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.

363

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.

364

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.

365

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?

366

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.