University of Virginia Library

POETIC DRAMAS

THE FIRE-BRINGER

The Fire-Bringer is intended as the first member of a trilogy on the Promethean theme, of which The Masque of Judgment is the second member; but the connection between the present poem and the one which follows it in the dramatic sequence is informal, and the action of each is complete in itself.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

• Prometheus
• Pandora
• Deukalion
• Pyrrha
• Æolus
• Lykophon
• Alcyone
• Rhodope
• The Stone Men
• The Earth Women
• A Priest of Zeus
• Various persons, survivors of Deukalion's flood.

ACT I

Darkness covers the scene. Faintly discernible, a mountain slope, backed by low cliffs, and beyond these the upper stretches of the mountain. In the cliffs a small cave, and before the mouth of the cave a rude altar or earth. Deukalion and Pyrrha are seated against the cliff; Æolus lies on his face at their feet.
Deukalion.
Thou hast slept long.

Pyrrha.
I saw a burning lamp
That passed between the levret and the dove
On Zeus's altar, and a smoke went up.

Deukalion.
Dreams: we are old. The green heart and the sear
He feeds with dreams; having some purpose in it,
Or else His idleness.

Pyrrha.
No lamp was here?
No fire, no light?

Deukalion.
Some fire-sparks in the eyes
Of dull bewildered beasts that came to gaze,
And dully moved again into the mist.
They have forgot their natures, even as we,
And those who tremble yonder on the heights
For fear the ebbing deep should mount again,
Breathing this darkness have forgot ourselves,
Our natures, and the motions of our souls.

Pyrrha.
Was not the Titan here? Seemed as he stood,
Behind him dawn, and in his lifted hand—

Deukalion.
He came, in darkness.

Pyrrha.
What word should he bring?

Deukalion.
I feigned to sleep. I had no heart for speech.

Pyrrha.
What did he, being with us?

Deukalion.
Stood awhile
Watching thy slumber; touched the sleeping head
Of Æolus; gazed upward to the heights;
Then vanished down the slope: and far below
Pandora sang.

Pyrrha.
Again?—

Deukalion.
I say below
I heard her once, and once upon the peaks.
A little after, thunder tore the sky,
And 't was as if, far off, unearthly steeds
And cloudy chariots plunged across the dark.
Hush fell; and, wailing like a broken bird,
I heard her dropping down from rock to rock.
Then for an endless season sat she here,
Her head between her knees, and all her hair
Spread like a night-pool in the autumn woods.

Pause.
Pyrrha.
Since the loosed raven flew, nor came again,
And since the black wind ceasing cast us here,
How long should the time be?

Deukalion.
A week, a month,
Measureless years, some moments. Time is dead,
Drowned in the waste of waters; or it lies
Somewhere abolished in the primal mud,
Caught in the rings of Python, whom at dusk
Of that last day, peering in terror forth
Before we shut the windows of our boat,
We heard hiss from the north and from the south,
And from the east and west, and saw him lay
His circles round the frothy rim of the world;
Or fled above the dark, Time softly there
Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods.

Pyrrha.
Think'st thou the gods laugh, now the colored world
They sought to when the spring was on the hills,
And had their stolen loves here, lies snuffed out,
A reeking lamp?

Deukalion.
Also therefore they laugh:
And therefore also do we bow us down
In fear and worship.

Pyrrha.
Aye, so.—What sayest thou?

Deukalion.
I say supernal laughter and smooth days
Fill up Heaven's golden room. For that the earth
Hath her dim sorrow and her shrouded face,
Should the gods grieve?

Pyrrha.
Husband, these breasts are dry
That fed our many sons; that head of thine
Is hoar with majesty of years and rule;
Much have I learned of thee and stored at heart
Concerning gods and men, the elder age
Of golden peace, the silver time between,
When lust and strife began to gnaw the world,
And these wild latter days. In the ark also,
Crouching in darkness, and upon this mount
Of weary darkness, hast thou held a torch
To light my mind to patience of these woes
Through understanding. Yet, behold, O king,
I understand not! Wherefore hath great Zeus,
Thy likeness in the heavens, bound like thee
To shepherd his wide people, sent his floods
To whelm them up, shut from the remnant clans
Sun, moon, and stars; and for a final curse
Drawn from the flints and dry boughs of the pine
The seed of divine fire,—yea, from our blood,
Yea, from the secret places of our frames
Sucked up the fire of passion and of will,
And left us here by the desolate black ebb
To rot and crumble with the crumbling world?
Wherefore is this, O king?

Deukalion.
Thyself hast said.

Pyrrha.
Yet know not.—Heavy of thought! Make me to know.

Deukalion.
Because these latter days are full of pride
And lust and wrangling; because his skies were vexed
With the might of rearing horses, and the wheels
Of chariots, and the young men blowing horns
Against his citadel; because the south
In all its chambers laughed a grievous red
Out of the vineyards of its wantonness;
Because our fitful pulses, when they fell,
Sang grief, division, terror, shame, and loss,
Troubling that harmony which is the breath
Of the gods' nostrils, yea the delicate tune
To which they pace their souls, and act with joy
Their several ministries.

Pyrrha.
Why then so long
Do these flat slugs, that once were statured men,
Cling to the oozy earth-rind He would cleanse
For some new perfect race? Why, when thou heard'st
Prometheus whisper thee his fearful news
That evening by the farm-gate, did'st thou grant
No sleep to slave or free, till from the hills
The mighty pines were dragged, the hull-beams laid,
The roof-tree raised, the doors and windows set,
And through the muttering thunder all thy house
Led in to safety? When the holy fire,
Brought by thine own hands from the hearth, went out,
Why did'st thou bare thy white head to the storm
To fetch another brand, and, finding none,
Come forth with lamentation? Why were seen,
Through all thy mountain kingdom, runners stripped,
And panted words, and flying to the peaks?
Thou answerest not; but leaning darkly down
Over the head of little Æolus,
Fingerest a tarnished lock from out the dust!
Speak, father! Through this numbing gloom, this death,
This veil of years, thy silence pierceth me.

Deukalion.
I try to feel again the thing I felt,
But cannot, so the sinews of my soul
Are loosened. Yet 't was for this radiant head
That all was done defiantly toward God.
His father Hellen and our other sons
Were wandering, or had poured their lifeblood out
In obscure battle. This alone was left,
This little flower of Greece, for whom I dreamed
Kingdoms and glories, plaudits, trophies, palms,
And sound of deathless lyres across the world.
For his sake, fumbling in the gloom I built
This altar, and have groped about the rocks
For live thing worthy sacrifice; have lain
In bush and hollow till some dreaming bird
Or sleep-besotted beast fell to my hands,
And rent the same, and offered it with groans
Upon the smokeless altar.

Pyrrha.
Once He heard,
Thou knowest.

Deukalion.
I know. We will not think thereon!

Pyrrha.
The unwrought shapes, the unmoulded attitudes!
The tongues of earth, the stony craving eyes!

Deukalion.
Unto the husband was the wife's desire
No longer, nor the husband's to the wife.
The young maid lay undreamed on by the boy.
The little life that was, was sinking fast
Or sunk beyond recall. God's doubtful voice
Out of the wind of the oak was fair to hear,
Seeming to promise store of goodly men,
And women vessels for the flowing life
To enter and be spilled not. There was hope.
Prometheus said not nay. Beside the verge
Of the spent flood did we not see him stoop,
Kneading the clay in with the roilèd foam,
Breathing and breathing with his fiery breath,
Then cry upon his work, and scattering it
Rise up in haste and wrath? Yet here was hope!

Pyrrha.
Yea, as I flung the clods, and stooped and flung,
I dared not look behind, for hope; and thou,
Stooping and flinging the allotted stones,
Seemed clothed in prime of years, foreseeing earth
With a big breed replenished; till on a sudden
Terribly out of the gloom the Titan cried;
Then we, ceasing, beheld, and fled in fear.

Deukalion.
Would they might sit as now, removed apart,
Brooding upon the ground; nor come again
With vague slow motion up the shrouded slope,
Filling the mist with formless utterance,
As craving to be born! My men of stone
In dreams appal me with their lifted hands
Of threat and supplication, and by thee
Stand the earth-women pleading.

Pyrrha.
Ere I slept
I was anhungered. Searching for sweet roots
I crawled and groped my way, till I was come
Unto a brackish water cupped and held
From that same sea whereof the gurge but then
Lessened its roar far down the craggèd dark.
There by the pool they sat, with faces lift
And brows of harsh attention; in their midst
Pandora bowed, and sang a doubtful song,
Its meaning faint or none, but mingled up
Of all that nests and housekeeps in the heart,
Or puts out in lone passion toward the vast
And cannot choose but go.

Deukalion.
In mockery sent,
In mercy be she taken, or on the hills
Drinking this darkness, wither and be changed
To such as we are!

Pyrrha.
Thinkest thou that Zeus
In anger made her thus?

Deukalion.
'T will be so. When she came
Our minds were dim and fearful.

Pyrrha.
Very dim,
And blurred with fearful dream; but—By the boat
We crouched, and hearkened if the water still
Drew downward, or was crawling up again
To seize us unaware; the mist was full
Of beasts and men in wretched fellowship;
Then suddenly a breath like morning blew;
I saw as 't were a shadowy sun and moon
Go up the blinded sky; far off yet near
I heard Prometheus speaking, and her voice
In low and happy answer.

Deukalion.
He would catch
The hurlèd thunder-bolt, and forge from it
A reaper's hook; the vials of white wrath
He spills to make a wine-cup for a feast;
Curses he knows not from the gifts of love;
And in the shadow of this death, even here,
As low as from her pitch of pride earth's fallen,
He will be plotting that whereby to climb
And lift us high above the peaks of God
One dizzy instant, ere we fall indeed
And he with us forever!

Pandora.
Sings, below.
Along the earth and up the sky
The Fowler spreads his net:
O soul, what pinions wild and shy
Are on thy shoulders set?
What wings of longing undeterred
Are native to thee, spirit bird?

Pyrrha.
Hearken, is 't not
Her song again? Far down among the vales
Did'st hear it? Faint and far, but—Hearken still!

Pandora.
Sings.
What sky is thine behind the sky,
For refuge and for ecstasy?
Of all thy heavens of clear delight
Why is each heaven twain,
O soul! that when the lure is cast
Before thy heedless flight,
And thou art snared and taken fast
Within one sky of light,
Behold, the net is empty, the cast is vain,
And from thy circling in the other sky the lyric laughters rain!

Deukalion.
Through the gorge there—a shadow—Pyrrha, look!
Over the torrent bed and up the slope
Something comes on, in stature more than man,
And swifter.

Pyrrha.
O swift-comer, it is thou!
None other, thou, wind-ranger, bringer-in!
Child, be awake! Prometheus!

Prometheus.
Entering, lifts Pyrrha.
Do not so;
These hands come poor; these feet bring nothing back.

Pyrrha.
Thy hands come filled with thee, thy feet from thence
Have brought thee hither; it is gifts enough.

Deukalion.
Is there no hope?

Pyrrha.
Speak! speak! Through this dark cloud
The eyes of Zeus's eagle cannot pierce
Or any listener heed. Have we a hope?

Prometheus.
From earth and all this lower realm of air
The fire is gone.

Pyrrha.
Thy searchings!—Giveth ease
If but to hear thy voice.

Prometheus.
Seats himself beside the cliff.
I clambered down
Old earthquake-cloven rifts and monstrous chasms
Where long ago the stripling Titans peered
At play and dared not venture,—found me out
Flint-stones so buried in disastrous rock
I thought the Darkener sure had passed them by;
But not a spark lived in them. Past the walls
Rhipean, and the Arimaspian caves,
I sought the far hyperborean day,
But not a banner of their rustling light
Flapped through the sagging sky, nor did the Fates
Once fling their gleaming shuttles east or west.
By Indian Nysa and the Edonian fount
Of Hæmus long I lurked, in hope to find
Young Dionysus as he raced along
And wrest his pine-torch from him, or to snare
Some god-distracted dancing ægipan,
And from his garland crush a wine of fire
To light the passion of the world again
And fill man's veins with music; but there went
A voice of sighing through the ghostly woods,
And up the mountain pastures in the mist
Desolate creatures sorrowed for the god.
Across the quenched Ægean, where of old
The shining islands sang their stasimon,
Forever chorusing great hymns of light
Round Delos, through the driving dark I steered
To seek Hephæstos on his Lemnian mount;
But found him not. His porches were o'erthrown,
His altar out, and round his faded peak
The toilèd Cyclops, bowing huge and dim,
Uncouthly mourned. ...
He starts up, and gazes toward the mountain-top.
Soon will the smouldering life
Cease even to smoulder! I must forth again.
But where? But where?

Pause.
Deukalion.
Where suppliants still must go,
But with the act of suppliance, and the mind.
Not stiff and rebel brows, not daring deeds
Be of availment, but to clasp the knees
And touch the beard of Zeus. Within his house
Still lives the sacred fire. 'T is there to have,
If one by sacrifice and rites full-brought
Could find the way.

Prometheus.
Laughs.
'T is there to have; thou sayst!
One thistledown of fortune to the good
And 't had been ravished thence, an hour ago,
To better uses!

Deukalion.
'T was but so long since
The thunder spake. Across the vault of heaven
Plunged down the shadowy furnishment of war.

Pyrrha.
Thou'rt wounded! Lo, this arm hangs helpless by!—
O, rash and overbold! Thou—thou hast dared—
The hermæ holding vigil at Heaven's bound
Have cried thy name out, and the shadows vast
Of perished gods, beside the inmost hearth,
Have spoken of thee, that the soul of Zeus
Hath shook with dreams of evil to his house!

Deukalion.
How might'st thou pass the terror of his ward,
Tread his serenest citadel, and come
Not thunder-blasted hither, with slight wound?

Prometheus.
Flings himself again upon the ground.
When each great cycle of Olympian years
Rounds to its end, there comes upon the gods
Mysterious compulsion. As a gem
Borne from a lighted chamber into dusk,
Heaven of its splendor disarrays itself,
Hushes its dyes, and all the whispering sphere
Hangs like a moon of change. Knowing not why,
Nor unto what, each brooding deity
Wends to the sacred old Uranian field,
Where bloom old flowers, which, in the morn of time,
Forgotten gods did garland for their hair,
To celebrate some long-forgotten joy
That then did pierce the heart of the young world.
Here gather they, with mute and doubtful looks
At one another, waiting till She comes,
Mnemosyne, mother of thought and tears,
Remembrancer, and bringer out of death
Burden of longing and sweet-fruited song.
Then toward the upper windows of the stars,
The roof and dome of things, the place supreme
Of speculation inward on the frame
Of life create, and outward on the abyss
That moans and welters in the wind of love,
She leadeth up their shining theory,
And there they stand and wonder on the time
When they were not and when they shall not be.
This was my moment; for I knew 't was near,
And laired away among the steep-up crags
That bastion and shore-fast his pearl of power,
His white acropolis. Soft as light I passed
The perilous gates that are acquainted forth,
The walls of starry safety and alarm,
The pillars and the awful roofs of song,
The stairs and colonnades whose marble work
Is spirit, and the joinings spirit also,—
And from the well-brink of his central court
Dipped vital fire of fire, flooding my vase,
Glutting it arm-deep in the keen element.
Then backward swifter than the osprey dips
Down the green slide of the sea, till—Fool, O fool!
'T was in my hands! 'T was next my bosom! Fierce
Sang the bright essence past my scorching cheek,
Blown up and backward as I dropped and skimmed
The glacier-drifts, cataracts, wild moraines,
And walls of frightful plunge. Upon the shore
Of this our night-bound wretched earth I paused,
Lifted on high the triumph of my hands,
And flung back words and laughter. As I dropped,
The dogs of thunder chased me at the heels,
A white tongue shook against me in the dark,
And lo, my vase was rended in my hands,
And all the precious substance that it held
Spread, faded, and was gone,—was quenched, was gone!

Pause.
Deukalion.
In a low voice.
We cannot thank thee, though thy love be love.
Great is thy heart; we cannot praise thy deed.

Prometheus.
It was not therefore done!

Pyrrha.
For our poor praise,
For our poor love and praise; albeit now
The shouting of thy loud blood drowneth all!

Deukalion.
After a long silence.
Prometheus, thou hast thought to be our friend,
Our blood-kin, our indweller; hast indued
Vesture of our mortality and pain,—
Wherefore if not for pride, for fiercest pride?
Thou hast found out wild pathways for our treading,
Whispered us Nature's secrets, given to our hand
The spirit of fire and all its restless works,
Yea, blown aflame our all too eager blood
Till earth went red and reeling like a torch
When Dionysus calls under the moon.
Look round thee, O storm-sower, what we reap
Now in the season's fullness! Is it good?
Pride was thy lesson, and earth learned so well
That she is fallen more low than she was high.

Prometheus.
And shall be higher than that height she was,
By all this depth she has fallen!

Deukalion.
In that day
Let Chronos lift his old abolished head
From mid Lethean mallows, and dim-tongued
Call to thy shadowy brothers where they dream,
And leading up his faint forgetful host,
Rive the great diadem from Zeus's brow.
Then may thy stormy will at last be thine;
But as for now, even for thy earth's dear sake,
Be humble, O be humble! Bind thy hair
With willow, and put on the iron ring,
That so, by walking fearfully at last,
We bend Heaven from its anger. Else shall man
Suffer such woes as now we muse not of,
And thou such punishment as quails the heart
To think on.

Prometheus.
Either now with violent hand
We snatch salvation home, or here we sit
Till Python, hissing softly up the dark,
Dizzy our lapsèd souls, and headlong down
We drop into his jaws, which from the first—
See, the boy wakes!

Æolus.
Waking.
Give me to eat and drink.

Pyrrha.
Water and roots I hoarded in the cave.
I will go fetch them forth.

She goes into the cave.
Deukalion.
Was 't well with thee
In slumber, child?

Æolus.
I know not. I did sleep.

Pyrrha.
Coming out.
The roots are gnawed, and the sweet water spilled.
Be patient, Æolus, I will seek thee more.

Deukalion.
Stay; let me fetch them rather. Thou wilt fall,
Or meet some fear. The sluggish serpents lie
And will not move, though trodden, save to sting.

Pyrrha.
Thou knowest not where the roots are still to find.

Deukalion.
Rising painfully.
Together then. Ah, me! Where is thy hand?

Pyrrha.
Here, father. No, this way!

They go slowly out, feeling along the cliff.
Prometheus.
Poor poisoned flower,
Poor droop-head, down again!
Stoops over Æolus.
Woe for the house,
Woe for the vineyard, woe for the orchard croft,
The oil-tree and the place of standing corn!
Woe for the ships of venture! Woe on Him
Who sows and will not gather; shame and woe
Who sendeth forth and when the message comes
Makes deaf and strange!
He sinks down beside the cliff.
O Mother Clymene,
What of the song-thrush and the morning star,
The moon deep-hung with increase down the dawn,
The wet fields brightening fast, the hour thy pangs
Came on thee for my sake? What of the earth
Thou loved'st so well and taught'st me well to love?
—Hears not! 'T was long ago.
His head falls upon his knees.
One deep, deep hour!
To drop ten thousand fathoms softly down
Below the lowest heaving of life's sea,
Till memory, sentience, will, are all annulled,
And the wild eyes of the must-be-answered Sphinx,
Couchant at dusk upon the spirit's moor,
Blocking at noon the highway of the soul,
At morn and night a spectre in her gates,—
For once, for one deep hour—
He lifts his head slowly, and peers into the darkness.
Say who ye are
That fill the night with deeper heaviness!
Break up your strangling circle and come out.
More, more, and wretcheder! A spirit pass
Into some old and unachievèd world,
A storm-fall in some wood of rooted souls!
But O, what spirit-piercing flower of life
Blooms from the wasteful heap?

From among the crouching figures of the Stone Men and Earth Women, Pandora's voice is heard.
Pandora.
Sings.
Of wounds and sore defeat
I made my battle stay;
Wingèd sandals for my feet
I wove of my delay;
Of weariness and fear,
I made my shouting spear;
Of loss, and doubt, and dread,
And swift oncoming doom
I made a helmet for my head
And a floating plume.
From the shutting mist of death,
From the failure of the breath,
I made a battle-horn to blow
Across the vales of overthrow.
O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring,
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!

Prometheus.
Thou! Is it thou?

Pandora.
Comes from among the recumbent figures, holding something aloft.
Where is Prometheus?

Prometheus.
I am I, thou knowest.

Pandora.
I had a gift for him. Where is he gone?

Prometheus.
Give me thy gift. 'T will bring Prometheus back
To the high home and fortress of his soul,
Where thou and he made gladness.
She gives him a fennel stalk.
What is this?

Pandora.
A hollow reed. I found it on the hills.

Prometheus.
Such used the mothers in the upland farms
Fetch unpolluted fire in, once a year,
To light their hearths anew; such would the girls
Crown with fir-cone and smilax when they heard
The frenzied pipe call in the midnight hills,
And whisperings of anguish dimmed their blood.

Pandora.
Such had Prometheus, were he here again,
Wreathed for his listening earth; such had he filled
With unpolluted fire, and kindled new
The hearth-cheer of the world.

Prometheus.
Earth, sea, and air,
The caverned clouds, the chambers of the storm,
Yea, the thrice perilous alps and crags of Heaven
Have watched the robber lurk, and laughed at him!
Do not thou mock him too!

Pandora.
Him I will mock
Who, being thirsty, climbs not to the spring,
But meanly drinks at rillet and low pool,
And thirsteth still the more.

Prometheus.
The spring? The spring?
He hesitates, then starts up with a wild gesture.
I could have done it once! I could have done it!

Pandora.
Coming nearer.
Stranger!

Prometheus.
Hush, look! They rise at me again!

The Stone Men.
When earth did heave as the sea, at the lifting up of the hills,
One said, “Ye shall wake and be; fear not, ye shall have your wills.”
We waited patient and dumb; and ere we thought to have heard,
One said to us, “Stay!” and “Come!”—a dim and a mumbled word.
Mortise us into the wall again, or lift us up that we look therefrom!

The Earth Women.
The night, the rain, and the dew from of old had lain with us,
The suns and winds were our lovers too, and our husbands bounteous:
But lo, we were sick at heart when we leaned from the towers of the pine,
We yearned and thirsted apart in the crimson globes of the vine.
O tell us of them that hew the tree, bring us to them that drink the wine!

They disappear.
Prometheus.
Only a moment did they strain their brows
In weary question at me, ere they turned
And melted down into the blotting dark!

He starts slowly down the slope.
Pandora.
They go to find Prometheus.

Prometheus.
Of these stones
To build my rumoring city, basèd deep
On elemental silence; in this earth
To plant my cool vine and my shady tree
Whose roots shall feed upon the central fire!
He turns to Pandora.
Love!

Pandora.
Where thou goest, I am; there, even now
I stand and cry thee to me.

Prometheus.
Starts again down the slope.
Yea, I come,
I come; to find somewhere through the piled gloom
A mountain path to unimagined day,
Build all this anger into walls of war
Not dreamed of, dung and fatten with this death
New fields of pleasant life, and make them teem
Strange corn, miraculous wine!

Pandora.
Watching him disappear.
Prometheus, lord!

ACT II

Scene as before. The space below the cliffs is deserted; on the slope above, voices of men and women are heard.
First Voice.
Peer farther down! Hear'st thou the waters yet?

Second Voice.
With sea-slime and with lichen-tangled shells
The rocks are strewn, and ocean-breathing things
Gasp in the shallow pools; but the main flood
Is sunken further than the ear can hark.

They descend.
A Young Man's Voice.
Above.
A little strength, sister, a little strength!
Nay, then, I die with thee.

An Old Man's Voice.
My son, my son,
Where art thou? Answer me!

Another Voice.
Peace. He is dead.
I saw him sink upon the farther slope.
Back to him, if thou wilt; thou'lt come too late.

Chorus of Men.
The fallen must lie where they fell,
For the dead cannot succor the dead.

Chorus of Women.
O when through the valleys of hell
Shall the light of our Saviour be shed?

They descend. Others appear from above.
First Voice.
Above.
Trust not the sea! Look where the frothing lip
Curls off the giant fang! Back to the heights!

Second Voice.
Nay, fallen are the waters. It is past.

Third Voice.
The life we hurled from off the temple crag
With supplications and with piercing song,
Has made thus much appeasement. One more life
Will roll away the ocean of main dark;
Unless we be forever doomed to lie
As now, blind bulks of sleep, or hunger-bitten
To creep the stagnant bottom of the world.

Fourth Voice.
This way, 't is said, Deukalion carried him.
Follow on, yonder, where the cliff breaks down.

They descend; others follow. From the side, below the cliffs, a muttering group presses in; in their midst are Deukalion and Pyrrha, who shield Æolus against the cliff. The space about the altar is filled with indistinct figures.
Deukalion.
I am king, hear ye, am I not the king?
Higher than I is none. Take me! Why him,
Little of strength and wisdom? I am wise,
My cunning brain is stronger than a host.
Though this my spear-arm be a little fallen
From when it led you out against the north,
I am more terrible and mighty now,
An old, much-seeing spirit. In my death
The gods will taste a pleasure and be soothed.
But from this child, this playmate—look ye here—
This piece of summer's carelessness, this tuft
Of hyssop planted by the wells of glee,—
What honor should the dread gods have on him?
They shall have me, Deukalion—

A Man's Voice.
Bring not on us
With wordy shifts, the last steep horror down!
That is no babe thy withered arm hides there.
We know him; we have seen. If he might live
His name would fill the future, and make big
The story of his folk. He is our best,
Our soul of price, and him the gods demand,
Together with the maid, whose father here—
O how much more a kinglier will than thou!—

Deukalion.
Where art thou, Lykophon? Mine eyes are dim.

Lykophon.
Here by the altar.

Deukalion.
And thy child?

Lykophon.
Here too.

Deukalion.
Thy heart is firm to do it? Thou wilt live,
And think on t' after? Ay, remember that!
Hast weighed that with the rest?

Lykophon.
He was my slave,
Whose crazed old voice cried yonder of his son.
Was it to win a remnant of dim days,
A handful of poor mealtimes and to-beds,
He offered him? To watch some mornings rise,
Some evenings fall, fringing with fearful light
The cliff he hurled him from to the hungry sea?
Am I a lesser than my bondman is?

Deukalion.
Yea, ye will teach me, and I'll bear it tame!
I know what fits a king, what he must pay
In peace of soul and heart's blood for his folk.
King-drownling of an island of drowned dogs,
Wolves, snakes, and field-rats, crept from out the flood
For hunger and the hell-bred fog to rot!
Rot ye! I'll keep my own.

Lykophon.
To the crowd.
Back, back, I say!
The gods despise enforcèd offerings.
When the heart brings its dearest and its last
Then only will they hear—if then, if then!

Deukalion.
Be this life taken, what is left? O friends,
O wretched children, lift your hearts and eyes,
Look through the death-dark hither and be known
On what you ask; think on yourselves, on me,
On them that keep the heights, and who lie strewn
Along the downward path. See how the price
Doth shame the purchase!

A Man's Voice.
We have thought on these,
And find they are our brothers and our friends,
Our parents, children, wives; and that they die.

Lykophon.
Not they alone. The past, the future dies.

A Woman's Voice.
Hark what he says! He knows not, yet he says!
None of you know. I have cried unto you
And told you of it, but you will not know!
You will not listen what I carry here
Under my heart, and feed and shelter now,
That then shall be the bread and wine of the world,
The torch and sword and lyre, the water-brook,
The lion-gate and wall of many towers,
The marshaler of dances,—there, O there
Beyond the shadow and the sorrow, far
In God's new garden, his green virgin mount!

Chorus of Women.
Would, would we might be silent, for we know
Though now He puts us by,
Though now He heeds us not nor hearkeneth,
The groping of our anguish up the sky
Will wean and wear Him so
That in the vexèd sendings of his breath
He will breathe out a deeper than the gloom
Of our deep doom,
And put in death a sting sharper than death.

Distant thunder.
Chorus of Men.
Seize them and stifle up their irking lips!
He grudgeth at us, but forgetteth where
He felt our spreaded palms, and was aware
Of fierce and tedious prayer.
Yonder of us night darkens with his frown;
Far off, and all forgetfully He drips
His drowsy anger down.

The thunder rolls nearer, and terrific storm sweeps over the scene.
A Woman's Voice.
Ah, no, He smiteth us! His lightning leaps
From end to end of the world!

A Man's Voice.
His thunder shakes
The pillars of the dark. Lo, up above
The roof of darkness ruins and lets in
Thrice horrible night!

Another Voice.
Alas, the wind, the wind!
The trampling and the bellowing herds of rain
Loose on the mountain slopes! Bow down! Bow down!

Deukalion.
Gropes forward through the tempest and lifts Æolus upon the altar.
Lord, stretch thy hand and take him! He is thine.

Lykophon.
What criest thou, Deukalion?

Deukalion.
Take the child.
The gods' dark will be done! I am content.

He falls.
Lykophon.
Bending over him.
Deukalion!

Pyrrha.
Husband! Father! Speak, look up!

Lykophon.
Rising.
The king is down. Here in his mighty room
I stand up over you! Where is the priest
Who serves the altar on God's mountain top?

A Man's Voice.
Yonder he crouches, and his sacred eyes
Are set athwart; he wanders in his wit.

Lykophon.
Prepare him for his ministry....And thou,
Alcyone, sweet head! Thou keepsake life
Left me for memory, thou precious seal
Stamped with her mystic love-sign unto me,
I put her blessing on thee; and do thou
Kiss me, and put her blessing upon me
For this I do.
He lifts her upon the altar.
Weep not.—Room for the priest!

The priest advances, holding the sacrificial knife.
Pyrrha.
Flings herself before the altar.
Hold off your hands, hold off! The king is fallen,
And falling spake somewhat. But I, who drank
Of his deep will, who ever was and am
His heart's high furtherer, cry over him
Ye shall not touch them yet! Not yet ye shall!
Not till Prometheus comes or makes a sign!

Lykophon.
Thou see'st the grey eternities of time
That we have waited, till our minds are crazed
With watching, and our all o'er-hearkened ears
Hear silence roar and mutter like a sea;
And still he comes not, and no word comes past
The crouching places and close lairs of death.

A Man's Voice.
Yet he will come: his haughty soul shall not
Be hindered of its walk.

Priest.
Behind the wall
A thief was taken, and his sons at dawn
Said, “Now he comes with purchase; we will feast,”—
Even while the ravens on his glazing eyes
Were feasted, and the master of the house
Said, “I have judged him and forgotten him.”
Ye blind and credulous, ye whispering things!
Mutterers, collusioners! What wait we for?

Chorus of Women.
O that our spirits might not thus
Afflict us, making pictures on the dark,
And giving silence tongues to cry against us!
For though we shut our ears and will not hark,
And blind our eyes from seeing, he is there;
The dust of heavenly battle dims his hair,
The large gods close about him, he is down;
Now thrice three times about the shining town
The thunder-wingèd chariot drags his corse;
And now they bind him to the wingèd horse
With chains of burning light; the portent rears away
O'er prairies of insufferable day!

Chorus of Men.
'Twixt Berenice's tangled hair
And that blue region of the morning where
The bright wind-shaken Lyre
Sheds down the dawn its spilth of silver fire,
We saw him stoop and run upon the air,
Shielding from region gusts the stolen flame;
But from a steep cloud warping up the west
A curse of lightning came.
With tort-flung neck and clutchèd breast
He fell, a ruined star;
And now the char
Had quenched itself with hissing, in the sea,
But lo, again his soul flamed gloriously!
The eagle tempest, gyring from its place,
Seized him, and whirled,
And hung him on the plunging prow of the world,
To shed the anguish of his face
Upon the reefs and shoals of space,
To lighten with the splendor of his pain
Earth's pathway through the main,
Though death was all her freightage, and the breath
That swelled her sails was death.

A Man's Voice.
He will not come. I heard an old bard once
Sing of him, saying Titan Iapetos
Fathered him not; his mother Clymene,
Wandering in the morning of the world,
Suffered human embraces. 'T will be so,
For he is human-minded, and too slight
To wrest from God's hand the withholden fire.

Second Voice.
Hearken! One sings upon the upper slopes.

Third Voice.
'T is she, the other gift in mockery sent,
Pandora.

Fourth Voice.
Haunting, cruel to the heart.
She opens sunny doors, which ere we look
Are closed foreverlasting, and their place
Not to be guessed.

Fifth Voice.
This was another thing
Prometheus did. Whom the gods sent in wrath
To make us know how wondrous was the life
That inchmeal they took from us, even her
He chose out for his love, and even here
He made his bridals.

Sixth Voice.
Some say 't is not so,
But she Pandora is a child he had
Before the sea rose and the night came down,
And others say his sister, whom he fetched
From Hades, where she was with Clymene,
Being childed late, after the Titans fell.

A Woman's Voice.
Hush, hark, the pouring music! Never yet
The pools below the waterfalls, thy pools,
Thy dark pools, O my heart—!

A Young Man's Voice.
Delirious breast!
She jetteth gladness as a sacred bird,
That o'er the springtime waves, at large of dawn,
Off Delos, to the wakening Cyclades
Declares Apollo.

A Girl's Voice.

Pause.
A Woman's Voice.
Look, Pandora comes!
See, there above the cliff she glimmers down,
And darker shapes come with her.

A Man's Voice.
The big seed
Deukalion and Pyrrha sowed in hope
To reap in terror; the scarce-featured sons
Of stone, and daughters of the sullen glebe.

Deukalion.
Waking.
Pyrrha! Where art thou?

Pyrrha.
'T is my face thou feelest,
Thy groping hands are even on me, father.

Deukalion.
Who are these? How is 't with us? O wherefore
Gaze ye all thus aloft?

Pyrrha.
Pandora comes.

Deukalion.
I see naught. Since a little while mine eyes
And brain are faded. Help mine eyes to see.

Pyrrha.
She pauses on the margin of the cliff.
About her are the shapes of them who rose
Behind us, when we sowed the heavy seed.
Her either hand is on a kneeling head,
Female and male; her forehead more than theirs
Is lifted up in yearning, and her face
Is like the lyrist's when at first he waits
And drifts his heart up through the cloudy strings.

A Man's Voice.
Take heed there to the lad, where he hath risen
His height upon the altar! And the maid
Is risen. Look to them!

Pyrrha.
Children! Æolus!
What is 't with you? What search ye in the heavens?
O, to what high thing do your spirits strain
And your hands tremble up?

Æolus and Alcyone.
Looking and pointing upward.
The stars! The stars!

Pause.
Deukalion.
Why hath so deep a hush fallen on the night?
I heard a whispering cry. What whisper they?

Pyrrha.
Æolus pointed—whispering of the stars.

Deukalion.
Æolus—stars. Pyrrha!

Pyrrha.
With thee!

Deukalion.
Spakest thou
Of stars?

Pyrrha.
Ay, so he whispered!

Deukalion.
Thou—and thou?

Pyrrha.
Nothing, nothing. My soul was as a lake
Spread out in utter darkness; to its depth
There pierced a silvery trembling—

Deukalion.
Look again.
Wife, cease to pray! Look out again!

Pyrrha.
The dark
Gathers and flees, and the wide roof of night
Leans in as it would break; the mountainous gloom
Unmoors, and streameth on us like a sea.
O Earth, lift up thy gates! It is the stars!
It is the stars! It is the ancient stars!
It is the young and everlasting stars!

Pandora.
Sings.

Pyrrha.
The veil that hid the holy sky is rent;
The vapors ravel down; and a bright wind
Blows, that the planets and the shoalèd worlds
Stoop from their dance, and wheel and shout again,
Scattering influence as a mænad shakes
Pine sparks and moon-dew from her whirling hair.
And hark, below, the many-voicèd earth,
The chanting of the old religious trees,
Rustle of far-off waters, woven sounds
Of small and multitudinous lives awake,
Peopling the grasses and the pools with joy,
Uttering their meaning to the mystic night!

A Man's Voice.
Within my soul there is a rushing down
Like darkness, and my being, as a heaven,
Soareth apparent, as a heaven with stars.
A heaven hung with stars my spirit is,
And all among them walks a wind of will,
Uttering life, and purpose, and desire!

A Woman's Voice.
O for the dreaming herbs, the whispering trees,
And rustling, far-off waters of my heart!
O for the mystic night risen within me!
The multitudinous life, the busy sounds
Of woven love, the hushed and pouring love,
The pouring love and stillness of the night!

Deukalion.
Wife, wife, what falleth since?

Pyrrha.
A stir of joy
Troubles the fields of air 'twixt star and star.
Across the quivering acres, by and large,
An unimaginable Reaper goes,
And where he walks the heavens are seldom-sown;
Till o'er wan earth the spreaded heavens are bare,
Save for one mighty star that gathers light
And stands like a flushed singer telling glory.
Now he, now even he has no dominion,
For he has looked behind him to the mountains,
O, he has looked up to the lovely mountains
Of the unimagined morning, and has hearkened
The pouring of the chill, eternal urns!
Over the solemn world grey habitation
Wonders at habitation. Room by room,
The heavens tremble and put on delight,
Ignorant one to another why it is
The festal wish compels them. They are brightened
Under the feet of many breathless spirits,
Who, lifting up their hands by the springs of ocean,
Cried “Pæan!” and “O, Hymen!” As a stream
Silvereth in a wind-start, heaven is brightened
Under the speed and striving of those spirits,—
Who now, even now dissolve, and leave behind them
Only their gladness and their speed; for now
Through all its height and frame of living light,
Through all its clear creation, breathing depths
And fleeing distances, the sacred sky
Pulses and is astonished like a heart;
It looketh inward and bethinks itself,
Outward, and putteth all its question by,
To shine and soar and sing and be at one!—
Nearhand the slopes drink light, and far about
Among the mountain places, headlands, cliffs,
Lone peaks, and brotherhoods of battlement
Shout, having apprehended.—Paler grow
The gulfs of shadowy air that brim the vales;
As ocean bateth in her thousand firths,
The grey and silver air draws down the land.
The little trees that climb among the rocks
As high as they can live, pierce with their spires
The shoaling mist, swim softly into light,
And stand apparent, shapely, every one
A dream of divine life, a miracle.
Chasms are cloven in the violet
And amethystine waters of the air;
Forests and winding rivers of the plain
Are given and withdrawn; a moment since
I saw, I thought I saw a strength of hill
Uplifted far below us, built upon
With what was once a lordly place of souls,
A carved and marble place of puissant souls,
Builded to such strong music that the sea
Had hardly heaved one lintel from its post,
Or marred one face of all the sculptured men,
Or shaken from his seat one musing god.—
Again the air is cloven; I have seen
Fane-crownèd promontories, curving sweeps
Of silver shore, islands, and straits, and bays;
And bright beyond, the myriad ocean stream.
And O, beyond—beyond!—O shelter me!
Bow down! Cover your eyes!

Confused Voices.
Terrible wings!—
Light awfuller than darkness or the sea!—
O spirit of sharp flame amid the burning!

A Boy's Voice.
My hands are on my eyelids, and my knees
Shelter my face. O mother, lay thy breast
About me, and shut out the killing light,
Before my eyeballs and my brain be dead!

Deukalion.
On his knees, with outstretched hands.
Of late mine eyes were quenched, and now I see.

Pyrrha.
Thine eyelids are not open, but thy face
Searcheth into the radiance. Father, cease!
Look not upon it with thy soul. Thy face
Is terrible with beauty in the light.
I cannot look upon thy seeing face.
Take not the mortal glory on thy face!
Bow down—O let me shield thy sightless eyes!

Deukalion.
Burning is laid unto the roots of the world;
The deep spouts conflagration from her springs;
And fire feeds on the air that feeds the stars.
Out of the sea has burst, from rended deeps
Of the unthought-on rearward has leapt out
The appearance of the glory of the sun,
Filling the one side of the roaring world
With creatures and with branch-work of pale fire;
And through the woods of fire the beasts of fire,
The birds and serpents and the naked souls
Flee, that their fleeing startles the slow dead
Through all their patient kingdoms, and the gods
In their faint spheres are flown and passionate.

A Man's Voice.
My soul is among lions. God, my God,
Thou see'st my quivering spirit what it is!
O lay not life upon it! We not knew
The thing we asked for. We had all forgot
How cruel was thy splendor in the house
Of sense, how awful in the house of thought,
How far unbearable in the wild house
That thou hast cast and builded for the heart!

Lykophon.
Deukalion, speak again!

Pyrrha.
If yet thy flesh
Endure to look upon it, speak again.

Deukalion.
His soul is strong and will deliver him!
The feature of his anguish and his joy
Makes dim the light adjacent, and his soul
Is bright to overcome. He treads the glory
Over against the roaring, hitherward.
Seeing the taper of small excellent light
He lifteth in his hand, the night rolls on
Before him, and day follows after him.
The hours, the months, the seasons, and the times
Acknowledge him; the waste calls to the sown;
The islands and hoar places of the sea
Sing, as the chief of them that are taught praises.
About his torch shineth a dust of souls,
Daughters and sons, who fly into the light
With trembling, and emerge with prophecy;
And round about goeth a wind of tongues,
A wind as of the travailing of the nations;
Vast sorrow, and the cry of desperate lives
To God, and God to them crying or answering.—
Child! Æolus! My child. Where is my child?

Pyrrha.
I cannot see; the dazzle of his coming
Makes blind the place. Here, father, in thy knees!
Feel, 't is the darling head! Wild comer, when?
Hasten, have pity, we are nothing strong!
Father, how is 't with thee? Why bow'st thou down?
Thy hand is cold, thy lips are very cold.—
O gone, O gone, even at the entering-in!

A Voice.
Who are these coming down, that they are mighty
To walk with foreheads forward to the light,
Singing the mortal radiance to its face?

A Voice.
It is Pandora and the unborn men,
Deukalion's seed. She doth it of her power,
They of their weakness.

Pandora.
Sings, invisible in the light.
Ye who from the stone and clay
Unto godhood grope your way,
Hastening up the morning see
Yonder One in trinity!

The Earth Women.
Save us, flaming Three!

Pandora.
Dionysus hath the wine,
Eros hath the rose divine,
Lord Apollo hath the lyre:
Three and one is the soul's desire.

The Stone Men.
Save us, sons of fire!

A Woman's Voice.
Listen, they have passed.
They go with singing forward down the light.

Prometheus.
Below, invisible.
Thou gavest me the vessel; it is filled.

Pandora.
I am the vessel, and with thee 't is filled.

Pause.
Lykophon.
Whispers.
Pyrrha!

Pyrrha.
Who whispers me?

Lykophon.
Is he not come?
Is he not busied by the altar there?

Pyrrha.
Nay—Lo, the terrible taper! It is he!
I see him not; my spirit seeth him;
My heart acheth upon him busied there.
—Deukalion, O Deukalion!

Prometheus.
From the altar.
Pyrrha! Pyrrha!

Pyrrha.
Prometheus, saviour!

Prometheus.
Lykophon!

Lykophon.
Lo, me!

Prometheus.
Bring me your children hither.

Pyrrha and Lykophon.
Groping forward with Æolus and Alcyone.
Here are they!

Prometheus.
Unto this twain, man-child and woman-child,
I give the passion of this element;
This seed of longing, substance of this love;
This power, this purity, this annihilation.
Let their hands light the altar of the world.
'T is yours forever. I have brought it home!

The radiant mist fades; it is clear day, flooded with morning sunlight. The children apply the burning reed to the fuel, and fire flames high upon the altar. Pandora's voice is heard faintly, far below.
Pandora.
Too far, too far, though hidden in thine arms;
Too darkly far, though lips on lips are laid!
Love, love, I am afraid;
I know not where to find thee in these storms
That dashed thy changèd breast my breast upon,
Here in the estranging dawn.
Unsteadfast! who didst call and hast not stayed.
Tryst-breaker! I have heard
Thy voice in the green wood, and not deferred:—
O fold me closer, fugitive one, and say where thou art gone!
Nay, speak not, strive not, sorrow not at all!
O, dim and gradual!—
Belovèd, my belovèd, shall it be?
Keep me, keep me with thy kiss,
Save me with thy deep embrace;
For down the gulfs of spirit space,
The slow, the implacable winds, now unescapably
Wheel us downward to our bliss,
Whelm us, darken us—O lethal winds!—down to our destined place.
Swimming faint, beneath, afar—
O lover, let there be
No haste, nor clamor of thy heart to see!
But I have seen, and I whisper thee
How the rivers of peace apparent are,
And the city of bridal peace
Waits, and wavers, and hardly is,
Fades, and is folded away from sight;
And now like a lily it openeth wistfully,
Whispering through its courts of light
“How long shall we be denied?
How long must the eastern gate stand wide,
Ere these who are called shalt enter in, and the bridegroom be with the bride?”

ACT III

An open rocky place higher in the mountains; in the rock-wall at one side is a rough-hewn open tomb; in the rear the stranded ark of Deukalion, caught amid great rocks, is outlined against snow-peaks and against a vast sunset cloud, full of shifting light. The funeral train of Deukalion winds up the steep path from below. Lykophon and a company of grown men carry the bier, beside which walk Pyrrha and Æolus.
Chorus of Old Men.
In one same breath
Uttering life and death,
Whatso his mouth seems darkly to ordain
The darkling signal of his hand makes vain,
And like a heart confused He sayeth and gainsaith.
With himself He wrestles thus
Or gives this wrestling unto us.
Whichever, it is well.
O children, we are risen out of hell,
And it is pleasant evening! Daughters, sing!
Upon his way let soft and golden mirth
Be spoken round the king,
And unto heaven be told the sweetness of the earth.

Chorus of Girls.
How shall the thought of our hearts be said,
Here, where this averted head
Lonely walks by the lonely dead?
'T were better others sang,
Not we, not we!
For when the mighty morning sprang
Terrible in gladness from the sea,
When, entering the high places of the air,
Noontide unbelievably
Possessed them, and lifted up his trophy there,—
Yea, all the noon and all the afternoon,
We could have put our secret by, we could have spoken
Well before thee, O mourner, O heart broken!
But now, but now—Mother, mother,
We have seen one coming with thee up the steep;
His mild great wing we saw him keep
Over thee like a sheltering arm,
And the shadow of one pinion fell across
To shield the bosom of thy lord from harm;
We have seen him, the dark peace-giver, Thanatos;—
But O, we have seen also another,
Winged like him, and dazzling dim,
He came up out of the sun, yet he goeth not down therewith;
For, ever warmer, closer, as the evening falleth pale,
His arm is over our necks, and his breath
Searches whispering under our hair; and his burning whisper saith
A thing that maketh the heart to cease and the limbs to fail,
And the hands to grope for they know not what;
We would not find what he whispers of, and we die if we find it not!

Chorus of Young Women.
Ere our mothers gave us birth,
Or in the morning of the earth
The high gods walked with the daughters and found them fair,
Ere ever the hills were piled or the seas were spread,
His arm was over our necks, my sisters, his breath was under our hair!
Their spirits withered and died who then
Found not the thing that his whisper said,
But we are the living, the chosen of life, who found it and found it again.
Where, walking secret in the flame,
Unbearably the Titan came,
Eros, Eros, yet we knew thee,
Yet we saw and cried unto thee!
Where thy face amid exceeding day more excellently shone
There our still hearts laughed upon thee, thou divine despaired-of one!
Though o'er and o'er our eyes and ears the heavy hair was wound,
Yet we saw thee, yet we heard thy pinions beat!
Though our fore-arms hid our faces and our brows were on the ground,
Yet, O Eros, we declare
That with flutes and timbrels meet,
Whirling garments, drunken feet,
With tears and throes our souls arose and danced before thee there!

They place the body in the hewn vault of the rock.
Pyrrha.
Go down now. I and Æolus will watch
Till dawn, when ye will come to shut the tomb
And sing him to his peace.

Lykophon.
Some few with thee
Will hold the watch, for safety.

Pyrrha.
None. Alone.

The others go down the path, leaving Pyrrha and Æolus seated by the tomb; a girl lingers behind, and when the last figure has disappeared, throws herself at Pyrrha's feet.
Rhodope.
See, it is Rhodope, thy handmaiden!
Behold, thou knowest. He loved her. She would stay.

Pyrrha.
Touching her head.
Thy heart shall take no fear. O, stay with us!

The voices of the young men are heard, descending.
Chorus of Young Men.
When, to the king's unveilèd eyes
The rended deeps and the rended skies
Seemed as a burning wood,—
Iacchos! Iacchos!
When flame took hold of the place of the dead,
And burning seized on the throne of God,
And birds and beasts and the souls of men
As a wind of burning fled,—
Iacchos!
Yea, in the blinding radiance when
The Bringer of Light by the altar stood,
Iacchos! Iacchos! Evoë!
We saw thee, we knew thee, we cried upon thee!
We had lost thee and had thee again!
Plucker of the tragic fruit,
Eater of the frantic root,
Shaker of the cones of raving, sounder of the panic flute
Over man and brute,
Iacchos!
Hunter in the burning wood,
Planter of the mystic vine,
From the spirit and the blood
Crusher of the awful wine,
Iacchos! Evoë! Iacchos!

The voice dies away in the distance. Silence.
Æolus.
Whispers to Rhodope.
See'st thou? The cloud!
Touching Pyrrha.
Mother, what means the cloud?

Pyrrha.
Raising her head.
How, child?

Æolus.
The cloud. See how it lives within!

Pyrrha.
'T will rain; he brought us back the blessèd rain,
And storm, and natural darkness, with the light.
Bows her head again.
As also to our hearts the shutting-in
Of rain and natural darkness.

Rhodope.
Looking up from Pyrrha's knees.
All the hours
Since long ago at dawn, the livelong hours
Of glory, since he brought the morning back,
The cloud has piled itself, and wondrous lights
Have been thus restless in it.

Æolus.
Where is he?

Pyrrha.
I know not, child. It may be that he sleeps,
Being weary; or he wanders with his love
To gaze upon the gladness of the world.

Rhodope.
No one has seen him since he fetched the light.
They say of him—I heard the old men say—

Pyrrha.
The sun goes down: we will be silent now.

Silence. Æolus and Rhodope, leaning together, fall asleep. Pyrrha kneels by the tomb, with hands stretched aloft upon the king's breast.
Pyrrha.
Speaks low.
Thou whom my glad heart once deliberately
Chose, and this morning suddenly with tears
Chose, and was chosen, and was made thine at last
In the destroying light—Deukalion, lord,
The day is past, the evening cometh on.
Once more to thy full-wishing lips I hold
The chalice of my heart up, husband! husband!
For night begins to pour her voices out,
And thou art stayed for on the voiceless hills.

She lifts her head and listens. In the distance Pandora's voice is heard, sharp and agonized.
Pyrrha.
For thee too, then! Even also for thee
He smote the rock; thy spirit thirsted too
Afar there in the desert of thy joy,
And came and drank against the morning ray
Waters of trembling. By the pools in haste
Thy soul stooped, plucking herb and flower of pain
That groweth newly there, by the new stream!

Rhodope.
Runs with Æolus, and crouches beside Pyrrha.
Pyrrha! Mother Pyrrha! Look, alas,
Lo, how it comes upon us! The bird! The bird!

Pyrrha.
What—where? How suddenly has darkness fallen,
And now as suddenly 't is light again!
How terribly the lion thunder roared
Leaping along the mountains to the sea!
—What saw ye? What went by us in the wind?

Rhodope.
Look where the giant wings rock down the slope!

Pyrrha.
Gazing below.
God's bird of wrath! Swift is thy wrath, O God,
Strong is thy jealousy!

Rhodope.
Awhile I slept;
Then as I looked and wondered at the cloud,
The restless lights flushed angry, and all the west
Shone stormy bright with ridges of blown fire.
The cloud flamed like a peak of the fiery isles,
Where in the western seas Hephæstos toils.
Then from yon cloven valley in the midst
Came forth the wings and shadow of the bird,
And grew towards us vaster than storm, more swift
Than I could cry upon him, and passed down.
Once o'er the plain and o'er the ocean straits,
And twice o'er the old olives by the stream
Where the folk rest to-night, his shadow wheeled,
And now he towers straight upward like a smoke,
High, high, into the evening.

Pandora's cry is heard again; she appears in the rocks above the tomb, gazing upward. After a moment she comes down and kneels beside Pyrrha, hiding her face against the rocks. Pause.
Pyrrha.
In a low voice, gazing at the cloud.
Deemest thou
That he will yield himself unmurmuring up,
Or will he make wild war along the peaks?

Prometheus enters swiftly from below, and raises Pandora. They stand clasped in each other's arms beside Pyrrha, who, still kneeling, draws herself up to gaze into the king's face, then clasps Æolus with one arm and with the other the knees of Prometheus.
Pyrrha.
Leave us not yet, before another dawn
Comes, bringing surety! For the giant dark,
Seeing thee absent, may arise again,
And Python lift unnameably his head
In hell, hearing the gods hiss him awake.

Prometheus.
Be comforted; it is established sure.
Light shall arise from light, day follow day,
Season meet season, with all lovely signs
And portents of the year. These shall not fail;
From their appointed dance no star shall swerve,
Nor mar one accent of one whirling strophe
Of that unfathomed chorus that they sing
Within the porch and laughing house of Life,
Which Time and Space and Change, bright caryatids,
Do meanwhile pillar up. These shall not fail;
But O, these were the least I brought you home!
The sun whose rising and whose going down
Are joy and grief and wonder in the heart;
The moon whose tides are passion, thought, and will;
The signs and portents of the spirit year,—
For these, if you would keep them, you must strive
Morning and night against the jealous gods
With anger, and with laughter, and with love;
And no man hath them till he brings them down
With love, and rage, and laughter from the heavens,—
Himself the heavens, himself the scornful gods,
The sun, the sun-thief, and the flaming reed
That kindles new the beauty of the world.
He draws Æolus and Rhodope to him.
For you the moon stilly imagineth
Her loiterings and her soft vicissitudes;
For you the Pleiades are seven, and one
Wanders invisible because of you;
For you the snake is burnished in the spring,
The flower has plots touching its marriage time,
The queen-bee from her wassailed lords soars high
And high and high into the nuptial blue,
Till only one heroic lover now
Flies with her, and her royal wish is prone
To the elected one, whose dizzy heart
Presageth him of ecstasy and death.
For you the sea has rivers in the midst,
And fathomless abysses where it breeds
Fantastic life; and each its tiniest drop
Flung from the fisher's oar-blade in the sun
Has rivers, abysses, and fantastic life.
For your sakes it was spoken of the soul
That it shall be a sea whereon the moon
Has might, and the four winds shall walk upon it,—
Also it has great rivers in the midst,
Uncharted islands that no sailor sees,
And fathomless abysses where it breeds
Mysterious life; yea, each its tiniest drop
Flung from the fisher's oar-blade in the sun
Has rivers, tempests, and eternal tides,
Untouched-at isles, horizons never hailed,
And fathomless abysses where it breeds
Incredible life, without astonishment.
He bends over Deukalion.
O death, majestic mood! Transfigured brow
And eyes heavy with vision, since the time
They saw creation sitting like a sphinx,
Woman and lion, riddling of herself
At twilight, in the place of parted souls—
He pauses, looks at the lighted cloud, and below at the darkening earth, where a mist is beginning to rise.
As far as being goes out past the stars
Into unthinkable distance, and as far
As being inward goes unthinkably,
Traveling the atom to its fleeing core,
Through world in world, heaven beneath wheeling heaven,
Firmament under firmament, without end,—
To-day there is rejoicing, and the folk,
Though ignorant, call us blessèd in their hearts.
Yea, He who is the Life of all this life,
Death of this death and Riser from this death,
Calleth us blessèd in his heart of hearts;
And once again, in the dim end of things,
When the sun sickens, and the heaven of heavens
Flames as a frosty leaf unto the fall,
In swoon and anguish shall his stormèd heart
Cry unto us; his cry is ringing there
In the sun's core! I heard it when I stood
Where all things past and present and to come
Ray out in fiery patterns, fading, changing,
Forevermore unfaded and unchanged.

Æolus.
Behold, alas, mother, look up!
O haste, let us be hidden in the rocks!

Pyrrha.
The wings that were a little cloud in heaven
Shed doom over the third part of the north;
And now he slants enormous down the west
Toward his throne and eyrie in the cloud.

In the background, about the ark of Deukalion, the figures of the Stone Men and Earth Women emerge, and stand darkly outlined against the sunset cloud. Prometheus speaks low to Pandora, who falls at his feet.
Pandora.
I would be there with thee, love. O, not here!

Prometheus.
Stooping over her.
There where I go thou art; there, even now
Thou cried'st me to thee, and I come, I come.
He lays her in Pyrrha's arms, and disappears in the rocks; he emerges on a higher level behind, and turns westward.
Pausing beside the ark.
O rude and dazèd spirits! Ye shall grope
And wonder toward a knowledge and a grace
That now we dream not of; then loneliness
Shall flee away, and enmity no more
Be spectral in the houses and the streets
Where walk your primal hearts in the large light
That floods the after-earth.
He raises his arms over them.
Out of these stones
I build my rumoring city, basèd deep
On elemental silence; in this soil
I plant my cool vine and my shady tree,
Whose roots shall feed upon the central fire!

He crosses a rocky stretch leading to the western heights over which the cloud rests, and disappears in a mist-filled pass. Æolus and Rhodope creep closer to Pyrrha and Pandora, sheltering themselves from the chill of the rising mist, which slowly covers the scene. There is a long silence, broken by faint peals of thunder.
Æolus.
Whispers.
Mother, the mist was grey and thick to breathe
But now; and now 't is thin, and flushes red
As if all round the forests were aflame.

Rhodope.
Whispers.
Hush! See'st thou not it is the mighty cloud,
That flames more fiery when the thunder speaks?

Heavy thunder; Pandora starts wildly up.
Pyrrha.
Drawing her down.
Thou spirit bird, that sangest all night long
And mad'st sweet utterance from the secret shade
Where his wild heart spread coolness in the sun,
For thee to flit and sing,—O look not out!
Still hide thee in my breast!
Pandora sinks back. Pyrrha whispers to Rhodope.
Rise thou, and look!

Rhodope.
Rises and speaks in a low voice.
Over against the region where he went
Thunder has torn the curtain of the mist,
And out of moving darkness soars the cloud
Like as a shadowed ruby, but above
Like as an opal and a sardine stone
Sun-touched to the panting heart; and in the midst
Are shapes throned on the moving of the lights,
Who ride the wrathful lights, and are the lights.
Up through the driving fringes of the mist
Battle a living splendor and a gloom.
O, while the shapes gather and wait at gaze,
That pharos of our peril in the straits,
That treader of the cups of gladness out
In the sun's vineyard for us—Mother! Mother!
Look hither, look at last, for it is time.
Up through the crud and substance of the cloud
Prometheus wrestles with the bird of God!

Pyrrha rises, lifting Pandora.
Æolus.
Look how the sudden wind has quenched the cloud,
And them that were therein; and how its blowing
Shoulders the mist away from the keen stars
That rushed out at the fading of the lights!
Look you, the cloud comes on us in the wind!
It tramples down the mountains, and above
Reaches abroad in darkness, blotting out
Place upon place of stars.

Rhodope.
The smoky air
Climbs up and eddies round us and falls down,
Rolling and spreading wider than the world!

As the cloud advances, Pandora goes toward it with outstretched hands, and pauses beside the prow of the ark, among the Stone Men and Earth Women, while deeper and deeper darkness drifts over the scene. The voices of Pyrrha and Pandora are heard as from the midst of the cloud.
Pyrrha.
Vast sorrow, and the voice of broken souls;
A cry as of all kinds and generations,
Times, places, and tongues; or as a mother
Heareth her unborn child crying for birth.

Pandora.
Sings.
A thousand æons, nailed in pain
On the blown world's plunging prow,
That seeks across the eternal main,—
Down whatever storms we drift,
What disastrous headlands lift,
Festal lips, triumphant brow,
Light us with thy joy, as now!

Pyrrha.
A sound of calling and of answering;
Answer or watch-cry of all desperate lives
To God, and God to them calling or answering.

The Stone Men and Earth Women sing, their voices growing fainter as they descend the valley behind.
The Stone Men and Earth Women.
We have heard the valleys groan
With one voice and manifold;
Stone is crying unto stone,
Mould is whispering unto mould.

The Stone Men.
Hear them whisper, hear them call,
“All for one, and one for all,
Dig the well and raise the wall.”

The Earth Women.
“For the nations to be born,
Root away the bitter thorn,
Reap and sow the golden corn.”

Rhodope.
To Pyrrha.
Hear'st thou this yet that thou didst whisper of,
Or is all silence now even to thee?

Pyrrha does not answer. Pandora's voice is heard, also from the valley behind, but more distant.
Pandora.
Sings.

Rhodope.
To Æolus.
Doth not the cloud go by us? Yonder, see,
A star looks dimly through. And there, and there
'T is all awake with stars!

Pandora.
Sings.

Rhodope.
How swiftly now,
As if it had a meaning in its haste,
The cloud-bank fades and dwindles in the north!

Starlight and silence. After a time, dawn begins to break in the east. Pyrrha rises and kneels again by the tomb. As the light increases, Æolus and Rhodope climb higher among the rocks and watch for the rising of the sun. Below, the voices of the young men are heard.
Chorus of Young Men.
Ascending.

THE MASQUE OF JUDGMENT

PRELUDE

The action falls immediately before the Incarnation.

PERSONS OF THE PRELUDE

• Raphael
• Uriel
• The Angel of the Pale Horse
• A Shepherd
• A Shepherd Boy
• A Young Man (persona muta)
• A Girl

SCENE I

A meadow and coppice near the sea; beyond low hills the roofs of a town. Dawn.
Raphael.
He sings.

Uriel.
Appearing.
Why tarriest on thine errand, Raphael?

Raphael.
I do no errand here.

Uriel.
Why camest thou then?

Raphael.
Since earth is dear to me. Sometimes it seems—
Treading the prairie's autumn sibilance,
Or when the tongues of summer lightning speak
In the corners of the cloud—I could forget
My station 'mid the deathless hierarchies,
And change into a clot of anxious clay.

Uriel.
Mock not, sweet brother! thou who knowest well—
Better than I or Michael or the rest—
The throes that shake these clots of passionate clay;
Knowest their lewd harsh blood, their shell of sense
So frail, so piteously contrived for pain.

Raphael.
I dare to say how little jest it was.
Oft, as I leave these sliding shafts of dark,
And homeward climb the immaterial cliffs,
My heart makes question which were worthier state
For a free soul to choose,—angelic calm,
Angelic vision, ebbless, increscent,
Or earth-life with its reachings and recoils,
Its lewd harsh blood so swift to change and flower
At the least touch of love, its shell of sense
So subtly made to minister them delight,
So frail, so piteously contrived for pain.

Uriel.
Brother, thou dost not well to wander here.
If thou wilt roam, choose some less troubled star.
The roaring midst of the insatiate sun
Where God has set my watch, is peace to this!
Of all the bitter drops that dewed His brow
In his old agony, this earth-drop fell
Most bitter salt, and ever since hath been
Fuller of travailing than other worlds.

Raphael.
Thy speech is dark. I understand it not.

Uriel.
Of a dark thing I speak a few dark words.
Put from thy gaze the sweet bloom of these hills
And all this gorgeous dapple of the sea,
And let thy memory stand again with me
On Time's untrodden threshold, that first day
Which searched and stung our immemorial peace
With pangs of vernal influence. Heaven rose
As if from sleep, and, lo, through all the void
Clambered and curled creation like a vine,
Hanging the dark with clusters of young bloom.
Then from the viewless ever-folded heart
Of the mystic Rose, stole breath and pulse of change,
Delicious pantings such as seize the breast
Of lovers when the love-tide nears its flood,
Yet touched with endless potency of pain,
As lips of mothers when their anguish ebbs
And leaves the waifling life. Then first the Dove
Began to mourn above the mercy-seat,
And the dear sister spirits of the Lamps
Bent all their shimmering wings one way to screen
Their wicks from the wind-flaw. Large with question turned
Angelic eyes to archangelic eyes,
Archangels laid changed lips to the ears of Thrones,
Thrones gazed at Dominations, Powers made sign
To Principalities; but not one dared,
Voicing the fear that filled him, to cry, “Lord,
What hast Thou brought upon Thy kingdom, Thou
Ancient of Days!” Their silence was right well.

Raphael.
All this the meditative spirits oft
Have pondered. But thy meaning still is dark.

Uriel.
Ourselves who questioned why the world was made
Were born of the same questionable seed,
And we who feared were the first cause of fear.
Of a dark thing I speak a few dark words.
Of old the mind of God, coiled on itself
In contemplation single and eterne,
Felt suddenly a stealing wistfulness
Sully the essence of his old content
With pangs of dim division. Long He strove
Against his bosom's deep necessity,
Then, groping for surcease, put forth the orbs
Of Paradise, with all their imagery,
And the ordered hierarchies where we stand;
Some sharing more in his essential calm,
Some, rebel spirits, banished now or quelled,
The ill-starred sons of his disquietude,—
Disquietude not quenched when fell the pride
Of Lucifer, long bastioned in the North.
Demand of joy, hardly to be gainsaid,
And vast necessity of grief, still worked
Compulsive in his breast: our essence calm,
Those lucid orbs accordant, could not bring
Nepenthe long. His hand He still withheld
Ages of ages, fearing the event,
Till, bathed in brighter urge and wistfulness
He put forth suddenly this vine of Time
And hung the hollow dark with passionate change.

Raphael.
I think for me Heaven seemed not Heaven till then,
When from our seats of peace we could behold
The strife of ripening suns and withering moons,
Marching of ice-floes, and the nameless wars
Of monster races laboring to be man;
When we could hear the wrestle of hoarse sound
Hurl gust on gust obscurely toward the time
Of disinvolvèd music: till at last,
Standing erect amid the giant fern—

Uriel.
At last! At last! O shaken Breast, nowhere
Couldst thou find quiet save in putting forth
This last imagination? Could no form
Of being stanch thee in thy groping thought
Save this of Man? Puny and terrible;
Apt to imagine powers beyond himself
In wind and lightning; cunning to evoke
From mould and flint-stone the surprising fire,
And carve the heavy hills to spiritual shapes
Of town and temple; nursing in his veins
More restlessness than called him from the void,
Perfidies, hungers, dreams, idolatries,
Pain, laughter, wonder, anger, sex, and song!

Raphael.
God had one other thought, more sweet, more dire;
Thy latest words remind thee.

Behind the trees a girl's voice sings.
O daughters of Jerusalem!
What said ye unto her
Who took her love by the garment's hem,
Where the tanned grape-gatherers were?
Did any go down and see
If she led him into her house?
Or was it aloft where the wild harts flee,
Was it high in the hills, 'neath the cedar-tree,
That she kissed him and called him spouse?

A young man and a girl come over the hill from the town.
Uriel.
Unto man
Woman was due. To hearts of fire more fire,
To pride of strength a still subduing strength.

As they pass through the coppice, the girl sings.
O keepers of the city walls!
Have ye taken her veil away,
Whose hasting feet and low love-calls
Ye heard at the drop of day?
Have ye taken her ankle-rings,
Who is fair, who hath eyes like a dove?
Must she seek her lover, her king of kings,
Naked, stripped of her costly things?
Must she have no garment but love?

SCENE II

A mountain glade and forest. Midnight.
Shepherd.
Here stand, if thou wilt see, by this great bole.
This way they passed, and hither should return.
But pray thee, gentle god, when they draw near
Abate the splendor of thy face, fold close
Thine eyed and irised plumage. God thou art,
But thou must needs be mighty to escape
The hill girls when they rage! From these old boughs
The climbing moon will soon pour deeper shade
To screen thee more.

Raphael.
How looked they when they passed?

Shepherd Boy.
Coney, how passed the hailstorm o'er, quotha!
Patter! patter! 't was sung beneath i' the dark.
I lost a birch cup full of whortleberries
Scrambling to cover when I heard their songs.
But when they burst across the glade, I peeped,
And saw their breasts gleam through their angry hair.
Evoë! they had snared the village lad
They hanker for so long. I hear them talk,
Dawdling on well-curbs with their water-skins
Or picking the May-apples.

Shepherd.
'T is the lad
Who sat mute at the merry threshing-stead,
Turned from their orgies in the sacred wood
With large bright eyes unamorous, and sang
In lonesome places piercing lonesome songs
Of other lives and other gods than theirs—
Perchance of thee and thy bright-wingèd mates,
If mates be thine, for god thou surely art.

Shepherd Boy.
To-night they have him limed! Brow of the hawk,
Throat of the hermit-thrush, and ring-dove eyes!

Shepherd.
He came across the moon-drench dragged by three
Whose bodies shone like the peeled willow wand;
The little snakes they knot into their hair
Lipping his neck, where oozed the red of grapes
From his crushed garland; his hands flung aloft
To the symbol of their fierce licentious god.
His eyes were large and fixed, his lips apart,
As I have seen him in the lonesome woods,
But madder than the maddest bacchant there!

Raphael.
Who cometh yonder?

Shepherd.
Where?

Raphael.
Across the glade.

Shepherd.
I see nought.

Raphael.
There, behind the trailing mist.
The moonlight gathers to a ghostly shape,
Unearthly silver, throbbing like a heart!
It seems a beast and rider.
The shepherds make off.
Ah, I know
That icy influence, and the voice I know,
First heard in Heaven when time began to be,—
A voice above our voices, and a hush
Beneath our hush, freezing the heart with fear,
With fear the heart even of spirit-kind. ...

The Angel of the Pale Horse.
Sings.

Raphael.
What makes thine errand here?

Angel of the Pale Horse.
Still as of old.

Raphael.
I think thou art way-wandered. Here is life.

Angel of the Pale Horse.
My horse's feet err not; they are way-wise.

Raphael.
Stand by me in the shade of these old boughs,
And let no anger fan thy wings alight
Or flake the nostrils of thy horse with fire
When the young bacchants halloo down the steep.

Angel of the Pale Horse.
Thou feedest thy giddy and half-human mind
Still on these little spectacles of change,
Forgetting Heaven's great woes!

Raphael.
What woe can come
Into those courts of old beatitude?

Angel of the Pale Horse.
Hast thou not felt its presence there?

Raphael.
Yes—nay—
I know not ... When I enter Heaven gate,
Fear comes upon me, for I seem to feel
Some subtle waning of accustomed joy,
Some dying off of music—thin, minute,
As the single cricket amid chorusing fields,
Whose ceasing breaks the rapture. Often, too,
Wan faces shun me in the woods of light
And voices of vague dolor die away
Along the living lilies as I come.
But this I held a phantasy of dream,
Bred of too earnest looking on the blight
That falls on mortal things.

Angel of the Pale Horse.
It is no dream;
Though more mysterious, more dark than dream.
Momently fades the splendor, momently
Silence and dissonance like eating moths
Scatter corruption on the choiring orbs.

Raphael.
No one declares the cause?

Angel of the Pale Horse.
The cause is here,
Here in the vagrant courses of the moon,
Who makes her lair and wanders for her love
After her own loose law; in yonder stars,
Gay spendthrifts of their plentitude of fire;
In this most dissolute earth, who decks herself
With gorgeous phantasy, and delicate whim,
And paces forth before the worlds to dance
A maiden measure, modest lids downcast
To hide her harlot's guile; but more than these,
And more than all, unutterably more,
Here in the wild and sinful heart of man,—
Of all the fruits upon creation's vine
The thirstiest one to drain the vital breast
Of God, wherein it grows.

Raphael.
Too fiery sweet
Gushes the liquor from the vine He set,
Man the broad leaf and maid the honeyed flower!

The shepherds creep back, and stand peering from behind the tree at the angels.
Raphael.
Musing.
What if they rendered up their wills to His?
Hushed and subdued their personality?
Became as members of the living tree?

Angel of the Pale Horse.
A whisper grows, various from tongue to tongue,
That so He will attempt. Those who consent
To render up their clamorous wills to Him,
To merge their fretful being in his peace,
He will accept: the rest He will destroy.

The boy whispers to Raphael.
Raphael.
What wilt thou, little friend?

Shepherd Boy.
Hither, sweet god!
But let the ghostly centaur stay behind.

Shepherd.
Lean o'er this rock and look into the gorge.
See how their torches dip from ledge to ledge.
They race beside some shape the torrent bears:
The eddies seize it now, and leaning out
Over the pool they stop to howl their hymns,
And, now it plunges, how they madden down
With laughter keen above the drumming foam.

Raphael.
Is 't not a man's torn trunk?

Shepherd Boy.
See those behind
Grasping the antlers of the lunging stag,
That bellows when their torches bite his flanks!
I know the witch who rides him!

Raphael.
Come away
That is a bleeding head she holds aloft
Above the clutching of her comrades' hands!

Shepherd Boy.
No more thou 'lt shun their orgies in the wood,
Throat of the hermit-thrush and ring-dove eyes!
Throat of the mourning thrush, thy songs are done;
Sad ring-dove eyes, the lids have shut you in!

Shepherd.
That is his harp the dancers bear before,
Mocking his solemn songs of other gods
And other lives than theirs.

Raphael.
Musing.
Those who consent
He will accept: the rest He will destroy!

Shepherd Boy.
Look! look! the ghostly centaur goeth down.

ACT I

Time: as in the Prelude

PERSONS OF THE MASQUE

• Raphael
• Uriel
• Michael
• Azaziel
• The Angel of the Pale Horse
• The Angel of the White Horse
• The Angel of the Red Horse
• Spirits of the Throne-Lamps
• The Lion of the Throne
• The Eagle of the Throne
• The Angel of the Tree of Knowledge
• Spirits of the Saved
• Spirits of the Lost
• Moon-Spirits
• Voices

SCENE I.

A high mountain pass, down which flows a brook, with pools and waterfalls. Early morning.
Raphael.
Climbing, sings.
He climbs higher, and sings.
Still climbing.
The trees grow stunted in this keener air,
And scarce the hardiest blossoms dare to take
Assurance from the sun. Southward the rocks
Boast mosses and a poor increase of flowers,
But all the northern shelters hold their snow.
Such flowers as come, come not quite flower-like,
But smitten from their gracious habitudes
By some alarm, some vast and voiceless cry
That just has ceased to echo ere I came.
These white buds stand unnaturally white,
Breathing no odors till their terror pass;
Those grey souls toss their arms into the wind,
Peer through their locks with bright distracted eyes
And hug the elfin horror to their breasts—
Poor brain-turned gypsy wildings, doomed to birth
In this uneasy region! ... Yonder lift
The outposts of the habitable land.
Ages of looking on the scene beyond
Have worn the granite into shapes of woe
And old disaster.
He climbs higher, to where the ravine debouches into the Valley of the Judgment.
Each time when I stand
Upon the borders of this monstrous place,
I still must question wherefore it was flung
Thus ruinous with toppled peak and scaur,
Sheer from the morning cliffs that hold up Heaven
To nether caverns where no foot of man
Has clambered down, nor eye of angel dared
To spy upon the sluggish denizens,
If any dwell so deep. What giant plow
Harnessed to behemoth and mastodon
Set this slope furrow down the side of the world?
And to what harvest? ... Here the sons of men,
Living and dead and yet unborn, might come
Unto the final judgment; here the lost
Might make one desperate stand. ... What moveth there?
What leonine and wingèd shape is he
Steals up yon gorge all desolate of light
Whence voices of fierce-tongued and desperate streams
Sound faint as throats of nooning doves? Till now
Never have I beheld a living thing
Amid these wastes. What manner beast is he
That he hath power to awe me, though removed
So far the fallen vastness of a cliff
Wherefrom a temple might be quarried, looks
Fit for a shepherd's sling? ... Surely he comes
From nameless battle yonder in the depths;
But whither steals he homeward there aloft?
What lair is his cloud-hidden in the snows,
Whose mates and loves wait 'neath the desert palms
To hear him tell his deed? Huge was the fight
That left that mighty prowess broken so!
For sorely is he broken: now he stops
And lies exhausted by an icy pool,
Now labors up the shale, skirts the bald top,
Drops with fierce caution down the further slope
Eyeing the next hard pass. I wonder ... ? No ...
Strange! 't was a blood-drop fell upon that flower
A-tremble from the brink. Another here
Upon the ground-moss—nay, upon my hand—
It falls all round me! ...
Looking upward.
Ah, an eagle goes
Lame from the battle, mate or duelist
Of him who crept by yonder. Even here
I see the vast wings, shattered and unpenned,
Almost refuse their labor; now he swerves
To rest upon a needled dolomite,
Then upward grievously another stage
Toward some sad eyrie where his heart abides.
I too must seek my eyrie—sad enough,
Since there my heart abides not any more,
Amid the waste infinitudes of light
Missing the flow of day, the refluent dark;
Amid the bliss of unconcerning eyes
Remembering woman's anguish, man's resolve,
Youth's wistful darling guess, kindled and quenched
And quenched and kindled yet a little year
In eyes too frail to hold their meaning long
Where chance and enmity conspire with death.

He flies up the Valley.

SCENE II

Above the peaks that crown the head of the Valley of the Judgment.
Raphael.
Flying.
Soon will the cliffs of Heaven give easier way,
For though my heart grows human, yet my frame
With immaterial things accordance keeps,
And to my feet these spiritual hills
Feel native, and the climate kind to breathe;
Still kindlier for the shredded mist of song
That wanders here at morning and at eve
Whispering witless words and prophecy.

Voices.
Above.

Raphael.
Many an age your song has hovered round
This theme of Heaven's distress. What mean ye now?
Was that the lion-hound of which ye sing
Crept wounded hither, masterless, this hour?

Voices.
As before.
Where had his gadding spirit led?
Beside what peopled water-head
Stooped he, or on what sleeping face
Was he intent the dream to trace?
Had creature love upon him fawned
Or had he drunk of mortal mirth
That he knew not what a morning dawned
Over his darling earth?
Heard not the storm, heard not the cries,
Heard not the talk of the startled skies
Over the guilty earth?

Raphael.
Those dubious voices fade, and in their stead
Succeeds a sound more anxious and perturbed,
Voices and mutterings of supernal wrath
Or whisperings of fear. ... Ah, there aloft
Upon the beetling rosy crag they stand,
The pale horse and the white horse and the red!
What rage vermilions his expanded wing?
Why streams his mane so fiery on the wind
Back from his staring eyeballs? What should make
His brother's steady candor pulse and throb
And falter like the light on cavern walls
Rocked under by the tide? O never yet
Did the pale horse seem terrible as now,
Pawing the margent cliff and snorting down
Pale fire into the Valley! ... Brothers, hail!
I fare from outland. Tell me what befalls.

Angel of the White Horse.
He strays too much abroad. He hath not heard.

Angel of the Pale Horse.
They say that he has lived too much in the sun
And waxes mortal, mortal. We shall see.

Angel of the Red Horse.
Saw'st thou aught stirring in the valley deeps?

Raphael.
Far down below a beast crept wounded hither.
Why gaze ye on each other thus aghast?

Angel of the Red Horse.
Cast ye that way—the passes and defiles!
This way will I.

The Angels of the Horses disappear.
Raphael.
What news has spread concern
Even to these marks and purlieus of God's dream?
Below the sun's pale rim a paleness moves,
Grows larger, blots the disc with deepening light. ...
And now above the Valley treads a shape
Too lordly to be aught but Uriel!
Poised on a peak he halts to gaze behind;
Now wingeth nearer, in the Eagle's track—

Uriel.
Approaching.
Hail, brother.

Raphael.
Hail! Saw'st thou the fight below?

Uriel.
Of what I saw I cannot spell the sense,
Too darkly hid for me!

Raphael.
Share me at least
Thy news, though scant. That winged and brindled bulk,
Whence came it and what quarry did it seek?
And the great eagle, was it mate or foe?

Uriel.
No earthly beast it was, no earthly bird,
Seeking no earthly quarry. More than this
I know not how to say, ere I have mused
Where in the sun's core light and thought are one.

Raphael.
But yet conjecture clamors at thy heart.

Uriel.
Thou knowest what whispers are abroad in Heaven;
How God pines ever for his broken dream,
Broken by vague division, whence who knows!
And pangs of restless love too strong to quench
Save by the putting of creation forth,—
Quenched then but for a moment, since the worlds
He made to soothe Him only vex Him more,
Being compact of passion, violent,
Exceeding quarrelsome, and in their midst
Man the arch-troubler. Fainter whispers say
He ponders how to win his prodigal
By some extremity to render back
The heritage abused, to merge again
Each individual will into his will:
Till when, his pangs increase.

Raphael.
A nine days' tale.
I hold Him no such weakling! Yet ... and yet ...
I have beheld ... I know not ... pallor couched
On brows that wont to beacon; through the orbs
Quivers of twilight, hints and flecks of change. ...
We cannot be, we would not be, I deem,
The same as ere space was, or time began
To trellis there life's wild and various bloom.
—We linger. Let me hear.

Uriel.
Some things He made
Out of his wistfulness, his ecstasy,
And made them lovely fair; yet other some
Out of his loathing, out of his remorse,
Out of chagrin at the antinomy
Cleaving his nature; these are monstrous shapes,
Whereof the most abhorred one dwells below
Within the caves and aged wells of dark
Toward which this Valley plunges. There it waits
Hoarding its ugly strength till time be full.

Raphael.
How nam'st thou him?

Uriel.
The spirits meditative
Darkly name him: The Worm that Dieth not,—
Perhaps the scourge reserved for those who prove
Rebellious in the event, perhaps himself
Scourge of the Scourger, biding but his hour
To 'venge his miscreation. So he lies,
A thing most opposite to spirit-kind,
Most hated by the Four who guard the Throne,
Within the viewless panoply of light
Immediately ministrant. To them,
But to the Lion and the Eagle most,
Is given to gaze in the Eternal eyes
Like hounds about a hunter's knee, that watch
Each passion written on their master's brow,
And having read his trouble, steal away
To taste the troubler's flesh beneath their fangs.
So stole away the Lion of the Throne,
The Eagle for his aid. Beneath the moon
Last night I came upon them stealing down,
Too eager on the scent to mark my flight.
Even to the splintered curb of the last profound
I followed, and thence heard the battle rage
Bellowed above by the loath elements,
Till dawn showed in the east, an ashen dawn
Clotted and drizzled o'er with sullen light.

Raphael.
Their hearts were faithful. They were fain to save
The Master from some sad extremity. ...
But not in yonder depths, alas, doth lie
The arch-foe of his peace. Would it were so!
A monster bred to hatred in the dark.
Would it were so! not rather, as we fear,
Man the uplifted stature, the proud mind,
The laughter!

Uriel.
Speedily our doubt shall end,
For not much more delayeth the event.
—My watch is set within the sun, and thither
My hour constrains me.

Raphael.
Heavenward I. Farewell!

SCENE III

A garden in Heaven. The Eagle sits on the Tree of Knowledge; the Lion and the Angel of the White Horse rest beneath.
Angel of the White Horse.

The Eagle.
Creep softly, softly! Heaven's streets are still,
Each seraph sentry drowseth on his hill,
The winds of song are folded, and as flowers
Folded are all the domes and dreaming towers.
Creep softly, softly; I am with thee, mate!
Softly I soar above the shrouded gate,
And till thou comest past the warding swords
Lone in the outer moonlight I will wait.

The Lion.
Wing swiftly! For the walls of chrysopras
Have melted at my roar to let me pass;
But Heaven is up and peers with mazèd eyes,
And wings are weighed to hinder our emprise.
Wing swiftly, swiftly, down the glooming air,
Past cloud and precipice and mountain stair,
For ere another morning drowns the stars
We must have met the Worm within his lair.

The Eagle.
Drear are the depths, O brother,
Bitter the fight!
Vainly we stand by each other.
Thy might and my might
Are as straw, in the flame and the smother.

Angel of the White Horse.
O ye familiars benedite,
Who, hidden in the eternal glow,
Keep guard about the Throne,
What things were given to your sight
Ere to the hold of such a foe
Ye dared to venture down?

The Lion.
Awaking.

The Eagle.
Wearily thou crep'st back
Sore from the track;
Thy hide was torn and thy tongue was black.
Long thou did'st slumber and deep.

The Lion.
A voice came in my sleep
Saying, “Why wander so far?
Nearhand lieth the earth
Full of rumors of war,
Of passion and pride no dearth.
There in his cavern cold
Lurketh the Dragon old;
He lies and pastures, plain to see,
On God's heart, sluggishly,
As once he sucked of the fruits of gold
Ages ago, on the Eden tree.

Angel of the White Horse.
Hearken! A wind walks in the Tree
Though the lily-heads are still,
From bough to bough inscrutably
It feeleth out its will;
And now the leaves, a-tremble long,
Utter impulsive song.

The Angel of the Tree.
Not in the loosened whirlwinds that invade
The sun's white core with shade,
Not in the wandering tribes of fire that sweep
With rapine through the deep,
Not in the venom of the caverned Worm
That drowseth out his term,
Nay, not in these or aught akin to these
Consisteth of God's groaning and disease
The incorporeal germ.
Though all that He hath made
Rebels and is exceeding turbulent,
Though all his loins' increase
Go after pleasures other than He meant,
And with excessive claims
Drain and defile the founts of his content,—
Yet only one of all the shapes He brought
Out of the gulfs of thought,
One only creature of his quickening hands
Hath from its brow
With reckless laugh and with reiterate vow
Stripped clean away all decencies and shames;
Till with continual strife
And divagant demands
Of separate life,
The searching and the scornful heart of Man
God's inmost being maims.

The Eagle.
For naught have my wings been broken,
Vain are the wounds of thy paws!
Hark what the Tree hath spoken.

Angel of the Pale Horse.
Hush! For a murmur shakes the bloom
That once drank Eden dew,
A shadowed wind like a word of doom
Darkens the branches through.

The Angel of the Tree.

ACT II

Time: during and immediately after the Crucifixion. The outlying plains of Heaven. Storm and darkness.
Raphael.
But now the air was thick with panic shades
Who made no answer when I cried to them
Across the vortices of spiritual dark.
Upon what stricken plain have I been flung,
Whose miscreations blot with leaves like hands
The far horizon light? Some glow-worm ghost
Flees yonder, pauses, turns, and flees again:
A woman spirit, by the anguish sweet
Wakes in me at her anguish. Sister, hear!

The Spirit of the Throne-Lamp.
O Light undimmed, if thou art powerful,
Speak to the wind! For see, my wings are torn
And shelter not my lamp; 't is almost spent.

Raphael.
Me too the wind afflicts. Together thus
Our wings will shield the flame. Already, see,
It climbs and steadies in the crystal bowl,
And purges half the terror from thine eyes,
Thou love-lamp of the Lord! Are these his storms?
By his allowance are we thus distraught?

The Spirit of the Lamp.
His throne is empty and Himself is gone.

Raphael.
Child, fright hath crazed thee. Lean thy shaking breast
On mine: shut out the terrifying dark.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
He died with grieving o'er the world He made.

Raphael.
We live in Him; with Him shall all things die.
Bright burns thy lamp; take heart, and tell me soon
What hath befallen in Heaven.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
I know not well.
My secret lies upon my heart too long....

Raphael.
Nay, tremble not. Rather look out and see
What presence comes; its influence makes cheer;
'T will be some spirit glad and resolute.
Put by thy wings and look; my eyes are blind
Watching the feverous pulsings of thy lamp.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
'T is he whose tent is pitched within the sun,
But hardly glad, no longer resolute.
Even Uriel's lordly light the wind subdues.

Raphael.
Hail, Uriel!

The Spirit of the Lamp.
Hail!

Uriel.
Hail, brother! Sister, hail!

Raphael.
Close, lend thy breadth of wing! Thou art a strength.
Speak, if thou knowest what has come to pass.

Uriel.
Something I know, and hither through the storms
That vex the deeps and on disastrous shores
Fling all frail stars that coast and merchant there,
I come to learn the sequel—if to learn
Be mine, in such a matter.

Raphael.
Speak.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
Oh, speak!

Uriel.
'Neath pleachèd boughs and vines of ancient fire
In the white centre of the sun I lay,
And watched the armies of young seraphim
Naked at play on the candescent plains,
When suddenly the skies of flame were rent
In sunder, and the plain became a sea
Whereon the whirlwind walked through weltering lanes
To the sun's core. With pain I made my way
'Twixt element and angry element.
Vast shapes of gathering and dissolving fire
That seemed as beast and bird, and awful frames
Of shadow, dubious whether bird or beast
Or fish or reptile, hidden until now
In shifting caverns of the photosphere,
Rose up across my path; and in their eyes
Sat fear, and on their limbs astonishment.
At last, long battling and bewildered oft,
I gained the solar coasts. Wide round I saw
Each planet passion-changed, each haggard star
Reeling from flight and swoon, and the great deep
Toiled like a runner's heart who runs with death.
Calm at confusion's centre stood the Earth,
A spiritual nimbus round her brow
Like as a woman angel-visited,
Sightless and deaf to all things save her swoon
And her heart's solemn hallelujah.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
Oh,
What hath He sent upon the joyous Earth?
The Earth that has the blue and little flowers
Thou brought'st me once to wreath my lamp withal,
Earth-lover! But they faded very soon,
And left a nameless hunger in my heart.
Thy Earth was chosen, Raphael! Art thou glad?

Raphael.
Not glad nor sorry, sister, since not yet
I know the meaning of our brother's words.
Earth-wandering, and the shows of restless time,
Have weighed the eyelids of my spirit down.
Speak, Uriel, and speak plain. What followed then?

Uriel.
That rapt and solemn aspect of the Earth
Soon drew me to her through the shuddering air;
And circling swiftly round her as she went
I neared the twilight verge that dipped toward night.
Here on a sunset hill I stayed my wings.
Rabble of people and much soldiery
Poured thence into their city gates; the place
Was steeped in level spendor after storm,
And like to pillars of advancing fire
Three trees of crucifixion loomed, whereon
Three men hung crucified, one beautiful
Beyond the measure of Man's flowering clay,
Conspicuous o'er the world placed for a sign.
Slowly to meet my gaze the dying lids
Were lifted, and the faint eyes swam on mine—

Raphael.
Nay, sister, sink not! We are three: be strong.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
I know whose eyes swam faint on thine! I know
The sorrows that He suffered for his world,
Ere ever He put off eternity
And put on clay, to be by hands of clay
Hung for a sign!

Raphael.
Above the pausing wind
Hearken! a rush of pinions. Who are these
That put an influence in this bitter air
Like Spring when she comes galliard from the south?

Uriel.
The globe of amber light wherein they fly
Goes ashen in the flaws. That ship of souls
Tacks in the wind's teeth and is blown abroad
Nigh Heaven's last confines. Now it veers again,
And groweth larger: they will pass this way.
Brother, lift up thy voice and sing to them.
These be the spirits that within the moon
Wander the lucent forests; shy are they
Amid their wood-thoughts and their shy love-thoughts,
Only by song their minds are quickly swayed.
Wide has the ocean been for their frail wings,
And wild the panic that has driven them forth
From their still lunar isle. Thy song shall be
A kindly net to snare them as they pass.

Raphael.
Sings.

The moon-spirits alight in a circle round the three angels.
The Spirit of the Lamp.
How fair they must have been ere yet their light
Was ruined with the wind and flying spume,
Being so fair, though ruined!

First Moon-Spirit.
Who are ye
That seem so safe when every shaken world
Voideth its tenantry, and even those stars
That keep the marches and strongholds of space
Flee with affrighted eyes down alien deeps,
Or cling to the necks of comets, whispering words
That stop them in their courses, though they be
Violent souls and outlaw.

Uriel.
We are such
As share God's sorrow in his evil time,
And wait the issue of the desperate draught
He drinks this hour to win surcease of pain.

Second Moon-Spirit.
Speak simply to the simple; make thy words
Accordant to our minds; our element
Is the moon's meek, unintellectual day.

Uriel.
You in the moon have felt his pangs more near
Than may the passionate dwellers in quick worlds
Wrapped in their own hot being; for your sphere
Has cooled the angry metal in its veins,
Its spent volcanoes utter now no more
Their proud and hasty meanings; age by age
Your world tends back to silence, rendering up
Its selfhood and control into his hands
Whence it rebelled, like all his prodigals,
To spend the hoard of fire He dowered them with
Too rashly. So it hangs, a doubtful ground:
Now, brooded on by powers of heavenly peace,
It goeth darkling and your hearts are dumb,
Now, caught within the orbits of desire,
It gathers ghostly splendor; in your woods
Old rites are paid, and o'er your crystal peaks,
That burn at the heart like genie-haunted gems,
Sweeps revelry so wild that mortal men,
Shepherds or sailors, gazing half a night,
Wander at dawn brain-crazed.

Third Moon-Spirit.
Angel, we wait,
We wait with trembling till thy lips declare
This present hour's disaster. Whose the arm
That broke our steppes in twain, and from the roots
Of cloven hills haled shapes of former men
And frames of monstrous ravin, ages dead?
Whose mouth was set against the moon-children
To blow their sheeny pleasances to dust
And scare them from their world?
What plains are these
Whose spiritual pulse of light and dark
Throbs as if hope and terror struggled there?

Uriel.
These are the plains of Heaven, least create
Of God's creation, nearest to his hand
When He would discreate, as now perchance,
The deeps that teem with rebel energies
Wanton, unteachable, intolerable,
Whereof the soul of man, though meant to be
His dearest pride and joy, is frowardest
And first to vex Him: were Man's will subdued,
The rest beneath his banners soon would swarm.
Long hath He warned and pleaded, but to-day
With a most searching bosom-whisper pleads;
For in their likeness clad He gives Himself
To die that they may live, accepting Him,
Or, still rejecting, and preferring still
Their own unto his pleasure, may be cast
To outer darkness and the second death.
These storms and perturbations are his throes,
And here we wait until He reassume
His attributes and kingdom.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
Will He come?
And will the ancient peace be ours again?
Speak, brother, will it be?

Uriel.
Hope still is ours.
Tremble no more, sweet Flame! Good hope is ours.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
My secret lies upon my heart too long!
Since first the trumpet told of Time begun,
And in the seven bowls the seven flames,
So white before and still, a patient praise,
Leaped up in restless colors, fear hath stood
A whispering eighth among the sisters seven,
A thin small voice singing above our songs,
A hush beneath our hush. Each side the throne
The mystic olive trees began to blow,
And on the candlesticks that burn beneath
Dropped dying bloom and fruitage mortal ripe.
When evening spread upon the holy hill
Its excellence of peace, small restless wings,
To Heaven unnative, fluttered round our lamps,
Forever circling nearer till they threw
Into the flame their lives of longing dust,
And though we plucked the char out hastily
A climbing rust had dulled our torch of praise.
Nay, where the very breast of God should be,
Forever panoplied with viewless light,
Gnawed darkness like a worm, and when this wind
That never came till now, blew wide and thin
The splendor of the Throne-stead—hush, bend close!—
His eyes were old with pain. Then all at once—
O brothers, is it hours or æons since?—
Intolerable lambence lit the air;
The sea of glass whereon the nations stand
At morn to carol, curdled red as blood,
And rolled a moaning billow to the shore;
The Eagle screamed; upon the tabled gem
Where was the footstool of God's feet, lay prone
The Lion's whining muzzle; and the Calf
Bleated beneath his six-times-folded wing.
My sister lamps were quenched, but ere I fled
I crept up past the Lion's awful paws,
Up past the shrouding light, and saw His place
Was empty. ... Is it hours or æons since?
I found the shadowed fields about me, grey
Each hearted amaranth and asphodel,
The living forests with their veins of light
Looped thickly, and the burning flowers between,
The living waters, and the lily souls
Along the waters—all a stricken grey!
Where'er I fled or turned it still pursued—
That Nothingness that sat upon the Throne;
And now it waits to seize me—yonder, here!

Uriel.
Hush, be of better comfort. Through the plain
Auroral pallors wake the asphodels;
The wind at last is still; and eastward far
Beyond the friths and islands of that sea
Which spreads before his dwelling in the Mount,
Behold, beginning glories star the dusk,
As if the clouds rolled burning from the throne,
To show us signs and wonders risen there.
And hark! the happy presage of keen wings
Ingathering from the corners of the winds;
Large light, and silvery calls and far replies,
And deeps of song that call unto the deeps.

Raphael.
His agony is done: a little while
He tarries, but He surely comes again
Even though but for a little.

The Spirit of the Lamp.
Let us join
These hasting companies whose steady flight
Goes tempered to all manner instruments
Borne in their midst by hidden taborists,
Lute-players, and them that pluck the dulcimer—
All sweet musicians! Surely these go in
Unto some holy matter.

Raphael.
Surely. Come!

ACT III.

SCENE I

A peak above the Valley of the Judgment. Between midnight and dawn of the Day of Judgment.
Raphael.

SCENE II

A peak above the Valley of the Judgment. Twilight of the Day of Judgment.
Michael.
God's vengeance is full wrought, unless this form
That labors from the dark mists of the Vale
Be one whose strength has overlived our wrath,
And the last hunger of whose heart shall be
To creep from out that mass of death, and wait
High on these ruined hills for death to come
At nightfall, when the last strong soul must die.
Nay, 't is no mortal creature, though he wears
A fallen unhappy splendor, and his wings,
All eyed and irised like the gladdest ones
That glimmer in the pageantry of Heaven,
Are folded sadly o'er his downcast eyes
As now he sits and dreams. 'T is Raphael.
Michael descends.
Why sitteth Raphael disconsolate
After the manifest glories of this day?

Raphael.
The rest may keep the glory.

Michael.
Wilt thou share
The love-feast of the saved in Heaven to-night
With hidden traitorous thoughts clouding thy heart?

Raphael.
Never again! Never again for me!
Never again the lily souls that live
Along the margent of the streams, shall grow
More candid at my coming. Never more
God's birds above the bearers of the Ark
Shall make a wood of implicated wings,
Swept by the wind of slow ecstatic song.
Thy youths shall hold their summer cenacles;
I am not of their fellowship, it seems.
God's ancient peace shall feed them, as it feeds
These yet uplifted hills. I would I knew
Where bubbled that insistent spring. To drink
Deep, and forget what I have seen to-day!

Michael.
What thou hast seen? The splendor of his power
Sent forth against the wicked; his right arm
Cleaving unbearable glories, lifted high
To hurl his chivalry down slopes of flame
With wheels and tramplings; the wide threshing-floor
Become a furnace; drop by anguished drop
The oozing of the wine-press of his wrath;
The gross pulp cumbering the floor of the world,
The little priceless liquor chaliced up,
Borne back 'mid plaining silver and sweet throats
For the Spirit's earliest house-gift to the Bride!
Thou would'st forget this gladly, Raphael?

Raphael.
Yes, yes; right gladly.

Michael.
Yonder where the fight
Flung its main sea of blood and broken souls
Into the nether dark, I saw a youth
Cling for a moment to a jutting rock
And gaze back at the angel shapes that rode
The neck of the avalanche; between the wings
Of the pale horse and the red his vision pierced,
Between the ranks of spectral charioteers,
Supernal arms and banners prone for speed,
Up to the central menace of the Hand
That launched that bulk of ruin; and I saw
A light of mighty pleasure fill his eyes
At all that harness and dispatch of war
Storming aslope. He laughed defiance back
Ere down cascades of blood and fire was flung
His body indistinguishably damned.
How should this puny valor rise in glee
To greet the power that crushed it, and thy heart,
Angelically dowered, stand listless by?

Raphael.
Perhaps for thinking on another sight.
After thy chivalry passed down and left
The valley-trough cumbered and heaped with death,
A broken girl o'er-lived to find the breast
Her arms had clung to in the awful fall
Strange, alien, not her lover's boyish shape
She deemed she held, but gross with years and sins.
Her changed eyes heavily a moment roamed,
Then settled back on his, the darkened mate
Whom chance had flung her at the hour extreme
In scornful bridals. From his brow she drew
The war-worn locks, and laid her kisses there
Unutterable with life's èxtreme tenderness.
[OMITTED]
Hark! where the last of those redeemed go by,
Companioned of the hasting paranymphs
Who hear afar the Spirit and the Bride
Say “Come,” and see the nuptial torch alight
Ere they have put their saffron vesture on,—
Too eager for their goal to join the song
Those throats redeemèd raise, save that their hearts
Throb rhythmic with it, systole dim
And bright diastole, with wax and wane
Of spirit-splendor pulsing to the tune.

Redeemed Spirits.
Sing, as they fly past below.

Raphael.
Another neareth, chill upon the wind;
Wan fire-flakes stain the clustering spires of cliff,
From ledge to shoulder hapless echo clings
And falters up.

Michael.
The pale one's homing-song!
To-day he makes good harvest, and his voice
Has autumn meanings; jealously and late
His steed foregoes the trampled threshing-stead.

Raphael.
Terrible angel! Never until now
Have I beheld his features through the veil
Of pallor that enwrapped them; now at last
Their terror is distinct, for triumph now
And large appeasement lights them visibly,
As o'er his horse's neck he strains for speed.

Michael.
One flieth with him, rosy-lit within.

Raphael.
Not as the battailous breathing of thy mates
Enrubies them: more vesperine and sad.
'T will be the lordly light of Uriel, dimmed.
Hail, Uriel! Quench thy speed.

The Angel of the Pale Horse.
Flying.
Why tarry now?
God's acts are throughly complished: Heaven stays
Till all her sons be gathered.

Flies past.
Uriel.
Alighting.
Here I wait
To see the swift reprisals Man shall take.

Michael.
Blaspheme not, lest I hurl thee down to swell
The carrion sin that Raphael mourns above!

Raphael.
Uriel's place is there, by those pale heads,
Those sightless eyes with awful question changed,
Those desperate broken hands cheated in death
With poor embraces chance and alien.
Not Uriel's only,—mine, and thine, and theirs
Thy warrior mates, and chiefly his whose breast
Bathed in some dawn's bright urge and wistfulness
Put out this lovely fruitage, this sweet vine
Of man the leaf and maid the honeyed flower
In mystic alternation, and when noon
Spread clamor in the pulses of the vine,
Was pined and plucked it up! Not so shall one
Deal with another's, much less with his own.

Michael.
For sins not to be borne He cut them off.
Murders, adulteries, and acts unclean,
Idolatries, and broken covenants,
Violent hearts and unconsidering tongues.

Uriel.
The violence and the unclean acts were his;
Unto Himself himself brake covenant;
Before the monstrous fancies of his heart
His heart made heathen mummery and song.
Wherefore to-day himself He punishes.

Michael.
Thy mouth uttereth darkness. Is all dream?
Human and heavenly deed unmeaning both?

Raphael.
To Uriel.
Brother, thou art all wisdom, as I know
And still have proved rejoicingly, but now
Thy word indeed is difficult and dark.
Take not away Man's ancient dignity,
The privilege and power to elect his ways,
His kingly self-possession. Level not
The head that lies too low to-day. Snatch not
From brows abased the crown of personal will
Which made them noble, though it brought them down,
Being worn too carelessly, too like a wreath
Of ivy or poppies meant for holiday.
Man's agonies and ecstasies obscure
Were more than shadow-show! Not all in vain
His groping toward some quaint imagined good,
His blood shed for a scruple, his low days
Winged and illumined with long-suffering love!

Uriel.
Nay, not in vain were these, though otherwise
Bound with the sum of things than unto Man
Seemed likely, wearing that glad wreath he wore.
And going after good the headstrong way.

Raphael.
We wait to hear this riddling talk made plain.

Uriel.
Truth is not soon made plain, nor in a breath
Fluently solved while the chance listener waits,
Nor by the elemental wrestling mind
Wrung from the rock with sobs. Myself have held,
Where in the sun's core light and thought are one,
Æons of question, and am darkling still.

Raphael.
Speak, brother, though thy words be hard and scant.
The candle flame goes far a moonless night.

Uriel.
The worlds and all their tenantry are Him,
Even to the utmost archipelagoes
Gazed at by maritime angels ere they veer
Homeward, awestruck by omens and sea-signs
Known to no pilot of them, and far off
Watch the scared islanders beside the straits,—
All these, and whatso lies beyond our hail,
Are effluence of the life that moves in Him,
Thought of his brain, wish of his working blood:
Yet every separate creature of his thought
Hath separate claims and separate potencies.
Oh, not a sparrow falleth to the ground
But He regardeth it! Since ere it fell
A little gladness died away in Him.
And not a creature sinneth but He weeps
His own sin with his creature's—fourfold pain.
Since god and creature, false each to itself,
Was false each to the other. Not a heart
O'ercometh evil and mounts up to good,
But He o'ercometh and is lifted too.
Each life of clay that flowered in fragrant deed,
Each grass-blade that grew willingly, each bird
That through the churlish weather hoarded song.
Not only worked its own salvation out
But helped Him in his old struggle with himself—
Or might have helped—or might have helped, it seemed. ...

Raphael.
Yet did not, thy disconsolate ending says.

Uriel.
Who shall dispute finalities with Him?
Not Uriel. But as far as Uriel sees,
Salvation lies annulled in yonder Vale
And prone are God's true helpers.

Michael.
Clay of clay!
Wassailers, fleshlings, quarrel-mongers, thieves
Of pleasure, plighters of unholy troth,
Mimes, gypsies, idol-breakers, idol-smiths,
Dervishing fantasists—most likely help!

Uriel.
Unlikely: yet the marrow of his bones;
Heat of the breath of his mouth; corpuscles red
Energic in his veins, loud gainsayers
Of death's insinuating whisper, “Peace!” ...
Before the Heavens were spread, or He himself
Rose from his changeless and unpictured dream,
These stirred in Him, demanding to be dowered
With individual shape and destiny,—
Each one a soul, yet each incorporate
With his great soul, which to far happy ends
Should henceforth in a million shapes of will
Immensely groan and travail, not with tears
Alone, but laughter, with singing as with sobs.
Oh, many a golden station on that march
Lie backward of us! when the armèd worlds
Broke leaguer round some conquered capital,
And in the pleasure-places of its kings
Sat down to feast, the unhelmed gleemen chanting
Victory past and victory to come.
Let me not darken thought with imagery!
Still the naked word escapes me, being too vast,
Too simple, for our little pictured speech.
This chiefly I would say: the restless joy
Which called God from his sleep and bade his hand
Depict much life and language on the dark,
Had other aims and meanings than are writ
In yonder Valley for an epilogue.
Man's violence was earnest of his strength,
His sin a heady overflow, dynamic
Unto all lovely uses, to be curbed
And sweetened, never broken with the rod!

Raphael.
Why did He quench their passion? I have walked
The rings of planets where strange-colored moons
Hung thick as dew, in ocean orchards feared
The glaucous tremble of the living boughs
Whose fruit hath eyes and purpose; but nowhere
Found any law but this: Passion is power,
And, kindly tempered, saves. All things declare
Struggle hath deeper peace than sleep can bring:
The restlessness that put creation forth
Impure and violent, held holier calm
Than that Nirvana whence it wakened Him.

Uriel.
This day declares He deemeth otherwise.
The Shining Wrestler, tired of strife, hath slain
The dark antagonist whose enmity
Gave Him rejoicing sinews; but of Him
His foe was flesh of flesh and bone of bone;
With suicidal hand He smote him down:
Soon we shall feel His lethal pangs begin.

Raphael.
Fiercer than those that clove thy burning realms
And sent grey winds to waste the plains of Heaven
When on the Cross He sought to purchase peace
And lure his wayward world back to his hand!

Michael.
His lightning dry thy tongue! Why should our minds
Peer and conjecture of the danger past?
Thou knowest what glory followeth.

Raphael.
Yes, I know.
The clouds at last rolled burning from the Throne
And let us see the risen wonders there.
Again I hear the gathering psalmody
Chant out the clement tale—eternal God
Made clay, by hands of clay unto the Cross
Hung for a sign, that who beholding Him
Should find Him very God, might dwell with us
In endless light and life. Again I hear
The deep consenting chorus mount and merge
The wayward crests of treble into one;
But still between the calling deeps of song
Vague and unacquiescent hung my heart,
Conning the burden wistfully anew
In hopes to find the joy my comrades found
Hid in the dubious notes. Vague hung my heart,
Wistful as morning boughs that watch the moon,
Not strong as now when I have seen all clear
And o'er the ashes of the world declare—
Listen! Are there not voices in the Vale?

Michael.
They talk together. Some die not till dark.

Raphael.
Aye, until dark! 'T will be a starless night.

ACT IV

Time: evening of the Day of Judgment.
A rock in the Valley of the Judgment; about the rock, and filling the whole trough of the valley, lie the bodies of the lost. Twilight.
Raphael.
My lot is cast with these: I watch to-night
Here islanded in death. Say me not nay:
Till from the last lip anguish is unwreathed,
From the last brow the frown of horror fades,
Here I must sit, witness and comforter
If any more conspicuous strengths survive
To mutter or make signal in the dusk.

Michael.
Nay, brother, stay not. Though thy words are calm,
Thy desperate eyes betray thee; thou resolvest
Some sudden irremediable thing.
The past is done, and, whether well or ill,
Necessitously. Put on that robe of song
Woven of youngest light and over-runed
With flickerings of the golden elder speech,
Wherein thou led'st the lily souls along
Choregic o'er the unclouded psalmody
And wert so starry long agone! Arise!
My soul is heavy at thee. Thou art wan;
Thine eyes are dull yet wild, even as these
Who lie involved and heaped along the Vale
Seeming in death to threaten and to rave.
Arise and come away! Why tarry here
To mourn above these outcast, since the fan
Hath winnowed them and left no righteous one?
Rather arise, make glad thy countenance,
And through the courts of day let herald throats
Softly declare thy coming, virgin hands,
From that oraculous tree whose leaves are tongues,
Laurel thee best of Heaven's lutanists
And seat thee at the minstrel-hand of God.

Raphael.
You urge me well. I think my songs to-night
Would cheer their festivals: I have a theme
Of very present gladness, deeply conned.
But if amid the gratulating chant,
If through the dances orbed and interorbed,
Furnished with solemn symbol and device,
Perchance there stole a quite unfurnished shape
Nakedly risen from this company?
Holding up horrible accusing hands
Against the nuptial light? That were scarce well.
I fear my lute would glance and jangle off
To themes as good unsung. Hark!

Michael.
'T was a voice,
Not distant.

Raphael.
Nay, 't is yonder,—he who lies
Half lifted from the jetsam of this sea
Across that ragged reef. Another, hush!
A woman's voice, was 't not? And see, below—
That aged throat would fain articulate. ...
They taste sweet speech ere the long silence comes.

A Youth's Voice.
Do any live but me? Do any wake to hear
A word spoke in the dark before I die?

An Old Man.
An old and wakeful spirit rests thee near.

A Young Woman.
Long had I lain asleep, but wakened at thy cry.

The Youth.
Not all discourteous is the Conqueror's heart,
Since now of that good strength I wore at noon
Ebbs back a little part.

Old Man.
Enough to syllable thy soul's young scorn,
Though all unripe, unwise;
And haply rouse some one of these that lie
Fixing the dark with undivining eyes
Of human wit and seemliness forlorn,
To speak their separate word or unto thine reply.

The Youth.

Second Youth.
Various the reasons why we could not pay
The price exacted from us!
My ear, though fain, I might have turned away
From spring's love-startled promise,
I might have given up the glorious sea
And the majestic mountains might for me
Have ceased to be;
God, with one sudden rinsing of his hand,
Might have wiped bare
The earth-ball of its deeds and pageantries,
Yea, even of light and air,
That on the stark circumference I might stand
And choose deliberately, unvexed of these,
Between my will and his.
Then I had said, with cheerful voice and strong,
Somewhat dismayed, yet with a cheerful voice,
“This many days, Lord, I have thought it long
Till I could put away creation's noise,
The tragic streets, the poignant drip of rains,
But chiefly the loud speaking in my veins
Concerning this and that desirable.
Now you have put me in a quiet place,
Take but away your too expectant face,
And all shall then be well.
Then I can ponder, as I meant to do
And as I singly long since thought was mine,
The mysteries divine;
Make quiet proof of you
If you be verily my lord or no,
And, having found you to be truly so,
Shall understand for sooth,
That down the eternities I may launch my mind
Not as a tame hawk haggard down the wind,
Whom huntsman's cry pursueth,
But as an eagle without bell or jess,
Obedient alone to his soul's lordliness.

Third Youth.

A Confused Voice.
Not very long to-day
Thy arm held back the mischief of the tide!
Thou could'st not check the play
Of scythes, the awful chariots beside!
Thy blood has ebbed a little from its pride.

A Girl's Voice.
I waited patiently and thought to hear
The secret reason dark,
The secret reason dark and dear
Why none of us had heart to mark
The pale evangel whispering from the sphere.
For oft the moon between the garden boughs
Her looks of summer longing would efface,
And come to be a halo round the brows
Of Him who died to give the sinner grace,
Now saddening o'er His purchase from that place.
And oft at dawn I heard the Sons of Morning
Silvered with lovely menace fill the sky,
And heard their solemn lips deliver warning
What time the central singer lifted high,
In the deep hush twixt ode and palinode,
The sangrael of the sun, brimmed with redeeming blood.
But how might I attend the minatory
Voices of many angels breathing doom,
When from the window of the little room
My love's face had not faded, and the story
His wakeful mouth had whispered in the gloom
Spake in my pulses yet? And how at evening turn
To feel those sad eyes down the moonlight yearn,
When mouth to mouth and breast to aching breast
I held my lover close, and by his nest
The nightingale, scarce master of his mood,
Now after faint essay
And amorous dim delay
Suddenly steeped his heart in song's mad plenitude?

A Woman's Voice.
What unripe girl is this who maketh bold
To speak for lovers at the extreme hour,
Yet fancy-paints the flower?
Yet hides with image-gilt the naked gold?
O sisters, brothers, help me to arise!
Of God's two-hornèd throne I will lay hold
And let Him see my eyes;
That He may understand what love can be,
And raise his curse, and set his children free.

Another Woman's Voice.
My life was a rank venomed weed
And hers, I think, a flower;
But my harsh voice shall have a power
Fiercer than hers to plead.
About his knees with curses I will cling,
My veins I will break open, till He see
The barb of the intolerable sting,
The tongues of the immitigable fire
He planted there to fret and fumble through me,
To craze and to undo me,
Till on the cruel altars where He threw me
I slew my heart's desire!

Old Man.

Fourth Youth.

Michael.
I wait no longer on their stammering tongues!
Once more I pray thee rise and come away.
The Valley darkens fast, and Heaven stays
Thy single voice to make its concord full.

Raphael.
These voices we have hearkened lack as well,
To make such concord as I care to hear.

Michael.
Then curse thee for a stubborn heart!—Nay, nay,
I will not curse thee whom I love. ... Take heed
Lest any wing patrolling in the dark,
Mistaking thee for one of these, should smite.

Raphael.
Already from the deeps approacheth one,
Staining the limbs and faces of the dead
With amber as he flies. What clime has blown
Azaziel's radiance to so blear a tinct?

Azaziel.
Flying past.
Woe! Woe! unto the dwellers in this Vale.
Woe unto them who wait the second death!
Prepare to meet the Worm that dieth not!

Raphael.
Azaziel, hear! What meaneth ...?

Michael.
He is past,
Bearing his message further. How it sobs
And falters on the wind!

Raphael.
In the deeps begins
A myriad lamentation. ...

Michael.
Nearer now,
And mixed with keener individual cry. ...

Raphael.
The sea of death sways moaning and recoils,
Bristling with serried surf of forms uplift,
Postures of supplication and despair,
Forlorn attitudes!

Michael.
From the starless sky
A star shoots screaming, hushes in mid-flight,
And stands at gaze above the vasty caves,
The cañons and the agèd wells of dark
Toward which this Valley plunges.

Raphael.
Far below
Disastrous splendor glares above the abyss,
And in the midst a bulk of sinuous shade
That lifts and swings a snaky head aloft
Surveying where to strike. ...

Michael.
Away! Away!
Even now his pendulous neck doth sweep the Vale
From wall to wall, incredibly advanced
Leagues hither, though his lewder folds are still
Hid backward in the abyss. Away! Away!
From yonder peak we may behold all safe:
To linger here even spirits dare not.

Raphael.
Go;
I tarry. Let me take thy mighty sword.
A minstrel's hand can swing a blade at need.

Michael.
Not so. Forgive me this my violence!
Thy soul is all distraught and desperate,
And I must save thee in thine own despite.

He overpowers Raphael, and bears him aloft just as the enormous swinging head of the Serpent blots out the scene.

ACT V.

SCENE I

Time: as in Act IV.
An exposed upland: one side looks down into the Valley of the Judgment, on the others the snow-peaks fade into the visionary cliffs and slopes crowned by the battlements of Heaven. Sunset glow still lingers on the heights: the moon is rising.
Raphael.
Awaking.
Where are we, brother? I remember naught.

Michael.
Safe lifted o'er the Vale, and none too soon.

Raphael.
Help me to rise.

Michael.
Nay, rest thee yet a while.

Raphael.
Something of portent passes in the Vale—
I cannot well recall, but know 't is so
By thy wild looking. Can thy vision pierce
So downward through the mists? Mine eyes are weak
And blink at the mild moon.

Michael.
Spare thou to look.
Even me it grieveth, thee it will destroy
With present heart-break.

Raphael.
O remembrance now
Creeps moaning through the sea-halls of my mind,—
A sluggish neap, with loss and wreckage strewn!

Michael.
The Serpent enters now that last defile
High lifted toward the spiritual hills.
Behind him as he came has silence fallen
And gesture ceased: final ineloquence.
These hither people are the lesser thewed
But more inspirited, who held the fight
Vanward against us, and who fell the first
Before the whirlwind of our going down.

Raphael.
Is it too late to save this remnant few
For seed of a new world, planted afar
Beyond this trouble? Come, thy might and mine!
He lifts a questioning head and seems to stand
Hesitant at the mouth of the defile:
There give him battle....

Michael.
Nay.

Raphael.
Then I alone.

Michael.
Too late; and even if sooner, much too late!
He brings the second death; his fangs have power,
'T is whispered, on the flaming seraphim
To tarnish or to quench; one venom fleck
Flung from his jaws, how might it lame and scar
Our substance archangelical.

Raphael.
Yes, yes,
You give me reasons to it. Lovelier
Such scars upon the breast, though mortal proven,
Than that fair sigil set upon thy brow
The morn of thy first victory. Why live,
Why live, when all these wills that searched the earth—
Until they found their one and inward love,
Refusing to be still—have ceased to search,
Though quite unsatisfied? To feel the night
Unvexed of longing, and the day purged blank
Of laughter and of sorrow and of brawl;
No pride of life to glory in the sun,
No ecstasy to mate the moon's increase,
No heart interpreting the twilight thrush—
All the heart's business done! Nay, not for me!
Mine ear hath lain too long on Nature's pulse,
I cannot miss that music. Let me go.

Michael.
Still detaining him.

Raphael.
All is done:
The great refusal made. The wayward heats
That might have moved God's blood to sweetest ends
In dreams and deed, have bled themselves away,
And peace is his, though profitless.

Michael.
Hush! Look!
The Worm goes on!

Raphael.
What say'st thou? Speak!
Mine eyes are still too dim, I see not well
What passes 'neath the drifting fogs.

Michael.
He mounts!
He lays his length upward the visioned hills,
The inviolable fundaments of Heaven!
There where he climbs the kindled slopes grow pale,
Ashen the amethystine dells, and dim
The starry reaches. ... Now he coils his bull
About a foreland, and the nacrous light
It beetled with turns cinder. High he piles
His folds, and seems to note the upward way.
Hark, the trump sings to battle! I am called.

He flies upward toward the walls of Heaven.
Raphael.
Alone.

He flies after Michael.

SCENE II

Raphael stands on a promontory of the cloudy slope up which the Serpent has passed. The Valley of the Judgment lies far below.
Raphael.

First Lamp.
O then art thou too fled?
Haste, let us flee together! We had thought
All but the timid spirits still abode
The battle's outcome. Timid thou art not,
Though woman-gentle; is the battle lost?
Or won? Oh, surely won, since thou art here.

Raphael.
I come from earthward. Mortal weariness
Beat down my wing, and I was forced to stay.
How goes the struggle?

First Lamp.
In and in it stormed
From ring to lessening ring, until we fled,
I and the sister Lamps, save only one,
Our meekest and most patient flame of praise,
Whom naught could make afraid. Now by the wind
Distract, we wander on these withered hills.

Second Lamp.
How withered from the day thou brought'st us hence
Flowers for our lampads!—tiny troublous things
That living pierced us with a faint unrest
And dying left a nameless woe behind.

Raphael.

Uriel.
Approaching.
The dream is done! Petal by petal falls
The coronal of creatured bloom God wove
To deck his brows at dawn.

Raphael.
No hope remains?

Uriel.
To save Him from himself not cherubim
Nor seraphim avail. Who loves not life
Receiveth not life's gifts at any hand.

Raphael.
And life He loved not, though it sprang from Him?

Uriel.
He loved it not entirely, good and ill.

Raphael.
For what end should we love an evil thing?

Uriel.
Better than I thou knowest, truant soul!
Who all the summer hours didst love to stoop
O'er insect feuds, herb-whisperings, and watch
The prurient-fingered sap startle the trees
To sudden laughter of bloom. Better than I
Thou knowest what lewd rebellion stings the core
Of nature, bidding every seed awake
To sacramental life after its kind;
Better than I thou knowest what cruelties
Rage round about each starry heroism,
Out of what murky stuff the lover builds
His soul's white habitation. 'T is not mine
To lesson thee how height and depth are bound
So straitly that when evil dies, as soon
Good languishes, nor how the flesh and soul
Quicken with striving, and when strife is done
Decline from what they were.

Raphael.
Would He had dared
To nerve each member of his mighty frame—
Man, beast, and tree, and all the shapes of will
That dream their darling ends in clod and star—
To everlasting conflict, wringing peace
From struggle, and from struggle peace again,
Higher and sweeter and more passionate
With every danger passed! Would He had spared
That dark Antagonist whose enmity
Gave Him rejoicing sinews, for of Him
His foe was flesh of flesh and bone of bone,
With suicidal hand He smote him down,
And now indeed His lethal pangs begin.

First Lamp.
To Uriel.
Brother, what lies beyond this trouble? Death?

Uriel.
All live in Him, with Him shall all things die.

Second Lamp.
And the snake reign, coiled on the holy hill?

Uriel.
Sorrow dies with the heart it feeds upon.

Raphael.
Look, where the red volcano of the fight
Hath burst, and down the violated hills
Pours ruin and repulse, a thousand streams
Choked with the pomp and furniture of Heaven.
In vain the Lion ramps against the tide,
In vain from slope to slope the giant Wraths
Rally but to be broken. Dwindling dim
Across the blackened pampas of the wind
The routed Horses flee with hoof and wing,
Till their trine light is one, and now is quenched.

Uriel.
The spirits fugitive from Heaven's brink
Put off their substance of ethereal fire
And mourn phantasmal on the phantom alps.

Fourth Lamp.
Mourn, sisters! For our light is fading too.
Thou of the topaz heart, thou of the jade,
And thou sweet trembling opal—ye are grown
Grey things, and aged as God's sorrowing eyes.

First Lamp.
My wick burns blue and dim.

Second Lamp.
My oil is spent.

Raphael.
The moon smoulders; and naked from their seats
The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait.

THE DEATH OF EVE

A Fragment

ACT I

A rocky mountain slope rising on the left by rude stone stairs towards Cain's stronghold in Nod, dimly discerned above. On the right and toward the rear the scene falls away to a wide desert country. In the foreground, on the lowest level of a terraced plateau, is a rudely sculptured well-curb. Behind this, on a higher level, a stone seat, known as the Seat of Supplication, faces the Mercy-Seat, a throne of the same primitive type, carved from the living rock. The mountain stair, which rises behind the Mercy-Seat toward the distant city, is barred, at a higher elevation, by a stone gateway.
On the Seat of Supplication sits Eve, shrouded. Her hand rests on the shoulder of Jubal, who sits at her feet. As the scene progresses, the sky gradually fades, then flushes with the colors of a tropical sunset.
Eve.
Yea, Jubal?

Jubal.
Nothing, mother.

Eve.
Thy lips moved;
The hand upon thy knee rose as in question,
And fell as in reply.

Jubal.
I slept; I dreamed.

Eve.
Sleep yet; the heat is strong.

Pause.
Jubal.
I dreamed he came
At sunset here unto the Strangers' well
To know us and our errand.

Eve.
Soon or late,
They say; his custom.

Jubal.
Aye, they say it is.
But why should travelers seeking to great Cain,
Wayfarers, weaponed only with their hands,
Or come, as now, in love and duty to him—?

Eve.
I know not. 'T is his pleasure.

Jubal.
And 't is thine,
Being, O mother, even what thou art
And hast been what thou hast been—'t is thy will
To hide thy name, to wait obscurely here,
Where at Cain's feet the desert suppliants
Kneel to unload their wrongs!

Eve.
Question it not.

Jubal.
But I must wonder.

Eve.
Wonder not either.

Jubal.
Nay,
I will not then.
Pause.
At home 't will be the hour
When the parched flocks climb faster as they feed,
Scenting the upper cisterns. Downward again
Toward folding time.

Eve.
Gazing at the sky.
I think the sun at home
Sits not in such a shoulder of the heavens.
We fetch him all about and overtake him.

Jubal.
So do we.
Pause.
Is it well that we do so?

Eve.
We make our journey; if the lights of Heaven
Move from their ancient places as we move,
Let the Heavens look to it; it is none of ours!

Jubal.
Thou sayest; and Jubal rises to thy words.—
At home Eve never spake so.

Eve.
Jubal, Jubal,
I know not what is in me! I am changed
From all I was. Or am I back-returned
Through life's deep changes to my changeless self?
Look in my face, and say.

Jubal.
Thy face is changed;—
And that behind the face, which looketh through,
Peers like a stranger.

Eve.
Since our latest guide,
Standing upon the red cliffs yester dawn,
Pointed and said, “Cain's City!”—

Jubal.
Longer ago
The change came.

Eve.
Murmurs.
Know'st me.

Jubal.
O mother, since the night
When thy loud whisper startled me awake,
And following thee in wonder from the tents
I found our camels houseled for the start,
And the wide moonlit stretches calling us,—
Since then, through desert perils, famine, beasts,
More ravenous men, and thirst the crown of terrors,
Thou art Eve, not that bowed soul we knew,
Not that great worn and patient majesty;
But like an angel going on an errand
Not for his lord but for his longing self,
Who burns from morn to morn and deep to deep
Toward his place, so Eve is, since the time
She fled, by night and stealth, from Adam's tent,
And took the wilderness.—To what purpose took,
She keeps from me too long!

Eve.
Have I not said?
To look upon my first-born's face again,
And know him what he grows to.

Jubal.
I am content.

Eve.
Jubal believes I scant him?

Jubal.
I am content!
There is no scanting in thee. Silence, speech,
Giving, withholding, doing, and letting be,
Sit on thee lovely as a change of jewels
And bounteous as the River of the South:
Forget my lips that they were troublesome.

Eve.
Why do you hold my words for less than truth?

Jubal.
Nay.

Eve.
Say on.

Jubal.
Freely?

Eve.
Say right freely on.

Jubal.
Eve knows ere Jubal speaks, yet he will speak.
At home lies bed-rid Adam in the tent,
With wasted hands and slow blank eyes agrope
To find the sole things they remember plain,
The hands and eyes of Eve, who never failed
To meet that need till now. And Eve sits here,
Within her eyes a high and thirsty light,
Brighter than burning Adam ever stilled
In that far storied morning of their loves;
Within her hands—Alas, I speak too near!

Eve.
Speak on.

Jubal.
And in her hands—I know not how
To say my meaning.

Eve.
Say, though.

Jubal.
On her hands,
That lie so quiet and so empty here,
A look as if they seized the hands of God,
And dragged Him with her through his holy mountain
Unwillingly to do her glorious will.

Eve.
Draws him to her.
Nearer. Bend back. Now by sweet Adah's pangs,
It is a goodly boy's face. Is it strong
As it is fresh and goodly?

Jubal.
It is his
Whom Eve chose out, a boy, and left unchosen
Others, firm men.

Eve.
What if she tried them first,
The others, the firm men? Seth, Enoch, all?
Thy father Lamech, too, and Irad, too?
Firm men, firm men! I shook them from their firmness!
Sinews and blood and heart-strings, at a word
Melted to water! At a woman's word,
Touching far off her cloudy enterprise!
Pause.
One more is left to try!

Long pause.
Jubal.
Mother, I saw
When thou did'st speak with Seth.

Eve.
Startled.
Saw'st? Thou saw'st?

Jubal.
I saw but heard not. Am no eaves-dropper,
No peep-thief neither, but mind eyes had looked
Before I knew 't was secret.

Eve.
Low.
When was this?

Jubal.
Early the third night ere we fled away
From Adam's tent-place. In the camel-close
I sat among the beasts, for one was big
And near her time. 'T was star-dusk, very still;
Only the beast groan'd low and human-like,
Or nosed my stroking hand and held her peace.
Thereby, over against, a voice, thy voice,
Never the words, only the naked voice,
Heavy and scant, as if a half-dead tongue
Fashioned its meaning stiffly. Then the moon
Stood all at once her height upon the hill
And showed thy form and Seth's within the gate.
Thy face I could not see, but saw thy hands
Raised unto Seth, pleading or threatening,
And saw the face of Seth, with mortal fear
Disfeatured,—updrawn forehead, loosened jaw,
And staring eyes gone empty.—Then, as one
Who shakes the night-witch Lilith from his breast,
He came into his manhood, took thy hands
And drew them down, kissed thee, and spoke thee small
As one bespeaks a trance-awakened child,
Softly and small, until it knows itself
And its familiar things. So went ye hence.
And next day and the next Seth's eyes were on thee,
Frightened and vague; but Eve walked straight her ways
Not heeding him.

Eve.
Who heeds a broken staff?
—Nay, nay, that wrongs him! Broken not, but bent,
No more but bent a little.—A good son,
Tender and meek and patient with all men,
And most with me, child, most of all with me!
I blame not Seth. Let him look to it, then,
He blame me not. O would't were by with blame!
When has the oak been proud against the willow?
Or the light aspen shook her jeweled hands
In scorn of the removeless mountain pine?
To every soul his stature, girth, and grain,
Each sovereign to its end: the use is all.—
And yet, and yet—Look you, he thought me crazed!
So did the others, or were ripe to think.
Some day they would have risen and stoned me forth,
To be like those banned women of the rocks,
Who haunt the savage summits of our land,
Aye, you have seen them! They were human once,
Daughters and sisters, mothers and right wives;
And now they sit there, high up in the sun
On noon-steeped crags, naked but for their hair,—
She-satyrs laughing with their satyr mates:
I might have sat aloft with them by now,
And thought not strange to be there.

Pause.
Jubal.
Eve must know
Another thing, ere I have cleared my life.

Eve.
Clear thee!

Jubal.
I saw her speak with Abel too.

Eve.
Looking fearfully about.
Thou sunlight shelter us! Abel?

Jubal.
His ghost.

Eve.
The night we fled away?

Jubal.
Thou know'st 't is so.

Eve.
How know? Albeit I blench to hear it said,
Yet I do talk with Abel, my lost son,
By night and day, forever!

Jubal.
Day and night,
Life, death, the hid, the shown, are in thy knowledge.
In his simplicity hath Jubal spoke,
And now his heart is free.

Eve.
Not yet! Not yet!
Abel? Thine eyes saw Abel? His risen ghost?

Jubal.
The thousand eyeballs of this flesh, they saw,
What time my crowding spirits, wild and pale,
Made all my curdled blood from head to heel
Their tower of outlook.

Eve.
By the altar? Was it?

Jubal.
Yea, yea.

Eve.
Cain's altar?

Jubal.
Abel's altar mound;
Though both be eat to nothing with the years.

Eve.
Aye, aye, the eating years! At first I thought
I was mistook; 't would be the farther mound.
After these years they should let something grow there.

Jubal.
Though salt were sown not, nor the stones not flung,
No plant would spring within the awful vale
Where murder first was born.—I followed thee
Scarce hoping to come thence again alive,
And crouched apart while Eve did call on Abel;
Thrice did she cry on him.

Eve.
Ere I cried once
I knew 't was vain. He would not let me go.
Living and dead they failed me!

Pause.
Jubal.
Lamech too!

Eve.
Ah, for thy father Lamech, honor him!
Good father, and good husband to his wives!
They point him and he goes, what man would not?
Both fair, and one right good; Adah is good.
Loves not much farther outward than her door,
But that is well for women,—narrow love,
Narrow and deep.

Jubal.
Then 't is not well with Eve,
Who loves as wide as life, though deep as death.

Eve.
Once, once! No longer now, these years of years!
They would not have me so.—Great years of years
Since Eve in anguish called her wild heart in
And taught it what to do.—Yet, yet, thou sayest—
What said'st thou of me?

Jubal.
What thyself said first,
O mighty Eve! Thy soul is back returned
Through life's sad changes to that joy it was
When first it soared into the new-made light.

Eve.
Seemeth almost it is so.—Years of years!

Pause.
Jubal.
Hark! Heard'st thou?

Eve.
Women coming to the well.

Jubal.
As the voices approach.
Mother, beseech ye, be as if we slept!
For they will mock thee as before they did.

Eve.
I care not for their mocking.

Jubal.
Be besought!

Chorus of Water-Bearers.
Two groups, one of young, the other of old women, sing in alternation.


Old Women.
Like a hunter in his mountain walks the purpose of the Lord!

Young Women.
O, the prey alert and little, be its littleness its ward!

Old Women.
Like a linnet on the lime-twig sings the bow-string on the bow.

Young Women.
O, the serpent when he sitteth on his coils singeth so!

Chorus
(in unison).
Even though, even though!
Be it ours to flee and double, be it His to bring us low.
Blessed she who tastes his arrow and lies broken in the wood.
She has fled, she has fallen: it is good.
They fill their jars at the well.

First Woman.
What makes the witch-wife hither? Have ye heard?

Second Woman.
What makes they all, who sit on yonder stone
To wait Cain's coming?

Third Woman.
The old tale.
Some sons of jackals, loping sharp-set by,
Have sniffed her hut, and stopped unbid to meat;
Some neighbor hath put sheep's-bane in her well;
An idle whirlwind, rising up to play,
Has wantoned with her little patch of dates,
And left it bleeding.

Second Woman.
Has none spoke with her?

Fourth Woman.
Aye, to much purpose! She is sullen dumb,
Sun-crazed, or hath a spirit. 'T was my son
Who found her in the gates. “Cain!” would she cry,
And “Cain!” again. By what she mumbled else
She will be outlandish.

Fifth Woman.
By raiment too.
And then the starveling camel, did you mark?
Longer in limb and muzzle than our breed,
The pelt more reddish.

Fourth Woman.
Let us stir her up!

Some go toward Eve and Jubal. Abdera, a young girl, puts herself in their path.
Abdera.
Ye shall not mock them!

Fourth Woman.
What! Weaned since, swaddling-clout?

Second Woman.
The maid says well. They are all travel-spent.
They sit like souls foredone for weariness.

Fourth Woman.
They feign! They feign! Saw ye? The stripling peeps
And lowers beneath his arm!

Second Woman.
And let them feign.
Take up your jars, and take your singing up.

All except Abdera mount the path behind.
Fourth Woman.
Looking back.
Look yon! Look yon! The little harlotry
Stops for her hire.

Third Woman.
'T will be the lad that pays!

Chorus of Water-Bearers.
As they ascend the slope behind, and pass through the gate.
Till the coming up of day,
Till the cool night flee away,
Till the Hunter rises up to pursue,
O my sisters, we will laugh, we will play!
Though He wake and walk anear us,
He is mused, He will not hear us;
Though He wanders lone and late,
He will never hear how mate whispereth to darkling mate.
Yea, and though He hear, and though!
Will He judge us, even so?
He is mused, He walketh harmless. In the shadowy mountain hid
We will lure our lovers to us, even as our mothers did!
When He cometh forth at dawn, and His anger burns anew,
As our hunted mothers did, even so we will do:
Flee and crouch and feint and double, leap the snare or gnaw it through!

Eve.
Who art thou? Tell us.

Abdera.
Abdera.

Eve.
Whose daughter?

Abdera.
Till now the daughter of captivity,
A leaf blown in by tempest of those wars
Which crushed the stem I grew to.

Eve.
And from now?

Abdera.
Kneeling.
If thou art earthly and hast need of love,
Thy servant and thy daughter.—O receive me!

Pause.
Jubal.
Mother, she waits. Wilt thou not speak to her?
Her countenance, that was so bright, is fallen.

Eve draws Abdera near and bends over her.
Abdera.
To Eve.
Why weep'st thou?
Pause. To Jubal.
O why weeps she? At my words
She looked beyond, with thinking, sightless eyes,
As I have seen my father's gods to look
Out of the dreaming stone; and then—alas,
Tell me what 't is you weep for!

Eve.
Lifting her head.
Sweet my child,
My fair new daughter, 't is for thee I weep.

Abdera.
No cause. See, I am glad now; all is well.

Eve.
Therefore I weep, that we all three are glad,
And all is well, thrice well.
She draws Jubal to her, also. To Jubal.
What say you, boy?
Hearts change! Here is a stranger in thy place.
—There is a wondrous vine called Jealousy;
It springs between this pulse-beat and the next,
And hangs the roofs of heaven with bitterness.
Does Jubal feel it growing?

Jubal.
Nay,—I know not.

Eve.
To Abdera.
He knows not. Then, alas, we know too well!

Jubal.
Touching his heart.
Mother, the Vine! I felt it springing here
Even as thou spakest, and hanging as it were
The roofs of Heaven, but not with bitterness.

Eve.
There may be other seeds I know not of,
That spring as fast, and load their trellises
With leaves of light and lovely fruits between.

Abdera.
Some I have seen with fairy vans outspread
Sail high, and yet no wind, or good as none.
And some have hands and finger they will cling
To sheep or goat or ass, all one to them
So they be carried where they long to be.

Eve.
Aye, where they long to be! Winds of the world,
Blow as ye will and blow what seeds ye will
If this kind mingle in.

Jubal.
She wonders at us.
Speak to her.

Eve.
Wonder'st thou? Are we so strange?

Abdera.
I was brought young to Cain's fierce citadel.
And since, day after day, season by season,
Now stark alone and now in bands of trouble,
The hurt and hungry people gather in,
To crouch upon this stone. Some I have feared,
Yea, hated for the wickedness in them,
Being myself made wicked by that hate;
Some seemed to fade to nothing where they sat,
Scarce there at all, and hardly gone, forgotten;
Of some I asked in wonder, “Who are ye?
What countrymen, what errand, and what cheer?”
My heart not beating till the answer fell,
And long, long wildly beating to remember.—
To-day I came, and lo, nothing to wonder,
Nothing to question of! Two trees of life
Planted from always unto everlasting
By the still waters; and my quiet soul,
With outspread hands and upturned countenance
In the bright shadow, saying, “Glory, glory!”

Jubal.
Low.
One tree.

Abdera.
Low to Jubal.
Thy parable?

Jubal.
Indicating Eve, who sits in reverie.
She is the tree;
And I with thee stand singing in her shadow.

Eve.
Rousing.
What think the people of their master Cain?

Abdera.
That he is master; that he is lord and king.

Eve.
No more?

Abdera.
Some mutter darkly and apart.

Eve.
What should they mutter of?

Abdera.
Looking about as in fear.
That Cain is old;
That as he grows more weak he grows more cruel.

Jubal.
Cruel? To thee?

Abdera.
The storm that breaks the tower
Roots not the little hyssop from the chink.
Nor do I hold him cruel of his will,
But in his withered blood a poison works,
Distilling wrath and panic.—Long ago,
In his hot youth, upon some jealousy
He slew his brother. Then the angry gods
Set on his brow a sign to know him by;
And since, in hopeless visions of his bed,
Or when the priestesses rave round his car,
Gashing themselves, and to their frothèd mouths
Setting the adder's mouth, or when he lairs,
His madness on, with demons of the waste—
The patient gods, the unwithdrawing gods,
Dropwise and piecemeal wean his soul from him.

Eve.
Old? Madness? Withered? Girl, can'st thou not speak plain?
Mutter not thou, whate'er yon rebels do!
To Jubal.
Did she say “old”?

Jubal.
What has she said amiss?
—She shrinks with fear.

Eve.
Old!

Jubal.
Seth, though the later born,
Thou knowest, Seth too—

Eve.
Seth too? And what of him?
Yes, yes, all's clear. Seth truly! That is well.
Children as ye two be! To the dropped lamb
The yearling from the father of the flock
Stands not a hair apart in reverend time.—
And cruel, say they? He was never so!
Hasty and hot, a blood where rage would run
As swift as sun-fire through dry prairie grass,
But cruel—never that.—Thy shoulder, Jubal.
A faintness is come on me. 'Twill pass, 't is passing.
Old—old and cruel.
She rouses again.
Girl, girl! What else was't, then?
Weak? As he grows more weak? Why I have seen
The young oak shudder in his wrestling arms,
And its torn roots come groaning from the hill,
When for a sport he did but breathe himself.
—Ages of years!—Thrust from his gate like dogs!
Weak, weak, indeed, to be afeard of us.

Her head sinks on Jubal's shoulder; her eyes close. Abdera kisses the hem of Eve's garment, rises, and takes up her jar.
Abdera.
She set me in the garden of her love;
At first I grew, as ne'er by so sweet clime
A tree was told to prosper and put forth;
But at the last not so.—Sour were my fruits,
Apples of ignorance.

She turns to go.
Jubal.
Where wilt thou go?
Stay yet! I thought—O ye two spake such things!
I thought—and thou wilt leave us now again?

Abdera.
Let me not leave you! Whither should I go?
I know naught else.—I have been always here.

Jubal.
He draws Abdera to him.
O never leave us more!

Abdera.
Yielding to his embrace.
Fair, fair my brother.

Jubal.
—Know'st thou nor guessest nothing who she is?

Abdera.
She is the tree 'neath which we sing together,
Herself in all her boughs to Heaven singing.

Jubal.
She sings not to the Heavens, but to the earth;
Once hoarsely, like a look-out overwatched,
Now in a new voice, battle-songs and birth-songs.

Abdera.
When first I looked on her I seemed to sit
A child and sleepy in my father's tent;
The wandering prophet sang, and 'neath my lids
I saw great shapes rise out of elder time;
Beginning earth, with other beasts and birds;
Æonian forests where winged serpents flew;
Seasons not ours, and long since fallen gods.

Jubal.
She saw creation's morning; she will stay
To watch the everlasting twilight fall.—

Abdera.
Hush!—

Jubal.
Looking about.
None to hear.

Abdera.
Pointing in fear.
Look where above the sand
The hot light dances. Should it dance for naught?

Jubal.
Know ye more gods but One?

Abdera.
My fathers knew;
And sometimes I—Hush! Bow thee! They walk, they hear!

Jubal.
Looking upward, toward the citadel.
Not gods, but men, come from the eyrie town,
Slow down the mountain stair! One walks between,
And two that stead him upon either hand;
And some before with singing, and yet some
Behind, with spears and banners.

Abdera.
Whispers to Eve.
Cain, he comes!

All three rise and gaze upward. The procession descends. Cain, aged, and broken, seats himself in the throne-seat surrounded by his armed men, while Eve, veiled but for the eyes, stands supported by Jubal and

---

425

Abdera. The chief officer at Cain's side lifts his hand.
Chief Officer.
The king is come into his judgment seat—
If any in this presence have a cause,
The time is gracious, and the king gives ear.

Eve.
Gazing from Cain to one and another of his men.
Seek not to try me, who am overtried!
Is this the king, or sits one in his room?

Cain.
What says the woman?

Officer.
If thou be the king.

Cain.
What should be answered?

Officer.
Mock not thy servant, lord,
Nor thy great self.

Cain.
Mutters.
Still king, or not yet wakened
From dreaming such a matter.
To Eve.
Unveil thy face.
Uncover thee and speak.
Eve drops her veil. Cain stares with slow gathering terror, then rises.
Thou hag of hell,
Glare not upon me with those caverned eyes!
To his officers.
Whoever has done this, his life shall pay.
Do ye spread out your nets among the dead,
And toll them here out of the earth and air
To daunt me, and to shake me from myself?
To the priests who advance.
Try her if she be human! Speak the word!
Make the dread sign!

Eve.
Make not your sign on me!
For on your bloods and bodies ere the birth
Myself have made on you a mightier sign.
—Cain, Cain, dost thou not know me? Look again!

Cain, gazing at her stupefied, makes a sign to his men to leave him.
Cain.
As they linger.
Back to the city! Away! Go, every one!

They mount the steps, with backward looks. An aged warrior lingers. Jubal and Abdera, clinging together in awe and fear, slip away down the desert path behind.
Warrior.
By one who in suspicion has grown grey,
And all to shield and warn thee, lord, be warned.
Many and subtle are thine enemies.
In many shapes they hunt thee for thy soul.

Cain.
Leave us alone! Go, go! Alone, alone.
The old man mounts the steps. Cain, with averted head, mutters to Eve.
God knows I know thee not.

Eve.
Approaching nearer.
Cain, Cain, look up!
Grieve no more; pity my grief. Eve knows thou knowest.

He draws her to him, and sinks on the bench,—she at his feet, her head buried in his knees. Song above, distant.
Cain.
As the singing ceases.
The first that I remember of my life
Was such a place, such a still afternoon,
I sitting thus, thy bright head in my knees,
And such a bird above us as him yonder
Who dips and hushes, lifts and takes his note.
I know not what child's trespass I had done,
Nor why it drove the girl out of thy face,
Clutched at thy heart with panic, and in thine eyes
Set shuddering love.

Eve.
O my first-born, my child!
O herald star in the wilderness appearing,
After the nine-fold moon of dubious speech,
Proclaiming silence soon to fall in Heaven—
The everlasting silence that soon did fall,
When by me lay thy little frame of breathing,
And blind and weak thou foundest out the breast!

Cain.
There was a day when winter held the hills
And all the lower places looking sunward
Knew that the spring was near. Until that day
I had but walked in a boy's dream and dazzle,
And in soft darkness folded on herself
My soul had spun her blind and silken house.
It was my birthday, for at earliest dawn
You had crept to me in the outer tent,
Kissed me with tears and laughter, whispering low
That I was born, and that the world was there,
A gift you had imagined and made for me.
Now, as I climbed the morning hills, behold,
Those words were true: the world at last was there;
At last 't was mine, and I was born at last.
I walked, and on my shoulders and my reins
Strength rang like armor; I sat, and in my belly
Strength gnawed like a new vinegar; I ran
And strength was on me like superfluous wings,
Even the six wings of the cherubim,
Twice twain to cover me and twain to fly.

Eve.
O green tree! O the young man in the house!
A gold frontlet of pride, and a green cedar!

Pause.
Cain.
His voice changes.
I knew that you would come.

Eve.
Lo, I am here.

Cain.
And knew 't would be too late.

Eve.
In full good time.

Cain.
Look on me; look once. Is this crazed frame
The thing Eve bare in joy? Let us climb down
Unto the sheep-pools; I will sit apart,
And do thou lean thee out over the pool
And look and tell me if that face be hers
Who waited while yon silence fell in Heaven
And Cain came forth the doors.—Too late, too late!

Eve.
Late, late—but in fair time! Never too late.

Silence.
Cain.
They told me Eve was dead.

Eve.
Startled.
They told—alas,
Who told?

Cain.
Chance-comers, wanderers from the waste.

Eve.
And do chance-wandering tongues still sound this name?

Cain.
Here one and there one, never aught aright,
But every man his tale, after his heart.

Eve.
Even in the tent my people do me this.
Even in my face, almost! Yea, I have lain,
Bowed on thy father's breast, and heard them do it.
I feigned to sleep; I heard them. And look you, son,
Here is the worst. Their glozing tales once heard,
Once pored on through long watches of the night,
They rise before my soul like very truth,
As bright, as fair, as strange,—almost, almost!

Cain.
Darkly.
On Adam's breast? How long since?

Eve.
The road is far,
And hard to find. Also, the second moon,
One camel sickened, and his pining mate
Went laggard.—Son, what ails thee?

Cain.
He lives?

Eve.
Who lives?
—Aye, aye, he lives. Hast heard aught, child? He lives,
Surely thy father lives.

Cain.
And thou art here?

Eve.
But most for his sake.—Listen while I tell!
—Why do you harshly thrust my hands away,
And lift your clenched hands trembling to the sky
With wild and smothered words?

Cain.
Pushing her from him.
I know you not,
Unclasp my knees.—I thought you were yourself
Yours, therefore mine at last. It is not so.
His, his, the same as when he cursed me forth
And Eve stood stockish, never one plea made,
One wail set up, one gesture of farewell,
No more than from a stone!

Eve.
She was a stone;
As afterwards, long years, a frozen stone.
No seasons and no weather on the earth;
Sun, moon, and stars dead in a field of death;
And in her dead heart, nothing, nothing, nothing!
After long years, she wakened, knew herself,
Rose up to wring some profit from her days,
Conceived again, and once again brought forth;
Yea, saw the teeming race in circles kindle
Roaring to God, a flame of generation.
From out the tossing battle of that fire
Flashed seldom and again wild news of thee,
And one red instant, ere night drove between,
Thy form would stand gigantic in the glare,
Islanded huge among thine enemies,—
As when the ice-bear rears upon the floe
And swings her flailing paws against the pack,
Or when the sea-volcano from his loins
Shakes climbing cities.

Cain.
Better, better far
That Eve had never sought, nor Cain been found,
Than thus, being together, to be sundered
More than by ice-fields or the raving sea.

Eve.
O Cain, how sundered?—Look on me! Kiss my lips,
And feel it is not so.

Cain.
Repulsing her.
'T is not so then.
There is no gateway shut between our souls,
No watchers stationed, and no lifted sword
Flaming forever!

Eve.
Ere I fled to thee
I knelt in fear by Abel's altar-mound
And begged his leave to go. His spirit rose,
Or seemed to rise, and seemed to threaten me.
The same night on thy father's breast I bowed,
And spoke of this my journey. In his eyes,
If still they seemed to know me who I was,
Kindled none other knowledge.—Albeit I rose,
And fled away, and suffered much, and came,
Thy name among the nations my sole guide,
Desire of thee my strength and company.
—Be glad of me! O lovingly entreat me!
Make all my meanings good, till such a time
As these our wounds are healed. Then if, perchance,
Our hearts at ease, I something should unveil
My stranger will, my cloudier purposes—

Cain.
Yea, yea, I wondered what would lurk behind!
—Not for my sake, that were too mere a mother.
—Wills, purposes! Lo, am I taken in
Because your tongue veers off and skirts the quick?
Do I not hear the words you dare not speak
Thunder above your speech? Do not your eyes
Hover and flinch and crawl upon my brow,
Seeking, and shuddering off to turn again
In sick and deadly search?—Look then! 'T is here.
He pushes back the head-band, baring the sign.
It is not faded, though these hands have shed
Rivers of kindred blood to wash it off.
—'T was this you came for: bring your errand full.
Look and begone!
Eve, staring at the Sign, has fainted. Her head drops on Cain's shoulder. He tries to lift her head.
Pitiful God, not this!
She could not come after the endless years,
To go so soon.—Mother, thou wilt not deal
Thus much unkindness to an unkind son,
As leave him when harsh words were on his lips.
Of old, when in our rage we thrust thee out,
Thou wouldst return again, unreconciled
To harshness and to wrath. O do it now,
In pity!

Eve.
Waking.
Where am I?

Cain.
Thou living Dread,
Whose fountains yet flow mercy!

Eve.
What hath passed?—
A faintness overfell me. Often of late,
But never quite so deep, so heavy deep.
I am far come, child. Lead me to thy house.
Much must be said, but there is time for all.
Nothing in haste; nothing before its hour.

Cain.
Wait till I call my people.

Eve.
Rising.
I am strong.
We will go up together.—I have dreamed
Of this our going-in, and spite of all
'T is very like my dream, yea, very like.—
Thy people cursed me, stoned and thrust me down;
But now I walk under thy mighty shadow.—
She pauses in their ascent, and looks out over the desert.
Where will my children be?

Cain.
Thy children, mother?

Eve.
Jubal, my travel-mate, a stripling boy
But great of heart; and Abdera, thy maid.

Cain.
Mine?

Eve.
So: thou hast forgot or never knew.
Leave them; no matter where. They cannot stray.
The sun will shepherd them.

Cain.
The sun is set.

Eve.
The stars, then, pouring influence.—Lead me on.
Art thou faint, also? Two can make a strength.

They begin to mount the steps. Above, Azrael, the Death Angel, appears, slowly descending, as from the city. With his left hand he clasps to his breast the hilt of a long sword; in his right he holds a stalk of flowering asphodel. Eve, seeing him, shrinks back, drawing Cain with her. Azrael, gazing at the pair, lifts the asphodel and descends to the left by a desert path, disappearing behind the Seat of Supplication. Eve gazes at the apparition in terrified silence, points at it as it disappears, then hides her head in Cain's breast.
Cain.
What ails thee, mother? Why dost thou point and peer
And shrink away—?

Eve.
Whispers.
Saw'st nothing?

Cain.
Where?

Eve.
Pointing.
Yonder.
And there, and yonder.

Cain.
Nothing.

Eve.
Look again!

Eve stands with face averted, while Cain peers over where the path behind the Seat of Supplication descends hidden to the plain.
Cain.
Two by the sheep-wells walking.

Eve.
Two?

Cain.
Thine eyes!
Thy lips, mother!

Eve.
How many did ye say?

Cain.
Twain, boy and girl.

Eve.
Lord, Lord!

Cain.
Mother, thy face—?

Eve.
And this my son saw nothing!

Cain.
What should I see?

Eve.
Nothing.—I praise Him. Long years yet for thee,—
Fair years, till then.—Nothing. I praise Him!

Cain.
Thou hast endured too much. If in her house
And throne of rule that sovereign mind be shaken,
Yet night and sleep and the new-risen day—

Eve.
Nor night nor day can help me who have seen
The angel of the Lord, the summoner.
There, there he stood, and lifted slowly up
His pallid flower, and without speech said, “Come!”
As once before in Adam's tent he did,
And Eve, beholding, rose and fled away,
To look on thee ere darkness. Son, thou strength,
Spread thy strong hands o'er this rebellious head,
That our two strengths yet for a little while
May hold against Jehovah! My fierce son,
Thou burning flame from childhood, look on me
And say that thou wilt do it, though the skies
Open to warn us back! Thy promise, Cain!

Cain.
What would ye of me, that these opening skies
And that up-startled Wrath—?

Eve.
I had a son
Who questioned his own wrath, the skies thereof,
His own heart's wrathful skies, what they were prone to,
And seeing where his will went, followed it.
I came to find that son. And shall I find him
But as the rest, whose marrow in their bones
Curdles to hear Eve's whisper? Nay, thou Cain,
Whose soul is as a torch blown back for speed,
'T is thou shalt light me on that fearful way
That I must go, and that I haste to go
Ere darkness falls forever.

Cain.
Though Cain were still
That flame which once he was, how should he light thee,
Not knowing of thy way nor of thine errand?
Fearful? And be it so. My goings-out
And comings-in be fearful. Tell me plain.

Eve.
Plain will I tell thee, son.—There was a place—
There was a place—and it will still be there,
For nightly I am told so—there is a place
That once—

Cain.
Mother!

Eve.
That once I knew—

Cain.
O woman!

Eve.
Thou sayest.—A place that Eve the woman knew,
Once, far off, long ago, when she was young—
With him—

Cain.
Hush!

Eve.
Young with him—

Cain.
Wilt thou be still?

Eve.
Adam the man—

Cain.
Woe on thee!

Eve.
Him the man
And her the woman, in their ignorance—
And still it waits there, waits for her to come,
Now she has gathered up a little knowledge.—
Be patient, child.—See, I am very patient.
I tell thee quietly I would go thither;
Ere darkness falls, Eve must go back again.
She hath an errand.

Cain.
Will thy lips cease now,
Ere they bring doomsday down?

Eve.
Hast ever—listen—
Hast ever, in thy desert wanderings,
Seen, or had news? Seen mayhap afar off—?

Cain.
Once, once!

Eve.
Far off? Or near to?

Cain.
Near enough.

Eve.
Ye stood and saw?

Cain.
Yea, verily.

Eve.
How near?

Cain.
Flesh goes not nearer than this flesh went near,
Yet 't was far off.

Eve.
How far?

Cain.
Far as a hawk
Up-wind can keep his wings set.

Eve.
Very near!
—Saw'st thou—?

Cain.
O mother, hush on what I saw!
Hush, for thy life's sake, for thy reason's sake.
—Night falls. Lean on me; let me lead thee home.

Eve.
Home thou must lead me, to that wondrous home
That was and is and shall be till I come.
—Turn not away so!—Touching this same journey,
I humbly do beseech thee, look thereon,
And be well pleased to lend thy royal favor,
Thereto the needed beasts and muniments
Proportioned to the distance and the time;
This only being besought, that my twain children,
Jubal and her, go up with me along
Into the gaze and silence of the Lord,
And that our starting be by dawn to-morrow.—
Unless, by favor, thy decreeing lips
Should breathe “To-night” and do it. Might it be?
'T is but an hour to moonrise, and the moon
Is at her full, or nearly. Say'st “To-night?”
Aye, aye, thy silence cries I have a son!
—To-night! That is right royal.

Cain.
Neither to-night,
Nor yet to-morrow, nor the day to come,
Nor any day till Cain, Eve's bloody son,
Gone brain-sick as his dam—Call to him then
And haply he will hear thee where he raves
Above his moaning nation! But for now—

Eve.
Now, even now. So, I beseech no more.
But lay on thee my still and high command.

Cain.
I will not hear thee; cannot, dare not hear!

Eve.
Thou wilt not hear me? Yea, but thou wilt hear!
Thy ears be not thy ears. I moulded them.
Thy life is not thy life. I gave it thee,
And do require it back. Thy beating heart
Beats not unto itself, but unto me,
Whose voice did tell it when to beat and how.
Thy deeds are not thy deeds. Ye conned them here,
Under this breast, where lay great store of deeds
Undone, for thee to choose from.
She uncovers the Sign on his forehead.
'T is not thy head
Weareth this Sign. 'T is my most cruel head,
Whose cruel hand, whose swift and bloody hand
Smote in its rage my own fair man-child down.
Not thy hand, Cain, not thine; but my dark hand;
And my dark forehead wears the sign thereof,
As now I take it on me.

She kisses him on the Sign.
Cain.
With bowed head.
Peace, at last.
After these struggles, peace.

Eve.
At dawn, O Cain?

Cain.
Whenever and wherever.

Eve.
My great son!

Cain and Eve mount toward the gate, and pass through, out of sight. Jubal and Abdera appear from the valley, behind the Seat of Supplication, and mount toward the city. Under the gate Jubal stops and looks over the desert.
Jubal.
O Abdera, the strangeness of the world.

Abdera.
Not strange.—Strange, strange before; no longer so.

Jubal.
Look where the star leans flaming from his throne
And viewless worlds are suppliant in his porches.

They pass through the gate and disappear, climbing upward.