Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses | Page 9

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 the long disdains,?The stubborn questing for a phantom shore,?The sleepless hopes and memorable pains,?And all mortality's immortal gains?
II
Because our kiss is as the moon to draw?The mounting waters of that red-lit sea?That circles brain with sense, and bids us be?The playthings of an elemental law,?Shall we forego the deeper touch of awe?On love's extremest pinnacle, where we,?Winging the vistas of infinity,?Gigantic on the mist our shadows saw?
Shall kinship with the dim first-moving clod?Not draw the folded pinion from the soul,?And shall we not, by spirals vision-trod,?Reach upward to some still-retreating goal,?As earth, escaping from the night's control,?Drinks at the founts of morning like a god?
III
All, all is sweet in that commingled draught?Mysterious, that life pours for lovers' thirst,?And I would meet your passion as the first?Wild woodland woman met her captor's craft,?Or