Name: In the shadows
Author: David Gray

INTRODUCTION

It is remarkable how often Poetry and Consumption have gone together. Is there some unsuspected connection, one feels tempted to ask, between the bacillus tuberculosis and the cupido carmina scribendi? The question is not without interest. Not a few poets “whom the gods love” have died young. But among all those cut off in early life the figure of David Gray, author of The Luggie and other Poems, seems to me to stand pathetically alone. Bacillus tuberculosis is usually a deceptive guest. But in David Gray, spes phthisica was notably absent.

Gray’s poems are inseparably connected with his life. The son of a poor handloom weaver, he was born near Kirkintilloch in 1838, and died at the age of twenty-three. By pupil-teaching he supported himself for four sessions at Glasgow University; then, bent on a literary life, he turned to London.

He had arranged with his friend, Robert Buchanan, to leave Glasgow at a certain hour; but, unfortunately missing each other, they travelled by different trains. On arriving in London alone, the author of The Luggie wandered aimlessly about for hours. It was a raw, misty afternoon, and never perhaps did a more disconsolate figure pace the pavements of the city of his dreams. Carrying a carpet-bag—filled with MSS.—and with but a few shillings in his pocket, the homeless poet sauntered about in the mist and rain, till at last, footsore and weary, he turned into Hyde Park to spend the night. One cannot tell the thoughts that passed through his mind as he strolled up and down the dismal Park “from weary chime to chime”; but it is known that he contracted a violent cold which settled on his lungs, and brought about the consumption of which he died.

The two friends did not meet until upwards of a week after their arrival in London. Thereafter they lived together in what Gray calls “the dear, old, ghastly, bankrupt garret.” Days and nights were spent in polishing the poems meant to conquer literary London. But the labour was in vain. He knocked at the doors of many influential editors, but failed to gain admission.

In the meantime, his disease had made rapid progress. After a brief residence in the south of England without benefit, Gray returned to Kirkintilloch to die. “I wish to die there,” he wrote to his mother from Torquay; and so, in due time—the mere wreck of what he once was—he turned up at his father’s house, never to leave it alive again. He lingered for some months, and the thirty sonnets here reprinted were written while he lay waiting for death.

Through the exertions of friends, his MSS. were sent to the printer; and, the day before his death, he had the satisfaction of holding in his hand a specimen page of The Luggie in print. On the following morning he died. He was laid to rest beside the Luggie, “now numbered with the streams illustrious in Scottish song.” The year after his death his poems were given to the world. And thus Fame, which had spurned the poet during his lifetime, laid her wreath upon his humble grave.

David Gray’s dying sonnets speak for themselves. Technically they may not fulfil all the requirements of the perfect sonnet, but they are so pathetic in their homeliness, so genuine in feeling, and contain such delicate flights of imaginative fancy that they cannot be read without unstinted admiration. They touch the heart, cling to the memory, and are profoundly human. In the Shadows is, I think, the most poignantly impressive “swan-song” ever written by poet. Sonnet No. 5 pierces the soul. In anticipation of death the poet describes his broken life, metaphor after metaphor succeeding each other with almost bewildering rapidity. Apart from its intrinsic merit, Sonnet No. 11 is interesting as the last sad memorial of the poet’s friendship with Robert Buchanan. Especially noteworthy are Sonnets Nos. 12, 16, and 21: No. 12 with its inspiring lesson of “Sorrow and Death” as ministers to raise humanity heavenward; No. 16, ending on a note of manly fortitude; and No. 21, presenting an unforgettable picture of the promise of life’s day overcast and finally sinking into the gloom of night. In its autumnal tenderness Sonnet No. 19 is very beautiful. It is a sonnet of rare loveliness, providing a mournful commentary on the reflection of the Hebrew prophet that “we all do fade as a leaf.”

Gray’s reverent love of Nature and of his mother runs as an undercurrent through the whole series. In the Shadows reveals a personality charming and spiritual, clinging to earth yet resigning itself to inevitable destiny. It is also unquestionably the work of a true poetic artist whose sun went down long before noon. And yet, as an able critic has said, “he lived long enough to give evidence of a warm heart and a sensitive nature; of a keen sympathy with all that is true, tender, and beautiful; of poetic insight, and considerable power of expression. He was born a poet as surely as the skylark is born to mount and sing.” In conception and execution, in simple pathos and real sincerity of feeling, his sonnets appeal alike to head and heart. They strike a note of pity in every compassionate breast, all the deeper when one remembers that the youthful author, in his own words:

“Died, not knowing what it was to live.”

In the earlier years of his “poor meagre life,” Gray hoped to win an imperishable name. His poems, when they appeared, met with a generous reception. Three editions were issued in 1862, 1874, and 1886—copies of which are now practically unprocurable. In these circumstances I ventured to suggest to Mr. Melrose the propriety of publishing a new edition; but, while rejecting the idea, he fixed upon In the Shadows to be issued in an unpretentious form as a separate publication. I most earnestly trust that Mr. Melrose’s intuition may prove prophetic of a revived interest in David Gray, and that the intensely human note of the sonnets, as well as their unusual beauty, may bring that lasting fame to the poet which he once so confidently anticipated.

JOHN FERGUSON.

February 1920.

IN THE SHADOWS

INDUCTION

Enter, scared mortal! and in awe behold

The chancel of a dying poet’s mind,

Hung round, ah! not adorned, with pictures bold

And quaint, but roughly touched for the refined.

The chancel, not the charnel house! For I

To God have raised a shrine immaculate

Therein, whereon His name to glorify,

And daily mercies meekly celebrate.

So in, scared breather! here no hint of death—

Skull or cross-bones suggesting sceptic fear;

Yea, rather calmer beauty, purer breath

Inhaled from a diviner atmosphere.

I

If it must be; if it must be, O God!

That I die young, and make no further moans;

That, underneath the unrespective sod,

In unescutcheoned privacy, my bones

Shall crumble soon,—then give me strength to bear

The last convulsive throe of too sweet breath!

I tremble from the edge of life, to dare

The dark and fatal leap, having no faith,

No glorious yearning for the Apocalypse;

But, like a child that in the night-time cries

For light, I cry; forgetting the eclipse

Of knowledge and our human destinies.

O peevish and uncertain soul! obey

The law of life in patience till the Day.

II

“Whom the gods love die young.” The thought is old;

And yet it soothed the sweet Athenian mind.

I take it with all pleasure, overbold,

Perhaps, yet to its virtue much inclined

By an inherent love for what is fair.

This is the utter poetry of woe—

That the bright-flashing gods should cure despair

By love, and make youth precious here below.

I die, being young; and, dying, could become

A pagan, with the tender Grecian trust.

Let death, the fell anatomy, benumb

The hand that writes, and fill my mouth with dust—

Chant no funereal theme, but, with a choral

Hymn, O ye mourners! hail immortal youth auroral!

III

With the tear-worthy four, consumption killed

In youthful prime, before the nebulous mind

Had its symmetric shapeliness defined,

Had its transcendent destiny fulfilled—

May future ages grant me gracious room,

With Pollok, in the voiceless solitude

Finding his holiest rapture, happiest mood;

Poor White for ever poring o’er the tomb;

With Keats, whose lucid fancy mounting far

Saw heaven as an intenser, a more keen

Redintegration of the Beauty seen

And felt by all the breathers on this star;

With gentle Bruce, flinging melodious blame

Upon the Future for an uncompleted name.

IV

Oh many a time with Ovid have I borne

My father’s vain, yet well-meant reprimand,

To leave the sweet-air’d, clover-purpled land

Of rhyme—its Lares loftily forlorn,

With all their pure humanities unworn—

To batten on the bare Theologies!

To quench a glory lighted at the skies,

Fed on one essence with the silver morn,

Were of all blasphemies the most insane.

So deeplier given to the delicious spell

I clung to thee, heart-soothing Poesy!

Now on a sick-bed rack’d with arrowy pain

I lift white hands of gratitude, and cry,

Spirit of God in Milton! was it well?

V

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,

There came arterial blood, and with a sigh

Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,

That drop is my death-warrant: I must die.

Poor meagre life is mine, meagre and poor!

Rather a piece of childhood thrown away;

An adumbration faint; the overture

To stifled music; year that ends in May;

The sweet beginning of a tale unknown;

A dream unspoken; promise unfulfilled;

A morning with no noon, a rose unblown—

All its deep rich vermilion crushed and killed

I’ th’ bud by frost:—Thus in false fear I cried,

Forgetting that to abolish death Christ died.

VI

Sweetly, my mother! Go not yet away—

I have not told my story. Oh, not yet,

With the fair past before me, can I lay

My cheek upon the pillow to forget.

O sweet, fair past, my twenty years of youth

Thus thrown away, not fashioning a man;

But fashioning a memory, forsooth!

More feminine than follower of Pan.

O God! let me not die for years and more!

Fulfil Thyself, and I will live then surely

Longer than a mere childhood. Now heart-sore,

Weary, with being weary—weary, purely.

In dying, mother, I can find no pleasure

Except in being near thee without measure.

VII

Hew Atlas for my monument; upraise

A pyramid for my tomb, that, undestroyed

By rank, oblivion and the hungry void,

My name shall echo through prospective days.

O careless conqueror! cold, abysmal grave!

Is it not sad—is it not sad, my heart—

To smother young ambition, and depart

Unhonoured and unwilling, like death’s slave?

No rare immortal remnant of my thought

Embalms my life; no poem, firmly reared

Against the shock of time, ignobly feared—

But all my life’s progression come to nought.

Hew Atlas! build a pyramid in a plain!

Oh, cool the fever burning in my brain!

VIII

From this entangling labyrinthine maze

Of doctrine, creed and theory; from vague

Vain speculations; the detested plague

Of spiritual pride, and vile affrays

Sectarian, good Lord, deliver me!

Nature! thy placid monitory glory

Shines uninterrogated, while the story

Goes round of this and that theology,

This creed, and that, till patience close the list.

Once more on Carronben’s wind-shrilling height

To sit in sovereign solitude, and quite

Forget the hollow world—a pantheist

Beyond Bonaventura! This were cheer

Passing the tedious tale of shallow pulpiteer.

IX

A vale of tears, a wilderness of woe,

A sad unmeaning mystery of strife;

Reason with Passion strives, and Feeling ever

Battles with Conscience, clear-eyed arbiter.

Thus spake I in sad mood not long ago,

To my dear father, of this human life,

Its jars and phantasies. Soft answered he,

With soul of love strong as a mountain river:

We make ourselves—Son, you are what you are

Neither by fate nor providence nor cause

External: all unformed humanity

Waiteth the stamp of individual laws;

And as you love and act, the plastic spirit

Doth the impression evermore inherit.

X

Last Autumn we were four, and travelled far

With Phœbe in her golden plenilune,

O’er stubble-fields where sheaves of harvest boon

Stood slanted. Many a clear and stedfast star

Twinkled its radiance thro’ crisp-leaved beeches,

Over the farm to which, with snatches rare

Of ancient ballads, songs and saucy speeches,

We hurried, happy mad. Then each had there

A dove-eyed sister pining for him, four

Fair ladies legacied with loveliness,

Chaste as a group of stars, or lilies blown

In rural nunnery. O God! Thy sore

Strange ways expound. Two to the grave have gone

Without apparent reason more or less.

XI

Now, while the long-delaying ash assumes

The delicate April green, and, loud and clear,

Through the cool, yellow, mellow twilight glooms,

The thrush’s song enchants the captive ear;

Now, while a shower is pleasant in the falling,

Stirring the still perfume that wakes around;

Now, that doves mourn, and from the distance calling,

The cuckoo answers, with a sovereign sound,—

Come, with thy native heart, O true and tried!

But leave all books; for what with converse high,

Flavoured with Attic wit, the time shall glide

On smoothly, as a river floweth by,

Or as on stately pinion, through the grey

Evening, the culver cuts his liquid way.

XII

Why are all fair things at their death the fairest?

Beauty the beautifullest in decay?

Why doth rich sunset clothe each closing day

With ever-new apparelling the rarest?

Why are the sweetest melodies all born

Of pain and sorrow? Mourneth not the dove,

In the green forest gloom, an absent love?

Leaning her breast against that cruel thorn,

Doth not the nightingale, poor bird, complain

And integrate her uncontrollable woe

To such perfection, that to hear is pain?

Thus, Sorrow and Death—alone realities—

Sweeten their ministration, and bestow

On troublous life a relish of the skies!

XIII

And, well-belovèd, is this all, this all?

Gone, like a vapour which the potent morn

Kills, and in killing glorifies! I call

Through the lone night for thee, my dear first-born

Soul-fellow! but my heart vibrates in vain.

Ah! well I know, and often fancy forms

The weather-blown churchyard where thou art lain—

The churchyard whistling to the frequent storms.

But down the valley, by the river side,

Huge walnut-trees—bronze-foliaged, motionless

As leaves of metal—in their shadows hide

Warm nests, low music, and true tenderness.

But thou, betrothed! art far from me, from me.

O heart! be merciful—I loved him utterly.

XIV

Father! when I have passed, with deathly swoon,

Into the ghost-world, immaterial, dim,

O may nor time nor circumstance dislimn

My image from thy memory, as noon

Steals from the fainting bloom the cooling dew!

Like flower, itself completing bud and bell,

In lonely thicket, be thy sorrow true,

And in expression secret. Worse than hell

To see the grave hypocrisy—to hear

The crocodilian sighs of summer friends

Outraging grief’s assuasive, holy ends!

But thou art faithful, father, and sincere;

And in thy brain the love of me shall dwell

Like the memorial music in the curved sea-shell.

XV

From my sick-bed gazing upon the west,

Where all the bright effulgences of day

Lay steeped in sunless vapours, raw and grey,—

Herein (methought) is mournfully exprest

The end of false ambitions, sullen doom

Of my brave hopes, Promethean desires:

Barren and perfumeless, my name expires

Like summer-day setting in joyless gloom.

Yet faint I not in sceptical dismay,

Upheld by the belief that all pure thought

Is deathless, perfect: that the truths out-wrought

By the laborious mind cannot decay,

Being evolutions of that Sovereign Mind

Akin to man’s; yet orbed, exhaustless, undefined.

XVI

The daisy-flower is to the summer sweet,

Though utterly unknown it live and die;

The spheral harmony were incomplete

Did the dew’d laverock mount no more the sky,

Because her music’s linkèd sorcery

Bewitched no mortal heart to heavenly mood.

This is the law of nature, that the deed

Should dedicate its excellence to God,

And in so doing find sufficient meed.

Then why should I make these heart-burning cries,

In sickly rhyme with morbid feeling rife,

For fame and temporal felicities?

Forgetting that in holy labour lies

The scholarship severe of human life.

XVII

O God, it is a terrible thing to die

Into the inextinguishable life;

To leave this known world with a feeble cry,

All its poor jarring and ignoble strife.

O that some shadowy spectre would disclose

The Future, and the soul’s confineless hunger

Satisfy with some knowledge of repose!

For here the lust of avarice waxeth stronger,

Making life hateful; youth alone is true,

Full of a glorious self-forgetfulness:

Better to die inhabiting the new

Kingdom of faith and promise, and confess,

Even in the agony and last eclipse,

Some revelation of the Apocalypse!

XVIII

Wise in his day that heathen emperor,

To whom, each morrow, came a slave, and cried—

“Philip, remember thou must die;” no more.

To me such daily voice were misapplied—

Disease guests with me; and each cough, or cramp,

Or aching, like the Macedonian slave,

Is my memento mori. ’Tis the stamp

Of God’s true life to be in dying brave.

“I fear not death, but dying”⁠[1]⁠—not the long

Hereafter, sweetened by immortal love;

But the quick, terrible last breath—the strong

Convulsion. Oh, my Lord of breath above!

Grant me a quiet end, in easeful rest—

A sweet removal, on my mother’s breast.

XIX

October’s gold is dim—the forests rot,

The weary rain falls ceaseless, while the day

Is wrapp’d in damp. In mire of village way

The hedgerow leaves are stamp’d, and, all forgot,

The broodless nest sits visible in the thorn.

Autumn, among her drooping marigolds,

Weeps all her garnered sheaves and empty folds

And dripping orchards—plundered and forlorn.

The season is a dead one, and I die!

No more, no more for me the spring shall make

A resurrection in the earth and take

The death from out her heart—O God, I die!

The cold throat-mist creeps nearer, till I breathe

Corruption. Drop, stark night, upon my death!

XX

Die down, O dismal day! and let me live.

And come, blue deeps! magnificently strewn

With coloured clouds—large, light and fugitive—

By upper winds through pompous motions blown.

Now it is death in life—a vapour dense

Creeps round my window till I cannot see

The far snow-shining mountains, and the glens

Shagging the mountain-tops. O God! make free

This barren, shackled earth, so deadly cold—

Breathe gently forth Thy spring, till winter flies

In rude amazement, fearful and yet bold,

While she performs her custom’d charities.

I weigh the loaded hours till life is bare—

O God! for one clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet air!

XXI

Sometimes, when sunshine and blue sky prevail—

When spent winds sleep, and, from the budding larch,

Small birds, with incomplete, vague sweetness, hail

The unconfirmed, yet quickening life of March,—

Then say I to myself, half-eased of care,

Toying with hope as with a maiden’s token—

“This glorious, invisible fresh air

Will clear my blood till the disease be broken.”

But slowly, from the wild and infinite west,

Up-sails a cloud, full-charged with bitter sleet.

The omen gives my spirit deep unrest;

I fling aside the hope, as indiscreet—

A false enchantment, treacherous and fair—

And sink into my habit of despair.

XXII

O winter! wilt thou never, never go?

O Summer! but I weary for thy coming;

Longing once more to hear the Luggie flow,

And frugal bees laboriously humming.

Now, the east wind diseases the infirm,

And I must crouch in corners from rough weather.

Sometimes a winter sunset is a charm—

When the fired clouds, compacted, blaze together,

And the large sun dips, red, behind the hills.

I, from my window, can behold this pleasure;

And the eternal moon, what time she fills

Her orb with argent, treading a soft measure,

With queenly motion of a bridal mood,

Through the white spaces of infinitude.

XXIII

Oh, beautiful moon! Oh, beautiful moon! again

Thou persecutest me until I bend

My brow, and soothe the aching of my brain.

I cannot see what handmaidens attend

Thy silver passage as the heaven clears;

For, like a slender mist, a sweet vexation

Works in my heart, till the impulsive tears

Confess the bitter pain of adoration.

Oh, too, too beautiful moon! lift the white shell

Of thy soft splendour through the shining air!

I own the magic power, the witching spell,

And, blinded by thy beauty, call thee fair!

Alas! not often now thy silver horn

Shall me delight with dreams and mystic love forlorn!

XXIV

’Tis April, yet the wind retains its tooth.

I cannot venture in the biting air,

But sit and feign wild trash, and dreams uncouth,

“Stretched on the rack of a too easy chair.”

And when the day has howled itself to sleep,

The lamp is lighted in my little room;

And lowly, as the tender lapwings creep,

Comes my own mother, with her love’s perfume.

O living sons with living mothers! learn

Their worth, and use them gently, with no chiding,

For youth, I know, is quick; of temper stern

Sometimes; and apt to blunder without guiding.

So was I long, but now I see her move,

Transfigured in the radiant mist of love.

XXV

Lying awake at holy eventide,

While in clear mournfulness the throstle’s hymn

Hushes the night, and the great west, grown dim,

Laments the sunset’s evanescent pride:

Lo! I behold an orb of silver brightly

Grow from the fringe of sunset, like a dream

From Thought’s severe infinitude, and nightly

Show forth God’s glory in its sacred gleam.

Ah, Hesper! maidenliest star that ere

Twinkled in firmament! cool gloaming’s prime

Cheerer, whose fairness maketh wondrous fair

Old pastorals, and the Spenserian rhyme:—

Thy soft seduction doth my soul enthral

Like music, with a dying, dying fall!

XXVI

There are three bonnie Scottish melodies,

So native to the music of my soul,

That of its humours they seem prophecies.

The ravishment of Chaucer was less whole,

Less perfect, when the April nightingale

Let itself in upon him. Surely, Lord!

Before whom psaltery and clarichord,

Concentual with saintly song, prevail,

There lurks some subtle sorcery, to Thee

And heaven akin, in each woe-burning air!

Land of the Leal, and Bonnie Bessie Lee,

And Home, Sweet Home, the lilt of love’s despair.

Now, in remembrance even, the feelings speak,

For lo! a shower of grace is on my cheek.

XXVII

“Thou art wearin’ awa’, Jean,

Like snaw when it’s thaw, Jean;

Thou art wearin’ awa’

To the land o’ the leal.”

O the impassable sorrow, mother mine!

Of the sweet, mournful air which, clear and well,

For me thou singest! Never the divine

Mahomedan harper, famous Israfel,

Such rich enchanting luxury of woe

Elicited from all his golden strings!

Therefore, dear singer sad! chant clear and low

And lovingly the bard’s imaginings.

O poet unknown! conning thy verses o’er

In lone, dim places, sorrowfully sweet;

And O musician! touching the quick core

Of pity, when thy skilful closes meet—

My tears confess your witchery as they flow,

Since I, too, wear away like the unenduring snow.

XXVIII

Uplift in unparticipated night

Oh indefinable Being! far retired

From mortal ken in uncreated light:

While demonstrating glories unacquired

When shall the wavering sciences evolve

The infinite secret, Thee? What mind shall scan

The tenour of Thy workmanship, or solve

The dark, perplexing destiny of man?

Oh! in the hereafter border-land of wonder,

Shall the proud world’s inveterate tale be told,

The curtain of all mysteries torn asunder,

The cerements from the living soul unrolled?

Impatient questioner, soon, soon shall death

Reveal to thee these dim phantasmata of faith.

XXIX

And thus proceeds the mode of human life

From mystery to mystery again;

From God to God, thro’ grandeur, grief and strife,

A hurried plunge into the dark inane

Whence we had lately sprung. And is’t for ever?

Ah! sense is blind beyond the gaping clay,

And all the eyes of faith can see it never.

We know the bright-haired sun will bring the day,

Like glorious book of silent prophecy;

Majestic night assume her starry throne;

The wondrous seasons come and go: but we

Die, unto mortal ken for ever gone.

Who shall pry further? who shall kindle light

In the dread bosom of the infinite?

XXX — Footnote: — Transcriber’s Notes

O thou of purer eyes than to behold

Uncleanness! sift my soul, removing all

Strange thoughts, imaginings fantastical,

Iniquitous allurements manifold.

Make it into a spiritual ark; abode

Severely sacred, perfumed, sanctified,

Wherein the Prince of Purities may abide—

The holy and eternal Spirit of God.

The gross, adhesive loathsomeness of sin,

Give me to see. Yet, O far more, far more.

That beautiful purity which the saints adore

In a consummate Paradise within

The Veil,—O Lord, upon my soul bestow,

An earnest of that purity here below.

PRINTED BY
MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED
EDINBURGH

[1] This is a saying of Socrates.

Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text.