Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

The silence of a moonless night
The path of time doth follow: moonless night
And starless tracks man's footsteps, with dim forms
Still crumbling back into the caverned past.
And thou the strangest legend wrought in stone
The huge rock-spectre of an earlier world,
Within that terrible darkness standest still,
A mystery now as then.
I shut my ears and hear
Through the far centuries the clang
Of Coptic hammers round thy limbs half-freed:
Slaves toiling in their blindness, slaves of fate,

And slaves of man! what mystic mutterings,
What inspiration or what sad resolve,—
Those laborers cheer that know not what they do?

II.

Oracular, ever open-eyed,
Open-eyed without vision; answerless,
Yet questioning for life or death, as hath
In later days been fabled.
The scarabee, the winged globe,
And other symbols dark are known to thee,
To thee and to the dead. Perhaps the bones
Of Cheops in his firmest of all tombs,
Shook to disclose thy secret from the dust
And make men gods by knowledge of hereafter,
Shook when the priests' thick steps passed evermore
Bearing another Pharoah home
Asbestos-clad to his subterrene realm.
And did not Cleopatra's eager blood
Throb at the thought of thee,
While her wide purple flaunted in the sun,

And the thick smoke of her perfumes was borne
From Cidnus to the waste, where now
The camel's tufted limb in thirsty march
By Moslem pipe is cheered.

The winged seeds of autumn die amidst
The whirling sand-waste. Not beneath thy shade
The sower walks. While the years ever young,
Passing quick-sandall'd from the exuberant sun
Awake new wonders, and new nations rise;
And young Hope ever girdled, worshipeth
Upon the steps of Truth's too radiant shrine;
Thou sittest voiceless, without priest or prayer,
As if thou wert self-born.

III.

And yet to whom, O Sphynx,
Hast thou not ministered?
Before the Isis gates, the gates of stone,
Have mythic heroes and the sons of gods
Questioned of thee. Around thy feet

The hands of wandering Homer have perchance
Groped in his blindness, while he smiled,
Smiled strangely like old Saturn, as high thoughts,
Thoughts level with thy mysteries,
Lifted the lucid eyelids of his soul.
The lyre of Hermes may have rung to thee,
Before Dodona's leaves shook prophecies
On slumbering votaries; ere the white shafts rose
Fluted on Delphi, or Athenian streets
Had heard the voice of Socrates, nor yet
Was there a Calvary in all the world.

The beacon-light from Pharos shines,
Guiding the prows with Sidon's wares,
Wine from Chios, Samian earth
Transformed to gold by potters' cunning hands;
Awhile it shines, and then the stars again
Heaven's watchers are alone. But now instead
Of monstrous hieroglyph, the preacher calls,
Preacher and bishop, and the cenobite
Hurries half naked by,

Smiting thee on the face with his strong hand,
Strong to destroy all gods save one,
The Unseen, Unknown, unto whom thou art
Thyself a minister, although unnamed
In the evangel by whose word he lives,
And by whose light he weaves the Thebaid straws.
Weave on! lean cenobite, take not again
The purple and fine linen, thou hast seen
Bread brought to thee by ravens from heaven's board,—
Souls passing upward upon angel's wings,—
And like the red edge of averted thunder,
Roll back the earthly, Typhon fall sheer down.
Heaven's face is visible, and man's heart throbs
Shedding joy-tears into the passion-cup;
For are not all old things now passed?
Alas! and he too is now passed, long since
His love-feast cup is dry as Odin's shell,
Yet heaven's face brightens still, and through the sand
Deepening about thy flanks
Cryest thou, O Sphynx, for burial with thy kin.

100

IV.

Hovering over phantom-mists
On the chance stepping-stones of time;
Descending the uneven stairs of Art,
Into our nature's cavern gloom;
Breathless almost become we,
As if the blood fled from collapsing veins.
And yet when we return
Into the even sunlight of to-day,
The interests of the present seem
Fool's-play, unreal, an even-song;
And all the living generation shrinks
Into turf-hidden grasshoppers; loud-tongued
As clamoring storks, that feebly build
Among the cloven roofs of old
And kingless cities; passing as a flock
Of clouds storm-scattered, when the sear leaves fall,
And day shrinks coldly in.

But rather let me hear
Derisive laughter than degenerate fears.

101

And verily thou art, O Sphynx, no more
Than a child's bauble which the man disowns
With loftier knowledge, weightier cares,—
Yet from the soul's profound,
The most dread question comes,—
Which nature cannot answer. Thou,
Watcher by temple-stairs,—
Thou might'st have taught the entering worshippers
Homeward to look not starward,
Inward and not back into the tomb,
Or over Styx with hopes that bloom not here!
Alas, and is the question still
Unanswered, is the night
Eternal upon Acheron?
And when the triumphs of our England fall
Crumbling before the tides of years to come,
Shall Sphynxes stand by temple-stairs?
Or from the heart's depths call?
And shalt thou still
Unburied sit amidst the sand?