Songs Of The Road - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (distant reading TXT) 📗

should be,
Why you should live with sorrow,
And joy should live with me.


MIND AND MATTER
[89]

Great was his soul and high his aim,
He viewed the world, and he could trace
A lofty plan to leave his name
Immortal 'mid the human race.
But as he planned, and as he worked,
The fungus spore within him lurked.

Though dark the present and the past,
The future seemed a sunlit thing.
Still ever deeper and more vast,
The changes that he hoped to bring.
His was the will to dare and do;
But still the stealthy fungus grew.

[90] Alas the plans that came to nought!
Alas the soul that thrilled in vain!
The sunlit future that he sought
Was but a mirage of the brain.
Where now the wit? Where now the will?
The fungus is the master still.


DARKNESS
[91]

A gentleman of wit and charm,
A kindly heart, a cleanly mind,
One who was quick with hand or purse,
To lift the burden of his kind.
A brain well balanced and mature,
A soul that shrank from all things
base,
So rode he forth that winter day,
Complete in every mortal grace.

And then the blunder of a horse,
The crash upon the frozen clods,
And Death? Ah! no such dignity,
But Life, all twisted and at odds!
[92] At odds in body and in soul,
Degraded to some brutish state,
A being loathsome and malign,
Debased, obscene, degenerate.

Pathology? The case is clear,
The diagnosis is exact;
A bone depressed, a haemorrhage,
The pressure on a nervous tract.
Theology? Ah, there's the rub!
Since brain and soul together fade,
Then when the brain is dead enough!
Lord help us, for we need Thine aid!


III MISCELLANEOUS VERSES
[93]


A WOMAN'S LOVE
[95]

I am not blind I understand;
I see him loyal, good, and wise,
I feel decision in his hand,
I read his honour in his eyes.
Manliest among men is he
With every gift and grace to clothe
him;
He never loved a girl but me —
And I I loathe him! loathe him!

The other! Ah! I value him
Precisely at his proper rate,
A creature of caprice and whim,
Unstable, weak, importunate.
[96] His thoughts are set on paltry gain —
You only tell me what I see —
I know him selfish, cold and vain;
But, oh! he's all the world to me!


BY THE NORTH SEA
[97]

Her cheek was wet with North Sea spray,
We walked where tide and shingle
meet;
The long waves rolled from far away
To purr in ripples at our feet.
And as we walked it seemed to me
That three old friends had met that
day,
The old, old sky, the old, old sea,
And love, which is as old as they.

Out seaward hung the brooding mist
We saw it rolling, fold on fold,
[98] And marked the great Sun alchemist
Turn all its leaden edge to gold,
Look well, look well, oh lady mine,
The gray below, the gold above,
For so the grayest life may shine
All golden in the light of love.


DECEMBER'S SNOW
[99]

The bloom is on the May once more,
The chestnut buds have burst anew;
But, darling, all our springs are o'er,
'Tis winter still for me and you.
We plucked Life's blossoms long ago
What's left is but December's snow.

But winter has its joys as fair,
The gentler joys, aloof, apart;
The snow may lie upon our hair
But never, darling, in our heart.
Sweet were the springs of long ago
But sweeter still December's snow.

[100] Yes, long ago, and yet to me
It seems a thing of yesterday;
The shade beneath the willow tree,
The word you looked but feared to say.
Ah! when I learned to love you so
What recked we of December's snow?

But swift the ruthless seasons sped
And swifter still they speed away.
What though they bow the dainty head
And fleck the raven hair with gray?
The boy and girl of long ago
Are laughing through the veil of snow.


SHAKESPEARE'S EXPOSTULATION
[101]

Masters, I sleep not quiet in my grave,
There where they laid me, by the Avon
shore,
In that some crazy wights have set it forth
By arguments most false and fanciful,
Analogy and far-drawn inference,
That Francis Bacon, Earl of Verulam
(A man whom I remember in old days,
A learned judge with sly adhesive palms,
To which the suitor's gold was wont to
stick) —
That this same Verulam had writ the plays
Which were the fancies of my frolic brain.
What can they urge to dispossess the crown
[102] Which all my comrades and the whole loud
world
Did in my lifetime lay upon my brow?
Look straitly at these arguments and see
How witless and how fondly slight they be.
Imprimis, they have urged that, being
born
In the mean compass of a paltry town,
I could not in my youth have trimmed
my mind
To such an eagle pitch, but must be found,
Like the hedge sparrow, somewhere near
the ground.
Bethink you, sirs, that though I was
denied
The learning which in colleges is found,
Yet may a hungry brain still find its fo
Wherever books may lie or men may be;
[103] And though perchance by Isis or by Cam
The meditative, philosophic plant
May best luxuriate; yet some would say
That in the task of limning mortal life
A fitter preparation might be made
Beside the banks of Thames. And then
again,
If I be suspect, in that I was not
A fellow of a college, how, I pray,
Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest,
Whose measured verse treads with as
proud a gait
As that which was my own? Whence did