Myth and Romance Part 2

Invisible ghosts,-- Who whisper in leaves and glimmer in blossoms and hover In color and fragrance and loveliness, breathed from the deep World-soul of the mother, Nature;--who, over and over, Both sweetheart and lover, Goes singing her songs from one sweet month to the other,-- That appear, that appear?

In forest and field, on hill-land and lea, As crystallized harmony, Materialized melody, An uttered essence peopling far and near The hyaline atmosphere?...

Behold how it sprouts from the gra.s.s and blooms from flower and tree!

In waves of diaphanous moonlight and mist, In fugue upon fugue of gold and of amethyst, Around me, above me it spirals; now slower, now faster, Like symphonies born of the thought of a musical master.-- --O music of Earth! O G.o.d who the music inspired!

Let me breathe of the life of thy breath!

And so be fulfilled and attired In resurrection, triumphant o'er time and o'er death!

_Hymn to Desire_

I

Mother of visions, with lineaments dulcet as numbers Breathed on the eyelids of love by music that slumbers, Secretly, sweetly, O presence of fire and snow, Thou comest mysterious, In beauty imperious, Clad on with dreams and the light of no world that we know.

Deep to my innermost soul am I shaken, Helplessly shaken and tossed, And of thy tyrannous yearnings so utterly taken, My lips, unsatisfied, thirst; Mine eyes are accurst With longings for visions that far in the night are forsaken; And mine ears, in listening lost, Yearn, yearn for the note of a chord that will never awaken.

II

Like palpable music thou comest, like moonlight; and far,-- Resonant bar upon bar,-- The vibrating lyre Of the spirit responds with melodious fire, As thy fluttering fingers now grasp it and ardently shake, With flame and with flake, The chords of existence, the instrument star-sprung.

Whose frame is of clay, so wonderfully molded from mire.

III

Vested with vanquishment, come, O Desire, Desire!

Breathe in this harp of my soul the audible angel of love!

Make of my heart an Israfel burning above, A lute for the music of G.o.d, that lips, which are mortal, but stammer!

Smite every rapturous wire With golden delirium, rebellion and silvery clamor, Crying--"Awake! awake!

Too long hast thou slumbered! too far from the regions of glamour, With its mountains of magic, its fountains of Faery, the spar-sprung, Hast thou wandered away, O Heart!

Come, oh, come and partake Of necromance banquets of beauty; and slake Thy thirst in the waters of art, That are drawn from the streams Of love and of dreams."

IV

"Come, oh, come!

No longer shall language be dumb!

Thy vision shall grasp-- As one doth the glittering hasp Of a dagger made splendid with gems and with gold-- The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely.

And out of the stark Eternity, awful and dark, Immensity silent and cold,-- Universe-shaking as trumpets, or thunderous metals That cymbal; yet pensive and pearly And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,-- The majestic music of Death, where he plays On the organ of eons and days."

_Music_

Thou, oh, thou!

Thou of the chorded sh.e.l.l and golden plectrum! thou Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow!

Music, who by the plangent waves, Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, Or on G.o.d's mountains, lonely as the stars, Touchest reverberant bars Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;-- Keeping regret and memory awake, And all the immortal ache Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days In retrospection!--now, oh, now, Interpreter and heart-physician, thou, Who gazest on the heaven and the h.e.l.l Of life, and singest each as well, Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips, Or thy melodious lips, This sickness named my soul, Making it whole, As is an echo of a chord, Or some symphonic word, Or sweet vibrating sigh, That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die On thy voluminous roll; Part of the beauty and the mystery That axles Earth with song; and as a slave, Swings it around and 'round on each sonorous pole, 'Mid spheric harmony, And choral majesty, And diapasoning of wind and wave; And speeds it on its far elliptic way 'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.-- O cosmic cry Of two eternities, wherein we see The phantasms, Death and Life, At endless strife Above the silence of a monster grave.

_Jotunheim_

I

Beyond the Northern Lights, in regions haunted Of twilight, where the world is glacier planted, And pale as Loki in his cavern when The serpent's slaver burns him to the bones, I saw the phantasms of gigantic men, The prototypes of vastness, quarrying stones; Great blocks of winter, glittering with the morn's And evening's colors,--wild prismatic tones Of boreal beauty.--Like the three gray Norns, Silence and solitude and terror loomed Around them where they labored. Walls arose, Vast as the Andes when creation boomed Insurgent fire; and through the rushing snows Enormous battlements of tremendous ice, Bastioned and turreted, I saw arise.

II

But who can sing the workmanship gigantic That reared within its coruscating dome The roaring fountain, hurling an Atlantic Of streaming ice that flashed with flame and foam?

An opal spirit, various and many formed,-- In whose clear heart reverberant fire stormed,-- Seemed its inhabitant; and through pale halls, And deep diaphanous walls, And corridors of whiteness.

Auroral colors swarmed, As rosy-flickering stains, Or lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed The pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins With ever-changing brightness.

And through the Arctic night there went a voice, As if the ancient Earth cried out, "Rejoice!

My heart is full of lightness!"

III

Here well might Thor, the G.o.d of war, Harness the whirlwinds to his car, While, mailed in storm, his iron arm Heaves high his hammer's lava-form, And red and black his beard streams back, Like some fierce torrent scoriac, Whose earthquake light glares through the night Around some dark volcanic height; And through the skies Valkyrian cries Trumpet, as battleward he flies, Death in his hair and havoc in his eyes.

IV

Still in my dreams I hear that fountain flowing; Beyond all seeing and beyond all knowing; Still in my dreams I see those wild walls glowing With hues, Aurora-kissed; And through huge halls fantastic phantoms going.

Vast shapes of snow and mist,-- Sonorous clarions of the tempest blowing,-- That trail dark banners by, Cloudlike, underneath the sky Of the caverned dome on high, Carbuncle and amethyst.-- Still I hear the ululation Of their stormy exultation, Mult.i.tudinous, and blending In hoa.r.s.e echoes, far, unending; And, through halls of fog and frost, Howling back, like madness lost In the moonless mansion of Its own demon-haunted love.

V

Still in my dreams I hear the mermaid singing; The mermaid music at its portal ringing; The mermaid song, that hinged with gold its door, And, whispering evermore, Hushed the ponderous hurl and roar And vast aeolian thunder Of the chained tempests under The frozen cataracts that were its floor.-- And, blinding beautiful, I still behold The mermaid there, combing her locks of gold, While, at her feet, green as the Northern Seas, Gambol her flocks of seals and walruses; While, like a drift, her dog--a Polar bear-- Lies by her, glowering through his s.h.a.ggy hair.

VI

O wondrous house, built by supernal hands In vague and ultimate lands!

Thy architects were behemoth wind and cloud, That, laboring loud, Mountained thy world foundations and uplifted Thy skyey bastions drifted Of piled eternities of ice and snow; Where storms, like ploughmen, go, Ploughing the deeps with awful hurricane; Where, spouting icy rain, The huge whale wallows; and through furious hail Th' explorer's tattered sail Drives like the wing of some terrific bird, Where wreck and famine herd.-- Home of the red Auroras and the G.o.ds!