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

Before him the immeasurable heaven
Lay deep and boundless. The eternal stars,
Pulsing and throbbing in the blue profound,
Grew nearer. Slow revolving lights of heaven,
Their golden spheres with moony clusters mixed,
Made orbit; and, beyond, as amber dust,
A sprinkling of innumerable globes,
Sown on the outward limits of the void:
Beyond all computation and account,
The seed and drift of undeveloped worlds,
In their bright millions rolling on their way.
The wonder of that wilderness of god
Flushed all his face, as swiftly rolled the car.
So slides some fleecy cloud along the dawn,
When the young east grows rosy, and wild rain,
Wrecks half the mountain woods and rends the pines.

So in his brief and baleful hour of joy,
The boy exulted in the soaring rush
Of that celestial road: he joyed to feel
The mighty long-haired coursers of the sun
At his command, and all their speed his own.
The gleaming chariot his: the pomp of heaven,
His: in his veins the ichor of a god
Seemed to dilate his pulse with spirit fire.
And with an easy rein his hand could guide
Time and Dominion: his to wake the world,
His to refresh the flushed auroral light
In splendid waves and cloud of purple foam,
A glorious task, well worth a god's control,
To wake the dewy fields and oceans old,
And lift the veil from Morning's violet eyes.

Then the rash boy in arrogant disdain
Shook the bright reins and shouted impious words
Behind the horses, nor the lash refrained;
Vain-glorious, clouded with the madding fume

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Of ill-accustomed honour. He would climb
God with the godlike now. Too long withheld
He grasped his birthright: all the bitter past,
Sordid, obscure, the delving, rustic days,
The dark dim days with herds and vacant boors,
End in the nectar cup and festal heaven.

As when the rathe and poignant spring divine
Sighs all too soon among the hoary woods,
And from the fleecy drifts of sodden snow
With promise and with perfume calls her buds,
And the buds open when they hear her feet,
And open but to perish. So his heart
Bloomed in a burst of immortality,
Nor feared the onward rolling vans of doom.
Yearning he had and hunger to ascend,
To sit at endless feast, with purple robes
To fold his limbs in sheer magnificence.
With rays of glory round his radiant hair,
And deity effulgent in his brows:
A dream divine, whose passionate desire
Flooded his soul, till in the golden car
He trembled at the vision: as a leaf
Moved by a gale of splendour, that comes on,
When, at the point of sunrise, the wind sweeps
With sudden ray and music across the sea.
So in that rapture of presumptuous joy
He spake a dreadful and an impious word;
That he was nature's lord and king of gods,
He cared not now for Zeus, how should he care?
Let the old dotard nod and doze above.
He rode the morning in unchecked career,
Apparelled in his sire's regalities,
The new Hyperion, greater than his sire;
While the swift hooves beat music to his dream:
And for a little while his heart was glad,
Throbbing Olympian ichors. For an hour
Elate, he bore an ecstasy too great
For mortal nerve, and knew the pride of gods.

The rushing air came on his brows, the deep
Ether around him rustled in his ears.
Among those awful solitudes, on, on,
The headlong onset of his coursers swept.
Light and the speed drew dimness on his eyes:
And, in the flakes and sparkles of the wheels,

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He drove as in a fountain drift of fire,
Orbed in a splendid shower of lambent gold;
He bore it not for long, an icy chill
Crept upwards inch by inch against his heart,
And formless horror deepened up behind;
Unguessed as yet, more awful from the shroud,
That hid its spectral features, creeping on.
Then impious exultation flared and fled,
And shuddering he beheld before his mind,
No nectar cup but Charon's charnel boat.
And the rose visions on his region clouds
Unpurpled all their gates, and gathered in
A core of thunder ripening ragged brows.
He saw and he despaired: an abject fear
Perplexed the demigod, who lately rode
Vaunting himself so proudly: now dismayed,
And horribly confounded in the toils
Of the great net his upstart pride had spread.

But when the horses guessed their driver's fear,
And felt the reins that shuddered in his grasp,
A grievous panic dimmed their dauntless mood,
In anger at the feeble charioteer.
Then with mad impulse and a headlong ire,
They scorned control, and swept resistless on—
Who shall assuage them now? Not Hercules,
Not Atlas shoring up the beams of heaven.
And all the chariot rocked from side to side,
And he, who guided, quailed upon his bench;
For these ethereal coursers, panic-wild,
Felt not his check and heeded not his rein
More than the pressure of a lighted fly.
He might as well pull back some granite cliff,
Athos unroot, dislodge Pelorus huge:
Or drag some river python from his ooze,
As set his weakling hand to check or chain
The corded sinews of their iron necks.
How could he calm their nostrils, snorting out
The cloudy vapour of resentful ire?
He found no balm, no comfort, no resource:
And so with ineffectual fingers numb,
Gave them reluctant way and let them sweep,
Through splendid zones of flushing roseate haze;
He heeded not their splendour: he beheld
The glimmer of his last poor rushlight hope
Abolished, vanished, blotted out, extinct.

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He saw the vengeance of the sire supreme
Reach in red anger at his armories,
To unlink the sleeping thunder. And he knew,
That from the gloomy oracles of Jove
Doom had gone out on his presumptuous head.

Then scorning curb at such a nerveless hand,
The mighty steeds, who bring the beam of morn,
In furious speed, revolting, broke away,
Straining the reins and loosening on the void
Flakes of dim foam, shed off like little clouds:
Wide-eyed, dishevelled, tossing their lithe heads,
And ruffling out the tangle of their manes,
Groaning and heaving, vapoured in a breath
Of effort, toiling as immortals toil:
And down their panting flanks the heat-drops rolled.

Then those undaunted horses first knew fear,
And cloudy horror vexed their mighty hearts,
When they perceived, Fate, mother of surprise,
Had made the sacred process of the sun
The plaything of a fool to steer or wreck,
With novice hand: an earthborn charioteer,
Usurping the Titanic chariot-bench,
To shatter on the void immense abyss
The fragments of the sun's triumphal march.
What time the fool himself, this spurious god,
Rocking and swaying in the chariot floor,
Clutched at the golden rail with palsied hand.
As some clown drunk with fumes of trodden wine,
When the red vats unpurple all the hills,
And the must trickles down to pipe and song,
As the rude orgies of the wake begin.
So stood he dazed and heaved a painful breath,
That caught and laboured harshly in his throat.
Not less between his parched and livid lips
The torment of immeasurable thirst
Raged as a flame, and greatened as they flew.
While, matting his half-girlish forehead curls,
The dew of his distress lay beaded cold.

But far away beneath those burning wheels,
Came up a gentle whisper of sea waves,
Murmur and ripple of music dimly heard,
And pleasant shocks of foam: and shaken bells

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On the faint pastoral hills by curving shores,
And dim gray forelands steeped in roseate haze:
And the white fisher cities, perched as birds,
In nooks and margins of the mighty seas
At rest: the reed-thatched homes of humble men,
Who never cloudward soared, but in content
Lived on the fickle favour of the waves;
And ploughed for harvest in the heaving fields
Of rolling Neptune and his gray-green realms.

But neither restful peace nor human joy
Lived in the aspect of thy anguished eyes,
Sad son of Phœbus, on whose rash career
The inevitable silence crushing came
To numb thee round in huge Pythonian coils.
Then in one supreme effort for his life,
Fiercely he set his ebbing strength to stem
That awful chariot race, where Hades sat
As arbiter, adjudging wreaths of yew.
Yet vain his effort; cut with leathern thongs,
He dropped his bleeding fingers, maimed and torn.
And those wild coursers swept remorseless on,
Because a fool had teased and angered them,
To end rebuke and the rebuker there,
And wreck themselves, and shed this ape of gods
Prone upon ether like a flake of snow.

Then the sad wretch, seeing his hour was come,
Called on his father in a hoarse wild cry,
Between a sigh and sob, most dire to hear:
And from his aching hands, relaxed with toil,
He dropt the useless wrestle of the reins.
They, fluttering in a downward tangle, fell,
And caught among the traces and the hooves:
And snapt and cracked, and the fierce horses plunged,
Jumbled in wreck, and rolled with frantic feet.
Then came a crash, as when thro' sodden clouds,
Tearing and hissing the blue bolt descends;
And on some towering temple's long facade
Lights in red vengeance, hurling from the frieze
Its marble god, the genius of the fane;
So with a deafening peal of thunder shock,
The dazzling Delian car was overturned,
Wondrous, eternal, treasure-house of rays,—
Which even gods revere and men adore

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With suppliant knee, as in itself a god—
Wrecked, ruined, drifted on the idle winds,
No better than an infant's broken toy:
Into the cloud abyss that racked below,
Shed as a dew-bead on a spider's raft.
And, headlong from the splintered chariot-bench,
The charioteer fell like a fluttered leaf;
Or as a feather shaken from the wing
Of some high-soaring eagle, when the hail
Falls in a whirlwind and the woods cry back.

So fell the doomed one, reaching to his sire
An ineffectual heap of yearning arms,
His father aidless at the pinch of need,
Remote and far away in idle heaven;
Lapt in amaracus and asphodel,
Lotus and oleander and musk-rose
Reclined at endless feast, and had no heed,
Purpling with nectar draughts his lip divine,
And thought not on his agonising son.

So helpless and so headlong didst thou fall,
Weak heart, unequal to the fiery helm,
A rush of heaving limb and fluttered robe,
Rolling and spinning like a plummet down
Into the spacious gulf of deep blue air:
Poor mortal fool, masked in a god's attire,
To die in borrowed trappings not thine own.
And as a diver, plunging down, divides
The columned wall of waters with his weight,
Which close in swift reunion, as he sinks,
Above his headlong passage to the pearl,—
Where the fell shark, that floating dragon, guards
The rich Hesperian orchards of the main—
So, through the cloudy stories of the sky,
Long purple belts and blood-red vapour lines,
Fell Phaethon; as falls some Pleiad lost,
Dead from the dance her starry sisters weave:
And, falling, in his horror he beheld
Merciless crag and angry precipice,
Waiting to rend him. Underneath, the earth
Rushed up to meet him with incredible speed,
Till one green field like lightning came at him,
Struck his brow wildly and dashed him into dead,
Shapeless and shattered, void of glory now,
Red clay to-day, to-morrow a little dust.

399

Ay me, ay me, now let the wail begin.
Where is the bright young god, the lovely where?
The sweet limbs like a maiden's, very white,
The cheek one rose-leaf? The young voice like song?
Crushed lies the hand that thought to guide the sun:
Still the proud heart and cold the marble lips,
Thirsting in vain the chalice of the gods.
Ay me, ay me; so must it always end,
When man, the mock of doom, this fleeting shade,
Disdains the narrow pinfold of his fate:
And breaks his heart in vain attempts to scale
The rampart of the adamantine rocks,
Whereon the careless Zeus sits calm and crowned.
Low art thou fallen, hapless Phaethon;
Be merciful, ye flowers, and cover him:
Be silent, birds and bees: gray fountains weep:
Let his fair sisters come with wild lament,
And in their fresh hands bring the cypress bough,
And let the dirge begin. Thou shalt be mourned,
More than Idalia mourned her shepherd lost.
And softly on thy urn shall fall the tear
Of kindred maidens. They shall wrap thy limbs
In costly cerements as a monarch's son;
And hide thy ashes in a marble tomb,
And give thee yearly rites and garlands due;
As, in the train of each revolving spring,
This sad day lives again; and men shall tell
Thy story thro' the never-ending years.