Maryland, my Maryland, and other poems/The Oriel Window
POEMS
SENTIMENTAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
PART SECOND
Beginning with "The Oriel Window", ending with "Resurgam"
THE ORIEL WINDOW
I pray in the country church, alas!
With missal and mind contrary;
And in spite of the hymn and the blessed Mass,
In spite of my Ave Mary,
My fancies are drowned in the faces around,
In spite of my Ave Mary!
The bluffs, the breeze, the bulwark trees,
Are grand and glad and holy yet;
The river as proudly seeks the seas
As it did in the days of Joilet—
It’s wave-lips stirr’d with the babble of a bird
As a psalm and a psalter for Joilet.
And then uprolled from the rafter’s mold,
Come the dear ones, the departed—
The fair and old ’neath the marigold,
The bold and the broken-hearted—
Till I shudder to think how we rabble on the brink
Of the early broken-hearted.
In mystic trance of my old Romance,
I let all my sorrow and sin go;
Forgetting the graves as they glance and dance
Down—down through the ghastly window—
With column and cross and banners of moss,
Down—down through the Oriel Window.
A purple band from the Phantom Land,
Come the idol-gods I cherished,
And lo! they stand by a throne of sand,
With palsied brows and perished—
And scoop from the shore of the sea no more
The shells of the Past and Perished.
But from those shells ring passion bells,
Till my soul from its sacred duty
Is ravished along with an earthly song,
But a song of love and beauty,
Till the air is aglow with lustrous hair
And dark-eyed songs of beauty.
She kneels in a nook by the dusty choir,
With aspect lost and lornful;
My breast is gored with spears of fire
To see her looking so mournful—
Ah, ’tis not meet that one so sweet
Should ever be moody and mournful.
She tells, I wist, the beads on her wrist,
With a gentle, lyrical motion;
And she seems in a mist when the Eucharist
Is soared for the people’s devotion;
While a glittering crown for the head bowed down
Is the meed of her dear devotion.
Have you come in the guise of Paradise
Our heart-troth to dissever?
In tears, for the lonesome, bitter years,
Would you woo me back forever?
Oh, speak, love, speak what your sad eyes seek,
And win me back forever!
Both overthrown, we both have known
How the chains of mortality clank ill—
But tonight, tonight a vow we’ll plight,
To make our wild hearts tranquil;
While the flambeaux shine over thine and mine
Untroubled, untortured and tranquil.
*********
She kneels in a nook by the dusty choir,
Shakes the bloom from my dream-mimosa,
I rush to the nook in the choir to greet
The Mater Dolorosa!
Nought, nought was there but a sculptured prayer
Of the Mater Dolorosa.
No more in a trance of my old Romance
Shall I let all my sorrow and sin go;
But I’ll join the graves as they glance and dance
Down—down through the ghastly window,
With column and cross, and banners of moss
Down—down through the Oriel Window!
Point Coupee on the Mississippi, 1861.