; well wast thou named,

Singer of love: wherefore should'st thou be blamed,

Whom Nature freely dower'd with joy and woe

More keen than other men's? Who shall repine

If that thou burnéd'st thy fierce youth away?

Thy love is ours, thy melody divine

Phœbus, Apollo, in love's halls did play,

And lo! as Mercury thou madest thine

His lyre, and fled'st to Scotia 'fore the day.

Russia in Tumultu

The curtain lifts a moment, when the wind

Rages too fiercely, and the swirling dust

Raised by the wanton stirring of wild lust

And fearful up-pent passion makes men blind

To the fierce battles that are waged behind;

With aching brows we gaze, with shattered trust

Menarch and helot seeing hellward thrust,

In hate and bitter jest their arms entwined.

Raucous and shrill, the warning voice of Doom

Urges them on impartial as they sway

Hot-breathed, oblivious, o'er the reeking fume

Of wasted blood and war-compounded clay:

The mocking brilliance of the rising day

Shall rise upon a grave,—the grave of whom?

TÄnnhauser

The Pilgrim's Chorus

Dim-drawn and throbbing is the passioned lyre,

Tuned to the theme eternal, love in pain,

Wild sense of life and love at war in vain,

Far-parted by the anguish of white fire;

The spirit's sense drugged in a clinging mire

Of slime and agony,—hot hands insane

Letting the fabled gold slip, slip like rain

Through fingers shaken by infinite desire,—

Master! Thou hast bewitched us; thou art wise,

But not in earthly wisdom: cease, O cease

To bear this shameful thing before our eyes.

Give thou the fearsome stream its last release.

In pain unspeakable the throbbing dies,

And, lost in deathless passion, findeth peace.

[420]