University of Virginia Library

EGYPTIAN SONNETS

I
COME TO ME!

Stretching supreme to Chaos' utmost skirt,
Darkness and light and bitter marish blaze,
Tumû broke off a sheaf of his own rays,
And plunged them spluttering in dark ponds inert.
Then as one mutilate he felt the hurt
Of his own loneliness, and stood at gaze
Mute, glowing on the interminable haze
Long time with stubborn ardour. Still no spirt,
No ripple! “Come,” he shouted—“Come to me,
Come to me, come!” There was a moving power
Upward; with pressure of a lotus-flower
The waters bickered; her pure leaves blew free,
Wide to his voice, and, over Nilus' streams
Stooping, he drank his spirit's sundered beams.

II
TAFNÛÎT

I am the lion-goddess of the sky,
Tafnûît, created that my god might mate.
“A creature scarcely full alive” men prate:
Most living of all woman souls am I,
Most man! Created new to every sigh
And change of my lord's mood, I meet his great
Passions at crisis, with their rage abate,
Warm in their rich appeasement. Royally
With him I rule; each morning from the East
Receive with him the sun. Ah, do I so?
Say rather, I receive the god's own glow
Of joy in its appearing. Say, I feast
On him and all my pleasure is—of me
Without him there is nothing, fame or sanctuary.

III
INEVITABLE DEATH

In Egypt by the river, we are told,
The gods creep slowly down Time's vale to die;
And we may find their relics by and by
Mummied in cave and rock: their bones are rolled
To silver ore, their flesh becomes pure gold,
Their hair blue-tinctured lapis-lazuli.
The sun himself looks round upon the sky
And leaves it, as a man worn out and old
Fares from the city, carried to his tomb:
Therefore through all the circle of the year
He is beloved. To die, to reappear,
To leave the earth and visit it again,
Moved by the sweetness of its valley bloom,
Is to be ever welcomed among men.

IV
THE MUMMY INVOKES HIS SOUL

Down to me quickly, down! I am such dust,
Baked, pressed together; let my flesh be fanned
With thy fresh breath; come from thy reedy land
Voiceful with birds; divert me, for I lust
To break, to crumble—prick with pores this crust!—
And fall apart, delicious, loosening sand.
Oh, joy, I feel thy breath, I feel thy hand
That searches for my heart, and trembles just
Where once it beat. How light thy touch, thy frame!
Surely thou perchest on the summer trees...
And the garden that we loved? Soul, take thine ease,
I am content, so thou enjoy the same
Sweet terraces and founts, content, for thee,
To burn in this immense torpidity.

V
THE BEAUTY OF GRATITUDE

“How shall my heart be lightened?” Menna, knowing,
Answers, “O king, thy sick heart to refresh,
To twenty maidens I will give a mesh
Of net for raiment, and will set them rowing
Adown the grassy waters of this cool,
Bird-fluttered inlet.” So it comes to pass,
As the king gazes idle from the grass
To the plashing oars and dazzle of the pool,
Voluptuous gladness fills him unawares.
Fair are the virgins: yet a fairer sight
Than those fair limbs, fair breasts, fair shading hair
Is Nebta's face when her new malachite
Drops in the stream and at the king's command
The chief magician lays it in her hand.

ARIADNE

DOMINA

A dream of Hades! “Mother, it befell”—
I must not vex my mother, by my side:
Let her sleep on: the harvest spreadeth wide!
But I will hug my dreams; I love them well;
They come a gift from that great elm in hell
I know the shade of, with so much beside
Grown tender to me in my multiplied,
Exceeding sorrow, inconceivable.
Dear realm that is my home! Oh, to confer
Again with Cerberus, to see him stand,
Turn from his honey-cake, and lick my hand,
Pondering the fresher blood; for it was thus
That the god, passing languid, paused by us,
And on the instant called me Domina.

ALCITHÖE

He cursed me on the instant as he stood
With wreath, with thyrsus, on his lips my name,
A god, a messenger of dew and flame,
With daze and dancing trouble from the wood.
Before I knew, before I understood,
Trembling for love of him, in very shame
To tremble so, I gripped my broidery-frame,
And there fell over me a filmy hood.
The stealthy darkness! I am free of wing
As any bird, and yet I see no light;
No song is in my throat: my doom fulfils
As, in the smothering shades of evening,
I brush against the Mænads flitting white,
And startle the wild orgies on the hills.

MOOD

As God creating did not yet create,
But, quickened in His spirit, moving stood,
And felt the light, and saw that it was good
Before the lesser lights, before the great
Were fashioned, not impatient to relate
The open, clear befalling of His mood,
So dwell I in the Muses' neighbourhood,
And in the infinite soft chaos wait.
More and yet more of sights, of scents that move,
More of that silent joy about the head,
The undisturbed beholding ere the hour,
More of that resting with the dawn outspread,
The assured, the tranquil vagueness of a flower
That Time has never seen the opening of!

LOOKING UP TO THE STARS

Not as the sun that presently must drop,
And in damp night no comfort for the eye;
Not as the moon that climbeth by and by,
Too late for my sad eve: as the full crop
Of stars that, clear or trembling, without stop
Amass in myriad feature on the sky,
Is manifest the love that as I die
Fills all my heaven to the archèd top.
What feats of gods are there in permanence,
Conflicts and reconciliations there,
As in a crystal, moving to the sense!
Glad am I, through these draughts of quiet air,
To breathe such visitings, and, in pale stream,
The crossing and recrossing of a dream.

MIEL

Oft have I seen men musing on the shore
Of their sad fate, cut from Hesperides!
The face I watched to-day was not of these:
Marks of a sudden praise, undreamed before,
Even as stigmata awhile it bore,
Then fell away to musing of its ease,
As when the honey settles from the bees,
Mingling its furze, and thyme, and hellebore
To one bland recollection of the sun.
And I, beholding, felt even such a glow
Shines through these smaller gods that in a row
Are set as guardians of the household shrine—
Nameless and formless, yet as youth divine,
Of whom all life's accomplishing is done.

HYDRANGEAS

What mean these old hydrangeas lingering,
For sake of their old blueness, though they droop?
—Breathing their element from crystal spring
A little shrine of shells? And, if one stoop,
One sees them as the garner of an elf.
Ice-plants fresh-nipt, of bloom too small for seeing!
What stealthy mines, what sporting with itself
Of some delicious and most vibrant being!
Who set, as a dear thief, this branching coral
Dipping its shade? Almost the touch we trace;
Yet with each lovely littering hint we quarrel,
Provoked more lonesome by its recent grace:
And the old blue hydrangeas, ball on ball,
Pattern their vacant flower-heads on the wall.