Chapter III: The Huntress of Stars

Tell me, O Night! what horses hale the moon!
Those of the sun rear now on Syria’s day,
But here the steeds of Artemis delay
At heavenly rivers hidden from the noon,
Or quench their starry thirst at cisterns hewn
In midnight’s deepest sapphire, ere she slay
The Bull, and hide the Pleiades’ dismay,
Or drown Orion in a silver swoon.

Are those the stars, and not their furious eyes,
That now before her coming chariot glare?
Is that their nebulous, phantasmal breath
Trailed like a mist upon the winter skies,
Or vapors from a Titan’s pyre of death--
Far-wafted on the orbit of Altair?

THE EVANESCENT

The wind upon the mountain-side
Sang to the dew: “My moments fly:
In yonder valley I must die.
How long thy restless gems abide!”

Low to the bent and laden grass
There came the whisper of the dew:
“My lessening hours, how fleet and few!
What months are thine ere thou shalt pass!”

The grass made murmur to the tree:
“My days a little time are fair;
But oh! thy brooding years to share--
The centuries that foster thee!”

Ere died the wind the tree had said:
“O mountain marvellous and strong,
The aeons of thine age--how long,
When I and all my kin lie dead!”

The mountain spake: “O sea! thy strength
Forevermore I shall not face.
At last I sink to thine embrace;
Thy waves await my ramparts’ length.”

The deep gave moan: “O stars supreme!
Your eyes shall see me mute in death.
Before your gaze I fade like breath
Of vapors in a mortal’s dream.”

Then bore the Void a choral cry,
Descendent from the starry throng:
“A little, and our ancient song
Dies at thy throne, Eternity!”

Then, silence on the heavenly Deep,
Wherein that music sank unheard,
As shuts the midnight on a word
Said by a dreamer in his sleep.

MEMORY

She stands beside the ocean of the Past,
A diver. Pearls and hydras can she bring,
Shells for the child and crystals for the king.
Prone on her reefs the sea-essaying mast
And keels that dared the hurricane are cast--
Trophies of tides invincible that swing
Around the islands where the Sirens sing,
The magic of whose song is hers at last.

Some shadow of the glory she restores,
Tho’ wave and wind devour the Ships of Dream;
For many mark her ere the fall of night,
When the surf’s sound is mighty on her shores,
Singing, as wildly on her bosom gleam
The sea-dews, and the rubies of the light.

THE MOTH OF TIME

Lo! this audacious vision of the dust--
This dream that it hath dreamt! Unresting wings,
Too strong for Time, too frail for timeless things!
Whence all thy thirst for God, thy piteous lust
For life to be when matter’s chain shall rust?
What pact hast thou with the undying kings,
Silence and Death? What sibyl’s counsellings
Assure thee that the eternal laws are just?

Nay! all thy hopes are nothing to the Night,
And justice but a figment of thy dream!
Upon the waste what wide mirages glow,
With hills that shift, and palms that mock the sight,
And cities on the desert’s far extreme--
Those veils we name, and dare to think we know!

THE BLACK VULTURE

Aloof upon the day’s immeasured dome,
He holds unshared the silence of the sky.
Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry
The eagle’s empire and the falcon’s home--
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;
His hazards on the sea of morning lie;
Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.

And least of all he holds the human swarm--
Unwitting now that envious men prepare
To make their dream and its fulfilment one,
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare
His roads between the thunder and the sun.

THE HOUSE OF ORCHIDS

Dedicated to Mrs. Joseph B. Coryell

How swift a step from zone to zone!
A moment since, the day
Was cool with winds from linden-bowers flown
And breath of mounded hay
That ripens on the plains,
Beneath the shadow of the western hill;
But here the air is still,
Warm as a Lesbian valley’s afternoon
Made langourous with June
And moist with spirits of unnumbered rains,
Pervaded with a perfume that might be
Of rainbow-haunted lands beyond the sea
And ocean-ending sands--
A ghost of fragrance whose elusive hands
Touch not the hidden harp of memory.
What sprites are those that gleam?
Can eyes betray?
Till now I did not deem
That Beauty’s flaming hands could shape in bloom
So marvelous and delicate designs.
The vision here that shines
Seems not a fabric of our mortal day
And Nature’s tireless loom,
By custom long defiled,
But symbol of a loveliness supreme,
A god’s forgotten dream
In alabaster told by elfin skill
In caverns underneath a haunted hill,
Or in some palace of enchantment hewn
From crystal in the twilights of the moon,
Where white Astarte strays
And Echo and the silver-footed fays
Make alien music, fugitive and wild.
Ye seem as flowers exiled,
More beautiful because they die so soon;
But who the gods that could have scorned
Your tenderness unmarred?
Put first ye forth your fragile wings,
Less of the form than of the soul of things,
Where seraphim had mourned
In Eden’s evening, heavy-starred,
When first the gates were barred
And cruel Time began?
For mystery hath lordship here, and ye
Seem spirit-flowers born to startle man
With intimations of eternity
And hint of what the flowers of Heaven may be.
Nor can your glamour greatly seem of earth:
Her blossoms are of mirth,
But ye with loveliness can tell of grief--
Unhappy love most exquisite and brief.

Wingéd ye seem and fleet,
Such flowers pale as are
Worn by the goddess of a distant star--
Before whose holy eyes
Beauty and evening meet,
Mysterious beauty delicate and strange,
And evening-calm that sighs
With Music’s inexpressible surmise--
Her question ere she dies.
From form to form ye range,
From hue to hue,
And this, with petals wan and mystical,
Seems votive to those spirits of the dew
That weep at silvern twilights silently,
With tears that gently fall
On hidden elves dim-curtained by the rose.
And thou, thy chalice better glows
In purple grottos where the stainless sea
On sands inviolable swirls--
On evanescent pearls,
That hold not all thy bosom’s purity.

And thou, more white
Than when on some blue lake,
Just as the zephyrs wake,
The ripples flash to light--
Touched by a swan’s unsullied breast to foam,
Hadst thou in melancholy halls thy home?
For long ago thou seemest to have slept,
Forlorn, in palace-glooms where queens have wept.
Ah! they too slept at last,
Whose sighs are half the music of the Past!

But thou, O palest one!
Dost seem to scorn the sun,
And, in a tropic, dense,
Languid magnificence,
Desire to know thy former place,
Where no man comes at night,
And in its antic flight
Behold the vampire-bat veer off from thee
As from a phantom face,
Or watch Antares’ light peer craftily
Down from the dank and moonless sky,
As goblins’ eyes might gleam
Or baleful rubies glare,
Muffled in smoke or incense-laden air.
And thou, most weird companion, thou dost seem
Some mottled moth of Hell,
That stealthily might fly
To hover there above the carnal bell
Of some black lily, still and venomous,
And poise forever thus.

Chill, in thy drowsy aether warm,
Softly thou gleamest, subtler form;
Witch-bloom thou seem’st to be,
For Lilith would have bound thee in her hair--
Smiling at dusk inscrutably,
And Circe gathered such for gods to wear,
In evenings when the moon,
A sorceress who steals in white
Along the cloudy parapets of night,
In every glade her ghostly pearl hath strewn.
Thou art as violet-wan
As eyelids of a vestal dead and meek.
If after-life can come to blossoms gone,
Surely Persephone
Shall crown her brow with thee,
In realms where burns nor star nor sun
To show the dead what amaranths to seek.
And ah--this other! none
Of all thy kin more purely is arrayed--
Pallid as Aphrodite’s cheek
To some long passion-swoon betrayed,
By ecstasy foretold;
Yet as with blood thy bosom gleams;
Red as Adonis’ wound it seems,
By Syria mourned of old,
Or scarlet lips that drink from bowls of jade,
Slowly, an ivory poison, sweet and cold....

Oh! mystically strange
That speechless things should so have power to hint,
With subtle form and tint
That seize the heart’s high memories unaware,
The sorrow and the mystery of Change,
And elements in Fate’s controlling plan
Not altogether ministrant to man
Nor mindful of his care--
Some joy to death akin,
Or tragic kiss, or fruit malignly fair,
Some garden built by Sin
For Love to wander in,
Some face whose beauty bids the heart despair!
And yet, O blossoms pure!
How marvelous the lure
Of your fragility and innocence--
This grace and wistfulness of helpless things
That ask no recompense!
Ye give the spirit wings,
For yours the beauty that is near to pain,
And stir the heart again
With visions of the Flowers that abide--
Ah! sweet
As when love’s glances meet
Across the music, heard at eventide!

Lloyden, June, 1909.

SONNETS ON THE SEA’S VOICE

I

Thou seem’st to call to that which will not hear,
As man to Fate. Thine anthems uncontrolled,
From winnowed sands and reefs reverberant rolled,
Shake as with sorrow, and the hour is near
Wherein thy voice shall seem a thing of fear,
Like to a lion’s at the trembling fold;
And men shall waken to the midnight cold,
And feel that dawn is far, that night is drear.

Thou wert ere Life, a dim but quenchless spark,
Found vesture in thy vastness. Thou shalt be
When Life hath crossed the threshold of the Dark,--
When shackling ice hath zoned at last thy breast,
And thy deep voice is hushed, O vanquished Sea!
One with eternity that giveth rest.

II

No cloud is on the heavens, and on the sea
No sail: the immortal, solemn ocean lies
Unbroken sapphire to the walling skies--
Immutable, supreme in majesty.
The billows, where the charging foam leaps free,
Burden the winds with thunder. Soul, arise!
For ghostly trumpet-blasts and battle-cries
Across the tumult wake the Past for thee.

They call me to a dim, disastrous land,
Where fallen marbles tell of mighty years,
Heroic architraves, but where the gust
Ripples forsaken waters. Lo! I stand
With armies round about, and in mine ears
The roar of harps reborn from legend’s dust.

III

How very still this odorous, dim space
Amid the pines! the light is reverent,
Pausing as one who stands with meek intent
On thresholds of an everlasting place.
A single iris waits in weary grace--
Her countenance before the dawning bent,
As Faith might linger, husht and innocent,
With all an altar’s glory on her face.

But silence now is hateful: I would be,
By midnight dark and wild as Satan’s soul,
Where the winds’ unreturning charioteers
Lash, with the hurtling scourges of the sea,
Their frantic steeds to some tempestuous goal--
The deep’s enormous music in their ears.