Feda with Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

There was a village on a jutting crest
Of olive-gardened mountain, a sea-nest
Of mouldering walls that fenced one climbing street.
Only poor fisher-folk, whose little fleet

Sparkled at sundawn over all those seas,
Reaping the harvest of the calm; and these
Were all their neighbours, and in all his life
Old silent Nanno and his shrill-tongued wife
Had fared no further from the ruined tower.

His joy was just to sit hour after hour,
And watch while Anton painted, till at last
Annita's voice came like a thunderblast,
Waking the echoes, ever and again
Enlarging on the idleness of men.
Worthy Annita, you had done her wrong
To judge her by the temper of her tongue;
A scolding, honest soul, although she held
Mankind in little honour, and compelled
Submission; he was grown too deaf to feel
The piercing eloquence of each appeal
To this or that Beata,—for she showed
In this her preference of her sex, bestowed
On each their separate functions in her prayers,
Invoked the lesser saints for household cares,
Made this one patron of her shrill surprise,—
Called that to weight her anger,—in her creed

Not one male saint intruded, though indeed
The padre had some reverence, but he too
Was just a man, and like them all, she knew.

There were two pictures in the valuted hall
Of Anton's half completed, broad and tall,
A year's full labour, in the hero mood
Of the dead mighty masters; long renewed
Unceasing effort;—and therein was told
The story of that after-world of old,
Of singers dreamed who dimly understood
The night of evil and the light of good.

The first, a vision of the Blessed Isles;—
The ripples break in everlasting smiles
On seas more azure than the skies above
Warmed by the summer of the land of love;
Deep banks of flowers broaden to the bays,
The groves are green through pleasant length of days
For gentle presences for ever young;
And highest songs of poets here unsung
Fall with a sweeter cadence, and fair dreams
Of kindred spirits mix like mountain streams

That flow in long communion to the sea,
And deepen into knowledge, silently;
And loyal eyes meet eyes, and hands
Grasp hands, and voiceless each one understands.
And all that wrought in patient love on earth,
And all who held their lives of little worth,
And all that suffered, and the long oppressed
Lie gladly in those meadow lawns at rest.

And then the other—the pale world of hell,—
Grey rustled there the knee-deep asphodel,
O'er dreary waste lands bounded by a mist,
And flitting things that wander where they list,
Like dead leaves fluttered on a lifeless breeze,
Glide hither, thither, through the yellow trees.

There in the midst, almost a child, she stood
Young-eyed as one that died in maidenhood,
The sad pale queen, sad to be young in vain,
And pale for wasted pity and dead pain.
And round her feet and near and far away
Phantasmal forms of lives that lived their day,
And died to all save consciousness of death

Who tasted Lethe with their dying breath,
And lost the souls they knew not;—for between
The nearer rocks and this folk and their queen
That slow-streamed river wound.

But near at hand
Were gaunt grey rocks, and wastes of barren sand,
The hither shore, where those whose sin was great
Wail by the margin in the doom of fate;
They may not traverse that forgetting rill,
But in death's midway must remember still.

These forms were dimly shadowed, and so much
Was still to do, in each the little touch
That makes or mars perfection, wanted yet.

All round the grey old castle walls were set
With Anton's studies, and in the midst the clay
Fresh from the master's moulding of to-day,
The Psyche, faith-redeemed and winged and free
And loving, into immortality.

And Adrien praised, and Anton was content,
So through the vine-porch arm in arm they went

One eve of summer; all the sky was red
With promise of fair weather, and Anton said:—
“To-morrow is the day of Rosalie,
“And I shall go over the hills to see
“Their feast of roses in the little town;
“The moon will be at full to light us down,
“Come with me, you will find, I think, a song
“Among the mountain faces, and too long
“You stay among your books; we shall not miss
“Just one day in Portello, spent like this.”
But Adrien said, “I have a mind to sail,
“Or drift or row me, if the wind should fail,
“A few days journey by the coast; this June
“Grows stifling under roof, and now the moon
“Is at the full; so be there wind, how light
“I care not, I will sail somewhere to-night.”

It chanced, with sunset rose a gentle breeze,
Rustling the pine-tops and the citron-trees,
And Adrien went below into the bay,
And set the sail, pushed out and fared away,
Where the wind listed under shadowy heights
Transfigured in the moon of Southern nights,

Westward and westward, and the freshening wind
Was life and joy; and soon he left behind
Familiar shapes of mountains,—in his wake
Pales the long moon-path, and the crisp waves break
In frost of silver on his bows, and far
Faint shore-bells seem to ring the music of the Star.