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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116130" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Waring</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">[Mr. Alfred Domett, C.M.G., author of "Ranolf and Amohia," full of descriptions of New Zealand scenery.]</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">What's become of Waring<br>Since he gave us all the slip,<br>Chose land-travel or seafaring,<br>Boots and chest or staff and scrip,<br>Rather than pace up and down<br>Any longer London town?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Who'd have guessed it from his lip<br>Or his brow's accustomed bearing,<br>On the night he thus took ship<br>Or started landward?--little caring<br>For us, it seems, who supped together<br>(Friends of his too, I remember)<br>And walked home thro' the merry weather,<br>The snowiest in all December.<br>I left his arm that night myself<br>For what's-his-name's, the new prose-poet<br>Who wrote the book there, on the shelf--<br>How, forsooth, was I to know it<br>If Waring meant to glide away<br>Like a ghost at break of day?<br>Never looked he half so gay!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>III</div><div style="margin:10px 0">He was prouder than the devil:<br>How he must have cursed our revel!<br>Ay and many other meetings,<br>Indoor visits, outdoor greetings,<br>As up and down he paced this London,<br>With no work done, but great works undone,<br>Where scarce twenty knew his name.<br>Why not, then, have earlier spoken,<br>Written, bustled? Who's to blame<br>If your silence kept unbroken?<br>"True, but there were sundry jottings,<br>Stray-leaves, fragments, blurrs and blottings,<br>Certain first steps were achieved<br>Already which (is that your meaning?)<br>Had well borne out whoe'er believed<br>In more to come!" But who goes gleaning<br>Hedgeside chance-glades, while full-sheaved<br>Stand cornfields by him? Pride, o'erweening<br>Pride alone, puts forth such claims<br>O'er the day's distinguished names.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>IV</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Meantime, how much I loved him,<br>I find out now I've lost him.<br>I who cared not if I moved him,<br>Who could so carelessly accost him,<br>Henceforth never shall get free<br>Of his ghostly company,<br>His eyes that just a little wink<br>As deep I go into the merit<br>Of this and that distinguished spirit--<br>His cheeks' raised colour, soon to sink,<br>As long I dwell on some stupendous<br>And tremendous (Heaven defend us!)<br>Monstr'-inform'-ingens-horrend-ous<br>Demoniaco-seraphic<br>Penman's latest piece of graphic.<br>Nay, my very wrist grows warm<br>With his dragging weight of arm.<br>E'en so, swimmingly appears,<br>Through one's after-supper musings,<br>Some lost lady of old years<br>With her beauteous vain endeavour<br>And goodness unrepaid as ever;<br>The face, accustomed to refusings,<br>We, puppies that we were . . . Oh never<br>Surely, nice of conscience, scrupled<br>Being aught like false, forsooth, to?<br>Telling aught but honest truth to?<br>What a sin, had we centupled<br>Its possessor's grace and sweetness!<br>No! she heard in its completeness<br>Truth, for truth's a weighty matter,<br>And truth, at issue, we can't flatter!<br>Well, 'tis done with; she's exempt<br>>From damning us thro' such a sally;<br>And so she glides, as down a valley,<br>Taking up with her contempt,<br>Past our reach; and in, the flowers<br>Shut her unregarded hours.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>V</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Oh, could I have him back once more,<br>This Waring, but one half-day more!<br>Back, with the quiet face of yore,<br>So hungry for acknowledgment<br>Like mine! I'd fool him to his bent.<br>Feed, should not he, to heart's content?<br>I'd say, "to only have conceived,<br>Planned your great works, apart from progress,<br>Surpasses little works achieved!"<br>I'd lie so, I should be believed.<br>I'd make such havoc of the claims<br>Of the day's distinguished names<br>To feast him with, as feasts an ogress<br>Her feverish sharp-toothed gold-crowned child!<br>Or as one feasts a creature rarely<br>Captured here, unreconciled<br>To capture; and completely gives<br>Its pettish humours license, barely<br>Requiring that it lives.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>VI</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Ichabod, Ichabod,<br>The glory is departed!<br>Travels Waring East away?<br>Who, of knowledge, by hearsay,<br>Reports a man upstarted<br>Somewhere as a god,<br>Hordes grown European-hearted,<br>Millions of the wild made tame<br>On a sudden at his fame?<br>In Vishnu-land what Avatar?<br>Or who in Moscow, toward the Czar,<br>With the demurest of footfalls<br>Over the Kremlin's pavement bright<br>With serpentine and syenite,<br>Steps, with five other Generals<br>That simultaneously take snuff,<br>For each to have pretext enough<br>And kerchiefwise unfold his sash<br>Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff<br>To hold fast where a steel chain snaps,<br>And leave the grand white neck no gash?<br>Waring in Moscow, to those rough<br>Cold northern natures born perhaps,<br>Like the lambwhite maiden dear<br>>From the circle of mute kings<br>Unable to repress the tear,<br>Each as his sceptre down he flings,<br>To Dian's fane at Taurica,<br>Where now a captive priestess, she alway<br>Mingles her tender grave Hellenic speech<br>With theirs, tuned to the hailstone-beaten beach<br>As pours some pigeon, from the myrrhy lands<br>Rapt by the whirlblast to fierce Scythian strands<br>Where breed the swallows, her melodious cry<br>Amid their barbarous twitter!<br>In Russia? Never! Spain were fitter!<br>Ay, most likely 'tis in Spain<br>That we and Waring meet again<br>Now, while he turns down that cool narrow lane<br>Into the blackness, out of grave Madrid<br>All fire and shine, abrupt as when there's slid<br>Its stiff gold blazing pall<br>>From some black coffin-lid.<br>Or, best of all,<br>I love to think<br>The leaving us was just a feint;<br>Back here to London did he slink,<br>And now works on without a wink<br>Of sleep, and we are on the brink<br>Of something great in fresco-paint:<br>Some garret's ceiling, walls and floor,<br>Up and down and o'er and o'er<br>He splashes, as none splashed before<br>Since great Caldara Polidore.<br>Or Music means this land of ours<br>Some favour yet, to pity won<br>By Purcell from his Rosy Bowers--<br>"Give me my so-long promised son,<br>Let Waring end what I begun!"<br>Then down he creeps and out he steals<br>Only when the night conceals<br>His face; in Kent 'tis cherry-time,<br>Or hops are picking: or at prime<br>Of March he wanders as, too happy,<br>Years ago when he was young,<br>Some mild eve when woods grew sappy<br>And the early moths had sprung<br>To life from many a trembling sheath<br>Woven the warm boughs beneath;<br>While small birds said to themselves<br>What should soon be actual song,<br>And young gnats, by tens and twelves,<br>Made as if they were the throng<br>That crowd around and carry aloft<br>The sound they have nursed, so sweet and pure,<br>Out of a myriad noises soft,<br>Into a tone that can endure<br>Amid the noise of a July noon<br>When all God's creatures crave their boon,<br>All at once and all in tune,<br>And get it, happy as Waring then,<br>Having first within his ken<br>What a man might do with men:<br>And far too glad, in the even-glow,<br>To mix with the world he meant to take<br>Into his hand, he told you, so--<br>And out of it his world to make,<br>To contract and to expand<br>As he shut or oped his hand.<br>Oh Waring, what's to really be?<br>A clear stage and a crowd to see!<br>Some Garrick, say, out shall not he<br>The heart of Hamlet's mystery pluck?<br>Or, where most unclean beasts are rife,<br>Some Junius--am I right?--shall tuck<br>His sleeve, and forth with flaying-knife!<br>Some Chatterton shall have the luck<br>Of calling Rowley into life!<br>Some one shall somehow run a muck<br>With this old world for want of strife<br>Sound asleep. Contrive, contrive<br>To rouse us, Waring! Who's alive?<br>Our men scarce seem in earnest now.<br>Distinguished names!--but 'tis, somehow,<br>As if they played at being names<br>Still more distinguished, like the games<br>Of children. Turn our sport to earnest<br>With a visage of the sternest!<br>Bring the real times back, confessed<br>Still better than our very best!</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"When I last saw Waring . . ."<br>(How all turned to him who spoke!<br>You saw Waring? Truth or joke?<br>In land-travel or sea-faring?)</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"We were sailing by Triest<br>Where a day or two we harboured:<br>A sunset was in the West,<br>When, looking over the vessel's side,<br>One of our company espied<br>A sudden speck to larboard.<br>And as a sea-duck flies and swims<br>At once, so came the light craft up,<br>With its sole lateen sail that trims<br>And turns (the water round its rims<br>Dancing, as round a sinking cup)<br>And by us like a fish it curled,<br>And drew itself up close beside,<br>Its great sail on the instant furled,<br>And o'er its thwarts a shrill voice cried,<br>(A neck as bronzed as a Lascar's)<br>'Buy wine of us, you English Brig?<br>Or fruit, tobacco and cigars?<br>A pilot for you to Triest?<br>Without one, look you ne'er so big,<br>They'll never let you up the bay!<br>We natives should know best.'<br>I turned, and 'just those fellows' way,'<br>Our captain said, 'The 'long-shore thieves<br>Are laughing at us in their sleeves.'</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III</div><div style="margin:10px 0">"In truth, the boy leaned laughing back;<br>And one, half-hidden by his side<br>Under the furled sail, soon I spied,<br>With great grass hat and kerchief black,<br>Who looked up with his kingly throat,<br>Said somewhat, while the other shook<br>His hair back from his eyes to look<br>Their longest at us; then the boat,<br>I know not how, turned sharply round,<br>Laying her whole side on the sea<br>As a leaping fish does; from the lee<br>Into the weather, cut somehow<br>Her sparkling path beneath our bow<br>And so went off, as with a bound,<br>Into the rosy and golden half<br>O' the sky, to overtake the sun<br>And reach the shore, like the sea-calf<br>Its singing cave; yet I caught one<br>Glance ere away the boat quite passed,<br>And neither time nor toil could mar<br>Those features: so I saw the last<br>Of Waring!"--You? Oh, never star<br>Was lost here but it rose afar!<br>Look East, where whole new thousands are!<br>In Vishnu-land what Avatar?</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Robert+Browning">Robert Browning</a> from <i>Cavalier Tunes</i><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=116130" data-title="Waring de Robert Browning" data-description="[Mr. Alfred Domett, C.M.G., author of "Ranolf and Amohia," full of descriptions of New Zealand scenery.]/I/What's become of Waring/Since he gave us all the slip,/Chose land-travel or seafaring,/Boots and chest or staff and scrip,/Rather than pace ..."></div>
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