Edith Wharton - Poems 02 Read online

  I nourished, hid, and suffered them to build

  Their branched hut in sight of this grey cross,

  That haply, falling on their guilty sleep,

  Its shadow should part them like the blade of God,

  And they should shudder at each other’s eyes.

  So dwelt they in this solitude with me,

  And daily, Tristan forth upon the chase,

  The tender Iseult sought my door and heard

  The words of holiness. Abashed she heard,

  Like one in wisdom nurtured from a child,

  Yet in whose ears an alien language dwells

  Of some far country whence the traveller brings

  Magical treasure, and still images

  Of gods forgotten, and the scent of groves

  That sleep by painted rivers. As I have seen

  Oft-times returning pilgrims with the spell

  Of these lost lands upon their lids, she moved

  Among familiar truths, accustomed sights,

  As she to them were strange, not they to her.

  And often, reasoning with her, have I felt

  Some ancient lore was in her, dimly drawn

  >From springs of life beyond the four-fold stream

  That makes a silver pale to Paradise;

  For she was calm as some forsaken god

  Who knows not that his power is passed from him,

  But sees with tranced eyes rich pilgrim-trains

  In sands the desert blows about his feet.

  Abhorring first, I heard her; yet her speech

  Warred not with pity, or the contrite heart,

  Or hatred of things evil: rather seemed

  The utterance of some world where these are not,

  And the heart lives in heathen innocence

  With earth’s innocuous creatures. For she said:

  “Love is not, as the shallow adage goes,

  A witch’s filter, brewed to trick the blood.

  The cup we drank of on the flying deck

  Was the blue vault of air, the round world’s lip,

  Brimmed with life’s hydromel, and pressed to ours

  By myriad hands of wind and sun and sea.

  For these are all the cup-bearers of youth,

  That bend above it at the board of life,

  Solicitous accomplices: there’s not

  A leaf on bough, a foam-flash on the wave,

  So brief and glancing but it serves them too;

  No scent the pale rose spends upon the night,

  Nor sky-lark’s rapture trusted to the blue,

  But these, from the remotest tides of air

  Brought in mysterious salvage, breathe and sing

  In lovers’ lips and eyes; and two that drink

  Thus onely of the strange commingled cup

  Of mortal fortune shall into their blood

  Take magic gifts. Upon each others’ hearts

  They shall surprise the heart-beat of the world,

  And feel a sense of life in things inert;

  For as love’s touch upon the yielded body

  Is a diviner’s wand, and where it falls

  A hidden treasure trembles: so their eyes,

  Falling upon the world of clod and brute,

  And cold hearts plotting evil, shall discern

  The inextinguishable flame of life

  That girdles the remotest frame of things

  With influences older than the stars.”

  So spake Iseult; and thus her passion found

  Far-flying words, like birds against the sunset

  That look on lands we see not. Yet I know

  It was not any argument she found,

  But that she was, the colour that life took

  About her, that thus reasoned in her stead,

  Making her like a lifted lantern borne

  Through midnight thickets, where the flitting ray

  Momently from inscrutable darkness draws

  A myriad-veined branch, and its shy nest

  Quivering with startled life: so moved Iseult.

  And all about her this deep solitude

  Stirred with responsive motions. Oft I knelt

  In night-long vigil while the lovers slept

  Under their outlawed thatch, and with long prayers

  Sought to disarm the indignant heavens; but lo,

  Thus kneeling in the intertidal hour

  ’Twixt dark and dawning, have mine eyes beheld

  How the old gods that hide in these hoar woods,

  And were to me but shapings of the air,

  And flit and murmur of the breathing trees,

  Or slant of moon on pools—how these stole forth,

  Grown living presences, yet not of bale,

  But innocent-eyed as fawns that come to drink,

  Thronging the threshold where the lovers lay,

  In service of the great god housed within

  Who hides in his breast, beneath his mighty plumes,

  The purposes and penalties of life.

  Or in yet deeper hours, when all was still,

  And the hushed air bowed over them alone,

  Such music of the heart as lovers hear,

  When close as lips lean, lean the thoughts between—

  When the cold world, no more a lonely orb

  Circling the unimagined track of Time,

  Is like a beating heart within their hands,

  A numb bird that they warm, and feel its wings—

  Such music have I heard; and through the prayers

  Wherewith I sought to shackle their desires,

  And bring them humbled to the feet of God,

  Caught the loud quiring of the fruitful year,

  The leap of springs, the throb of loosened earth,

  And the sound of all the streams that seek the sea.

  So fell it, that when pity moved their hearts,

  And those high lovers, one unto the end,

  Bowed to the sundering will, and each his way

  Went through a world that could not make them twain,

  Knowing that a great vision, passing by,

  Had swept mine eye-lids with its fringe of fire,

  I, with the wonder of it on my head,

  And with the silence of it in my heart,

  Forth to Tintagel went by secret ways,

  A long lone journey; and from them that loose

  Their spiced bales upon the wharves, and shake

  Strange silks to the sun, or covertly unbosom

  Rich hoard of pearls and amber, or let drip

  Through swarthy fingers links of sinuous gold,

  Chose their most delicate treasures. Though I knew

  No touch more silken than this knotted gown,

  My hands, grown tender with the sense of her,

  Discerned the airiest tissues, light to cling

  As shower-loosed petals, veils like meadow-smoke,

  Fur soft as snow, amber like sun congealed,

  Pearls pink as may-buds in an orb of dew;

  And laden with these wonders, that to her

  Were natural as the vesture of a flower,

  Fared home to lay my booty at her feet.

  And she, consenting, nor with useless words

  Proving my purpose, robed herself therein

  To meet her lawful lord; but while she thus

  Prisoned the wandering glory of her hair,

  Dimmed her bright breast with jewels, and subdued

  Her light to those dull splendours, well she knew

  The lord that I adorned her thus to meet

  Was not Tintagel’s shadowy King, but he,

  That other lord beneath whose plumy feet

  The currents of the seas of life run gold

  As from eternal sunrise; well she knew

  That when I laid my hands upon her head,

  Saying, “Fare forth forgiven,” the words I spoke

  Were the breathings of his pity, who beholds

  H
ow, swept on his inexorable wings

  Too far beyond the planetary fires

  On the last coasts of darkness, plunged too deep

  In light ineffable, the heart amazed

  Swoons of its glory, and dropping back to earth

  Craves the dim shelter of familiar sounds,

  The rain on the roof, the noise of flocks that pass,

  And the slow world waking to its daily round….

  And thus, as one who speeds a banished queen,

  I set her on my mule, and hung about

  With royal ornament she went her way;

  For meet it was that this great Queen should pass

  Crowned and forgiven from the face of Love.

  (Atlantic Monthly 104, Dec 1909)

  

  The Comrade.

  Wild winged thing, O brought I know not whence

  To beat your life out in my life’s low cage;

  You strange familiar, nearer than my flesh

  Yet distant as a star, that were at first

  A child with me a child, yet elfin-far,

  And visibly of some unearthly breed;

  Mirthfullest mate of all my mortal games,

  Yet shedding on them some evasive gleam

  Of Latmian loneliness—O seven then

  Expert to lift the latch of our low door

  And profit by the hours when, dusked about

  By human misintelligence, our first

  Weak fledgling flights were safeliest essayed;

  Divine accomplice of those perilous-sweet

  Low moth-flights of the unadventured soul

  Above the world’s dim garden!—now we sit,

  After what stretch of years, what stretch of wings,

  In the same cage together—still as near

  And still as strange!

  Only I know at last

  That we are fellows till the last night falls,

  And that I shall not miss your comrade hands

  Till they have closed my lids, and by them set

  A taper that—who knows!—may yet shine through.

  Sister, my comrade, I have ached for you,

  Sometimes, to see you curb your pace to mine,

  And bow your Maenad crest to the dull forms

  Of human usage; I have loosed your hand

  And whispered: ‘Go! Since I am tethered here;’

  And you have turned, and breathing for reply,

  ‘I too am pinioned, as you too are free,’

  Have caught me to such undreamed distances

  As the last planets see, when they look forth,

  To the sentinel pacings of the outmost stars—

  Nor these alone,

  Comrade, my sister, were your gifts. More oft

  Has your impalpable wing-brush bared for me

  The heart of wonder in familiar things,

  Unroofed dull rooms, and hung above my head

  The cloudy glimpses of a vernal moon,

  Or all the autumn heaven ripe with stars.

  And you have made a secret pact with Sleep,

  And when she comes not, or her feet delay,

  Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel

  Under a pale sky where no shadows fall,

  Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal,

  And the night grows like a great rumouring sea,

  And you a boat, and I your passenger,

  And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath

  Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents,

  Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage

  Of desperate moon-drawn waters—on and on

  To some blue ocean immarcescible

  That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks

  The balanced breasts of sea-birds motionless.

  Yet other nights, my sister, you have been

  The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it

  Terrifically down voids that never knew

  The pity of creation—or have felt

  The immitigable anguish of a soul

  Left last in a long-ruined world alone;

  And then your touch has drawn me back to earth,

  As in the night, upon an unknown road,

  A scent of lilac breathing from the hedge

  Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows,

  And safety, and the sense of human kind …

  And I have climbed with you by hidden ways

  To meet the dews of morning, and have seen

  The shy gods like retreating shadows fade,

  Or on the thymy reaches have surprised

  Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not …

  Yet farther have I fared with you, and known

  Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites

  Of his most inward temple; and beyond

  His temple lights, have seen the long gray waste

  Where lonely thoughts, like creatures of the night,

  Listen and wander where a city stood.

  And creeping down by waterless defiles

  Under an iron midnight, have I kept

  My vigil in the waste till dawn began

  To move among the ruins, and I saw

  A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth,

  And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand

  Of some old god of granite in the dust …

  (Atlantic Monthly 106, Dec. 1910)

  

  Summer Afternoon (Bodiam Castle, Sussex).

  Thou couldst not look on me and live: so runs

  The mortal legend—thou that couldst not live

  Nor look on me (so the divine decree)!

  That sawst me in the cloud, the wave, the bough,

  The clod commoved with April, and the shapes

  Lurking ’twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark.

  Mocked I thee not in every guise of life,

  Hid in girls’ eyes, a naiad in her well,

  Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled,

  Luring thee down the primal silences

  Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb?

  Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out

  Relentlessly from the detaining shore,

  Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices,

  Forth from the last faint headland’s failing line,

  Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge

  And hid thee in the hollow of my being?

  And still, because between us hung the veil,

  The myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet

  Refused their rest, thy hands the gifts of life,

  Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face

  Should blur mine image in thine upturned soul

  Ere death had stamped it there. This was thy thought.

  And mine?

  The gods, they say, have all: not so!

  This have they—flocks on every hill, the blue

  Spirals of incense and the amber drip

  Of lucid honey-comb on sylvan shrines,

  First-chosen weanlings, doves immaculate,

  Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage,

  And ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew:

  Man’s wealth, man’s servitude, but not himself!

  And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane,

  Freeze to the marble of their images,

  And, pinnacled on man’s subserviency,

  Through the thick sacrificial haze discern

  Unheeding lives and loves, as some cold peak

  Through icy mists may enviously descry

  Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun.

  So they along an immortality

  Of endless-vistaed homage strain their gaze,

  If haply some rash votary, empty-urned,

  But light of foot, with all-adventuring hand,

  Break rank, fling past the people and the priest,

  Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine,

  And there, the sacred c
urtain in his clutch,

  Drop dead of seeing—while the others prayed!

  Yea, this we wait for, this renews us, this

  Incarnates us, pale people of your dreams,

  Who are but what you make us, wood or stone,

  Or cold chryselephantine hung with gems,

  Or else the beating purpose of your life,

  Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues,

  The face that haunts your pillow, or the light

  Scarce visible over leagues of laboring sea!

  O thus through use to reign again, to drink

  The cup of peradventure to the lees,

  For one dear instant disimmortalized

  In giving immortality!

  So dream the gods upon their listless thrones.

  Yet sometimes, when the votary appears,

  With death-affronting forehead and glad eyes,

  Too young, they rather muse, too frail thou art,

  And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil

  And nuptial garland for so slight a thing?

  And so to their incurious loves return.

  Not so with thee; for some indeed there are

  Who would behold the truth and then return

  To pine among the semblances—but I

  Divined in thee the questing foot that never

  Revisits the cold hearth of yesterday

  Or calls achievement home. I from afar

  Beheld thee fashioned for one hour’s high use,

  Nor meant to slake oblivion drop by drop.

  Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams,

  Surprising me as harts surprise a pool,

  Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined

  Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie

  Bosom to bosom in occasion’s arms,

  And said: Because I love thee thou shalt die!

  For immortality is not to range

  Unlimited through vast Olympian days,

  Or sit in dull dominion over time;

  But this—to drink fate’s utmost at a draught,

  Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip,

  To scale the summit of some soaring moment,

  Nor know the dulness of the long descent,

  To snatch the crown of life and seal it up

  Secure forever in the vaults of death!

  And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,

  Relive in my renewal, and become

  The light of other lives, a quenchless torch