University of Virginia Library

All breathing men have trouble of their day.
Fate and the gods abhor prosperity
For us who live the wasting of an hour.
Yet I, that Orpheus, whose sole craft is song,
The mortal son of the immortal muse,
Claim to have vanquished all competitors;
In endless desolation held supreme,
I bear the palm of sorrow's thorny road.
Man's common grief to my imperial pain
Seems like a puny gnat that pricks the skin,
Beside a python crushing in his coils
The very bones to pulp, a broken heap;
Seems as a ripple to a cataract,
Seems as a dew-bead to a planet sphere.
O miserable bard, whose grinding woes
Drive him to wander with an aching heart
Thro' mountain fields and Thracian solitudes.
Loathing his fellow men, a life apart;
Scorn in my soul against man's shallow race,
In trivial jars consuming narrow days,
Wailing and laughter, spite and vanities,
And as a robe they are folded and put away.

From the first quivering dawn-point in the gray
To the last purple foot-step in the cloud
Upon the road where Phœbus went to rest,
Thro' the long day and all its wasteful hours,
I wander like a phantom of myself.
Pale, hollow-eyed, immersed in utter gloom,
I peal my piteous passion to the crags,
And the pines hear me and the torrent-voice
Wails in with mine, concordant to my woe.
One theme the dawn, one theme the sunset brings,
The fierce noon blazing on the mountain walls
Explains no other sorrow; the fair moon
Floated in many a star and fleeting cloud
Burns the same story on the brow of heaven.
One master-chord of grief is tyrannous,
And, without pity stifling, sweeps aside
The feeble notes which whisper nascent hope,
Soon turns the cadence back to grim despair;
Until the lyre and its seven brother strings
Sound each a vocal tear, distinct in woe:
As when the urns of heaven come pouring down
Against the full-leaved heaving forest-sheets,
And the woods drip with quick perpetual throb,
Mocking the semblance and the sound of tears
And seem responsive to my streaming eyes.
My faltering hand in many a broken pause,
My heaving breast in many a gasping sob,
Divulge a loss, which tears have never sounded,
Deep-welling from the fountains of my life,
An agony which words are dumb to tell,
Which only music, sovereign to express
The supreme desolation of despair,
Unveils by gleam and glimpse in ruinous deeps,
A mind that crumbles like a wasted crag
Into a midnight of unfathomed chasm,
Ragged, abrupt, another Taenarus.
Why should I wither slowly, inch by inch?
Where is this laggard Death? No stranger he,
Familiar is his face, and day by day
I have burnt incense in his gloomy shrine.
He comes to those who prosper and fare well.
I am not worth the raising of his hand;
The young, the good, the lovely are his prey.

I am become as some pale, rotten weed
Beside a stagnant marsh, whose matted floors
Reek up polluted vapours; leaf by leaf
I drop to dust, and round my sapless roots
The horror of a black and staining mire
Festers, and tho' the attributes of life
Survive, I perish piecemeal in my wane,
As one long dead, forgotten out of mind
Among the dusty brethren of the grave.
I am withered from my old identity,
O! I am changed, for as no man believes
That this sere leaf which in October hangs
Can be the same with May's redundant shoot,
Can this same Orpheus of the grand attempt
Be one with this weak palsied nerveless thing
Stumbling along the granite glens of Thrace,
Perplexed with aimless fear and girded round
With walls of apprehension, woebegone
And trembling at the movements of the trees,
When the wind gently stirs the stagnant noon?
How can I be that greatly daring bard,
Armed with his lyre and armoured with his love,
Who went among the torments of the dead,
Who saw calm-eyed, with visage well composed,
Dire emanations, shapes intensely foul,
Worse than the dream of fever brings the brain,
Horrors, abortions, lemures, vampires, ghosts?
I faced them all to save my well-beloved,
To bring her back to nature, whom the snake
Plucked down to Orcus. There stern Hades sat,
His shaggy brow ridged in reluctant frown
At my request, glooming an angry nay,
Until I made the mighty Queen of Hell
Weep like a maiden, and the fluttering ghosts,
Who had forgot emotion could recall
Some faded touches of their human heart,—
Love, Ire, and Sorrow that build up a soul.
So music won my wish. They gave her back,
And thro' the roads of torment we returned
Up to the light. Conditions Orcus made,
Easy conditions surely. Woe is me!
And she behind me, trembling like a child,
Came closely, as a timid infant clings
Fast to the mother's skirt, whose homeward steps
Lie o'er a darkling waste as eve shuts in.
And all went well till on the edge of light,
In sight of golden safety and love secured,
I faltered; agony it seemed to wait
A moment longer; such a flood of love
Conquered my soul to see once more the light
Beam in those dearest eyes, to hear her breathe,
To catch one glimmer of her glancing robes.
Fool to forego restraint, ere I had won
All with my patience, fool to falter then,
For mighty Love took part against himself,
And his intensity became a spear
To pierce his own true heart with pangs of doom;
And in an instant I had turned and gazed.
Then from the deeps of Orcus far below
Came up the muttered thunder, and the abyss
Trembled at my transgression. All was lost.
She with a shriek cast upwards piteous arms
And down the gloomy chasm slipt slowly back,
And as she faded dim in veils of gloom
To me were spread her ineffectual hands
For aidance from the wide engulfing void,
Fruitlessly spread, and as she faded, came
These piteous accents, and her voice was changed
To thin and strange as might a shadow speak;
“O love, what madness slays thy heart and mine?
I am torn from thee by relentless fate
And Death is heavy on my drowsy eyes
Which see thee and which love thee while they may
An instant, ere I fleet into the shades,
Veiled in a mantle of eternal night
And filmy staining of the wasteful grave.
And now farewell, my love, for thine no more
Towards thee I reach my ineffectual hands
Fruitlessly reached as slowly I recede,
Such drowsy sleep involves my hapless form.
Loving, I pass to that dim land, where Love
Comes not, nor any comfortable beam;
Thy bride no more: oblivion plucks me down.
Hail! Love, my weak hand wafts thee long farewell,
Touching the lips that never shall be thine.”

Then as a misty wreath of waterish haze
Melts in the sombre background of the woods
That make a midnight with their crowded shafts
Where pines uprear a labyrinth of spears,—
She spake and faded piteous from my view;
A whisper and a rustle and she was gone,
As some sere leaf drifts down the chasm dire,
And gone for aye, irrevocably gone.
Then all my love and all my perilous road
Seemed like a fruitless beating of the air,
And all my daring, all my lyric skill
Issued in this supreme calamity.
Ah, wasted toil, and valour thrown away!
What could I do there at the cavern mouth,
But pore upon its depths in blank despair?
No second ingress Taenarus allows.
The gloomy ferry-man, propitious once,
Refuses stern a second living freight.
What penalty could Hades not impose
If once again I fought my furious way
Back to the fiery throne?

Hope faded fast,
And all my soul grew sick with giant grief;
Yet months I loitered near the pass of pain,
Sustaining life on roots and bramble fruit.
Hopeless at last, dead to the heart and dazed,
I wandered northwards to the Thracian wolds,
By gentle streams, deep vales and spacious hills,
A region fair tilled by an evil race,
Who live as dogs live brutish wrangling days,
And pasture beeves, and shear a patch of maize,
And crush a grape sour-hearted into wine,
Herdsmen and thieves when chance arrives to steal.
And their fierce matrons, they who rear this race,
The very dregs and lees of womanhood,
Are Mænads stained by wind and tanned by glare,
Crude faces furrowed by a hundred storms,
And harsher than the panic-screeching jay
Peals out each shrewish voice from field to field,
With hideous laughters, foul, abominable.
And these dare offer to me their fierce love,
And, when repulsed with loathing, they depart
With clamour and wild menace of revenge,
And when the grape-god's festal day arrives,
They indulge their thirsty humour, calling this
Religion, and inflamed with new made wine
Bestial they rush with howlings o'er the hills
Maddened and fierce as tigers cub-bereaved.
Surely a wise god this, one worshipped well,
To tear and ruin, yell and soak and fling
Their limbs abroad and rend their scanty robes!
The inspiration of a noble cult!
The holy priest of Bacchus hounds them on
With twinkling eye and shining hairless pate,
A bull-faced stunt Silenus spider-bellied,
Whose girdle-clasps scarce meet across his paunch,
His exhortations what the Mænads rage.
He names them pious daughters ripe for heaven,
He tells them, if they only drink enough,
Like Ariadne they will turn to stars
And beam their radiance on the nightly world:
That the red ruin by a god inspired
Out-weighs a cold and barren rectitude.
On me the special fury of their scorn
Descends, because my solitary days
Insult their love and flout their vinous charms.
My grief disturbs their chorus to the grape,
Their orgies are a loathing to my soul;
For all which slights they one day vow revenge.
The vengeance of a maddened Mænad takes
A hundred forms: I know not which will come.
Perhaps to hale me like a tethered steer
In drunk procession to a drunken god,
And slay me with a sacrificial hymn.
A grievous ending; yet my life has sunk
Lately to such a fathomless despair,
That I should welcome even the flamen's knife
To balm the edge of my calamity.
If death be slumber, I shall surely dream
That I am walking with Eurydice.
If death be wakeful, and I know it is,
I shall arise and joyous greet her there,
And shade and shadow we will mix and greet.