Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 6

the common dusty
wind-blown day
That roofs earth's millions.
O, too long I walked
In that thrice-sifted air that princes breathe,

Nor felt the heaven-wide jostling of the winds
And all the ancient
outlawry of earth!
Now let me breathe and see.
This pilgrimage
They call a penance--let them call it that!
I set my
face to the East to shrive my soul
Of mortal sin? So be it. If my blade

Once questioned living flesh, if once I tore
The pages of the Book
in opening it,
See what the torn page yielded ere the light
Had paled
its buried characters--and judge!
The girl they brought me, pinioned hand and foot
In catalepsy--say I
should have known
That trance had not yet darkened into death,

And held my scalpel. Well, suppose I knew?
Sum up the facts--her
life against her death.
Her life? The scum upon the pools of pleasure

Breeds such by thousands. And her death? Perchance
The obolus
to appease the ferrying Shade,
And waft her into immortality.
Think
what she purchased with that one heart-flutter
That whispered its
deep secret to my blade!
For, just because her bosom fluttered still,

It told me more than many rifled graves;
Because I spoke too soon,

she answered me,
Her vain life ripened to this bud of death
As the
whole plant is forced into one flower,
All her blank past a scroll on
which God wrote
His word of healing--so that the poor flesh,

Which spread death living, died to purchase life!
Ah, no! The sin I sinned was mine, not theirs.
Not that they sent me
forth to wash away--
None of their tariffed frailties, but a deed
So
far beyond their grasp of good or ill
That, set to weigh it in the
Church's balance,
Scarce would they know which scale to cast it in.

But I, I know. I sinned against my will,
Myself, my soul--the God
within the breast:
Can any penance wash such sacrilege?
When I was young in Venice, years ago,
I walked the hospice with a
Spanish monk,
A solitary cloistered in high thoughts,
The great
Loyola, whom I reckoned then
A mere refurbisher of faded creeds,

Expert to edge anew the arms of faith,
As who should say, a Galenist,
resolved
To hold the walls of dogma against fact,
Experience,
insight, his own self, if need be!
Ah, how I pitied him, mine own eyes
set
Straight in the level beams of Truth, who groped
In error's old
deserted catacombs
And lit his tapers upon empty graves!
Ay, but
he held his own, the monk--more man
Than any laurelled cripple of
the wars,
Charles's spent shafts; for what he willed he willed,
As
those do that forerun the wheels of fate,
Not take their dust--that force
the virgin hours,
Hew life into the likeness of themselves
And wrest
the stars from their concurrences.
So firm his mould; but mine the
ductile soul
That wears the livery of circumstance
And hangs
obsequious on its suzerain's eye.
For who rules now? The
twilight-flitting monk,
Or I, that took the morning like an Alp?
He
held his own, I let mine slip from me,
The birthright that no sovereign
can restore;
And so ironic Time beholds us now
Master and
slave--he lord of half the earth,
I ousted from my narrow heritage.
For there's the sting! My kingdom knows me not.
Reach me that
folio--my usurper's title!
Fallopius reigning, vice--nay, not so:


Successor, not usurper. I am dead.
My throne stood empty; he was
heir to it.
Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste,
Cleared,
inch by inch, the acres for his sowing,
Won back for man that ancient
fief o' the Church,
His body? Who flung Galen from his seat,
And
founded the great dynasty of truth
In error's central kingdom?
Ask men that,
And see their answer: just a wondering stare
To learn
things were not always as they are--
The very fight forgotten with the
fighter;
Already grows the moss upon my grave!
Ay, and so
meet--hold fast to that, Vesalius.
They only, who re-conquer day by
day
The inch of ground they camped on over-night,
Have right of
foothold on this crowded earth.
I left mine own; he seized it; with it
went
My name, my fame, my very self, it seems,
Till I am but the
symbol of a man,
The sign-board creaking o'er an empty inn.
He
names me--true! Oh, give the door its due
I entered by. Only, I pray
you, note,
Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine
Had
breached the crazy wall"--he seems to say.
So meet--and yet a word
of thanks, of praise,
Of recognition that the clue was found,
Seized,
followed, clung to, by some hand now dust--
Had this obscured his
quartering of my shield?
How the one weakness stirs again! I thought
I had done with that old
thirst for gratitude
That lured me to the desert years ago.
I did my
work--and was not that enough?
No; but because the idlers sneered
and shrugged,
The envious whispered, the traducers lied,
And
friendship doubted where it should have cheered
I flung aside the
unfinished task, sought praise
Outside my soul's esteem, and learned
too late
That victory, like God's kingdom, is within.

(Nay, let the
folio rest upon my knee.
I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude?
The
hurrying traveller does not ask the name
Of him who