Chapter IV: Of the Golden Age

“Recall for me, recall
The time more true and ample;
The world whereon I trample,
How tortuous and small!
Behold, I tire of all.

Once, gods in jeweled mail
Through greenwood ways invited;
There now the moon is blighted,
And mosses long and pale
On lifeless cedars trail.”

“_Child, keep this good unrest:
But give to thine own story
Simplicity with glory;
To greatness dispossessed,
Dominion of thy breast._

_In abstinence, in pride,
Thou, who from Folly’s boldest
Thy sacred eye withholdest,
Another morn shalt ride
At Agamemnon’s side._”

SANCTUARY

HIGH above hate I dwell:
O storms! farewell.
Though at my sill your daggered thunders play,
Lawless and loud to-morrow as to-day,
To me they sound more small
Than a young fay’s footfall:
Soft and far-sunken, forty fathoms low
In Long Ago,
And winnowed into silence on that wind
Which takes wars like a dust, and leaves but love behind.

Hither Felicity
Doth climb to me,
And bank me in with turf and marjoram
Such as bees lip, or the new-weanèd lamb;
With golden barberry-wreath,
And bluets thick beneath;
One grosbeak, too, mid apple-buds a guest
With bud-red breast,
Is singing, singing! All the hells that rage
Float less than April fog below our hermitage.

ORISONS

ORANGE and olive and glossed bay-tree,
And air of the evening out at sea,
And out at sea, on the steep warm stone,
A little bare diver poising alone.

Flushed from the cool of Sicilian waves,
Flushed as the coral in clean sea-caves,
“I am!” he cries to his glorying heart,
And unto he knows not what: “THOU art!”

He leaps, he shines, he sinks, he is gone:
He will climb to the golden ledge anon.
Perfecter rite can none employ,
When the god of the isle is good to a boy.

THE INNER FATE: A CHORUS

NOT weak with eld
The stars beheld
Proud Persia coming to her doom;
Not battle-broke, nor tempest-tossed,
The long luxurious galleys lost
Their souls at Actium.

Not outer arts
Of hostile hearts
Persuaded him of France to be
The wreckage of his wars at last,
The orphan of the kingdoms, cast
Upon the mothering sea.

Man evermore doth work his will,
And evermore the gods are still,
Applauding him alone who stands
Too just for heaven-accusing groans,
And in his house of havoc owns
The doing of his hands;
Transgressor, yet divinely taught
To suffer all, blaspheming naught,
When fair-begun must foul conclude:
Himself progenitor of death,
Who breeds, within, the only breath
Can kill beatitude.

OF JOAN’S YOUTH