University of Virginia Library

From the swamp the white mist stealeth,
Wendeth slowly through the grasses,
Like a long lithe snake it circleth
Breathing from its mouth its poison,
Breathing fumes of the malaria.
Up the grassy slope it passeth,
Is a snake no more but changes
To a thin white veil of smoke-drift,
White as when the warm Scirocco
Blows across wet meadows gleaming
In the sudden glare of sunshine.
Thin and white upon the uplands;
Dappled, soft, as windblown swans-down,
In the sudden dips and hollows.

In the hollow where the ruins,
Immemorial ruins, columns,
Prostrate all, with strange devices,
Sculptured 'neath the yellow lichen,
In the hollow where the ruins
Lie as when the earthquake shook them
From their ancient stately beauty
Long ere Rome had gathered slowly
Round the sacred fane of Saturn,
There the grass is tall as wild-rice,
Tall as is the wind-waved bulrush
Rustling by the Tiber-marshes.
Nought is seen around but grasses,
Flower-filled grasses, lizard-haunted,
Musical with many whisperings
And the loud crescendo humming
Of the wild-bees coming, going,
And the myriad things that flitter,
Breathe, and gleam, and swift evanish
Mid these tortuous dim savannahs,
These gigantic grass-stem forests.
Nought above, but the blue hollow
With its infinite depths of azure.
Nought to meet the wandering vision
But the ruins mid the grasses,
But the windied grasses swaying
Up and billowing o'er the margins
Of the lone mist-haunted hollow,
But the wide deep dome of purple,
Cloudless, speckless, save when darkling
For a moment drifts a shadow
Far in the aerial distance,
Though no sound is borne earthward
Of the scream of that wild eagle
Whirling from his Volscian eyrie.

Where the green gloom of the grasses
Turns at noon to amber dayshine,
There the fallen ruins are covered
With a wilderness of roses:
Roses, roses, in such masses
That the fangless snakes which wander
Deep within their fragrant coverts
Sink and rise and glide and vanish
As though swimming in sweet waters
Where each wavelet curdles rosily
To a blossoming bud or floateth
Calmly as a smooth soft rose-leaf.
Oh, the wilderness of roses
Shrouding all the fallen columns,
All the mossy lichened marbles:
Crimson depths of fluctuant sweetness,
Carmine, pink, some wanly yellow
As young lime-leaves in the dawnlight,
Some as ivory of India
Deftly wrought by patient fingers
In the dim mysterious ages;
Others wan as surf in starlight,
Dusky white as coral garnered
In the deeps where light a dream is,
Ruffling the swart glooms of Ocean:
But damask most, or crimson, blood-red,
Flushed as wine-stained, or as dawn-clouds.
Mass on mass of tangled roses,
Blossom-flames, or multitudinous
Plumes of those lost birds of Eden
Which, as in long roseate vapours,
With a myriad wings waft upward
Each new morn, and with the sunrise
Earthward sweep on glowing pinions,
Till they wheel and fade and vanish
On their endless quest of Eden.
One vast crimson flood of roses,
Whence a carven stone or column
Reareth sometimes as a boulder
Swart upborne o'er sunset-waters.
Oh the fragrance when the south-wind,
When the languorous Scirocco
Breathes with tepid breath upon them,
And with idle feet strays lightly
O'er and o'er their billowy sweetness.
Nought but this flushed sea of roses,
And the green gloom of the grasses
Shrouding the forgotten ruins
In the lone mist-haunted hollow,
Lost, unseen, but domed in splendour
By the depths of purple azure.

Lo, amidst the roses' tangle
What white sunlit beauty shineth?
Some stone goddess, nymph, or naiad,
Carven in the bygone ages,
Wan as ivory now, and glowing
With the multitudinous breaths of sunlight?
Nay, no marble this that gleameth
Ivory-white among the roses,
For the naked flesh moves gently
With the breath that rising, falling,
Scarcely stirs the fluttered rose-leaves.
O wild mountain-girl, whom never
Lover yet has won with passion,
But whose arms have claspt the hill-wind,
But whose swelling breast has quivered
'Neath the soft south-wind's caresses,
Whose white limbs have felt the kisses
Of the wandering wind, thy lover:
O wild mountain-girl, sleep ever,
Naked there in all thy beauty
Mid the sea of clustering roses,
Lost within the green-glooms tender
Of the wind-swayed desert-grasses.
Dark thy cloud of hair about thee,
Dark thy shadowy eyes that dream
Far into the azure distance:
White thy limbs as sunlit ivory,
With stray roseleaves scattered o'er them,
With thy sea of roses round thee.
What strange dreams are thine, O Goddess—
Goddess, surely, for beyond thee
Sways a cloud of fluttering sparrows:
Ah, is it thou—nay, never goddess
Now to mortal man discloseth
That serene immortal beauty,
Which is as a draught of rapture
Fraught with bitterness and sorrow:
I have tasted, quaffed it, Goddess,
For the soul can know and see thee,
For the soul can woo and win thee,
Thee, even thee, O Beautiful!
I have drunk its perilous rapture,
Knowing all have quaffed and feared not,
And have known the bitter savour:
Yet, would drink again, O Goddess!

Nay, no goddess here, but only,
Naked, dreaming in the sunshine,
Ivory-white among the rose-leaves,
With her dark hair thrown about her
Like the dusk about the morning,
Only a wild mountain-girl,
Filled with secret springs of passion,
Immemorial seeds of passion
Wrought at last through generations
In this perfect flower of beauty
To a strange unspeakable longing.
In a blaze of heat the sunlight,
Fierce with torrid fires of Junetide,
Beats upon her white limbs gleaming
In the sunlit flames of roses:
But she moves not, though a quiver
Ofttimes passes like a tremor
Shimmering through the furthest eastward
Ere the stars grow suddenly paler.

O wild mountain-girl, sleep ever,
Naked there in all thy beauty
Mid the sea of clustering roses:
Deep within thy sea of roses
Sink to slumber, sweeter, deeper,
Where no waking is, but dreams are
Changed to roses that shall hide thee,
That shall hide thee and enshroud thee
There within thy grassy hollow:
Where the winds alone shall call thee,
And the marish-mist shall wander
Like a ghost between the grasses,
In among the buried columns
Lost within thy ruin of roses.