Wake up!” And, shooting by, we ran;
The while I mused, This, surely, now,
Confutes the Naturalists, allow!
Sirens, true sirens verily be,
Sirens, waylayers in the sea.
Well, wooed by these same deadly misses,
Is it shame to run?
No! flee them did divine Ulysses,
Brave, wise, and Venus’ son.
Pisa’s Leaning Tower
THE Tower in tiers of architraves,
Fair circle over cirque,
A trunk of rounded colonades,
The maker’s master-work,
Impends with all its pillared tribes,
And, poising them, debates:
It thinks to plunge—but hesitates;
Shrinks back—yet fain would slide;
Withholds itself—itself would urge;
Hovering, shivering on the verge,
A would-be suicide!
In a Church of Padua
IN vaulted place where shadows flit,
An upright sombre box you see:
A door, but fast, and lattice none.
But punctured holes minutely small
In lateral silver panel square
Above a kneeling-board without,
Suggest an aim if not declare.
Who bendeth here the tremulous knee
No glimpse may get of him within,
And he immured may hardly see
The soul confessing there the sin;
Nor yields the low-sieved voice a tone
Whereby the murmurer may be known.
Dread diving-bell! In thee inurned
What hollows the priest must sound,
Descending into consciences
Where more is hid than found.
Milan Cathedral
THROUGH light green haze, a rolling sea
Over gardens where redundance flows,
The fat old plain of Lombardy,
The White Cathedral shows.
Of Art the miracles
Its tribes of pinnacles
Gleam like to ice-peaks snowed; and higher,
Erect upon each airy spire
In concourse without end,
Statues of saints over saints ascend
Like multitudinous forks of fire.
What motive was the master-builder’s here?
Why these synodic hierarchies given,
Sublimely ranked in marble sessions clear,
Except to signify the host of heaven.
Pausilippo
(In the time of Bomba)
A HILL there is that laves its feet
In Naples’ bay and lifts its head
In jovial season, curled with vines.
Its name, in pristine years conferred
By settling Greeks, imports that none
Who take the prospect thence can pine,
For such the charm of beauty shown
Even sorrow’s self they cheerful weened
Surcease might find and thank good Pan.
Toward that Hill my landau drew;
And there, hard by the verge, was seen
Two faces with such meaning fraught
One scarce could mark and straight pass on:
I bade my charioteer rein up.
A man it was less hoar with time
Than bleached through strange immurement long,
Retaining still, by doom depressed,
Dim trace of some aspiring prime.
Seated, he tuned a homely harp
Watched by a girl, whose filial mien
Toward one almost a child again,
Took on a staid maternal tone.
Nor might one question that the locks
Which in smoothed natural silvery curls
Fell on the bowed one’s thread-bare coat
Betrayed her ministering hand.
Anon, among some ramblers drawn
A murmur rose, “’Tis Silvio, Silvio!”
With inklings more in tone suppressed
Touching his story, part recalled:
Clandestine arrest abrupt by night;
The sole conjecturable cause
The yearning in a patriot ode
Prolonged captivity profound;
Vain liberation late. All this,
With pity for impoverishment
And blight forestalling age’s wane.
Hillward the quelled enthusiast turned,
Unmanned, made meek through strenuous wrong,
Preluding, faltering; then began,
But only thrilled the wire—no more,
The constant maid supplying voice,
Hinting by no ineloquent sign
That she was but his mouth-piece mere,
Himself too spiritless and spent.
Pausilippo, Pausilippo,
Pledging easement unto pain,
Shall your beauty even solace
If one’s sense of beauty wane?
Could light airs that round ye play
Waft heart-heaviness away
Or memory lull to sleep,
Then, then indeed your balm
Might Silvio becharm,
And life in fount would leap,
Pausilippo!
Did not your spell invite,
In moods that slip between,
A dream of years serene,
And wake, to dash, delight—
Evoking here in vision
Fulfillment and fruition—
Nor mine, nor meant for man!
Did hope not frequent share
The mirage when despair
Overtakes the caravan,
Me then your scene might move
To break from sorrow’s snare,
And apt your name would prove,
Pausilippo!
But I’ve looked upon your revel—
It unravels not the pain:
Pausilippo, Pausilippo,
Named benignly if in vain!
It ceased. In low and languid tone
The tideless ripple lapped the passive shore.
As listlessly the bland untroubled heaven
Looked down, as silver doled was silent given
In pity—futile as the ore!
The Attic Landscape
TOURIST, spare the avid glance
That greedy roves the sights to see:
Little here of “Old Romance,”
Or Picturesque of Tivoli.
No flushful tint the sense to warm—
Pure outline pale, a linear charm.
The clear-cut hills carved temples face,
Respond, and share their sculptural grace.
’Tis Art and Nature lodged together,
Sister by sister, cheek to cheek;
Such Art, such Nature, and such weather
The All-in-All seems here a Greek.
The Same
A CIRCUMAMBIENT spell it is,
Pellucid on these scenes that waits,
Repose that does of Plato tell—
Charm that his style authenticates.
The Parthenon
I
Seen aloft from afar
ESTRANGED in site,
Aerial gleaming, warmly white,
You look a sun-cloud motionless
In noon of day divine;
Your beaut
y charmed enhancement takes
In Art’s long after-shine.
II
Nearer viewed
Like Lais, fairest of her kind,
In subtlety your form’s defined—
The cornice curved, each shaft inclined,
While yet, to eyes that do but revel
And take the sweeping view,
Erect this seems, and that a level,
To line and plummet true.
Spinoza gazes; and in mind
Dreams that one architect designed
Lais—and you!
III
The Frieze
What happy musings genial went
With airiest touch the chisel lent
To frisk and curvet light
Of horses gay—their riders grave—
Contrasting so in action brave
With virgins meekly bright,
Clear filing on in even tone
With pitcher each, one after one
Like water-fowl in flight.
IV
The Last Tile
When the last marble tile was laid
The winds died down on all the seas;
Hushed were the birds, and swooned the glade;
Ictinus sat; Aspasia said
“Hist!—Art’s meridian, Pericles!”
Greek Masonry
JOINTS were none that mortar sealed:
Together, scarce with line revealed,
The blocks in symmetry congealed.
Greek Architecture
NOT magnitude, not lavishness,
But Form—the Site;
Not innovating wilfulness,
But reverence for the Archetype.
Off Cape Colonna
ALOOF they crown the foreland lone,
From aloft they loftier rise—
Fair columns, in the aureola rolled
From sunned Greek seas and skies.
They wax, sublimed to fancy’s view,
A god-like group against the blue.
Overmuch like gods! Serene they saw
The wolf-waves board the deck,
And headlong hull of Falconer,
And many a deadlier wreck.
The Archipelago
SAIL before the morning breeze
The Sporads through and Cyclades,
They look like isles of absentees—
Gone whither?
You bless Apollo’s cheering ray,
But Delos, his own isle, to-day
Not e’en a Selkirk there to pray
God friend me!
Scarce lone these groups, scarce lone and bare,
When Theseus roved a Raleigh there,
Each isle a small Virginia fair—
Unravished.
Nor less, though havoc fell they rue,
They still retain, in outline true,
Their grace of form when earth was new
And primal.
But beauty clear, the frame’s as yet,
Never shall make one quite forget
Thy picture, Pan, therein once set—
Life’s revel!
’Tis Polynesia reft of palms,
Seaward no valley breathes her balms—
Not such as musk thy rings of calms,
Marquesas!
Syra
(A Transmitted Reminiscence)
FLEEING from Scio’s smouldering vines
(Where when the sword its work had done
The Turk applied the torch) the Greek
Came here, a fugitive stript of goods,
Here to an all but tenantless isle,
Nor here in footing gained at first,
Felt safe. Still from the turbaned foe
Dreading the doom of shipwrecked men
Whom feline seas permit to land
Then pounce upon and drag them back,
For height they made, and prudent won
A cone-shaped fastness on whose flanks
With pains they pitched their eyrie camp,
Stone huts, whereto they wary clung;
But, reassured in end, come down—
Multiplied through compatriots now,
Refugees like themselves forlorn—
And building along the water’s verge
Begin to thrive; and thriving more
When Greece at last flung off the Turk,
Make of the haven mere a mart.
I saw it in its earlier day—
Primitive, such an isled resort
As hearthless Homer might have known
Wandering about the Ægean here.
Sheds ribbed with wreck-stuff faced the sea
Where goods in transit shelter found.
And here and there a shanty-shop
Where Fez-caps, swords, tobacco, shawls,
Pistols, and orient finery, Eve’s—
(The spangles dimmed by hands profane)
Like plunder on a pirate’s deck
Lay orderless in such loose way
As to suggest things ravished or gone astray.
Above a tented inn with fluttering flag
A sunburnt board announced Greek wine
In selfsame text Anacreon knew,
Dispensed by one named “Pericles.”
Got up as for the opera’s scene,
Armed strangers, various, lounged or lazed,
Lithe fellows tall, with gold-shot eyes,
Sunning themselves as leopards may.
Off-shore lay xebecs trim and light,
And some but dubious in repute.
But on the strand, for docks were none,
What busy bees! no testy fry;
Frolickers, picturesquely odd,
With bales and oil-jars lading boats,
Lighters that served an anchored craft,
Each in his tasseled Phrygian cap,
Blue Eastern drawers and braided vest;
And some with features cleanly cut
As Proserpine’s upon the coin.
Such chatterers all! like children gay
Who make believe to work, but play.
I saw, and how help musing too.
Here traffic’s immature as yet:
Forever this juvenile fun hold out
And these light hearts? Their garb, their glee,
Alike profuse in flowing measure,
Alike inapt for serious work,
Blab of grandfather Saturn’s prime
When trade was not, nor toil nor stress,
But life was leisure, merriment, peace,
And lucre none, and love was righteousness.
Disinterment of the Hermes
WHAT forms divine in adamant fair—
Carven demigod and god,
And hero-marbles rivalling these,
Bide under Latium’s sod,
Or lost in sediment and drift
Alluvial which the Grecian rivers sift.
To dig for these, O better far
Than raking arid sands
For gold more barren, meetly theirs
Sterile, with brimming hands.
The Apparition
(The Parthenon uplifted on its rock first challenging
the view on the approach to Athens)
ABRUPT the supernatural Cross,
Vivid in startled air,
Smote the Emperor Constantine
And turned his soul’s allegiance there.
With other pow
er appealing down,
Trophy of Adam’s best!
If cynic minds you scarce convert,
You try them, shake them, or molest.
Diogenes, that honest heart,
Lived ere your date began;
Thee had he seen, he might have swerved
In mood nor barked so much at Man.
In the Desert
NEVER Pharoah’s Night,
Whereof the Hebrew wizards croon,
Did so the Theban flamens try
As me this veritable Noon.
Like blank ocean in blue calm
Undulates the ethereal frame;
In one flowing oriflamme
God flings his fiery standard out.
Battling with the Emirs fierce,
Napoleon a great victory won,
Through and through his sword did pierce;
But, bayonetted by this sun,
His gunners drop beneath the gun.
Holy, holy, holy Light!
Immaterial incandescence,
Of God the effluence of the essence,
Shekinah, intolerably bright!
The Great Pyramid
YOUR masonry—and is it man’s?
More like some Cosmic artizan’s.
Your courses as in strata rise,
Beget you do a blind surmise
Like Grampians.
Far slanting up your sweeping flank