Chapter 7

Chapter 73,863 wordsPublic domain

The rooks aclamor when one enters here Startle the empty towers far overhead; Through gaping walls the summer fields appear, Green, tan, or, poppy-mingled, tinged with red. The courts where revel rang deep grass and moss Cover, and tangled vines have overgrown The gate where banners blazoned with a cross Rolled forth to toss round Tyre and Ascalon. Decay consumes it. The old causes fade. And fretting for the contest many a heart Waits their Tyrtaeus to chant on the new. Oh, pass him by who, in this haunted shade Musing enthralled, has only this much art, To love the things the birds and flowers love too.

Tezcotzinco

Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold, Thou wert sometime the garden of a king. The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing. The flowers are few. It was not so of old. It was not thus when hand in hand there strolled Through arbors perfumed with undying Spring Bare bodies beautiful, brown, glistening, Decked with green plumes and rings of yellow gold. Do you suppose the herdsman sometimes hears Vague echoes borne beneath the moon's pale ray From those old, old, far-off, forgotten years? Who knows? Here where his ancient kings held sway He stands. Their names are strangers to his ears. Even their memory has passed away.

The Old Lowe House, Staten Island

Another prospect pleased the builder's eye, And Fashion tenanted (where Fashion wanes) Here in the sorrowful suburban lanes When first these gables rose against the sky. Relic of a romantic taste gone by, This stately monument alone remains, Vacant, with lichened walls and window-panes Blank as the windows of a skull. But I, On evenings when autumnal winds have stirred In the porch-vines, to this gray oracle Have laid a wondering ear and oft-times heard, As from the hollow of a stranded shell, Old voices echoing (or my fancy erred) Things indistinct, but not insensible.

Oneata

A hilltop sought by every soothing breeze That loves the melody of murmuring boughs, Cool shades, green acreage, and antique house Fronting the ocean and the dawn; than these Old monks built never for the spirit's ease Cloisters more calm--not Cluny nor Clairvaux; Sweet are the noises from the bay below, And cuckoos calling in the tulip-trees. Here, a yet empty suitor in thy train, Beloved Poesy, great joy was mine To while a listless spell of summer days, Happier than hoarder in each evening's gain, When evenings found me richer by one line, One verse well turned, or serviceable phrase.

On the Cliffs, Newport

Tonight a shimmer of gold lies mantled o'er Smooth lovely Ocean. Through the lustrous gloom A savor steals from linden trees in bloom And gardens ranged at many a palace door. Proud walls rise here, and, where the moonbeams pour Their pale enchantment down the dim coast-line, Terrace and lawn, trim hedge and flowering vine, Crown with fair culture all the sounding shore. How sweet, to such a place, on such a night, From halls with beauty and festival a-glare, To come distract and, stretched on the cool turf, Yield to some fond, improbable delight, While the moon, reddening, sinks, and all the air Sighs with the muffled tumult of the surf!

To England at the Outbreak of the Balkan War

A cloud has lowered that shall not soon pass o'er. The world takes sides: whether for impious aims With Tyranny whose bloody toll enflames A generous people to heroic war; Whether with Freedom, stretched in her own gore, Whose pleading hands and suppliant distress Still offer hearts that thirst for Righteousness A glorious cause to strike or perish for. England, which side is thine? Thou hast had sons Would shrink not from the choice however grim, Were Justice trampled on and Courage downed; Which will they be--cravens or champions? Oh, if a doubt intrude, remember him Whose death made Missolonghi holy ground.

At the Tomb of Napoleon Before the Elections in America--November, 1912

I stood beside his sepulchre whose fame, Hurled over Europe once on bolt and blast, Now glows far off as storm-clouds overpast Glow in the sunset flushed with glorious flame. Has Nature marred his mould? Can Art acclaim No hero now, no man with whom men side As with their hearts' high needs personified? There are will say, One such our lips could name; Columbia gave him birth. Him Genius most Gifted to rule. Against the world's great man Lift their low calumny and sneering cries The Pharisaic multitude, the host Of piddling slanderers whose little eyes Know not what greatness is and never can.

The Rendezvous

He faints with hope and fear. It is the hour. Distant, across the thundering organ-swell, In sweet discord from the cathedral-tower, Fall the faint chimes and the thrice-sequent bell. Over the crowd his eye uneasy roves. He sees a plume, a fur; his heart dilates -- Soars . . . and then sinks again. It is not hers he loves. She will not come, the woman that he waits.

Braided with streams of silver incense rise The antique prayers and ponderous antiphones. 'Gloria Patri' echoes to the skies; 'Nunc et in saecula' the choir intones. He marks not the monotonous refrain, The priest that serves nor him that celebrates, But ever scans the aisle for his blonde head. . . . In vain! She will not come, the woman that he waits.

How like a flower seemed the perfumed place Where the sweet flesh lay loveliest to kiss; And her white hands in what delicious ways, With what unfeigned caresses, answered his! Each tender charm intolerable to lose, Each happy scene his fancy recreates. And he calls out her name and spreads his arms . . . No use! She will not come, the woman that he waits.

But the long vespers close. The priest on high Raises the thing that Christ's own flesh enforms; And down the Gothic nave the crowd flows by And through the portal's carven entry swarms. Maddened he peers upon each passing face Till the long drab procession terminates. No princess passes out with proud majestic pace. She has not come, the woman that he waits.

Back in the empty silent church alone He walks with aching heart. A white-robed boy Puts out the altar-candles one by one, Even as by inches darkens all his joy. He dreams of the sweet night their lips first met, And groans--and turns to leave--and hesitates . . . Poor stricken heart, he will, he can not fancy yet She will not come, the woman that he waits.

But in an arch where deepest shadows fall He sits and studies the old, storied panes, And the calm crucifix that from the wall Looks on a world that quavers and complains. Hopeless, abandoned, desolate, aghast, On modes of violent death he meditates. And the tower-clock tolls five, and he admits at last, She will not come, the woman that he waits.

Through the stained rose the winter daylight dies, And all the tide of anguish unrepressed Swells in his throat and gathers in his eyes; He kneels and bows his head upon his breast, And feigns a prayer to hide his burning tears, While the satanic voice reiterates 'Tonight, tomorrow, nay, nor all the impending years, She will not come,' the woman that he waits.

Fond, fervent heart of life's enamored spring, So true, so confident, so passing fair, That thought of Love as some sweet, tender thing, And not as war, red tooth and nail laid bare, How in that hour its innocence was slain, How from that hour our disillusion dates, When first we learned thy sense, ironical refrain, She will not come, the woman that he waits.

Do You Remember Once . . .

Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces, The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places, Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais?

The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned. Out of the starry south provoking rumors brought us Far promise of the spring already northward turned.

And breast drew near to breast, and round its soft desire My arm uncertain stole and clung there unrepelled. I thought that nevermore my heart would hover nigher To the last flower of bliss that Nature's garden held.

There, in your beauty's sweet abandonment to pleasure, The mute, half-open lips and tender, wondering eyes, I saw embodied first smile back on me the treasure Long sought across the seas and back of summer skies.

Dear face, when courted Death shall claim my limbs and find them Laid in some desert place, alone or where the tides Of war's tumultuous waves on the wet sands behind them Leave rifts of gasping life when their red flood subsides,

Out of the past's remote delirious abysses Shine forth once more as then you shone,--beloved head, Laid back in ecstasy between our blinding kisses, Transfigured with the bliss of being so coveted.

And my sick arms will part, and though hot fever sear it, My mouth will curve again with the old, tender flame. And darkness will come down, still finding in my spirit The dream of your brief love, and on my lips your name.

You loved me on that moonlit night long since. You were my queen and I the charming prince Elected from a world of mortal men. You loved me once. . . . What pity was it, then, You loved not Love. . . . Deep in the emerald west, Like a returning caravel caressed By breezes that load all the ambient airs With clinging fragrance of the bales it bears From harbors where the caravans come down, I see over the roof-tops of the town The new moon back again, but shall not see The joy that once it had in store for me, Nor know again the voice upon the stair, The little studio in the candle-glare, And all that makes in word and touch and glance The bliss of the first nights of a romance When will to love and be beloved casts out The want to question or the will to doubt. You loved me once. . . . Under the western seas The pale moon settles and the Pleiades. The firelight sinks; outside the night-winds moan -- The hour advances, and I sleep alone.*

III

Farewell, dear heart, enough of vain despairing! If I have erred I plead but one excuse -- The jewel were a lesser joy in wearing That cost a lesser agony to lose.

I had not bid for beautifuller hours Had I not found the door so near unsealed, Nor hoped, had you not filled my arms with flowers, For that one flower that bloomed too far afield.

If I have wept, it was because, forsaken, I felt perhaps more poignantly than some The blank eternity from which we waken And all the blank eternity to come.

And I betrayed how sweet a thing and tender (In the regret with which my lip was curled) Seemed in its tragic, momentary splendor My transit through the beauty of the world.

The Bayadere

Flaked, drifting clouds hide not the full moon's rays More than her beautiful bright limbs were hid By the light veils they burned and blushed amid, Skilled to provoke in soft, lascivious ways, And there was invitation in her voice And laughing lips and wonderful dark eyes, As though above the gates of Paradise Fair verses bade, Be welcome and rejoice!

O'er rugs where mottled blue and green and red Blent in the patterns of the Orient loom, Like a bright butterfly from bloom to bloom, She floated with delicious arms outspread. There was no pose she took, no move she made, But all the feverous, love-envenomed flesh Wrapped round as in the gladiator's mesh And smote as with his triple-forked blade.

I thought that round her sinuous beauty curled Fierce exhalations of hot human love, -- Around her beauty valuable above The sunny outspread kingdoms of the world; Flowing as ever like a dancing fire Flowed her belled ankles and bejewelled wrists, Around her beauty swept like sanguine mists The nimbus of a thousand hearts' desire.

Eudaemon

O happiness, I know not what far seas, Blue hills and deep, thy sunny realms surround, That thus in Music's wistful harmonies And concert of sweet sound A rumor steals, from some uncertain shore, Of lovely things outworn or gladness yet in store:

Whether thy beams be pitiful and come, Across the sundering of vanished years, From childhood and the happy fields of home, Like eyes instinct with tears Felt through green brakes of hedge and apple-bough Round haunts delightful once, desert and silent now;

Or yet if prescience of unrealized love Startle the breast with each melodious air, And gifts that gentle hands are donors of Still wait intact somewhere, Furled up all golden in a perfumed place Within the folded petals of forthcoming days.

Only forever, in the old unrest Of winds and waters and the varying year, A litany from islands of the blessed Answers, Not here . . . not here! And over the wide world that wandering cry Shall lead my searching heart unsoothed until I die.

Broceliande

Broceliande! in the perilous beauty of silence and menacing shade, Thou art set on the shores of the sea down the haze of horizons untravelled, unscanned. Untroubled, untouched with the woes of this world are the moon-marshalled hosts that invade Broceliande.

Only at dusk, when lavender clouds in the orient twilight disband, Vanishing where all the blue afternoon they have drifted in solemn parade, Sometimes a whisper comes down on the wind from the valleys of Fairyland ----

Sometimes an echo most mournful and faint like the horn of a huntsman strayed, Faint and forlorn, half drowned in the murmur of foliage fitfully fanned, Breathes in a burden of nameless regret till I startle, disturbed and affrayed: Broceliande -- Broceliande -- Broceliande. . . .

Lyonesse

In Lyonesse was beauty enough, men say: Long Summer loaded the orchards to excess, And fertile lowlands lengthening far away, In Lyonesse.

Came a term to that land's old favoredness: Past the sea-walls, crumbled in thundering spray, Rolled the green waves, ravening, merciless.

Through bearded boughs immobile in cool decay, Where sea-bloom covers corroding palaces, The mermaid glides with a curious glance to-day, In Lyonesse.

Tithonus

So when the verdure of his life was shed, With all the grace of ripened manlihead, And on his locks, but now so lovable, Old age like desolating winter fell, Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn: Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less With pious works of pitying tenderness; Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes, And hoary height bent down none otherwise Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight Of snow when winter winds turn temperate, -- So bowed with years--when still he lingered on: Then to the daughter of Hyperion This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar By dove-gray seas under the morning star, Where, on the wide world's uttermost extremes, Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleams, High in an orient chamber bade prepare An everlasting couch, and laid him there, And leaving, closed the shining doors. But he, Deathless by Jove's compassionless decree, Found not, as others find, a dreamless rest. There wakeful, with half-waking dreams oppressed, Still in an aural, visionary haze Float round him vanished forms of happier days; Still at his side he fancies to behold The rosy, radiant thing beloved of old; And oft, as over dewy meads at morn, Far inland from a sunrise coast is borne The drowsy, muffled moaning of the sea, Even so his voice flows on unceasingly, -- Lisping sweet names of passion overblown, Breaking with dull, persistent undertone The breathless silence that forever broods Round those colossal, lustrous solitudes. Times change. Man's fortune prospers, or it falls. Change harbors not in those eternal halls And tranquil chamber where Tithonus lies. But through his window there the eastern skies Fall palely fair to the dim ocean's end. There, in blue mist where air and ocean blend, The lazy clouds that sail the wide world o'er Falter and turn where they can sail no more. There singing groves, there spacious gardens blow -- Cedars and silver poplars, row on row, Through whose black boughs on her appointed night, Flooding his chamber with enchanted light, Lifts the full moon's immeasurable sphere, Crimson and huge and wonderfully near.

An Ode to Antares

At dusk, when lowlands where dark waters glide Robe in gray mist, and through the greening hills The hoot-owl calls his mate, and whippoorwills Clamor from every copse and orchard-side, I watched the red star rising in the East, And while his fellows of the flaming sign From prisoning daylight more and more released, Lift their pale lamps, and, climbing higher, higher, Out of their locks the waters of the Line Shaking in clouds of phosphorescent fire, Rose in the splendor of their curving flight, Their dolphin leap across the austral night, From windows southward opening on the sea What eyes, I wondered, might be watching, too, Orbed in some blossom-laden balcony. Where, from the garden to the rail above, As though a lover's greeting to his love Should borrow body and form and hue And tower in torrents of floral flame, The crimson bougainvillea grew, What starlit brow uplifted to the same Majestic regress of the summering sky, What ultimate thing--hushed, holy, throned as high Above the currents that tarnish and profane As silver summits are whose pure repose No curious eyes disclose Nor any footfalls stain, But round their beauty on azure evenings Only the oreads go on gauzy wings, Only the oreads troop with dance and song And airy beings in rainbow mists who throng Out of those wonderful worlds that lie afar Betwixt the outmost cloud and the nearest star.

Like the moon, sanguine in the orient night Shines the red flower in her beautiful hair. Her breasts are distant islands of delight Upon a sea where all is soft and fair. Those robes that make a silken sheath For each lithe attitude that flows beneath, Shrouding in scented folds sweet warmths and tumid flowers, Call them far clouds that half emerge Beyond a sunset ocean's utmost verge, Hiding in purple shade and downpour of soft showers Enchanted isles by mortal foot untrod, And there in humid dells resplendent orchids nod; There always from serene horizons blow Soul-easing gales and there all spice-trees grow That Phoenix robbed to line his fragrant nest Each hundred years in Araby the Blest.

Star of the South that now through orient mist At nightfall off Tampico or Belize Greetest the sailor rising from those seas Where first in me, a fond romanticist, The tropic sunset's bloom on cloudy piles Cast out industrious cares with dreams of fabulous isles -- Thou lamp of the swart lover to his tryst, O'er planted acres at the jungle's rim Reeking with orange-flower and tuberose, Dear to his eyes thy ruddy splendor glows Among the palms where beauty waits for him; Bliss too thou bringst to our greening North, Red scintillant through cherry-blossom rifts, Herald of summer-heat, and all the gifts And all the joys a summer can bring forth ----

Be thou my star, for I have made my aim To follow loveliness till autumn-strown Sunder the sinews of this flower-like frame As rose-leaves sunder when the bud is blown. Ay, sooner spirit and sense disintegrate Than reconcilement to a common fate Strip the enchantment from a world so dressed In hues of high romance. I cannot rest While aught of beauty in any path untrod Swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad Unworshipped of my love. I cannot see In Life's profusion and passionate brevity How hearts enamored of life can strain too much In one long tension to hear, to see, to touch. Now on each rustling night-wind from the South Far music calls; beyond the harbor mouth Each outbound argosy with sail unfurled May point the path through this fortuitous world That holds the heart from its desire. Away! Where tinted coast-towns gleam at close of day, Where squares are sweet with bells, or shores thick set With bloom and bower, with mosque and minaret. Blue peaks loom up beyond the coast-plains here, White roads wind up the dales and disappear, By silvery waters in the plains afar Glimmers the inland city like a star, With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze And burnished domes half-seen through luminous haze, Lo, with what opportunity Earth teems! How like a fair its ample beauty seems! Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise: What bright bazaars, what marvelous merchandise, Down seething alleys what melodious din, What clamor importuning from every booth! At Earth's great market where Joy is trafficked in Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!

Translations

Dante. Inferno, Canto XXVI

Florence, rejoice! For thou o'er land and sea So spread'st thy pinions that the fame of thee Hath reached no less into the depths of Hell. So noble were the five I found to dwell Therein--thy sons--whence shame accrues to me And no great praise is thine; but if it be That truth unveil in dreamings before dawn, Then is the vengeful hour not far withdrawn When Prato shall exult within her walls To see thy suffering. Whate'er befalls, Let it come soon, since come it must, for later, Each year would see my grief for thee the greater.

We left; and once more up the craggy side By the blind steps of our descent, my guide, Remounting, drew me on. So we pursued The rugged path through that steep solitude, Where rocks and splintered fragments strewed the land So thick, that foot availed not without hand. Grief filled me then, and still great sorrow stirs My heart as oft as memory recurs To what I saw; that more and more I rein My natural powers, and curb them lest they strain Where Virtue guide not,--that if some good star, Or better thing, have made them what they are, That good I may not grudge, nor turn to ill.

As when, reclining on some verdant hill -- What season the hot sun least veils his power That lightens all, and in that gloaming hour The fly resigns to the shrill gnat--even then, As rustic, looking down, sees, o'er the glen, Vineyard, or tilth where lies his husbandry, Fireflies innumerable sparkle: so to me, Come where its mighty depth unfolded, straight With flames no fewer seemed to scintillate The shades of the eighth pit. And as to him Whose wrongs the bears avenged, dim and more dim Elijah's chariot seemed, when to the skies Uprose the heavenly steeds; and still his eyes Strained, following them, till naught remained in view But flame, like a thin cloud against the blue: So here, the melancholy gulf within, Wandered these flames, concealing each its sin, Yet each, a fiery integument, Wrapped round a sinner.