University of Virginia Library

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!
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.
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,
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,
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
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.