Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 4

in her well,
Wooed through their laughter, and like echo
fled,
Luring thee down the primal silences
Where the heart hushes

and the flesh is dumb?
Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out

Relentlessly from the detaining shore,
Forth from the home-lights and
the hailing voices,
Forth from the last faint headland's failing line,

Till I enveloped thee from verge to verge
And hid thee in the hollow
of my being?
And still, because between us hung the veil,
The
myriad-tinted veil of sense, thy feet
Refused their rest, thy hands the
gifts of life,
Thy heart its losses, lest some lesser face
Should blur
mine image in thine upturned soul
Ere death had stamped it there.
This was thy thought.
And mine?
The gods, they say, have all: not so!
This have they--flocks on every
hill, the blue
Spirals of incense and the amber drip
Of lucid
honey-comb on sylvan shrines,
First-chosen weanlings, doves
immaculate,
Twin-cooing in the osier-plaited cage,
And
ivy-garlands glaucous with the dew:
Man's wealth, man's servitude,
but not himself!
And so they pale, for lack of warmth they wane,

Freeze to the marble of their images,
And, pinnacled on man's
subserviency,
Through the thick sacrificial haze discern
Unheeding
lives and loves, as some cold peak
Through icy mists may enviously
descry
Warm vales unzoned to the all-fruitful sun.
So they along an
immortality
Of endless-envistaed homage strain their gaze,
If haply
some rash votary, empty-urned,
But light of foot, with
all-adventuring hand,
Break rank, fling past the people and the priest,

Up the last step, on to the inmost shrine,
And there, the sacred
curtain in his clutch,
Drop dead of seeing--while the others prayed!

Yes, this we wait for, this renews us, this
Incarnates us, pale people
of your dreams,
Who are but what you make us, wood or stone,
Or
cold chryselephantine hung with gems,

Or else the beating purpose of
your life,
Your sword, your clay, the note your pipe pursues,
The
face that haunts your pillow, or the light
Scarce visible over leagues
of labouring sea!
O thus through use to reign again, to drink
The
cup of peradventure to the lees,
For one dear instant disimmortalised

In giving immortality!
So dream the gods upon their listless thrones.


Yet sometimes, when the votary appears,
With death-affronting
forehead and glad eyes,
Too young_, they rather muse, _too frail thou
art,
And shall we rob some girl of saffron veil
And nuptial garland
for so slight a thing?
And so to their incurious loves return.
Not so with thee; for some indeed there are
Who would behold the
truth and then return
To pine among the semblances--but I
Divined
in thee the questing foot that never
Revisits the cold hearth of
yesterday
Or calls achievement home. I from afar
Beheld thee
fashioned for one hour's high use,
Nor meant to slake oblivion drop
by drop.
Long, long hadst thou inhabited my dreams,
Surprising me
as harts surprise a pool,
Stealing to drink at midnight; I divined

Thee rash to reach the heart of life, and lie
Bosom to bosom in
occasion's arms.
And said: Because I love thee thou shalt die!
For immortality is not to range
Unlimited through vast Olympian
days,
Or sit in dull dominion over time;
But this--to drink fate's
utmost at a draught,
Nor feel the wine grow stale upon the lip,
To
scale the summit of some soaring moment,
Nor know the dulness of
the long descent,
To snatch the crown of life and seal it up
Secure
forever in the vaults of death!
And this was thine: to lose thyself in me,
Relive in my renewal, and
become
The light of other lives, a quenchless torch
Passed on from
hand to hand, till men are dust
And the last garland withers from my
shrine.
LIFE
NAY, lift me to thy lips, Life, and once more
Pour the wild music
through me--
I quivered in the reed-bed with my kind,
Rooted in Lethe-bank, when
at the dawn
There came a groping shape of mystery
Moving among
us, that with random stroke

Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe,


Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice,
Laughing on
Lethe-bank--and in my throat
I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling
notes,
The bubble of godlike laughter in my throat.
Such little songs she sang,
Pursing her lips to fit the tiny pipe,
They
trickled from me like a slender spring
That strings frail wood-growths
on its crystal thread,
Nor dreams of glassing cities, bearing ships.

She sang, and bore me through the April world
Matching the birds,
doubling the insect-hum
In the meadows, under the low-moving airs,

And breathings of the scarce-articulate air
When it makes mouths
of grasses--but when the sky
Burst into storm, and took great trees for
pipes,
She thrust me in her breast, and warm beneath
Her cloudy
vesture, on her terrible heart,
I shook, and heard the battle.
But more oft,
Those early days, we moved in charmed woods,

Where once, at dusk, she piped against a faun,
And one warm dawn a
tree became a nymph
Listening; and trembled; and Life laughed and
passed.
And once we came to a great stream that bore
The stars
upon its bosom like a sea,
And ships like stars; so to the sea we came.

And there she raised me to her lips, and sent
One swift pang
through me; then refrained her hand,
And whispered: "Hear--"