Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (1097 page)
Read Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) Online
Authors: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
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.
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!
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,
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.
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.
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.
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
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;
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
they suck
This honey that they stored?
Can you
recite
The vantages which each of these has had
And I had not?
Or is the argument
That my Lord Verulam hath written all,
And covers in his wide-embracing self
The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?
You
prate
about
my
learning.
I
would urge
My want of learning rather as a proof
That I am still myself.
Have I not traced
A seaboard to Bohemia, and made
The cannons roar a whole wide century
Before the first was forged?
Think you,
then,
That he, the ever-learned Verulam,
Would have erred thus?
So may my very
faults
In their gross falseness prove that I am true,
And by that falseness gender truth in you.
And what is left?
They say that they
have found
A script, wherein the writer tells my Lord
He is a secret poet.
True enough!
But surely now that secret is o’er past.
Have you not read his poems?
Know
you not
That in our day a learned chancellor
Might better far dispense unjustest law
Than be suspect of such frivolity
As lies in verse?
Therefore his poetry
Was secret.
Now that he is gone
‘Tis so no longer.
You may read his verse,
And judge if mine be better or be worse:
Read
and pronounce!
The
meed
of
praise is thine;
But still let his be his and mine be mine.
I say no more; but how can you for-
swear
Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well;
So, too, the epitaph which still you read?
Think you they faced my sepulchre with
lies —
Gross lies, so evident and palpable
That every townsman must have wot of it,
And not a worshipper within the church
But must have smiled to see the marbled
fraud?
Surely this touches you?
But if by chance
My reasoning still leaves you obdurate,
I’ll lay one final plea.
I pray you look
On my presentment, as it reaches you.
My features shall be sponsors for my fame;
My brow shall speak when Shakespeare’s
voice is dumb,
And be his warrant in an age to come.
1902
They said that it had feet of clay,
That its fall was sure and quick.
In the flames of yesterday
All the clay was burned to brick.
When they carved our epitaph
And marked us doomed beyond recall,
“We are,” we answered, with a laugh,
“The Empire that declines to fall.”
1909
Breathing the stale and stuffy air
Of office or consulting room,
Our thoughts will wander back to where
We heard the low Atlantic boom,
And, creaming underneath our screw,
We watched the swirling waters break,
Silver filagrees on blue
Spreading fan-wise in our wake.
Cribbed within the city’s fold,
Fettered to our daily round,
We’ll conjure up the haze of gold
Which ringed the wide horizon round.
And still we’ll break the sordid day
By fleeting visions far and fair,
The silver shield of Vigo Bay,
The long brown cliff of Finisterre.
Where once the Roman galley sped,
Or Moorish corsair spread his sail,
By wooded shore, or sunlit head,
By barren hill or sea-washed vale
We took our way.
But we can swear,
That many countries we have scanned,
But never one that could compare
With our own island mother-land.
The dream is o’er.
No more we view
The shores of Christian or of Turk,
But turning to our tasks anew,
We bend us to our wonted work.
But there will come to you and me
Some glimpse of spacious days gone
by,
The wide, wide stretches of the sea,
The mighty curtain of the sky,
When, ere the tangled web is reft,
The
kid-gloved
villain
scowls
and
sneers,
And hapless innocence is left
With no assets save sighs and tears,
‘Tis then, just then, that in there stalks
The hero, watchful of her needs;
He talks, Great heavens how he talks!
But we forgive him, for his deeds.
Life is the drama here to-day
And Death the villain of the plot.
It is a realistic play.
Shall it end well or shall it not?
The hero?
Oh, the hero’s part
Is vacant — to be played by you.
Then act it well! An orphan’s heart
May beat the lighter if you do.
From our youth to our age
We have passed each stage
In
old immemorial
order,
From primitive days
Through flowery ways
With love like a hedge as their border.
Ah, youth was a kingdom of joy,
And we were the king and the queen,
When I was a year
Short of thirty, my dear,
And you were just nearing nineteen.
But dark follows light
And day follows night
As the old planet circles the sun;
And nature still traces
Her score on our faces
And tallies the years as they run.
Have they chilled the old warmth in your
heart?
I swear that they have not in mine,
Though I am a year
Short of sixty, my dear,
And you are — well, say thirty-nine.
