Classic Poem

Through the green grove my footsteps stray;
Alas! they stray:
I met a sportsman on the way.

The sun shines out in warmth above;
Ah! warm above:
My heart it blossoms forth in love.

A ND there we sit till eve draws near;
Ah! eve draws near—
The sportsman shoots a wandering deer.

I T is no deer—it is a doe;
Alas! a doe—
O maiden! thou hast planted woe.

T IME flies—and soon the grass is mown;
Alas! 'tis mown—
Would I had ne'er that sportsman known!

S HE wash'd the linen by the stream;
Alas! the stream:
And bitterly upbraided him.

B EFORE I met that sportsman there;
Alas! 'twas there—
I was a rose—all pure and fair.

B EAUTY and purity are gone;
Alas! are gone—
He is gone too—the faithless one!

H E to another breast hath crept;
Alas! hath crept—
And then the maiden wept and wept.

A H ! go not to the grove, ye fair;
Alas! ye fair—
For ye may meet a sportsman there.

I love you. Do you smile? And well you may:
You who have heard the beast in many men
Mouth glibly that old spirit phrase so oft.
It is a word you scoff aThere, I know.
And yet—when one dreams sleepless all the night,
Somehow a sense of the enduring things,
Creeps in upon him, till the old beast sleeps,
And spirits wise with time possess the hush.

It seems a life has passed since yestereve;
'Twas then I met you—just a night ago:
How little can a clock-gong measure dreams!

You sat beneath the tawdry glare of gas
Among the weary painted woman-flowers,
Exhaling sickly scents; while to the tune
Of shrill barbaric fiddles, squawking horns,
And that piano the mulatto played,
(Nay, smitten by the devil's dancing feet!)
The haggard creatures wreathed the dizzy dance.

Sin errant rides for heavens built of mist;
But once, O once it lead me to the goal!
I saw you—virgin-eyed and sunny haired,
With cheeks whereon the country's kiss remained,
And round you, somehow, the effluvium
Of green things smiling upward in the day.

Gazing upon you, over me there came
The drone of cornfields in the warm damp night;
Far, far away I saw the wheat a-shimmer;
The smell of fresh-turned earth was everywhere!
And O your touch flung trooping through my blood
Such dream-wrought throngs of maiden violets!
So all my thirsty soul cried out to you,
The one green spot in all that arid place.

And yet—I did not love you then as now.
The smouldering ashes of old primal lusts
The strident fiddles wakened, and the wine.
And so I bought you—paid the stated price—
Washed out my scruples in a flood of wine.
Then all the smell of violets died out,
The visioned fields of happy growing things
Went stifling hot, oppressive with the breath
Of flowers that never blossomed in the day.
And then when I had borne you from the place
Of glare and noise, where painted lilies swayed
Unto the shrieking hell-wind of the fiddles,
You flung aside those garish strumpet garments
And stood before me!


So would April look
If all the lure and wonder of that time
Could flesh itself in woman! And I knew
'Twas thus of old the maiden Lais stood,
Fresh from the wholesome fields of Sicily,
Before Apelles quickened with his dream.
A ghost of spring crept back into the world
Haunting the hot, autumnal hollow of it.
It seemed the time when maples ooze their sap,
When humid winds of promise sing all night
Beneath the stars that run aghast through mist:
When rivers wake and burst their shrouds of ice
To boom down swollen channels. Cherry bows
Flung to the winds their odorous living snows,
And apple blossoms drifted in the breeze,
Pink as the buds that tipped your spotless breasts.
Up through the spring-sweet vistas of the dream
Old Greece came back with all her purple bays,
Her ships of venture and her fighting men,
Her sculptors and her painters and her bards,
Her temples and her ever-living gods,
Her women whom to name must be to sing.
I touched you—and 'twas Helen that I touched;
And in my blood young Paris lived again;
And all the grief and gloom of Ilium,
Her wailing wives enslaved to foreign lords,
Her stricken warriors and her gutted fanes,
Her song-built towers falling in the smoke,
And all the anguish of her tragic Queen,
Seemed naught for one round burning kiss from you!

You thought it was the wine; ah, so it was—
The wine of woman fraught with life and death,
The wine of beauty and the wine of doom.
You laughed; and Greece with all her purple bays,
Her gladness and her weeping went to dust;
While through the panting hollow of the world
A hot storm grumbled up. And we alone
In some tremendous lightning-riven night!

But when the quiet came, and down the dark
The awful music of our youth died out,
And in the gloomy hollow lived no sound
Except the sullen thunder of our hearts.
Your languid kissing mouth seemed like a wound
Wet with the blood of something I had killed!
And while you stroked my dampened hair. and lisped
Delirious nothings, over me there came
The sad still singing of the things that are.
Close nestled in the hollow of my arm,
You slept like any weary little girl,
Unconscious of the ancient weight you bore.
But I lay wakeful with the ghostly years.

Above the glooming surf of yesterdays
The faces of all women that have been
Bloomed beacon-like, and lit with ghastly glare
The wreck-strewn coasts of the eternal sea!
Faces of patient woe and wise with grief,
Faces from which my mother gazed at me,
Faces that were one face with that of Christ!
And some with haggard unforgetting eyes
Haunted far sea-rims, gray with ships of mist;
And some were drawn and white above the slain,
With sick lips mumbling kisses of farewell;
And in them all the wistful mother-light.
Once more for me the Carthaginian pyre
Built day amid the dusk of sordid things;
And that sad Queen whom all the world shall love
Because one man forsook her, far away
Followed with tearless tragic eyes the sail
That bellied skyward in a wind of Fate.
And through the night the wail of Hecuba
Brought back the Thracian sorrow, made it mine:
While in the aching hush that followed it
Red drop by drop I heard the Virgin's blood.
Fair Phryne came and bared her breast to me
With ancient sorrow pleading in her gaze.
And on her painted cheeks my sister's tears.
And one with ashen face and tiger eyes
Held huddled close the remnant of her brood.
One, pale above a loom, with nervous hands
Wove and unwove the shroud of each day's hope—
The web of Woman's weaving. Hand in hand,
The Roman wife, the subtle Queen of Nile,
Walked down the night—one woman at the last.
And haloed round with an eternal spring,
Rode she with whom all men have sinned; her face
Foreshadowed with the doom that was to be:
And aged with more than years, unqueened, and yet
Ten times the former queen. I heard her sob
Amid the cloistral gloom at Almesbury.
And O, I saw upon a mystic sea
A rose-souled lily fleshed into a girl,
Tall as a fighting man and terrible
With all the keen clean beauty of a sword,
That one who took the luring mystic cup
And drank of it. and thirsted evermore.
From myriad graves they came, till night was day
Lit with the radiance of them. Queens and slaves;
Sweet maidens with the life-dawn in their eyes;
Mothers with babes at breast, and painted harlots;
Unsung forgotten daughters of the ground,
Dumb under burdens, with dull questioning eyes
That stared uncomprehending upon Fate.
All lifted up imploring arms to me
And over them a wind of music went,
The crooning of the mothers of the Race.
The vision passed. Out in the quiet night
Across the huddled roofs the clock-gong tolled.
I raised the blind. The tremulous woman-star,
Like a great tear moon-smitten, watched the town,
And thin soft whispers prophesied the dawn.

Bathed in the glamorous beauty of the stars
You lay asleep—a chiselled Parian dream,
A spotless vase of sleeping sacred fire,
A still white awe! No vandal hand had filched
The meaning from the breasts that might not know
The sad sweet thrill of nurture. With cool lips
That yearned with primal worshippings, I kissed them;
And, though you slept, the tender mother arm,
Wise with old memories, sought the restless babe.

God makes you mothers spite of milkless breasts!
He only knows how sterile gardens dream
Of bloom flung riot: how through arid night
The wooing rain comes kissing like a ghost,
Unfruitful kisses!
O that you might know
The cleansing wonder quickening in your blood,
The sweet dream fleshing with the passing moons,
The wild red pang, the first thin strangled cry
From world to world, the great white after-peace!

But O I saw you sitting in the sun
Before a green-girt cottage with your babes;
And grapes hung purple in the afternoon,
And there were bees abroad and smell of fruit;
And up the shimmering hillside went the man—

Stamped with the kinship of the giving Earth,
The old Antæan wisdom in his heart—
Glad in the flowing furrow turned for you.

See! faint upon the melancholy roofs
The gray light, like the aching backward creep
Of some familiar sorrow!
O the grapes
That never sun shall purple!