Poems Real and Ideal :: :: University of Virginia Library

Here is a bridal bower! Here is a marriage-chamber!
Hung not with tinted silk, or bright pure cloth of amber:
The deadly black
Scaffold is all that these will know of bower of roses;
Now for the man and maid their earthly journey closes,
And lo! what blood-hounds bay around their track.

II

Only the red strange flowers of Revolution's garden
For these, who having sinned beyond all mortal pardon
And slain the Czar

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Must pass, not uncontent, into the viewless region
Where every light goes out, save only perhaps the legion
Of God's lamps,—moon on moon and star on star.

III

O strange embrace for these and enigmatic bridal!
Never to meet in love, save only when the tidal
Great streams of human gore
From governmental swords and their own knives were running
And Revolution's waves all human ears were stunning
With their dull deadly desperate ravening roar.

IV

Never to meet in love in joyous green-leafed places!
Never to hope for love and common sweet embraces
That all souls hope to win!

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To have vowed their lives to crime as to a sacramental
Great task,—the lover strong, and she the Russian gentle
And high-born woman, red to the eyes with sin!

V

Stained with all deadliest sin—if this be sin, the plotting
How, when a native land lies helpless, bound, and rotting
In slavery grim,
And when a despot holds the keys of every prison,
To bring to prisoned eyes fair Freedom's sunny vision
Even, if it need be, through the death of him.

VI

If this be sin,—to hold that one man's life is little,
A thread most thin indeed, and frail of make, and brittle,
Though he be the Czar,

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Compared with ceaseless lives that wear away in bondage,
Lives multitudinous as the blood-red autumn frondage,
Who surge in pain and beckon from afar.

VII

If this be sin,—to meet the Terror White with savage
Response o'the Terror Red; the swords that slay and ravage
With keener swords that slay;—
To oppose to headstrong brain of one besotted Ruler
Brains forceful as his own,—as resolute but cooler;
To meet white foam-tides with red tidal spray.

VIII

If this be sin,—to cast one's life and all one's being
On one side in the scale, and then with deep sigh seeing
That for one's country's sake

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These have to go, to choose without a moment's murmur
The sacrificial part, with brow and stern lips firmer
Than God's old martyrs at the fiery stake.

IX

And have ye passed away for ever from us gazing
Far into heaven in vain, O hearts and souls amazing,
O spirits strong,
Who lived and died pursuing a grand mistake (it may be),
Yet died for Russia's sake? While morn and night and day be,
Your names shall live in Russia's love and song.

X

Have ye beyond the grave, though black your bridal carriage
And black your bridal wreaths, in love's eternal marriage
Been joined indeed?

283

Lover, hast thou now heard beyond all death the laughter
Of her who sought with thee the perilous hereafter,
With love and freedom—nought else—for a creed?

XI

Though dark mistakes be there, and doubt and complication,
Yet for the people indeed, for the vast iron-bound nation,
This man and woman fell:
For Freedom's sake their dream (though it were mad) they cherished,
And for the oppressed and poor without a groan they perished,
First having faced the glittering ranks of hell.

XII

God is on their side; God, and Love, and all the ringing
Of free and spotless waves beneath the morning singing;
God present in these things.

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Yea, when they fell, the sky was darkened as with tender
Heart-yearning. Round them falls the omnipresent splendour
Of Liberty's large sunset-tinctured wings.

XIII

Over the bodies of these the Imperial Army trampled.
Yet have they left behind a token unexampled:
Their dead lips say,
“For Russia's sake we left the safe sweet paths of pleasure:
If we were wrong God knows, and knows that past all measure
We loved,—past love of lips that praise and pray.

XIV

“We did a cruel deed? Yes: cruel it was then; granted.
But who the bitter seeds of cruelty first planted
In either breast?

285

Who made with iron black immeasurable oppression
Our deep-stung souls revolt and surge past retrogression?
Who forced us forth upon the blood-stained quest?

XV

“Who made the love of country one thing with conspiring,
And love of our own race the same thing with desiring
To die that it might live?
Who made all glad thoughts fade and dark thoughts only attend us,
So that our swords alone we trusted to defend us
When all defences else were fugitive?

XVI

“Who made our spirits bleed for friends and neighbours scattered
Over the ice-bound steppes,—himself adored and flattered

286

By a cringing Court the while?
If him we have slain, we have slain the mystic incarnation
Of Tyranny that crushed the chained and helpless nation
And froze all laughter with its deadly smile.”

May, 1883.

University of Virginia Library

GELIABOFF. Geliaboff, who was loved by Sophia Perovskaia, had, as it happened, taken no direct part in the murder of the Czar on March 13, 1882. But he was arrested, and he and Sophia Perovskaia were executed on the same day.

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GELIABOFF.

Geliaboff, who was loved by Sophia Perovskaia, had, as it happened, taken no direct part in the murder of the Czar on March 13, 1882. But he was arrested, and he and Sophia Perovskaia were executed on the same day.