Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 9

his chapel here
And cleanse the echoes with his litanies?

The sodden grasses spring again--why not
The trampled soul? Is
man less merciful

Than nature, good more fugitive than grass?"

And so--if, after all, he had not died,
And suddenly that door should
know his hand,
And with that voice as kind as yours he said:
"Come,
Margaret, forth into the sun again,
Back to the life we fashioned with
our hands
Out of old sins and follies, fragments scorned
Of more
ambitious builders, yet by Love,
The patient architect, so shaped and
fitted
That not a crevice let the winter in--"
Think you my bones
would not arise and walk,
This bruised body (as once the bruised soul)


Turn from the wonders of the seventh heaven
As from the antics of
the market-place?
If this could be (as I so oft have dreamed),
I, who
have known both loves, divine and human,
Think you I would not
leave this Christ for that?
--I rave, you say? You start from me, Fra Paolo?
Go, then; your going
leaves me not alone.
I marvel, rather, that I feared the question,

Since, now I name it, it draws near to me
With such dear reassurance
in its eyes,
And takes your place beside me. . .
Nay, I tell you,
Fra Paolo, I have cried on all the saints--
If this be
devil's prompting, let them drown it
In Alleluias! Yet not one replies.

And, for the Christ there--is He silent too?
Your Christ? Poor father;
you that have but one,
And that one silent--how I pity you!
He will
not answer? Will not help you cast
The devil out? But hangs there on
the wall,
Blind wood and bone--?
How if _I_ call on Him--
I, whom He talks with, as the town attests?

If ever prayer hath ravished me so high
That its wings failed and
dropped me in Thy breast,
Christ, I adjure Thee! By that naked hour

Of innermost commixture, when my soul
Contained Thee as the
paten holds the host,
Judge Thou alone between this priest and me;

Nay, rather, Lord, between my past and present,
Thy Margaret and
that other's--whose she is
By right of salvage--and whose call should
follow!
Thine? Silent still.--Or his, who stooped to her,
And drew
her to Thee by the bands of love?
Not Thine? Then his?
Ah, Christ--the thorn-crowned Head
Bends . . . bends again . . . down
on your knees,
Fra Paolo!
If his, then Thine!
Kneel, priest, for this is heaven. . .
A TORCHBEARER

GREAT cities rise and have their fall; the brass
That held their
glories moulders in its turn.
Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed,

And ever on the palimpsest of earth
Impatient Time rubs out the
word he writ.
But one thing makes the years its pedestal,
Springs
from the ashes of its pyre, and claps
A skyward wing above its
epitaph--
The will of man willing immortal things.
The ages are but baubles hung upon
The thread of some strong
lives--and one slight wrist
May lift a century above the dust;
For
Time,
The Sisyphean load of little lives,
Becomes the globe and
sceptre of the great.
But who are these that, linking hand in hand,

Transmit across the twilight waste of years
The flying brightness of a
kindled hour?
Not always, nor alone, the lives that search
How they
may snatch a glory out of heaven
Or add a height to Babel; oftener
they
That in the still fulfilment of each day's
Pacific order hold
great deeds in leash,
That in the sober sheath of tranquil tasks
Hide
the attempered blade of high emprise,
And leap like lightning to the
clap of fate.
So greatly gave he, nurturing 'gainst the call
Of one rare moment all
the daily store
Of joy distilled from the acquitted task,
And that
deliberate rashness which bespeaks
The pondered action passed into
the blood;
So swift to harden purpose into deed
That, with the wind
of ruin in his hair,
Soul sprang full-statured from the broken flesh,

And at one stroke he lived the whole of life,
Poured all in one libation
to the truth,
A brimming flood whose drops shall overflow
On
deserts of the soul long beaten down
By the brute hoof of habit, till
they spring
In manifold upheaval to the sun.
Call here no high artificer to raise
His wordy monument--such lives
as these

Make death a dull misnomer and its pomp
An empty
vesture. Let resounding lives
Re-echo splendidly through high-piled
vaults
And make the grave their spokesman--such as he
Are as the
hidden streams that, underground,
Sweeten the pastures for the

grazing kine,
Or as spring airs that bring through prison bars
The
scent of freedom; or a light that burns
Immutably across the shaken
seas,
Forevermore by nameless hands renewed,
Where else were
darkness and a glutted shore.
II
THE MORTAL LEASE
I
BECAUSE the currents of our love are poured
Through the slow
welter of the primal flood
From some blind source of
monster-haunted mud,
And flung together by random forces stored

Ere the vast void with rushing worlds was scored--
Because we know
ourselves but the dim scud
Tossed from their heedless keels, the
sea-blown bud
That wastes and scatters ere the wave has roared--
Because we have this knowledge in our veins,
Shall we deny the
journey's gathered lore--
The great refusals and