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

Ruler and Regent, to whose dread domain
The mighty flood of life and human woe
Sends down the immeasurable drift of souls,
As silted sands are rolled to Neptune's deep,
I, even I, approach your awful realms,
Queen of oblivion, lady of Acheron,
To crave one captive. I alive descend,
A live man nourished still on human bread,
A man with limbs of flesh and veins of blood,
What right have I to tread the cheerless field
Of the eternal exile? What despair
Hath made me undertake so dire a road;
A chasm, in whose mouth the tumbled crags,
Tumbled and jumbled, as in Titan wars,
Lie fragmented in horror, block on block,
Torn and enormous boulders. On through these
Undaunted down I went. I wished to die.
I held my poor life cheaply in one hand,
Cheaply and loosely, as a fluttering bird,
Whom any onward step may grant escape;
And, at the base of the abyss, behold,
A level platform and an unknown land.
And at this point the ghostly realm begins,
And I had done with light and done with men,
And the sweet sun was quenched and far away.

Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come,
Coasting along, as swallows, beating low
Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air,
Circling they poise, and hardly move the wing,
And rather float than fly. Then other spirits,
Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale;
As plaintive plovers come with swoop and scream
To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest,
So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung
To save the secrets of their gloomy lair,
And waved me back, impeding my advance.

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Yet I persisted, tho' my veins ran cold
To catch the winnowing of their awful wings,
And feel the sweat-drops of their ghostly flight
Drip on my neck and shoulder from above,
As ice-flakes from the mantle of some cloud
That overpasses, bearing in its breast
A core of thunder and the seeds of hail.
Ye spectral bats, with latticed cobweb sails,
Shall I, around whose cradle Muses sang,
Quail at your emanations weak as rain?
As mist I cleave your ineffectual files,
Love shall not shudder at your goblin eyes.
Yet have I weathered direr dread than these,
In winding from the frontier of thy realm,
Here to thy throne-step and thy sceptred seat,
A piteous interval, a roadway grim,
And avenued with horrors; thick as when
The Arcadian peasant plants the frequent stem
Of rough-leaved, bramble-fruited mulberries,
Ranked on the causeways of the dusty roads
To feed the worm who weaves the stoles of queens.

Thus on each hand has peril fringed my path,
Under the strong wing of the rose-wreathed god:
Peril of waters, peril of the dunes,
The marsh, the fog, the whirlwind, and the fire,
Malignant shores with reason-blasting sights,
And the dim dungeons of the eternal curse
I traversed, and in arduous passage scaled.
Love, orbed in iris halo, step by step,
Went with me, mighty Love, who tunes my lyre:
Unseen he went, and breathed into my ear
The consolations of his nectared lips,
And on the utter edge of horror gave
A whisper from the fair Thessalian fields,
A hint of rosebuds ripe in crystal dew,
And the clear morning summits poised above
The belt of vineyards and the zone of pines.

I, fed with vision, held securely on,
Nor heeded half the execrable sights
Which ripen in the forest of despair:
The thorn-encircled stem of human woe,
The leaves of agony's expanded rose
With glowing petals and a fiery heart.

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Under the shelter of my master's plumes,
I did not turn my feet from any dread,
I took the woes full-breasted as they came;
Then suddenly the dolorous thicket ceased,
And all the wailing of its woods retired,
Like voices of some dreadful nightingale.
And at my feet a turbid river came.

I knew the stream, I knew the flaccid roll
Of those accursed waves: sighing it ran.
Lethe thou art and worthy of thy name.
Will Love sustain me through this bitter flood,
Where all things are forgot? Maybe these waves
Will wash away my sorrow. On, faint heart,
And bear me up, sweet Love, and guide me through.
And out I waded through the curdled wave
To the mid-channel: girdle-deep it grew.
Loathing I went, from waist to knee in wave,
From knee to heel in slime; I moved as one
In heavy chains advancing to his doom.
But Eros found a ford and pushed me through;
And whispered, “Fear not—see, it shallows now.”
And when I found the hateful waves subside,
And saw the nearness of the further shore,
My heart rejoiced. I cared not for the slime:
Nor those Lethean reaches daunted then,
Not the long withered reed-beds, sad in ooze,
Not the black bulrush bank, against whose stems
The lap and washing of the sequent waves
Sough on for ever. Not the broken brows,
Steep at the river turn and undermined,
Wherefrom the snags of oak and tortured boughs
Project, and latticed ribs in skeleton
Jut from the crumbling margin, hung with weeds,
Trophies and wrecks of some old deluge gone,
That rot and fester in the eddying creeks.

Evading then these foul and crumbling brinks,
I planted footstep on a firmer soil.
Before me rose a great and gloomy plain,
Ridged into tracks by mighty chariot wheels,
And at its verge a formidable gate
With castled bastions like a mountain wall,
And adamantine portals smooth as ice.
And trembling I approached these Titan doors.

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Then through the gate I entered Acheron,
Region of sorrow, citadel of pain,
The city with the sad-eyed citizens.
Coasts of remorse and colonies of sin
I traversed, sore of foot and sick of soul:
I saw the awful many-sided face
Of human agony. I found the dregs
Of anguish and the deepest deeps of woe.

The bitter road is run. The goal is gained.
Here at thy throne my gloomy journey ends,
O purple-mantled Queen, with slow grave eyes,
And I unbind my sandals, stained in blood,
And make petition on adorant knee.
Forgive and grant me pardon that I come.
For great is Love, who gave me pilotage,
And mighty in the land without a rose.
I come not as Alcides, sheathed in mail.
I have no shield but music and a lyre,
Seven piteous chords, strung on a tortoise back.
Dare I approach the impenetrable doors,
Or batter at the famished gates of hell,
So feebly furnished for the dire assault?

Can music build the stars or mould the moon,
Or wring assent from Hades' doubtful brows?
Can I make weep the stern and lovely Queen,
Before whose feet the ripples of the dead
Pass like an endless sea, beating her throne?
They move her not. In autumn's gusty hour
Shall the innumerable broken leaves,
The aimless russet-sided rushing leaves,
Gain pity from the hatchet-handed boor,
Who shears the stubborn oak, an eagle's throne?
Doth pity sting the rugged fisher folk
For the blue tunnies snared inside their net?
She will not hearken. I shall sing in vain.

Yet song is great. These pale dishevelled ghosts
Crowd in to hear with dim pathetic eyes,
And quivering corners of their charnel lips.
They rustle in from all the coasts of hell,
As starlings mustering on their evening tree,
Some blasted oak full in the sunset's eye.
And over all the mead the vibrating
Hiss of their chatter deepens. I can move
These bat-like spectres. Can I move their Queen?

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Yet song is great: and in the listed war
The hero, while some martial pæan thrills,
Breathes out his soul upon the hostile spears,
And gains—a wreath to bind his temples dead!

Ay, song is great, and even an iron Queen,
Stern as her flinty judgment-seat of doom,
May see on music's golden plume arise
Ambrosial glimpses of a dawn divine,
And pearl-drops in the rose-red heaven of youth.

THE INVOCATION

Queen, thou shalt hearken by the breath and fragrance
Of those old lawns at Enna: by the gales
That woke the drooping sister-violets,
And mingled all the sward with musky thyme:
By the trembling iris, by the speckled eye-bright,
By the zoned orchis like a purple bee,
By the rich mountain-tulip's splendid wings
Dropt like a flame-tuft on the shelving crag:
By the grey headland o'er the crescent bay:
By the faint ripple of the island foam:
By the sails that swept so proudly up the sea,
By the stern galleys, pulsing golden oars,
By every tuneful wind and wasted wave,
By virgin innocence and vestal tears,
And by thine own immortal maidenhood:—
Ah, by remembrance of those asphodels—
The lily of the Elysian heroes' rest—
The asphodels flung groundward in dismay
From thy faint trembling hands and fingers pure,
What time the sudden chariot and wild steeds
Rolled as a whirlwind, rushing up behind,
While on thy bare and ivoried shoulder came
Their breathing like the bellows of a forge—
And he, the demon lover, from the car
Stept as a cloud of gloom, and in his folds
Wrapt thee, and night closed on thy radiant eyes.

O, I adjure thee by that day's despair,
By those torn flowers thy lonely mother found
In search for thee, scorched by the burning wheels:
Ah, fallen flowers, have pity on them and me!

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Bethink thee, Queen, how on that day one rose
Fell, of all blooms that fell the sweetest bud,
The mystic rose of girlhood ne'er rebloomed,
Its virgin curtain broken, its dewdrops gone—
Ah, not of Orcus all the sceptred gloom,
The purple and the queendom and the gold,
Shall do away touch of those gracious days,
By the hum of Ætna, vineyard-clustered Ætna,
Flushing its grapes with subterranean fire,
Girdled with gleaming cities round its sides,
And the hewn houses of great marble gods,
By the Sicilian ocean, cold and clear,
Whose deeps outpass in azure Hellas' seas,
Whose nights have mellower moons and clearer stars,
Whose fountains gush from more enamelled meads,
Whereby the halcyon flits, a tissued gleam,
Bird of the rainbow: and the lovely land
Is as one great and golden orchard plain,
And haunted by some Genius, dropping balm,
Winged, as a nightjar wings o'er darkened moors
With plumes of silent flight.

I make appeal
Beyond thy queendom and these nether shades:
Out past the gloomy grandeur of thy throne
I rise to other regions, other realms;
And my entreaty soars on eagle wing
Beyond the horizon barriers of the past.
I speak to one pale girl, who passed her hours
With wool and distaff at her mother's side
In the sweet long ago. Still beats thy heart
The same behind the ruby-cinctured stole;
Although long years of judging guilty souls
Have given thy lips and brow a stony mask,
And changed thee in Medusa's loveliness
For Hebe's roseleaf dimples. In those days
The dews of pity came in easy tears,
And slight occasion dimmed thy lucid eyes
And brimmed their fountains. If athwart thy path,
Prone from the lofty nest, some callow bird
Lay shattered in unfeathered nakedness,
A sight for tears. And tears thou couldst bestow,
If with the hunter's arrow in her flank,
With blood-drips, limping through the cork-woods came
A mild and sobbing fawn. I half believe
That the shed glories of a wasted rose
Could make thee weeping-ripe for one dead flower.

368

Ah! what a change has come! The wax grows steel.
But in thy stern heart pity is not dead,
But on her lies the dust of cruel years.
Be once again the girl compassionate,
And lay aside the inexorable queen,
To hear my prayer, if only for an hour.
While I unroll the tragedy of love
In bleeding accents set to burning chords,
In agonies which thrill along my string.
Oh, for the language of a god to prove
The enormous desolation I endure!
Had Phœbus half my pain, all hell would weep.
Or if I had the mighty Sun-god's touch,
Then would I sweep the lyre with such a stress
And storm of passion, such supreme despair,
Such wailing emphasis, that I would make
The woods, the waves, the lonely mountains weep,
And I would drown all Nature in remorse,
A Niobe of tears, that this should be.
Until the withered phantom, hungry Death,
Relenting latest of created things,
In utter pity sets his cage-door wide.
And lets my lark soar back to crystal heaven,
Regaining that clear region, where her nest,
Empty and orphan, waits Eurydice.

What scourge from heaven, what scorpion whip of hell
Out-venoms my bereavement? Surely none.
To lose her any way were giant woe:
To lose her thus, ineffable despair.
Torn from my lips upon her spousal morn,
In the climax of her utmost dearness slain:
Slain at love's loveliest moment, ere the cup
Of her sweet being had enriched my life.
The rites at Hymen's gate were barely done,
The incense smouldering yet, the wine undried,
And trickling ruddy from the altar face
In our libations. Then the marriage train
Wound through the temple doors with choral hymn.
She, like a meadow-rose in bridal robes,
Light-hearted trips along the pastoral hills,
Her maidens round her, roses near the rose.
Sweet as the blushing planet of the dawn,
She went with hurrying footsteps, light and free,
In silken bents knee-deep and tufted thyme,
Nor knew within the sedge an adder coiled,

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Nor saw she pressing death. But that ill worm,
Evolving fanged and fiercely from the herb,
Mailed round in sapphire bars and speckled scale,
Kissed once her rosy feet, and kissed no more:
But gave my darling sleep, measureless sleep;
And we stood round, like nations changed to rock,
With some new Gorgon horror frozen numb.
Then wild lament arose along the hills,
And dirges came where hymeneals rang.
Lord of his kingdom, Love sang pæan then;
Reft of his empire, we sing dirges now.
And, sobbing cadence of funereal gloom,
We wind her in the raiment of the dead,
The shrouded mantle of eternal sleep,
Ay me, the dear one. Then as twilight fell,
With torch and taper rounded, crowned with yew,
Wailing we bore her to the cypress lines,
Sown with the urns and ash of fiery hearts
Of old-world lovers, cold and gone to dust.
Thither we bore her pallid on her bier,
A silver moon cradled in ebon cloud;
And over her we sprinkled marigolds,
Flowers of the dead, stars on the sable pall;
And there was one more gravestone, one more heart
Broken, and in the world no other change.

What right have I to live, so crushed with woe?
I dare not see the light now she is gone.
I hate to watch the flower set up its face.
I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea,
Its heaving roods of intertangled weed
And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit;
The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn,
The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones,
The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves,
Rotting the floors of Autumn. I am weary,
Weary and incomplete and desolate.
To me Spring, sceptred with her daffodil,
Droops with a blight of dim mortality,
And the birds sing Death and Eurydice.

Ah, dear and unforgotten! on the wind
Her voice comes often, low and sweet it comes,
In such a sigh as draws the yearning soul
Out of my breast to follow and float away,

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To lean upon the storm with falcon wing,
To overtake the laggard moaning blast,
And clasp her in the whirlwind, shade to shade,
And ghost to ghost. Then let us interlock
Our spectral limbs, and so in mutual flight
Rush at the sun and burn remembrance out.
Be thou effectual Lethe to our pangs,
O mighty fountain of primeval fire;
Father of lesser lights, compassionate,
Burn out, abolish our two weary souls!
Thou rollest on to rest the toiling stars.
The meteor of the morning doth untie
Her shining sandals on thy temple floor,
And fiery flakes fall from her golden locks.

Forsaken Orpheus, smite once more the lyre:
Sweep all thy echoing chords and make an end.
Let sorrow quell the deep and vanquish Fate.
Let song and pity, winged with burning words,
Prevail upon a storm of melody,
Melting the Queen's inexorable heart,
As wax before the furnace of my pain.

O thou, most regal, arch and arbitress
Of doleful nations, with thy mural crown,
Rod of dominion, orb of adamant,
Robed in the ruddy stain of vintage lees,
With garments like the morning fiery red—
I do adjure thee, lovely Proserpine,
Terrible Proserpine, and yet most lovely,
Release the viper-slain Eurydice,
Untimely taken and supremely loved:
Give her again to taste the gentle air,
Let me extort her from this rugged Hell.

Lo, on my brow the toil-drops start as rain,
Raised by the wrestling fervour of my prayer;
And all my blood beats in an agony
Of hope and expectation. Ah! relent.
I see sweet pity dawning in thine eyes
Immortal. O my Queen, on thee returns
Breath of the ancient meads, thy mother's smile,
The old, old days, the sweet, sweet times of eld.
Thou shalt relent. O lady, is it much

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To thin the frequence of thy crowded realms
By losing one poor captive, dearly loved?
She will return after a few brief years
To thine eternity. 'Tis but one crumb
Pinched from the side of thy great loaf of death,
Daughter of Ceres; but one grain of corn,
Which in this nether world all winter slept
To rise on wings of spring in glorious birth!

Clash, O my lyre, clash all thy golden chords!
For we have won! I see the ghosts divide
To right and left a mighty lane of darkness
As from the utmost coasts of Acheron
Eurydice comes sailing like a star.
Dove of the cypress, come: my hungry soul
Awaits thee trembling with expanded arms.