Edith Wharton - Poems 02 Read online

  Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears,

  And love’s oblivion, and remembering hate,

  Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight

  Upon our souls—and shall our hopes and fears

  Buy nothing of thee, Death? Behold our wares,

  And sell us the one joy for which we wait.

  Had we lived longer, life had such for sale,

  With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap,

  But now we stand before thy shadowy pale,

  And all our longings lie within thy keep—

  Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?

  “Not so,” Death answered, “they shall purchase sleep.”

  (Scribner’s Magazine 13, Jan 1893)

  

  Chartres.

  I.

  Immense, august, like some Titanic bloom,

  The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,

  Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,

  Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,

  And stamened with keen flamelets that illume

  The pale high-altar. On the prayer-worn floor,

  By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,

  A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,

  The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea—

  For these alone the finials fret the skies,

  The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,

  While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,

  Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,

  The cloud of witnesses still testifies.

  II.

  The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize

  The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold.

  A rigid fetich in her robe of gold

  The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,

  Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,

  Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.

  The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,

  Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies.

  Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows

  To be a part of nature’s self, withdrawn

  From hot humanity’s impatient woes;

  The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,

  And in the east one giant window shows

  The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.

  (Scribner’s Magazine 14, Sept. 1893)

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  Jade.

  The patient craftsman of the East who made

  His undulant dragons of the veined jade,

  And wound their sinuous volutes round the whole

  Pellucid green redundance of the bowl,

  Chiseled his subtle traceries with the same

  Keen stone he wrought them in.

  Nor praise, nor blame,

  Nor gifts the years relinquish or refuse,

  But only a grief commensurate with thy soul,

  Shall carve it in a shape for gods to use.

  (Century Magazine 49, Jan 1895)

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  Phaedra.

  Not that on me the Cyprian fury fell,

  Last martyr of my love-ensanguined race;

  Not that my children drop the averted face

  When my name shames the silence; not that hell

  Holds me where nevermore his glance shall dwell

  Nightlong between my lids, my pulses race

  Through flying pines the tempest of the chase,

  Nor my heart rest with him beside the well.

  Not that he hates me; not, O baffled gods—

  Not that I slew him!—yet, because your goal

  Is always reached, nor your rejoicing rods

  Fell ever yet upon insensate clods,

  Know, the one pang that makes your triumph whole

  Is, that he knows the baseness of my soul.

  (Scribner’s Magazine 23, Jan 1898)

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  The One Grief .

  One grief there is, the helpmeet of my heart,

  That shall not from me till my days be sped,

  That walks beside me in sunshine and shade,

  And hath in all my fortunes equal part.

  At first I feared it, and would often start

  Aghast to find it bending o’er my bed,

  Till usage slowly dulled the edge of dread,

  And one cold night I cried: How warm thou art!

  Since then we two have travelled hand in hand,

  And, lo, my grief has been interpreter

  For me in many a fierce and alien land

  Whose speech young Joy had failed to understand,

  Plucking me tribute of red gold and myrrh

  From desolate whirlings of the desert sand.

  (Scribner’s Magazine 24, July 1898)

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  Mould and Vase.

  Greek Pottery of Arezzo.

  Here in the jealous hollow of the mould,

  Faint, light-eluding, as templed in the breast

  Of some rose-vaulted lotus, see the best

  The artist had—the vision that unrolled

  Its flying sequence till completion’s hold

  Caught the wild round and bade the dancers rest—

  The mortal lip on the immortal pressed

  One instant, ere the blindness and the cold.

  And there the vase: immobile, exiled, tame,

  The captives of fulfillment link their round,

  Foot-heavy on the inelastic ground,

  How different, yet how enviously the same!

  Dishonoring the kinship that they claim,

  As here the written word the inner sound.

  (Atlantic Monthly 88, Sept 1901)

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  Uses.

  Ah, from the niggard tree of Time

  How quickly fall the hours!

  It needs no touch of wind or rime

  To loose such facile flowers.

  Drift of the dead year’s harvesting,

  They clog to-morrow’s way,

  Yet serve to shelter growths of Spring

  Beneath their warm decay.

  Or, blent by pious hands with rare

  Sweet savors of content,

  Surprise the soul’s December air

  With June’s forgotten scent.

  (Scribner’s Magazine 31, Feb 1902)

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  The Bread of Angels.

  At that lost hour disowned of day and night,

  The after-birth of midnight, when life’s face

  Turns to the wall and the last lamp goes out

  Before the incipient irony of dawn—

  In that obliterate interval of time

  Between the oil’s last flicker and the first

  Reluctant shudder of averted day,

  Threading the city’s streets (like mine own ghost

  Wakening the echoes of dispeopled dreams),

  I smiled to see how the last light that fought

  Extinction was the old familiar glare

  Of supper tables under gas-lit ceilings,

  The same old stale monotonous carouse

  Of greed and surfeit nodding face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure …

  So that the city seemed, at that waste hour,

  Like some expiring planet from whose face

  All nobler life had perished—love and hate,

  And labor and the ecstasy of thought—

  Leaving the eyeless creatures of the ooze,

  Dull offspring of its first inchoate birth,

  The last to cling to its exhausted breast.

  And threading thus the aimless streets that strayed

  Conjectural through a labyrinth of death,

  Strangely I came upon two hooded nuns,

  Hands in their sleeves, heads bent as if beneath

  Some weight of benediction, gliding by

  Punctual as shadows that perform their round

  Upon the inveterate bidding of the sunr />
  Again and yet again their ordered course

  At the same hour crossed mine: obedient shades

  Cast by some high-orbed pity on the waste

  Of midnight evil! and my wondering thoughts

  Tracked them from the hushed convent where there kin

  Lay hived in sweetness of their prayer built cells.

  What wind of fate had loosed them from the lee

  Of that dear anchorage where their sisters slept?

  On what emprise of heavenly piracy

  Did such frail craft put forth upon this world;

  In what incalculable currents caught

  And swept beyond the signal-lights of home

  Did their white coifs set sail against the night?

  At last, upon my wonder drawn, I followed

  The secret wanderers till I saw them pause

  Before the dying glare of those tall panes

  Where greed and surfeit nodded face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure …

  And the door opened and the nuns went in.

  Again I met them, followed them again.

  Straight as a thought of mercy to its goal

  To the same door they sped. I stood alone.

  And suddenly the silent city shook

  With inarticulate clamor of gagged lips,

  As in Jerusalem when the veil was rent

  And the dead drove the living from the streets.

  And all about me stalked the shrouded dead,

  Dead hopes, dead efforts, loves and sorrows dead,

  With empty orbits groping for their dead

  In that blind mustering of murdered faiths …

  And the door opened and the nuns came out.

  I turned and followed. Once again we came

  To such a threshold, such a door received them,

  They vanished, and I waited. The grim round

  Ceased only when the festal panes grew dark

  And the last door had shot its tardy bolt.

  “Too late!” I heard one murmur; and “Too late!”

  The other, in unholy antiphon.

  And with dejected steps they turned away.

  They turned, and still I tracked them, till they bent

  Under the lee of a calm convent wall

  Bounding a quiet street. I knew the street,

  One of those village byways strangely trapped

  In the city’s meshes, where at loudest noon

  The silence spreads like moss beneath the foot,

  And all the tumult of the town becomes

  Idle as Ocean’s fury in a shell.

  Silent at noon—but now, at this void hour,

  When the blank sky hung over the blank streets

  Clear as a mirror held above dead lips,

  Came footfalls, and a thronging of dim shapes

  About the convent door: a suppliant line

  Of pallid figures, ghosts of happier folk,

  Moving in some gray underworld of want

  On which the sun of plenty never dawns.

  And as the nuns approached I saw the throng

  Pale emanation of that outcast hour,

  Divide like vapor when the sun breaks through

  And take the glory on its tattered edge.

  For so a brightness ran from face to face,

  Faint as a diver’s light beneath the sea

  And as a wave draws up the beach, the crowd

  Drew to the nuns.

  I waited. Then those two

  Strange pilgrims of the sanctuaries of sin

  Brought from beneath their large conniving cloaks

  Two hidden baskets brimming with rich store

  Of broken viands—pasties, jellies, meats,

  Crumbs of Belshazzar’s table, evil waste

  Of that interminable nightly feast

  Of greed and surfeit, nodding face to face

  O’er the picked bones of pleasure …

  And piteous hands were stretched to take the bread

  Of this strange sacrament—this manna brought

  Out of the antique wilderness of sin.

  Each seized a portion, turning comforted

  From this new breaking of the elements;

  And while I watched the mystery of renewal

  Whereby the dead bones of old sins become

  The living body of the love of God,

  It seemed to me that a like change transformed

  The city’s self … a little wandering air

  Ruffled the ivy on the convent wall;

  A bird piped doubtfully; the dawn replied;

  And in that ancient gray necropolis

  Somewhere a child awoke and took the breast.

  (Harper’s Magazine 105, Sept. 1902)

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  Moonrise over Tyringham.

  Now the high holocaust of hours is done,

  And all the west empurpled with their death,

  How swift oblivion drinks the fallen sun,

  How little while the dusk remembereth!

  Though some there were, proud hours that marched in mail,

  And took the morning on auspicious crest,

  Crying to Fortune, “Back! For I prevail!”—

  Yet now they lie disfeatured with the rest;

  And some that stole so soft on Destiny

  Methought they had surprised her to a smile;

  But these fled frozen when she turned to see,

  And moaned and muttered through my heart awhile.

  But now the day is emptied of them all,

  And night absorbs their life-blood at a draught;

  And so my life lies, as the gods let fall

  An empty cup from which their lips have quaffed.

  Yet see—night is not: by translucent ways,

  Up the gray void of autumn afternoon

  Steals a mild crescent, charioted in haze,

  And all the air is merciful as June.

  The lake is a forgotten streak of day

  That trembles through the hemlocks’ darkling bars,

  And still, my heart, still some divine delay

  Upon the threshold holds the earliest stars.

  O pale equivocal hour, whose suppliant feet

  Haunt the mute reaches of the sleeping wind,

  Art thou a watcher stealing to entreat

  Prayer and sepulture for thy fallen kind?

  Poor plaintive waif of a predestined race,

  Their ruin gapes for thee. Why linger here?

  Go hence in silence. Veil thine orphaned face,

  Lest I should look on it and call it dear.

  For if I love thee thou wilt sooner die;

  Some sudden ruin will plunge upon thy head,

  Midnight will fall from the revengeful sky

  And hurl thee down among thy shuddering dead.

  Avert thine eyes. Lapse softly from my sight,

  Call not my name, nor heed if thine I crave;

  So shalt thou sink through mitigated night

  And bathe thee in the all-effacing wave.

  But upward still thy perilous footsteps fare

  Along a high-hung heaven drenched in light,

  Dilating on a tide of crystal air

  That floods the dark hills to their utmost height.

  Strange hour, is this thy waning face that leans

  Out of mid-heaven and makes my soul its glass?

  What victory is imaged there? What means

  Thy tarrying smile? Oh, veil thy lips and pass!

  Nay—pause and let me name thee! For I see,

  Oh, with what flooding ecstasy of light,

  Strange hour that wilt not loose thy hold on me,

  Thou’rt not day’s latest, but the first of night!

  And after thee the gold-foot stars come thick;

  From hand to hand they toss the flying fire,

  Till all the zenith with their dance is quick,

  About the wheeling music of the Lyre.

  Dread h
our that leadst the immemorial round,

  With lifted torch revealing one by one

  The thronging splendors that the day held bound,

  And how each blue abyss enshrines its sun—

  Be thou the image of a thought that fares

  Forth from itself, and flings its ray ahead,

  Leaping the barriers of ephemeral cares,

  To where our lives are but the ages’ tread,

  And let this year be, not the last of youth,

  But first—like thee!—of some new train of hours,

  If more remote from hope yet nearer truth,

  And kin to the unfathomable powers.

  (Century Magazine 76, July 1908)

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  Ogrin the Hermit.

  Vous qui nous jugez, savez-vous quel boivre nous avons bu sur la mer?

  Ogrin the Hermit in old age set forth

  This tale to them that sought him in the extreme

  Ancient grey wood where he and silence housed:

  Long years ago, when yet my sight was keen,

  My hearing knew the word of wind in bough,

  And all the low fore-runners of the storm,

  There reached me, where I sat beneath my thatch,

  A crash as of tracked quarry in the brake,

  And storm-flecked, fugitive, with straining breasts

  And backward eyes and hands inseparable,

  Tristan and Iseult, swooning at my feet,

  Sought hiding from their hunters. Here they lay.

  For pity of their great extremity,

  Their sin abhorring, yet not them with it,