Name: From The Hidden Way
Author: James Branch Cabell

APOLOGIA AUCTORIS

In agreeing to collaborate with Mr. Cabell, in preparing this volume of his selections from my inedited verses, I have been influenced by a number of considerations. I am attempting in this place to indicate a few of these.

To begin with, it is generally known—according to the literary reviewers,—that nowadays we are producing an indigenous “new” poetry, of hitherto unknown directness and simplicity; and that, in consequence, America is rendering her poets the unprecedented tribute of purchasing their volumes. That, of course, is one consideration.

Conceivably, too, I think, it may be not unsalutary, at this especial moment, to contrast the output of what has been, in another place, not inappropriately described as “the new naïveté” with the productions of poets who were in reality naïve. Conceivably, at least, one way of learning what is actually “natural” is to observe the ways of unsophisticated persons. This much preamble comes as warning that hereinafter you may look to encounter, in default of the debatable simplicities of “new” poetry, those genuinely simple melodies which were born of ages less complex.

§

I admit that, poetry having become in some sort a salable commodity, a book of verse no longer absolutely demands, as in the old days, a preface to explain and palliate its existence. None the less, these verses based upon pre-Renaissance formulæ must keep to the fashion of their time, and come with a prose pursuivant.

For the way needs clearing, since the road is clogged with the makings of an ugly syllogism. No matter with what joy we may admire “the new naïveté,” the poverty of thought evinced in mediæval poetry remains notorious; and it is, after all, only the mental gist of a poem which is translatable.

Yet, in truth, the feature which repels, and troubles us, is not so much that the thoughts of these men were feeble as that their beliefs were firm. The springtide awakens loveliness and human joy therewith, true love ennobles the lover, and death is a terrific adventuring into the dark; such was their simple credo: and their belief in its tenets was unquestioning. Now, it is perhaps more subtle to consider spring as a meteorological phenomenon, love as an ingenious device for perpetuating the species, and death as a logical progression toward higher spheres of activity; yet each may be a miracle, for all that; and not any longer to see its wonder may quite conceivably be loss rather than gain. Ophthalmia is at the best an infirm basis whereon to assume airs of superiority.

Just so, these mediæval rhymesters wrote by choice of what to us seems prosaic because to them it was throughout heart-shakingly strange. Their more alert perceptions were aware of a continuous wonderfulness, on every side, which we have learned to overlook. It really is astounding, when you come sanely to think of it, to find a frost-nipped world converted overnight into a place of warmth and beauty; and they said so, in the best language they could muster. We heirs of more sophisticated ages cannot but assent; yet even those few of us who are still guilty, say, once in a blue moon, of reading a little time-honored verse, avert with more congenial interest toward the straggling eccentricities of vers libre and of polyphonic prose, with such eye-arresting gambits as “We maidens are many of us older than sheep,” and “Hey, old world, shove your staid bonnet over your ear!”

It were flippant to suggest this is the interest that we accord, with livelier concern, to any other approach of the mentally unbalanced. Yet wonder, not bewilderment, is the gateway to the palace of art. The grand power of poetry, in particular, is its interpretative faculty of so dealing with familiar things as to awaken a full and new sense of their strangeness. And life affords nothing more remarkable than its truisms. There is a waggish saying somewhere as to how eagerly we would all scramble for the best seats if God heralded the coming of the crocus by mailing circulars or announced a sunrise via the public journals. The conceit is sound; for Omnipotence would, so to speak, be versifying the commonplace by stressing its importance, much as a noble rhyme and meter emphasize so insistently the thought they clothe that the whole matter dwindles into bathos if (after all) the thought prove mediocre. Yet the real wonderfulness of the terrestrial pageant, even then, would consist, not in its felicities of color, but in its commonplaceness. For the most beautiful and terrible thing about a sunrise is that it happens every day. Just so the sun arose when Pliocene monstrosities held the earth as their heritage, just so it arose to waken the laborers of Nineveh, just so it arose as the cock crew and Peter for the third time denied his Master: and just so, too, it will arise—every day,—when Earth is a frozen clod, trundling voiceless and naked through infinity. A sunrise has nothing to do with man’s existence, for all that it serves to time his clocks and rouse his factory-whistles; and therein lies the fundamental beauty of a sunrise, which is above and beyond and indifferent to the utmost reach of human achievement, and is therefore worthy to furnish recreation for human thought.

§

Here, too, we touch one fallacy of our modernists who insist that poetry should deal with workaday life, and develop the poetic side of shopwindows and streetcars and pessimism. But in shopwindows and streetcars and consistent pessimism is to be contemplated nothing save what man, whether for good or ill, has heaped together in defiance of nature. He made these things, however curious; he knows the elements whereof they are compounded; and he comprehends—there wakens disenchantment—that at a pinch he can patch up something else of pretty much the same sort. Not hereabouts is to be found aught fore-ordained and uncontrollable, or the beauty of fatality—of Ἀνάγκη—and human inefficiency thereunder, such as the old Greeks knew was necessary to art’s highest strivings.

And what is this Hellenic Ἀνάγκη, after all, but the commonplace deified, with humanity as pawns? It is assuredly sheer commonplace to point out that more or less unpleasantness inevitably follows an elopement with another man’s wife, or that miscegenation tends to shorten life; yet works of very real merit have been based upon these truisms, and nobody worth hearing questions the poetry of the Iliad or of Othello. Nor is in either case the commonplace an inessential; attempting to imagine Helen as the fiancée of Menelaus, or Othello as a Caucasian, you flounder into the inconceivable.

An element of triteness, in fine, must be conceded as necessary to first class art. That which becomes a classic is, both by etymology and human nature, something which belongs to a class. It is not in any way unique; it is innocent of any “disturbing novelty.” Now, neither Ovid’s Lynceus or Poe’s Dupin, nor even the indestructible Mr. Holmes (of Baker Street, W. C.), could plausibly detect any disturbing novelty in the poets of Raynouard’s Choix des poësies originales des Troubadours and Rochegude’s Parnasse Occitanien: and when we find these tinkling verses, played always on the two strings of love and death, astonishingly naïve, the thing is partly owing, no doubt, to our superior perception of the proper ends of poetry, but partly too to a more obtuse perception of life’s actual wonderfulness. So that in criticism it behooves us, like Agag of old, to tread softly. By the rarest luck, there is no such pressing obligation laid on many of us touching poets—whether immortal or minor,—as compels us either to criticize or to read.

§

And, truly, it is this consideration, above all others, which emboldens me to make a volume out of those verses that, for the most part, I “adapted” during my college life, from bardic byways of even more ancient eras.... For the rest, a formal bibliography of the sources of this little book was begun, and laid aside as entailing too much labor squandered to no utilitarian end. Petronius and Villon, at worst, require scant introduction to a generation which, the day before yesterday at any rate, was familiar with Quo Vadis and If I Were King. With Alessandro de Medici, as he misconducts himself in de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, many of us preserve a bowing acquaintance, however few extend the intimacy to include his Latin or Italian verses; which, if not positively unknown, would appear to have been overshadowed, even for the specialist, by the similar diversions of Alessandro’s more gifted great-grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then, too, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and his beloved Belhs Cavaliers figure at respectable length in all books treating of Provençal poetry. And Nicolas de Caen has, at any event, afforded the late Mr. Howard Pyle the subject-matter for some striking paintings.

To the other side, apart from any poetical repute, oblivion has swallowed even Antoine Riczi’s queer part in the matrimonial affairs of King Henry the Fourth of England. Such unfamiliar names as Charles Garnier and Théodore Passerat and Alphonse Moreau are not likely ever to cut a dash in popular romance; and, for very obvious reasons, just as in the cases of Petronius and Villon, their verses have never been adjudged particularly suitable for undergraduates to worry through in colleges. These, therefore, are indisputably forgotten, if indeed in any general sense they were ever known. Yet here as elsewhere—one would like to think at least, with the discoverer’s thrill—the “iniquity of oblivion” has scattered her poppy with rather injudicious cæcity.

If Petronius be not precisely mediæval, he is past doubt more antiquated than his present company in nothing save an accident of birth. And the inclusion of those scattered pieces hereinafter given severally under the name of Paul Verville has seemed on various grounds desirable, in spite of their (comparative) modernity of tone. Into the making of such decisions must always enter, of course, an element of purely personal taste, wherewith proverbially there can be no disputing to the arraigner’s profit. To those who do not honor maxims, it can but be answered, with profound irrationality, that all the verses in this book possess at least the common feature of owing their existence in English to the fact that, once upon a time, to put them into English seemed to their transcriber a natural and desirable action. No other bond has ever united the contents of any book of English verse. And although this particular excuse for making rhymes may very often prove inadequate, experience tends to show that any other reason proves so invariably.

§

This book’s sub-title appears to me a bit affected. But Mr. Cabell believes that it will please reviewers, by enabling them to start off with a smart witticism about its applicability to other books: and so I yield.... Moreover, I find that, in printing a collection of “adapted” verses, there seems to be no Median or Persic makeshift whereby plodding translation may, with the desirable precision, be distinguished from those less faithful paraphrases in which the plagiarist has more temerariously pulled about his larcenies. Upon consideration, this has appeared as satisfactory a rule of thumb as any:—to indicate the latter class by mention of an author’s name; and with the former class, to include also the first words of the original. The curious may seek out at will the victims of some few unacknowledged borrowings.

Robert Etheridge Townsend.

Lichfield April, 1924.

I MIGONITIS

“Autant en emporte ly vens”

1 AT OUTSET

—After Nicolas de Caen.

Depart, depart, my book! and live and die

Dependent on the idle fantasy

Of men who cannot view you, quite, as I

For I am fond, and willingly mistake

My book to be the book I meant to make,

And cannot judge you, for that phantom’s sake.

Yet pardon me if I have wrought too ill

In making you, that never spared the will

To shape you perfectly, and lacked the skill.

Ah, had I but the power, my book, then I

Had wrought in you some wizardry so high

That no man but had listened....

They pass by,

And shrug—as we, who know that unto us

It has been granted never to fare thus,

And never to be strong and glorious.

Is it denied me to perpetuate

What so much loving labor did create?—

I hear Oblivion tap upon the gate,

And acquiesce, not all disconsolate.

FOR I HAVE GOT SUCH RECOMPENSE

OF THAT HIGH-HEARTED EXCELLENCE

WHICH THE CONTENTED CRAFTSMAN KNOWS,

ALONE, THAT TO LOVED LABOR GOES,

AND DAILY DOES THE WORK HE CHOSE,

AND COUNTS ALL ELSE IMPERTINENCE!

2 THE OLDEST STORY

“Jadis il était roy d’Argos”

—Antoine Riczi.

He was a king in Argos,

She was a queen in Tyre,

And they went astray from the jogtrot way,

In quest of the heart’s desire.

They had pillaged, in royal fashion,

Rare raiments and spiceries

From the marts of Argos, to furnish them cargoes

For traffic in far-off seas;

And before them bright waters parted,

And the wind was fair.

Because

Love leads us—they spoke, light-hearted,—

Who is lord over man-made laws.

The High Gods noted them, idly

Lolling in Paradise,

And remarked they were erring widely

From rules the High Gods devise.

But the Most High Gods were wise,

And conceded:—They are not as We

Whom no follies beguile; let them go for a while.

Yet presently all men must see

They attain not to where their desire is,

Lest laxity lose Us men’s love.

—Thus Wotan ordained, or Osiris,

Or Shiva, or Dagon, or Jove.

—We must think of Our pontiffs in Argos

And praiseworthy prebends in Tyre,

Who would suffer dismay did the parish essay

To win to man’s heart’s desire.

So these two fared ever westward—

Elate, and in love with life—

Amid wide reprehension; for histories mention

These were not husband and wife

Who fared westward, ever westward.

—Beyond the Hesperides,

Where the slow long stroke of their gilt oars broke

The lisping of virgin seas,

They viewed the ends of the earth,

Where the Singing Maidens are

Enthroned above death and birth:

And they still fared ever westward—

Elate, and alone, and afar

From the yelpings of little people,—

For they viewed the ends of the earth.

Then the Gods gave word: and Their thunders stirred

To requite, and to silence mirth;

And that roving vessel was shattered

As a handful of shaken dust

Ere twice They thundered.

All peoples wondered,

And cried:—Lo, the Gods are just,

And, look you, abated no tittle

Of punishment due these twain.

Even though They slumbered a little,

We knew They would waken again:

And, whether it was Bubastis,

Or Milcom, or Artemis

Or Baäl, or Zeus, interrupted this cruise,

We knew it would end in this

When he was a king in Argos,

And she was a queen in Tyre,

And they went astray from the jogtrot way,

In quest of the heart’s desire.

THE OLD SONOROUS NAMES OF THESE

THAT FARED BEYOND THE HESPERIDES

IN QUEST OF REST AND JOY AND EASE,

LONG SINCE WERE MOCKED AT; AND WERE HISSED

TO SEEK, THEY SOUGHT,—AND VIEWED, AND MISSED.

BUT LIFE REMAINS LIFE’S PLAGIARIST.

3 FALSE DAWN IN TROY

“Helenam omnes amant; invidia semper movente”

—Alessandro de Medici.

There is no man but loves her, I well know;

Yet mutinous women, muttering with pinched lips,

Cast side-long glances always when—unvexed—

Queen Helen passes; for she is very fair,

And they have only right and truth with them.

Women remember all the fevered years

This siege has lasted; all its many ills;

The plague; the hunger; the unnumbered men

Who died because this queen is beautiful,—

Men whom they loved, and she loved not at all

Nor even knew by name.

None but remembers

How coldly loved lips kissed her in farewell—

Coldly, because for fairer lips than hers,

And for the sake of brighter and tearless eyes,

This man went forth to battle. He thereafter

Beheld the plume of lithe Achilles leap

As flame among the fighting, or beheld

The sudden splendor of swart Diomed

Crash through the press of spears; and lay quite still,

Remembering that way Queen Helen has

Of laughter, when the little sigh breaks through

And spoils the music, or her way of speaking,

Which turns to music the most trivial words

Wherein that wonder and that wistfulness

Her voice has always held since Hector died,

Commingles with our rude and alien tongue

As honey with sharp wine. Such idle words

As any man who, with uncovered head,

Waits and makes way when princes will to pass,

May hear of her in passing, gladdened him,

For all that death was fingering his throat

Even now. He was content, remembering her

The Queen.

For she is very beautiful;

And doubtless Paris, too, gets joy of her

When in that gleaming place which is their home

Her soft arms lift, and clasp his neck, and loose

His helmet—scarcely dented as mine is,

Where that wolf-visaged Greek smote yesterday

Who smites no coward blows to-day, I think.

—But Paris loves not blows. And then he tells

His version of the battle; and they kiss;

And hear shrill women wailing over corpses

Without; and kiss once more. And so he lies

Upon his cushioned couch, and is content,—

Contented just to lie there, still as they

Who fought for his love’s sake lie now, and feel

Her fingers moving gently mid his curls,

And hear Queen Helen’s laughter.

It is for this

That hollow-eyed Œnone mumbles charms

On twin-peaked Ida; and gaunt Menelaus

Slays silently; and heaven is wroth; and the banks

Of slothful Styx, made populous with them

Whose bodies rot unburied on the plains

That girdle hapless Troy, are resonant

With lamentation.

Thus it is for this

One woman’s sake, whose beauty is as a fire

Fed by contending kings with honor and fame

And memories of distant homes and wives,

That all without there is a mighty stir

Of clanging armors, wrangling foreign tongues,

And many Grecian huts about our walls;

And famine and death within. It is for this

One woman’s sake—who sleeps now, and in sleep

Smiles, as I think, who may not see her thus,—

That we the common soldiers gather here,

Who are as naught in Troy Town, and go forth

As fodder to appease the fury of Death,

Who ravens by Scamander.

So we meet

In the deep dawn; and furbish up our arms;

And call one to another, in the dusk,

With hearthside sayings and century-old jests,

Until Æneas and Antenor come,

Our leaders, and with sharp words marshalling us,

Bid sound the trumpet, and the Tymbrian gate

Vomits us forth upon the barren plains.

4 EASTER EVE

“Ses meurtriers donc ses rencontraient de bon cœur”

—Alphonse Moreau.

His murderers met. Their consciences were free:

The sun’s eclipse was past, the tumult stilled

In Jewry, and their duty well fulfilled.

Quoth Caiaphas:—It wrung my heart to see

His mother’s grief, God knows! Yet blasphemy

Was proven, the uprising imminent,

And all the church-supporting element

Demanded action, sir, of you and me.

Quoth Pilate:—When this Nazarene denied

Even Cæsar’s rule, reluctantly I knew

My duty to the state, sir. Still, I tried,

But found no way, to spare him yet stay true

In loyalty.... And still, the poor lad cried,

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”

5 ST. MAGDALENE

“Femme je suis, ridée, povrette et ancienne”

—Théodore Passerat.

Must I abide forever in this place

Of bloodless folk, amid the vain outcries

Of fools that deem me holy, full of grace,

And skillful in foresaying prophecies?

Thou wouldst not know me in this wrinkled guise—

How couldst thou, O belovèd? I am she

Thou knewest those mad years in Galilee

When we were young. And now thy tale is told,

And I await death, shivering wretchedly,

A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old.

They call thee god. Paul, when his choleric face

Enkindles from his ever-blazing eyes,

Swears thou art god, and blusters of a place—

A city that the man calls Paradise,—

Wherein thou reignest. Dear, am I not wise

That deem thee worthy of idolatry.

Yet man,—man whom I loved, and verily

Man whom I love, for all that I behold

Thy face no more, beloved, and I be

A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old.

Yet westerly, where golden clouds enlace

Earth’s rim with heaven’s, kindlier kingdoms rise;

For there the fortunate Far Islands face

The ends of Ocean, and the sacrifice

Burns ever to Dis’ Queen, and no man sighs

In vain for quietude,—where even we

May win such grace of grave Persephonê

As to obliterate woes manifold

In dragging days that fretted sordidly

A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old.

Man whom I loved, my heart cries out to thee,

All that thou wert I loved!—and so, let be

To dream of maids immortal arms enfold,

Nor rank with Dryopê or Danaë

A pitiful poor woman, shrunk and old.

6 MARCUS AURELIUS: A SUPPRESSED “MEDITATION”

“L’impératrice a les beaux yeux”

—Antoine Riczi.

Bright eyes in truth Faustina hath:

They are colored like that restive path

Which sunset cleaves across the sea;

They are as chill; it well may be

Their splendors, also, do but screen

Waste wreckage and coiled, slow, obscene,

Vague, ravenous things. It is of this

I think whenever her lips kiss.

She is brightly colored and soft and frail;

Her beauty like a tinctured veil

Hides and divides her heart from me.

Nor would I vex your secrecy,

Grave eyes, that screen her unguessed heart,

Wherein I ask not any part;

It is enough that ye are bright.

I praise you; and am expedite

Once more to touch Faustina’s hair

Caressingly, one instant, where

Her face lifts now, and shows how fair

That body is which Parcæ planned,

And fashioned fitly, to command

Such love as all men understand.

Grant her unfaithful, and wherein

Am I less favored by Faustine

Than were her heart all faithfulness?

Fools in their folly face distress;

But wisdom muffles wisdom’s sight

And looks for naught more recondite

In any woman’s grace than this—

Fair flesh, bright hair, and lips that kiss

So winsomely that thereupon

Man’s wisdom wins oblivion,

And right and reason, swooning, seem

Faint figments of a fool’s fond dream.

7 AMAIMON VISITS THE THEBAID

“Quam luna adest video nocte illusiones dæmonum”

—Alessandro de Medici.

Each night at moonrise is let forth from hell

In a fair woman’s shape—yea, I know well

How fair it is!—Amaimon; and thus stands

A darkling shade against stilled seas of sands

Made wonderful with moonlight; and speaks not.

What need?—Amaimon knows I have forgot

No one of those soft curves Amaimon wears.

So have I need of penance and long prayers:

Because since ever time began to be,

No woman, living, was lovelier than she,

Nor statelier,—yea, buoyant with that power

Her beauty loaned, she moved as moves a flower,

Mire-rooted, nodding by a pool wherein

Its double drowns, and dancing when its twin

Struggles in wind-stirred waters.

Nay, most sweet

Of women, I serve that Man whose tortured feet

Spurned Zeus from heaven, and for human sake

Trod evil down, even as folk tread a snake

And end all, once for all; by night and day

My prayers assail the ears of God, nor stay

For any bodily weakness till I gain

Surety of pardon through my body’s pain.

Hath God not pardoned me? Men tell of them

That bent with sickness touched my cassock’s hem

And straight were hale. They tell how these poor hands

Raised dead folk even. Throughout distant lands

My fame is spread, where emperors quake to tell

Their harlots of some recent miracle

Which I—nay, which High God performed through me

That God’s sole glory be proclaimed, and be

A scourge to scoffers.

So, being fain to die,

I bide that day when High God lifts on high

My soul, and sets me with His cherubim,

Remembering how I have striven for Him

And smitten heresy—yea, with sword and flame

Laid waste how many homes!—in His dear name,

Whose wrath is quenchless.

It is well with me:

O woman the fiend mimics, how is it with thee?

—With thee, enswirled in some unending sweep

Of ageless flame, whose fires forever leap

Like adders round the damned their coils consume

Not ever, nor relinquish! These illume

Bright tender bodies, such as Cæsar kissed

But yesterday, and now long torments twist....

Ey, what a host of women howl in hell

Who were when they wore flesh so lovable,

And whom men loved as I—

But thou art dead,

Rotted, and damned, long since.

When I am sped

To heaven’s loftiest courts, and thereamong

Made free of heaven, how shall I force my tongue

To honor Him that damned thee? and how be

Content with heaven? What, through eternity

Hear thy voice—thine, my lost love, loved in vain,

And lost, lost, lost, with only heaven to gain!—

Hear thy voice call in agony to God,

Who likewise hears—and heeds not!

Ey, once shod

With gold and clad in fair white linen cloth,

Shall I then be quite changed? and not be wroth

With God? but be as God is? and never know

Regret for thee, nor pity for the woe

Of shrieking fire-wrapped folk swept to and fro

Where Satan gibes at them and the worm stings?

Lust, who is overlord of living things;

Lust, by the heavings of whose leathery wings

The flames of hell are fanned to signal-fires

That mark each haven each human heart desires;

Lust, who with ceaseless and illusive snares

Derides our dreams and prompts us in our prayers;

Lust, who is strong and patient and cautelous,

And whom fiends name Amaimon in Satan’s house:

Plays thus at dice, our stake being my soul’s bliss.

Nay, God is love (Amaimon whispers this),

Nor pedant-like peers from far heaven’s vault

To estimate His children’s least light fault

As folk weigh gold, to the last hair-breadth’s worth.

Grant that this woman, living upon earth,

A little leaned to Marcion’s mad creed,

That High God grieves when unbelievers bleed

And Holy Church’s servants, or with rod

Or rack or rope, attest the might of God:—

“Because a father’s love, pre-eminent

In Him, contrives no curious punishment,

But, even as earthly fathers check a child,

Reproves, and for love’s sake is reconciled”:—

Thus runneth Marcion’s foul heresy.

This woman, then, must burn. It yet may be

All need not burn for all eternity;

And God at last may pardon Donatists,

And Athanasians, and Tritheists—

Ho, even Marcionites!—as lacking wit

Always to read aright God’s holy writ,

And, therefore, worthier of pity than hate.

For God is love; and love or soon or late

Forgives,—yea, even pardons thy dread to see

In God some burlier counterpart of thee.

Such blasphemies Amaimon whispers me

Nightly at moonrise: and I answer not.

What need?—Amaimon knows I have forgot

No one of those soft curves Amaimon wears.

So have I need of penance and long prayers.

8 DAME VENUS IN THURINGIA

“Icy je regne, et je m’assemble tous les hommes”

—Théodore Passerat.

Even to the Hörselberg they follow me,

These men Thou couldst not save: the hollow hill

Is thronged with them that have abandoned Thee

To follow her that yet endures, and will

Outlive all tenets. Canst Thou ever still

Our revelry, O Christ? or canst Thou stay

These lips that on my lover’s lips I lay,

Deriding Thee unpunished? Nay, God wot,

Here rest no pilgrims on Thy bloodless way,

Where in the Hörselberg we know Thee not!

We have no ending to our revelry;

Of lust and drunkenness we have our fill:

Thou hast the uplands, and the sun-bathed sea—

My mother sea!—is subject to Thy will,

Poor foolish Christ, that hadst not wit to kill

Her whom Thou hadst discrowned. I may not stray

Amid the fields of Paphos, and men pray

No more to me in Eryx; yet no jot

Of lust’s old worship dwindles, even to-day,

Where in the Hörselberg we know Thee not.

Wilt Thou not slay me for much blasphemy?

Strike and have done! Whom kindlier shouldst Thou kill

Than one begotten of the restive sea,

Thus penned, and turned a potent poison till

Man’s folly fail him?—I with futile skill

Snare ceaselessly; and never see the day

Smite huddling golden waves; nor feel the spray

Make glad my lips. My godhood is forgot.

I tread a hill more drear than Golgotha,

Where in the Hörselberg we know Thee not.

Christ, curse me not with immortality!

I once was Aphroditê; must I be

A thing unclean, and unto fools allot

All fools may crave, even for eternity,

Where in the Hörselberg we know Thee not?

II EPISTROPHIA

“Pour son amour eut cest essoyne”

9 ONE END OF LOVE

“Yolande dit, en soupirant”

—Alphonse Moreau.

It is long since we met,—she said.

I answered,—Yes.

She is not fair,

But very old now, and no gold

Gleams in that scant gray withered hair

Where once much gold was: and, I think.

Not easily might one bring tears

Into her eyes, which have become

Like dusty glass.

’Tis thirty years,

I said.—And then the war came on

Apace, and our young King had need

Of men to serve him oversea

Against the heathen. For their greed,

Puffed up at Tunis, troubles him—

She said:—This week my son is gone

To him at Paris with his men.

And then:—You never married, John?

I answered,—No. And so we sate

Musing a while.

Then with his guests

Came Robert; and his thin voice broke

Upon my dream, with the old jests,

No food for laughter now; and swore

We must be friends now that our feud

Was overpast.

We are grown old,—

Eh, John?—he said. And, by the Rood!

’Tis time we were at peace with God

Who are not long for this world.

—Yea,

I answered;—we are old. And then,

Remembering that April day

At Calais, and that hawthorn field

Wherein we fought long since, I said:—

We are friends now.

And she sate by,

Scarce heeding. Thus the evening sped.

And we ride homeward now, and I

Ride moodily: my palfrey jogs

Along a rock-strewn way the moon

Lights up for us; yonder the bogs

Are curdled with thin ice; the trees

Are naked; from the barren wold

The wind comes like a blade aslant

Across a world grown very old.

10 VILLON QUITS FRANCE

“Demain tous nous mourrons; c’est juste notre affaire”

—Théodore Passerat.

We hang to-morrow, then? That doom is fit

For most of us, I think. Yet, harkee, friend,

I have a ballad here which I have writ

Of us and our high ending. Pray you, send

The scrawl to Cayeux, bidding him commend

François to grace. Old Colin loves me well,

For no good reason, save it so befell

We two were young together.... When I am hung,

Colin will weep—and then will laugh, and tell

How many pranks we played when we were young.

Dear lads of yesterday!... We had not wit

To live always so we might not offend,

Yet—how we laughed! I marvel now at it,

Because that merry company will spend

No more mad nights together. Some are penned

In abbeys, some in dungeons, others fell

In battle.... Time assesses death’s gabelle,—

Salt must be taxed, eh?—well, we ranked among

The salt of earth, once, who are old and tell

How many pranks we played when we were young.

Afraid to die, you ask?—Why, not a whit.

Ah, no! whole-heartedly I mean to wend

Out of a world I have found exquisite

By every testing. For I apprehend

Life was not made all lovely to the end

That life ensnare us, nor the miracle

Of youth devised but as a trap to swell

Old Legion’s legions; and must give full tongue

To praise no less than prayer, when bidden tell

How many pranks we played when we were young.

Nay, cheerily we of the Cockle-shell,

And all whose youth was nor to stay nor quell,

Will dare foregather when earth’s knell is rung,

And Calvary’s young conqueror bids us tell

How many pranks we played when we were young.

11 INVOCATION: TO THE DARK VENUS

“Audite litaniam, quam dulce in noctibus quondam”

—? Archilochus of Sicyon.

Hearken and heed, Melænis!

For all that the litany ceased

When time had pilfered the victim,

And flouted thy pale-lipped priest,

And set astir in the temple

Where burned the fires of thy shrine

The owls and wolves of the desert—

Yet hearken, (the issue is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

For I have followed, nor faltered—

Adrift in a land of dreams

Where laughter and pity and terror

Commingle as confluent streams,

I have seen and adored the Sidonian,

Implacable, fair and divine,—

And bending low, have implored thee

To hearken, (the issue is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

There are taller lads than Atys,

And many are wiser than he,—

How should I heed them?—whose fate is

Ever to serve and to be

Ever the lover of Atys,

And die that Atys may dine,

Live if he need me—Then heed me,

And speed me, (the moment is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

HIC TONAT: DEA ADEST

Fair is the form unbeholden,

And golden the glory of thee

Whose voice is the voice of a vision,

Whose face is the foam of the sea,

And the fall of whose feet is the flutter

Of breezes in birches and pine,

When thou drawest near me, to hear me,

And cheer me, (the moment is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

Long I besought thee, nor vainly,

Daughter of Water and Air,—

Charis! Idalia! Hortensis!

Hast thou not heard the prayer,

When the blood stood still with loving,

And the blood in me leapt like wine,

And I cried on thy name, Melænis?—

That heard me, (the glory is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

Falsely they tell of thy dying,

Thou that art older than death;

And never the Hörselberg hid thee,

Whatever the slanderer saith;

For the stars are as heralds forerunning.

When laughter and love combine

At twilight, in thy light, Melænis—

That heard me, (the glory is thine!)

And let the heart of Atys,

At last, at last, be mine!

12 RONSARD RE-VOICES A TRUISM

“Quand vous seres bien vieille, et quand je serais mort”

—Théodore Passerat.

When you are very old, and I am gone,

Not to return, it may be you will say—

Hearing my name and holding me as one

Long dead to you,—in some half-jesting way

Of speech, sweet as vague heraldings of May

Rumored in woods when first the throstles sing:—

He loved me once. And straightway murmuring

My half-forgotten rhymes, you will regret

Evanished times when I was wont to sing

So very lightly, Love runs into debt.

I shall not heed you then. My course being run

For good or ill, I shall have gone my way,

And know you, love, no longer,—nor the sun,

Perchance, nor any light of earthly day,

Nor any joy nor sorrow,—while at play

The world speeds merrily, nor reckoning

Our coming or our going. Lips will cling,

Forswear, and be forsaken, and men forget

Where once our tombs were, and our children sing—

So very lightly!—Love runs into debt.

If in the grave love have dominion

Will that wild cry not quicken the wise clay,

And taunt with memories of fond deeds undone—

Some joy untasted, some lost holiday,—

All death’s large wisdom? Will that wisdom lay

The ghost of any sweet familiar thing

Come haggard from the Past, or ever bring

Forgetfulness of those two lovers met

When all was April?—nor too wise to sing

So very lightly, Love runs into debt!

Yea, though the years of vain remembering

Draw nigh, and age be drear, yet in the spring

We meet and kiss, whatever hour be set

Wherein all hours attain to harvesting,—

So very lightly Love runs into debt.

13 JAUNTS FROM STRATFORD — III—IN VERONA — XII—IN TROY

—“Loin de Stratford”: Paul Verville.

“Il m’étonne de voir que le vieux Capulet”

I had not thought the house of Capulet

Might boast a daughter of such colorful grace

As this whole-hearted girl, with flower-soft face

Round which the glory of her hair is set

Like some great golden halo;—and, as yet,

Love is to her a word that, spoken, spurs

Wonder alone, since love administers

In nothing to the mirth of Juliet.

What if some day I woke this heart unharried

As yet by love, and won these lips more red

Than rain-tossed cherries?—Look, the dancers go.

What’s he that would not dance? If he be married

My grave is like to be my wedding-bed.

—God rest you, sweet! the knave is Romeo.

“Le Scamandre engourdi, qui la lune illumine”

Stagnant Scamander, which the moon—a slight

Frail-seeming crescent toiling through gaunt trees

Mid stars that follow her like golden bees,—

Makes glittering; beyond its marge a white

Glitter of tossed bleached bones where camp-dogs fight

For offal, and a glitter of panoplies

Where sentinels prowl; and partly shrouding these,

Thin fever-breeding mists and dubious night.

And one clear song—fond, as all love-songs be—

From Troilus’ fevered lips that give fond vent

To love and wonder and idolatry,

Snapped short; and mutterings of thunder, blent

With cries of mourners, and the garrulous glee

Of Cressida in Diomedes’ tent.

14 INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE

“Quand le poëte d’Angleterre disait que ce monde”

—Paul Verville.

The world’s a stage?—Well, faith! it may have seemed so

In days less bleak, when Arden’s brakes were green,

And Rosalind’s low insolent fond laughter

Woke mirth to charm that planet which to-day

Seems all one vast decorous hospital,—

Germless, immaculate, well-ventilated,

Whitewashed, and odorful with antiseptics.

And we that toss upon the softest beds,

While yet our fever lasts, are impotent

Beneath this dreary burden of right angles

And blank white walls. And so, we twist, and murmur,

And groan, and twitch the coverlets awry,

Which Mrs. Grundy, head-nurse of our ward,

Pats straight again, in curtseying to the doctor.

Lean Dr. Death, who never lost a case,

Comes thus; and daily pauses by one’s bed;

Fingers the pulse; declares the fever abating;

Writes a prescription for the apothecary,

Old Time; then cuts a jest or so,—departing

With dubious promises of one’s discharge

Next year, next month, next week, may be.

Ha, neighbor,

Slim pale-haired woman with opal-colored eyes,

Why bide his pleasure? Nay, let us steal out

Together, and—blithe mariners faring forth

On chartless seas,—seek out a vessel bound

For some politer port, made point-device

By Fragonard, Watteau, or whom you will

So the contriver of this hospital

Be not the architect.

Oh, dimly gleams

Our haven; for its ways are vaporous

With smouldering incense, mid whose loitering spirals

Frail cupids weave, eternally, long garlands

Of ribbons and pale roses,—weave unvexed

By any garish sunlight, since one star

Alone peeps out of heaven. See, the moon

Shows like a silver sickle to the west,

But casts no shadows yet; and twilight dims

All glow of color where resistless gallants,

Sleek abbés, and false subtle lovely women

Pass to the sound of tinkling mandolines

And hushed contralto laughter.

We will make

Rondeaux of life and triolets of death;

And be at peace; and never laugh aloud;

And grieve not though he mar those stately hedges

Wherethrough he leers—gaunt sensual Pierrot!—

To note the ankles of young Columbine.

Yes, we will smile to see her pirouette

With Harlequin in shadowed avenues,—

Yew-shadowed statue-haunted avenues,

Where pensive gods incuriously remember

Put-off omnipotence,—with Harlequin

While tricked Pierrot sings at her father’s window....

Smile, it may be, but never laugh aloud.

And in the autumn Columbine will die,

And Harlequin be sad a whole half-hour.

But Pierrot’s heart will break; and he will grieve

That so much earth lies heavily on her

Who trod the earth so lightly!—and will weep

Big facile tears, and babble to the moon.

Will you not go?—Then come. Give me your hand,—

That firm small slender hand. Tread quietly,

For Mrs. Grundy nods now, who will wake

Full-cry when all our fellow-patients chatter

And drone and bustle like fat surfeited flies

Round our dead reputations.

Let us go.

15 STORY OF THE FLOWERY KINGDOM

“La belle Sou-Chong-Thé, au clair de pleine lune”

—Paul Verville.

Fair Sou-Chong-Tee, by a shimmering brook

Where ghost-like lilies loomed tall and straight,

Met young Too-Hi, in a moonlit nook,

Where they cooed and kissed till the hour was late:

Then, with lanterns, a mandarin passed in state,

Named Hoo-Hung-Hoo of the Golden Band,

Who had wooed the maiden to be his mate,—

For these things occur in the Flowery Land.

Now, Hoo-Hung-Hoo had written a book,

In seven volumes, to celebrate

The death of the Emperor’s thirteenth cook:

So, being a person whose power was great,

He ordered a herald to indicate

He would blind Too-Hi with a red-hot brand

And marry Sou-Chong at a quarter-past-eight,—

For these things occur in the Flowery Land.

Whilst the brand was heating, the lovers shook

In their several shoes,—when by lucky fate

A Dragon came, with his tail in a crook,—

A Dragon out of a Nankeen Plate,—

And gobbled the hard-hearted potentate

And all of his servants, and snorted, and

Passed on at a super-cyclonic rate,—

For these things occur in the Flowery Land.

The lovers were wed at an early date,

And lived for the future, I understand,

In one continuous tête-à-tête,—

For these things occur ... in the Flowery Land.

16 THE HOIDENS

“Au point du premier jour, dans l’enfance du tout”

—Antoine Riczi.

When the Morning broke before us

Came the wayward Three astraying,

Chattering in babbling chorus,

(Obloquies of Æther saying),—

Hoidens that, at pegtop playing,

Flung their Top where yet it whirls

Through the coil of clouds unstaying;

For the Fates are captious girls.

CLOTHO

Why, upon that Toy before us

Insects cluster! Hear them saying,

In the quaintest shrillest chorus:—

‘Life affords no time for playing!

And for each that goes astraying,

Featly as a planet whirls

Drops the stroke of doom unstaying,

For the Fates are captious girls.’

LACHESIS

La, I thought it reeled before us

Tumbling, lurching, stumbling, straying,

In some sort of mumbling chorus!

Now I see them at their playing—

I too see,—and hear them saying:—

‘Note with what fixed aim life whirls

Onward to set goals unstaying,

For the Fates are captious girls.’

ATROPOS

Sisters, I am tired of straying.

Catch the Toy while yet it whirls!

Cleanse the Toy, and end our playing!

—For the Fates are captious girls.

III LIBITINA

“Mort, j’appelle de ta rigueur”

17 ACCORDING TO THEIR FOLLY

“Ce que vous faites-là n’importe pas”

—Charles Garnier.

Ye that made merry through mirthless ages,

And jeered in the thick of the knights’ mêlée,

And derided all wrangles of sophists and sages,

And toasted your toes round an auto-da-fé,—

Do ye grieve, in your coffins, now worms assay

That motley logic of quip and pun

And elvish laughter?—or still do ye say,

Whatever ye do there matters to none?

Chuckling and shrugging, ye clutched such wages

As life allotted; then went your way

Into the dark, where no conflict rages,

No wrangles follow, no cruelties stray.

—Le Glorieux, Armstrong, Patch, Brusquet,

And Sommers! rest ye, for jesting is done,

And ye need not joke now as yesterday,

For whatever ye do there matters to none.

And a dream that he found in his tomb assuages

The brutish sorrows of Triboulet;

And Dagonet sleeps, and no more engages

To follow his master in any fray;

And Chicot, too, makes his bed of clay—

Whither wins never the Gascon sun,—

Where baubles and sceptres alike decay,

And whatever ye do there matters to none.

My prince! it is better to quote than obey

The precepts of Solon and Solomon;

Yet the world they admonished is larger than they,

And whatever ye do there matters to none.

18 FOOT-NOTES FOR IDYLS

“Le Sicilien chantait—mais c’est, ma foy, bien drôle”

—Théodore Passerat.

’Mongst all immortals tardiest is their tread!

Dear and desired, they tread with dainty feet,

By whose dear advent all are comforted

’Mongst mortal men! Thus, thus, thy verses greet

The Coming Hours—those Hours that from the heat

And mirth and friendly girls of Sicily,

Unheeding, haled thee to hell’s minstrels’-seat,

To edify austere Persephonê.

The living may forget; only the dead

Are hopeless! sang blithe Corydon, where beat

Bright waves upon bright sands, and overhead

Pines murmured benisons. Now is it sweet

To rhyme of this in thy less glad retreat,

Theocritus, who badest that song be

Immortal? and dost thou find that song meet

To edify austere Persephonê?

Now all old hours and all old years are sped

What profits it with thee if men repeat

Or all or anything thy live lips said?

Thou hast forgot Bombyca’s ivory feet,

The shrill cicalæ’s chirp, the lambkins’ bleat,

And Lacon’s honied song on Helykê.

What profits thee the honied sound of it

To edify austere Persephonê?

Lord of glad songs, for us the winding-sheet.

For thee the funeral pyre—built near the sea,—

Bids singing cease, and songless lips compete

To edify austere Persephonê.

19 THE GOD-FATHER

“Primus in orbe deos fecit timor; ardua cœlo”

—Petronius Arbiter.

Always was fear the god’s ambassador,

Since first in traverse of high-tumbling seas

Man quailed and out of thunderings made Thor;

Or mid the desert’s dumb infinities

He shuddered, dreaming of Tanit and the Sphinx;

Or noting life’s large cruelty, surmised

Plethoric Zeus, with twinkling eyes that roam

Alcmena-ward.—Still as man fears, man thinks;

And presently each dread is canonized,

And duly terror is wheedled and exorcised,

And given his priest, and shrine, and hecatomb.

Fearing, we loathe, and to the thing abhorred

Bow down; and terror and fancy beget a god

A while evaded, and a while adored,

And afterward bemocked. As with a rod

Time smote the lords of Nineveh and Khem,

And raised the dreams which Hellas deemed divine;

As presently the grosser gods of Rome

Turned ghost, and Saturn’s pilfered diadem

Rolled at Christ’s bleeding feet.—What praise was thine

That art most feared of all? what gilded shrine,

Cajoling priest, and steaming hecatomb?

Scant need to wheedle Death! men said. Our life,

With all the pain and passion of the whole,

With all the toil, the sorrow and the strife,

Is but a passing onward to the goal

Where Death awaits us. Mid his votaries

Our birth-cry ranked us; nor may any art

Avail to save us, while the years consume

As ashes smoulder when their fervor dies

Insensibly; and he that lies apart

In darkness hears the pulsing of Death’s heart,

And knows that Death waits near him in the gloom.

Yea, of all gods thou only lovest not gifts!

Others we placate; or in smiting we

Evade them. When thou smitest with what shifts

May we evade thee? or how placate thee?

Thou wilt not hearken to any prayer of ours;

Thou biddest emperors and popes as well

As witless clowns, Be still and bide thy fate!—

Whose altar we have wreathed with fitting flowers—

With purple lupine, crumpled poppy-bell,

Ambiguous mandrake, and pale asphodel,—

Since praise thee or blame thee, thou art obdurate.

And nor to wheedle thee, nor to demand

Favor of thee or any pity of thee,

We come. Beneath a lifted sword we stand

And praise thee, knowing, whatever gods may be,

Thy altar is not shaken: though the creeds

And outworn faiths of dreaming seer and priest

Endure as sinister shadows, or endure

As marsh-fires glittering round a path that leads

Nowhither; and the night be, and the east

Sleep, and the sun not waken;—yet at least,

Though all things else be doubtful, death is sure.

We praise thee, knowing how vainly fancy spans

With timorous dreams the grave’s unplumbed abyss.

Vainly we famed the calm Olympians,

And vainly Ammon-Ra, and Artemis,

And Neith, and Krishna. Comfort we have had

Of kindlier lords whose fabled potency

With shadows decked the darkness lest the dread

Of darkness absolute should drive us mad,—

But Time discrowns them. Time endures. But he

Discrowns thee never, and endures by thee

Endured, against that time when Time be dead.

20 BALLAD OF THE DESTROYER

“Ainsi nous applaudons la mort, la mort qui vient”

—Nicolas de Caen.

We laud him thus, that comes unto the king,

And lightly plucks him from the cushioned throne;

And drowns his glory and his warfaring

In unrecorded dim oblivion;

And girds another with the sword thereof;

And sets another in his stead to reign;

And ousts the remnant, nakedly to gain

Styx’ formless shore and nakedly complain

Midst twittering ghosts lamenting life and love.

For Death is merciless: a crack-brained king

He raises in the place of Prester John,

Smites Priam, and mid-course in conquering

Bids Cæsar pause; the wit of Solomon,

The wealth of Nero and the pride thereof,

And battle-prowess—or of Tamburlaine,

Darius, Jeshua, or Charlemaigne,—

Wheedle and bribe and surfeit Death in vain,

And get no grace of him nor any love.

Incuriously he smites the armored king

And tricks his counsellors;—as, later on,

Death will, half-idly, still our pleasuring,

And change for fevered laughter in the sun

Sleep such as Merlin’s,—and excess thereof,—

Whence we, divorceless Death our Viviaine

Implacable, may never more regain

The unforgotten rapture, and the pain

And grief and ecstasy of life and love.

For, presently, as quiet as the king

Sleeps now that planned the keeps of Ilion,

We, too, will sleep, whilst overhead the spring

Rules, and young lovers laugh—as we have done,—

And kiss—as we, that take no heed thereof,

But slumber very soundly, and disdain

The world-wide heralding of winter’s wane

And swift sweet ripple of the April rain

Running about the world to waken love.

We shall have done with love, and Death be king

And turn our nimble bodies carrion,

Our red lips dusty;—yet our live lips cling

Despite that age-long severance, and are one

Despite the grave and the vain grief thereof,—

Which we will baffle, if in Death’s domain

Fond memories may enter, and we twain

May dream a little, and rehearse again

In that unending sleep our present love.

Speed forth to her in halting unison,

My rhymes; and say no hindrance may restrain

Love from his aim when Love is bent thereon;

And that were love at my disposal lain—

All mine to take!—and Death had said, Refrain,

Lest I, even I, exact the cost thereof,

I know that even as the weather-vane

Follows the wind so would I follow Love.

21 EXHORTATION TOWARD ALMSGIVING

“Faulse beaulté, qui tant me couste cher”

—François Villon.

O Beauty of her, whereby I am undone!

O Grace of her, that hath no grace for me!

O Love of her, the bit that guides me on

To sorrow and to grievous misery!

O felon Charms, my poor heart’s enemy!

O furtive murderous Pride! O pitiless, great,

Cold Eyes of her! have done with cruelty!

Have pity upon me ere it be too late!

Happier for me if elsewhere I had gone

For pity,—ah, far happier for me,

Since never of her may any grace be won,

And lest dishonor slay me, I must flee.

Haro! I cry, (and cry how uselessly!)

Haro! I cry to folk of all estate,

For I must die unless it chance that she

Have pity upon me ere it be too late.

M’amye, that day in whose disastrous sun

Your beauty’s flower must fade and wane and be

No longer beautiful, draws near,—whereon

I will nor plead nor mock;—not I, for we

Shall both be old and vigorless! M’amye,

Drink deep of love, drink deep, nor hesitate

Until the spring run dry, but speedily

Have pity upon me—ere it be too late!

Lord Love, that all love’s lordship hast in fee,

Lighten, ah, lighten thy displeasure’s weight.

For all true hearts should, of Christ’s charity,

Have pity upon me ere it be too late.

22 COMFORT FOR CENTENARIANS

—After Nicolas de Caen.

Marvel not if my words are bold;

Though the sound be rude, yet the sense is true:

Too long you have flouted a tale oft-told

By the stammering tongues of men that woo,

And woo you vainly. Your brain is askew

For pride in your body’s magnificence,

And its color and curving so fair to view;—

And what will it matter a hundred years hence?

My burden, I grant you, is blunt and old:

Yet time will sharpen its sting when you—

Even you yourself!—and the things you hold

At so dear a price are a bone or two;

And those wonderful eyes, whose heaven-like blue

Is the crown of your beauty’s excellence,

Are unsavory holes that a worm crawls through;—

And what will it matter a hundred years hence?

Encrusted and tainted with churchyard mould,

Your dear perfections must lie perdue;

Take on such favor as few behold

With liking, and certainly none pursue;

And your beauty be reft of all revenue,

And suffer the blind worm’s insolence,

Who recks not at all of height, hair and hue,—

And what will it matter a hundred years hence?

Ettarre, I proffer my love anew,

And life with a jest at the world’s expense;

And if for your favor I vainly sue—

Why, what will it matter a hundred years hence?

23 THE CONQUEROR PASSES

“Non dormatz plus! les messatges de douz pascor”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Awaken! for the servitors of Spring

Proclaim his triumph! ah, make haste to see

With what tempestuous pageantry they bring

The victor homeward! haste, for this is he

That cast out Winter, and all woes that cling

To Winter’s garments, and bade April be!

And now that Spring is master, let us be

Content, and laugh as anciently in spring

The battle-wearied Tristran laughed, when he

Was come again Tintagel-ward, to bring

Glad news of Arthur’s victory—and see

Ysoude, with parted lips, that waver and cling.

Not yet in Brittany must Tristran cling

To this or that sad memory, and be

Alone, as she in Cornwall; for in spring

Love sows against far harvestings,—and he

Is blind, and scatters baleful seed that bring

Such fruitage as blind Love lacks eyes to see.

Love sows, but lovers reap: and ye will see

The loved eyes lighten, feel the loved lips cling,

Never again when in the grave ye be

Incurious of your happiness in spring,

And get no grace of Love there, whither he

That bartered life for love no love may bring.

No braggart Heracles avails to bring

Alcestis hence; nor here may Roland see

The eyes of Aude; nor here the wakening spring

Vex any man with memories: for there be

No memories that cling as cerements cling,

No force that baffles Death, more strong than he.

Us hath he noted, and for us hath he

An hour appointed; and that hour will bring

Oblivion.—Then laugh! Laugh, dear, and see

The tyrant mocked, while yet our bosoms cling,

While yet our lips obey us, and we be

Untrammeled in our little hour of spring!

Thus in the spring we jeer at Death, though he

Will see our children perish, and will bring

Asunder all that cling while love may be.

24 THE MENDICANTS

“Domna, de totz bos aips complida”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,

Be not too obdurate to us who pray

That this our transient grant of youth be spent

In laughter as befits a holiday,—

From which the evening summons us away,

From which to-morrow wakens us to strife

And toil and grief and wisdom,—and to-day

Grudge us not life!

O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,

Why need our elders trouble us at play?

We know that very soon we shall repent

The idle follies of our holiday.

And being old, shall be as wise as they:

But now we are not wise, and lute and fife

Plead sweetlier than axioms,—so to-day

Grudge us not life!

O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,

You have given us youth—and must we cast away

The cup undrained and our one coin unspent

Because our elders’ beards and hearts are gray?

They have forgotten that if we delay

Death claps us on the shoulder, and with knife

Or cord or fever, flouts the prayer we pray—

Grudge us not life!

Madam, recall that in the sun we play

But for an hour, then have the worm for wife,

The tomb for habitation,—and to-day

Grudge us not life!

IV HORTENSIS

“Dedans le boys je m’en allay”

25 ALONE IN APRIL

“In un boschetto trovai pastorella”

—? Guerzo di Montecanti.

Rustling leaves of the willow-tree

Peering downward at you and me,

And no man else in the world to see.

Only the birds, whose dusty coats

Show dark in the green—whose throbbing throats

Turn joy to music and love to notes.

Lean your body against the tree,

Lifting your red lips up to me,

Ettarre, and kiss, with no man to see!

And let us laugh for a little.—Yea,

Let love and laughter herald the day

When laughter and love will be put away.

Then you will remember the willow-tree

And this very hour, and remember me,

Ettarre,—whose face you will no more see!

So swift, so swift the glad time goes,

And Eld and Death with their countless woes

Draw near, and the end thereof no man knows.

Lean your body against the tree,

Lifting your red lips up to me,

Ettarre, and kiss, with no man to see!

26 “—BUT WISDOM IS JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN”

“Oramai quando flore”

—Alessandro de Medici.

Phyllida, spring wakes about us—

Wakes to mock at us and flout us

That so coldly do delay:

When the very birds are mating,

Pray you, why should we be waiting—

We that might be wed to-day?

Life is brief, the wise men tell us;—

Even those dusty, musty fellows

That have done with life,—and pass

Where the wraith of Aristotle

Hankers, vainly, for a bottle,

Youth and some frank Grecian lass.

Ah, I warrant you;—and Zeno

Would not reason, now, could he know

One more chance to live and love:

For, at best, the merry May-time

Is a very fleeting playtime;—

Why, then, waste an hour thereof?

Plato, Solon, Periander,

Seneca, Anaximander,

Pyrrho, and Parmenides!

Were one hour alone remaining

Would ye spend it in attaining

Learning, or to lips like these?

Thus, I demonstrate by reason

Now is our predestined season

For the garnering of all bliss;

Prudence is but long-faced folly;

Cry a fig for melancholy!

Seal the bargain with a kiss.

27 THE LOVERS’ DOXOLOGY

“O voi che per la via d’amor passate”

—Alessandro de Medici.

Listen, all lovers! the spring is here,

And the world is not amiss;

As long as laughter is good to hear,

And lips are good to kiss,—

As long as Youth and Spring endure,—

There is never an evil past a cure,

And the world is never amiss.

O lovers all, I bid ye declare

The world is a pleasant place;—

Give thanks to God for the gift so fair,

Give thanks for His singular grace!

Give thanks for Youth and Love and Spring!

Give thanks, as gentlefolk should, and sing,

The world is a pleasant place!

28 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY

“Be m play lo dous temp de pascor”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Now I loiter, and dream to the branches’ swaying

In furtive conference,—high overhead,—

A-tingle with rumors that Winter is sped

And over his ruins a world goes maying.

Somewhere—impressively,—people are saying

Intelligent things (which their grandmothers said),

While I loiter, and dream to the branches’ swaying

In furtive conference, high overhead.

Here the hand of April, unwashed from slaying

Earth’s fallen tyrant—for Winter is dead,—

Uncloses anemones, staining them red;

And her daffodils guard me, in squads,—displaying

Intrepid lances lest wisdom tread

Where I loiter and dream to the branches’ swaying.

29 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-FIVE

“Quant erba vertz e fuelha par”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

April wakes, and the gifts are good

Which April grants in this lonely wood,

Mid the wistful sounds of a solitude

Whose immemorial murmuring

Is the voice of Spring

And murmurs the burden of burgeoning.

April wakes, and her heart is high,

For the Bassarids and the Fauns are nigh,

And prosperous leaves lisp busily

Over fluttered brakes, whence the breezes bring

Vext twittering

To swell the burden of burgeoning.

April wakes, and afield, astray,

She calls to whom at the end I say,

Heart o’ My Heart, I am thine alway,—

And I follow, follow her carolling,

For I hear her sing

Above the burden of burgeoning.

April wakes;—it were good to live

(Yet April passes), though April give

No other gift for our pleasuring

Than the old, old burden of burgeoning.

30 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-EIGHT

“Era m requier sa custum’e son us pascor”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

May shows with godlike showing

To-day for each that sees

May’s magic overthrowing

All musty memories

In him whom May decrees

To be love’s own. He saith,

I wear love’s liveries

Until released by death.

Thus all we laud May’s sowing,

Nor heed how harvests please

When nowhere grain worth growing

Greets autumn’s questing breeze,

And garnerers garner these—

Vain words and wasted breath

And spilth and tasteless lees,—

Until released by death.

Unwillingly foreknowing

That love with May-time flees,

We take this day’s bestowing,

And feed on fantasies

Such as love lends for ease

Where none but travaileth,

With lean infrequent fees,

Until released by death.

31 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT THIRTY

“Ai! chant d’ouzel comensa sa sazos”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Now May awakes, and spring comes back;

Now green fire creeps from tree to tree,

And he that travels need not lack

The sight of an anemone

’Twixt one sea and another sea;

Now blithe birds build, and wan hearts quicken,

Oblivious of dreams that sicken

Drear ice-engirdled reverie.

Now I in part forget ... recall

In part ... how yonder throstle’s call

Inveigles whither mirth is,—

Because so many lips have told

The tale I told, once, who am old,

However young the earth is.

32 THE DOTARD CONJURER

“Le Printemps est devenu comme un sorcier faible”

—Paul Verville.

Spring is become a dotard conjurer,

And his old magic works not any more!

No more avails the whisper of friendly leaves;

And now the forest is undenizened

Of daydreams, which, like elfin outlaws, once

Lay hid in wait for every passer-by

And pilfered all his sorrows; dawn abates

In wonder and tells flatly, It is day,

And tells no more than that now; and the night

Brews no more philtres; and the moon forgets

That ancient wizardry which once was hers.

Ah, the old magic works not any more,

Though I have known its potency. Perchance,

Somewhere a great way off, in Avalon,

Atlantis, or the hushed Hesperides,

Hearts lighten with the coming in of spring,

Even as once. Yes, for this thing has been,

And may be yet in far-off Avalon.

For it may be in far-off Avalon,

Even as once—was it not yesterday?—

All forests are akin to Brocelaunde,

And fear and beauty keep their heritage

And breathe of something hidden in the woods

Save birds, and trees, and flowers, and ravenous gnats,—

For they are haunted by those messengers

That April sends about our woods no more

On primal errands. But in Avalon,

Fern-carpeted untroubled Avalon,

When April wakes and rises, with wind-blown hair

And steadfast eyes—when at the tip of the world

The sun takes heart a little,—then sturdy April

Exults, and summons tricksy ministers

To color and flaunt in low, yet-dreaming fields

The first flush of the apple-blossoms; and marshal

The stout spears of the daffodils; and guide

Frail baby clouds about the lonely heavens;

And polish frost-nipped stars; and re-awaken

Warm gracious land-winds where the restive waters

Shout to the glistening sands and hunger all night

With impotent desire of the naked moon.

Yes; this may be, in far-off Avalon.

Here the old magic works not any more:

And Spring, a dotard conjurer, forgets

The runes and sorceries of yesterday,

And may at best evoke but tenuous visions,—

Faint-hearted dreams that people the turbid past

With half-seen faces and derisive laughter;—

And there is nothing hidden in the woods

Save birds, and trees, and flowers, and ravenous gnats,

And, under all, dead and decaying leaves.

Nay, under all, dead and decaying leaves

Enrich that mould which bred them, and whereby

The tree is nourished and new leaves put forth.

V MELÆNIS

“De moy, pauvre, je veuil parler”

33 UNCHARTED

“Un beau royaume nous cherchons”

—Antoine Riczi.

There is a land those hereabout

Ignore.... Its gates are barred

By Titan twins, named Fear and Doubt.

These mercifully guard

That land we seek—the land so fair!—

And all the fields thereof,

Where daffodils flaunt everywhere

And ouzels chant of love,—

Lest we attain the Middle-Land,

Whence clouded well-springs rise,

And vipers from a slimy strand

Lift glittering cold eyes.

NOW, THE PARABLE ALL MAY UNDERSTAND,

AND SURELY YOU KNOW THE NAME OF THE LAND!

AH, NEVER A GUIDE OR EVER A CHART

MAY SAFELY LEAD YOU ABOUT THIS LAND,—

THE LAND OF THE HUMAN HEART!

34 SCHOOL-SONG

“Je fais attention aux maîtres”

—Alphonse Moreau.

I have to heed my teachers,

And try to trust my school,

And yet no less, through awkwardness,

Infringe on every rule.

Dim laws I may not understand

I strive to keep—and break,

Somehow. I see forbidden me

Much that I want—and take

Sometimes,—not meaning to do wrong,

Nor meaning to deny

Due weight to rules one ridicules

Somewhat, yet lives thereby.

If teachers could but recollect

The lads they used to be,

I think that all could half-recall,

Somewhere, someone like me.

(The lads they were! What looking-glass

Shows me a lad to-day?

With little learned, much half-discerned,

I toil already gray).

Yet honor, ruefully, the rule—

All teachers must be sure

That each mistake their pupils make

Was never made before:

And honor, tacitly, the rule—

No pupil ever thrives

Who questions Why? of laws whereby

We lead our ordered lives.

For we must heed our teachers,

And try to trust our school,

Until they teach the reason each

Infringes every rule.

35 “AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING—”

—After Nicolas de Caen.

Man’s love hath many prompters,

But a woman’s love hath none;

And he may woo a nimble wit

Or hair that shames the sun,

Whilst she must pick of all one man

And ever brood thereon,—

And for no reason,

And not rightly,—

Save that the plan was foreordained

(More old than Chalcedon,

Or any tower of Tarshish

Or of gleaming Babylon),

That she must love unwillingly

And love till life be done,—

He for a season,

And more lightly.

36 BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL

“Les Dieux, qui trop aiment ses facéties cruelles”

—Paul Verville.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea,

And the earth’s fair face for man’s dwelling-place; and this was the Gods’ decree:—

Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin;

He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within:

So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf,

Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

Yet some have the Gods forgotten,—or is it that subtler mirth

The Gods extort of a certain sort of folk that cumber the earth?

FOR THIS IS THE SONG OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL, DISTORTEDLY TWO IN ONE,——

OF THE WEARIED EYES THAT STILL BEHOLD THE FRUIT ERE THE SEED BE SOWN,

AND DERIVE AFFRIGHT FOR THE NEARING NIGHT FROM THE LIGHT OF THE NOONTIDE SUN.

For, one that with hope in the morning set forth, and knew never a fear,

They have linked with another whom omens bother; and he whispers in one’s ear.

And one is fain to be climbing where only angels have trod,

But is fettered and tied to another’s side who fears that it might look odd.

And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower,

But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer.

Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth,

And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.

SO THIS IS THE SONG OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL, DISTORTEDLY TWO IN ONE,—

OF THE WEARIED EYES THAT STILL BEHOLD THE FRUIT ERE THE SEED BE SOWN,

AND DERIVE AFFRIGHT FOR THE NEARING NIGHT FROM THE LIGHT OF THE NOONTIDE SUN.

37 WHEN TRAVELLERS RETURN

—A fancy from Alphonse Moreau.

There is more in this room than is corporal,—

Grieved, silent, and striving in nameless ways,

While I read, with my back against the wall,

And nothing happens, and naught betrays

Unseen sad eyes that are weighing me

Somehow.

They trouble me, too, although

By rule and reason this should not be....

But a woman died here, years ago,

Who loved me much:—and what if the dead

Were doomed to this as their punishment—

That with those whom, living, they loved they tread

Forever, and are omniscient?

38 ANNALS — I—“ Quis Desiderio? ” — II—“ Sed Risit Midas ” — III—“ Aprilis Gesta ” — IV—“ Lex Scripta Est ”

(May 15th, 1913)

There is no room for grief when harvest nears

And, labor done, fit wages are received,—

No room for grief now that she wins full-sheaved

Her harvest, and no need of any tears.

She goes to garner honorable years;

She was a little wearied by long strife,

And still alert, and still in love with life—

As ever—would ascend to her compeers.

There is no room for grief; as to its nest

A seabird moves on pinions sure and strong,

Her sturdy spirit mounts when sturdiest,

And life ends nobly like a rounded song.

There is no room for grief; she is at rest

To whom rest was a stranger overlong.

(1915: Somewhere in the United States)

Let all I touch be gold! King Midas cried

Of old in Phrygia. Jove heard the prayer,

And Midas laughed; for gold gleamed everywhere

His fingers reached; and iron gleamed outside.

Within, no friendly handclasp might abide

That touch which turned all gold, and made his food

Chill metal on his lips; chill amplitude

Derided him. So Midas laughed, and died.

To-day who follows Midas?—Nay, let be

To whisper of lost friends I knew of old

When England gave me life which France made free!

I trade unbiased; and my guns are sold—

Whoever buys—now all need buy of me,

And all I touch or handle turns to gold!

(Easter, 1865—Easter, 1915: Richmond, Virginia)

A long half-century since when April reigned,

As now, our cause was lost because unjust—

Else wherefore lost?—when level with the dust

Fell citadels our fathers’ faith maintained

Till that old April,—hath the fool ordained.

Imprisoned by his bookshelves; and forgets

Truth is not lightly slain with bayonets,

Or warfare lost whence honor comes unstained.

And April craved her jest ere time began,—

So time anew brings April, to deride

More changeful, strife-drowned Earth, wherein to span

The surge of war’s inexorable tide

Attends the wit of a Virginian,

And men acclaim the Christ men crucified.

(February 14th, 1916)

Time rounds a twelvemonth since you died,—most dear

And brave of women!—and he thrives as yet

Whose craven heart found courage to beget

The lie that slew you;—who, with fame made clear

And past his poison, rest till High God hear

Our prayer, and smite with godlike plenitude

This lean gray snake, and spill the venom spewed

In vain to guard his lewd blood-brother’s bier.

Not yet—most dear and brave!—may faith foretell

Fate’s fixed inevitable hour, nor be

Rewarded by its advent, to compel

This liar’s exile from all less vile than he,

And startle in the loneliest nook of hell

Iscariot and Cain with company.

39 “—AND EVER SHALL BE”

—After Alphonse Moreau.

Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;

One thing unshaken stays:

Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover;

Whereby decays

Each thing save one thing:—mid this strife diurnal

Of hourly change begot,

Love, that is God-born, bides as God eternal,

And changes not;—

Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers

Find altered by and by,

When, with possession, time anon discovers

Trapped dreams must die,—

For he that visions God, of mankind gathers

One manlike trait alone,

And reverently imputes to Him a father’s

Love for his son.

40 THE PERFECT REASON

“Le Roy Jésus crucifié”

—Antoine Riczi.

King Jesus hung upon the Cross,

And have ye sinned?—quo’ He,—

Nay, Dysmas, ’tis no honest loss

When Satan cogs the dice ye toss,

And thou shalt sup with Me,—

Sedebis apud angelos,

Quia amavisti!

At Heaven’s Gate was Heaven’s Queen,

And have ye sinned?—quo’ She,—

And would I hold him worth a bean

That durst not seek, because unclean,

My cleansing charity?—

Speak thou, that wast the Magdalene,

Quia amavisti!

VI SCOTEIA

“Or il est mort, passé trente ans”

41 TWO IN TWILIGHT — I— Alba — II— Serena

“Ave, Maria, que l’amour Divine inspire”

—Antoine Riczi.

Ave, Maria! whom Love did move

To triumph over earthly love.

Mother and Maid, now that wan stars take flight,

And larks with song assail high heaven’s height,

Unwillingly we lose the kindly night

That sheltered us when we were fain thereof.

For we are frail, and know not of His aim,

Yet Whosoever made us—were His name

Jove or Jehovah,—should we dare to blame

Our Maker that He made us fit for love?—

Were we not modeled by an Artizan

That to His liking shaped the soul of man,

And fashioned all things after His own plan.

Divulging nothing of the aims thereof?—

Is it by His grace we grow adventurous,

And, laughing, say:—Love proves victorious,—

Who made love potent? if love hoodwink us

How may we dare reprove Him That made love?

MATER, ORA FILIUM,

UT POST HOC EXILIUM

NOBIS DONET GAUDIUM

BEATORUM OMNIUM!

Ave, Maria! now cry we so

That see night wake and daylight go.

Mother and Maid, in nothing incomplete,

This night that gathers is more light and fleet

Than twilight trod alway with stumbling feet,

Agentes semper uno animo.

Ever we touch the prize we dare not take!

Ever we know that thirst we dare not slake!

Yet ever to a dreamed-of goal we make—

Est tui cœli in palatio!

Long, long the road, and set with many a snare;

And to how small sure knowledge are we heir

That blindly tread, with twilight everywhere!

Volo in toto; sed non valeo!

Long, long the road, and very frail are we,

That may not lightly curb mortality,

Nor lightly tread together steadfastly,

Et parvum carmen unum facio:—

MATER, ORA FILIUM,

UT POST HOC EXILIUM

NOBIS DONET GAUDIUM

BEATORUM OMNIUM!

42 “IN FINE,—”

Good and evil, blending,—

Everywhere men say,—

Obscurely work at sending

Rewards on Judgment Day.

Good and evil, blending,—

Elsewhere others bray,—

Take no thought of ending,

Keep no ordered way,—

Eternally at play,

Aim but at inter playing....

Thirdly, some offend

Ineffably by saying,

Not without shrugs, My friend,

Good and evil blend.

43 STY-SONG

—After Nicolas de Caen.

As with her dupes dealt Circê,

Life deals with hers, for she

Reshapes them without mercy,

And shapes them swinishly,

To wallow swinishly,

And for eternity;—

Though, harder than the witch was,

Life, changing not the whole,

Transmutes the body, which was

Proud garment of the soul,

And briefly drugs the soul,

Whose ruin is her goal;—

And means by this thereafter

A subtler mirth to get,

And mock with bitterer laughter

Her helpless dupes’ regret,

Their swinish dull regret

For what they half forget.

44 THE TOY-MAKER

From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,

Shaping fanciful playthings with tireless hands,—

Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,

Gave them unto all peoples—who mocked at him,

Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.

Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again,

Gave his gimcracks to people who mocked at him,

Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.

Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him;—

That is, when they remember he still exists.

Who, you ask, is this fellow?—What matter names?

He is only a scribbler who is content.

45 THE CASTLE OF CONTENT

—Provençal Burden.

Through the mist of years does it gleam as yet—

That fair and free extent

Of moonlit turret and parapet,

Which castled, once, Content?

Ei ho! Ei ho! the Castle of Content,

With drowsy music drowning merriment

Where Dreams and Visions held high carnival,

And frolicking frail Loves made light of all,—

Ei ho! the vanished Castle of Content!

Such toll we took of his niggling Hours

That the troops of Time were sent

To seize the treasures and fell the towers

Of the Castle of Content.

Ei ho! Ei ho! the Castle of Content,

With flaming roof and tumbling battlement

Where Time hath conquered, and the firelight streams

Above sore-wounded Loves and dying Dreams,—

Ei ho! the vanished Castle of Content!

The towers are fallen; no laughter rings

Through the rafters, charred and rent;

The ruin is wrought of all goodly things

In the Castle of Content.

Ei ho! Ei ho! the Castle of Content,

Razed in the Land of Youth, where mirth was meant!

Nay, all is ashes there; and all in vain

Hand-shadowed eyes turn backward, to regain

Disastrous memories of that dear domain,—

Ei ho! the vanished Castle of Content!

46 THE PARODIST

—After Paul Verville.

I hear proud singing at times;

And when that singing is ended

I mimic, with arduous rhymes,

A song which I knew to be splendid,

And make of what I comprehended—

I singly,—a thing so absurd

That rightly is reason offended.

What matter?—My rhymes are blurred

Because I wept when I heard

Proud singing whereof these rhymes

Iterate never a word;

And safely I treasure the times

Wherein is a song that climbs,

And my heart singly is stirred.

47 THE DARK COMPANION

“Nous sommes unités à cette fin”

—Charles Garnier.

I and my Shadow are so made one

That were we parted each life were done.

Throughout the flight of the blithe bright day

Always he follows me, doggedly;

But I need not heed him,—because my way

Is flecked with sunlight,—and shrug to see

How fondly my Shadow follows me.

When dying day grows chill and stark,

And vigilant stars troop each to his place,

He rises,—being free in the dark,

He rises and grins,—being freed for a space,

He rises to talk with me face to face.

Then he tells me of much I am loth to hear,

For he whispers of all that we two have seen,

And loved, and squandered. At forty year,

My master, how wide is the gulf between

That which we are and what might have been!

And he whispers of dreams that the years degrade,

And of lust made lord over love’s demesne,

And of chances wasted, and faith betrayed.

My master, how wide is the gulf between

That which we are and what might have been!

Even thus he whispers; and he and I

Sit thus, alone, till the night’s defeat

Is signaled eastward, and chance thereby

Wins room for a morrow, fair and fleet,

That finds my Shadow beneath my feet.

I and my Shadow are so made one

That were we parted each life were done.

48 SEA-SCAPES

I lie and dream in the soft warm sand; and the thunder and surge and the baffled roar

Of the sea’s relentless and vain endeavors are a pleasant lullaby, here on shore.

Since a little hillock screens yonder ageless tenacious battlings (which shatter, and pass

In foam and spume), I appraise, half-nodding, much sand and sky and gaunt nodding grass.

And I am content to lie and dream; and I am too drowsy to rise, and see

If it be worth breasting—that ocean yonder, which a little hillock hides from me.

VII VERTICORDIA

“A vous parle, compaings de galles”

49 THE AGELESS MAID

“Amors, qu’a escien m’a donat tal voler”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Man’s Love, that leads me day by day

Through many a screened and scented way,

Finds to assuage my thirst

No love that may the old love slay,

None sweeter than the first.

Fond heart of mine, that beats so fast

As this or that fair maid trips past,

Once, and with lesser stir,

We viewed the grace of love, at last,

And turned idolater.

Lad’s Love it was, that in the spring

When all things woke to blossoming,

Was as a child that came

Laughing, and filled with wondering,

Nor knowing his own name.

And still—whatever years impend

To witness time a fickle friend

And youth a dwindling fire,—

I must adore till all years end

My first love, Heart’s Desire.

I may not hear men speak of her

Unmoved, and vagrant pulses stir

To greet her passing-by,

And I, in all her worshipper,

Must serve her till I die.

For I remember: this is she

That reigns in one man’s memory

Immune to age and fret,

And stays the maid I may nor see

Nor win to, nor forget.

50 FROM AFAR — I — II

“Domna, si no us vezon mei heulh”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Félise, whose will, yet undiscerned, commands

My willing heart, stayest thou unmoved to see

How Love, forlorn and reft of empery,

Strains toward thy free heart with bleeding hands?

Now the last hour of day runs leaden sands

Hast thou indeed, Félise, no thought of me,

As all my thoughts take wing and throng to thee

Athwart the long leagues of dividing lands?

Félise, I am long sick with long delay,

Brain-wearied with long dreaming of thy grace,

Heart-hungered with long waiting in this place

Of days that are so long, whilst Love’s own day,

Longed-for so long, draws on with leisured pace

To make thee mine, dear love so far away.

Félise, have pity!—cringing, at thy door

Entreats, with dolorous cry and clamoring,

That mendicant who quits thee nevermore:

Now winter chills the world, and no birds sing

In any woods, yet as in wanton spring

He follows thee; and never will have done,

Though nakedly he die, from following

Whither thou leadest.

Canst thou look upon

His woes, and laugh to see a goddess’ son

Of wide dominion, and in strategy

More strong than Jove, more wise than Solomon,

Inept to combat thy severity?

Félise, have pity! and let Love be one

Among the folk that bear thee company.

51 COMPETITORS

—After Alessandro de Medici.

Heart o’ My Heart, dost thou not hear

Tired waves, perturbed by the mystery

Of the voiding east where vext winds veer,

Lamenting and lisping?—I, the Sea,

Grapple and strain till I win to thee

I have loved so long, and may never depart

From that age-long siege till I win to thee,

Though I win as Enipëus, Heart o’ My Heart.

—The Sea’s exordium

Pleads thus, cor cordium.

Heart o’ My Heart, dost thou not hear

A sighing of dying Winds?—crying to thee:—

We that were friendly with Guinevere,

And wafted Queen Helen oversea,

And served that lady of mystery

Balkis, a Sheban—caress and depart

Unwillingly, finding none fairer than thee

In those cold old venturings, Heart o’ My Heart.

—The Winds’ exordium

Sighs thus, cor cordium.

Heart o’ My Heart, dost thou not hear

Love that strives—as the yearning Sea,

As the truant Winds,—for the staid, and severe,

And sturdy and stainless heart of thee?—

Nay, without warning Love wins to thee

Suddenly some day, swift to impart

The secret of tears and the mystery

Of sorrow and heartbreak, Heart o’ My Heart.

—Without exordium

Love takes, cor cordium.

All sighs and tears are the Winds and the Sea,

And fit precursors—nay, portion and part—

Of Love that is silent, and wins to thee

Silently some day, Heart o’ My Heart.

52 THE STRIKING HOUR — I — II — III

“Comme un Croisé vaincu, qui longtemps languissait”

—Nicolas de Caen.

As one imprisoned, that hath lain alone

And dreamed of sunlight where no vagrant gleam

Of sunlight pierces, being freed, must deem

This too but dreaming, and must dread the sun

Whose glory dazzles;—even as such-an-one

Am I, whose longing was but now supreme

For this high hour, and, now it strikes, esteem

I do but dream long dreamed-of goals are won.

Take heed! be still! lest haply God reprove.

We have climbed too high! Those note us overhead

Who know I am unworthy of your love;

And when yet-parted lips, sigh-visited,

End speech and wait, mine when I will to move,

Such joy awakens that I grow afraid.

Yet I have loved you in so many ways,—

With reverence always, and such purity

As often curbs that which is base in me;

And, though some folly oftentimes betrays

My purpose into naught, through all these days

Till this day I had striven silently

To win at last to what, at least, would be

Earth-staggering homage reverberant in your praise.

To-day in flight from world-wide dissonance,

I storm your heart,—and claim not any fee

For any service rendered anywhere,

But as one comes to his inheritance

Demand admittance, knowing my love to be

No whit unworthy even to enter there.

Catullus might have made of words that seek

With rippling sound, in soft recurrent ways,

The perfect song, or in remoter days

Theocritus have hymned you in glad Greek;

But I am not as they,—and dare not speak

Of you unworthily, and dare not praise

Perfection with imperfect roundelays,

And desecrate the prize I dare to seek.

I do not woo you, then, by fashioning

Vext analogues ’twixt you and Guinevere;

Nor do I come with agile lips that bring

The sugared periods of a sonneteer,

And bring no more,—but just with lips that cling

To yours, in murmuring, I love you, dear!

53 LIGHTS OF THE WORLD

—After Charles Garnier.

Speed forth, my song, the sun’s ambassador,

Lest in the east night prove the conqueror,

And day be slain, and darkness triumph,—for

The sun is single, but her eyes are twain.

And now the sunlight and the night contest

A doubtful battle, and day bides at best

Doubtful, till Phyllis wake. It is attest

The sun is single.

But her eyes are twain,—

And should the light of all the world delay,

And darkness prove victorious? Is it day

Now that the sun alone is risen?

Nay,

The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,—

Twain firmaments that mock with heavenlier hue

The heavens’ less lordly and less gracious blue,

And lit with sunlier sunlight through and through.

The sun is single, but her eyes are twain,

And of fair things this side of Paradise

Fairest, of goodly things most goodly.

Rise!

And succor the benighted world that cries,

The sun is single, but her eyes are twain!

54 “—OF ANISE AND CUMMIN ALSO”

—After Nicolas de Caen.

It is in vain I mirror forth the praise

In pondered virelais

Of her that is the lady of my love;

Far-sought and curious phrases fail to tell

The tender miracle

Of her white body and the grace thereof.

Thus many and many an artful-artless strain

Is fashioned all in vain:

Sound proves unsound; and even her name, that is

To me more glorious than the glow of fire

Or dawn or love’s desire

Or opals interlinked with turquoises,

Mocks utterance.

So, lacking skill to praise

That perfect bodily beauty which is hers,

Even as those worshippers

Who bore rude offerings of honey and maize,

Their all, into the gold-paved ministers

Of Aphroditê, I have given her these

My faltering melodies,

That are Love’s lean and ragged messengers.

55 “SWEET ADELAIS”

—After Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Had you lived when earth was new

What had bards of old to do

Save to sing in praise of you?

Had you lived in ancient days,

Adelais, sweet Adelais,

You had all the ancients’ praise,—

You whose beauty would have won

Canticles of Solomon,

Had the sage Judean king

Gazed upon this goodliest thing

Earth of Heaven’s grace hath got.

Had you gladdened Greece, were not

All the nymphs of Greece forgot?

Had you trod Sicilian ways,

Adelais, sweet Adelais,

You had pilfered all their praise:

Bion and Theocritus

Had transmitted unto us

Honeyed harmonies to tell

Of your beauty’s miracle,

Delicate, desirable,

And their singing skill were bent

You-ward tenderly,—content,

While the world slipped by, to gaze

On the grace of you, and praise

Sweet Adelais.

Had you lived in Roman times

No Catullus in his rhymes

Had lamented Lesbia’s sparrow!

He had praised your forehead, narrow

As the newly-crescent moon,

White as apple-trees in June;

He had made some amorous tune

Of the laughing light Erôs

Snared as Psychê-ward he goes

By your beauty,—by your slim,

White, perfect beauty.

After him

Horace, finding in your eyes

Horace limned in lustrous wise,

Would have made you melodies

Fittingly to hymn your praise,

Sweet Adelais.

Had your father’s household been

Guelfic-born or Ghibelline,

Beatricê were unknown

On her star-encompassed throne.

For, had Dante viewed your grace,

Adelais, sweet Adelais,

You had reigned in Bicê’s place,—

Had, for candles, Sirius,

Rigel and Rutilicus,

Whilst you heard Zacháriel

Chant of you, and, chanting, tell

All the grace of you, and praise

Sweet Adelais.

Had you lived when earth was new

What had bards of old to do

Save to sing in praise of you?

They had sung of you always,

Adelais, sweet Adelais,

As worthiest of all men’s praise;

Nor had undying melodies

Wailed soft as love may sing of these

Dream-hallowed names,—of Héloïse,

Ysoude, Salomê, Semelê,

Morgaine, Lucrece, Antiopê,

Brunhilda, Helen, Mélusine,

Penelopê, and Magdalene:

—But you alone had all men’s praise,

Sweet Adelais.

56 LOVE’S LOVERS

—After Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Nor had undying melodies

Wailed soft as love may sing of these

That are love’s martyrs,—Héloïse,

Brunhilda, Helen, Mélusine,

Antiopê, and Magdalene,—

Ysoude, Salomê, Semelê,

Lucretia, and Penelopê.

What of these ladies that have been

Exalted by stern songs wherein

Beats strong the valorous heart of Love

And all the power and pride thereof—

Unto what haven are they sped?

Because they are not wholly dead:

The Land of Matters Unforgot

They walk at will, where time is not

And death has no dominion,—

And there they never view the sun,

But through a vague and amiable

Hushed twilight pass, and, passing, tell

Their tale of ancient miseries,

And neither laugh nor weep.

To these,

Whose lives were troubled harmonies

Whereby the heart of Love yet is

Enamored, Love at last accords

An end of love. To these, the Lords

Of Life and Death, that kindled lust,

And wrath, and joy frail as blown dust,

And faith like flame that braves the wind;

And kindled for each sin they sinned

Fame, and for every misery fame

Set as a flaring star to flame

And blaze and glow above the seas

Where light love founders: have granted peace

Unvexed by heart-beats.—Thus they pass,

Desiring naught of life that was

Exhausted of all things long ago,—

With void eyes, emptied of woe,

Emptied of joy, pass hand-in-hand,

Being shadows in a shadow land.

The story of their love is writ

In song; the valiant sound of it

Endures unaltered evermore:

But we, that love as heretofore

These loved, must perish, as they, and be

Forgotten by all men utterly.

I cry Content! Our names will die.

I cry Content! and cheerily,

Félise.

Our love-songs are unsung,

Yet we have loved. We have been young

In April and in unison ...

Oblivious of oblivion,

And heedless of each after-year,

How well we lived our verses, dear!

VIII RIDENS

“Soient blanches, soient brunettes”

57 BALLAD OF PLAGIARY

“Frères et maîtres, vous qui cultivez”

—Paul Verville.

Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme,

Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?

Still ye blot and change and polish—vary, heighten and transpose—

Old sonorous metres marching grandly to their tranquil close.

Ye have toiled and ye have fretted; ye attain perfected speech:

Ye have nothing new to utter and but platitudes to preach.

Still your rhymes are all of loving, as within the old days when

Love was lord of the ascendant in the horoscopes of men.

Still ye make of love the utmost end and scope of all your art,

And, more blind than he you write of, note not what a modest part

Loving now may claim in living, when we have scant time to spare,

Who are plundering the sea-depths, taking tribute of the air,—

Whilst the sun makes pictures for us; since to-day, for good or ill,

Earth and sky and sea are harnessed, and the lightnings work our will.

Hey, my masters, all these love-songs by dust-hidden mouths were sung

That ye mimic and re-echo with an artful-artless tongue,—

Sung by poets close to nature, free to touch her garments’ hem

Whom to-day ye know not truly; for ye only copy them.

Them ye copy, copy always, with your backs turned to the sun,

Caring not what man is doing, noting that which man has done.

We are talking over telephones, as Shakespeare could not talk;

We are riding out in motor-cars, where Homer had to walk;

And pictures Dante labored on of mediæval Hell

The nearest cinematograph paints quicker, and as well.

But ye copy, copy always;—and ye marvel when ye find

This new beauty, that new meaning,—while a model stands behind,

Waiting, young and fair as ever, till some singer turn and trace

Something of the deathless wonder of life lived in any place.

Hey, my masters, turn from piddling to the turmoil and the strife!

Cease from sonneting, my brothers; let us fashion songs from life.

THUS I WROTE ERE SYLVIA PASSED ME.... THEN DID I EPITOMIZE

ALL LIFE’S BEAUTY IN ONE POEM, AND MAKE HASTE TO EULOGIZE

QUITE THE FAIREST THING LIFE BOASTS OF, FOR I WROTE OF SYLVIA’S EYES.

58 TOUCHING UBIQUITY — I — II

“Voulant faire un cadeau digne de la plus belle”

—Charles Garnier.

The gods in honor of my Sylvia’s worth

Bore gifts to her:—and Jove, Olympus’ lord,

Co-rule of Earth and Heaven did accord,

And Hermes brought that lyre he framed at birth,

And Venus her famed girdle (to engirth

A fairer beauty now), and Mars his sword,

And wrinkled Plutus half the secret hoard

And immemorial treasure of mid-earth;—

And while the careful gods were pondering

Which of these goodly gifts the goodliest was,

Young Cupid came among them carolling

And proffered unto her a looking-glass,

Wherein she gazed and saw the goodliest thing

That Earth had borne, and Heaven might not surpass.

Cupid invaded Hell, and boldly drove

Before him all the hosts of Erebus,

Till he had conquered; and grim Cerberus

Sang madrigals, the Furies rhymed of love,

Old Charon sighed, and sonnets rang above

The gloomy Styx; and even as Tantalus

Was Prosperine discrowned in Tartarus,

And Cupid regnant in the place thereof.

Thus Love is monarch throughout Hell to-day;

In Heaven we know his power was always great;

And Earth acclaimed Love’s mastery straightway

When Sylvia came to gladden Earth’s estate:—

Thus Hell and Heaven and Earth his rule obey,

And Sylvia’s heart alone is obdurate.

59 FANCIES IN FILIGREE — XXIV — XLI

—Strambotti of Alessandro de Medici.

“Guarda negli occhi la nostra regina”

My Lady’s Eyes Remembrance bring

Of lyttel Waves whose Wavering

Beneathe ye roving Summer Breeze

Makes scintillant hushed Summer Seas

Whenas ye Sun is vanishing.

They gladden me, as when in Spring

We sing & knowe not why we sing.

In sooth, there be noe Eyes like these

My Lady’s Eyes.

Whenas their Glance is threatening

They frighten Cupid, & that King

From Florimel a-quaking flees;

But when they soften, on hys Knees

Love falls before them worshipping

My Lady’s Eyes.

“Rime d’amore usar dolci e leggiadre”

Ye little Rhyme I swore last Night

To lay before ye Eyes so bright

I have long loved—& loved too well!—

So now ye Muses to compell,

& shapely Phrases to indite.

Which shall it be?—Ye Villanelle,

Ode, Triolet, Rondeau, Rondel,

Ballade, or Sonnet?—Each is hight

Ye littel Rhyme.

Yet none will aide my hapless Plight:

All little Rhymes are short & slight,

& of ye Charmes of Florimel

An Epick’s Length alone can tell,—

So that of her I may not write

Ye lyttel Rhyme.

60 IT IS ENOUGH

—After Nicolas de Caen.

Love me or love me not, it is enough

That I have loved you, seeing my whole life is

Uplifted and made glad by the glory of Love,—

My life that was a scroll bescrawled and blurred

With tavern-catches, which that pity of his

Erased, and wrote instead one lonely word,

Yolande!

I have accorded you incessant praise

And song and service, dear, because of this;

And always I have dreamed incessantly

Who always dreamed,—When in oncoming days

This man or that shall love you, and at last

This man or that shall win you, it must be

That, loving him, you will have pity on me

When happiness engenders memory

And long thoughts nor unkindly of the past,

Yolande!

Of this I know not surely,—who am sure

That I shall always love you while I live,

And that, when I am dead, with naught to give

Of song or service, Love will yet endure,

And yet retain his last prerogative,

When I lie still, and sleep out centuries

With dreams of you and the exceeding love

I bore you, and am glad dreaming thereof,

And give God thanks for all, and so find peace,

Yolande!

61 AN ARCADIAN APOLOGIZES

—After Charles Garnier.

I pray you do not marvel, dear, that I,

Whenever with fond hardihood I try

To rhyme your praises, fail ingloriously.

And marvel not that I in happier wise

Have hymned Félise and lauded Sylvia’s eyes,

And now may offer you no melodies.

We poets are so made that when we be

Unscathed by love none woos so well as we,

But, wounded once, we worship silently.

62 ARCADIANS CONFER IN EXILE — I — II — III — IV

—After Charles Garnier.

So long ago it was! Nay, is it true

In verity we passed a month or so

In Arcady when life and love were new

So long ago?

The tide of time’s indomitable flow,

Augmenting, rears a drearier realm, whereto

We twain are exiled. Yet ... I do not know ...

Now that a woman calls, whose eyes are blue,

Whose speech is gracious—strangely sweet and low

She calls, and smiles as Stella used to do

So long ago.

I am not fit to follow; yet I pray

Some mighty task be set me, to commit

In her dear name, for trifles to essay

I am not fit.

Nay, I, unstable and infirm of wit—

Even I!—return to my old love to-day,

Whose bounty is so fond and infinite

That I am heartened, and made strong, and may

Not ever falter in deserving it,

If but for dread lest of such grace men say

I am not fit.

Time has changed naught in us; for now the din

And darkness of tempestuous years, that wrought

So vainly, lift; and it is lightly seen

Time has changed naught.

Such knowledge of those brawling years I bought:

The thing which shall be is that which has been,

When heaven again surprises us, unsought,

And life returns full circle; and we win

Again to realms which with how little thought

We ceded, and find loyalty wherein

Time has changed naught.

Sweetheart, I wait; now, as in time gone by,

Your suppliant, half-frightened, half-elate,

Outside the trellised doors of Arcady,

Sweetheart, I wait.

Again I glimpse its meadows—through a grate,

Alas!—and streams and groves and cloudless sky;

And cry to you to be compassionate,—

Yea, as of old to Stella, now I cry

To you that once were Stella; and my fate

Attends your piloting, for whose reply,

Sweetheart, I wait.

63 THE EAVESDROPPERS

—After Alphonse Moreau.

The heart of the twilight is troubled; and there

Where the stubbled fields bathe in colorless air,

And show as the chin of a giant unshorn,

Dog-weary, and dreaming of days unborn,

The east is perturbed; and night kindles to morn.

Wide world, that wakes to each miracle

Each dawn engenders, thou wilt not tell,

If mother of me indeed thou art,

How gladly and furtively I depart

Master and lord of Phyllida’s heart.

Hah, Lady Moon, so we meet again!

I remember. Who silvered the window-pane,

Climbed over heaped faggots with noiseless tread,

Turned velvet the cobwebs that gleamed overhead,

Stealthily, hearkening to all we said?

Eavesdropper, keep my secret well!

Remember the tales that old poets tell

Of the Latmian hills, and a cave thereon

Whereinto passed when each day was done—

Eavesdropper!—not only Endymion.

Ye will not tell of it. Nor will he,

The owl that hoots now in yonder tree,

And flutters his wings, with a watchful eye

Bent through the boughs at a passer-by

Who laughs, in the dawn ... and he wonders why.

64 NOSTALGIA

—After Alphonse Moreau.

Were the All-Mother wise, life (shaped anotherwise)

Would be all high and true;

Could I be otherwise I had been otherwise

Simply because of you....

With whom I have naught to do,

And who are no longer you!

Life with its pay to be bade us essay to be

What we became,—I believe

Were there a way to be what it was play to be

I would not greatly grieve....

Hearts are not worn on the sleeve.

Let us neither laugh nor grieve!

BUT, OH, THE WORLD IS WIDE, DEAR LASS,

THAT I MUST WANDER THROUGH,

AND MANY A WIND AND TIDE, DEAR LASS,

MUST FLOW ’TWIXT ME AND YOU,

ERE LOVE THAT MAY NOT BE DENIED

SHALL BRING ME BACK TO YOU,

—DEAR LASS!

SHALL BRING ME BACK TO YOU.

IX APATURIA

“Ainsi m’ont amours abusé”

65 GRAY DAYS

—After Nicolas de Caen.

I can find no meaning in life.

That have weighed the world,—and it was

Abundant with folly, and rife

With sorrows brittle as glass,

And with joys that flicker and pass

Like dreams through a fevered head;

And as the dripping of rain

In gardens naked and dead

Is the obdurate thin refrain

Of our youth which is presently dead.

And Chloris, whom last I loved,

Looks ever with loathing on me,

As one she hath seen disproved

And stained with such smirches as be

Not ever cleansed utterly;

And is loth to remember the days

When destiny fixed her name

As the theme and the goal of my praise;

And my love engenders shame,

And I stain what I strive for and praise.

Chloris, most perfect of all,

Just to have known you is well!

And it heartens me now to recall

That just to have known you is well.

And naught else is desirable

Save only to do as you willed

And to love you my whole life long;—

But this heart in me is filled

With hunger cruel and strong,

And with hunger unfulfilled.

Fond heart, though thy hunger be

As a flame that wanders unstilled,

There is none more perfect than she!

66 A WOOD-PIECE

Yes, you will soon forget. Leaf-shadowed ways

Are disenchanted now; the kindly haze

Of love-light lifts from too-long loitering;

A kiss is now at most two lips that cling;

And mirth is dead now; and desire decays.

Even now Love flutters restive wings, and stays

Impatient of restraint, what while I praise

Love’s old lost favor, past replevining,—

But you will soon forget.

Yes, you will soon forget: and naught betrays

That any heart save mine even now inveighs

In futile rage because nor youth nor spring

Can stay or solace light love’s vanishing.

I shall remember, dear, through all my days,

But you will soon forget.

67 LOVE GOES INTO WINTER QUARTERS

—After Antoine Riczi.

(The Scene a dale, somewhere in Arcady,

But filled with snow and sleet, made horrible

By many tramplings; there anon must be

A Crier, robed in black and with a bell;

To whom a Poet, peering curiously.)

“What are thou calling, small sombre Crier?—

Who seeks what fugitive? who is beguiled?

Is it a theft or a house to hire,

A sheriff’s sale or a stolen child?”

For none of these do I play the crier.

And toll a reward where the winds are wild,

And I strive knee-deep in the sleet and the mire

In quest of a kingdom undefiled.

“Reward, quoth he!—and how darest thou prattle

Of guerdon-giving, that goest in black,

Sans cap and sandals, where bleak winds battle

Which first may strip the rags from thy back?”

Of no compulsion save my own pleasure’s

I wear this black—for a mourning sign,—

Till Yesterday waken, and yield the treasures

And gold-wrought garments which once were mine.

“Faith, only a madman dreams to muster

The bygone hours, bid them live again ...

Though Crœsus wheedle or Charlemaigne bluster,

Time heeds not at all, and they strive in vain.”

Nay, Time forgets them; for these—unlanded,

Unkinged, uncarnate, and cold,—lie hid

Where Time comes never, to be commanded;—

Time cannot hear through the coffin’s lid.

“So it matters naught with what pomp they wended,

What queens they wed, and what realms they won!

These things were goodly; these things are ended;

And naught sleeps sounder than joy fordone.”

Cry Absit omen! the sermon is stupid—

Hey, even of sermons I grow afraid,

Who am no madman, but outlawed Cupid,

With never a place to lay my head.

But Yesterday! for Yesterday!

I cry a reward for a Yesterday

Now lost or stolen or gone astray,

With all the laughter of Yesterday!

(FOR WE HAVE MADE AN END OF AMOROUS PLAYING,

AND SHALLOW-HEARTED LOVE IS TURNED ASTRAY,

WITH CHILDISH SORROWING AND WEAK-VOICED PRAYING

FOR YESTERDAY.)

68 FLOTSAM

We did not share the same inheritance,—

I and this woman, five years older than I,

Yet daughter of a later century,—

Who is therefore only wearied by that dance

Which has set my blood a-leaping.

It is queer

To note how kind her face grows, listening

To my wild talk, and plainly pitying

My callow youth, and seeing in me a dear

Amusing boy,—yet somewhat old to be

Still reading Alice Through the Looking-Glass

And Water Babies....

With light talk we pass.

And I that have lived long in Arcady—

I that have kept so many a foolish tryst,

And written drivelling rhymes—feel stirring in me

Droll pity for this woman who pities me,

And whose weak mouth so many men have kissed.

69 HEIRS UNAPPARENT

How very heartily I hate

The man that will love you,

Some day, somewhere, and more than I,

And with a love more true;—

Whom for that reason you will love

As you may not love me,—

Though I might hold your heart, I think,

Held I one heart in fee.

My dear, too many ghosts arise

Between us when I woo,

One mocking me with softer lips,

And one with eyes more blue,

And one with hands more fine than yours,

And one with lovelier hair,

Proclaiming:—She is fair enough,

But then ... I too was fair.

What of thy heart thou gavest me

(“And me!”—“And me!”)—is thine

No more to give again. That part

Is mine.—(“And mine!”—“And mine!”)

And he that plays with love too long

Gets love of many-an-one,

But is denied Love’s crowning grace,

And can give love to none.

Since these be truthful ghosts, I shrug

And woo you without tears

Or too much laughter, till with time

A properer Prince appears,

Whom very heartily I hate,—

The man that will love you,

Some day, somewhere, and more than I,

And with a love more true.

70 THE SUN’S HIGHWAY

—After Antoine Riczi.

Though long be the way to the Limit of Lands,

And through leagues and leagues of treacherous sands,

And miles of marsh and mire,

One must win, if at all, to the rim of the west

Ere one enter the kingdom the sun loves best,

Yet there is my heart’s desire.

And lately I learned of a pleasanter way

Which two of us travel on every day—

Oh, for all that a staid world deems

None cross high heaven, men have forgot

The sun in his flamy chariot

And me in my car of dreams!

Whereby we win to a land of ease

In whose stately glittering palaces

Wracked lives are lived anew,—

For the sun and I go on pilgrimage

To the lovelier land of a younger age,

Where what might have been is true.

I may not know on what lordly quest

The sun fares sturdily into the west,

But I know that he goes with joy,

And espies, perhaps, past the mountained rim

Repentant Daphnê awaiting him,

Or Creusa no longer coy.

There, too, she waits whom alone I love;

And a chill light heart that I could not move

And bright eyes which would not see

My heart’s hard hunger, no more the same,

Enkindle and nourish love’s lovely flame,

And its beacon burns for me.

Well! I must win to her; I must kneel—

Kneel at her naked feet,—and feel

Soft hands that caress my hair

Silently—oh, in such tender wise

That I shall not hasten to raise tired eyes

To a face however fair.

Fair face unstained by the grave’s eclipse!

Fair face that lifts now to no man’s lips

And troubles no man’s sleep!

The woman that wore you has children now ...

But that is nothing; I keep my vow,

And I have a tryst to keep.

And so in a world whose tumults seem

Intriguing shadows I tread, and dream

Of a maiden who dreams of me:

For the tryst is set; be it late, be it soon,

Or east of the sun or west of the moon,

I shall win to you, Dorothy.

71 THE OLDEST DITTY

—After Nicolas de Caen.

And so farewell;—for now assuredly

Did the long pulse of the profoundest sea,

So deep it knows not light nor any heat,

Vex now some seaweed thick about my feet

Which there had nodded through a century,

All faith in you were not more dead in me,—

And so farewell!

And so, Farewell! I cry,—that may not see

Love quicken in the eyes of Dorothy

Ever again, nor evermore repeat

Mad rhymes to her, nor ever bend to meet

Her lips this side of all eternity;—

Love hath nowhere enfixed pre-potency,

And so farewell!

72 TO THE SAME AIR AS THE PRECEDING

And so farewell (as my rondeau wails

In obsolete accents and absolute truth),

For all is over, and nothing avails

To capture the rapture of last year’s youth.

All is quite over. Touch hands. Good-bye.

For you the future is nowise dim;

For me there are other women, and I

Must forget you now, since that is your whim.

And we will laugh in the after-times

At two young people we knew, no doubt,

Who scribbled each other such woeful rhymes

And played a comical tragedy out.

We shall not die of it. We shall be

Contented and healed of the passing smart;

And yet if you had not tired of me,

Life while life lasted were yours, sweetheart.

X ARMATA

“Ainsi le bon temps regretons”

73 LIGHT COINAGE — XX — XXIII

—“Mercuriens”: Paul Verville.

“C’est une comédie, qui termine aujourd’huy”

That comedy we end, content to please

Its players merely, was a comedy

Wherein Love had no part. It may not be

Enrolled among Love’s mighty memories,

And men unborn will read of Héloïse,

And Ruth, and Rosamond, and Semelê,

When none remembers your name’s melody

Or rhymes your name enregistered with these.

And will my name wake moods as amorous

As that of Abélard or Lancelot

Arouses? be recalled when Pyramus

And Tristram are unrhymed of and forgot?—

Time’s laughter answers, who accords to us

More gracious fields, wherein we harvest—what?

“Voicy! un autre chante!—Il n’est pas interdit”

A singer, eh?... Well, well! but when he sings

Take jealous heed lest idiosyncrasies

Entinge and taint too deep his melodies;

See that his lute has no discordant strings

To harrow us; and let his vaporings

Be all of virtue and its victories,

And of man’s best and noblest qualities,

And scenery, and flowers, and similar things.

Thus bid our paymasters, whose mutterings

Some few deride, and blithely link their rhymes

At random; and, as ever, on frail wings

Of wine-stained paper scribbled with such rhymes

Men mount to heaven, and loud laughter springs

From hell’s midpit, whose fuel is such rhymes.

74 GRAVE GALLANTRY — I — II — III

—After Charles Garnier.

My rival Death is fashioned amorously;—

No caliph boasts more comely wives than he,

For whom crowned Cleopatra reft the snare

Of careful-eyed Octavius, and—less fair

Than she, but lovely still—Leucothoë,

And Atalanta, and Antigonê,

Loosed virgin zones.... What need hadst thou to be

Desirous then of this girl’s lips and hair,

My rival Death?

What need hadst thou likewise of Dorothy!

What need of that which was all life to me!

What need, lascivious Death, that she forswear

Fond oaths to me—fond oaths made otherwhere—

In thy lank arms, and leave me friends with thee,

My rival, Death!

Had she divined how many virelais

Have feebly parodied some piercing phase

Of love for her whom love lacked might to claim—

How many rhymes have marshalled frail and lame,

Yet fervent-hearted, to avouch her praise,—

Such pity had been mine as well repays

Drear years of waiting. Ey, in kindlier days

Compassion might have worn some kinglier name

Had she divined.

Now that may never be; divergent ways

Allured; and all is ended; and naught betrays

Dead cheeks to kindle, now, with livelier flame

For aught I utter.... Yet it were no shame

To dream a little on her softening gaze

Had she divined.

That she is dead breeds no uncouth despair,

However,—as death bred when men would bear

A glove upon their helms, and slay or sing

In honor of its giver, hazarding

Life and life’s aims because a girl was fair ...

Grotesque their liege-lord seems when we compare

That Cupidling who spurs me to declare

Sedate regret, in rhythmic sorrowing

That she is dead.

Nay, he is much the punier of the pair,—

My little lord, who dreads lest critics stare

Too pointedly,—a flimsy fainéant king;—

Yet hearts may crack without crude posturing.

This girl is dead; and I confess I care

That she is dead.

75 BY-WORDS

—After Alphonse Moreau.

Not even now in all things may there be

An end of folly; nor, as mutineers

Against love’s lunacy, that now appears

Of no more weight or worth or urgency

Than last night’s dreams,—not wholly yet may we

Become in all things like all our compeers,

That are armored by interminable years

And keep no vestige of insanity.

What yet remains, now we drift far apart,

With seas between, and each of us forgets

The happenings of all our happy days?—

Your by-words, heard on other lips, to raise

Love’s pitiable phantom in my heart,

And waken mirthful memories and regrets.

76 ANOTHER LABORER WEIGHS HIS HIRE

“Amors, tant vos ai servit”

—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras.

Lord, I have worshipped thee ever,—

Through all these years

I have served thee, forsaking never

Light Love that veers

As a child between laughter and tears.

Hast thou no more to afford,—

Naught save laughter and tears,—

Love, my lord?

I have borne thy heaviest burden,

Nor served thee amiss:

When thou hast given a guerdon,

Lo, it was this—

A sigh, a shudder, a kiss.

Hast thou no more to accord?

I would have more than this,

Love, my lord.

I am wearied of love that is pastime

And gifts that it brings;

I entreat of thee, lord, at this last time

Ineffable things.

Nay, have proud long-dead kings

Stricken no subtler chord,

Whereof the memory clings,

Love, my lord?

But for a little we live;

Show me thine innermost hoard!

Hast thou no more to give,

Love, my lord?

77 RETRACTIONS — I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII — IX — X — XI — XII — XIII — XIV — XV

—After Théodore Passerat.

YOU ASK A SONNET?—WELL, IT IS YOUR RIGHT.

I GRANT IT, LAUGH, SHRUG, SET ABOUT THE TASK,

AND MAKE A SEQUENCE, SINCE IT IS MY RIGHT

NO MORE TO GIVE YOU ONLY WHAT YOU ASK.

Although as yet my cure be incomplete,

Yet love of you, time-lulled and vigorless,

Engenders now no more unhappiness,

Not even discontent. And now we meet

Unmoved—half-waggish,—and my pulses beat

Quite calmly as I wonder now, Is he

As proud as I was? and—as once to me—

To him is her love lovely and very sweet?

Nor do I grudge him any joy of his

Who follows on a road that I have trod,

And sues for love where I was wont to sue;

I am contented by remembrances,

And know that neither fate nor time, nor God,

Robs me of that first mastery of you.

I am contented by remembrances,—

Dreams of dead passions, wraiths of vanished times,

Fragments of vows, and by-ends of old rhymes,—

Flotsam and jetsam tumbling in the seas

Whereon, long since, put forth our argosies

Which, launched for traffic in the Isles of Love,

Lie foundered somewhere in some firth thereof,

Encradled by eternal silences.

Thus, having come to naked bankruptcy,

Let us part friends, as thrifty tradesmen do

When common ventures fail; for it may be

These battered oaths and rhymes may yet ring true

To some fair woman’s hearing, so that she

Will listen and think of love, and I of you.

You have chosen the love “that lives sans murmurings,

Sans passion,” and incuriously endures

The gradual lapse of time. You have chosen as yours

A level life of little happenings;

And through the long autumnal evenings

Lord Love, no doubt, is of the company,

And hugs your ingleside contentedly,

Smiles at old griefs, and rustles needless wings.

And yet I think that sometimes memories

Of divers trysts, of blood that urged like wine

On moonlit nights, and of that first long kiss

Whereby your lips were first made one with mine,

Awake and trouble you, and loving is

Once more important and perhaps divine.

You have chosen; and I cry content thereto,

And cry your pardon also, and am reproved

In that I took you for a woman I loved

Odd centuries ago, and would undo

That curious error. Nay, your eyes are blue,

Your speech is gracious, but you are not she;

And I am older,—and changed how utterly!—

I am no longer I, you are not you.

Time, destined as we thought but to befriend

And guerdon love like ours, finds you beset

With joys and griefs I neither share nor mend

Who am a stranger; and we two are met

Nor wholly glad nor sorry, and the end

Of too much laughter is a faint regret.

It is in many ways made plain to us

That love must grow like any common thing,

Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering

The mellow fruitage front us; even thus

Must Helena encounter Thesëus

Ere Paris come, and every century

Spawn divers queens who die with Antony

But live a great while first with Julius.

Thus I have spoken the prologue of a play

Wherein I have no part, and laugh, and sit

Contented in the wings, whilst you portray

An amorous maid with gestures that befit

This lovely rôle,—as who knows better, pray.

Than I that helped you in rehearsing it?

With Love I garnered mirth, and dreams, and shame;

And half his playmate, half his worshipper,

I flouted him, and yet might not demur

To do his bidding, or in aught defame

Love’s tutorage,—not even when you came,

And at the portal of Love’s golden house

We hazarded stray kisses, sighs and vows,

And lightly staked them in a hackneyed game.

And now the game is ended, dear; and we

May not re-enter that august domain

Which we, encoasting, lost eternally;

And now, although beloved by many men,

You may love no man as you have loved me,

Who have loved you as I may not love again.

Unto how many futures I was heir

In those old talks, which fixed what must be done

When we at last should rule (in Babylon

Perhaps, or in Caer-Is, or Kennaquhair),

And must do this or that, and bravely share

Fantastic fates, whose frolic freakishness

Seems how less quaint than this is,—to confess

That I have lost you, and do not greatly care!

Well! had we never cared, in all that fleet

Sweet time which passed so swiftly and is gone—

And gone eternally!—yet it was sweet

To play at loving, for all that every groan,

And gainless grieving, was in counterfeit

And parody of love, ungained, unknown.

And so we played at loving. So we played

With love as venturous children in the sea

Wade ankle-deep, and laugh, and wistfully

Peer at the world’s far rim, being half-afraid.

Half-wistful. So we laughed, and we obeyed

That changeless law which sways the cosmic plan,

And ever draws the maid unto the man,

And ever draws the man unto the maid.

The sea hides deep our fragile argosy,

And idle doubts quest fruitlessly above

Those shattered hulks, too frail to brave the sea,

Too frail to brave the wrath and mirth thereof:

I had not heart to love you heartily,

You were too shrewd to be befooled by love.

Time was I coveted the woes they rued

Whose love commemorates them—I that meant

To get like grace of love then!—and intent

To win, as they had done, love’s plenitude,

Rapture and havoc, vauntingly I sued

That love like theirs might make a toy of me,

At will caressed, at will (if publicly)

Demolished, as Love found or found not good.

To-day I am no longer overbrave.

I have a fever—I that always knew

This hour was certain!—and am too weak to rave,

Too tired to seek (as later I must do)

Tried remedies—time, manhood and the grave,—

To drug, abate and banish love of you.

Time was I loved you.... And indeed I came

To love you so time hardly washes out

The scars of an old moment which, as flame

Leaps toward chaff, bereft me even of doubt:

And then indeed I knew you had deceived me—

You, even you!—and counterfeiting truth

So cunningly that you and I believed me,

I cried, I will forget! ... This was in youth.

Now, being older and less over-nice,

I estimate these follies, breed of them

My little books,—shift, polish and re-price

The jewels of a battered diadem,—

And cry, What hope of heaven for those who sell

What I am vending? and what need of hell?

We are as time moulds us, lacking wherewithal

To shape out nobler fortunes or contend

Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend

The allotted pattern of things temporal,

Or alter it a thread’s-width, or let fall

A single stitch thereof, until at last

The web and its drear weavers be overcast,

And predetermined darkness swallow all.

They have ordained for us a time to sing,

A time to love, a time wherein to tire

Of all spent songs and kisses; carolling

Such elegies as buried dreams require,

Love now departs, and leaves us shivering

Beside the embers of a burned-out fire.

Cry Kismet! and take heart. Erôs is gone,

Nor may we follow to that loftier air

Olympians breathe. Take heart, and enter where

A lighter love-lord takes a heatless sun,

Oblivious of tangled webs ill-spun

By ancient wearied weavers, for it may be

His guidance leads to lovers of such as we

And hearts so credulous as to be won.

Cry Kismet! Put away vain memories

Of all old sorrows and of all old joys,

And learn that life is never quite amiss

So long as unreflective girls and boys

Remember that young lips were meant to kiss,

And hold that laughter is a seemly noise.

So, let us laugh.... How quaint that even I

Was once a fool such as each fool bemocks,

Burlesques and shames! how droll a paradox

It is that we meet calmly! nor deny

That I in an old time dared to be I,

And you in that same season dared be you,

When commonly we wooed (as others do,

And we do not, now) dreams which do not die,—

But take new life, with new idolaters.

Among our juniors; and in naught are kin

To our time-tempered blood which, drowsing, stirs

A little, recollecting with what din

And ardor we assailed stark barriers

Proved obdurate ere we were locked therein.

So, let us laugh,—lest vain rememberings

Breed, as of old, some rude bucolic cry

Of awkward anguishes, of dreams that die

Without decorum, of Love lacking wings

Yet striving you-ward in his flounderings

Eternally,—as now, even when I lie

As I lie now, who know that you and I

Exist and heed not lesser happenings.

I was. I am. I will be. Eh, no doubt

For some sufficient cause, I drift, defer,

Equivocate, dream, hazard, grow more stout,

Age, am no longer Love’s idolater,—

And yet I could and would not live without

Your faith that heartens and your doubts which spur.

Nightly I mark and praise, or great or small.

Such stars as proudly struggle one by one

To heaven’s highest place, as Procyon,

Antares, Naös, Tejat and Nibal

Attain supremacy, and proudly fall,

Still glorious, and glitter, and are gone

So very soon;—whilst steadfast and alone

Polaris gleams, and is not changed at all.

Daily I find some gallant dream that ranges

The heights of heaven; and as others do,

I serve my dream until my dream estranges

Its errant bondage, and I note anew

That nothing dims, nor shakes, nor mars, nor changes.

Fond faith in you and in my love of you.

AND THEREFORE PRAISE I EVEN THE MOST HIGH

LORD CHANCE,—THAT, BEING OF KIN WITH SETEBOS,

IN ORDERING LIFE’S LABOR, STRIFE AND LOSS,

ORDAINED THAT YOU BE YOU, AND I BE I.

78 GARDEN-SONG

“Adieu, nous n’irons plus aux champs”

—Charles Garnier.

Farewell to Fields and Butterflies

And levities of Yester-year!

For we espy, and hold more dear,

The Wicket of our Destinies.

Whereby we enter, once for all,

A Garden which such Fruit doth yield

As, tasted once, no more Afield

We fare where Youth holds carnival.

Farewell, fair Fields, none found amiss

When laughter was a frequent noise

And golden-hearted girls and boys

Appraised the mouth they meant to kiss.

Farewell, farewell! but for a space

We, being young, Afield might stray,

That in our Garden nod and say,

Afield is no unpleasant place.

79 THE CAVERN OF PHIGALIA

(Adytum of Demeter Melænis)

I enter,

Proud and erect:

I take my fill of delight

Imperiously, irrationally.

And none punishes.

—Not yet.

But in three months

And in three months

And in three more months,

The avenger comes forth

And mocks me

By being as I am,

Visibly,

And by being foredoomed

To do as I have done,

Inevitably.

80 AT PARTING

Thus then I end my calendar

Of ancient loves more light than air;—

And now Lad’s Love, that led afar

In April fields that were so fair,

Is fled, and I no longer share

Sedate unutterable days

With Heart’s Desire, nor ever praise

Félise, or mirror forth the lures

Of Stella’s eyes nor Sylvia’s,

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

Chloris is wedded, and Ettarre

Forgets; Yolande loves otherwhere,

And worms long since made bold to mar

The lips of Dorothy and fare

Mid Florimel’s bright ruined hair;

And time obscures that roseate haze

Which glorified hushed woodland ways

When Phyllis came, as time obscures

That faith which once was Phyllida’s,—

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

That boy is dead as Schariar,

Tiglath-pileser, or Clotaire,

Who once of love got many a scar.

And his loved lasses past compare?—

None is alive now anywhere.

Each is transmuted nowadays

Into a stranger, and displays

No whit of love’s investitures.

I let these women go their ways,

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

Heart o’ My Heart, thine be the praise

If aught of good in me betrays

Thy tutelage—whose love matures

Unmarred in these more wistful days,—

Yet love for each loved lass endures.

Explicit

Transcriber’s note:

Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies and archaic forms have been retained as printed.

Alone in April	81
“—but Wisdom Is Justified of Her Children”	83
The Lovers’ Doxology	85
Of Annual Magic: at Twenty	86
Of Annual Magic: at Twenty-five	87
Of Annual Magic: at Twenty-eight	89
Of Annual Magic: at Thirty	91
The Dotard Conjurer	92

Uncharted	97
School-Song	99
“As It Was in the Beginning—”	101
Ballad of the Double-Soul	102
When Travellers Return	105
Annals	106
“—and Ever Shall Be”	109
The Perfect Reason	111

Two in Twilight	115
“In Fine,—”	118
Sty-Song	119
The Toy-Maker	121
The Castle of Content	122
The Parodist	124
The Dark Companion	125
Sea-Scapes	127

The Ageless Maid	131
From Afar	133
Competitors	135
The Striking Hour	137
Lights of the World	140
“—of Anise and Cummin Also”	142
“Sweet Adelais”	144
Love’s Lovers	148

Ballad of Plagiary	153
Touching Ubiquity	156
Fancies in Filigree	158
It Is Enough	160
An Arcadian Apologizes	162
Arcadians Confer in Exile	163
The Eavesdroppers	166
Nostalgia	168

At Outset	13
The Oldest Story	15
False Dawn in Troy	19
Easter Eve	23
St. Magdalene	24
Marcus Aurelius: a Suppressed “Meditation”	26
Amaimon Visits the Thebaid	28
Dame Venus in Thuringia	33

One End of Love	37
Villon Quits France	40
Invocation: to the Dark Venus	42
Ronsard Re-voices a Truism	45
Jaunts from Stratford	47
Invitation to the Voyage	49
Story of the Flowery Kingdom	52
The Hoidens	54

According to Their Folly	59
Foot-Note for Idyls	61
The God-Father	63
Ballad of the Destroyer	66
Exhortation Toward Almsgiving	69
Comfort for Centenarians	71
The Conqueror Passes	73
The Mendicants	76

Gray Days	173
A Wood-Piece	175
Love Goes into Winter Quarters	176
Flotsam	179
Heirs Unapparent	180
The Sun’s Highway	182
The Oldest Ditty	185
To the Same Air as the Preceding	186

Light Coinage	189
Grave Gallantry	191
By-Words	194
Another Laborer Weighs His Hire	195
Retractions	197
Garden-Song	208
The Cavern of Phigalia	210
At Parting	211

FROM THE HIDDEN WAY

CONTENTS

APOLOGIA AUCTORIS

I MIGONITIS

1 AT OUTSET

2 THE OLDEST STORY

3 FALSE DAWN IN TROY

4 EASTER EVE

5 ST. MAGDALENE

6 MARCUS AURELIUS: A SUPPRESSED “MEDITATION”

7 AMAIMON VISITS THE THEBAID

8 DAME VENUS IN THURINGIA

II EPISTROPHIA

9 ONE END OF LOVE

10 VILLON QUITS FRANCE

11 INVOCATION: TO THE DARK VENUS

12 RONSARD RE-VOICES A TRUISM

13 JAUNTS FROM STRATFORD — III—IN VERONA — XII—IN TROY

14 INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE

15 STORY OF THE FLOWERY KINGDOM

16 THE HOIDENS

III LIBITINA

17 ACCORDING TO THEIR FOLLY

18 FOOT-NOTES FOR IDYLS

19 THE GOD-FATHER

20 BALLAD OF THE DESTROYER

21 EXHORTATION TOWARD ALMSGIVING

22 COMFORT FOR CENTENARIANS

23 THE CONQUEROR PASSES

24 THE MENDICANTS

IV HORTENSIS

25 ALONE IN APRIL

26 “—BUT WISDOM IS JUSTIFIED OF HER CHILDREN”

27 THE LOVERS’ DOXOLOGY

28 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY

29 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-FIVE

30 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT TWENTY-EIGHT

31 OF ANNUAL MAGIC: AT THIRTY

32 THE DOTARD CONJURER

V MELÆNIS

33 UNCHARTED

34 SCHOOL-SONG

35 “AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING—”

36 BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL

37 WHEN TRAVELLERS RETURN

38 ANNALS — I—“ Quis Desiderio? ” — II—“ Sed Risit Midas ” — III—“ Aprilis Gesta ” — IV—“ Lex Scripta Est ”

39 “—AND EVER SHALL BE”

40 THE PERFECT REASON

VI SCOTEIA

41 TWO IN TWILIGHT — I— Alba — II— Serena

42 “IN FINE,—”

43 STY-SONG

44 THE TOY-MAKER

45 THE CASTLE OF CONTENT

46 THE PARODIST

47 THE DARK COMPANION

48 SEA-SCAPES

VII VERTICORDIA

49 THE AGELESS MAID

50 FROM AFAR — I — II

51 COMPETITORS

52 THE STRIKING HOUR — I — II — III

53 LIGHTS OF THE WORLD

54 “—OF ANISE AND CUMMIN ALSO”

55 “SWEET ADELAIS”

56 LOVE’S LOVERS

VIII RIDENS

57 BALLAD OF PLAGIARY

58 TOUCHING UBIQUITY — I — II

59 FANCIES IN FILIGREE — XXIV — XLI

60 IT IS ENOUGH

61 AN ARCADIAN APOLOGIZES

62 ARCADIANS CONFER IN EXILE — I — II — III — IV

63 THE EAVESDROPPERS

64 NOSTALGIA

IX APATURIA

65 GRAY DAYS

66 A WOOD-PIECE

67 LOVE GOES INTO WINTER QUARTERS

68 FLOTSAM