The Finding of The Book and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

[The rare quadriliteral ([HEBREW] S'mādăr) is found in Cant. 11. 13-15; VII. 13. The highest Rabbinical authorities consider that from its derivation the word includes both the blossom and its scent. Thus it is richer than the pretty Greek Οινανθη by which it is here translated by the LXX., and which seems to have been more pleasant to Pindar and the Greek dramatists.]

Semadar, quoth a Rabbi thus,
‘Odor et idem flosculus.’

I

Heavily my desk upon
Lay a Hebrew Lexicon.
As I pried into the tome
I thought me of Saint Hierome,
By the Jew tormented sore
With his strange triliteral lore,—

173

Words that hiss and pant are those,
Torture of the throat and nose.
Fine of scent and fleet of foot,
Coldly obstinate in pursuit,
Must he be who hunts the root.
I too, weary and athirst,
Try the game in volume vast,
Where the thousandth page is first,
And the first leaf is the last.

II

So I fell to muse on words.
Ships they are, methought, that bear
Cargoes sometimes passing rare;
Little harps with magic chords;
Hives that hide and hush the bees
Who in the far summers wrought
Sweetest honey of man's thought;
Little song-enfolding birds.
But behold! upon the seas
In some voyage the ship is lost;

174

And the chords one day are broken;
And the dead bird, mute, is moss'd,
The wan wood-leaves o'er it toss'd;
And away the bees have fled,
And the word becomes unspoken.
O the grief, or soon or late,
When a language lieth dead,
When the hope and love and hate,
And the laughter and the wrath
Multitudinous that it hath,
Out of life have perishèd,—
Influences half-divine,
Teaching how to do and think,
Levigated to a line,
Dungeon'd in a drop of ink.

III

Yet the lost once more is found,
When the happy hour arrives.
By the deep, dark sea undrown'd,
Lovely thoughts and lofty lives
Rise superbly from the wreck,
Move once more upon the deck:

175

Cithern-chords are strung again,
Summer hums about the hives:
The tiny skeleton doth flit,
Flashing musical and lit
With the new-born life of it:
The speech becomes a speech of men.

IV

Semadar! Let the word
With the breath of life be stirr'd.
Soft! The poet-king withdrawn,
Hush'd in a sweet world of thought,
With the music he hath wrought,
Like his psalmist-sire awakes
The red pillars of the dawn,—
And an earlier morning takes
Than the first flash on the lakes,
Or the first-lit laughter-spell
Of the sea uncountable.
To his fancy comes and goes
Softer scent than that which throws
The remembrance of a rose;
Many a delicate blossom makes
Along the vineyard-line adust

176

Promise of a red, divine,
Wondrous exuberance of wine.
All the Syrian vault of blue;
All the dim delightful changes,—
The broad vine-leaves pictured through
Sunset's fierce and red-gold rust,
Moonlights on the mountain-ranges—
Where the scent is sweeter growing,
Where the blossom daintier blowing,
Scent and blossomry in one;
Both, and all the Orient round
Sphered and circled in a sound—
Quicken in your Lexicon,
Semadar—and the thing is done!

V

So it is. Then who shall doom
To the language of the dead
Words with holier meaning said?
In Semadar is there pent
Of the passionate Orient
Half the beauty and the scent?
In its little exquisite tomb
Waiting but a touch to leap
Lovely from its centuried sleep,—

177

Sure in its own turn to find
Summer in some happy mind!—
Words that once were sent abroad
From nearer to the Heart of God:
Full of sap and fierce with life,
Sweet for love and strong for strife.
Not all ages intervening
Disenchant them of their meaning.
Heaven and earth shall pass away,
Nevermore such words as they.
Be it near, or be it far,
Better resurrections are
For such words beneath the sun,—
Sweet with an eternal sweetness,
Strong with an eternal strength,
Finished with a full completeness;
Sure from out the pedant's page,
From beneath the wrecks of age,
Sure to waken up at length—
Splendid with their victory won,—
Triumphant from the Lexicon!

‘Stridentia anhelantiaque verba,’ exclaims the Saint in disgust.