The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Buchanan :: :: University of Virginia Library

At dawn (as old traditions tell),
When the pale priests and soldiers came
To see once more that shining frame
Within her marble tomb, behold!
Still beautiful, with locks of gold,
Unfaded to the finger-tips,
With faint pink cheeks and rose-red lips,
Her they found softly sleeping on;
And by her, turn'd to senseless stone,
Watching her face with eyes of lead,
Knelt the monk Marcus, cold and dead.
He ceased, to a chorus from the Priory walls
Of daws thick-throated. Straightway Douglas cried,
‘It is the caws, my soul, it is the caws!
Hark how the dusky rascals echo her!
They vaunt the merriment of cakes and ale,
And other succulent sweets they loved when monks,
Above all kneeling and praying in the dark
That make the stony heart and horny knee!’
But no one laughed, for on our souls the tale
Fell with a touch of sweet solemnity;
And we were silent, till a quiet voice,
Low like a woman's, murmured: ‘Oftentimes
I have dreamed a dream like that (if dream it were),
And seen, instead of Cytherea's eyes,
The orbs of Dian, passionately pure,
Witching the world to worship!’

He who spoke—
A man with heavily hanging under lip,
Man's brow above a maiden's moist blue eyes—
Was Verity, the gentle priest of Art,
A vestal spirit, not too masculine
To avoid those seizures epileptiform
Which virgins have when yielding oracles.
He, by the affinity of sex which draws
The ivy to the oak-tree, long had loved
Not wisely but too well, though reverently,
The Scottish prophet, Thomas Ercildoune,
Who, thundering for the nations seventy years,
Found in the end that he had merely soured
The small beer and the milk of his own dwelling.
He, Verity, though all his soul was love,
Had from his master learned the scolding trick,
And so was somewhat shrewish out o' doors.
Inside the temple where he ministered
His soul was solemnised to perfect speech,
And many a storm-toss'd wanderer, listening to him,
Had worshipt and been saved.

‘How sweet it were,’
He added, ‘in this godless age of Fact,
When hideous monsters of machinery

Are fashioned unto largess-giving gods,
To uprear on some green mountain-side a shrine
To Artemis, the goddess of the pure!
For if, as Heine held, the gentler gods
Whom Christ drave forth from heaven with whip of cords
Survive, but banish'd into lonely lands
Do gloomy task work for their bitter bread,
Somewhere on this sad earth the heaveneyed Maid
Wears homespun, turns the wheel, and is a slave.
Upbuild her temple, make it beautiful
With shapes of marble wonderfully wrought,
Strew it with flowers of antique witchery,
And on the altar let the lunar beam
Sleep like the white and sacrificial Lamb;
And thither on some peaceful summer night
Perchance the weary one will come, and shed
Peace on the eyelids of her worshippers!’

We listen'd wondering, some with pitying smiles,
And others credulous of the fantasy.
I answered, ‘Who shall find her? We, who dwell
In cities vast and foul as Babylon,
Have seen, or seemed to see, the baser gods,
Her sisters and her brethren, busy yet
As spirits of the orgy and the dance.
Smooth Hermes, full of craft as when he filch'd
Apollo's horses, wears a modern coat,
And helps the citizen to cheat on 'Change;
And Jupiter, though feeble and rheumatic,
Leading his moulting eagle on the chain,
Still creeps about the distant villages
And prompts the silly preacher as he throws
His Calvinistic lightnings at the boors;
And who that ever walk'd down Regent Street
At midnight, or some garish summer day
At Paris saw the Grand Prix lost and won,
Has failed to note the pink divinity,
In rags or silk and sealskin, still the same
As when she tript Adonis long ago!
But for the other, Dian, Artemis,
Athenian or Ephesian, who shall say
The pure thing lives, where nought that lives is pure?
The sunshine knows her not, and the sweet moon,
Which used to shine upon her ivory limbs
Bright and pellucid in her dusky bath,
Now lights the pale street-walker at her trade,
And there's an end.’

Buller from Brazenose,
Another priest of Art, who holds that Art
Is lost if clothed or draped, and in whose eyes
The very fig-leaf is a priest's device
To mar the fair and archetypal Eve,
Broke in with mincing speech and courteous sneer—
‘I have heard that when that good man George the Third
Reign'd o'er his farm, this England, Artemis
Was noticed raining happy influences
Over the national pig-sty! Later still,
Arm'd with the British matron's household broom,
She drove our Byron out and bang'd the door.
Since then, thank God!—or say, since Wordsworth died
[Poor man, he came to physic a sick world
That wanted wine, and gave it curds and whey!]—
Your goddess has been seldom heard or seen.
Doubtless she drudges in some parson's house
As far as Lapland, where the temperature
Is like her bosom, virginal and cold.
We want her not in England! Heaven forbid!
We need the sun of love to warm our blood,
Apollo's blaze and Cytherea's breath
To thaw our lives and prove us men indeed!’

While thus he spake, I noticed in our midst
A pale young man who had come into the world
White-hair'd, and so looked old before his time;
His eye was burning, and his delicate hand
Was thrust into his bosom, touching there
Some secret treasure. Listening he stood,
Eager to speak, yet dumb through diffidence.
To him the pythoness Miranda Jones

Exclaimed, ‘What secret are you hiding there,
Close to your heart, or shirt-front, Cousin Fred?
I'll swear—a poem!’ Turning with a laugh
To Barbara, she added, ‘Speak to him!
My cousin Frederick is a poet too,
And fain I know would win a poet's praise
From this fair company and you, its Queen.’

Then blushing like a girl, and glancing up
To encounter Barbara's smile of kind command,
The young man answered, ‘Nay, indeed 'tis naught—
The merest trifle—not a tale at all;
Yet strangely enough, it touches rhyme by rhyme
Upon the very quest of which they speak;—
I too,’ he added, blushing still more deep,
‘Have chased that same Diana, in a song!’

‘Then prithee read it,’ cried Queen Barbara,
And other voices clamour'd echoing her;
And drawing a paper from his breast, the youth
Glanced timidly around the company,
And then with eye that kindled like a coal
Blown with the breath, he eagerly began.