Artemis to Actaeon, and Other Verses Part 2

But stay! Suppose my lover had not died?

(At last my question! Father, help me face it.) I say: Suppose my lover had not died-- Think you I ever would have left him living, Even to be Christ's blessed Margaret?

--We lived in sin? Why, to the sin I died to That other was as Paradise, when G.o.d Walks there at eventide, the air pure gold, And angels treading all the gra.s.s to flowers!

He was my Christ--he led me out of h.e.l.l-- He died to save me (so your casuists say!)-- Could Christ do more? Your Christ out-pity mine?

Why, _yours_ but let the sinner bathe His feet; Mine raised her to the level of his heart. . .

And then Christ's way is saving, as man's way Is squandering--and the devil take the shards!

But this man kept for sacramental use The cup that once had slaked a pa.s.sing thirst; This man declared: "The same clay serves to model A devil or a saint; the scribe may stain The same fair parchment with obscenities, Or gild with benedictions; nay," he cried, "Because a satyr feasted in this wood, And fouled the gra.s.ses with carousing foot, Shall not a hermit build his chapel here And cleanse the echoes with his litanies?

The sodden gra.s.ses spring again--why not The trampled soul? Is man less merciful Than nature, good more fugitive than gra.s.s?"

And so--if, after all, he had not died, And suddenly that door should know his hand, And with that voice as kind as yours he said: "Come, Margaret, forth into the sun again, Back to the life we fashioned with our hands Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned Of more ambitious builders, yet by Love, The patient architect, so shaped and fitted That not a crevice let the winter in--"

Think you my bones would not arise and walk, This bruised body (as once the bruised soul) Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven As from the antics of the market-place?

If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed), I, who have known both loves, divine and human, Think you I would not leave this Christ for that?

--I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo?

Go, then; your going leaves me not alone.

I marvel, rather, that I feared the question, Since, now I name it, it draws near to me With such dear rea.s.surance in its eyes, And takes your place beside me. . .

Nay, I tell you, Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints-- If this be devil's prompting, let them drown it In Alleluias! Yet not one replies.

And, for the Christ there--is He silent too?

_Your_ Christ? Poor father; you that have but one, And that one silent--how I pity you!

He will not answer? Will not help you cast The devil out? But hangs there on the wall, Blind wood and bone--?

How if _I_ call on Him-- I, whom He talks with, as the town attests?

If ever prayer hath ravished me so high That its wings failed and dropped me in Thy breast, Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour Of innermost commixture, when my soul Contained Thee as the paten holds the host, Judge Thou alone between this priest and me; Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present, Thy Margaret and that other's--whose she is By right of salvage--and whose call should follow!

Thine? Silent still.--Or his, who stooped to her, And drew her to Thee by the bands of love?

Not Thine? Then his?

Ah, Christ--the thorn-crowned Head Bends . . . bends again . . . down on your knees,

Fra Paolo!

If his, then Thine!

Kneel, priest, for this is heaven. . .

A TORCHBEARER

GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the bra.s.s That held their glories moulders in its turn.

Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ.

But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph-- The will of man willing immortal things.

The ages are but baubles hung upon The thread of some strong lives--and one slight wrist May lift a century above the dust; For Time, The Sisyphean load of little lives, Becomes the globe and sceptre of the great.

But who are these that, linking hand in hand, Transmit across the twilight waste of years The flying brightness of a kindled hour?

Not always, nor alone, the lives that search How they may s.n.a.t.c.h a glory out of heaven Or add a height to Babel; oftener they That in the still fulfilment of each day's Pacific order hold great deeds in leash, That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks Hide the attempered blade of high emprise, And leap like lightning to the clap of fate.

So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call Of one rare moment all the daily store Of joy distilled from the acquitted task, And that deliberate rashness which bespeaks The pondered action pa.s.sed into the blood; So swift to harden purpose into deed That, with the wind of ruin in his hair, Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh, And at one stroke he lived the whole of life, Poured all in one libation to the truth, A br.i.m.m.i.n.g flood whose drops shall overflow On deserts of the soul long beaten down By the brute hoof of habit, till they spring In manifold upheaval to the sun.

Call here no high artificer to raise His wordy monument--such lives as these Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp An empty vesture. Let resounding lives Re-echo splendidly through high-piled vaults And make the grave their spokesman--such as he Are as the hidden streams that, underground, Sweeten the pastures for the grazing kine, Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars The scent of freedom; or a light that burns Immutably across the shaken seas, Forevermore by nameless hands renewed, Where else were darkness and a glutted sh.o.r.e.

II

THE MORTAL LEASE

I

BECAUSE the currents of our love are poured Through the slow welter of the primal flood From some blind source of monster-haunted mud, And flung together by random forces stored Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored-- Because we know ourselves but the dim scud Tossed from their heedless keels, the sea-blown bud That wastes and scatters ere the wave has roared--

Because we have this knowledge in our veins, Shall we deny the journey's gathered lore-- The great refusals and the long disdains, The stubborn questing for a phantom sh.o.r.e, The sleepless hopes and memorable pains, And all mortality's immortal gains?

II

Because our kiss is as the moon to draw The mounting waters of that red-lit sea That circles brain with sense, and bids us be The playthings of an elemental law, Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe On love's extremest pinnacle, where we, Winging the vistas of infinity, Gigantic on the mist our shadows saw?

Shall kinship with the dim first-moving clod Not draw the folded pinion from the soul, And shall we not, by spirals vision-trod, Reach upward to some still-retreating goal, As earth, escaping from the night's control, Drinks at the founts of morning like a G.o.d?

III

All, all is sweet in that commingled draught Mysterious, that life pours for lovers' thirst, And I would meet your pa.s.sion as the first Wild woodland woman met her captor's craft, Or as the Greek whose fearless beauty laughed And doffed her raiment by the Attic flood; But in the streams of my belated blood Flow all the warring potions love has quaffed.

How can I be to you the nymph who danced Smooth by Ilissus as the plane-tree's bole, Or how the Nereid whose drenched lashes glanced Like sea-flowers through the summer sea's long roll-- I that have also been the nun entranced Who night-long held her Bridegroom in her soul?

IV

"Sad Immortality is dead," you say, "And all her grey brood banished from the soul; Life, like the earth, is now a rounded whole, The orb of man's dominion. Live to-day."

And every sense in me leapt to obey, Seeing the routed phantoms backward roll; But from their waning throng a whisper stole, And touched the morning splendour with decay.

"Sad Immortality is dead; and we The funeral train that bear her to her grave.

Yet hath she left a two-faced progeny In hearts of men, and some will always see The skull beneath the wreath, yet always crave In every kiss the folded kiss to be."

V

Yet for one rounded moment I will be No more to you than what my lips may give, And in the circle of your kisses live As in some island of a storm-blown sea, Where the cold surges of infinity Upon the outward reefs unheeded grieve, And the loud murmur of our blood shall weave Primeval silences round you and me.

If in that moment we are all we are We live enough. Let this for all requite.

Do I not know, some winged things from far Are borne along illimitable night To dance their lives out in a single flight Between the moonrise and the setting star?