Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 4

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--" and into my frail flanks,?Into my bursting veins, the whole sea poured?Its spaces and its thunder; and I feared.
We came to cities, and Life piped on me?Low calls to dreaming girls,?In counting-house windows, through the chink of gold,?Flung cries that fired the captive brain of youth,?And made the heavy merchant at his desk?Curse us for a cracked hurdy-gurdy; Life?Mimicked the hurdy-gurdy, and we passed.
We climbed the slopes of solitude, and there?Life met a god, who challenged her and said:?"Thy pipe against my lyre!" But "Wait!" she laughed,?And in my live flank dug a