June, 1884.
·THE·SIRENS·THREE
THE SIRENS THREE
DEDICATORY SONNET
TO
WILLIAM MORRIS
THE Mage of Naishapur in English tongue
Beside the northern sea, I, wandering, read,
With chaunt of breaking waves each verse was said,
Till, storm-possessed, my heart in answer sung;
And to the winds my ship of thoughts I flung,
And drifted wide upon the ocean dread
Of space and time, ere thought and life were bred,
Till Hope did cast the anchor, and I clung.
The Book of Omar saw I limned in gold,
And decked with vine and rose and pictured pause,
Enwrought by hands of one well skilled and bold
In art and poesy and Freedom’s cause—
Hope of humanity and equal laws—
To him and to this hope be mine enscrolled.
I
LOST on a sleepless sea, without avail
My soul’s ship drifted wide, with idle sail
And slow pulsating oars, that night’s blue gulf
Beat noiselessly to Time’s recurring tale.
II
The rolling hours like waves broke, one by one,
Upon the tide of thought time’s sands outrun,
And cloudy visions hovered o’er my bed,
Piled to the stars, full soon like cloud undone:
III
As, like the wan moon through her fleecy sea,
My spirit clove their rack unceasingly,
And struck at last upon an unknown ground,
More still than sleep, more strange than dreamlands be.
IV
The echoes of lost thoughts wild music made,
Like Sirens, heard above the winds that played,
Above the rhythmic waves’ tumultuous tone,
Upon the hollows of that coast decayed.
V
Yea, on the strand they stood, the Sirens three—
No More, and golden Now, and dark To be,
Whose vocal harps are love, and hope, and grief;
To these they sang, and waved their hands to me.
VI
Who thence, unto the shore, escaping, clung,
As from the dread insatiate ocean’s tongue
That lapped the barren sand, and evermore,
Above its vain recoil, the Sisters sung.
VII
Prone on that unknown land, outcast, forlorn,
My soul lay; watching for the eyes of morn;
As from a dying universe adrift,
A naked life—to what dim world new born?
VIII
All former things had passed, the sea’s salt tears
From Youths’ frail ship had washed false hopes and fears,
And relics, treasured once, bestrewed the sand,
Wrapped in the clinging weed the seamaid wears.
IX
The bodies of lost Faith and Love, outcast,
Spurned by the waves, and clinging to the mast,
Were flung upon the shore, mid drift and wreck,—
Time’s fragile shells, which frailer lives outlast.
X
As at the world’s end left, the last of men,
Or ere the first was sphered, beyond his ken,
Was I, mid tumbled kosmic fragments cast—
A babe at play within a mammoth’s den:
XI
Mid bones of power extinct, and its lost prey,
With shreds and shards of unknown primal day—
The formless Future, and the Past forgot,
The broken statue, and the sculptor’s clay.
XII
The blue-breast bird of space his fan outspread,
And shook the starry splendour o’er my head—
A wood of eyes that wonder at the world,
Glassed in the world’s eyes’ wonder, scanned and read:
XIII
Each burning orb that did the sky emblaze
Upon my spirit lone cast piercing gaze;
World beyond world enringed, and suns aflame
Shot from night’s spangled cloud their storm of rays.
XIV
As doth the glass to one bright point intense
Draw the sun’s fervour to our shrinking sense;
So, on my soul, the concentrated fire
Of countless suns that moment did condense.
XV
My brain, an instant’s Atlas, seemed to bear
The Universe immense, and all its care;
For thought’s frail arms intolerable weight,
Since Nature’s triumph still is Man’s despair.
XVI
Untilled, unknown, the trackless regions spread
Which Thought, belated wanderer, doth tread,
Where, like river flashing through the night,
The milky way its myriad star-foam shed.
XVII
Cast from what vital source—what teeming brain?
By blind persistent force—from fiery rain?
Suns, moons, and stars, transmuted, globed, and hung—
The dew of Space upon its blue campaign:
XVIII
Trod by the feet of Time, as he doth go,
A labourer night and morn to reap and sow—
Who counts the glittering drops—the spheres that fall,
Or marvels they should hold such weight of woe?
XIX
Each drop a desert, or a battle-ground
Of life in its arena ringed around,
Where without quarter wears the endless war,
Till Death the hunter slips his famished hound.
XX
Here, circling with the horses of the sun,
Man’s fateful race from day to day is run;
Bound in this narrow ring—his crown, his grave
Still as the world for each is lost or won.
XXI
Then, like a homeless one, my spirit turned
For shelter ’neath the roofless void, and—spurned
From the star-desert to the stony one—
Scanned the dark waste where yet no hearth fire burned:
XXII
But through the veil of night, around me there,
Rose towering shapes clothed in the voiceless air,
Like kings enthroned amid their powers’ decay—
Statue, and ruined shrine, and temple bare:
XXIII
Dolmen, and sphinx, and Greek or Gothic fane,
The shattered caskets of man’s winged brain,
Whose flight hath left them empty, desolate,
Sublime in ruin on the crumbling plain.
XXIV
The perished bodies frail that once did house
His restless soul, and heard his sacred vows
To his own likeness, dressed in speech or stone,
Ere he forswore them for some fairer spouse.
XXV
He sought for Truth, and cried, “Where dost thou dwell?”
Ten thousand tongues replied, but none could tell:
They held their peace, and then the stones did cry—
“Lo! Truth sits naked by the wayside well.”
XXVI
She sitteth naked since they drove her out
From Babel of the Creeds to wastes of Doubt;
There hath she wandered long in dens and caves,
Through Custom’s winter, and through Reason’s drought.
XXVII
They would have cloaked her as a shameful thing;
Force brought her chains, and Fraud a marriage ring,
But Truth, affrighted, fled the market place
Where lies were coined in gold, and Craft was king.
XXVIII
And still she flies from sacred fount, and school,
When man defiles, or doth his kind befool;
And still they wait, the halt, the lame, the blind,
Though Truth, the angel, troubleth not the pool.
XXIX
A wandering spirit in this street of tombs,
I sought her yet who still to travel dooms,
From hostel unto hostel o’er the waste,
Her votaries the fitful lamp illumes.
XXX
But ere the dawn stood trembling at night’s gate,
Dark as the night, I reached a portal great,
Wide to the homeless wind, defaced and bare,
While yet it spake of power, and antique state,
XXXI
Of pillared hall and chambers large and fair,
Which Thought and Art had carven and made rare,
As life by life was laid with stone on stone,
Or flowed through marble veins the beams to bear;
XXXII
And flowered aloft in capital and frieze,
As roof and wall high rose with years’ increase;
Withal did slow decay still gild and stain,
Or like a stealthy robber climbed to seize.
XXXIII
Strange lights from windows glared, and stranger sound
Of mingled mourners’ grief and revel round—
Sad discords from a world’s disorder wrung—
With music broke upon the desert bound.
XXXIV
A fountain in the forecourt sullen slept,
One wintry tree beside it, wind beswept,
And shorn of its last leaves, which strewed the stone,
Like one above the water, drooped and wept.
XXXV
And at the threshold, on the shattered stair,
In raiment sad one sate as cloaked in care;
There, too, her sister shape in vernal green,
The lintel old did hang with garlands fair.
XXXVI
“Who,” then I would have cried, “art thou that weep?
And why with mourning festal garlands heap?
Why thus, though kindred, are your hearts in twain!
O Sisters weird this magic house who keep?
XXXVII
“This magic house, so fair, so disarrayed,
What god, what demon first its foundings laid?
Who thus its treasure to Oblivion casts,
Still hungering at the gate but never stayed?”
XXXVIII
And I was answered ere my thought found tongue,
As pealing from the gate their voices rung,
Like wailing harp and voice together heard;
With ear intent upon their speech I hung.
XXXIX
“Let no man ask, but he who doth not shrink
To stand at gaze upon thought’s giddy brink,
Where breaks the endless sea, and ebbs and flows
The tides of life and death that Time doth drink.
XL
“Time’s very house is this, his daughters we,
Ruin and Renovation, thou dost see,
That sweep or garnish, and its chambers fit
For grief or joy, or whatso guests may be.
XLI
“Pillared and roofed it is with nights and days,
And windows gemmed in gold, or azure space,
Its table spread, with earth’s, for fast or feast,
Between Birth’s gate and Death’s where all find place.
XLII
“Close curtained both with mystery and pain,
O’erwrought with costly tears, and heart-hued stain,
And Love the windows dim hath painted o’er
With dreams of dear delight, that wax and wane
XLIII
“From morn to eve, as through the glowing glass
His vital sun transfigures, as they pass,
Those visionary joys, and hopes, and fears
That mask Life’s face—a dream itself, alas!”
XLIV
But ere they ceased a fairer one forth came,
With cup of welcome and with torch aflame,
In floating raiment soft, and radiant hair,
And thus she sang, each captive sense to claim:—
XLV
“Dream on, O soul, or sleep and take thy rest,
The feast is spread however late the guest;
Let passion drug the cup with secret fire,
Till torturing thought be slain on pleasure’s breast.
XLVI
“Where all are masked thy mask shall be thy face,
Call for the best life gives, and take thy place
At Time’s long hostel board; cast off thy care,
And rest you merry in dame Fortune’s grace.
XLVII
“Vex not thy soul until the reckoning day,
Though life be but the least thou hast to pay;
Stand not too late on pleasure’s foaming brink,
Nor yet, with sightless eld, outsit the play.
XLVIII
“Time is thine host, and, ere the day grows old,
To thee his story strange he shall unfold,
Writ in a half-obliterated scroll,
But pictured fair, and graven deep—behold!”
XLIX
As though a new Pandora raised the lid,
And let life’s mystery escape unbid,
Broke sudden on my sight a wonder show,
As through the portal dark I gazed, close hid:
L
E’en like as one who sits expectant, dumb,
At gaze before some world’s proscenium,
When rolls the curtain from the painted stage,
To see life’s play,—Past, Present, and To Come;
LI
The drama of the earth before me rolled,
The war of good and evil, new and old,
The fight for very life, for space, for air,
The sum and cost of Being, still untold.
LII
Since when Time’s brooding bird did patient sit
Upon her spherèd egg—the world, to wit,
Potent with life, in ocean, earth, and air,
Ere ever faun or flower did people it:
LIII
Since when from countless germs life’s tree did grow
From writhing worms about its roots below,
From dragon-shapes that clasp its fossil stem,
To bear love’s fruit, and human flowers arow.
LIV
Where Thought’s winged kind among its branches dwell,
Still fertilized by Beauty’s potent spell;
Cast and re-cast in Nature’s supple mould,
Through death and change, and birth’s transforming cell.
LV
’Twas pictured here—with boughs outspread thro’ space,
Blossomed with stars upon the sky’s swart face,
With globing worlds for fruit, that cool or glow
As night and day, like leaves their shadows chase.
LVI
Out of the dream of ages, sleeping fast,
Out of the dim and unrecorded past,
Out of the caverns of uncounted time,
In life’s dark house Man saw the sun at last.
LVII
Inhuman Man, late come unto the birth,
Wrapped in the swathing bands of mother Earth,
Long his descent, his pedigree obscure,
To his inheritance of strife and dearth.
LVIII
As from the ground the earth worm crawls to light,
Speechless and blind, from antenatal night
Man rose on earth, the bitter strife began—
Man rose on earth, and craft did conquer might:
LIX
Since cruel Nature, careless of her child,
Left him an outcast on the worldly wild,
Cradled in space, and serpent-swathed in time,
And rocked to sleep by death, or dream-beguiled.
LX
I saw him in his cradle at the first,
With beasts and savage passions, rudely nursed,
To snatch uncertain life from Nature’s hand,
Niggard or prodigal, through best and worst;
LXI
He blindly bore the burden of his day
With his dumb kindred of the primal clay,
Whence drew his blood brute instincts, fiery lusts,
That waste his substance still, and tear and slay.
LXII
A babbling child he sits upon Time’s sand,
To the mute sky he cries, he would command;
Heedless he plays with serpents and with fire,
With life—a toy in his unconscious hand.
LXIII
Yet hath he held it from that early day,
Though Death did ever plot to snatch away,
And snared his tottering steps with dangers thick,
Prowling in countless shapes beside his way.
LXIV
Sore was the strife, and little was life’s boon
Between the toiling sun and wasting moon,
With lurid pleasures fierce, and horrid rite,
Blind day outworn, the long long sleep won soon.
LXV
Still Nature, prodigal, did cast his seed
O’er frozen sea, or burning zone, to breed—
Where hand or foot could cling, or heart could beat—
Man’s kind on earth, since sprung to flower, or weed.
LXVI
The rod of Want, the school of bitter Need,
Taught him Life’s letters, still so hard to read:
Use gave him skill, and skill new sense to use,
He bent the bow, he bade the ploughshare speed.
LXVII
Bread for his body and his soul he sought,
Raiment to cloak him from the cold he bought
Of ruthless nature, toiling brain and hand;
Past all the gates of death his race he brought.
LXVIII
Lo! infant Thought and Art, Man’s children fair,
First tottering from the cave, his primal lair;
Babes in the world’s wood wandering, to and fro,
To touch man’s sordid heart, and lift his care.
LXIX
Since the first hunter graved his dirk and horn,
Or in the shepherd state was music born—
When Song lay dreaming in the whispering reed,
Ere she discoursed unto the golden morn.
LXX
Born of life’s travail, Virtues, sweet, benign,
Grew like fair daughters of a race divine—
The pillars of Man’s house, before whose rod
Evil and Good, as twisted snakes, untwine.
LXXI
But to his roof had fled pale palsied Fear,
The child of Death and Night, but fathered there,
And nursed by Ignorance beside the hearth
To cloud his house with all her mystic gear.
LXXII
Demon and fetish painted she to scare,
And veils against the light did weave and wear;
Yea, Art and Thought, man’s firstlings, fain would bind
From birth to serve her will, her yoke to bear.
LXXIII
So Man, held hand and foot, a slave behold
Between the soldier-king and priest of old;
By force and fraud bound fast as by two chains—
How long, O Man, how long shall they thee hold?
LXXIV
“How long?” again I cried,—but Silence kept
Her finger on the lips of Hope: still slept,
Like clouds upon the mountains, dreams untold,
And Freedom on the tomb of ages wept.
LXXV
Yet, like a watcher by a beacon fire,
Amid the lurid gloom and shadows dire,
Wrapped in the cloak of darkness, fold on fold,
I marked through flames portentous shapes aspire.
LXXVI
Slow streamed the progress vast of human kind,
Out of the primal dark I watched it wind,
Like a full river gleaming towards the sun,
Crested with light, but lost in mists behind.
LXXVII
I saw the towering crests of ancient state
Arise and pass, and bow themselves to fate:
Captors of men bound still to conquering Time,
And in their triumph drawn to death’s dark gate.
LXXVIII
Colossal Egypt on her car rolled by,
Dragged by her crowd of slaves, with lash and cry;
Who now, a slave herself, is bought and sold,
And buried in the sand her pride doth lie.
LXXIX
Athens, supreme, with burnished helm and spear,
In art and arms and wisdom shining clear,
To other hands hath passed the lamp of life,
And weep the muses o’er her sculptured bier.
LXXX
There, clothed as with a robe with power and pride,
Great Rome upon her triumph car did ride
Over the necks of nations and of men,
Unto whose broken wheel still souls are tied.
LXXXI
All these I saw, as on time’s painted page
The figure of man’s life from age to age
Was figured, like his life of years and hours,
And glassed his face—an infant or a mage.
LXXXII
In boyhood bright beneath the Grecian sun,
I saw him stand, intent his race to run—
To touch the golden goal of thought and art,
And daring all man since hath dared or done.
LXXXIII
The apple of his life to Beauty’s hand
Freely he gave, and she so dowered his land,
That still that fond world takes it for her glass,
And gazes, leaving knowledge and command.
LXXXIV
In youth a mystic shadow o’er him fell:
He touched the lover’s lute beneath the spell;
He fought, a knight-at-arms, for lady’s grace;
He prayed a monk austere in haunted cell;
LXXXV
Till Nature roused him from his dreams again,
And Reason broke the chains which bound him then;
New knowledge, power, and beauty filled life’s cup,
And rolled the round world to his manhood’s ken.
LXXXVI
Yet old before his time he sits, out-worn
With words and wars, upon the seat of scorn;
Weary of life’s vain round, love’s fruitless chase,
False fortune’s whirling wheel, fame’s empty horn.
LXXXVII
For here, in living shape and semblance, shone
The passions and the powers man’s soul hath won
Through all his ages, like the starry signs
Where through life’s year revolves the sleepless sun.
LXXXVIII
The pattern and the form of thoughts untold;
The book of being wrought in runes of gold;
The twisted net that holds all gain and loss
The birth-clothes cover, or the shroud doth fold.
LXXXIX
The moving tapestry of human date,
Where lives for threads are crossed in love or hate,
Between the narrow beams of dark and day—
Time’s shifting loom, the toil of threefold fate.
XC
At their eternal task the sisters dread,
Who spin and weave and shear the slender thread
With all its dyes, that doth sustain and fill
This tangled web from pole to pole outspread.
XCI
The arras that doth clothe the house of Time,
Stained with the hues of all man’s bliss and crime:—
The chequered pageant of the changing earth
Still through its folds doth ever sink and climb:
XCII
Along the street of days and nights where rolls
The world’s car onwards and its throng of souls,
Like captives in a conqueror’s triumph chained—
Compelled by fortune’s wheel that none controls.
XCIII
The glittering triumph of youth’s golden dreams,
And ardent manhood in the zenith, beams
Of love, and fame, and power that guides the car,
And slow-pulsed eld still warmed in their last gleams.
XCIV
Masqued with the masquers in that endless race
The hours go by at grief’s or passion’s pace,
And cloaked alike in poverty or pride,
Through all life’s masks death shows his ashen face.
XCV
The shadow clinging to the feet of life,
As unto day doth cleave his silent wife—
Sower and reaper in the self-same field—
Twin spirits folded in immortal strife.
XCVI
There good and ill, brothers and bitter foes,
Do strike the balance of man’s joys and woes;
And in the traffic of the world’s exchange
Oft ill as good, and good as evil goes:
XCVII
Two knights that battle for Truth’s painted targe,
With flashing spears upon time’s river marge,
Where, like the rushing waters, rise their steeds,
And crash together in tremendous charge.