An ancient mirror hangs
Within an ancient Hall;
In a lonely room where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall.
A mystic mirror, framed
In ebon, wildly carved,
That seems to stare on the shadows there,
Like something lean and starved.
A mirror, where one sees
In the broad, good light of day,
Like crimson torches, at the window arches,
Red roses swing and sway.
And a part o' the garth is seen,
With its quaint stone-dial plate,
That, gray and old, green-stained with mold,
Stands near the lioned gate.
These it reflects all day,
And at night one star of blue,
That the nightingale, where the rose is pale,
Lifts its passionate love-song to.
The nightbird sings below;
The stars hang bright above;
And the roses soon in the sultry moon
Shall palpitate with love.
The nightbird sobs below;
The roses blow and bloom;
Through mullioned panes the moonlight rains
In the dim, unholy room.
Grim ancestors that stare,—
Stiff, starched and haughty,—down
From the oaken wall of the noble hall,
Put on a sterner frown.
The old, hoarse castle-clock
Coughs midnight overhead—
And the rose is wan and the bird is gone
When walk the shrouded dead.
Then from their frames, it seems,
The portraits' shadows flit;
By the mirror there they stand and stare
And weep or sigh to it.
In rare rich ermine, earls
And knights in gold and vair,
With a rapiered throng of courtiers long
Pass with a stately stare.
With jewels and perfumes,
In powder, ruff, and lace,
Tall ladies pass by the looking-glass
Each sighing at her face.
What secret does it hide,
This mirror, gaunt and tall,
In this lonely room, where th' arrased gloom
Scowls from the pictured wall?
THE HALL OF DARKNESS
Within her veins it beats
And burns within her brain,
As year by year more sad and sear
Grow barren hill and plain.
Ah! over young is she
Who bears within her breast
More pain and woe than women know,
And all of love's unrest.
Seven towers of shaggy rock
Rise black to ragged skies,
From out a fen where bones of men
Stare with their empty eyes.
Eternal sunset pours,
Around its warlock towers,—
From out its urn of beams that burn,—
Long fire-cloudy flowers.
On bat-like turrets high,
And owlet battlements,
Huge condors dream and vultures scream
As at the battle's scents.
Within the banquet-hall,
A bride, rich-robed and pale,
She sits at board with men o' the sword
Cased all in silver mail.
Their visors barred are drawn;
Their hands are gauntletéd;
And one, behold! in glittering gold
Sits at the table's head.
Wild music echoes through
The hollow-sounding air—
It seems, at least, a wedding feast
With richness everywhere.
Wild music oozes from
The ceiling, groined with white
Pure pearl, and floors, like mythic shores,
Of limpid chrysolite.
Silent they sit at feast,
And she, whom he sits near,—
He in gold mail,—why is she pale,
As one with grief and fear?
The heav'ns grow slaughter-red,
Grow blood-red west and east;
Seven casements high that frame the sky
Flare on the blood-red feast.
Gaunt torches tall they seem,
Red revel-torches seven;—
And then, behold! the hour is tolled;
A great bell strikes eleven.
Silence.—The light, that makes
Each plate a splash of fire,—
Gold-splintered,—dims; and softer swims
The music of each lyre.
Grave Silence, like a king,
At that strange feast has place;
Grave Silence still as God's own will
Within the deeps of space.
She leans to him in gold,
And to him seems to say—
"The night grows late, my love! Why wait?
Ah God! would it were day!
"Would it were day, ah God!
How long is it till dawn?—
Why wear this mask?—Undo thy casque!
The midnight hour comes on!"
Silent he sits, severe;
Then one sonorous tower,
Owl-swarmed, that looms in glaring glooms,
Tolls slow the midnight hour.
Three strokes; the knights arise,
The silence from them flung,
Like waves that mock some hoarse sea-rock,
Wild laughter moves each tongue.
Six strokes; and wailing out
The music hoots away;
The fiery glimmer of heaven grows dimmer,
The red turns ghostly gray.
Nine strokes; and, dropping mold,
The crumbling Hall is lead;
The plate is rust; the feast is dust;
The banqueters are dead.
Twelve strokes pound out and roll;
The vast Hall heaves and waves
With things that crawl from floor and wall—
Spawn of a thousand graves.
Then rattling in the night
His golden visor slips—
In rotting mail a death's-head pale
Kisses her loathing lips.
Then over all a voice
Crying above the strife—
"Death is the Groom: this Hall, the Tomb:
The Bride, behold, is Life!"
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
I have lain for an hour or twain
Awake, and the tempest is beating
On the roof and the sleet on the pane,
And the winds are three enemies meeting;
And I listen and hear it again,
My name, in the silence, repeating.
Then dumbness of death; and, moon-gray,
In the darkness a light like a bubble,
From which, like a single white ray,
Comes a woman in loveliness double;
Her face is the breaking of day,
Her eyes are the night and its trouble.
I move not; she lies with her lips
At mine; and I feel she is drawing
My life from my heart to their tips,
My heart where the horror is gnawing;
My life in a hundred slow sips,
My soul with her gaze overawing.
She binds me with merciless eyes;
She drinks of my blood; and I hear it
Drain up with a shudder and rise
To the lips, like a serpent's, that steer it;
And she lies, and she laughs as she lies,
Saying, "Lo! thy affinitized spirit."
I pray—and a gate, as of swords,—
'Mid torments and tortures huge-grated,
Clangs iron deep under; and words
Are heard as of sins that awaited
A fiend who lashed into their hordes,
And a demon who lacerated.
I pray—and lie clammy and stark,
As a something mounts higher and higher,
Up, out of damnation and dark,
With hobbling of hoofs that is dire;
A devil, whose breath is a spark,
Whose face is of filth and of fire.
"To thy body's corruption! thy grave!
Thy hell! from which thou hast stolen!"
He snarls; and the night, like a wave,
Engulfs them with darkness wild swollen.—
Can it be that in sleep I'm a slave
Of a thing neither flesh nor eidolon?
THAT HOUR
When she was dead, a voice—she knew not whose—
Said to her: "Soul that fell,
To cheer thee there in Hell,
Of all thy life's lost happiness now choose.
"Ask what thou wilt, thou, who hast walked 'mid flowers
And songs the easy way
Of pleasure day by day,
Ask what thou wilt of all thy lived-out hours."
And then she thought: "Oh, shall it be when there,
A blameless maiden, I,
Dreaming, watched love draw nigh,
And felt his kiss rose-sweet on mouth and hair?
"Or shall it be when, that white night, his fingers
Smoothed from my brow the curls,
And fell, like unstrung pearls,
His words of passionate love whose memory lingers?
"Or shall it be when over earth and sea
I heard the sweet unrest
Within his ardent breast,
His heart that beat alone for me, for me?
"Or shall it be when, in his belting arms,
Soul gazed on kindred soul,
And love had won the goal
Of his desire, and his were all my charms?
"No! no! not these! that hour he left me lost!
Stunned, fallen and despised
Before the world he prized,
When—God forgive me!—when I loved him most!"
EPILOGUE
Beyond the moon, within a land of mist,
Lies the dim Garden of all Dead Desires,
Walled round with morning's clouded amethyst,
And haunted of the sunset's shadowy fires;
There all lost things we loved hold ghostly tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
Sad are the stars that day and night exist
Above the Garden of all Dead Desires;
And sad the roses that within it twist
Deep bow'rs; and sad the wind that through it quires;
But sadder far are they who there hold tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
There, like a dove upon the twilight's wrist,—
Soft in the Garden of all Dead Desires,—
Sleep broods; and there, where never a serpent hissed,
On the wan willows music hangs her lyres,
Æolian dials by which phantoms tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
There you shall hear low voices; kisses kissed,
Faint in the Garden of all Dead Desires,
By lips the anguish of vain song makes whist;
And meet with shapes that art's despair attires;
And gaze in eyes where all sweet sorrows tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
Thither we go, dreamer and realist,
Bound for the Garden of all Dead Desires,
Where we shall find, perhaps, all Life hath missed,
All Life hath longed for when the soul aspires;
All Earth's elusive loveliness at tryst—
Dead dreams, dead hopes, dead loves, and dead desires.
POEMS OF MYTH AND
ROMANCE
TO
MY FRIEND
WILLIAM WARWICK THUM
PROEM
There is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;
There is no metre that's half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.—
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My heart their beautiful parts of speech,
And the natural art that they say these with,
My soul would sing of beauty and myth
In a rhyme and a metre that none before
Have sung in their love, or dreamed in their lore,
And the world would be richer one poet the more.
MYTH AND ROMANCE
I
When I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring,
Just at the time of opening apple-buds,
When brooks are laughing, winds are whispering,
On babbling hillsides, or in warbling woods,
There is an unseen presence that eludes:—
Perhaps a Dryad, in whose tresses cling
The loamy odors of old solitudes,
Who from her beechen doorway calls, and leads
My soul to follow; now with dimpling words
Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds;
While here and there—is it her limbs that swing?
Or restless sunlight on the moss and weeds?
II
Or, haply 'tis a Naiad now who slips,
Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass,
While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips
The moisture rains cool music on the grass.
Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas!
Have seen no more than the wet ray that dips
The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass;
But in the liquid light, where she doth hide,
I have beheld the azure of her gaze
Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays,
Among her minnows I have heard her lips,
Bubbling, make merry by the waterside.
III
Or now it is an Oread—whose eyes
Are constellated dusk—who stands confessed,
As naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise,
Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast:
She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed
Stands for a startled moment ere she flies,
Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest,
Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn.
And is 't her footfalls lure me? or the sound
Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground?
And is 't her body glimmers on yon rise?
Or dogwood blossoms snowing on the lawn?
Now 'tis a Satyr piping serenades
On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance
Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades,
Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance,
Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance
The Nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades
Of sun-embodied perfume.—Myth, Romance,
Where'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms,
Compelling me to follow. Day and night
I hear their voices and behold the light
Of their divinity that still evades,
And still allures me in a thousand forms.
REVERIE
What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,
What walls of Parian, whiter than a rose,
What towers of crystal, for the eyes of thought,
Hast builded on dim Islands of Repose?
Thy cloudy columns, vast, Corinthian,
Or huge, Ionic, colonnade the heights
Of Dreamland, looming o'er the soul's deep seas;
Piled melodies of marble, that no man
Has ever reached, except in fancy's flights,
Templing the presence of perpetual ease.
Oft, where o'er plastic frieze and plinths of spar,—
In glimmering solitudes of pillared stone,—
The twilight blossoms with one violet star,
With thee, O Reverie, I have stood alone,
And there beheld, from out the Mythic Age,
The rosy breasts of Cytherea—fair,
Full-cestused, and suggestive of what loves
Immortal!—rise; and heard the lyric rage
Of sunburnt Poesy, whose throat breathes bare
O'er leopard skins, fluting among his groves.
Oft, where thy castled peaks and templed vales
Cloud—like convulsive sunsets—shores that dream,
Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas whose sails
Gleam white as lilies on a lilied stream,
My soul has stood. Or by thy sapphire sea,
In thy arcaded gardens, in the shade
Of breathing sculpture, oft has walked with thought,
And bent, in shadowy attitude, its knee
Before the shrine of Beauty that must fade
And leave no memory of the mind that wrought.
Who hath beheld thy caverns where, in heaps,
The wine of Lethe and Love's witchery,
In sealéd amphoræ a sibyl keeps?
World-old, a grape filled with the soul of thee.
No wine of Xeres or of Syracuse!
No fine Falernian and no vile Sabine!
The stolen fire of a demigod,
Whose bubbled purple heavenly feet did bruise
In crusted vats of vintage, when the green
Flamed into autumn, on the Samian sod.
Oh, for the deep enchantment of one draught!
The reckless ecstasy of classic earth!—
To make me godlike as the gods that laughed
In eyes of mortal brown, a mighty mirth
Of deity delirious with desire!
To make me one with roses of the shrines,
The splashing wine-libation or the blood,
And all the young priest's dreaming! To inspire
My very soul with beauty till it shines
Star-like amid life's starry brotherhood!
Would I might slumber in the old-world shades,
Where poesy could touch me, as some bold
Wild-bee a pulpy lily of the glades,
Barbaric-covered with the kerneled gold;
And feel the glory of the Golden Age
Less godly than my purpose, strong to dare
Death with the young immortal lips of Love:
Less lovely than my soul's ideal rage
To mate itself with Music and declare
Itself part meaning of the stars above.
LETHE
I
There is a scent of roses and spilt wine
Between the moonlight and the laurel-coppice;
The marble idol glimmers on its shrine,
White as a star, among a heaven of poppies.
Here all my life lies like a spilth of wine.
There is a mouth of music like a lute,
A nightingale that singeth to one flower;
Between the falling flower and the fruit,
Where love hath died, the music of an hour.
II
To sit alone with memory and a rose;
To dwell with shadows of whilom romances;
To make one hour of a year of woes
And walk on starlight, in ethereal trances,
With love's lost face fair as a moon-white rose.
To shape from music and the scent of buds
Love's spirit and its presence of sweet fire,
Between the heart's wild burning and the blood's,
Is part of life and of the soul's desire.
There is a song to silence and the stars,
Between the forest and the temple's arches;
And down the stream of night, like nenuphars,
The tossing fires of the Mænads' torches.—
Here all my life waits lonely as the stars.—
Shall not one hour of all those hours suffice
For resignation God hath given as dower?
Between the summons and the sacrifice
One hour of love, th' eternity of an hour?
IV
The shrine is shattered and the bird is gone;
Dark is the house of music and of bridal:
The stars are stricken and the storm comes on;
Beneath a wreck of roses lies the idol,
Sad as the memory of a joy that's gone.—
To dream of perished gladness and a kiss,
Waking the last chord of Love's broken lyre,
Between remembering and forgetting, this
Is part of life and of the soul's desire.
THE NAIAD
She sits among the iris stalks
Of bubbling brooks; and leans for hours
Among the river's lily-flowers,
Or on their whiteness walks:
Above dark forest pools, gray rocks
Wall in, she leans with dripping locks,
And listening to the echo, talks
With her own face—Iothera.
There is no forest of the hills,
No valley of the solitude,
Nor fern nor moss, that may elude
Her searching step that stills:
She dreams among the wild-rose brakes
Of fountains that the ripple shakes,
And, dreaming of herself, she fills
The silence with "Iothera."
And every wind that haunts the ways
Of leaf and bough, once having kissed
Her virgin nudity, goes whist
With wonder and amaze.
There blows no breeze which hath not learned
Her name's sweet melody, and yearned
To kiss her mouth that laughs and says,
"Iothera, Iothera."
No wild thing of the wood, no bird,
Or brown or blue, or gold or gray,
Beneath the sun's or moon's pale ray,
That hath not loved and heard;
They are her pupils; she can say
No new thing but, within a day,
They have its music, word for word,
Harmonious as Iothera.
No man who lives and is not wise
With love for common flowers and trees,
Bee, bird, and beast, and brook, and breeze,
And rocks, and hills, and skies,—
Search where he will,—shall ever see
One flutter of her drapery,
One glimpse of limbs, or hair, or eyes
Of beautiful Iothera.
THE LIMNAD
I
The lake she haunts gleams mistily
Through sleepy boughs of melody,—
Lost 'mid lone hills beside the sea,
In tangled bush and brier:—
Where reflected sunsets write
Ghostly things in golden light;
Where, along the pine-crowned height,
Clouds of twilight, rosy white,
Build far towers of fire.
II
'Mid the rushes there that swing,
Flowering flags where voices sing
When night-winds are murmuring,
And the stars of midnight glitter;
Blossom-white, with purple locks,
Underneath the stars' still flocks,
In the dusky waves she rocks,
Rocks, and all the landscape mocks
With a song both sweet and bitter.
Soft it sounds, at first, as dreams
Filled with tears that fall in streams;
Then it soars, until it seems
Beauty's very self hath spoken;
And the woods grow silent quite,
Stars wax faint and flowers wane white;
And the nightingales that light
Near, or hear her through the night,
Die, their hearts with longing broken.
IV
Dark, dim, and sad o'er mournful lands,
White-throated stars heaped in her hands,
Like wildwood buds, the Twilight stands,
The Twilight, dreaming, lingers;
Listening where the Limnad sings
Witcheries, whose magic brings
A great moon from hidden springs,
Pale with amorous quiverings
Feet of fire and silvery fingers.
V
In the vales Auloniads,
On the mountains Oreads,
On the leas Leimoniads,
Whiter than the stars that glisten,
Pan, the Satyrs, Dryades,
Fountain-lovely Naiades,
Foam-lipped Oceanides,
Breathless 'mid their seas and trees,
Stay and look and lean and listen.
VI
Large-eyed, Siren-like she stands,
In the lake or on its sands,
And with rapture from the hands
Of the Night some stars are shaken;
To her song the rushes swing,
Lilies nod and ripples ring,
Lost in helpless listening—
These will wake who hear her sing,
But one mortal will not waken.
BEFORE THE TEMPLE
I
All desolate she sate her down
Upon the marble of the temple's stair.
You would have thought her, with her eyes of brown,
Flushed cheeks and hazel hair,
A Dryad dreaming there.
II
A priest of Bacchus passed, nor stopped
To chide her; deeming her—whose chiton hid
But half her bosom, and whose girdle dropped—
Some grief-drowned Bassarid,
The god of wine had chid.
III
IV
Fierce lights on shields of bossy brass
And helms of bronze, next from the hills deploy
Tall youths of Argos. And she sees him pass,
Flushed with heroic joy,
On towards the siege of Troy.
THE RUE-ANEMONE
Under an oak-tree in a woodland, where
The dreaming Spring had dropped it from her hair,
I found a flower, through which I seemed to gaze
Beyond the world and see what no man dare
Behold and live—the myths of bygone days—
Diana and Endymion; and the bare,
Slim beauty of the boy whom Echo wooed;
And Hyacinthus, whom Apollo dewed
With love and death; and Daphne, ever fair;
And that reed-slender girl whom Pan pursued.
I stood and gazed and through it seemed to see
The Dryad dancing by the forest tree,
Her hair wild blown: the Faun, with listening ear,
Deep in the boscage, kneeling on one knee,
Watching the wandered Oread draw near,
Her wild heart beating like a honey-bee
Within a rose.—All, all the myths of old,
All, all the bright shapes of the Age of Gold,
Peopling the wonder-worlds of Poetry,
Through it I seemed in fancy to behold.
What other flower, that, fashioned like a star,
Draws its frail life from earth and braves the war
Of all the heavens, can suggest the dreams
That this suggests? in which no trace of mar
Or soil exists: where stainless innocence seems
Enshrined; and where, beyond our vision far,
That inaccessible beauty, which the heart
Worships as truth and holiness and art,
Is symbolized; wherein embodied are
The things that make the soul's immortal part.
ARTEMIS
Oft of the hiding Oread wast thou seen
At earliest morn, a tall, imperial shape,
High-buskined, dew-dripped, and on close, young curls,
Bright blackness of thick hair, the tipsy drops
Caught from the dripping sprays of under-bosks,—
Kissed of thy cheek and of thy shoulder brushed,—
Thy rosy cheek as far Aurora's fair,
Thy snowy shoulder Hebe-beautiful.
Oft did the shaggy hills and solitudes
Of Arethusa shout and ring and reel,
Reverberate and echo merrily,
Leap into sound with singing of thy hounds,
With the deep belling of thy noble hounds,
Big-mouthed and musical, that on the stag
Or bristling wild-boar furious grew in quest:
And thou, as keen, fleet-footed and clean-limbed,
Inviolable, with thy quivered crew,
Rushed, swinging on the wind free limbs and lithe,
And locks, all radiance, flung back to blow
And balm with spice the wine-sharp air of morn.
Ai me! their throats! their clarion-crystal throats,
That made the hills sing and the wood-ways dance,
As if to orphic strains, and gave them life.
Ai me! their bosoms' deepness and the firm,
Pure, happy beauty of their naked limbs,
That stormed the forest vacancies with light,
Swift daylight of their splendor, and made blow,
Within the glad sonorous solitudes,
Old germs of flowerets a century cold.
The woodland Naiad whispered by her rock;
The Hamadryad, limpid-eyed and wild,
Expectant rustled by her usual oak
And laughed in wonder; and mad Pan himself
Reeled piping fiercely down the dingled deeps,
With rollicking eye that rolled a brutish joy.
And did some unwed maiden, musing where
Her father's well, among the god-graced hills;
Bubbled and babbled, hear thy bugled cry,
O Huntress, she, while deep her dripping jar
Unheeded brimmed, vowed her virginity
To thee—her shorn hair at thy vestal feet.
But, ah! not when the garish daylight fills
The forests with far-swimming gold and green
Let me behold thee, goddess! but when dim
The slow night settles on the haunted wood
And walks in mystery; and the myriad stars
Maze heaven with fire; and the echoy waste,
Far off, far off, in murmurs palpitates
Unto the Limnad's voice, unmerciful,—
Or is 't some night-bird breaking with song its heart?—
Unmerciful and sad and bitter-sweet?—
Then come in all thy godhead, beautiful!
All beautiful and gentle, as thou cam'st
To lorn Endymion, who, in Lemnos once,
Lone in the wizard magic of the wood,
Wandered, a dreaming boy, unfriended, sad.—
It grew far off among the easy trees,
Thy pensive beauty, blossoming flower-like
Between the tree-trunks and the lacing limbs;
Bright in the leaves that kissed for very joy
And drunkenness of glory thus revealed.
He saw it all, from glorious face to feet—
The naked pearl of all thy loveliness,
Thy body's beauty, blended lily and rose,
Alone, uncompanied of handmaidens.
Like some rare, radiant fruit Hesperian,
Not to be plucked of gods or men, thou hung'st
Upon the boughs of heaven. Thy moonéd voice
Came silvering on his wistful ear, and sighed
With light like leaves that kiss and cling again.
And on such perilous beauty that must slay,—
The poisonous favor of thy godliness,—
Feasting his every sense through eyes and ears,
His soul exalted waxed and amorous,—
Like some young god who, draining Olympian bowls,
Grows drunk with nectar,—with immortal love;
And what remained, ah, what remained but death!
APHRODITE
Apollo never smote as lovely a strain,
When swan-necked Hebe stayed her nectared bowl
Among the circled and reclining gods,
To lend a listening ear and smile on him,
As that the Tritons blew on wreathéd horns
When Aphrodite, the cold ocean-foam,
In lovely labor, from its singing snow
Upheaved her dazzling form, like some white pearl,
Naked and fresh within its ocean shell,
Borne shoreward from its bed of golden sponge
And crimson coral by the mad monsoon.
Wind-rocked she swung, her white feet on the sea;
And music raved down the slant western winds:
With swollen jowls the Tritons puffed their conchs,
Where, breasting with white bosoms the green waves,
That laughed in ripples at Love's misty feet,
Oceanids with dimple-dented palms
Smote sidewise the pale bubbles of the foam,
Weaving a silver rainbow round her form.
Around her dolphins sparkled in the spray,
And Nereids sang, braiding their streaming locks,
Or flung them backward shimm'ring with bells of foam,
Till evening lit her loneliest, loveliest star,—
That passion-flower of the fields of heaven,—
Pale mirrored in the sheen of shadowy seas,—
That, like arrested music, o'er the caves
The Sirens haunt, hung deep on silent deep,—
When, in a hollow pearl, down moon-white waves,
The creatures of the ocean danced their queen
Unto an island, like a rosy mist
That glimmering dreamed upon the glimmering blue.
There on the silvery sands beside the sea,
Beneath the moon,—narcissus-white,—they met,
She naked as a star and crowned with stars,
Child of the airy foam and Queen of Love.