Charmides and Other Poems | Page 8

a long and
dismal blare
Blew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed,
And like a flame
a barbed reed flew whizzing down the glade.
And where the little flowers of her breast
Just brake into their milky blossoming,
This
murderous paramour, this unbidden guest,
Pierced and struck deep in horrid
chambering,
And ploughed a bloody furrow with its dart,
And dug a long red road,
and cleft with winged death her heart.
Sobbing her life out with a bitter cry
On the boy's body fell the Dryad maid,
Sobbing
for incomplete virginity,
And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead,
And all the
pain of things unsatisfied,
And the bright drops of crimson youth crept down her
throbbing side.
Ah! pitiful it was to hear her moan,

And very pitiful to see her die
Ere she had yielded
up her sweets, or known
The joy of passion, that dread mystery
Which not to know is
not to live at all,
And yet to know is to be held in death's most deadly thrall.
But as it hapt the Queen of Cythere,
Who with Adonis all night long had lain
Within
some shepherd's hut in Arcady,
On team of silver doves and gilded wain
Was
journeying Paphos-ward, high up afar
From mortal ken between the mountains and the
morning star,

And when low down she spied the hapless pair,
And heard the Oread's faint despairing
cry,
Whose cadence seemed to play upon the air
As though it were a viol, hastily

She bade her pigeons fold each straining plume,
And dropt to earth, and reached the
strand, and saw their dolorous doom.
For as a gardener turning back his head
To catch the last notes of the linnet, mows

With careless scythe too near some flower bed,
And cuts the thorny pillar of the rose,

And with the flower's loosened loneliness
Strews the brown mould; or as some
shepherd lad in wantonness
Driving his little flock along the mead
Treads down two daffodils, which side by aide

Have lured the lady-bird with yellow brede
And made the gaudy moth forget its pride,

Treads down their brimming golden chalices
Under light feet which were not made
for such rude ravages;
Or as a schoolboy tired of his book
Flings himself down upon the reedy grass
And
plucks two water-lilies from the brook,
And for a time forgets the hour glass,
Then
wearies of their sweets, and goes his way,
And lets the hot sun kill them, even go these
lovers lay.
And Venus cried, 'It is dread Artemis
Whose bitter hand hath wrought this cruelty,
Or
else that mightier maid whose care it is
To guard her strong and stainless majesty

Upon the hill Athenian, - alas!
That they who loved so well unloved into Death's house
should pass.'
So with soft hands she laid the boy and girl
In the great golden waggon tenderly
(Her
white throat whiter than a moony pearl
Just threaded with a blue vein's tapestry
Had
not yet ceased to throb, and still her breast
Swayed like a wind-stirred lily in ambiguous
unrest)
And then each pigeon spread its milky van,
The bright car soared into the dawning sky,

And like a cloud the aerial caravan
Passed over the AEgean silently,
Till the faint
air was troubled with the song
From the wan mouths that call on bleeding Thammuz all
night long.
But when the doves had reached their wonted goal
Where the wide stair of orbed
marble dips
Its snows into the sea, her fluttering soul

Just shook the trembling petals
of her lips
And passed into the void, and Venus knew
That one fair maid the less
would walk amid her retinue,
And bade her servants carve a cedar chest
With all the wonder of this history,
Within
whose scented womb their limbs should rest
Where olive-trees make tender the blue
sky
On the low hills of Paphos, and the Faun
Pipes in the noonday, and the
nightingale sings on till dawn.

Nor failed they to obey her hest, and ere
The morning bee had stung the daffodil
With
tiny fretful spear, or from its lair
The waking stag had leapt across the rill
And roused
the ouzel, or the lizard crept
Athwart the sunny rock, beneath the grass their bodies
slept.
And when day brake, within that silver shrine
Fed by the flames of cressets tremulous,

Queen Venus knelt and prayed to Proserpine
That she whose beauty made Death
amorous
Should beg a guerdon from her pallid Lord,
And let Desire pass across dread
Charon's icy ford.
III
In melancholy moonless Acheron,
Farm for the goodly earth and joyous day
Where
no spring ever buds, nor ripening sun
Weighs down the apple trees, nor flowery May

Chequers with chestnut blooms the grassy floor,
Where thrushes never sing, and piping
linnets mate no more,
There by a dim and dark Lethaean well
Young Charmides was lying; wearily
He
plucked the blossoms from the asphodel,
And with its little rifled treasury
Strewed the
dull waters of the dusky stream,
And watched the white stars founder, and the land was
like a dream,
When as he gazed into the watery glass
And through his brown hair's curly tangles
scanned
His own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass
Across the mirror, and a little
hand
Stole into his, and warm lips