Lyrical Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Ηρι μεν αι τε Κυδωνιαι μαλιδες αρδομεναι ροαν εκ ποταμων, ινα παρθενων κηπος ακηρατος, αι τ' οινανθιδες αυξομεναι σκιεροισιν υφ' ερνεσιν οιναρεοις θαλεθοισιν, εμοι δ' Ερος ουδεμιαν κατακοιτος ωραν----

This quotation is from one of the too-scanty fragments in which the poetry of Ibycus of Rhegium has reached us. That on the reverse of the title is from a Paean by Bacchylides.

I THE VOYAGE

White star of the green and distance-hazy coast,
And is it Limnocréné that I view?
Before this rediscovery of the lost
Scarce can I tell if truth herself be true:—
O glad prophetic warmth that cheers the brain,
Deceive me not again;
But let this oracle be without alloy,

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Void of some second sense, some heart of pain;
In boyhood's land to be once more a boy,
Nor joy by her retreating footsteps own,
This, Hope, I ask alone!
O wild west wind that sigh'st to touch the bay,
O cloven furrow of the volant bark,
O faithful rudder love-straight to the mark,
Stretch all your speed and close this long delay:—
—For all ye can and more
My spirit leaps on Leuconnese before—
The land I seem'd to quit, yet there alway:
From Cleora to Cleora
Is the limit of my way.

I dwelt in exile long and far from Thee:
I sought a solace fitted for my need:
‘'Twas no peculiar curse was laid on me;
Some Providence that wills the heart should bleed.
Patient submissiveness meet ransom bears,
Pure wisdom comes thro' tears.
The close makes all things clear to waiting eyes,
Fix'd on that crown beyond the mist of years:
Enough! Man may not read the mysteries:

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‘Submit; nor waste thyself on idle grief,
‘For Action is relief.’
—O wild west wind, O truer-hearted breeze,
Is there no yearning in thy length of sighs?
Can holy Nature her own lore despise,
Yielding her aims before such sophistries?
Teach me to prize one so;
Then bid me turn aside the nearing prow
From what I seem'd to quit, yet there alway:—
From Cleora to Cleora
Is the limit of my way.

And I have drunk experience to the lees,
Have waked vain nights with mindful solitude,
Fretting the days on action's vanities,
And call'd Forgetfulness my final good:
From Friendship's hand Lethaean goblets quaff'd,
And laugh'd with those that laugh'd.
I ask'd the heart resign'd and full submission,
The flower of Patience on Love's tomb engraff'd;
But sorrow from despair takes no remission:
Patience, where Love in trance unconscious breathes,
Amaranthine garlands wreathes.

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And as when summer's hour and Enna bloom
Enfranchised from dim Hell Proserpine springs,
So love shakes free the cerement-crumpled wings,
Knowing afar Cleora's voice:—I come—
I come to claim thee now,
Striking the conscious shore with trembling prow—
The shore I seem'd to quit, yet there alway:—
From Cleora to Cleora
Is the limit of my way.

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II A MEETING

What is this silence when I meet thee, Dear,
And after such delay?
Is soul to soul for words too nearly near;
Or are we still apart;
Cleora, say?

The tender hand my boyhood press'd I take,
That thro' some fifteen years
Its young proportion keeps: I cannot speak:
But gaze on that dear pledge
Time more endears.

Ah Love—And has love grown with growing years?
In that dumb moment's show
The question of a life with many fears
Perusing glances ask:
And better so.

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There are no mortal words for such request:
Nor could I, Darling, more
Than by the voiceless pleading of the breast,
By the heart's crimson tears,
Thy pity implore:

By all that changeless love to promise thee
For more than life may dare:
By all the burden thou hast laid on me,
Having no other hope
But this despair:—

Not so, the scornful world and custom say:
Submit: be blithe as we.
I take the tenour of the common day:
To common themes the tongue
Again is free.

But ever and anon some transient tone,
Some glance at where thou art—
And mid the jocund throng I stand alone,
And in my all the world
May claim no part.

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How will it be, I ask'd me as I came,
With her I left so fair?
—The music of thy beauty is the same;
'Tis the bright voice of yore
Heard on the stair.

Dearest: And hast no little word for ease:
No hint of kindlier strain?
And owns the tender heart no tenderness:
Canst thus endure to give
Painless, such pain?

Ah Child—, ah dearer than aught else on earth,
So far off and so near:—
Spare him a little who so knows thy worth,
But finds no words to say
How thou art dear.

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III ANTICIPATIONS

Sweet Spring, blind quiverings in the breast,
And vague emotions fired along the blood;—
I know the secret fount of this unrest,
This vital vernal flood.

Deep in her Demiurgic gloom
Nature, that heeds not oft her children's moan,
From th' alchemic and life-encradling tomb
Feels sometimes for her own.

She bids the balmier hours return,
And the glad Zephyr imps his crumpled wing;
The rubies of her crown dilating burn
When she proclaims it Spring.

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She in Cleora's breast, her child,
The living ruby swells with vital fire;
Fluttering the gentle heart with visions wild
And unexplain'd desire.

Me also, Mother, yet again
By thine inspiring to new hope beguiled,—
By this rewaking of the sleepless pain,
Compassionate thy child!

Sweet Spring, responsive to my breast,
Hope's quicken'd tide that fires along the blood,
Bring the dear kiss of peace for this unrest
And sympathetic flood.

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IV INVOCATION

Low on thy suppliants,
Us, even us,
Bend thy pure eyelids,
Lady of Amathus.

Zeus in white majesty
Lords it on high;
Pallas with wisdom
Arches the sky.

Phoebus each morning
Climbs to his throne;
Nightly fair Artemis
Walketh alone.

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Yet to thy suppliants,
Us, even us,
Turn thee and smile,
Lady of Amathus!

On the great Presences
Idly we call:
Thou, Aphrodité,
Greater than all.

Come with the sweetness
Love knoweth well,
All thine, only thine,
Utter, ineffable.

Smile on thy suppliants,
Us, even us;
Smile as of yore,
Lady of Amathus!

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V A SUPPLICATION

As a child on mother's face
Looks a longing lingering gaze;
He has ask'd a boon and knows not
If she gives or if bestows not:
So I to Thee: so my soul hangs on thine,
Waiting thy whisper and the doom of life:
Life in one word,
Cleora mine.

As sweet lilies to the blue,
Downcast 'neath Aurora's dew,
When Apollo bids, lift up
Tears within each timid cup:
So I to thee when doubt one moment flies,
Uplift the glance that trembles as it dwells;
Thy face my Heaven;
God in thine eyes.

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And as mariners that view
Typho's dark wing shroud the blue,
Silent thro' the rifted veil
Bid the gracious azure hail;
So where thy crystal casement-quarrels gleam
The voiceless lips a prayerful suppliance send;
Bidding my love
Wake in thy dream.

In his day of sore distress,
Child, thy child, Cleora, bless:
Heaven mine, thro' clouded skies
Rain the grace of starry eyes.
Life's first last hope to thee I thus consign,
Summ'd in one venture, bosom'd in one word;
One word sigh-short,—
Cleora mine.

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VI UNREST

In strange unrest from room to room I glide:
A spell is on me: I must find her now:
I have a word to speak, that on my brow
Is writ in lines of flame,
And to all else what I for her would hide
Betrays my shame.

My moody silence wrong'd her yester-eve:
Methought for pride the gift she so refused
Her young confuséd blush I more confused
With words of foolish haste
My penitence my heart's-ease should receive
Ere day be past.

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In Love's own inmost bower does she dream?
Or is her footstep on the walnut stair?
I track the sounds: I know the passionate air,
The song of yesternight,
‘Bells in the valley, flowers by the stream’:
They guide me right:—

Through rushen-rustling hall I follow, follow,
Through lucent-paved and pillar'd corridor,
By grape-heap'd altar-niche and vine-hung door,
And lawnward 'neath the glade:
Where with one high lament and laughter hollow
Those accents fade.

O balmy dusk and crown'd with Love's own star!
I see the star: I cannot see my Love:
I cry Repentance to the ringing grove:
‘Unheard she scorns thy cry;
‘Love's quick ear to Love's footstep beats from far’
The Nymphs reply.

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I turn from those drear omens of mistrust:
A casement flashes on the palace-wall:
I hear her sliding lattice softly fall:
Love's star I see no more:
The cloud comes weaving o'er the sky with gust
And scornful roar.

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VII AT MIDNIGHT

I dare not bid Time speed his pace:
I dare not bid him linger:
Fate lifts the scale and holds my life
Poised on her even finger.

—Why, my heart, this idle beating?
Fate is deaf to thine entreating:
Time holds on his equal way:
Calm thee, calm thee, till the day.

I dare not bid the Dawn awake:
I know not what she bears me:
My all is in her rosy hands:
In providence she spares me.

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—Yet O Name of hope, Aurora!
By my sunny-hair'd Cleora,
By thyself I thee implore
Dawn on such suspense no more

I dare not watch the paling Night,
Or Dawn's advances number:
My life is in my Darling hid,
And slumbers with her slumber.

—Yet as midnight music streaming
Hear Love's voice within thy dreaming.
Hear my heart within thy heart;
‘All I am for life thou art.’

I dare not bid thee wake, my fate
By those fair lips disclosing:
Thy utter sweetness folds me round,
In Love's own heart reposing.

—Why, my heart, then, why this beating?
Sleep bars Love to thine entreating:
Night fulfils her long delay:
Wait the promise and the Day.

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VIII VOX CLAMANTIS

When that long yew-tree shade
That grows toward each man from his falling sun
Shall touch me into darkness, undismay'd,
Rejoiced my sands are run:

Come then, Cleora, come,
Come unregretful in thy prime of May,
Relentless of the havoc and the doom
Thou on my life didst lay.

And let thy rosy feet
Tread the rare spike-grass o'er a new-heap'd mound,
And look Truth face to face, and say ‘'Tis meet
That he such rest hath found.

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‘There was no other choice.
His soul's desire for life I might not yield,
Nor set thine own to fraudful smiles and voice
When the heart's lips were seal'd.

‘I may not now deplore
The death-dried fountain of wan wasted tears;
The feet that yet would try the perilous shore,
The chase of fruitless years.

‘Ah, not unwarn'd he strove!
All wiser whisperings hush'd, all help repell'd:
What moment's hope was giv'n, what lure to love?
What anodyne withheld?

‘It could not but be so.
The might of Gods contends with Fate in vain:
Rest, hidden dust, assoil'd from earthly woe,
And that forgotten pain.’

Then if, as sages say,
The soul, resolved into some vaster life,
Heeds not what passes o'er its moulder'd clay,
A-rest from hope and strife:

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If these dark powers that bind
Our individual selves to nerve and vein,
This fond remembrance, this fore-glancing mind
O'er-running present pain:

If it be Death untwines
This thread of consciousness the Genius spun,
And as the fainting flower on earth declines
The All resume the One:—

O Love, I pray thy feet
May stir my dust to fresh access of pain!
My soul recorporate in the sindon-sheet
Its ancient self regain:

And from that gloom below
Some voice be felt, some last appealing plea:
‘Better to feel the gnawing worm, as now,
Than not remember thee.’

Till some reluctant sigh,
Some love of love, that holds her yet so dear,
Dim the blue wonder of Cleora's eye,
And bless me with a tear.

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IX LAST PRAYER

And when returning from the place of death
With something from my grave reflected on thee,
Thy little Sister, laughing thro' lost breath,
Tells thee some baby jest, some young surprise,
Let not that memory quit all hold upon thee,
But smile with quiet eyes:

And touch the happy head, and turn aside
To some white shrine, and pray God's peace may find me:
That in heaven's dew Lethaean drops may glide
And pierce the sod and touch th' unrestful head:
Ending the life-long pangs thou hast assign'd me,
Thy lover midst the dead.

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The prayer I cannot pray—no more to be;
Thro' mute aeonian glooms no more adore her:—
Then take these foolish rhymes, faint hints of thee,
And read them o'er and say, ‘'Twas his request:—
‘Cleora's self has barr'd him from Cleora,
‘And so has wrought him rest.’

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X FAREWELL

Call her once more, once more,
Cleora! Cleora!
The rein'd horse darkens the palace door:
There is yet one prayer unheard
One little word:
Farewell, Cleora.

I have sought her in vain the day
Thro' chamber and garden:
A thousand sighs for utterance pray,
And the roses know them well
But they may not tell
The tale to Cleora.

And the mounting rooks to the sky
The farewell are telling:

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And the West is red at the passionate cry
But I must whisper it low
Ere yet I go,—
Farewell to Cleora.

So, little one, call her once more,
Call Sister Cleora:
And run to the horse by the garden door
And stroke him with song and shout;
Whilst I weep out
My soul to Cleora.

There is a hand in my hand:
A gaze on my gazing:
A something passes as there we stand:
But no one word can we say:
Must we for aye
Part, and so, Cleora?

A thousand thoughts thro' the breast
Run riot and terror:

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A thousand sum them in one request:
One word for Love ere I go:
But 'tis not so,
Not so, Cleora.

A hand in my hand; an eye
Too tender in sadness:
The silence of Love that could not die
Yet knows thou wilt ne'er be mine:—
Yet ever thine
For ever, Cleora!

Whilst even crimsons the west
And homeward birds clamour:
Whilst I lie in that long unrest
And dream in the grave of thee
—So must it be,
Ever, Cleora.

And West is one ruby red,
And homeward birds clamour:

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And the dying sun enhaloes thy head:
And O could the thought of thee
Having been, not be,
For ever, Cleora!

—We met in silence: and o'er
Our parting was silence.
Call her no more, no more:—
I have no words can say
For aye, for aye
Farewell, Cleora.