University of Virginia Library

Deep in the warm heart of Brazil
There lay a diamond bright and still;
The summers sinking through the ground,
Dead flowers and some lost water-rill,
Dim secrets of the earth profound,
Long symphonies of all her sound—
These things enriched and nourished it
With splendours of their infinite.
And, through each dark terrestrial birth,
Regenerating to the light,
That quenchless star of central night
Passed upward from the occult earth;
Became an emanating dew,
Bloomed forth a passion-flower, or flew
A humming-bird with crimson-crest,
Or melting in a virgin's breast,
Made for her heart a diamond too.

Among the forest-folk that child
Seemed a sweet wonder. Strange and wild
From the first years she grew, as one
With superhuman secrets, things
Unspeakable; who oft must shun
Her people for far communings;
Having unclouded sights and clues
Of swift ways to an unknown land
Past all the trails their feet might use.
A spell they could not understand
Was with her, that she did begin
To move unwontedly their hearts,
And there was nought she might not win
With her charmed smile and lovely arts.
Her fellow-children's forest-play
Grew beautiful when she was there;
The butterflies they chased would stay
With blue wings closed, and seemed more rare
And of a gaudier kind; the way
Led more resplendently along,
Lit vividly with the forked ray
The sun shot through the trees; and song
And sweet, unbridled folly reigned,
As though that day the summer bright
Trebled with joyance unexplained.
The children thought she had some might
With all the glowing things, whose flight
Was like an arrow's flash, or fair
And buoyant on the rapturous air.
They thought for her the flowers could talk,
Each one upon its quivering stalk,
In an enchanted tongue she knew
And all day long was listening to;
And sure were they she was a queen
Far in the forest-lands unseen,
Whence wondrous voices that they heard
Shouted her many a magic word,
Or sang or called confusedly.
So that all through the radiant hour
A sweet awe mingled with their glee,
And they had called her Colibri,
Thinking her brother was the bird
Whose sister was the passion-flower.

Oft in the middle flush of sport
She fled them waywardly, and went
Smiling and singing, till the short
Impenetrable paths that bent
Inwardly through the trees were closed
Behind the echoes of her song.
But when all lovely she reposed
In dense, sweet places where days long
No foot drew near and no eye saw;
Where purple-scented stillness grew,
And red trees had not stirred, for awe
Of the eternal thing they knew;
Strange richness of thought undivulged
Would roll upon her heart, and dreams,
In whose remote joy she indulged
Until the warm day's yellowing beams
Fell vaguely on her dazzled cheek.
For soon within her there began
To grow more thoughts than she could speak,
Than she could show to any man,
Sometimes for joy, sometimes for shame,
Since they were measureless and vast
As great blue skies, or went and came
As troops of fair birds flying fast,
Since each was stranger than the last,
And none of them had yet a name.
She could but feel the solitude
Held something of their endless mood,
That they were a mysterious part
Of flower's sweet soul and bird's strong heart;
She could but think it was a share
Of her rich secrets that did gleam
On many a bell-bloom red and fair;
And that in truth it was her dream
The palms dreamed in the lofty air.

The forest voices great and sweet,
The speaking, yea, and singing there,
That seemed so often to repeat
Some powerless murmur of her own,
Were in a language better known
Than any of her kindred's speech.
And what those strange, sweet tongues could teach
Her yielding spirit day by day
Prevailed to lure her far away
And ever farther: till she grew
United more to each wild thing
Of furtive foot or rushing wing,
Than to the sister that she knew;
And many a nameless flower had been
With rich effusive spell between
Her and her mother's heart.

Her friends
Were none else than the blue macaw,
The troupial, whose long nest she saw
Dragging down all the plantain's ends
Close to the canes and swaying sedge
Of every dim lake's hidden edge;
Or, more than these, the tanager,
Whose bright eye had no fear of her;
She loved to hear the joyous stir
He made among the leaves all round,
And knew he followed her for miles
About the forest, with swift bound
Through sidelong ways and green defiles
He only, or the lithe tree snake,
Had skill to thread; and, but for him,
Sometimes she felt her heart would break
With the great throng of thoughts so dim,
So wonderful and hard to speak,
When, watching his shape, vivid, slim,
Ecstatic, she could well believe
He too was bearing in his breast
A secret rapture unconfest.
And more and more she did conceive
That all these in their several ways
Were telling her for days and days
Of one whose face she had not seen,
Who surely some long while had been
Roaming about the forest, felt
By bird and flower, and many a time
Dreamed of by her; strangely sublime
And beautiful, with a great kind
Of power and sweetness, such as dwelt
Perchance in no one man. And still
More than that dream she thought to find,
Wandering with yet a mightier thrill
Deeper and deeper through the wild
Magnificence of trees. Each bird
Had newly seen him, and just heard
Some rare harmonious speech that died
Into its liquid song; each place
Was awed yet, having felt him glide
Loftily through it, leaving trace
Of luminous majesty and grace
And strange transfigurement on all.
O! there was many a clear footfall
Approaching grandly, shaking long
The attentive solitudes with strong
Rythmical thunder,—O the leaves!
The ponderous draperies of green
The dragon-like liana weaves,
Were ofttimes stirred, ay, parted e'en,
As though a hand would have been laid
That moment on her wondering head,
And sudden revelations made
Of all the mystery of her thought—
And yet no miracle was wrought;
While only lasted there instead
The great appalling quiet noon,
With yellow glints of sunlight shed
Through long bright inlets; or too soon
The day in momentary glare
Went down, and joyless, shook the air
With the immense night-shudder.

Then
A weary melancholy ill
Became her life to her, as when
Some crushed palm-sapling fades or dies
Whom its rich inward scents must kill,
And the repression of flushed leaves
That cannot rise to wave and thrill
In azure heights of tropic skies:
So seemed it with her, and she went
To a lone forest lake that heaves
With no fond swell of cadenced waves,
But hollows out its liquid tomb,
And deepens shadowy and content
In the green hollows of its gloom;
Above it monstrously the trees
Have stridden, and their crossèd limbs are bent
And locked in the contorted throes
Of savage strife, while o'er them grows,
Darkening with cumbersome increase,
The dank black parasite. Alone
She sat there drooping; a disease
Her melancholy thought was grown,
Her love of a great thing unknown,
Or known to all and hidden from her.
She was estranged now from blithe day,
And left the fair birds far away,
Nor chose to hear the tanager,
Whose black eye seemed to know so well
All things she sought, and would not tell.

Greater it seemed her heart must grow
Than bird or flower at all might know,
And very desolate was her walk
Through the green lovely solitude;
For no wild creature of the wood
Was high enough to feel or talk
Or commune with her. For her love
Might be the God who reigned above,
Unknown, tremendous in the blue;
But the slim palm-trees were so high,
She might no way ascend thereto.
Or perchance he was wandering through
Some mightier forest all remote,
Or dwelt in marvellous countries nigh
The world's end, where the salt wave smote
The shadowy blue Bahamas' shore,
And she must dream on evermore.
And lo! her dream's exalted joy,
And endless wonder and vague sweet—
The faith no long day might destroy,
The vast hope making her heart beat
Through silent hours of the sun's heat,
The vision that had filled the fiery west,
And rose up making the huge night
Speak and sing wondrously—were best
Of all things to her life, and more,
Yea, e'en than that strange country, bright
With manifold shapes and hues, and more
Than its red warrior-folk, whose town
Boisterous along the river shore
Held yet a home that seemed her own.
And to the lover who now bore
Such hopeless passionate looks, that wooed
With their dumb desolation, nought
She yielded, save some pitying thought
And strange word he scarce understood—
How a surpassing god, unsought,
Unknown, was holding all her heart
Close to his mysteries, and no part
He or her brethren had therein,
Unless some flower should quite begin
To teach them out of its rare hues
Unheard of secrets, or with loose
O'erflowing song, a forest bird
Should tell such things, as when they heard
They should be changed and live again
Could he who loved her say one word?
The countless voices sang so plain,
Passing her charmed ear, from height
Or depth or far unfathomed green,
Gave answer to her, making bright
Some dim place in her heart; could e'en
That love of his for summer have been
To one of those unfading blooms
Of speechless and transcendant thought
That grew up, filling with perfumes
And fervours all her being, fraught
With unknown seed within? But well,
Alas! she saw that bird and flower,
And all the eloquent forest, turned
Their dim side unto him, or fled,
Or shut their sweet mouths, or sang lower
Their song, or sang mere vain things, learned
Of empty echoes and dull dread;
And even the tanager would glance
Full of bright scorn amid his dance,
Mocking him, out of arrow-reach
On topmost bough. Full of dumb love,
That youth would follow afar off,
Daring no longer to beseech,
Stricken through to his warrior's heart
More keenly than his whistling dart
Was wont to strike in war or chase,
All silent and with scarce a stir
More than a gliding snake made,—her
He followed, hearkening many a space
In the side forest's hiding-place.

I am that curst and hopeless one. My face
Has caught the brown glow of these Southern seasons,
And warm new virgin worlds have burnt the trace
Of half a summer on me; in its place
Is none the less that memory of treasons
And faithless faces, and that love, half hate,
The rest despair and lust, that woe—that fate—
That evil I perceive, not one man's doom,
But a great death in a decorous tomb
Called Europe.

Would the taintless sun could reach
To burn away the dull dust at my heart,
And quite transmute its yearnings, and then teach
The ruined intuitions of pure feeling
One frank, warm love of this unsullied part
Of lovely, passionate earth. I mock that thought!
The old world's wound is past the new world's healing,
And Europe holds the child that Europe taught.

The last days in a desolate-peopled city
Were long with wretchedness. I felt the whole
Dissembled pang that inwardly depraves
The love alike of king and courtezan,
And dries the very sources of soft pity,
Hardening the farewell word the heart most craves
To leave behind. I understood each man
In his consummate coldness, and the lying
Of every woman's love and jewelled smile
Was bare to me in secret. I saw dying
In agonizing bonds, beneath the vile
Enamelled falsehood of triumphant fashion,
All lonely loveliness of truth and passion,
Stung to a poisoned death by one small asp,
The deathless fiend, Mistrust—from kiss to kiss,
From heart to heart, crawling for aye unseen;
Given in the ready hands, unheeding clasp,
Lying in wait beneath each coming bliss,
Spoiling the fair place where a true past hath been.

And so I did not curse her whom I curst
In the appalling hour that taught me first
To see her as she is; to be alone
For ever with the angel overthrown,
The self she spoiled, and left me. No, the throne
She has not moved from hath a chain as cruel
As gold can be, drawn tight across the heart,
Till the restraint hath cankered every part,
And joyless is the splendour of each jewel,
And pitiless the semblance of each joy
Put on her daily. He who out of love
Or hate should change or slay her, would destroy
One long, keen punishment some Lord above
Sees and remits not. For she may not fall,
And she shall never dare to love at all.
Sitting at noontide in the gilded hall
Of one of those vain-glorious palaces,
Haunted ere night time by some shrieking host
Of void, disconsolate souls, whose miseries
Stalk tombless through the shifting centuries.
That shadowy horror that appalleth most,
The loneliness of kings, took hold on me.
Surely it laid a cold hand on my heart,
And with the cruel, supernatural speech
Of one who knoweth all things, made me see
And measure and consider, part by part,
The soul of Cleopatra; then of each
Most exquisite and exorable queen,
And still, in clear discourse, unshrinking, keen,
Told me the truth concerning many a dame,
Adored and of an all unspotted fame,
Laid bare the shallow secret or the shame,
And bade me then be wise with scarce a taunt.
And many times, in the histories of doom
Written of men and women, over whom
The graves are tearless, and the past makes vaunt
Of hollow praise or passionless lament,
I saw the face, I found the lineament
In all respects of her I was content
To bind myself the slave of: in my soul
She was the prophecy of page on page,
That named her with the name some former age
Counted its curse, and left its aureole.

And then I scarcely know what fatal rage
Urged me to seek such wisdom's sad extreme,
To probe yet further, and to find the core
Of all her life; to overthrow each dream,
To question, to examine, to explore,
To rack each reticent nerve of memory,
Piercing and ruining the lovely ore
Of many a fond illusion, just to see
How hollow the clear hollowness might be—
In truth, to work out with a fearful might
Myself mine own unmitigated hell;
For, when I stood in the cold, cruel light,
And knew the depths, and gazed up to the height
Of that consummate knowledge, O! I fell—
Yea, weeping as the hopeless souls may weep,
And for one little hope of her—to keep
One undestroyed deception as before
To love and live in,—would have knelt once more
And served the blindest God that men adore.
Alas! if some world-conquering Emperor,
Roaming among his ruins, with the sun
For compeer, and the moon, that weeping nun,
For pale, reproachful consort, should repent,
Loathing the loneliness of empire won,
And yearn to bring again the sweet content
Of people there, and life, and grace, and sound,
To fill once more each hollow tenement,
And lift the fallen temples from the ground,
Whom, yearning so, the sun's red taunt at noon
Must answer, and the misery of the moon
Mock him at night with silence; then my own
Great hopelessness were a thing not unknown,
Nor quite unparalleled, nor all alone.

I had long ceased from that consuming need,
To seek her where she was, to have indeed
The sight and presence of her; now, alas!
It mattered little how her days might pass,
I knew and saw; having so felt and seen,
There could not be one thing that had not been;
And in some rugged and remotest cell—
Rock-guarded, sea-environed solitude,
Silenced and overawed by my great mood
Of mightier desolation—I could tell
Her deepest thought that hour, and see and dwell
Most intimately with her in the home
Of inward self-avowal. There with crowds
In some cold glittering capital—at Rome,
In languid ease; at Venice, in disguise—
I reached her through the glitter and the shrouds,
I alone; for my soul's enlightened eyes
Had read her inward self, and did divine
A soul dividing solitude with mine.

And once, beholding vain eternity,
Made of irreparable life—aghast,
With nearness of her face for destiny,
And all the future plighted to the past,
Seen like an arid country, red and vast,
Scathed by one present memory—I besought
Some death that were not momentary—aught,
For blindness and oblivion and reprieve,
A grief not all of mine to share and grieve,
A labour to be lost upon, a wide
Inhuman wilderness, wherein to hide—
A darkness of a forest.

Refulgent moment of supreme emotion,
Sweetening the earth, swelling the lurid ocean,
Making a flagrant painting of the sky,
Burdening the soul of things with dumb devotion,
Urging the heart of man to speak and die,
Speaking then in a bird's despairing cry,
Breaking then, agonizing, passing by!

So the tremendous evening fades, and night,
Like a great noiseless eagle, at one flight
Covers the glowing country of the light.

Hark how, a mile away, the wild Savannah
Wakens and heaves and roars! Inward this road,
And then a rush through plantain and banana,
And then the forest. Where the strange flower glowed,
The giant yellow flower between the trees,
The blossom of the dragon-like liana,
There she awaits me; there her hands will seize
And hold me to the fire of her heart,
That wild Brazilian fire, whose diamond dart
Makes the small bosom of the humming-bird
A coruscation.

Who would speak a word
Through such transcendant silence? All was done.
And once more in the day, beneath the sun,
She and I journey, as though two were one.
She and I, in a gliding boat of bark,
Are going up the mighty Amazon;
On either side of us a forest dark
With wonders that the light ne'er looked upon,
Whence ever here and there some brilliant thing
Issues enchanted. Sometimes great trees fling
Their tortuous arms across, and endless trails
And coils and thongs of leafage and of bloom
Hang down and sweep the wave, and scarce leave room,
Or stretch their dense impenetrable veils
All overhead. And now the waters dream
And darken in the shadows where they keep
Rich stains of leaf and flower buried deep,
In pastures where the feeding fishes gleam,
Spangled with suns and stars; and now the stream,
Bounding with glossy back beneath some cape,
Goes onward like an oscillating snake,
Until one midmost rock's unyielding shape
Thwarts it, and lo! whole seas of fury break
From lashèd sides, and the rock and river wage
A roaring, endless strife; but slim and swift
As the Anhinga bird, we dart or drift,
Or hurry through the eddies, and the rage
Of the wave's desperate onset far behind
Is lost among rich murmurs. Then the noon,
In some delicious spot where slowly wind
The weakened currents round soft oases,
Linked by their joining flowers, allures us soon
So overwhelmingly with perfumed breeze,
And purple glow and wonderful appeal
Of supernatural colours that reveal
Strange speechless yearnings of the heart, and steal
Into its subtlest communings, that long
We linger, feeling what the waters feel,
And what the flowers are faint with, and a throng
Of passionate thought goes mingling with the song
Of low-voiced love-birds, till we join the dream
Of all their emerald Eden. Nothing said
Around, beneath, or answered overhead,
Yet all one soul in one effusion seem
The opulent odours, the transcendent gleam,
The radiant heights of verdure—the cool gloom,
The flowering orgies of unwonted bloom,
The love, the thought—one soul, one dream, one doom!
Nursed in the noiseless water haunt where night
And day are softened, and the liquid light
And shallow fawning wastes for ever dwell
In unison beneath an amber spell,
We watch some burnished miracle of green,
Piercing the hollow shade with vivid sheen,
The plume-tailed halcyon, with scintillant wing,
Sudden and flashing, like a meteor stone;
Or gazing upwards, long enamouring
Enthralling moments, all that world unknown,
That labyrinth of leaves and blossoming,
That waving ocean of sonorous day,
Where the red palms expand in vast array,
And the sun works his wonders, opens deep
Surpassing vistas; and enchantments keep,
Or visions lure us thitherward in sleep.
Unnumbered pass those redolent hours: a trance
Of luminous magic lulls the whole expanse
Of lovely wilderness. At length a call
Comes from the waters; then the clamorous din
Of some amphibious host: then aimless fall
The spent red arrows of the lurid light
Among the tree stems, and a sun akin
To flame leaves crimson on the palm-trees' height,
And orange on the wave. Then sudden night.

This Indian girl came softly to my side,
In the resplendent border-land, one noon.
I, lingering through the day's luxurious swoon,
Communing with colossal sadness hewn
In the red sunset, felt her long look steal
Into my soul, as some dark glade may feel
The sweet insinuation of the light;
And when I turned the momentary sight
Of her unfaining face touched me with yet
One other thing my soul may not forget.
Neither shall I forget a long rich hour,
Eloquent between pausing sun and moon,
The darkening forest and the closing flower
Spoke in the silence with an unknown power.
She stirred not at my side; but let her cheek
Fall in its soft effusion on my breast,
The while her long, dark yearning gaze exprest
Thoughts wonderful, and things she could not speak.
And looking on her face, I saw indeed
How inwardly that hour her soul took heed
Of love and far-off fate, and life and death,
In some great height of sadness, passionate
And pensive. And the woodlands' wavering breath
Seemed tremulous, because it bore a freight
Of unrequited tears. On either hand
Brethren and sisters of her tribe did stand,
Speechless and saddened; then, a little while,
Made farewells fading, and in shadowy file
Passed onward through the shadowy forest land,
Leaving her there and me; and at her feet
Her Indian lover, dying, making sweet
His death with gazing on her.

Here is our oasis. Slow water-ways
Murmur meandering through the golden maze:
All the lulled river, like a winding snake,
Fondles the flowerage of the bending shores,
Glistens half hidden under blooming brake,
Or basks in glossy opening. Secret pores
Enchant the air with an exhaling scent,
And great corollas tossing redolent,
Like high-swung censers, lavish a large gift
Of magical strange fragrance; while the palms,
Rising exuberant, emulously lift
Crowned heads surpassing to the exalted calms
And luminous heats of high ethereal day.
In such an Eden glorious creatures stay,
Fearless of foe, and many a nest is made
Safe in the blue recesses of the shade,
By lazy golden fowl, whose feathers flame
Most like the burning phoenix of old fame.

Here, when our gliding soft canoe was heard,
Failed there a flower or ceased there any bird
His lone ecstatic song? The red canes stirred
Only with wonted music, shuddering sweet
In long unanimous revelry: the wave
Fawned on insatiably about their feet;
The large leaves met behind us to repave
The blossoming path for wading water-hen,
And glossy green-billed trampler of the fen.
And nothing broke the high beatitude,
Harmonious through the one-voiced solitude,
Where jubilant birds and scents of dreaming flowers,
Poured out rich souls and blended them with ours.

And, truly, to be here in this our isle,
In the red hour of the sun's last smile,
Is fair and full of wonder; for the banks
Gleam with a moving splendour; dazzling ranks
Of lories, and the parrots manifold,
In fluttering glory, crimson, green and gold,
Flown banded from the forest hitherward,
Dapple with shifting hues the bended sward
Down to the wave; or, lighting on some space
Of rustling cane and undulating rush,
Amaze the forests with their swaying grace,
And break the deepening blue with sudden gush
And pageantry of colour.

Colibri!
Yea, let me live for ever here, and see
Only the beauty of the place, and thee,
Strangest and loveliest. There is some part
Of the snake's fascinating soul in thee;
'Twas a surpassing flower that made thy heart
Of passionate secrecy, of hues that start
And rise and fill the soft depths in thy face,
As unknown crimsons formed beneath the wave
Expand and fade; and all thy wild swift grace
Belongeth to the bird that dims the eye
With sunny lightning: whence one name they gave
To thee and to the bird.

And by-and-by
I shall know better all thy mystery.
Here thou shalt bind me, and the flowers maybe
Shall also bind me for thee day by day,
Adding inscrutably some lasting link
Of fragrance round my heart; here thou and they,
Joining soft league against me, lull away
My life to dream a life again, or think
In lofty-cadenced rhapsodies that hold
The long sonorous winds in worlds of gold,
Singing transcendently above the palms.

Already I have felt the inward balms,
Rich stealing emanations from the deep
Unfathomable forest, healing me,
O'erwhelming me in an enchanted sleep
Of unremembering, buoyant luxury,
Whence colour, perfume, sound, on painless wings,
Issue immortal in wide liquid thrill
Of softest dissolution. Unknown things,
Reaching the secret of my kindred sense,
Lure me, moreover; so that I fulfil
A daily-growing bond with the immense
Exuberant solitude; while now the will
Of some long-stifled ancient being intense
Wakes me to soar forth boundless.

Oh, last night,
The great voice of the universal soul
Seemed to be speaking to me from the height
And from the depth, bidding me rise up whole,
Blasting my weakness in the scornful roll
Of thousand-throated thunder. Every tongue
Of fair infuriate creature, gracious, strong,
Uttered or roared or sang the frenzied song
Of its appalling self, that once more flung
A loud defiance through the fearless night,
Great and without a grief. And I, like one
Roused by some vast resuscitating voice
From death's drugged lethargy, watched with delight,
Against the jaggèd blue, the faultless poise
And sheer intrepid leap or violent run
Of ounce or jaguar—hearkening while the noise
Of all that hurricane of life and strife
Roared and rolled on terrific through the leagues
Of shaken woodland, till a loftier life
Of great primeval passions and fatigues
Rose and grew mine—a long exuberant breath
Of pauseless life to end in dreamless death.