Classic Poem

( First Version, 1920 )

The coral-cold snow seemed the Parthenon,
Huge peristyle of temples that are gone,
And dark as Asia, now, is Beauty's daughter,
The rose, once clear as music o'er deep water.

Now the full moon her fire and light doth spill
On turkey-plumaged leaves and window-sill,

On leaves that seem the necks and plumes of urban
Turkeys, each a Sultan in a turban,

And strawberries among the beavers' wool
(So grass seemed where that ruined temple's cool

Shade fell). When first the dew with golden foot
Makes tremble every leaf and strawberry root,

The rainbow gives those berries light above,
The dark rose gives them all her secret love,

Until those coral tears of the rich light
Hold roses, rubies, rainbows for the sight.

My ancient shadow nods a turbaned head;
One candle through thick leaves throws a gold thread;

The dark green country temple of the snows
Hides porphyry bones of nymphs whence grew the rose,

And dark green dog-haired leaves of strawberries,
All marked with maps of unknown lands and seas,

And that small Negro page, the cross dark quail,
Chasing the ghosts of dairymaids that fail

In butter-yellow dew by Georgian stables
(The snow, dark green as strawberry leaves, has gables).

But Time, a heavy ghost, groans through thick leaves;
Time is a weary bell which ever grieves;

It is not Death which is the skeleton —
But Time; Death merely strikes the hour of one,

Night's creeping end ere light begins again.
Oh, Death has never worm for heart and brain

Like that which Time conceives to fill his grave,
Devouring the last faith, the word love gave,

Changing the light in eyes to heavy tears,
Changing the beat in heart to empty years

Wherein we listen for that little sound
Of footsteps that come never to our ground.

How terrible these winter nights must be
To the deserted Dead . . . if we could see

The eternal anguish of the skeleton,
So fleshless even the dog leaves it alone,

Atridae-like devouring its own blood
With hopeless love beneath the earth's blind hood;
For warmth, the rags of flesh about the bone
Devoured by black disastrous dreams, alone

The worm is their companion, vast years
Pile mountain-high above, and the last tears

Freeze to gigantic polar nights of ice
Around the heart through crumbling centuries.

O Dead, your heart is gone, it cannot weep!
From decency the skeleton must sleep;

O heart, shrink out of sight, you have no flesh
For love or dog or worm to court afresh,

Only your youthful smile is mirrored lone
In that eternity, the skeleton.

For never come they now, nor comes the hour
When your lips spoke, and winter broke in flower,

The Parthenon was built by your dead kiss.
What should they seek, now you are changed to this

Vast craggy bulk, strong as the prophet's rock?
No grief tore waters from that stone to mock
Death's immobility, and, changed to stone,
Those eyelids see one sight and one alone.

What do they see? Some lost and childish kiss
In summers ere they knew that love was this,

The terrible Gehenna of the bone
Deserted by the flesh, tears changed to stone?

Or do they blame us that we walk this earth,
Who are more dead than they, nor seek rebirth

Nor change? The snowflake's six-rayed star can see
Rock-crystal's cold six-rayed eternity —

Thus light grief melts in craggy waterfalls;
But mine melts never, though the last spring calls:

The polar night's huge boulder hath rolled this,
My heart, my Sisyphus, in the abyss.

Do the Dead know the nights wherein we grope
From our more terrible abyss of hope
To soft despair? The nights when creeping Fear
Crumples our hearts, knowing when age appear,

Our sun, our love, will leave us more alone
Than the black moldering rags about the bone?

Age shrinks our hearts to ape-like dust . . . that ape
Looks through the eyes where all death's chasms gape

Between ourself and what we used to be.
My soul, my Lazarus, know you not me?

Am I so changed by Time's appalling night?
'Tis but my bone that cannot stand upright,

That leans as if it thirsted . . . for what spring,
The ape's bent skeleton foreshadowing,

With head bent from the light, its only kiss?
Do the Dead know that metamorphosis,

When the appalling lion-claws of age
With talons tear the cheek and heart, yet rage

For life devours the bone, a tigerish fire?
But quenched in the vast empire of the mire

These craters cry not to the eternal bone:
The Dead may hide the changing skeleton.

So quench the light, my Lazarus, nor see
The thing we are, the thing that we might be:

In moldering cerements of that thick grave,
Our flesh, we lose the one light that could save.

But yet it shall avail that grass shall sing
From loveless bones in some foreshadowed spring,

And summer break from a long-shadowed kiss,
Though our dry bones are sunless grown as this,

And eyeless statues, broken and alone
In shadeless avenues, the music gone,
We stand . . . the leaves we knew are black as jet,
Though the light scatters feathers on them yet,

Remembering sylvan nymphs. . . . Death is our clime,
And, among heavy leaves, our bell to chime —

Death is our sun, illumining our old
Dim-jewelled bones — Death is our winter cold,

Yet sighs of voyages and landing stages
From unknown seas, and sylvan equipages,

And of a clime where Death's light on the eyes
Could make each shapeless lump of clay grow wise;

The topaz, sapphires, diamonds of the bone,
That mineral in our earth's dark mine, alone
Leap to the eastern light. . . . Death-blinded eyes
See beyond wild bird-winged discoveries.

Death is the Sun's heat making all men black:
O Death, the splendors die in the leaves' track:

All men are Ethiopian shades of thee:
The wild and glittering fleece Parthenope

Loosened, more rich than feathers of bright birds,
Though rich and thick as Ethiopian herds

Died like the wave, or early light that grew
In eastern quarries ripening precious dew.

Though lovely are the tombs of the dead nymphs
On the heroic shore, the glittering plinths
Of jacynth, hyacinthine waves profound
Sigh of the beauty out of sight and sound

And many a golden foot that pressed the sand:
The panoply of suns on distant strand.

Panope walking like the pomp of waves
With plumaged helmet near the fountain caves

Is only now an arena for the worm;
Her golden flesh lies in the dust's frail storm,

And beauty water-bright for long is laid
Deep in the empire of eternal shade;

Only the sighing waves know now the plinth
Of those deep tombs that were of hyacinth.

Still echoes of that helmeted bright hair
Are like the pomp of tropic suns, the blare

That from the inaccessible horizon runs,
The eternal music of heroic suns
When their strong youth comes freshened from deep seas,
And the first music heard among the trees.

By elephant trunks of the water, showers
Now change to cornucopias of flowers;

Panope with her dark majestic train
Of nymphs walked like the pomp of waves, the main

Sees Asia, Parthenope, Eunomia,
Euphrosyne, Urania, Ausonia,

In feathered head-dresses as bright as sleep,
As onward with the pomp of waves they sweep

In pelongs, chelloes, and great pallampores,
Gaze d'Ispahan and bulchauls, sallampores,

In plumaged turbans, sweeping gros des Indes,
That the long golden fingers of the winds

Pull by the waters paler than a pearl.
The airs like rain-wet shrinking petals curl

And waves are freckled with gold ripples, these
Seem golden spangles on the strawberries;
And black Bacchantes with their panached feathers
Wear mittens with gold fringe bright as the weathers,

Where elephant trunks of the water rear
As the great pomp and train of nymphs draws near —

An ambassade of Amazons; rich trees
And Abyssinian glooms have fostered these.

But now Melpomene, Zenobia,
The Amazons black as Ethiopia,

In Pan's huge forests seem like statues tall,
Where the thick jewels from the rich figs fall

In this vast empire of eternal shade
Where leaves seem Memphis, Thebes, from music made.

In wooded gardens by each gardener's frame
Dark wrinkled satyrs with long straw beards came,

Dark honey from rough cups of straw to sip,
And every straw cup has an amber lip.

The gardener, wrinkled, dark, beside a cave
Sways branches gold-mosaic'd as the wave

And finds these are with satyrs' straw beards twined
By that gold-fingered arborist, the wind.

And there beside the greenest, shaggiest caves,
As green as melons hiding honey waves,

The rose that shone like the first light of tears
Was once a buskined bright nymph in lost years,

And from the amber dust that was a rose
In the green heat Parthenope still grows.

In this green world the melons' dogskin flowers,
Leaves green as country temples, snare the hours,

And dew seems butter-yellow, the bright mesh
Of dear and dead Panope's golden flesh

Where grapes and apples boom like emerald rain
In green baize forests, and the sylvan train

Of country nymphs wear yellow petticoats
Looped over leathern gaiters; long hair floats,
Cream-colored and as thick as ponies' manes,
Through swan-soft great mauve leaves where Jove's gold rains

Still fly; rich strawberries are honeyed cold
By all Pan's honey and Palmyra's gold,

And in the laughing green the rich fruits ran
With gilded honeyed blood of Phaebus, Pan.

But now the branches droop their melancholy
And owl-soft dusk upon this summer folly;

And under trees that were as fresh and green
As laughing nymphs' guitar and mandoline

(When country nymphs wear yellow petticoats
Looped over leathern gaiters, long hair floats

From straw hats trimmed with pheasants' feathers twined
By the long golden fingers of the wind),

The broken country statue Corydon,
Gilded by Phaebus, with his straw flute gone,

Stands in the cocks of snow (once cocks of hay
Gilded and rustling o'er that green land lay);

And shadows brush the statue, not the snowy
Winged bees Sylvia and Thisbe, Chloe,

That sang sweet country songs in owl-dusked leaves:
" Poor Rose Is Dying" and " Sweet Sultan Grieves."

But Time drifts owl-dusk o'er the brightest eyes
And dulls the sleepy gods and the sad wise,

And shall despoil our woods and monuments
And make them like the small bees' cerements . . .

And heavy is dark Time, that ever moans
Among thick leaves his mournful overtones.

Now the snow lies upon my rose-shaped heart,
And on the years, and many a glittering chart

The dog-furred strawberry leaves bear — maps from dream
To dream — and berries with Orion's gleam.

This dark green country temple of the snows
Hides still the amber dust of nymph and rose,

The melons' dogskin flowers where the mellow,
Whining early dew is butter-yellow,

And the nymphs' smooth-eared hound, far from the light,
When early dew whines hound-like as in fright.

I looked out from my window where the urban
Leaves seemed turkeys (Sultans in a turban)
Across the lake where, cupolas and gables,
The ripples seemed deserted Georgian stables;

And my old shadow nods a turbaned head,
The full moon sees one candle's thick gold thread

Pierce through the thick leaves near the window sill,
Where she her lovely fire and light doth spill.

The rose that shone like the first light of tears
Is faded, and its leaves, bright as the years

When we knew life and love and youth, are wet
With tears beneath the shady winter. Yet

Although the small immortal serpent cries,
" I, only, know if Plato still be wise,

Great golden Hector had the pomp and pride
Of waves, but like the strength of these, he died;

And the first soundless wrinkles fall like snow
On many a golden cheek, and none may know,

Seeing your ancient wrinkled shadow-shape,
If this be long-dead Venus or an ape."

To patience with the apeish dust I came,
Seeing this mimicry of death a game;

Since all things have beginnings; the bright plume
Was once thin grass in shady winter's gloom,

And the furred fire is barking for the shape
Of hoarse-voiced animals; cold air agape

Whines to be shut in water's shape and plumes;
All this is hidden in the winter's glooms.

I, too, from ruined walls hung upside down
And, bat-like, only saw Death's ruined town

And mumbling crumbling dust. . . . I saw the people
Mouthing blindly for the earth's blind nipple.

Their thick sleep dreams not of the infinite
Wild strength the grass must have to find the light

With all the bulk of earth across its eyes
And strength, and the huge weight of centuries.

Hate-hidden by a monk's cowl of ape's pelf,
Bear-clumsy and appalling, mine own self
Devouring, blinded by the earth's thick hood
I crouched, Atridae-like devoured my blood

And knew the anguish of the skeleton
Deserted by the flesh, with Death alone.

Then my immortal Sun rose, Heavenly Love,
To rouse my carrion to life and move

The polar night, the boulder that rolled this,
My heart, my Sisyphus, in the abyss.

Come then, my Sun, to melt the eternal ice
Of Death, and crumble the thick centuries,
Nor shrink, my soul, as dull wax owlish eyes
In the sun's light, before my sad eternities.