University of Virginia Library

NARCISSUS.

Once when the golden day had dawned and died,
Narcissus, lily-cradled by the side
Of silver-waved Cephissus, whose soft sheen
Day-long divides his meadow-margins green,
Was found by woodland nymphs. Him, for the sake
Of his famed river-father—wont to slake
Their thirst beside his fountains—and his own
Exceeding beauty thus ere boyhood shown,
Unto their forest haunts they nimbly took,
And nurtured in a leaf-entangled nook.
And day by day the boy in form and face
Grew fairer, by the myriad waving grace
Of slender arms encircled—grew to be
More comely than the gods did e'er decree
To mortal man before. His beauty was
The beauty of a tall flower in the grass
Where-o'er the golden hours glide one by one,
Steeped in sweet slumbers of the golden sun,
A dream-fed beauty: in those night-black eyes
Lay undiscovered realms of rich surprise,
Whereto the broad and overarching brows
Were like the entrance of a stately house.
And round about the lips a light smile ran
That lingered there and would be gone a span,
But never far. So fair Endymion showed
To lonely-souled Selene when she glowed
All night above him in his land of rest,
Latmos below the sun-illumined West,
And all her thin and silver beauty turned
To burnished gold as o'er his cloud-hung bed she yearned.
Among the mountain gorges far withdrawn,
Unvisited save by the feet of Dawn,
Where lofty lone Parnassus lifts his peak
Supreme in snow, speckless of stain or streak,—
A white and dazzling wonder, to defy
The midnoon splendour of the deep blue sky—
There spreads a shelving lake. The valley there
Lays out its sunny slopes to light and air
Crowned with eternal forest: fir and pine
With silver birch and maple intertwine
Dense-clustered boughs, and companies of beech
Their suppliant red-tipped fingers heavenward reach.
But all about, as if the earth in sport
Ran riot of her riches, every sort
Of flowering shrub and dainty flower is seen
To deck those lawny dells and coverts green.
There crimson-tipped anemone, and white
Lily and asphodel glitter in the light;
Blue fields of hyacinth, spread lower down,
The languid sense in luscious odours drown;
Rose, mountain-rowan and acacia vie
Each with the other to enchant the eye
Of way-worn shepherds; thick-sown are the meads
With purple-petalled saffron; and the reeds
With spears of yellow iris-bloom are set
And modest flowers of blue marsh violet.
This at the lower margin; but the lake
Where swift Cephissus enters it doth take
More gloomy featuring; its flood is pent
Within a black precipitous rock-rent
Of bleak Parnassus. There the livelong day
Behind an angle, weather-scarped and grey,
Secluded in its blue mist-circled halls
A high foam-laden cataract falls and falls;
And from the sunny margin far remote,
Sometimes at eventide when every note
Of strenuous cicala chirping shrill
Is hushed, and loud melodious birds are still,
Across the calm lake-surface wind-unstirred
A low continuous sweet sound is heard—
The music of the silver cataract
In rhythmic pulse and soft repeated tact
Sleepladen; for whoever listens long
To that delicious far undying song
Treads a dream-haunted labyrinthine ground
And swiftly falls into forgetfulness profound.
Thither one noon Narcissus, dream-content,
His wayward slowly wandering footsteps bent.
Of love for him lone nymphs ere this had died:
Their beauty and their breath—together sighed
Upon the breeze for him—ere this had shed
A distant cloud-like lustre round his head;
Who all the while with half-averted look
The pleasant laughter and the dance forsook,
Cared not for winning smile, or wistful eye,
Or swift encounter of fair looks whereby
A wavering heart is won; for him no charm
Had rosy limb, or slender arching arm,
Or passionate device of perplext love,
Of any nymph in woodland, lawn, or grove,
This side of Mount Parnassus. But it seemed
As though some fair forgotten image gleamed,
Haunting the crystal caverns of his mind
In beauty undiminished, undivined.
Then to himself he sang: ‘O pleasant hours
Arching the earth like rainbow after showers
In sweet perpetual round, roam lightly on,
Bring vernal songs, bring summer, bring the sun,
Bring fresh and rosy flowers, all that is fair,
To fill the fragrant kingdoms of the air:
But when with sandals loosed and feet unshod
Ye pace the darkened chambers of your God,
Bring me—delay not—down the heavenly steep
Not troublous Love but sweet and dreamless sleep.’
And through the still hot air his music rang
In bell-like tones, high, plaintive, as he sang,
Which on the waveless lake from shore to shore
Fell like foam-bubbles on a damask floor,
Floating and bounding onward till they died
Upon the distant crag-encircled tide:
Where they awoke an answering echo sweet
Which fluttered back and perished at Narcissus' feet.
For all amid the crags remote from view,
Enfolded in a fairy curtain blue,
Just where the rock 'neath overhanging boughs
Steepfalling to the water's edge allows
No footspace for a goat or fallow deer,
But all its grooves and angles and its sheer
Black shining faces are with dew besprent
Of falling waters in loud tournament,
There is a niche. Hart's-tongue and maidenhair
There hide their frondage from the troubled air;
The slender harebell rimed with dewy flakes
Nods to and fro; and evermore there breaks
Upon its rocky sides a sea of sound
That roars with loud reverberation round.
For like a pearly ocean-moulded shell
Deepwinding inwards is that rockhewn cell,
Wherein all day the listener may hear
The murmurs of the outer world made clear
In ceaseless iteration. Here her home
The maiden Echo made. Her bath the foam
Of unseen waters, and her bed the rock
Raincurtained and fernbraided; for her frock
She wove the changeful iris hues, and set
A silver girdle with an amber fret.
Pale was she: by the dewy mist and air
Made like a water-spirit light and rare;
Pale blue her eyes; her features laughter-lined,
Yet white like one who of the lonely wind
Had made a playmate; very cold her mien
Yet by a sad and distant smile, star-keen,
At times transpierced; her step assured and swift,
As on her task through windswept chasm and rift
She plied white feet; and over all her hair
Hung back in cloud-bejewelled tresses fair.
Unseen of man she dwelt. No mortal eye
Had looked upon her life; yet to descry
Her strange and tameless beauty many a one
Had left the high warm uplands of the Sun,
And passed into those caverns cold as grave,
And perished in the fathomless dark wave.
For all day long with high and mocking note
She teased the merry shepherds when they smote
Their palms together, through them hooting shrill
In jubilant reply from hill to hill.
And when they sang, it was her wanton joy
Unto their words to render answer coy;
Till one at last, from ruddy mien and rude,
Would grow lovesick, and leave his wonted food
Untouched, and plain upon the passing wind,
And pray a shepherd mate his flocks to mind.
Then would the nymph his steps astray beguile,
And hide his eyes from day's returning smile.
This cold fantastic fickle maid that day
Dreambound in unaccustomed slumbers lay
Upon her ferny couch. Her breathing came
And went, quick, fitful, like a flickering flame.
Her face was changed—it seemed her latest freak:
A rose had broke the spell upon her cheek.
And o'er her limbs a wave-like languor swelled
And on her bosom brake, for she beheld
In visionary fancy one unmoved
By all her lures and antics—and she loved.
Beside the far remote lake-marge he stood
And sang; and o'er the level waterflood
His words seemed floating to her single ear—
Through obscure shades and sunlit spaces clear,
And down the dark rocklimits lone and steep—
‘Not troublous love, but sweet and dreamless sleep.’
And from her slumbers swiftly she uprose,
But, ere her waking powers she could dispose,
Old fatal use upon her lips did leap,
In loud and mocking accents she made answer ‘Sleep.’
Then from the cold clear gloom she turned her face
Upward, between those walls—a moment's space—
And saw o'erhead the hot and dazzling sky
Sharp-sundered by the forest-fringes high,
And for that bright unblemished upper land
Longing, and bold because the breezes fanned
Her forehead, from her lonely home she crept,
And out into the sunlight lightly stept;
Where, from a heathery bee-haunted slope,
The valley of her vision and her hope
She viewed with actual eye. Yet stayed not here,
But downwards to the meadows by the mere
Went through the dry sweet grass. But now the Sun
His toilsome heavenward ascent had done,
And pausing for a while upon the height
Flung wide o'er all the earth his arrowy light;
Then westward went, another golden hour
Shining with intense undiminished power.
Hot was the air; no sound the sultry time
Gave but the silvery insistent chime
Of shoreward ripples, though the white lake-face
Showed not of wandering wind or wave a trace.
Betwixt the green and glassy worlds she went—
The rock nymph Echo—on her love intent;
Her feet within the wave-washed fringes wet,
Her face against the sun's full splendour set,
Nor careful, till most suddenly the heat
Shot needles from her shoulders to her feet,
And on her head the sunbeams seemed to beat
Intolerable rhythm. And as from trance
Awaking, to her half-confounded glance
The world appeared to reel in senseless swound,
While o'er her path the awful Sungod frowned
Absolute prohibition. Yet she took
No heeding of his fierce forbidding look,
But disobedient to the high behest
On to her own destruction proudly pressed.
For this fair sprite, whose fit and only home
Had been shade-curtained crags and cooling foam,
In the intense glare wasted all her strength
And thinned into a shadow, till at length
Her form grew bodiless, and she became
White and translucent like a taper flame
Set in the sunlight. So the dew is seen
On summer morns to vanish from the green;
So written characters cast on the fire
Lose substance but not form; so when the lyre
Is softly struck, and all the strings are still,
The sound moves on. So moved her stedfast will.
And by the marshes where the moorhen breeds
Among bulrushes and red-flowering reeds,
And by the sunny overhanging banks
Where all day long fieldmice are full of pranks
And swift kingfishers dart below and pass
Into their tunnelled homes beneath the grass,
She fled swiftfooted; and you might have said
A moonlike glamour on the ground was shed,
Or that a shimmering light breeze, half spent,
The verdure's myriad slender spires had bent:
Till through a belt of lilacs she did peep
And saw Narcissus on a mossy bank asleep.
Then Echo turned away, and in her grief,
Seeing the end too surely, sought relief
In darkness and the shadow of a grove,
Whereto she told her first last only love,
And all night long beneath the flying Moon
Made melancholy plaining. But so soon
As morning came—and with it dawn of hope—
With her distressful fancies did she cope,
And went to seek Narcissus. So six days
She teased him in and out the woodland ways,
And now would scatter roses for his bed,
Relenting, now would mimic all he said,
Saying Echo, Echo, in her lightest tone;
And oft at midnoon, in a hollow stone,
Brought icy water from a crystal well,
Or lilies from some moist and shady dell.
For all he knew her not, but turned aside,
And evermore regarded but the glassy tide.
Then on the seventh day she saw the Fate
Throw wide for her its final gloomy gate;
And turning on itself her life down went
Through all the sharp degrees of pain's descent
To Death: for Anger and great grief had sped
The end of passion, and her heart was dead.
So throwing out her arms upon the gale
She cried unto the Gods with grievous wail,
And cursed the careless lord of her desire,
And said: ‘Let the same unremitting fire
Devour thy heart and mine: for I must die.’
And with a sharp and ominous loud sigh
Backward upon the breezes from the bank
She fled, and into the blue distance sank.
And on Narcissus fell the fair nymph's ban;
For while within the waters he did scan
Some dreamworld wonder, in that lake-born land
Dimly discerning his own image stand,
He knew it not; but deemed that some fair maid
Upon the nether meadow-marge delayed,
And in love-cravings for that unattained
Fanciful beauty, his own beauty waned
And wasted with desire unsatisfied;
Whereof at length himself had surely died,
But that the Gods took pity in that hour
And so transformed him to the fashion of a flower.
And now each vernal season, when the Sun
His vertical high course begins to run,
When midday Zephyrs dream beside the rill,
And the lake from an overhanging hill
Looks like the entrance of another land,
Upon its sunny bank is seen to stand
A fragrant flower whose white and golden eye
Peers at its own pale image mournfully,
And, long ere Philomel forsakes her sighs,
Pines on its slender stem and falls and dies.
And, as the changes of the world go by,
About that land ofttimes is heard a cry
Like thin and bitter laughter, wheresoe'er
Among her lonely crags and caverns bare,
Now bodiless and dwindled to a sound,
Heart-broken Echo mocks the starry night profound.