The Collected Poems of Lord De Tabley :: :: University of Virginia Library

The rulers of Olympus owe no bond
Of earthly kindred: in their cloudy state
They see the wrong and anguish of their sons,
And turn the brilliance of their eyes away.

349

Is it in nature that a mother's soul
Forgets the child she held upon her breast?
Can love to that same helpless little one
Be utterly abolished, when the years
Have made the fibres of those strengthless hands
Strong with the spear? Is human love so vile,
Ye gods, that ye despise it? Do you shrink,
Immortal fathers, by the cradle-head
To see your mighty likeness, as a babe,
Renewed in features of the helpless years?
Is there reproach in that small wailing voice
To dash the high reserve of majesty
To mere emotion? And these children grow
To men with record of the godlike eyes,
And something better than the common breed.
But can the father in his amber halls
Retain one dim least instinct towards his own,
To let them reap and hustle with the herd?
Is winter's interval less rough to these,
The god-begotten? Doth the sour ice rain
Flood by their vineyard scatheless? Drought and dust
Vex them and vex their works, as other men's.
But those inexorable listless sires
Move round their drowsy eyes in much disdain
Of earthward care and all vicissitude.
They see the setting and the rising stars:
The storm is like a distant waterfall:
Except they listen, this they will not hear:
Except they will, they need not watch its wings;
That far, far down, one blot of violet shower,
Move on the terraced islands, edged in foam,
Green bays of earth and patches of grey sea.

They slumber in their careless citadel.
The centuries are gathered in their homes
Beneath them, ancients of an ageless dawn:
The strength and beauty of impregnable
Pavilions are their haven in a calm,
Deeper than silence, avenued in stars.
They will not raise a hand for any woe.
The pestilence and agonies of earth
Dare not invade the porches of their rest:
Only the sudden glory of a dream
Plays on the stern lip-corners like a light,
Nor turns them in their slumber on the cloud.

350

Infirm am I to dream that bond or blood,
Justice or love, as tender-minded men
Use them and die, are anything to these.
Not these it angers, that their sons have worn
Their feature in disasters infinite,
Debasing god-resemblance fallen low
With stain of earth; as one a captive king
Slaves in his royal garment fray'd and old.

Compassion scales not to that terrible land,
If the sons perish wailing, with a gleam
Of the cold sun-dawn on their rigid face.
They raise a heavenward arm: it falls: and dust
Is in their fingers: answers thus the sire:
Those lips can name their father now no more.

These gods it moves not, that the cheeks grow old
Which in their bloom drew down immortal lips
To taste them, sweet as anything above
The cloud: gods changed the long monotony,
Eonian calm, and irksome eminence
For pastime: leaving desolate in heaven
Their Herès for the daughter of a day.
They scorned their empty thrones and passionless heights,
Weary of isolation due to gods,
To bathe in that strange river of desire:
Which flows not from Olympus' girth of snow,
But skirts the lowland precincts of the race,
That knows no certain morrow, cheering these.

There is no memory in omnipotence.
They change their love-dreams as the meadows change
Their raiment month by month. The hireling slave
Mates with a bondsmaid longer. Human love
Of meaner creatures is a nobler thing.
But these, when love is sated, make an end
And crush remembrance, like an evil snake,
That stings them in the asphodels of heaven;
Where nothing comes, save that which fosters up
Eternal sense of self-sufficiency,
Careless of past, of forward days secure.

The earthly sons of these in narrow homes
By marges of the solitary seas
Give glory to their fathers, if the earth
Ripens the seed, or rounds the grape to wine,

351

That they may mingle them a little cup,
Or sheaf the threshold of the marsh for bread;
And breed in turn new offspring, handing down
The record of their lineage, bitterly
Remembered in the dim degenerate days;
Or serving as an ancient lullaby
To rock the cradles of an alien race.

The generations pass, the gods abide.
The beauty and perfections of the earth
Are due to silence in a little while.
And other things displace them fair as these.
The hearth is broken where the children played:
The gradual wave is eating at the land,
The gradual river shallows up the sea.
The mounds are garnered with the bones of men.
We creep to silence: but the eternal earth,
With all her gods about her, evermore
Sleeps into night and wakens into dawn.