The Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley :: :: University of Virginia Library

Artemis, Artemis, she loves my blood,
Comes like a great snake folding round my life,
Crushes and kills and takes sweet meal of blood:
Palsies the victim with her quiet eyes
Inexorably bright, draws on, and grasps;
It can but quiver feebly, so complete
Her masterdom that not one choking wail
Wrestles away the thing that lived, and dared
Be happy, ere she came and crushed it out:
Forsooth its smile displeased her, that was all.

Passionless snake of heaven, who never loved,
And must be cruel since she never loved,
Chaste only as her temple image is
Because it cannot feel and cannot err.
She will not even share with other God
Her meal of vengeance: and her altar stands
Alone in loamy Aulis by the shore,
Lest certain drops of slaughter should enrich
Another precinct with the spilth and rills
Of her sweet vintage, nay her lips crave all.

Artemis, Artemis, cold sliding moon,
Treadest along the withered forest tops,
When all the Gods are sleeping else in heaven;
And every noisome creature at thy ray
Crawls out for blood and scents his meat with joy,
And men do all they dare not in the sun.

The tides are thine an evil arbitress
To rear Poseidon up against sea-mounds,
And crack them, rending inland harvest down.
Thou bindest sullen calm against the gray
And steamy ocean, even as now, until
Thy gentle priests assuage thy mild desire
And climb the shamble-altar; then at last
The ripple bears a head from eastern cloud,
And the long floor curls out its many vales—
A God, and yet so cruel? Thou art none.

The wrath of Hellas waits without a wind.
A virgin life is little to ensure
The waftage of her bravest bravely borne
To their revenge: what marvel I must die?
And yet the pity and the fear of this,
To wither in the emphasis and bud
Of ripe sensation; at the very door
Of life's new splendour like a shade to stand
Dazed with the lights, and see the guests within,
And scent the saffron from their stately robes,
Then sink back wailing on the utter dark.

How wonderful to cease when all this world
Goes on without us, feeding, loving, buying,
When I, now large at heart as these that move,
Shall be most still and nothing in my change.
The world in its fresh blood is all awake,
And I in urn a cinder of myself;
The age-dried crone then nearer love than I
That move not with the story of the earth,
Nor feel of day the soft light on my eyes,
Nor the sweet motion of the lavish air,
Nor human love, the stolen spark of heaven.

New maidens wander on with lovers new
In tender leafage shielded from the night;
Lean cheek on cheek, and set their lips so fast,
That all the starry air melts out above
In that exceeding miracle of time.
Where shall I be that never knew delight?

O cold thin gloom of Orcus, where the shrill
And fluttered spectres cling like bats between
The dusky columns of the hollow vale:
Whence is return no more and yet no more
To where my mother sits so wonderingly
Because her maid returns not: sweet and dear
My home; and mother dearer, dost thou wait,
Where valley slopes clench round that inland brim
Of waters? There the rustling temple-doves
Stream towards the forest mountains with the dawn.
The earnest kings of Hellas carven sit,
Between the steep courts of the sanctuary,

And look the greatness of their lives in stone,
Ringed in a terrible semblance of their state,
With brooches on their chariots harnessed near:
Austere dead men, rare-hearted in their age
To push among and use the old iron days.
I am their daughter and I will not fear:
The cruel god consumes me and I go.

But O ye maidens, weaving by the sea,
Upon your gentle voices let my name
Live always, long removed in utter night.
And in your loves remember her that died
To launch the sailings of the proudest war,
When the hard chiefs gazed daunted at the calm,
The daughter of the monarch of them all.
And bring me crispy garlands once a year
To wreathe about my urn, so I may say,
On that green earth I am not all forgot.