Chapter IV

Fierce lights on shields of bossy brass
And helms of bronze, next from the hills deploy
Tall youths of Argos. And she sees him pass,
Flushed with heroic joy,
On towards the siege of Troy.

THE RUE-ANEMONE

Under an oak-tree in a woodland, where
The dreaming Spring had dropped it from her hair,
I found a flower, through which I seemed to gaze
Beyond the world and see what no man dare
Behold and live--the myths of bygone days--
Diana and Endymion; and the bare,
Slim beauty of the boy whom Echo wooed;
And Hyacinthus, whom Apollo dewed
With love and death; and Daphne, ever fair;
And that reed-slender girl whom Pan pursued.

I stood and gazed and through it seemed to see
The Dryad dancing by the forest tree,
Her hair wild blown: the Faun, with listening ear,
Deep in the boscage, kneeling on one knee,
Watching the wandered Oread draw near,
Her wild heart beating like a honey-bee
Within a rose.--All, all the myths of old,
All, all the bright shapes of the Age of Gold,
Peopling the wonder-worlds of Poetry,
Through it I seemed in fancy to behold.

What other flower, that, fashioned like a star,
Draws its frail life from earth and braves the war
Of all the heavens, can suggest the dreams
That this suggests? in which no trace of mar
Or soil exists: where stainless innocence seems
Enshrined; and where, beyond our vision far,
That inaccessible beauty, which the heart
Worships as truth and holiness and art,
Is symbolized; wherein embodied are
The things that make the soul's immortal part.

ARTEMIS

Oft of the hiding Oread wast thou seen
At earliest morn, a tall, imperial shape,
High-buskined, dew-dripped, and on close, young curls,
Bright blackness of thick hair, the tipsy drops
Caught from the dripping sprays of under-bosks,--
Kissed of thy cheek and of thy shoulder brushed,--
Thy rosy cheek as far Aurora's fair,
Thy snowy shoulder Hebe-beautiful.

Oft did the shaggy hills and solitudes
Of Arethusa shout and ring and reel,
Reverberate and echo merrily,
Leap into sound with singing of thy hounds,
With the deep belling of thy noble hounds,
Big-mouthed and musical, that on the stag
Or bristling wild-boar furious grew in quest:
And thou, as keen, fleet-footed and clean-limbed,
Inviolable, with thy quivered crew,
Rushed, swinging on the wind free limbs and lithe,
And locks, all radiance, flung back to blow
And balm with spice the wine-sharp air of morn.

Ai me! their throats! their clarion-crystal throats,
That made the hills sing and the wood-ways dance,
As if to orphic strains, and gave them life.
Ai me! their bosoms' deepness and the firm,
Pure, happy beauty of their naked limbs,
That stormed the forest vacancies with light,
Swift daylight of their splendor, and made blow,
Within the glad sonorous solitudes,
Old germs of flowerets a century cold.

The woodland Naiad whispered by her rock;
The Hamadryad, limpid-eyed and wild,
Expectant rustled by her usual oak
And laughed in wonder; and mad Pan himself
Reeled piping fiercely down the dingled deeps,
With rollicking eye that rolled a brutish joy.
And did some unwed maiden, musing where
Her father's well, among the god-graced hills;
Bubbled and babbled, hear thy bugled cry,
O Huntress, she, while deep her dripping jar
Unheeded brimmed, vowed her virginity
To thee--her shorn hair at thy vestal feet.

But, ah! not when the garish daylight fills
The forests with far-swimming gold and green
Let me behold thee, goddess! but when dim
The slow night settles on the haunted wood
And walks in mystery; and the myriad stars
Maze heaven with fire; and the echoy waste,
Far off, far off, in murmurs palpitates
Unto the Limnad's voice, unmerciful,--
Or is 't some night-bird breaking with song its heart?--
Unmerciful and sad and bitter-sweet?--
Then come in all thy godhead, beautiful!
All beautiful and gentle, as thou cam'st
To lorn Endymion, who, in Lemnos once,
Lone in the wizard magic of the wood,
Wandered, a dreaming boy, unfriended, sad.--
It grew far off among the easy trees,
Thy pensive beauty, blossoming flower-like
Between the tree-trunks and the lacing limbs;
Bright in the leaves that kissed for very joy
And drunkenness of glory thus revealed.
He saw it all, from glorious face to feet--
The naked pearl of all thy loveliness,
Thy body's beauty, blended lily and rose,
Alone, uncompanied of handmaidens.
Like some rare, radiant fruit Hesperian,
Not to be plucked of gods or men, thou hung'st
Upon the boughs of heaven. Thy moonéd voice
Came silvering on his wistful ear, and sighed
With light like leaves that kiss and cling again.
And on such perilous beauty that must slay,--
The poisonous favor of thy godliness,--
Feasting his every sense through eyes and ears,
His soul exalted waxed and amorous,--
Like some young god who, draining Olympian bowls,
Grows drunk with nectar,--with immortal love;
And what remained, ah, what remained but death!

APHRODITE

Apollo never smote as lovely a strain,
When swan-necked Hebe stayed her nectared bowl
Among the circled and reclining gods,
To lend a listening ear and smile on him,
As that the Tritons blew on wreathéd horns
When Aphrodite, the cold ocean-foam,
In lovely labor, from its singing snow
Upheaved her dazzling form, like some white pearl,
Naked and fresh within its ocean shell,
Borne shoreward from its bed of golden sponge
And crimson coral by the mad monsoon.

Wind-rocked she swung, her white feet on the sea;
And music raved down the slant western winds:
With swollen jowls the Tritons puffed their conchs,
Where, breasting with white bosoms the green waves,
That laughed in ripples at Love's misty feet,
Oceanids with dimple-dented palms
Smote sidewise the pale bubbles of the foam,
Weaving a silver rainbow round her form.
Around her dolphins sparkled in the spray,
And Nereids sang, braiding their streaming locks,
Or flung them backward shimm'ring with bells of foam,
Till evening lit her loneliest, loveliest star,--
That passion-flower of the fields of heaven,--
Pale mirrored in the sheen of shadowy seas,--
That, like arrested music, o'er the caves
The Sirens haunt, hung deep on silent deep,--
When, in a hollow pearl, down moon-white waves,
The creatures of the ocean danced their queen
Unto an island, like a rosy mist
That glimmering dreamed upon the glimmering blue.
There on the silvery sands beside the sea,
Beneath the moon,--narcissus-white,--they met,
She naked as a star and crowned with stars,
Child of the airy foam and Queen of Love.

PERSEPHONE

O Hades! O false gods! false to yourselves!
O Hades, 'twas thy brother gave her thee
Without a mother's sanction or her knowledge!
Thou bor'st her to the dreadful gulfs below,
And made her queen, a shadowy queen of shades,
Queen of the fiery flood and iron realms,
Eternal torture and eternal pain.

On blossomed plains in Far Trinacria
A maiden,--the dark cascade of whose hair
Was deep as midnight circled and crowned with stars,--
Hair dark as rays that brighten with the moon,--
Went gathering flowers with the Oceanids,
Lily and rose and pale Narcissus,--who
Was Echo's passion once, a flower now
That stares forever in the lake's still glass,
Whose ripple breaks its image, flickering seen,--
As once with tears it broke beneath his eyes,--
With the fast-falling dew that fills its heart:
When suddenly there rose with iron wain,
With iron wain and steeds, a shape like death,
'Mid sallow smoke and sulphur and pale fires,
Its countenance ghastly, and its hair and eyes
Like the blue flame of sulphur: in its arms,
Its sooty arms, where like to supple steel
The mighty muscles lay, unto its breast,
Such as its arms, it drew her fragile form
As bosomed bulks of tempest in their joy
With arms of winds drag to their black embrace
A fairy mist that flecks with white the summer,
With wings of shadeless white, and 'tis no more
Heaved on the rapture of the thunder's heart.

The snowy flowers shuddered and grew still;
With withered heads they bowed, and on the stream--
Where all the day it was their wont to stand
In silence gazing at their loveliness--
Laid their fair faces limp and shriveled white.
Flames whipped the air like fiery scorpions,
Blasting and burning all the fragrant myths
That haunt the dew and lair in bloom and breeze.

O foam-fair daughters of Oceanus!
In vain you seek your mate and chide the flowers
For hiding her beneath their palms of snow:
Ask of that shell, that conch of twisted pearl,
Which, like a spirit of the singing sea,
Moans at your pallid feet made wet with spray:
Then, sitting by the tumbling blue of waves,
Mourn to the waters and the ribbéd sands,
The falseness of the god who grasps the storm.

DEMETER

Eternal pouring in her lonely path
The wells of sorrow lay. I see her now,--
Methinks I see her now,--an awful shape
Guiding her dragon-team in frenzied search
From Argive lands unto the jeweled shores
Of the remotest Ind where Usha's hand
Soothed her grief-shadowed brow with kindly touch,
And Savitar breathed sympathy from the skies
O'er uttermost regions of the faneless Brahm.

In melancholy search I see her roam
The Himalayas,--world-dividing,--pale
'Mid ice and snow, through mists and night and storm;
Then back again with that wild mother woe
Fueling the anguished fire of her eyes,--
Back where old Atlas groans beneath the world,
And the Cimmerian twilight weighs the soul.
Deep was her sleep in Persia's haunted vales,
Where many a languid Philomela moaned
Her heart to rest with heartbreak melody.
I see her near Ionia's swelling seas
Cull from the sands a labyrinthine shell,
Hollowing its spiral murmur to her ear,--
A pearly mouth against an ear of pearl,--
In hope some message of Persephone
It might impart; then finding all in vain,
In anguish and despair, cast it afar,
To watch the salt-spray flash, like some soft plume
Dropped from the wings of Eros, where it fell.
I see her take a flute of coral from
A listening Triton; and on Ithakan rocks
High seated at the starry close of day,--
When sad the moon rose from her salty couch,
Gazing with sorrow on her face of sorrow,--
Pipe pensive airs,--plaintive as Sirens sing
In streaming caves beneath the ocean wall,--
Till hoar Poseidon cleared his wrinkled front
And stilled his surgy clamors to a sigh.

This do I see, and more: Behold, with fear!
I see her 'mid the lonely groves of Crete,
Frighten the dun deer from th' o'ervaulted green
Of thickest boscage, searching every covert
With terror of her torches and her wail,
"Persephone! Persephone!" till the pines
Of mist-swathed Dicte shuddered through their miles,
The panther roared down in the stream-mad gorge,
And Echo shrieked from chasm to answering chasm,
"Persephone!" bewildered with her woe:
As wild as when she echoed the despair,
Dishevel-haired, of maidens, wailing borne,--
Athenian tribute,--to that King of Crete,
Great Minos, when the Minotaur they saw
Grim, crouching in his labyrinth of stone.

DIONYSOS

"Io! Bacchus! Bacchus! Io! Io!
O Dionysos! Dionysos! ivy-crowned!
O let me sing thy triumph ere I die!"

I slept; and dreamed a Mænad came to me:
A harp of hollow agate strung with gold
Wailed 'neath her waxen fingers, and her heart
Under its gauze, through which the moonlight shone,
Kept time with its wild throbbings to her song.

"Ægeus sleeps, O Dionysos! sleeps
Beneath the restless waves that sigh his name
Eternally at my dew-glistening feet.
Here 'twas he died, O Dionysos! here
The great king died for whom is named this sea.--
O let me sing thy triumph ere I die!

"With the shrill syrinx and the kissing clang
Of silver cymbals, and the sound of flutes,
O pard-drawn youth, thou dist awake the world
To joy and pleasure with thy sunny wine!
Mad'st India bow and the dun, flooding Nile
Grow purple with the murex of the wine
Cast from the fullness of Silenus' cup,
While yet the heavens of heat saw sarabands
Whirl 'mid the redness of the Libyan sands,
That drank the spilth of Bacchus, sparkling-spun
From the Bacchante bowl, a beaded red
O'er the slant edge, that twinkled in the sun,
The tiger sun fierce-glaring overhead.

"What made gold Horus smile with golden lips?
Anubis dire forget his ghosts to lead
To Hell's profoundness?--He, who stayed to sip
One winking bubble from the wine-god's cup,
And, captive ever after, joined thy train?--
What made Osiris, 'mid the palms of Nile,
Leave Isis dreaming, and the frolic Pan's
Wild trebles follow as a roaring bull,
Far as the fanes of Indra; he who long
Was mourned in Memphis by his tawny priests?--
Io! Bacchus! Bacchus! Io! Io!
The brimming purple of thy hollow gold
They tasted and, 'though gods, they worship'd too!

"Sad Echo sat once in a spiral cave;
She, from its sea-dyed labyrinth of rock,
Saw the long pageant dancing on the strand,
Where Nereus slept upon an isle of crags,
And o'er the slope of his far-foaming head
The strangeness of the orgies wildly cried,
Till the gray god awoke, at first in rage;
Serened his face then; stretched a welcoming hand
With civil utterance for the Bacchus horn.
But Echo followed not; instead, she sits
Among her crags remembering that wild cry,
That nomad sound still haunting all her dreams,
Confusing all her speech, that naught can say
Save warring words bewildering her ears
Like waves reverberant in a deep sea-cave.

"Io! Bacchus! Bacchus! Io! Io!
See, the white stars, O Dionysos! see,
Have spilled their glittering globules, one by one,--
Like bubbles winking in the cup of night,--
Down the dark west behind the mountain chain.
Ægeus sleeps, lulled by my murmuring harp;
And I have sung thy triumph. Let me die!"

THE PAPHIAN VENUS

With anxious eyes and dry, expectant lips,
Within the sculptured stoa by the sea,
All day she waited while, like ghostly ships,
Long clouds rolled over Paphos: the wild bee
Hung in the sultry poppy, half asleep,
Beside the shepherd and his drowsy sheep.

White-robed she waited day by day; alone
With the white temple's shrined concupiscence,
The Paphian goddess on her obscene throne,
Binding all chastity to violence,
All innocent to lust that feels no shame--
Venus Mylitta born of filth and flame.

So must they haunt her marble portico,
The devotees of passion, passion-pale
As moonlight streaming through the stormy snow;
Dark eyes desirous of the stranger sail,--
The gods shall bring across the Cyprian Sea,
And him elected to their mastery.

A priestess of the temple came, when eve
Blazed, like a satrap's triumph, in the west;
And watched her listening to the ocean's heave,
Dusk's golden glory on her face and breast,
And in her hair the rosy wind's caress,--
Pitying her dedicated tenderness.

When out of darkness night persuades the stars,
A dream shall bend above her saying, "Soon
A barque shall come with purple sails and spars,
Sailing from Tarsus 'neath a low white moon;
And thou shalt see one in a robe of Tyre
Facing toward thee like the god Desire.

"Rise then! as, clad in starlight, riseth night--
Thy nakedness clad on with loveliness!
So shalt thou see him, like the god Delight,
Breast through the foam and climb the cliff to press
Hot lips to thine and lead thee in before
Love's awful presence where ye shall adore."

Thus at her heart the vision entered in,
With lips of lust the lips of song had kissed,
And eyes of passion laughing with sweet sin,
A starry splendor robed in amethyst,
Seen like that star set in the glittering gloam--
Venus Mylitta born of fire and foam.

So shall she dream until, near middle night,--
When on the blackness of the ocean's rim
The moon, like some war-galleon all alight
With blazing battle, from the sea shall swim,--
A shadow, with inviolate lips and eyes,
Shall rise before her speaking in this wise:

"So hast thou heard the promises of one,--
Of her, with whom the God of gods is wroth,--
For whom was prophesied at Babylon
The second death--Chaldæan Mylidoth!
Whose feet take hold on darkness and despair,
Hissing destruction in her heart and hair!

"Wouldst thou behold the vessel she would bring?--
A wreck! ten hundred years have smeared with slime:
A hulk! where all abominations cling,
The spawn and vermin of the seas of time:
Wild waves have rotted it, fierce suns have scorched,
Mad winds have tossed and stormy stars have torched.

"Can lust give birth to love! The vile and foul
Be mother to beauty? Lo! can this thing be?--
A monster like a man shall rise and howl
Upon the wreck across the crawling sea,
Then plunge; and swim unto thee; like an ape,
A beast all belly.--Thou canst not escape!"

Gone was the shadow with the suffering brow;
And in the temple's porch she lay and wept,
Alone with night, the ocean, and her vow.
Then up the east the moon's full splendor swept,
And, dark between it--wreck or argosy?--
A sudden vessel far away at sea.

GARGAPHIE

"_Succinctæ sacra Dianæ._"--Ovid.

I

There the ragged sunlight lay
Tawny on thick ferns and gray
On dark waters: dimmer,
Lone and deep, the cypress grove
Bowered mystery and wove
Braided lights, like those that love
On the pearl plumes of a dove
Faint to gleam and glimmer.

II

There centennial pine and oak
Into stormy utterance broke:
Hollow rocks gloomed, slanting,
Echoing in dim arcade,
Looming with long moss, that made
Twilight streaks in tatters laid:
Where the wild hart, hunt-affrayed,
Plunged the water, panting.

III

Poppies of a sleepy gold
Mooned the gray-green darkness rolled
Down its vistas, making
Wisp-like blurs of flame. And pale
Stole the dim deer down the vale:
And the haunting nightingale
Sang unseen--the olden tale
All its hurt heart breaking.

IV

There the hazy serpolet,
Dewy cistus, blooming wet,
Blushed on bank and boulder:
There the cyclamen, as wan
As faint footsteps of the Dawn,
Carpeted the spotted lawn:
Where the nude nymph, dripping drawn,
Sloped a flower-white shoulder.

V

In the citrine shadow there
What tall presences and fair,
Godlike, lingered!--gracious
As the rock-rose there that grew:--
Delicate and dim as dew
Stepped from out the oaks, and drew
Faun-like forms to follow, who
Filled the forest spacious!

VI

Guarded that Bœotian
Valley so no foot of man
Soiled its silence holy
With profaning tread--save one,
The Hyantian: Actæon,
Who beheld but was undone
By Diana's wrath, that none--
'Though with magic moly,--