Part 6 (1/2)

'When that fierce age,' they'll say, 'went up in flame He lived ... or died, seeing those bright deeds done Whereby our sweet and settled peace was won, Yet offereth slender dreams, not deeds, to Fame.'

Then say: 'Out of the heart the mouth speaketh, And mine was as the hearts of other men Whom those dark days impa.s.sioned; yet it seeketh To paint the sombre woes that held us then, No more than the cloud-rending levin's light Seeks to illumine the sad skies of night.'

INVOCATION

Whither, O, my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?

For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing, And wait on thy appearing, Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers, Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers; Alas! her presence lingers No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;-- Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed By a strange unworldly rest, Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.

Yet when their secret chambers I essayed My spirit sank, dismayed, Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed--but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture-- I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes: So, suddenly made wise, Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....

Whither, O, divine mistress, must I then follow thee?

Is it only in love ... say, is it only in death That the spirit blossometh, And words that may match my vision shall come to me?

THAMAR

(_To Thamar Karsavina_)

Once in the sombre light of the throng'd courts of night, In a dream-haunted land only inhabited By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed, Clung to my idle hand with clenched fingers weak And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak.

Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves.

Then I: 'O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come?

Tell me thy race and name!' And he, with veiled face: 'I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far, A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms, Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar...

Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared By ways that no men dared unto a desert land, Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand-- Older a million years: Babel was builded on That broken city's tears; dust of her crumbled past Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel's charioteers In whorled clouds above those s.h.i.+ning thoroughfares Where Babel's millions tread on her unheeding dead.

Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait Parch'd with an ancient thirst that no aeons can abate, Pa.s.sed I, predestinate, to a thorn'd desert's drought, Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate, Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten gla.s.s Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot.

Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste, Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land, Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled; Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting, Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating Struggled my hapless soul...

There, in a thousand springs, Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing, Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings, Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air That s.h.i.+vered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight, And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing'd egrets white Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare; But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter.

Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst, The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips, To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great s.h.i.+ps With moving towers of sail, p.o.o.ps throng'd with grinning crowds And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire In the green gloom beneath.

So, again and again, Hath a phantom city thrust to the visionary vault Of inviolate cobalt, dome and dreaming minaret Mosque and gleaming water-tower hazy in a fountain's jet Or a market's rising dust; and my lips have cried aloud To see them tremble there, though I knew within my heart They were chiselled out of cloud or carven of thin air; And my fingers clenched my hand, for I wondered if this land Of my stony pilgrimage were a glimmering mirage, And I myself no more than a phantom of the sand.

'But beyond these fading slender cities, many leagues away, Strange brooding mountains lay heaped, crowding range on range In a changing cloudy splendour; and beyond, in lakes of light, As eastward still I staggered, there swam into my sight, More vast and h.o.a.r and haggard, shoulders of ice and snow Bounding the heavens low of burnished bra.s.s, whereunder The hot plains of Cathay perpetually slumber: Where tawny millions breed in cities without number, Whither, a hill-born thunder, rolling on Tartary With torrents and barb'd lightning, swelleth the yellow river To a tumult of whitening foam and confused might That drowns in a single night many a mud-made city; And cities of boats, and frail cities of lath and reed, Are whirled away without pity or set afloat in a pale, Swirling, shallow sea ... and their names seem lost for ever Till a stranger nomad race drive their herds to the sad place Where old sorrows lie forgotten, and raise upon the rotten Level waste another brood to await another flood.

'But I never might attain to this melancholy plain For the mountains rose between; stark in my path they lay Between me and Cathay, through moving mist half-seen.

And I knew that they were real, for their drooping folds of cloud Enwrapped me in a shroud, and the air that fell at night From their frozen summits white slid like an ice-blue steel Into my living breast and stilled the heart within As the chill of an old sin that robs a man of rest, Killing all delight in the silence of the night And brooding black above till the heart dare not move But lieth cold and numb ... and the dawn will not come.

'Yet to me a dawn came, new-kindled in cold flame, Flinging the imminence of those inviolate snows On the forest lawns below in a shadow more immense Than their eternal vastness; and a new hope beyond reason, Flamed in my heart's dark season, dazzled my pallid eyes, Till, when the hot sun soared above the uttermost height, A draught of keen delight into my body was poured, For all that frozen fastness lay flowered with the spring: Her starry blossoms broke beneath my bruised feet, And their beauty was so sweet to me I kissed them where they lay; Yea, I bent my weary hips and kissed them with dry lips, Tenderly, only dreading lest their petals delicate Should be broken by my treading, for I lived, I lived again, And my heart would have been broken by a living creature's pain, So I kissed them for a token of my joy in their new birth, And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept To the bases of the crags, and I slept....

'Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep, When tired children creep on to their mother's knees, And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings, Before the nightjar spins or the nightingale begins; When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf Lest the silence should break.

'Other sleep have I known, Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil, And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax, And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles, Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves Like phosph.o.r.escent waves was.h.i.+ng summer seas: And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazed wonder When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky And raptured lovers lie faint in each other's arms Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms, Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only In each other's eyes, and sigh, and sleep again; For while they sleep they seem to forget the world's pain, And when they wake, they dream....

'But other sleep was mine As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep'd, Or soused with the heaped milky poppyheads A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep.

So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled Eastward under the vast dominion of night, Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight, Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun's amber.

'Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis, Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals, And silver-sounding timbrels s.h.i.+vered through the vale.

O lovely, and O white, under the holy night Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon In far forests under desolate Lebanon, While the flame of Moloch's pyre reddens the sea-born cloud That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud, Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side!