Collected Poems (8 page)

With the shining of silver yet on thy feet,

With the fleeing of stars that are flameless fleet,

With the cool of the sea for the cool of thine eyes,

                                                  Arise

                                        And come to my need!

From the grey of the unstarred eastern skies

                                                  Oh, speed!

Up from the sea, up from the sea,

Come with thine eagerness, girlishly;

Sweep with the quiver and gleaming of thee

Dark from my heart like dew from the lawn;

With the cool of thy coming, half stars and half sun,

Deliver my soul from the deeds that are done —

Breath of the dawn, breath of the dawn,

                                                  Purify me.

               At last the sunset and the quietness;

               The iron clutch of day loosened at last.

    Here where the sky is limpid loveliness

                         And depth on depth of peace, I may forget

The fretful work-a-day and midgy round of things …

                         A smothered pain the long, long day.

Nor does forgetting come with dark and nights of dream;

    But sweet with pain and filmèd tenderness

               This hour of the pity of all things.…

Grey as slow tears, the dusk blurs out the trees;

    The colors ebb beneath the western marge;

                         And homing come the birds —

                         Not singly come they, but,

               With throated happiness, together.

    But we no more shall come together home,

                         Nor hear their twittering gusts,

    Nor watch the deep west come more deep

                         Till we behold the stars,

    So bright they must but now have wept.

                         Oh, for one hour to-night,

               One little hour with you —

                         To touch your hand —

To lean within the halo of your perfume —

    To watch, as those sweet many times,

               Together, love, the young, white moon,

Like some strange petal blown into our round of space

               From out the cool abysms of the night,

Where unknown blossoms bloom for unknown eyes

                         To gaze upon in wistfulness.…

                         A little while to watch,

                         And then, together, home.

To-day the very dead would love his face;

And, loving them, I wish that to their place

Of woe his feet might find awhile the way,

And ease them with perfection for a space.

His beauty is so beautiful to-day.

As, when its freight of dew is blown away,

The grass uprises, so would they uprise,

Those ancient dead, and shake their anguish grey,

Breathing his coolness and his glad surprise

As ‘twere the blow and glittering of day.

Ashine with clinging petals and late tears,

Sweet with aroma of Sicilian green,

I see the dear, dear dead make way and lean

To catch the summer of his mouth, the sheen

Of laughter in those eyes that wisdom fears.

And, ah! Persephone! She hath forgot

The pallor and the poppied heaviness —

Upon her wine-red heart her hand is hot.

If thus the very dead, ’twere sure excess

Of blame, were I to love his beauty less!

So many here have struggled, fought the fight!

    Life after life so many here have flung

As incense to the gods, that served — for what

    Save Cerberus’ toll to nothingness?

    Of what avail to them, to us,

    Their gaunt resistance and their trust?

Across the clear, sad light of centuries,

Their epitaph reveals what line of comfort?

Those that with lit, courageous eyes opposed

The mean, the merely earth, the less than highest,

Was recompense or special profit theirs?

    Did their names less profoundly plumb

                                        The chasms of oblivion

                         Than theirs that never fought,

                         But, lightly submissive, spread

                         The purple for their summer hearts

                                        Within the garden’s cool,

Called for the golden cups, the snowy wine,

    The honey-comb, and Aphrodite’s flutes?

To which was happiness the booner comrade?

Sweeter than chaplets hold you sweat and blood!

               Than easy pomp, strife and hot tears!

                         Which likelier served the gods?

               Behold the gods of both in ambered death

                         Of fairy tales and poets’ guile!

                                        Which hold in heritage

    Elysian meadows and eternal May?

Poor trade, indeed, hoped immortality

For hot lips and the certain spring!

Ah! but the nobler struggle did bequeath

    Impetus, blossom-bearing warmth unto

That blind and mighty impulse to perfection —

    The race’s slow, incessant upward surge!

                         Dreams! dreams! About, about, behold

                                        Their bastard-souled successors,

                                                  Legitimate in blood alone!

Here once were millions; gazing hence, one saw

The high-hung walls, the teeming market place,

               The colors and the colonnades,

The curving city’s brilliant amplitude.…

    There hangs upon that northern crag,

    As some dirt-wasp had hovelled there,

    The drab inheritor of all that purpose;

Slattern of villages, where sat the lily-crowned!

                                                  Golden Girgenti!

               Of soft Sicilian cities goldenest!

                                        Gone, all gone thy gold,

Save where the rhythm of the ripened fields

               Sweeps mellowing to the sea;

Save where the lonely temples lift their pride,

    And on their maimed and desecrated fronts

    The evening light lays heavenly pure hands.

Gone thy gold; thy beauty, childless, gone;

Gone alike the strugglers and the strife.

Only the bland, unflashing blue, the Libyan,

               Holds yet its immemorial loveliness.

               Thus from the lofty temple steps at gaze,

                         My thoughts came faltering.

But my proud heart leaped up in glittering mail

And called:

                                        Tho’ the gods be dead or never were;

Tho’ death blow out the flame and soul be dust;

                         Tho’ generation follow generation

    Level, no higher footing gained, no hope

    Broad day will sometime flood the race

    Upon some mountain won with agony;

Tho’ all dissolve and leave no mist of gold —

    Yet vision only and the strife therefor

               Shall I accept as life!

If here, across this present’s windy peak, I gaze

               Back, back across the infinite years,

               And forward thro’ the infinite to be —

               Above the human rabble, past the soft

Guzzlers against the fertile breasts of life,

               I see, I do behold, how proudly, them

Whom blind nobility, heroic uselessness,

Impelled to scorn all acquiescence, brute

And easy; to strike to the blood’s last crimson for

                         The dream of their own making;

               Defenders, tho’ creators, of their own

               Divinity; soldiers in sweat, in blood,

                                        Before the mouth of death.

               So long as one remain, but one,

To shout the battle cry and take no quarter,

So long the velvet ease of life is infamous,

So long I stand with him and beard the world!

Girgenti, O Girgenti, vanished all thy sons!

    And only spring with equal glory spreads

Across thy hills its billows of deep bloom.

                         
Empedocles, thy loveliest, is gone;

    And Dædalus is dead; his wings no more

    Shall darken up the east or shake the sea;

    Nor any make return whose name thy mouth

               Smiled to repeat. Yet not to them

               My heart gives hail across the grave.

                         Oh, not to them whose heralding

               Sufficient heaven gave to their attempt.

               But to thy sons, that, silently,

                                        Oblivion-crowned,

               Battled as tho’ the very gods made part,

    And from their golden ramparts called applause.

               Them do I hail across the heavy mold;

    And them unborn, foredoomed to like red death,

Whose swords submit not chance, nor fate, nor flesh.…

    My brothers, proud, tho’ unworthy, let me stand with you

               In stubborn rank against the wall of doom,

               Opposing meek acceptance of the world;

    Scornful of scorn and vileness and black sloth;

    Battling, we know not why; dying, we care not how;

    Glimpsing our kinship with the farther stars;

                         Defeated always — but how splendidly!

How comes the spring in those far lands of yours?

               Tremulous as here — and full of wings?

               Full, too, of secrets and the hint

                         Of half divine events?

               Do twilights there unfold

Blue shadow petals to the swarm of stars?

And does the hem of rapture darkness wears

               Glisten, as here, with tears?

               This hour that we loved most,

My long forgetting like a garment falls.

               How long away! From you how long!

                         Failure and tears and strife,

               The intermittent bubbling up

                         Of that deep loneliness

               All know, yet know not to resist —

These come, but coming, wake not surely in my heart

                         Its lack of you.

But yours, yours always, are the Happy Isles!

               Their transient, fortuitous discovery —

               Rarer each year that sears and falls —

                         Brings back the need of you.

And every failing breath sent from their shores

                         Seems meant for two.

               Let but the darkling hour as now

Move mystical upon the tides of spring,

And from the vague horizon’s verge they rise.

               The air is unheard music that we knew;

Ahead, familiarly, the purple shallows shine;

                         I turn, I turn

               To whom alone with me is sovereign there,

                         And, missing you,

               Miss, too, the opal of their magic coves,

               And scant the fugitive, bland hour.

But no! that thought would shade your eyes,

               Tho’ fresh with immortality.

Oh, think not you can ever bring me pain —

Or pain such only as clear sunsets cast;

Their shining wings uplift us and their peace seems home,

               But sadness is their soul,

And all their lustral loveliness wells up from tears.

Perhaps, there, too, in those far lands of yours,

Springtime comes flowing like a tide of dreams,

                         Mysterious, on bluer wings,

Laving in magic more profound the curve of lovelier

                                        shores.

                         Yet, even there, perhaps,

               Your unaccustomed eyes yearn back

               Across the spirit-footed ocean of the air,

               And you are homesick for the earth,

Twilight, and stars that are not worlds but flowers —

               Homesick, perhaps, tho’ Paradise be yours,

                         For me and for those isles.…

               They fade; the world returns,

               And with them fades

The conjured vision of your biding place.

               Soon may they come again;

Soon; on the waters blue of twilight,

               Tremulous, full of wings,

The purple of unrisen stars about their base,

And on their crest the calm of sunset.

                                        O God, author of song

               And of the will to righteousness,

               Thee have I loved in guise of him,

                         The golden-haired, the beautiful,

                         The incense-tainted leader of the Nine,

    With dim, averted eyes and prescience of pain —

Knowing Thee frail and perishable, fit for youth.