Classic Poem

CAPUTXIX

Three were fair as beauty's trefoil,
Far excelling all the others:
Gracious forms of lovely women —
Ah, I never shall forget them!

Unmistakable the first was,
From the crescent on her forehead;
Pure and proudly, like a statue,
Rode and passed the mighty goddess.

High upgirdled was her tunic,
Veiling half the hips and bosom;
On her white voluptuous body
Played the torch-light and the moonlight.

White as marble was her face, too,
And as cold as marble; fearful
Were the fixity and pallor
Of the stern and noble features.

But within her eye of shadow
Leapt and flamed an awful fire,
Sweet, uncanny, and mysterious,
Spirit-blinding and consuming.

Ah! how altered is Diana:
She who changed the young Actaeon
To a stag, for dogs to mangle,
In her chastity unbending.

Does she expiate her error
'Mid this company licentious?
Like the frailest among mortals
Now, a ghost, by night she travels.

Late, indeed, yet all the fiercer
In her heart desire awakens,
In her eyes it burns devouring
Like a very brand of hell.

For she rues the vanished ages
When the men were nobler, fairer;
Seeks, in numbers, compensation
Now that quality has dwindled.

By her side there rode a beauty
From whose features, less severely
On the classic model chiselled,
Shone the Celtic grace and charm.

'Twas the lovely fay Abunde,
And I knew her, knew her straightway,
By the sweetness of her smiling,
By her mad and merry laughter.

Ah, the blooming face and rosy,
Such as Greuze had haply painted!
Like a heart her mouth, and open,
With enchanting pearly teeth.

And her gown was blue; it fluttered,
For the wind was fain to lift it.
In the fairest of my visions
I have never seen such shoulders.

From the window, in my longing,
I had almost leapt to kiss her —
And my neck had surely broken
In the hazardous adventure.

Ah! if bleeding I had fallen
At her feet in the abysses,
She had only laughed — such laughter
I have heard, alas! too often!

Was the third, the third and fairest
Of the women that so deeply
And so strangely stirred my bosom,
But a devil like the others?

Whether fiend she was, or angel,
For my life I could not tell you.
It is hard to say, with women,
Where the fiend in angel merges.

On her face aglow with fever,
Lay the Morning-land's enchantment,
And her costly robes reminded
Of the tales of Scheherazade.

And her lips were like pomegranates,
And her nose a curving lily,
And her limbs were cool and slender
As the palm in the oasis.

On a palfrey white she rode,
Led by negroes twain who trotted
Swift afoot beside the princess,
By the golden bridle holding.

Oh, in truth, a royal lady
Was the queen of old Judaea:
Herod's lovely wife who lusted
For the head of John the Baptist!

For this deed of blood accursid,
As a night-tormented spirit
She must join the rout and gallop
Till the final day of doom.

In her hand she holds the charger
With the head of John the Baptist,
Holds it evermore and kisses,
Yes, she kisses it with fervour.

For she loved Saint John the Baptist;
Though it stand not in the Bible,
'Mongst the folk the legend lingers
Of Herodias' bloody passion.

'Tis the only supposition
That explains the lady's longing.
Will a woman ask the head
Of a man she does not love?

She was maybe wroth a little
With her lover — cut his head off;
But when, bleeding on the charger,
She had won the head so precious.

Wildly weeping she went crazy,
Wept and died of love's delirium —
(Love's delirium! Phrase redundant!
Love — delirium — they are one!)

From the grave uprising nightly,
As I said, she rides a-hunting,
In her hand the bloody charger;
Yet, with woman's mad caprice,

Now and then with childish laughter
She will hurl the gruesome burden
Through the air, and catch it lightly
And adroitly like a plaything.

As she galloped past she saw me;
And her nod was so coquettish
And so languishing, that deeply
To its core my heart was shaken.

Thrice the cavalcade went surging,
As I watched, before my window,
And the lovely ghost in passing
Nodded thrice to me in greeting.

When the hunting throng had vanished,
And the tumult sunk to silence,
Still the sweetness of that greeting
Burned and smouldered in my brain.

And the livelong night I tumbled,
Tossing fevered limbs and weary
On the straw — Uraka's hovel
Was unblest with beds of down; —

And I mused upon the meaning
Of that strange, mysterious greeting.
Why so tenderly and softly
Didst thou gaze on me, Herodias?