Or in yet deeper hours, when all was still,
And the hushed air bowed over them alone,
Such music of the heart as lovers hear,
When close as lips lean, lean the thoughts between--
When the cold world, no more a lonely orb
Circling the unimagined track of Time,
Is like a beating heart within their hands,
A numb bird that they warm, and feel its wings--
Such music have I heard; and through the prayers
Wherewith I sought to shackle their desires,
And bring them humbled to the feet of God,
Caught the loud quiring of the fruitful year,
The leap of springs, the throb of loosened earth,
And the sound of all the streams that seek the sea.
So fell it, that when pity moved their hearts,
And those high lovers, one unto the end,
Bowed to the sundering will, and each his way
Went through a world that could not make them twain,
Knowing that a great vision, passing by,
Had swept mine eye-lids with its fringe of fire,
I, with the wonder of it on my head,
And with the silence of it in my heart,
Forth to Tintagel went by secret ways,
A long lone journey; and from them that loose
Their spiced bales upon the wharves, and shake
Strange silks to the sun, or covertly unbosom
Rich hoard of pearls and amber, or let drip
Through swarthy fingers links of sinuous gold,
Chose their most delicate treasures. Though I knew
No touch more silken than this knotted gown,
My hands, grown tender with the sense of her,
Discerned the airiest tissues, light to cling
As shower-loosed petals, veils like meadow-smoke,
Fur soft as snow, amber like sun congealed,
Pearls pink as may-buds in an orb of dew;
And laden with these wonders, that to her
Were natural as the vesture of a flower,
Fared home to lay my booty at her feet.
And she, consenting, nor with useless words
Proving my purpose, robed herself therein
To meet her lawful lord; but while she thus
Prisoned the wandering glory of her hair,
Dimmed her bright breast with jewels, and subdued
Her light to those dull splendours, well she knew
The lord that I adorned her thus to meet
Was not Tintagel’s shadowy King, but he,
That other lord beneath whose plumy feet
The currents of the seas of life run gold
As from eternal sunrise; well she knew
That when I laid my hands upon her head,
Saying, "Fare forth forgiven," the words I spoke
Were the breathings of his pity, who beholds
How, swept on his inexorable wings
Too far beyond the planetary fires
On the last coasts of darkness, plunged too deep
In light ineffable, the heart amazed
Swoons of its glory, and dropping back to earth
Craves the dim shelter of familiar sounds,
The rain on the roof, the noise of flocks that pass,
And the slow world waking to its daily round. . . .
And thus, as one who speeds a banished queen,
I set her on my mule, and hung about
With royal ornament she went her way;
For meet it was that this great Queen should pass
Crowned and forgiven from the face of Love.
"The Comrade." Atlantic Monthly 106 (Dec. 1910): 785-87.
WILD winged thing, O brought I know not whence
To beat your life out in my life’s low cage;
You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh
Yet distant as a star, that were at first
A child with me a child, yet elfin-far,
And visibly of some unearthly breed;
Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games,
Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam
Of Latmian loneliness--O seven then
Expert to lift the latch of our low door
And profit by the hours when, dusked about
By human misintelligence, our first
Weak fledgling flights were safeliest essayed;
Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet
Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul
Above the world’s dim garden!--now we sit,
After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings,
In the same cage together--still as near
And still as strange!
Only I know at last
And that I shall not miss your comrade hands
Till they have closed my lids, and by them set
A taper that--who knows!--may yet shine through.
Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you,
Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine,
And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms
Of human usage; I have loosed your hand
And whispered: ’Go! Since I am tethered here;’
And you have turned, and breathing for reply,
’I too am pinioned, as you too are free,’
Have caught me to such undreamed distances
As the last planets see, when they look forth,
To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars--
Nor these alone,
Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft
Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me
The heart of wonder in familiar things,
Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head
The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon,
Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.
And you have made a secret pact with Sleep,
And when she comes not, or her feet delay,
Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel
Under a pale sky where no shadows fall,
Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal,
And the night grows like a great rumouring sea,
And you a boat, and I your passenger,
And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath
Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents,
Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage
Of desperate moon-drawn waters--on and on
To some blue ocean immarcescible
That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks
The balanced breasts of sea-birds motionless.
Yet other nights, my sister, you have been
The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it
Terrifically down voids that never knew
The pity of creation--or have felt
The immitigable anguish of a soul
Left last in a long-ruined world alone;
And then your touch has drawn me back to earth,
As in the night, upon an unknown road,
A scent of lilac breathing from the hedge
Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,
And safety, and the sense of human kind . . .
And I have climbed with you by hidden ways
To meet the dews of morning, and have seen
The shy gods like retreating shadows fade,
Or on the thymy reaches have surprised
Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not . . .
Yet farther have I fared with you, and known
Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites
Of his most inward temple; and beyond
His temple lights, have seen the long gray waste
Where lonely thoughts, like creatures of the night,
Listen and wander where a city stood.
And creeping down by waterless defiles
Under an
iron midnight, have I kept
My vigil in the waste till dawn began
To move among the ruins, and I saw
A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth,
And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand
Of some old god of granite in the dust . . .
"Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex)." Scribner’s Magazine 49 (Mar. 1911): 277-78. Edith Wharton
NOT all the wasteful beauty of the year
Heaped in the scale of one consummate hour
Shall this outweigh: the curve of quiet air
That held, as in the green sun-fluted light
Of sea-caves quivering in a tidal lull,
Those tranced towers and long unruined walls,
Moat-girdled from the world’s dissolving touch,
The rook-flights lessening over evening woods,
And, down the unfrequented grassy slopes,
The shadows of old oaks contemplative
Reaching behind them like the thoughts of age.
High overhead hung the long Sussex ridge,
Sun-cinctured, as a beaker’s rim of gold
Curves round its green concavity; and slow
Across the upper pastures of the sky
The clouds moved white before the herding airs
That in the hollow, by the moated walls,
Stirred not one sleeping lily from its sleep.
Deeper the hush fell; more remote the earth
Fled onward with the flight of cloud and sun,
And cities strung upon the flashing reel
Of nights and days. We knew no more of these
Than the grey towers redoubling in the moat
The image of a bygone strength transformed
To beauty’s endless uses; and like them
We felt the touch of that renewing power
That turns the landmarks of man’s ruined toil
To high star-haunted reservoirs of peace.
And with that sense there came the deeper sense
Of moments that, between the beats of time,
May thus insphere in some transcendent air
The plenitude of being.
Far currents feed them, from those slopes of soul
That know the rise and set of other stars
White-roaring downward through remote defiles
Dim-forested with unexplored thought;
Yet tawny from the flow of lower streams
That drink the blood of battle, sweat of earth,
And the broached vats of cities revelling.
All these the moments hold; yet these resolved
To such clear wine of beauty as shall flush
The blood to richer living. . . . Thus we mused,
And musing thus we felt the magic touch,
And such a moment held us. As, at times,
Through the long windings of each other’s eyes
We have reached some secret hallowed silent place
That a god visits at the turn of night--
In such a solitude the moment held us.
And one were thought and sense in that profound
Submersion of all being deep below
The vexed waves of action. Clear we saw,
Through the clear nether stillness of the place,
The gliding images of words and looks
Swept from us down the gusty tides of time,
And here unfolding to completer life;
And like dull pebbles from a sunless shore
Plunged into crystal waters, suddenly
We took the hues of beauty, and became,
Each to the other, all that each had sought.
Thus did we feel the moment and the place
One in the heart of beauty; while far off
The rooks’ last cry died on the fading air,
And the first star stood white upon the hill.
"Pomegranate Seed." Scribner’s Magazine 51 (Mar. 1912): p284-91. BY EDITH WHARTON
DEMETER PERSEPHONE
HECATE HERMES
In the vale of Elusis
Hail, goddess, from the midmost caverned vale
Of Samothracia, where with darksome rites
Unnameable, and sacrificial lambs,
Pale priests salute thy triple-headed form,
Borne hither by swift Hermes o’er the sea:
Hail, Hecate, what word soe’er thou bring
To me, undaughtered, of my vanished child.
Word have I, but no Samothracian wild
Last saw me, and mine aged footsteps pine
For the bleak vale, my dusky-pillared house,
And the cold murmur of incessant rites
Forever falling down mine altar-steps
Into black pools of fear . . . for I am come
Even now from that blue-cinctured westward isle,
Trinacria, where, till thou withheldst thy face,
Yearly three harvests yellowed to the sun,
And vines deep-laden yoked the heavier boughs--
Trinacria, that last saw Persephone.
Now, triune goddess, may the black ewe-lambs
Pour a red river down thine altar-steps,
Fruit, loaves and honey, at the cross-roads laid,
With each young moon by pious hands renewed,
Appease thee, and the Thracian vale resound
With awful homage to thine oracle!
What bring’st thou of Persephone, my child?
Thy daughter lives, yet never sees the sun.
Blind am I in her blindness. Tell no more.
Blind is she not, and yet beholds no light.
Dark as her doom is, are thy words to me.
When the wild chariot of the flying sea
Bore me to Etna, ’neath his silver slope
Herding their father’s flocks three maids I found,
The daughters of the god whose golden house
Rears in the east its cloudy peristyle.
"Helios, our father," to my quest they cried,
"Was last to see Persephone on earth."
On earth? What nameless region holds her now?
Even as I put thy question to the three,
Etna became as one who knows a god,
And wondrously, across the waiting deep,
Wave after wave the golden portent bore,
Till Helios rose before us.
O, I need
Thy words as the parched valleys need my rain!
May the draught slake thee! Thus the god replied:
When the first suns of March with verdant flame
Relume the fig-trees in the crannied hills,
And the pale myrtle scents the rain-washed air--
Ere oleanders down the mountain stream
Pass the wild torch of summer, and my kine
Breathe of gold gorse and honey-laden sage;
Between the first white flowering of the bay
And the last almond’s fading from the hill,
Along the fields of Enna came a maid
Who seemed among her mates to move alone,
As the full moon will mow the sky of stars,
And whom, by that transcendence, I divined
Of breed Olympian, and Demeter’s child.
All-seeing god! So walks she in my dreams.
Persephone (so spake the god of day)
Ran here and there with footsteps that out-shone
The daffodils she gathered, while her maids,
Like shadows of herself by noon fore-shortened,
On every side her laughing task prolonged;
When suddenly the warm and trusted earth
Widened black jaws beneath them, and therefrom
Rose Aides, whom with averted head
Pale mortals worship, as the poplar turns,
Whitening, her fearful foliage from the gale.
Like thunder rolling up against the wind
He dusked the sky with midnight ere he came,
Whirling his cloak of
subterraneous cloud
In awful coils about the fated maid,
Till nothing marked the place where she had stood
But her dropped flowers--a garland on a grave.
Where is that grave? There will I lay me down,
And know no more the change of night to day.
Such is the cry that mortal mothers make;
But the sun rises, and their task goes on.
Yet happier they, that make an end at last.
Behold, along the Eleusinian vale
A god approaches, by his feathered tread
Arcadian Hermes. Wait upon his word.
I am a god. What do the gods avail?
Oft have I heard that cry--but not the answer.
Demeter, from Olympus am I come,
By laurelled Tempe and Thessalian ways,
Charged with grave words of aegis-bearing Zeus.
DEMETER
( as if she has not heard him)
If there be any grief I have not borne,
Go, bring it here, and I will give it suck . . .
Thou art a god, and speakest mortal words?
Even the gods grow greater when they love.
It is the Life-giver who speaks by me.
I want no words but those my child shall speak.
His words are winged seeds that carry hope
To root and ripen in long-barren hearts.
Deeds, and not words, alone can quicken me.
His words are fruitfuller than deeds of men.
Why hast thou left Olympus, and thy kind?
Because my kind are they that walk the earth
For numbered days, and lay them down in graves.
My sisters are the miserable women
Who seek their children up and down the world,
Who feel a babe’s hand at the faded breast,
And live upon the words of lips gone dumb.
Sorrow no footing on Olympus finds,
And the gods are gods because their hearts forget.
Why then, since thou hast cast thy lot with those
Who painfully endure vain days on earth,
Hast thou, harsh arbitress of fruit and flower,
Cut off the natural increase of the fields?
The baffled herds, tongues lolling, eyes agape,
Range wretchedly from sullen spring to spring,
A million sun-blades lacerate the ground,
And the shrunk fruits untimely drop, like tears
That Earth at her own desolation sheds.
These are the words Zeus bids me bring to thee.
To whom reply: No pasture longs for rain
As for Persephone I thirst and hunger.
Give me my child, and all the earth shall laugh
Like Rhodian rose-fields in the eye of June.
What if such might were mine? What if, indeed,