Thamar
Once in the sombre light of the throng'd courts of night,
In a dream-haunted land only inhabited
By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed,
Clung to my idle hand with clenchèd fingers weak
And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak.
Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves
Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves.
Then I: ‘O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone
Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come?
Tell me thy race and name!’ And he, with veiled face:
‘I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far,
A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms,
Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star
In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar …
Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared
By ways that no men dared unto a desert land,
Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast
As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand—
Older a million years: Babel was builded on
That broken city's tears; dust of her crumbled past
Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel's charioteers
In whorlèd clouds above those shining thorough fares
Where Babel's millions tread on her unheeding dead.
Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait
Parch'd with an ancient thirst that no æons can abate,
Passed I, predestinate, to a thorn'd desert's drought,
Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate,
Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten glass
Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length
Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot.
Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste,
Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal
Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land,
Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered
Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled;
Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting,
Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating
Struggled my hapless soul …
There, in a thousand springs,
Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing,
Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings,
Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air
That shivered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight,
And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing'd egrets white
Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare;
But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things
Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings
And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter.
Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst,
The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust
Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips,
To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great ships
With moving towers of sail, poops throng'd with grinning crowds
And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale
Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat
And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire
In the green gloom beneath.
So, again and again,
Hath a phantom city thrust to the visionary vault
Of inviolate cobalt, dome and dreaming minaret
Mosque and gleaming water-tower hazy in a fountain's jet
Or a market's rising dust; and my lips have cried aloud
To see them tremble there, though I knew within my heart
They were chiselled out of cloud or carven of thin air;
And my fingers clenched my hand, for I wondered if this land
Of my stony pilgrimage were a glimmering mirage,
And I myself no more than a phantom of the sand.
‘But beyond these fading slender cities, many leagues away,
Strange brooding mountains lay heaped, crowding range on range
In a changing cloudy splendour; and beyond, in lakes of light,
As eastward still I staggered, there swam into my sight,
More vast and hoar and haggard, shoulders of ice and snow
Bounding the heavens low of burnished brass, where-under
The hot plains of Cathay perpetually slumber:
Where tawny millions breed in cities without number,
Whither, a hill-born thunder, rolling on Tartary
With torrents and barb'd lightning, swelleth the yellow river
To a tumult of whitening foam and confused might
That drowns in a single night many a mud-made city;
And cities of boats, and frail cities of lath and reed,
Are whirled away without pity or set afloat in a pale,
Swirling, shallow sea … and their names seem lost for ever
Till a stranger nomad race drive their herds to the sad place
Where old sorrows lie forgotten, and raise upon the rotten
Level waste another brood to await another flood.
‘But I never might attain to this melancholy plain
For the mountains rose between; stark in my path they lay
Between me and Cathay, through moving mist half-seen.
And I knew that they were real, for their drooping folds of cloud
Enwrapped me in a shroud, and the air that fell at night
From their frozen summits white slid like an ice-blue steel
Into my living breast and stilled the heart within
As the chill of an old sin that robs a man of rest,
Killing all delight in the silence of the night
And brooding black above till the heart dare not move
But lieth cold and numb … and the dawn will not come.
‘Yet to me a dawn came, new-kindled in cold flame,
Flinging the imminence of those inviolate snows
On the forest lawns below in a shadow more immense
Than their eternal vastness; and a new hope beyond reason,
Flamed in my heart's dark season, dazzled my pallid eyes,
Till, when the hot sun soared above the uttermost height,
A draught of keen delight into my body was poured,
For all that frozen fastness lay flowered with the spring:
Her starry blossoms broke beneath my bruisèd feet,
And their beauty was so sweet to me I kissed them where they lay;
Yea, I bent my weary hips and kissed them with dry lips,
Tenderly, only dreading lest their petals delicate
Should be broken by my treading, for I lived, I lived again,
And my heart would have been broken by a living creature's pain,
So I kissed them for a token of my joy in their new birth,
And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept.
To the bases of the crags, and I slept. . . .
‘Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep,
When tired children creep on to their mother's knees,
And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth
Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings,
Before the night-jar spins or the nightingale begins;
When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake
And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf
Lest the silence should break.
‘Other sleep have I known,
Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax
After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields
Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil,
And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening
Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax,
And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles,
Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along
Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves
Like phosphorescent waves washing summer seas:
And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazèd wonder
When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky
And raptured lovers lie faint in each other's arms
Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms,
Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars
In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn
From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only
In each other's eyes, and sigh, and sleep again;
For while they sleep they seem to forget the world's pain,
And when they wake, they dream. . . .
‘But other sleep was mine
As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep'd,
Or sousèd with the heapèd milky poppyheads
A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep
Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep.
So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled
Eastward under the vast dominion of night,
Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber
Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight,
Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun's amber.
‘Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade
Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis,
Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals,
And silver-sounding timbrels shivered through the vale.
O lovely, and O white, under the holy night
Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale
As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon
In far forests under desolate Lebanon,
While the flame of Moloch's pyre reddens the sea-born cloud
That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud,
Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side!
‘O bright, O beautiful! for never kindlier light
Fell on the darkened sight of mortal eyes and dull
Since that devoted one, whom gloomy Caucasus
In icy silence lonely bound to his cruel shoulders,
Brought to benighted men in a hollow fennel-stem
Sparks of the torrid vapour that burned behind the bars
Of evening, broke dawn's rose, or smouldered in the stars,
Or lit the glowworm's taper, or wavered over the fen,
Or tipped the javelin of the far-ravening levin,
Lash of the Lord of Heaven and bitter scourge of sin.
O beautiful, O bright! my tired sinews strained
To this torch that flared and waned as a watery planet gloweth
And waneth in the night when a calm sea floweth
Under a misty sky spread with the tattered veils
Of rapid cloud driven over the deeps of heaven
By wings that range too high to sweep the languid sails.
On through the frozen night, like a blind moth flying
With battered wing and bruisèd bloom into a light,
I dragged my ragged limbs, cared not if I were dying,
Knew not if I were dead, where cavernous crevasses,
And stony desperate passes snared, waylaid my tread:
In the roar of broken boulders split from rocky shoulders,
In the thunder of snow sliding, or under the appalling
Rending of glacier ice or hoarse cataracts falling:
And I knew not what could save me but the unholy guiding
That some demon gave me. Thrice I fell, and thrice
In torrents of blue ice-water slipp'd and was toss'd
Like a dead leaf, or a ghost
Harried by thin buffetings of wind
Downward to Tartarus at daybreak,
Downward to the regions of the lost. . . .
But the rushing waters ceased, and the bitter wind fell:
How I cannot tell, unless that I had come
To the hollow heart of the storm where the wind is dumb;
And there my gelid blood thawed, glowed, and grew warm,
While a black-hooded form caught at my arm, and stayed
And held me as I swayed, until, at last, I saw
In a strange unworldly awe, at the gate of light I stood:
And I entered, alone. . . .
‘Behold a cavern of stone carven, and in the midst
A brazier that hissed with tongued flames, leaping
Over whitened embers of gummy frankincense,
Into a fume of dense and fragrant vapour, creeping
Over the roof to spread a milky coverlet
Softer than the woof of webby spider's net.
But never spider yet spun a more delicate wonder
Than that which hung thereunder, drooping fold on fold,
Silks that glowed with fire of tawny Oxus gold,
Richer than ever flowed from the eager fancy of man
In his vain desire for beauty that endures:
And on the floor were spread by many a heaped daiwan
Carpets of Kurdistan, cured skins, and water-ewers
Encrusted with such gems as emperors of Hind
(Swart conquerors, long dead) sought for their diadems.
No other light was there but one torch, flaring
Against a square of sky possess'd by the wind,
And never another sound but the tongued flames creeping.
‘At last, my eyes staring into the clouded gloom,
Saw that the caverned room with shadowy forms was strewn
In heavy sleep or swoon fallen, who did not move
But lay as mortals lie in the sweet release of love.
And stark between them stood huge eunuchs of ebony,
Mute, motionless, as they had been carven of black wood.
But these I scarcely saw, for, through the flame was seen
Another, a queen, with heavy closèd eyes
White against the skies of that empurpled night
In her loveliness she lay, and leaned upon her hand:
And my blood leapt at the sight, so that I could not stand
But fell upon my knees, pleading, and cried aloud
For her white loveliness as Ixion for his cloud:
And my cry the silence broke, and the sleepers awoke
From their slumber, stirred, and rose every one,—save those
Mute eunuchs of ebony, those frowning caryatides.
Slowly she looked at me, and when I cried again
In yearning and in pain, she beckoned with her hand.
Then from my knees rose I, and greatly daring,
Through the hazy air, past the brazier flaring
And the hissing flame, crept, until I came
Unto the carven seat, and kissed her white feet;
And she smiled, but spake not.
When she smiled the sleepers wavered as the grass
Of a cornfield wavers when the ears are swept
By the breath of brown reapers singing as they pass,
Or grass of woody glades when a wind that has slept
Wakens, and invades their moonlit solitude,
When the hazels shiver and the birch is blown
To a billow of silver, but oaks in the wood
Stand firm nor quiver, stand firm as stone:
So, amid the sleepers, the black eunuchs stood.
When the sleepers stirred faintly in the heat
Of that painted room a silken sound I heard,
And a thin music, sweet as the brown nightingale
Sings in the jealous shade of a lonely spinney,
Stranger far than any music mortal made
Fell softer than the dew falleth when stars are pale.
Sweet it was, and clear as light, or as the tears
That sad Narcissus wears in the spring of the year
On barren mountain ranges where rain falls cool
And every lonely pool is sprayed with broken light:
So cool, so beautiful, and so divinely strange
I doubted if it came from any marshy reed
Or hollow fluting stem pluck'd by the hands of men,
Unless it were indeed that airy fugitive
Syrinx, who cried and ran before the laughing eyes
Of goat-footed Pan, and must for ever live
A shadowy green reed by an Arcadian river—
But never music made of Ladon's reedy daughter
Or singing river-water more sweet than that which stole,
Slow as amber honey wells from the honeycomb,
Into my weary soul with solace and strange peace.
So, trembling as I lay in a dream more desolate
Than is the darkened day of the mid-winter north,
I heard the voice of one who sang in a strange tongue,
And I know not what he sang save that he sang of love,
The while they led me forth unheeding, till we came
Unto a chamber lit with one slow-burning flame
That yellow horn bedims, and laid me down, and there
They soothed my bruised limbs, and combed my tangled hair,
And salved my limbs with rarely-mingled unguents pressed
By hands of holy ones who dream deneath the suns
Of Araby the Blest, and so, when they had bathed
My burning eyes with milk of dreamy anodyne
And cool'd my throat with wine,
In robings of cool silk my broken body they swathed,
Sandals of gold they placed upon my feet, and round
My sad sun-blistered brows a silver fillet bound—
Decking me with the pride of a bridegroom that goes
To the joy of his bride and is lovely in her eyes—
And led me to her side. Then, as a conquering prince,
I, who long since had been battered and tost
Like a dead leaf or ghost buffeted by wild storms,
Came to her white arms, conquering, and was lost,
Yet dared not gaze upon the beauty that I dreamed.
So, in my trance, it seemed that a shadowy soft dance
Coiled slowly and unwound, swayed, beckoned, and recovered
As hooded cobra bound by hollow spells of sound
Unto the piper sways; so silently they hovered
I only heard the beat of their naked feet,
And then, another sound. . . .
A dull throb thrumming, a noise of faint drumming,
Threatening, coming nearer, piercing deeper
Than a dream lost in the heart of a sleeper
Into those deeps where the dark fire gloweth,
The secret flame that every man knoweth,
Embers that smoulder, fires that none can fan,
Terrible, older than the mind of man. . . .
Before he crawled from his swamp and spurned
The life of the beast that dark fire burned
In the hidden deeps where no dream can come:
Only the throbbing of a drum
Can wake it from its smouldering—
Sightless, soundless, senseless, dumb—
Dumb as those blind seeds that lie
Drown'd in mud, and shuddering,
I knew that I was man no more,
But a throbbin
In a dream-haunted land only inhabited
By the unhappy dead, came one who, anxious eyed,
Clung to my idle hand with clenchèd fingers weak
And gazed into my eyes as he had wrongs to speak.
Silent he stood and wan, more pallid than the leaves
Of an aspen blown under a wind that grieves.
Then I: ‘O haggard one, say from what ghostly zone
Of thwarted destinies or torment hast thou come?
Tell me thy race and name!’ And he, with veiled face:
‘I have neither name nor race, but I have travelled far,
A timeless avatar of never-ending dooms,
Out of those tyrannous glooms where, like a tired star
In stormy darkness, looms the castle of Thamar …
Once in a lonely dawn my eager spirit fared
By ways that no men dared unto a desert land,
Where, on a sullen strand, a mouldering city, vast
As towered Babylon, stood in the dreamy sand—
Older a million years: Babel was builded on
That broken city's tears; dust of her crumbled past
Rose from the rapid wheels of Babel's charioteers
In whorlèd clouds above those shining thorough fares
Where Babel's millions tread on her unheeding dead.
Forth from an eastern gate where the lips of Asia wait
Parch'd with an ancient thirst that no æons can abate,
Passed I, predestinate, to a thorn'd desert's drought,
Where the rivers of the south, flowing in a cloudy spate,
Spend at last their splendid strength in a sea of molten glass
Seething with the brazen might of a white sun dipped at length
Like a baked stone, burning hot, plunged in a hissing pot.
Out of that solemn portal over the tawny waste,
Without stay, without haste, nor the joy of any mortal
Glance of eye or clasp of hand, desolate, in a burning land,
Lonely days and nights I travelled and the changing seasons squandered
Friendless, endlessly, I wandered nor my woven fate unravelled;
Drawn to a hidden goal, sore, forlorn with waiting,
Seeking I knew not what, yet unhesitating
Struggled my hapless soul …
There, in a thousand springs,
Slow, beneath frozen snow, where the blind earth lay cringing,
Have I seen the steppe unfold uncounted blossomings,
Where salty pools shone fair in a quivering blue air
That shivered every fringing reed-bed with cool delight,
And fanned the mazy flight of slow-wing'd egrets white
Beating and wheeling bright against the sun astare;
But I could not hear their wings for they were ghostly things
Sent by the powers of night to mock my sufferings
And rain upon the bitter waterpools their drops aglitter.
Yet, when these lakes accursed tortured my aching thirst,
The green reeds fell to dust, the cool pools to a crust
Of frozen salt crystallised to taunt my broken lips,
To cheat my staring eyes, as a vision of great ships
With moving towers of sail, poops throng'd with grinning crowds
And a wind in their shrouds, bears down upon the pale
Wasted castaway afloat with the salt in his throat
And a feeble wild desire to be quenched of his fire
In the green gloom beneath.
So, again and again,
Hath a phantom city thrust to the visionary vault
Of inviolate cobalt, dome and dreaming minaret
Mosque and gleaming water-tower hazy in a fountain's jet
Or a market's rising dust; and my lips have cried aloud
To see them tremble there, though I knew within my heart
They were chiselled out of cloud or carven of thin air;
And my fingers clenched my hand, for I wondered if this land
Of my stony pilgrimage were a glimmering mirage,
And I myself no more than a phantom of the sand.
‘But beyond these fading slender cities, many leagues away,
Strange brooding mountains lay heaped, crowding range on range
In a changing cloudy splendour; and beyond, in lakes of light,
As eastward still I staggered, there swam into my sight,
More vast and hoar and haggard, shoulders of ice and snow
Bounding the heavens low of burnished brass, where-under
The hot plains of Cathay perpetually slumber:
Where tawny millions breed in cities without number,
Whither, a hill-born thunder, rolling on Tartary
With torrents and barb'd lightning, swelleth the yellow river
To a tumult of whitening foam and confused might
That drowns in a single night many a mud-made city;
And cities of boats, and frail cities of lath and reed,
Are whirled away without pity or set afloat in a pale,
Swirling, shallow sea … and their names seem lost for ever
Till a stranger nomad race drive their herds to the sad place
Where old sorrows lie forgotten, and raise upon the rotten
Level waste another brood to await another flood.
‘But I never might attain to this melancholy plain
For the mountains rose between; stark in my path they lay
Between me and Cathay, through moving mist half-seen.
And I knew that they were real, for their drooping folds of cloud
Enwrapped me in a shroud, and the air that fell at night
From their frozen summits white slid like an ice-blue steel
Into my living breast and stilled the heart within
As the chill of an old sin that robs a man of rest,
Killing all delight in the silence of the night
And brooding black above till the heart dare not move
But lieth cold and numb … and the dawn will not come.
‘Yet to me a dawn came, new-kindled in cold flame,
Flinging the imminence of those inviolate snows
On the forest lawns below in a shadow more immense
Than their eternal vastness; and a new hope beyond reason,
Flamed in my heart's dark season, dazzled my pallid eyes,
Till, when the hot sun soared above the uttermost height,
A draught of keen delight into my body was poured,
For all that frozen fastness lay flowered with the spring:
Her starry blossoms broke beneath my bruisèd feet,
And their beauty was so sweet to me I kissed them where they lay;
Yea, I bent my weary hips and kissed them with dry lips,
Tenderly, only dreading lest their petals delicate
Should be broken by my treading, for I lived, I lived again,
And my heart would have been broken by a living creature's pain,
So I kissed them for a token of my joy in their new birth,
And I kissed the gentle earth. Slowly the shadows crept.
To the bases of the crags, and I slept. . . .
‘Once, in another life, had I remembered sleep,
When tired children creep on to their mother's knees,
And there a dreamless peace more quietly descendeth
Than gentle evening endeth or ring-doves fold their wings,
Before the night-jar spins or the nightingale begins;
When the brooding hedgerow trees where they nest lie awake
And breathe so soft they shake not a single shuddering leaf
Lest the silence should break.
‘Other sleep have I known,
Deeper, beyond belief, when straining limbs relax
After hot human toil in yellow harvest fields
Where the panting earth yields a smell of baked soil,
And the dust of dry stubbles blows over the whitening
Shocks of lank grain and bundles of flax,
And men fling themselves down forgetting their troubles,
Unheedful of the song that the landrail weaves along
Misty woodlands, or lightning that the pale sky laves
Like phosphorescent waves washing summer seas:
And, more beautiful than these, that sleep of dazèd wonder
When love has torn asunder the veils of the sky
And raptured lovers lie faint in each other's arms
Beneath a heaven strewn with myriad starry swarms,
Where planets float like lonely gold-flowered nenuphars
In pools of the sky; yet, when they wake, they turn
From those burning galaxies seeking heaven only
In each other's eyes, and sigh, and sleep again;
For while they sleep they seem to forget the world's pain,
And when they wake, they dream. . . .
‘But other sleep was mine
As I had drunk of wine with bitter hemlock steep'd,
Or sousèd with the heapèd milky poppyheads
A drowsy Tartar treads where slow waters sweep
Over red river beds, and the air is heavy with sleep.
So, when I woke at last, the labouring earth had rolled
Eastward under the vast dominion of night,
Funereal, forlorn as that unlighted chamber
Wherein she first was born, bereft of all starlight,
Pale silver of the moon, or the low sun's amber.
‘Then to my queen I prayed, grave Ashtoreth, whose shade
Hallows the dim abyss of Heliopolis,
Where many an olive maid clashed kissing Syrian cymbals,
And silver-sounding timbrels shivered through the vale.
O lovely, and O white, under the holy night
Is their gleaming wonder, and their brows are pale
As the new risen moon, dancing till they swoon
In far forests under desolate Lebanon,
While the flame of Moloch's pyre reddens the sea-born cloud
That overshadows Tyre; so, when I cried aloud,
Behold, a torch of fire leapt on the mountain-side!
‘O bright, O beautiful! for never kindlier light
Fell on the darkened sight of mortal eyes and dull
Since that devoted one, whom gloomy Caucasus
In icy silence lonely bound to his cruel shoulders,
Brought to benighted men in a hollow fennel-stem
Sparks of the torrid vapour that burned behind the bars
Of evening, broke dawn's rose, or smouldered in the stars,
Or lit the glowworm's taper, or wavered over the fen,
Or tipped the javelin of the far-ravening levin,
Lash of the Lord of Heaven and bitter scourge of sin.
O beautiful, O bright! my tired sinews strained
To this torch that flared and waned as a watery planet gloweth
And waneth in the night when a calm sea floweth
Under a misty sky spread with the tattered veils
Of rapid cloud driven over the deeps of heaven
By wings that range too high to sweep the languid sails.
On through the frozen night, like a blind moth flying
With battered wing and bruisèd bloom into a light,
I dragged my ragged limbs, cared not if I were dying,
Knew not if I were dead, where cavernous crevasses,
And stony desperate passes snared, waylaid my tread:
In the roar of broken boulders split from rocky shoulders,
In the thunder of snow sliding, or under the appalling
Rending of glacier ice or hoarse cataracts falling:
And I knew not what could save me but the unholy guiding
That some demon gave me. Thrice I fell, and thrice
In torrents of blue ice-water slipp'd and was toss'd
Like a dead leaf, or a ghost
Harried by thin buffetings of wind
Downward to Tartarus at daybreak,
Downward to the regions of the lost. . . .
But the rushing waters ceased, and the bitter wind fell:
How I cannot tell, unless that I had come
To the hollow heart of the storm where the wind is dumb;
And there my gelid blood thawed, glowed, and grew warm,
While a black-hooded form caught at my arm, and stayed
And held me as I swayed, until, at last, I saw
In a strange unworldly awe, at the gate of light I stood:
And I entered, alone. . . .
‘Behold a cavern of stone carven, and in the midst
A brazier that hissed with tongued flames, leaping
Over whitened embers of gummy frankincense,
Into a fume of dense and fragrant vapour, creeping
Over the roof to spread a milky coverlet
Softer than the woof of webby spider's net.
But never spider yet spun a more delicate wonder
Than that which hung thereunder, drooping fold on fold,
Silks that glowed with fire of tawny Oxus gold,
Richer than ever flowed from the eager fancy of man
In his vain desire for beauty that endures:
And on the floor were spread by many a heaped daiwan
Carpets of Kurdistan, cured skins, and water-ewers
Encrusted with such gems as emperors of Hind
(Swart conquerors, long dead) sought for their diadems.
No other light was there but one torch, flaring
Against a square of sky possess'd by the wind,
And never another sound but the tongued flames creeping.
‘At last, my eyes staring into the clouded gloom,
Saw that the caverned room with shadowy forms was strewn
In heavy sleep or swoon fallen, who did not move
But lay as mortals lie in the sweet release of love.
And stark between them stood huge eunuchs of ebony,
Mute, motionless, as they had been carven of black wood.
But these I scarcely saw, for, through the flame was seen
Another, a queen, with heavy closèd eyes
White against the skies of that empurpled night
In her loveliness she lay, and leaned upon her hand:
And my blood leapt at the sight, so that I could not stand
But fell upon my knees, pleading, and cried aloud
For her white loveliness as Ixion for his cloud:
And my cry the silence broke, and the sleepers awoke
From their slumber, stirred, and rose every one,—save those
Mute eunuchs of ebony, those frowning caryatides.
Slowly she looked at me, and when I cried again
In yearning and in pain, she beckoned with her hand.
Then from my knees rose I, and greatly daring,
Through the hazy air, past the brazier flaring
And the hissing flame, crept, until I came
Unto the carven seat, and kissed her white feet;
And she smiled, but spake not.
When she smiled the sleepers wavered as the grass
Of a cornfield wavers when the ears are swept
By the breath of brown reapers singing as they pass,
Or grass of woody glades when a wind that has slept
Wakens, and invades their moonlit solitude,
When the hazels shiver and the birch is blown
To a billow of silver, but oaks in the wood
Stand firm nor quiver, stand firm as stone:
So, amid the sleepers, the black eunuchs stood.
When the sleepers stirred faintly in the heat
Of that painted room a silken sound I heard,
And a thin music, sweet as the brown nightingale
Sings in the jealous shade of a lonely spinney,
Stranger far than any music mortal made
Fell softer than the dew falleth when stars are pale.
Sweet it was, and clear as light, or as the tears
That sad Narcissus wears in the spring of the year
On barren mountain ranges where rain falls cool
And every lonely pool is sprayed with broken light:
So cool, so beautiful, and so divinely strange
I doubted if it came from any marshy reed
Or hollow fluting stem pluck'd by the hands of men,
Unless it were indeed that airy fugitive
Syrinx, who cried and ran before the laughing eyes
Of goat-footed Pan, and must for ever live
A shadowy green reed by an Arcadian river—
But never music made of Ladon's reedy daughter
Or singing river-water more sweet than that which stole,
Slow as amber honey wells from the honeycomb,
Into my weary soul with solace and strange peace.
So, trembling as I lay in a dream more desolate
Than is the darkened day of the mid-winter north,
I heard the voice of one who sang in a strange tongue,
And I know not what he sang save that he sang of love,
The while they led me forth unheeding, till we came
Unto a chamber lit with one slow-burning flame
That yellow horn bedims, and laid me down, and there
They soothed my bruised limbs, and combed my tangled hair,
And salved my limbs with rarely-mingled unguents pressed
By hands of holy ones who dream deneath the suns
Of Araby the Blest, and so, when they had bathed
My burning eyes with milk of dreamy anodyne
And cool'd my throat with wine,
In robings of cool silk my broken body they swathed,
Sandals of gold they placed upon my feet, and round
My sad sun-blistered brows a silver fillet bound—
Decking me with the pride of a bridegroom that goes
To the joy of his bride and is lovely in her eyes—
And led me to her side. Then, as a conquering prince,
I, who long since had been battered and tost
Like a dead leaf or ghost buffeted by wild storms,
Came to her white arms, conquering, and was lost,
Yet dared not gaze upon the beauty that I dreamed.
So, in my trance, it seemed that a shadowy soft dance
Coiled slowly and unwound, swayed, beckoned, and recovered
As hooded cobra bound by hollow spells of sound
Unto the piper sways; so silently they hovered
I only heard the beat of their naked feet,
And then, another sound. . . .
A dull throb thrumming, a noise of faint drumming,
Threatening, coming nearer, piercing deeper
Than a dream lost in the heart of a sleeper
Into those deeps where the dark fire gloweth,
The secret flame that every man knoweth,
Embers that smoulder, fires that none can fan,
Terrible, older than the mind of man. . . .
Before he crawled from his swamp and spurned
The life of the beast that dark fire burned
In the hidden deeps where no dream can come:
Only the throbbing of a drum
Can wake it from its smouldering—
Sightless, soundless, senseless, dumb—
Dumb as those blind seeds that lie
Drown'd in mud, and shuddering,
I knew that I was man no more,
But a throbbin
Translation:
Language:
Reviews
No reviews yet.