Chapter II

O blue flower of the evening,
You have touched my face
With your leaves of silver.

Love me for I must depart.

RICHARD ALDINGTON

BROMIOS

The withered bonds are broken.
The waxed reeds and the double pipe
Clamour about me;
The hot wind swirls
Through the red pine trunks.

Io! the fauns and the satyrs.
The touch of their shagged curled fur
And blunt horns!

They have wine in heavy craters
Painted black and red;
Wine to splash on her white body.
Io!
She shrinks from the cold shower—
Afraid, afraid!

Let the Maenads break through the myrtles
And the boughs of the rohododaphnai.
Let them tear the quick deers’ flesh.
Ah, the cruel, exquisite fingers!

Io!
I have brought you the brown clusters,
The ivy-boughs and pine-cones.

Your breasts are cold sea-ripples,
But they smell of the warm grasses.

Throw wide the chiton and the peplum,
Maidens of the Dew.
Beautiful are your bodies, O Maenads,
Beautiful the sudden folds,
The vanishing curves of the white linen
About you.

Io!
Hear the rich laughter of the forest,
The cymbals,
The trampling of the panisks and the centaurs.

RICHARD ALDINGTON.

TO ATTHIS

(_After the Manuscript of Sappho now in Berlin_)

Atthis, far from me and dear Mnasidika,
Dwells in Sardis;
Many times she was near us
So that we lived life well
Like the far-famed goddess
Whom above all things music delighted.

And now she is first among the Lydian women
As the mighty sun, the rose-fingered moon,
Beside the great stars.

And the light fades from the bitter sea
And in like manner from the rich-blossoming earth;
And the dew is shed upon the flowers,
Rose and soft meadow-sweet
And many-coloured melilote.

Many things told are remembered of sterile Atthis.

I yearn to behold thy delicate soul
To satiate my desire. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .

RICHARD ALDINGTON

SITALKAS

Thou art come at length
More beautiful
Than any cool god
In a chamber under
Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god
Who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass.
Aye, than Argestes
Scattering the broken leaves.

H. D.

HERMES OF THE WAYS