Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

And starless track Time's footsteps; strongest things
Still crumbling back into the caverned past.
But thou, the earliest legend wrought in stone,
The rock-bound riddle of an infant world,
Within that terrible darkness standest still,
Questioning now as then.
I shut my ears to this day's cares, and hear,
Vaguely across the centuries, the clang
Of Coptic hammers round thy half freed limbs:
Slaves with their whip-armed masters see I there;
Thousands like ants; and priests, with noiseless feet,
Passing around them with a serpent-coil;
And kings in crowned hoods, with great sceptres borne
Before them;—red men, and brown-skinned, and swart,
From Nubia or the Isles: what sad resolve,
What fear or inspiration or despair,
Drive on those hordes that know not what they do?

II

Oracular, impassive, open-eyed,—
Open-eyed without vision; answerless,
Yet questioning for life or death, as hath
In later days been fabled,—round thy rest
The scarabee, the snake, the circle-winged,
And other symbols dark were as thy food,

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Prepared for thee with cruelest rites and oaths
Of secresy; innumerable gods
Made life about thee slave to death, seared up
Unchangeably, and in the grave wound in
With undivulged negations of all hopes:
So that the dead could only render back
The sense of these dim-shadowed myths and creeds,
That thou wert set to guard. Perhaps the bones
Of Cheops in his firmest of all tombs
Shook to disclose thy password from the dust
And free man's heart by knowing he cannot know,—
Shook when the priests' slow steps passed evermore
Bearing another Pharaoh home,
With baseless rites and fantasies of faiths,
Devised like clashing symbols and loud drums
To drown the victim's shrieks.
And did not Cleopatra's eager blood
Throb at the thought of thee,
While her wide purple flaunted in the sun,
And the white smoke of her fine perfumes spread
From Cidnus to the unknown waste where now
Ships pass uniting hemispheres by trade?
And yet, may be, she knew, because a queen,
The riddle of thy birth and of thy watch
Before the temple door. Her feverish brain
Left her no heart except for Anthony.
And then, as now,
The winged seeds of autumn died amidst

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The whirling sand-waste. Not beneath thy shade
The sower walked. Joy fled thee, and desire
Passed thee and knelt upon the marble floor:
And still the passionate heart believes, and thou,—
Thou sittest voiceless, without priest or prayer,
As if thou wert self-born.

III

And yet to whom, O Sphinx!
Hast thou not ministered, and dost thou not,
If we interpret rightly those blank eyes?
Beside the Isis-gates, the gates of stone,
Have blood-red heroes and the sons of gods
Uncrowned to thee. Around thy great smooth feet
The hands of wandering Homer may have groped
In his old blindness, while his eloquent lips
Smiled gravely saturnine, as sad high thoughts
Lightened across the hill-tops of his soul.
The lyre of Hermes may have rung to thee,
Before Dodona's leaves shook prophecies
On slumbering votaries; ere the white shafts rose
Fluted on Delphi, or Athenian streets
Had heard the voice of Socrates, nor yet
Was there a Calvary in all the world.

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IV

The beacon-fire from Pharos shines to guide
The beaked triremes with Sidon's wares
And wine from Chios, and the Samian earth
Transformed to gold by potters' artful hands:
A while it shines and then the ships and wares
Are changed: anon the stars are left again
The only watchers. Temples and their shrines
Before the Faith that brooks no rivals fall,
And from the strife the conquering Christian shouts
Against the demons, and the cenobite
Hurries half naked by,
Smiting thee with his crutch and palsied hand.
In the far Thebaid's hermit-warren, weave
Thy straws, blest cenobite! for thou hast seen
Bread brought to thee by ravens from heaven's board,—
Souls carried upwards upon angels' wings;
And, like the red edge of averted thunder,
Thou hast seen all the demons fall sheer down.
Heaven waits for thee; thy life throbs up in prayer,
Shedding joy-tears into the passion-cup;
For these old wickednesses passed away—
Alas! and he too has now passed the same—
And through the deepening sand about thy flanks
Even thou, before the face of heaven,
Appealeth for like burial with thy kin.

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V

Crossing the dusky stream
On the chance stepping-stones of time,
Descending the uneven stairs of myths
Into our nature's cavern-gloom,
Nigh breathless we become,
As if the blood fled backward in the veins;
And when we turn again
Into the even sunlight of to-day,
The interests of the present seem no more
Than fool's-play, wind in trees, an even-song;
And all our dear wise generation shrinks
Into small grasshoppers, or clamouring storks
That build frail nests on roofs of kingless towns,
Uncertain as storm-scattered clouds, or leaves
Heaped up as day shrinks coldly in.
Yet art thou not, O Sphinx!
The mere child's bauble that the man disowns
With loftier knowledge, weightier cares?
Ah, no; for evermore
The question comes again
Which nature cannot answer, but which thou,
Watcher by temple-doors,
Thou mightest have solved to entering worshippers,
Making them turn away,
Earthward, not starward, searching for their home.

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Inward and not down beyond the tomb,
Nor over Styx for fairer days than ours;
For night is certain on the further shore.
Watch then, O Sphinx! watch on,
Before the temple doors of all the gods.