Chapter 6
'Tis the city of Lovers, There many paths meet. Blessed he above others, With faltering feet, Who past its proud spires Intends not nor hears The noise of its lyres Grow faint in his ears! Men reach it through portals of triumph, but leave through a postern of tears.
It was thither, ambitious, We came for Youth's right, When our lips yearned for kisses As moths for the light, When our souls cried for Love As for life-giving rain Wan leaves of the grove, Withered grass of the plain, And our flesh ached for Love-flesh beside it with bitter, intolerable pain.
Under arbor and trellis, Full of flutes, full of flowers, What mad fortunes befell us, What glad orgies were ours! In the days of our youth, In our festal attire, When the sweet flesh was smooth, When the swift blood was fire, And all Earth paid in orange and purple to pavilion the bed of Desire!
The Sultan's Palace
My spirit only lived to look on Beauty's face, As only when they clasp the arms seem served aright; As in their flesh inheres the impulse to embrace, To gaze on Loveliness was my soul's appetite.
I have roamed far in search; white road and plunging bow Were keys in the blue doors where my desire was set; Obedient to their lure, my lips and laughing brow The hill-showers and the spray of many seas have wet.
Hot are enamored hands, the fragrant zone unbound, To leave no dear delight unfelt, unfondled o'er, The will possessed my heart to girdle Earth around With their insatiate need to wonder and adore.
The flowers in the fields, the surf upon the sands, The sunset and the clouds it turned to blood and wine, Were shreds of the thin veil behind whose beaded strands A radiant visage rose, serene, august, divine.
A noise of summer wind astir in starlit trees, A song where sensual love's delirium rose and fell, Were rites that moved my soul more than the devotee's When from the blazing choir rings out the altar bell.
I woke amid the pomp of a proud palace; writ In tinted arabesque on walls that gems o'erlay, The names of caliphs were who once held court in it, Their baths and bowers were mine to dwell in for a day.
Their robes and rings were mine to draw from shimmering trays -- Brocades and broidered silks, topaz and tourmaline -- Their turban-cloths to wind in proud capricious ways, And fasten plumes and pearls and pendent sapphires in.
I rose; far music drew my steps in fond pursuit Down tessellated floors and towering peristyles: Through groves of colonnades fair lamps were blushing fruit, On seas of green mosaic soft rugs were flowery isles.
And there were verdurous courts that scalloped arches wreathed, Where fountains plashed in bowls of lapis lazuli. Through enigmatic doors voluptuous accents breathed, And having Youth I had their Open Sesame.
I paused where shadowy walls were hung with cloths of gold, And tinted twilight streamed through storied panes above. In lamplit alcoves deep as flowers when they unfold Soft cushions called to rest and fragrant fumes to love.
I hungered; at my hand delicious dainties teemed -- Fair pyramids of fruit; pastry in sugared piles. I thirsted; in cool cups inviting vintage beamed -- Sweet syrups from the South; brown muscat from the isles.
I yearned for passionate Love; faint gauzes fell away. Pillowed in rosy light I found my heart's desire. Over the silks and down her florid beauty lay, As over orient clouds the sunset's coral fire.
Joys that had smiled afar, a visionary form, Behind the ranges hid, remote and rainbow-dyed, Drew near unto my heart, a wonder soft and warm, To touch, to stroke, to clasp, to sleep and wake beside.
Joy, that where summer seas and hot horizons shone Had been the outspread arms I gave my youth to seek, Drew near; awhile its pulse strove sweetly with my own, Awhile I felt its breath astir upon my cheek.
I was so happy there; so fleeting was my stay, -- What wonder if, assailed with vistas so divine, I only lived to search and sample them the day When between dawn and dusk the sultan's courts were mine!
Speak not of other worlds of happiness to be, As though in any fond imaginary sphere Lay more to tempt man's soul to immortality Than ripens for his bliss abundant now and here!
Flowerlike I hope to die as flowerlike was my birth. Rooted in Nature's just benignant law like them, I want no better joys than those that from green Earth My spirit's blossom drew through the sweet body's stem.
I see no dread in death, no horror to abhor. I never thought it else than but to cease to dwell Spectator, and resolve most naturally once more Into the dearly loved eternal spectacle.
Unto the fields and flowers this flesh I found so fair I yield; do you, dear friend, over your rose-crowned wine, Murmur my name some day as though my lips were there, And frame your mouth as though its blushing kiss were mine.
Yea, where the banquet-hall is brilliant with young men, You whose bright youth it might have thrilled my breast to know, Drink . . . and perhaps my lips, insatiate even then Of lips to hang upon, may find their loved ones so.
Unto the flush of dawn and evening I commend This immaterial self and flamelike part of me, -- Unto the azure haze that hangs at the world's end, The sunshine on the hills, the starlight on the sea, --
Unto angelic Earth, whereof the lives of those Who love and dream great dreams and deeply feel may be The elemental cells and nervules that compose Its divine consciousness and joy and harmony.
Fragments
I
In that fair capital where Pleasure, crowned Amidst her myriad courtiers, riots and rules, I too have been a suitor. Radiant eyes Were my life's warmth and sunshine, outspread arms My gilded deep horizons. I rejoiced In yielding to all amorous influence And multiple impulsion of the flesh, To feel within my being surge and sway The force that all the stars acknowledge too. Amid the nebulous humanity Where I an atom crawled and cleaved and sundered, I saw a million motions, but one law; And from the city's splendor to my eyes The vapors passed and there was nought but Love, A ferment turbulent, intensely fair, Where Beauty beckoned and where Strength pursued.
II
There was a time when I thought much of Fame, And laid the golden edifice to be That in the clear light of eternity Should fitly house the glory of my name.
But swifter than my fingers pushed their plan, Over the fair foundation scarce begun, While I with lovers dallied in the sun, The ivy clambered and the rose-vine ran.
And now, too late to see my vision, rise, In place of golden pinnacles and towers, Only some sunny mounds of leaves and flowers, Only beloved of birds and butterflies.
My friends were duped, my favorers deceived; But sometimes, musing sorrowfully there, That flowered wreck has seemed to me so fair I scarce regret the temple unachieved.
III
For there were nights . . . my love to him whose brow Has glistened with the spoils of nights like those, Home turning as a conqueror turns home, What time green dawn down every street uprears Arches of triumph! He has drained as well Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried: Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by. This only matters: from some flowery bed, Laden with sweetness like a homing bee, If one have known what bliss it is to come, Bearing on hands and breast and laughing lips The fragrance of his youth's dear rose. To him The hills have bared their treasure, the far clouds Unveiled the vision that o'er summer seas Drew on his thirsting arms. This last thing known, He can court danger, laugh at perilous odds, And, pillowed on a memory so sweet, Unto oblivious eternity Without regret yield his victorious soul, The blessed pilgrim of a vow fulfilled.
IV
What is Success? Out of the endless ore Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold Of passionate memory; to have lived so well That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build And apple flowers unfold, Find not of that dear need that all things tell The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled.
O Love, whereof my boyhood was the dream, My youth the beautiful novitiate, Life was so slight a thing and thou so great, How could I make thee less than all-supreme! In thy sweet transports not alone I thought Mingled the twain that panted breast to breast. The sun and stars throbbed with them; they were caught Into the pulse of Nature and possessed By the same light that consecrates it so. Love!--'tis the payment of the debt we owe The beauty of the world, and whensoe'er In silks and perfume and unloosened hair The loveliness of lovers, face to face, Lies folded in the adorable embrace, Doubt not as of a perfect sacrifice That soul partakes whose inspiration fills The springtime and the depth of summer skies, The rainbow and the clouds behind the hills, That excellence in earth and air and sea That makes things as they are the real divinity.
Thirty Sonnets:
Sonnet I
Down the strait vistas where a city street Fades in pale dust and vaporous distances, Stained with far fumes the light grows less and less And the sky reddens round the day's retreat. Now out of orient chambers, cool and sweet, Like Nature's pure lustration, Dusk comes down. Now the lamps brighten and the quickening town Rings with the trample of returning feet. And Pleasure, risen from her own warm mould Sunk all the drowsy and unloved daylight In layers of odorous softness, Paphian girls Cover with gauze, with satin, and with pearls, Crown, and about her spangly vestments fold The ermine of the empire of the Night.
Sonnet II
Her courts are by the flux of flaming ways, Between the rivers and the illumined sky Whose fervid depths reverberate from on high Fierce lustres mingled in a fiery haze. They mark it inland; blithe and fair of face Her suitors follow, guessing by the glare Beyond the hilltops in the evening air How bright the cressets at her portals blaze. On the pure fronts Defeat ere many a day Falls like the soot and dirt on city-snow; There hopes deferred lie sunk in piteous seams. Her paths are disillusion and decay, With ruins piled and unapparent woe, The graves of Beauty and the wreck of dreams.
Sonnet III
There was a youth around whose early way White angels hung in converse and sweet choir, Teaching in summer clouds his thought to stray, -- In cloud and far horizon to desire. His life was nursed in beauty, like the stream Born of clear showers and the mountain dew, Close under snow-clad summits where they gleam Forever pure against heaven's orient blue. Within the city's shades he walked at last. Faint and more faint in sad recessional Down the dim corridors of Time outworn, A chorus ebbed from that forsaken past, A hymn of glories fled beyond recall With the lost heights and splendor of life's morn.
Sonnet IV
Up at his attic sill the South wind came And days of sun and storm but never peace. Along the town's tumultuous arteries He heard the heart-throbs of a sentient frame: Each night the whistles in the bay, the same Whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars: For smoke that half obscured, the circling stars Burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame. Up to his attic came the city cries -- The throes with which her iron sinews heave -- And yet forever behind prison doors Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes The light that hangs on desert hills at eve And tints the sea on solitary shores. . . .
Sonnet V
A tide of beauty with returning May Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay. Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe; The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound; And through the streets, like veins when they abound, The lust for pleasure throbs itself away. Here let me live, here let me still pursue Phantoms of bliss that beckon and recede, -- Thy strange allurements, City that I love, Maze of romance, where I have followed too The dream Youth treasures of its dearest need And stars beyond thy towers bring tidings of.
Sonnet VI
Give me the treble of thy horns and hoofs, The ponderous undertones of 'bus and tram, A garret and a glimpse across the roofs Of clouds blown eastward over Notre Dame, The glad-eyed streets and radiant gatherings Where I drank deep the bliss of being young, The strife and sweet potential flux of things I sought Youth's dream of happiness among! It walks here aureoled with the city-light, Forever through the myriad-featured mass Flaunting not far its fugitive embrace, -- Heard sometimes in a song across the night, Caught in a perfume from the crowds that pass, And when love yields to love seen face to face.
Sonnet VII
To me, a pilgrim on that journey bound Whose stations Beauty's bright examples are, As of a silken city famed afar Over the sands for wealth and holy ground, Came the report of one--a woman crowned With all perfection, blemishless and high, As the full moon amid the moonlit sky, With the world's praise and wonder clad around. And I who held this notion of success: To leave no form of Nature's loveliness Unworshipped, if glad eyes have access there, -- Beyond all earthly bounds have made my goal To find where that sweet shrine is and extol The hand that triumphed in a work so fair.
Sonnet VIII
Oft as by chance, a little while apart The pall of empty, loveless hours withdrawn, Sweet Beauty, opening on the impoverished heart, Beams like the jewel on the breast of dawn: Not though high heaven should rend would deeper awe Fill me than penetrates my spirit thus, Nor all those signs the Patmian prophet saw Seem a new heaven and earth so marvelous; But, clad thenceforth in iridescent dyes, The fair world glistens, and in after days The memory of kind lips and laughing eyes Lives in my step and lightens all my face, -- So they who found the Earthly Paradise Still breathed, returned, of that sweet, joyful place.
Sonnet IX
Amid the florid multitude her face Was like the full moon seen behind the lace Of orchard boughs where clouded blossoms part When Spring shines in the world and in the heart. As the full-moon-beams to the ferny floor Of summer woods through flower and foliage pour, So to my being's innermost recess Flooded the light of so much loveliness; She held as in a vase of priceless ware The wine that over arid ways and bare My youth was the pathetic thirsting for, And where she moved the veil of Nature grew Diaphanous and that radiance mantled through Which, when I see, I tremble and adore.
Sonnet X
A splendor, flamelike, born to be pursued, With palms extent for amorous charity And eyes incensed with love for all they see, A wonder more to be adored than wooed, On whom the grace of conscious womanhood Adorning every little thing she does Sits like enchantment, making glorious A careless pose, a casual attitude; Around her lovely shoulders mantle-wise Hath come the realm of those old fabulous queens Whose storied loves are Art's rich heritage, To keep alive in this our latter age That force that moving through sweet Beauty's means Lifts up Man's soul to towering enterprise.
Sonnet XI
* A paraphrase of Petrarca, 'Quando fra l'altre donne . . .'
When among creatures fair of countenance Love comes enformed in such proud character, So far as other beauty yields to her, So far the breast with fiercer longing pants; I bless the spot, and hour, and circumstance, That wed desire to a thing so high, And say, Glad soul, rejoice, for thou and I Of bliss unpaired are made participants; Hence have come ardent thoughts and waking dreams That, feeding Fancy from so sweet a cup, Leave it no lust for gross imaginings. Through her the woman's perfect beauty gleams That while it gazes lifts the spirit up To that high source from which all beauty springs.
Sonnet XII
Like as a dryad, from her native bole Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge, To a slow river at whose silent verge Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll, Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup, Bend till thine image from the pool beam up Arched with blue heaven like an aureole. See how adorable in fancy then Lives the fair face it mirrors even so, O thou whose beauty moving among men Is like the wind's way on the woods below, Filling all nature where its pathway lies With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs.
Sonnet XIII
I fancied, while you stood conversing there, Superb, in every attitude a queen, Her ermine thus Boadicea bare, So moved amid the multitude Faustine. My life, whose whole religion Beauty is, Be charged with sin if ever before yours A lesser feeling crossed my mind than his Who owning grandeur marvels and adores. Nay, rather in my dream-world's ivory tower I made your image the high pearly sill, And mounting there in many a wistful hour, Burdened with love, I trembled and was still, Seeing discovered from that azure height Remote, untrod horizons of delight.
Sonnet XIV
It may be for the world of weeds and tares And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty's rose That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows One from the train of Love's true courtiers Straightway on him who gazes, unawares, Deep wonder seizes and swift trembling grows, Reft by that sight of purpose and repose, Hardly its weight his fainting breast upbears. Then on the soul from some ancestral place Floods back remembrance of its heavenly birth, When, in the light of that serener sphere, It saw ideal beauty face to face That through the forms of this our meaner Earth Shines with a beam less steadfast and less clear.
Sonnet XV
Above the ruin of God's holy place, Where man-forsaken lay the bleeding rood, Whose hands, when men had craved substantial food, Gave not, nor folded when they cried, Embrace, I saw exalted in the latter days Her whom west winds with natal foam bedewed, Wafted toward Cyprus, lily-breasted, nude, Standing with arms out-stretched and flower-like face. And, sick with all those centuries of tears Shed in the penance for factitious woe, Once more I saw the nations at her feet, For Love shone in their eyes, and in their ears Come unto me, Love beckoned them, for lo! The breast your lips abjured is still as sweet.
Sonnet XVI
Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest, With single rites the common debt to pay? On some green headland fronting to the East Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day. Naked, uplifting in a laden tray New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine, Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine. The morning planet poised above the sea Shall drop sweet influence through her drowsing lid; Dew-drenched, his delicate virginity Shall scarce disturb the flowers he kneels amid, That, waked so lightly, shall lift up their eyes, Cushion his knees, and nod between his thighs.
Kyrenaikos
Lay me where soft Cyrene rambles down In grove and garden to the sapphire sea; Twine yellow roses for the drinker's crown; Let music reach and fair heads circle me, Watching blue ocean where the white sails steer Fruit-laden forth or with the wares and news Of merchant cities seek our harbors here, Careless how Corinth fares, how Syracuse; But here, with love and sleep in her caress, Warm night shall sink and utterly persuade The gentle doctrine Aristippus bare, -- Night-winds, and one whose white youth's loveliness, In a flowered balcony beside me laid, Dreams, with the starlight on her fragrant hair.
Antinous
Stretched on a sunny bank he lay at rest, Ferns at his elbow, lilies round his knees, With sweet flesh patterned where the cool turf pressed, Flowerlike crept o'er with emerald aphides. Single he couched there, to his circling flocks Piping at times some happy shepherd's tune, Nude, with the warm wind in his golden locks, And arched with the blue Asian afternoon. Past him, gorse-purpled, to the distant coast Rolled the clear foothills. There his white-walled town, There, a blue band, the placid Euxine lay. Beyond, on fields of azure light embossed He watched from noon till dewy eve came down The summer clouds pile up and fade away.
Vivien
Her eyes under their lashes were blue pools Fringed round with lilies; her bright hair unfurled Clothed her as sunshine clothes the summer world. Her robes were gauzes--gold and green and gules, All furry things flocked round her, from her hand Nibbling their foods and fawning at her feet. Two peacocks watched her where she made her seat Beside a fountain in Broceliande. Sometimes she sang. . . . Whoever heard forgot Errand and aim, and knights at noontide here, Riding from fabulous gestes beyond the seas, Would follow, tranced, and seek . . . and find her not . . . But wake that night, lost, by some woodland mere, Powdered with stars and rimmed with silent trees.
I Loved . . .
I loved illustrious cities and the crowds That eddy through their incandescent nights. I loved remote horizons with far clouds Girdled, and fringed about with snowy heights. I loved fair women, their sweet, conscious ways Of wearing among hands that covet and plead The rose ablossom at the rainbow's base That bounds the world's desire and all its need. Nature I worshipped, whose fecundity Embraces every vision the most fair, Of perfect benediction. From a boy I gloated on existence. Earth to me Seemed all-sufficient and my sojourn there One trembling opportunity for joy.
Virginibus Puerisque . . .
I care not that one listen if he lives For aught but life's romance, nor puts above All life's necessities the need to love, Nor counts his greatest wealth what Beauty gives. But sometime on an afternoon in spring, When dandelions dot the fields with gold, And under rustling shade a few weeks old 'Tis sweet to stroll and hear the bluebirds sing, Do you, blond head, whom beauty and the power Of being young and winsome have prepared For life's last privilege that really pays, Make the companion of an idle hour These relics of the time when I too fared Across the sweet fifth lustrum of my days.
With a Copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Leaving College
As one of some fat tillage dispossessed, Weighing the yield of these four faded years, If any ask what fruit seems loveliest, What lasting gold among the garnered ears, -- Ah, then I'll say what hours I had of thine, Therein I reaped Time's richest revenue, Read in thy text the sense of David's line, Through thee achieved the love that Shakespeare knew. Take then his book, laden with mine own love As flowers made sweeter by deep-drunken rain, That when years sunder and between us move Wide waters, and less kindly bonds constrain, Thou may'st turn here, dear boy, and reading see Some part of what thy friend once felt for thee.
Written in a Volume of the Comtesse de Noailles
Be my companion under cool arcades That frame some drowsy street and dazzling square Beyond whose flowers and palm-tree promenades White belfries burn in the blue tropic air. Lie near me in dim forests where the croon Of wood-doves sounds and moss-banked water flows, Or musing late till the midsummer moon Breaks through some ruined abbey's empty rose. Sweetest of those to-day whose pious hands Tend the sequestered altar of Romance, Where fewer offerings burn, and fewer kneel, Pour there your passionate beauty on my heart, And, gladdening such solitudes, impart How sweet the fellowship of those who feel!
Coucy