Classic Poem

(1)

First I will tell you something of these two.
He followed love as watchful as a child,
And yet unchildlike never quite beguiled
To think the thing he found the thing he knew:
She, sure of all things seen by moon or sun,
And sure that these were all her eyes could see,
Waited impatient for the victory
That should secure what was already won.

He followed love, she waited her true lover:
She waited what she need but wait to find;
He followed what pursuit could not discover
Nor time disclose nor death surprise and bind.
Over the hills, he sang, and far away—
She never knew that land nor where it lay.

(2)

Well, he was drunk. That much was clear,
Or not quite clear but certain.
Queer
The way a rising moon will burn
Green copper!
Thing you'll never learn
From books: but out of life and beer
Or beer and life you may discern
Great truths—as that a tower gleams
In moon-fire like a torch and seems
A toppling brand of burnt emprise.
No teacher else is half so wise
At demonstrating chords and themes
The singing sort of men devise.

Take Helen,—all you hear of her
In lectures is a learned slur
Of couplets solemnly undressed
To indicate the female chest,
Till Helen's lost and nothing's sure
But that she had, praise God, a breast.

And then you're drunk and out you walk
Through High Street where the shadows mock
The third dimension of thick day,
And walls chirp back the words you say;
And magically above your talk,
As lift faint mountains far away,
There lifts a sudden loveliness,
A flare of beauty, an excess

Of radiance, more sense than thought,
Like soundless music somehow caught
Back of the brain, or some impress
Of figures in a dream forgot—
And there stands Helen—there's the face
Young Marlowe saw past time and space
And would have seen again and died;
There, there the subtle breast, the side
White as white water, there the grace
Of queens and there the pride, the pride.

Helen, he said,—but was it she?
Somewhere he'd seen serenity
Drawn smooth as this across a flame
As bright to hide, and brows that tame
Eyes as unapt to secrecy,—
Nay, he had known these eyes, this same
Young breast, this throat.—There was a name—

(3)

He had used love or lust or what's between
Long, long before. When he was still a boy
Old hairy love that hugs his knees for joy
And quavers tunes, ecstatic and obscene,
Grey goatish love that whistles to the fauns,
Had whistled fever through his aching flesh
And led him giddy down his nerves' dark mesh
To lie with empresses and leprechauns.

So he had used and after in a mood
Of sluggish melancholy and vague grief,
Ruffled with such warm rifts as in a wood
A sunny wind blows over leaf by leaf,
Had longed for death that lies beneath the ground
And feels no lust and listens to no sound.

(4)

And he had used love's dream of love before,
Love that hopes nothing but the hope it is,
Love that has no utterance in a kiss,
Nor eloquence in flesh, but would adore
Its perfect adoration, its desire,
As musingly in wonder as the moon
Stares back into a brook whose running rune
Burns with the imaged argent of moon-fire.

Sometimes in music when the phrase would close
And yet yearn on in silence, unfulfilled,
Once in the imperfection of a rose,
Once in an ape's face marvellously stilled,
He had imagined the perfected thing,
The hope made real, the unfolded wing.

(5)

But she was both,—she was both loved and love,
She was desire and the thing desired,
She was Troy flame and she was Troy town fired,
She was hope realized and the hope thereof:
Her slender body was the instant bloom
Of lovely secrecies; the shadowed swell
Of her small breast was beauty sensible;
Her stormy hair wore wonder like a plume.

Away, his sense of her was like the sense
Of moonlight under the smooth vague of sleep;
Near, at her touch, her beauty's imminence
Was like a wave that falters at the leap
And lifts in foam a moment till it fall,
Filling with thunderous hush the interval.

(6)

Passing her in the day he had but dared
To meet her eyes and in the moment's touch
Seemed to his flinching brain to dare too much
So proud she was and single and unshared.
She was another flesh than his he thought,
Another element, less earth than flame,
A different life, unnamed but for the name,
Her eyes should teach him if he could be taught.

But now at midnight the remembering dark
Imaged her body naked by his side,
Her head half turned and on her mouth the mark
Of lust fed full and still unsatisfied,
And her clear eyes that had compelled his mind
Were humble now and hideously kind.

(7)

Under an elm tree where the river reaches
They watched the evening deepen in the sky,
They watched the westward clouds go towering by
Through lakes of blue toward those shining beaches,
Those far enchanted strands where blowing tides
Break into light along the shallow air;
They watched how like a ship's tall lantern there
Over that silent surf the faint star rides.

Ship of a dream, he thought,—O dreamed of shore
Beyond all oceans and all earthly seas!
Now would they never call him any more,
Now would they never hurt him with unease.
She was that ship, that sea, that syren land;
And she was here, her hand shut in his hand.

(8)

Here, O wanderer, here is the hill and the harbor,
Farer and follower, here the Hesperides.
Here wings the Halcyon down through the glamorous arbor,
 Here is the end of the seas.

Have you heard music at morning of far sea singing?
Have you heard singing over the water at dark?
This was the music you heard here forever reringing,
 Only the thrush, O hark!

Have you seen citadels glance in the sunset, and towers?
Have you seen castles of glint and of gossamer spun?
These, only these, were the heights, these hills grown with flowers,
 These were the gates of the sun.

There is no music but this, no loveliness other,—
Only the reaching of arms and the rose of a breast,
Only a girl's throat—beyond this earth ends and seas smother,
 And the old moon fades in the west.

There is no land beyond and no shore and no ocean,
Nothing but night and the moon and the cold thin air,
Where change never comes but the stars' unchangeable motion,
 Nor end but endlessness there.

(9)

Beatrice, Beatrice, poor Beatrice,
She said, and laughed and tossed aside the book.
Once Dante saw her and his green bones shook
And that you say was love. Why love is—this—
She leaned above him in the sunlight there.
Poor Beatrice! The shadowy Florentine
Dissolved in shadow, and high heaven's queen
Drowned in the heavy darkness of dark hair.

Poor Beatrice—Poor Dante—did they miss
So much of love exalting love so much?
Or is it love to tremble on a kiss?
Or does true love love only past the touch?
But this was true whatever truth's device,
And this could live in Hell or Paradise.

(10)

 Would you jig, O lusty loin?
 O brain, would you dance so soon?
But love who pays the fiddler's coin
  Must call the tune.

 Not when you would, O soul,
 Not, O flesh, when you will,
But when love nods, and the wild drums roll
  And the fiddles shrill.