University of Virginia Library

THE WAKING OF EURYDICE.

ORPHEUS.
Goddess, with the torn pomegranate in that white immortal hand,
Quivering, with a chord's vibrations, at thy fatal throne I stand!
I have braved the raucous horror, I have cleft the streams of woe,
And my living locks are whitened with their grey and sluggish flow;
Proud I might be of endurance, high of heart to find my feet
Strong to bear me, queen and goddess, to thine awful judgment-seat,
But the soul in me is quiet and the spirit in me dies
Underneath the cold still flaming of those dark impassive eyes.
Let me speak, then, lest I perish, lest the lyre that brought me hither
Snap its strings, and lose its cunning, and be like a leaf and wither,
For the lyre alone sustains me, and without this breathing shell
I had died upon the upland and the moaning wastes of hell.

PERSEPHONE.
Mortal, speak, and spend no accents on the prelude of thy prayer,
Sovereign knowledge crowns my queenship to the utmost bounds of air.

ORPHEUS.
None have wit to pierce the darkness if thou veil thine awful eyes,
None can hide his heart, I know it, if their clear effulgence rise;
In the fringes of thine eyelids light is born to beam on man,
And without it he may stumble through the night-time as he can,
Bare my senses crowd before thee, on my burning spirit read,
Sculptured, like a rune on marble, all the woes that make it bleed;
Few the words, but long their burden, brief the tale, but sad to see,
Graven with a world of anguish, and the name Eurydice.

PERSEPHONE.
Sweetest ghost, around whose shadow just so much of beauty clings
As a faded jonquil gathers in its sad grey petal wings,
Fairest of the weightless number that with mute beseeching hand
Drop the obolus and vanish when the wherry comes to land;
Sighing like a wind they vanish, and before my feet they fail.
Ruddy mortal, say, what would'st thou with a soul so thin and pale!

ORPHEUS.
Goddess wiser than the wisest of the gods of upper air,
Torture not my soul within me, thou canst read its sorrow there.
Through my veins the blood is beating, life and youth are slaves to me,
But the triple world contains not what can solace me but she.
She is but a wandering spirit in a molten land of dreams,
Like the phantom of a blossom to thine own clear sense she seems,
Wasted is she, like a wine-draught that an old blind priest would pour,
When he stumbles, and it passes, and no god may taste it more.
Hollow sounds this strand of echoes, and the winds of Acheron
As about a pineless mountain round its crowded banks are blown,
For the souls that cluster thickly are too faint and slight to shiver,
And the wind goes whistling through them by the cold and sullen river.
Little glory, thrice-crowned goddess, such a handmaid brings to thee;
Yield her, O be great, and master her o'ermastering destiny!

PERSEPHONE.
Poignant is the voice that utters, seldom in these courts combine
Words that bear so live a passion with a note so masculine;
I could smile to hear thee pleading, for my heart well nigh forgets
What a weight there is in glory and how queenship wears and frets.
Such a voice, full-toned and virile, I have scarcely heard again
Since I stood a maid with maidens on the lily-woven plain,
And behind me down the valley heard the breath of steeds, and found
One who spake in amorous accents with broad arms about me wound.
Thou hast won thy suit, musician, and I grant thee leave to try
If to live on earth be sweeter to a spirit than to die.
Tune thy chords and wield the plectrum; on my throne I sit apart;
Draw her ghost to stand before us by the witchcraft of thine art;
She herself, not I, shall teach thee what may be her own desire,
Win her if thou canst with pleading on thy tense impassioned lyre.

ORPHEUS.
Ah! I see the cloud dividing; through the liquid gloom appears,
Like the crescent moon seen faintly through a hopeless mist of tears,
One that glides among the shadows, and has left the serried line:
Spirit, lift thine eyes and fix them on these aching eyes of mine!
Lo! I stir remembrance in thee by the endless throb and motion
Of the dolphin-haunted channels of thy blue Ionian ocean,
By the rosy peaks of Chios, by thy father's snow-white sail
Hastening home past granite headlands and before a southern gale,
By the shining sands that glittered with their dust of chrysoprase,
When we first gazed each at other in that silent, sunlit place,
By the blush that mounted o'er thee, by the kindling of those eyes,
Lit by no such flames as these are, but the liquidest of skies!
Child, remember life at waking and forget the dream of this!
Cool the wind, but warm the sea was, oh! how warm our tender kiss;
Grey and wan those lips of thine now, but my living lips are red,
And to thrill thy mouth with colour but a whisper needs be said.

EURYDICE.
Pray me not to speak that whisper, thou whose words sound harsh and loud!
Dim and vague all worldly memories on my weary fancy crowd;
Yes! 'tis true; and I remember; oh! be that enough for thee!
Boundless space and time unmeasured lie between thy voice and me.
I am troubled at its ardour; O believe me, it were best
To return and stir no longer in the silence of my rest.
Once I was thy bride, it may be; I am now the bride of Death,
Vexed no more with throbbing pulses, led by no mad mortal breath;
Vain those hands that stretch to seize me, vain those pleading lips and eyes,
I am but the shade of shadows and a wandering wind of sighs.
In the urn of brass that moulders in our garden year by year,
There is more of me to echo to thine ecstasy than here;
And the dying grasp that gathered close around thy answering hand
Said farewell, farewell for ever, if thy heart could understand.

ORPHEUS.
Ah! the shape, the faultless beauty, ah! the gracious lines I see,
Rounded arm and waving bosom, 'tis indeed Eurydice!
White, indeed, with more of lustre than befits a living form,
But the lights of hell are lurid in this hollow vault of storm.
Ah! the face is hers, I know it, but the voice is hard to tell,
Other were the words it uttered when it bade me last farewell.
When they poured the last libation, and with myrtles full of dew
Sprinkled lightly those cold fingers, and then hid them from my view,
When the mourners left the doorway and went slowly down the hill,
I was master of my anguish, for I heard thy whisper still;
But the voice that comes to meet me through this hollow land and drear,
Is as empty and as chilly as the wind that wanders here.
Thou hast drunk the icy waters of the dull Lethæan spring,
And thy memories fade and falter, thou art slowly withering;
Dolorous are the streams of Lethe, poor the gifts they have to give,—
Gaze on me, and strain thy utmost, and remember life and live!

EURYDICE.
Did this hand so pale and fragile lie within the grasp of thine?
Was thy breath upon my spirit like a burning draught of wine?
Did I pledge my soul to love thee, yea! within the halls of hell?
Ah! a woman's vow is nothing, like an autumn flower it fell.
Once those eyes could move me strangely, and those hands across the lyre
Led my beating heart and plunged it in a well of living fire;
Now thy spirit scarcely moves me through the crystal of thy tears,
And thy lyre-strings crack with passion, but the soul is dead that hears.

ORPHEUS.
Nay, not dead, since memory wakens! Golden shell, I call to thee!
Cry as when the pine-trees heard thee on the snows of Rhodope,
When thy music lashed to frenzy in their hollow marble lairs
Lions of the Thracian upland, and the rugged heart of bears;
Harder now the task before thee, toil more arduous, more sublime,
To awake a soul that slumbers by the mastery of rhyme.
Now beneath my fingers quicken, leap to life, wild strings, and be
Not a tool to work my fancy, but a throbbing part of me;
Softly move with rising measure, like the tide upon the shore,
Lapping on the sands and darkening their white surface more and more,
Rising, till, almost unheeded, with its moaning weight of waves,
Crest on crest, the sea o'erpowers us, as our last retreat it laves!
Mildly mount in gathering music as the snow-white flakes of cloud
Branch across the summer heaven till its blue expanse they shroud,
Scarcely noted in their lustre, blanched and pure without a stain,
Till they blacken in a moment and o'erwhelm us with the rain!
Hover poised, in air, vibrating, as the eagle hangs aloft,
With his brazen wings half viewless in the coloured sky and soft,
Waiting with a gentle motion, till the fateful moment come,
Like a bolt to thunder downward on the quarry still and dumb!
So, but with a subtler motion, with insistence more intense,
Pierce a path, my lyre, with music to her inmost secret sense;
Thrill her soul with tenderest memories of a nobler life than this,
Whisper to her of the fullness of our first enfolding kiss,
Let her see the spicy torches, let her mark the friends that fled,
Laughing folds of radiant purple round our rosy marriage bed,
Fear that faded into rapture, as the night must fade in day,
All the holy rites and secret that the priests of Love obey!
Sound, and if her shade awake not, nor take form of life again,
Phoibos' self might wake the echoes of his Helicon in vain.

EURYDICE.
Ah! the roots that bud with summer when they feel the creeping rain,—
And the tingling pulse that thrills me, half with pleasure, half with pain!
Ah! the secret fields of ocean, in their stirless hyaline,
When the skirts of storm sweep by them,—and this shaken heart of mine!
O forbear and leave me painless, as in time gone past I was,
When my face found no reflection in the water's sheeny glass!
Hot and wild this tide returning, sore the shock where-with it strains
This poor fount of life that murmurs in its coil of swelling veins!
Shades that hover round the circles of the nine rings of the river,
Come and free me, come in legions, crowd around me, and deliver!
Ah! have pity, Love, and leave me, turn away that longing face,—
Or unclose your arms and fold me in an infinite embrace!