Classic Poem

( A CHRONICLE OF ANCIENT GREECE )

Hear the strange story of the silver flute:
Beside Ægean waters on an isle
Of what fair name my chronicle is mute,
Save that 't was of the storied Cyclades —
Once in a long-past hour on Chronos' dial
There dwelt a youth in bondage of that lord
Whose grandsire had the isle for his reward
In some old war when Persians swept the seas.

This youth was not an islander, but dwelt,
Before his lord had bound him, under skies
Where the white fanes of fair-limbed gods did melt
Within the still-fleeced blue of Grecian air.
There had his lips, and there his ardent eyes,
Their lesson of all beauty spoke or writ,
And his impassioned heart had stored the wit
Of artists, bards, and sages gathered there.

Sold out of Athens for a paltry debt!
Seeking a father's blemished name to clear,
He willingly his hand to letters set,
Pledging a certain weary term of suns
His scholar-service; then with feigned cheer
Clomb a tall galley of his master's fleet,
Turned southward, nor looked back to hillsides sweet
And the loved sands where green Ægina runs.

Then all the afternoon that galley sailed
To south and east by Attic promontories,
And many a gleaming, homeward prow was hailed,
Bound for Piraeus and familiar rest.
Well knew that exile youth all songs and stories
Yon fishers loved when night had fetched them home,
And often had he longed like them to roam —
Yet now his heart lay heavy in his breast.

Among the isles dim, purple evening came:
With sails reefed, cables coiled, and slackened oars,
The ship still glided 'neath its harbour flame.
Strange port that was, whose black unwelcoming wharves,
Heaped high with spicy spoils from Asian shores,
No hillside temple whitely overgleamed —
For Trade was there the only god esteemed,
With votives of huge bales and hideous corves.

Then in the youth an agony of dread,
Of utter, homesick longing searched his soul.
He cursed his honour — wished he had lain dead
Or e'er he bound his scholarship to be
Counter of gains to such a lord. He stole
Far sternward on the steady-moving ship,
Set a small flute unto his rounded lip,
And made a little Attic melody.

'T was a boy's song he oft enough had sung
In golden summers with Athenian lads
When, under leafy temple groves, they flung
Wave-weary limbs along that green of Pan
Wherewith her rock lone Psyttaleia clads;
Full many a faun-like circle had he trod
Round the rough statues of the woodland god
Ere swift care came and touched him into man.

As now that wavering air fell soothingwise
Deep in his painful dream of merry hours —
Air mystically fitting to these skies,
Though framed for fairer — his hot tide of blood
Ebbed back to calmness: so from Pan's thick bowers
Young bathers watch quick storms across the bay
Subsiding as they chant their joyous lay,
Ere they plunge homeward through the purple flood.

He felt the keel's grate and the prow's impact:
But still he stood alone aloft the stern
With flute to lip, and yearning eyes that tracked
The westward crimson of that fallen day:
Then, pausing 'mid the stir, he chanced to turn
And met the passionate gaze of one in whom
Music had called Hope, shining from her tomb,
And raised warm Memory in her trodden clay.

(What dryad, faun, or god in beechen dell —
Some say 't was Pan himself — did first discover
How 'neath a wooden wand's dissolving spell
Hope trembles into life, Despair turns Hope?
Or was it only some too-happy lover?
Or sad slave toiling on in Fate's despite?
For Grief and Joy, when both have reached their height,
Meet in the calm of Music's crowning slope.)

'Twas but one upward glance from reeking benches
Deep in the labouring hulk where main Despair
Pulled that proud galley through the ocean trenches;
An instant — it was gone: and nevermore
Beheld the youth again those eyes of care.
He stowed his flute, and through the lanterned dark,
With other cargoes bidden disembark,
He sought the untried shadows of the shore.

And now through month on month his fine brain tasks
O'er ledgers, bonds, and countless bills-of-lading —
From dawn to dusk, o'er corves and oily casks
That steam the warehouse dock with odours brute;
But often, when he sees fair courage fading,
In cool of night, or by the earliest dawn,
Ere the first step, or after all have gone,
He seeks the fiery spirit of his flute.

So, for dull years the price of youth he flung
To the dark keeping of regardless Time.
Sole thrift of all that wasteful barter, clung
Those golden moments of the night and morn
When crystal-limpid melodies would climb
Round the great heart of Silence from his lips;
Or when, of dusks, he boarded galley ships
Fresh from Piraeus with their wine and corn.

Just gods decree that naught of beauty fades,
Nor ever is lost in this deaf-seeming world;
And, if sweet sound no earthly ear persuades,
Unto its breath they do themselves bend low,
And in their heavenly memories keep it furled
For poets' dreams; or else they make sad hearts
Draw near, as if by chance, till Music starts,
As in that oarsman, Hope's diviner glow.

Oft on that oarsman mused the exile youth,
Still vivid in his thought the first surprise
Of that revealing face. Yet now the truth,
As long years laboured by, became more plain
And a new meaning looked from all men's eyes
With hints of old, deep-sunken loveliness,
And, under toil's coarse mask, the slow distress
Of godlike dreams crushed down and dumb in pain.

And oft, beneath tall pharos-fires he boarded
Some trader in the harbour, and would wend
Fluting among dank shrouds and cargoes sordid,
And deep into foul caverns of the hold,
Thinking alway perchance to touch that friend;
But never thus — though many another face
Through sooty glooms yearned up to such rare grace,
And many an ear drank in that music's gold.

It happened so one night he, wandering thus,
Through tender stops his Attic spirit sighed,
While the great summer's moon hung luminous
Like a clear cresset o'er the yarded sail.
Oarsmen and sailors, weary of the tide,
Lay moveless, listening; 'twixt the toiling morrows
Music and rest shut down upon their sorrows,
And through their limbs did kindly sleep prevail.

Then, like a very genius of dark earth,
Sudden, the island's lord before them rose —
Or like on vineyard hills the August dearth,
Or olive-blight when boughs droop heaviest.
Oh, cruel had he ever been, God knows,
Cruel to man and beast, and even cruel
To earth whose vintage, metal, oil, and fuel.
He wrung from her with miserly unrest!

" What fellow idles here with piping tune? "
His loud cry shattered down the moonlit hush.
" Hence to thy shed, knave! What, thou 'lt have me soon
Master of mock-men and slug-mountebanks! "
No more. — Some shrank as though beneath the crush
Of powers ancestral who proud Persian arms
Had beat to dust, some hid their base alarms;
While others, cursing, writhed upon their planks.

Over them all in dignity serene,
With flute to lip, the youth paused musefully.
Arion was not tranquiller of mien
What time the enchanted dolphin heard his lyre
And from those vile Sicilians on the sea
Swept him afar; nor yet more certain-souled
Amphion was, who built up Thebes of old
By music magical, and Orphean fire!

Selene, poising on her silver path,
Remembered Phoebus' fine Thessalian lute
That soothed his exile when their father's wrath
Doomed him to service of the Shepherd Kings
And oh, Endymion with a herdboy's flute
Through the pale valley piping to his sheep,
Or in his listless Latmian cave asleep,
Were not more fair than he of whom I sing!

Whether or no the dulcet goddess turned
Into the youth's warm heart some yearning thought,
His being with resistless music burned;
Into his memory crept a country air,
Of an old minor love-song chiefly wrought,
But mingled with the laughter and the sighs
Of half-forgotten Attic lullabies:
Sweet was its cadence out of all compare.

And this he played, until the maddened ear
Of one's own past would stop itself for woe;
Then, gliding into martial measures, near
Burst the reichoing heart with bounding wars —
The blaze of splendid battles long ago;
Magnificence of Marathon; wild bliss
Of Mycale, Plataea, Salamis,
And shattered prows on Hellespontine shores!

They say stones leaped along the Ilian walls
At the Phoebean melodies; then how
Might human blood, e'en though it sluggish crawls
Through craven limbs, resist so sweet appeal? —
Laconia bred that lord; yet his stern brow
Had known a mother's lips, his Spartan breast,
For once, had panted love, ere riches pressed.
And Fortune set him highest upon her wheel.

Still he stood with amazement, all the bound
Of his pride-withered and self-rooted dreams
Hot-surging under tides of sudden sound:
Child, lover, awoke; his grandsire in him stirred —
(At Artemisium he with two triremes
Had baffled Persia!) — Then the silence fell,
Resounding silence, Night's blue-caverned shell
Treasuring immortal harmonies unheard!

All this the youth perceived: not vain those years
Of music's ministry to secret pain —
Not all for naught those desperate mortal fears
Searched out in others' lives at dawn and dusk;
Nor were the exile and the toil in vain.
Beauty-remembered is a fragrant flower,
But, cherished through the else-unlovely hour,
Elysium hath no bloom to match its musk!
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The common morning of a common morrow
Succeeded to the wonder of the night.
With dawn that galley's oars began to furrow
Old fareways of eternal amaranth;
The youth beheld the slanting lateen's flight
From his black island-wharf; into his mind
Strange ports arose, his feet might never find,
Piled high with Tyrian wools and tragacanth.

Out with the ship the island's master sailed,
Boarding her sudden at the front of dawn,
Wherefore none knew ... And now mild Autumn paled
The rose-red passion of Summer all among
Those island-beds of purple ocean-lawn,
And brought the day ten years had toiled to bring
Whereon the youth's release should shout and sing
Within him — yet he shouted not nor sung.

With the same sun when that long term was full,
The island lord returned within his boat,
Bearing nor tragacanth, nor Tyrian wool,
Nor myrrh, in barter for his fruit and oil.
He came in Antioch linen, all his coat
Being one woven piece, and in his hand
He bore, soft-wound in many an azure band,
Some hidden Asian thing of princely spoil.

Down from the ship he stepped along the wharf
All in his rich array and stately style:
Then calling over cask, and bale, and corf,
He summoned the Athenian to his side.
The curious village folk from round the isle,
Idlers, and merchants, stood there wonder-smitten,
And so the youth as well, at what lay written
Plain in that countenance of cruel pride:

For cruel pride was gone, and in its stead
A meekness dwelt, as strange to him as all
The sumptuous vesture that so richly fed
The astonishment of people, and more fit,
For mildness gave him looks imperial,
And loftier power that suited with a lord,
Of glorious descent. With one accord
They hailed him in awed murmurs, seeing it.

The Athenian obeyed with courtesy.
And thus it fell: That costly orient vest,
One piece of woven linen flowing free,
From his own shoulders did the lord remove.
And in its folds his bondman rarely dressed.
Then, from its swathings, slow the marvel came —
A wondrous flute, wrought out by toil and flame
From purest silver ever smith did prove.

For these that ship's whole treasure was exchanged;
For these men searched through many an Asian town
And that tall galley many a seaboard ranged. —
" To-day thou'rt free again, " the master spake.
" To-morrow shall this galley bear thee down
Between the isles, along Ægina foam,
A victor, with his spoil, returning home.
To-night for me thou shalt fair sounds awake. "

And so it fell. That night with princely feast
The master entertained his ten-years' slave.
The young Athenian fluted on, nor ceased
To move melodious spirits with a sigh,
But to the silver flute his sweet lip gave,
Till white waves broke around them in the dawn;
And through east windows, loitering and wan,
Selene listened from a saffron sky.

So, the tale goes, among the Cyclades
One shining temple more strove heavenward;
And Beauty again, from foam of sullen seas
Like Aphrodite, rose to regal power.
Thus Music moved the heart of that great lord.
And the white temple on his island's brow
Cheered many a mariner over many a prow
For full a thousand years from that far hour.

In the gold noontide of that final day
Anchors were heaved, smooth dipped a hundred oars,
And southern winds compelled his sail away,
That son of Art. — My chronicle is mute
About his after-deeds on other shores:
It only says men's hearts could long discern
Bright vision of him at the galley's stern,
And the clear music of his silver flute.