Chapter I: Front Matter

THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS
AND OTHER POEMS

THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS
AND OTHER POEMS

BY
GEORGE STERLING
Author of “The Testimony of the Suns”
and “A Wine of Wizardry”

A. M. ROBERTSON
SAN FRANCISCO
1911

COPYRIGHT
1911
BY GEORGE STERLING

_Printed by
The Stanley-Taylor Company
San Francisco_

TO MY WIFE

CONTENTS

PAGE

DUANDON 9

ALDEBARAN AT DUSK 22

THE CHARIOTS OF DAWN 23

THE HUNTRESS OF STARS 24

THE EVANESCENT 25

MEMORY 28

THE MOTH OF TIME 29

THE BLACK VULTURE 30

THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS 31

SONNETS ON THE SEA’S VOICE 40

AUTUMN 44

STARS OF THE NOON 46

THE APOTHECARY’S 48

THE SWIMMERS 51

BENEATH THE REDWOODS 58

MUSIC AT DUSK 60

THE TIDES OF CHANGE 61

MORNING TWILIGHT 62

AN ALTAR OF THE WEST 64

THE FAUN 77

THE VOICES 80

A CHARACTER 81

THE GUERDON OF THE SUN 84

THE GARDENS OF THE SEA 86

THE SIBYL OF DREAMS 90

THE MUSIC OF SLEEP 91

DUTY 92

THE ECHO AND THE QUEST 93

JUSTICE 96

THE FLEET 102

REMORSE 105

MOONLIGHT IN THE PINES 107

AT THE GRAVE OF SERRA 111

WHITE MAGIC 114

THREE SONNETS BY THE NIGHT SEA 117

AFTER THE STORM 120

THE HARLOT’S AWAKENING 122

THE MIDGES 124

TO AMBROSE BIERCE 126

TO HALL B. RAND 127

TO VERNON L. KELLOGG 128

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD 129

THE ASHES IN THE SEA 132

THE FORTY-THIRD CHAPTER OF JOB 135

DUANDON

Duandon, king of Aetria’s farthest bound
And lord of isles the sea is loud around,
Beheld the crimson fountains of the dawn
Bear up the lark, a foam of song, till drawn
By some new sorrow in the ocean’s tone,
Thither he fared, expectant and alone.
Thither he fared, fresh from the sea of sleep,
And all the balmy land was blossomed deep,
Nor could one wander save on helpless flow’rs,
Where Summer made a garland of the hours
And bound it on the dew-dipt brow of Morn,
Bent low above the meadow’s blossom-bourn.
But past all peace of bowers rang the call
And invocation of the billows’ fall,
And, clean from kingdoms of the sapphire vast,
The winds of ocean smote his brow at last.
Afar he saw the eddying petrel sweep
O’er reefs where hoarser roared the thwarted deep,
And soon before his eyes, exultant, fain,
Heavy with azure gleamed the investing main,
And quick with pulsings of a distant storm,
Strong as that music floating Troy to form.
Splendid the everlasting ocean shone
As God’s blue robe upon a desert thrown;
Landward he saw the sea-born breakers fare,
Young as a wind and ancient as the air;
August he saw the unending ranks uproll,
With joy and wonder mastering the soul,
With marvel on the hearing and the sight--
Green fires, and billows tremulous with light,
With shaken soul of light and shuddering blaze
Of leaping emerald and cold chrysoprase,--
The surge and suspiration of the sea,
Great waters choral of eternity,--
The mighty dirge that will not cease for day
Nor all the stars’ invincible array,--
The thunder that hath set, since Time began,
Its sorrow in the lonely heart of man.

Long stood the king before that wide review,
Divining, deep beyond its sound and hue,
Unfathomable mystery and dream,--
Rapture and woe illusive but supreme;
And as the pine against the sea-wind sighs,
So thrilled his breast with whispers and surmise;
Till, on a beach that only he might roam,
The sea, from broadest tapestries of foam,
From mighty looms immaculate and cold,
A scarlet shell before his feet uprolled.
Wet as with blood against the dawn it flamed,
Deep-whorled and irised, lustrous and unnamed--
A jewel of the sea that burned and shone
Like some king-ruby ravished from a throne.
And long Duandon wandered, all-amazed,
And long upon the shell’s wild beauty gazed,
Till, half-unwitting, swiftly to his ear
He held it, fain as any child to hear
That echo like the murmuring of seas--
Astray forever on a mournful breeze
And borne from some remote, nocturnal bound;
Whereat a voice, in sorceries of sound
To which the grace of vanished lyres had clung,
Sang from the shell as never voice hath sung:

_Far down, where virgin silence reigns,
In jasper evenings of the sea,
I toss my pearls, I wait for thee.
The sea hath lent me all its stains:
It is but treasure-house of me._

_The corals of the deep have caught
A Titan shell whose fragile dome_
_Is crimson o’er mine ocean home--
Mine opal chambers subtly wrought
In semblance of the shaken foam._

_Oh, come! and thou shalt dream with me
By violet foam at twilight tost
On strands of ocean islets lost
To prows that seek them wearily,
O’er seas by questing sunsets crost._

_All dreams that Hope hath promised Love,
All beauty thou hast sought in vain,
All joy held once and lost again,
These, and the mystery thereof,
I guard beneath the sundering main._

So rang that crystal cry, as from afar,
Clear as the voice of Heaven’s whitest star,
And strong Duandon pondered, with his gaze
Set like twin stars above those azure ways.
Keener his heart, a plummet, yearned to sound
The gulf that held his soul amazed and bound,
Where, darker for the sky’s unclouded dome,
The waves took sudden coronals of foam,
Till half he deemed he saw, far out, the white
Flung arms and bosom of the ocean-sprite.
Hour beyond hour, until the sun was fled,
Strode he on sands that none but he might tread;
Hour beyond hour one sight his vision drank--
A foam-white arm that beckoned once, and sank.
Then, wave to wave in deeper anthems roared,
And realm by realm the belted sunset soared,
As tho’ a city of the Titans burned
In lands below the sea-line, undiscerned,
Till desolation touched it, zone by zone,
Its splendors gone, like jewels turned to stone,
And sad with evening sang the ocean-choirs,
Domed by the stars’ imperishable fires.
But still Duandon lingered on the sands
And clasped the shell with indecisive hands;
Ghostly it gleamed, nor music would outpour
Save of the sea on some disastrous shore.
And still he stood, and listened but to hark
The surf, like dragons battling in the dark;
Implacable they ravened, ere the moon,
A towering glory on the eastern dune,
A frozen splendor on the seething strand,
In silver webs had snared the sea and land.
Then, as on hostile waves her arrows leapt,
Duandon turned him from the sea, and slept.
Slept, but the morning found him yet again
A lonely searcher of the lonelier main;
And night by night, and day by barren day,
Silent he stood before the waves’ array--
The victim of an unrelenting strife
Of joy with death, of love with love of life.
Ever at dawn the voice from out the shell
Renewed within his heart the siren’s spell;
Ever the wild, enchanting melody
Rang as the sun was wedded to the sea.
And still the royal pageant of the world
Before his doom-bewildered eyes unfurled,
With dusky stain of sunsets northward drawn
And cloudy headlands of the coasts of dawn.
Beyond that realm of jade and jade-bound bays,
He saw the sapphire fields of ocean blaze;
Heard the alliant waters chant their rune
Before the turquoise battlements of noon,
Where evening armies of the mist would roam
As twilight mixed its purple with the foam,--
Where sunlight, checked in its torrential leap,
Would froth at dawn about some cloudland steep.
Debarred was peace, tho’ Sleep, with tender hand,
Led him awhile in her allaying land;
For soon the sea flowed in upon his dream
And far below he saw the Singer gleam--
Her floating hair and pearly body’s grace,
With sunken moonlight pure upon her face.
So still he yearned, on whom her spell was laid,
And ever sunset, like a golden blade,
Cut day by day from life, and ever he
Heard like the voice of Death the lordly sea,
Chanting, enthroned on choric reef and bars,
Its midnight song below the western stars,
And all the stars seemed ministrant to doom
As high Orion trod his arc of gloom.

Broke then a morning when the weary sea
Lay husht above its halls of mystery;
Besieging fog hung mute on shore and vale,
With pallid banners and with ashen mail,
And ocean, grey as with oblivion,
Lay hidden from the visage of the sun.
High noon drave not the phantom army forth,
Nor winds slow-seeping from the muffled North,
And weary with its vigil of the deep,
Duandon’s soul put out on seas of sleep;
Dreamless he lay ere sunset, and the shell,
Unguarded, from assenting fingers fell.
Came then, nor spilt that anodyne of rest,
His only son, impatient with the quest,
New-fared from crimson victories of war,--
Tall as the spears that lesser champions bore.
To him the horizon was a smitten chord
That rang in challenge to his youthful sword,
And thrilled with all the murmurs of romance
The realms remote from his insatiate lance.
Silent awhile he stood, and ere he spoke,
Routed at last, the sea-mist’s army broke,
And, as its ranks fled landward to their knell,
The consummating sunset smote the shell....

Duandon woke below the evening star,
And saw the foam’s incessant scimetar
Leap from the billow’s sheath, and heard the cry
Of winds unleashed upon the western sky;
Forlorn beyond the darkling waters lay
The sullen embers of the pyre of Day--
Dull, ere obscuring night should make the sea
One with the reaches of infinity;
Then to the sands his gaze returned, to meet
The seaward print of unreturning feet.
Gone was the shell; a sword lay in its stead,
From altars of the buried sun made red--
A blade he knew so well from all the rest
It seemed that instant to transfix his breast.
Afar or near, on waters grey and lone,
No swimmer drave, no arm uplifted shone;
Austere and vacant rolled the cryptic main,
Unsearchable: the prince came not again,
Unseen on tawny beach or waters loud,--
Gone like the shadow of a vanished cloud.

Aye! better vanished, than to wait, as he,
Duandon, silent by the unmastered sea,
From which, till death, his heart was doomed to crave
The uncomprehended tidings of the wave--
An echo of that music from the shell
Forever vibrant in its fall and swell--
Was fated, still, from azure gulfs to dream
He saw the arm of some white swimmer gleam,
Flung for an instant from the shifting spray--
Siren, or son, or both, he could not say.
And feelest _thou_ no pangs of beauty lost,
When morning waves or waters sunset-crost
Cry to thy soul, unsatisfied, alone,
Of Isles to which its younger dreams have flown?
The might-have-been, the nevermore-to-be,
Bears not the deep their antiphon to thee?
For man has found, as man shall ever find,
Some echo of his travail on the wind,
And sigh of great Departures, and the breath
Of pinions incontestable by Death.
Of stars and shadows past to-morrow’s ken
He finds him vision and announcement, when,
As storms beyond the horizon-line prolong
The sea’s imperious, eternal song,
The thunder-chorded surf on yellow sands
Resounds, like harps on which the gods lay hands.

_THREE SONNETS OF THE NIGHT SKIES_

I

ALDEBARAN AT DUSK

Thou art the star for which all evening waits--
O star of peace, come tenderly and soon!
As for the drowsy and enchanted moon,
She dreams in silver at the eastern gates
Ere yet she brim with light the blue estates
Abandoned by the eagles of the noon.
But shine thou swiftly on the darkling dune
And woodlands where the twilight hesitates.

Above that wide and ruby lake to-West
Wherein the sunset waits reluctantly,
Stir silently the purple wings of Night.
She stands afar, upholding to her breast,
As mighty murmurs reach her from the sea,
Thy lone and everlasting rose of light.

II

THE CHARIOTS OF DAWN

O Night, is this indeed the morning-star,
That now with brandished and impatient beam
On eastern heights of darkness flames supreme,
Or some great captain of the dawn, whose car
Scornful of all thy rear-guard ranks that bar
His battle, now foreruns the helms that gleam
Below horizons of dissevering dream,
Who lifts his javelin to his hosts afar?

Now am I minded of some ocean-king
That in a war of gods has wielded arms,
And still in slumber hears their harness ring
And dreams of isles where golden altars fume,
Till, mad for irretrievable alarms,
He passes down the seas to some strange doom.