University of Virginia Library

The dædal and delightful earth,
Who may declare the secret of her birth?

In wonder and the mist of days,
Between grey heaven and glancing main,
The ancient powers in mystic ways,
They bound her with a giant chain.

So that she always might remain
Term to the wasted stars, eye to the risen rays.
They set around her, as a raiment, sea,
And vestured her about with shining cloud,
That softened all its domes continually,
As to a music when the wind grew loud.
They ringed the giant mountains firm as death;
Flake after flake upon them came the snows,
Till spring was warming underneath
Their hoarded silence into vernal glows.
How then it snapt like a chain from its sleeping,
Fountain on fountain, with sound thro' the hills
Trembling, exuberant, gleaming and leaping,
Wrestle and trouble of down-going rills.
The shivering forests hearkened, and they cried
To the warm vernal waters in delight.
“Our tendril roots are cold, our branches dried,
Sweetest child of the hill, give us wave warm as light;
Lap and bathe, drench us thro' down our dry torrent seams
With coiling enormous sweet limitless streams.”

Let the great light be on us like music from thy lips;
Light and water flooding down with sound;
Smite the grey frozen branches, until their perished tips
Rush out in crumpled leaflets at a bound.
Let the white resinous ends throb with the bud within,
So shall the wood lead out, with a song and a musical din,
The tender green of its arches, light as a vapour thin.

So grandly then the forest music runs,
As the great world goes on and takes no fear,
Guarded of giant stars and planet suns,
Into her burning daylight of the year.
Surely to her this winter is death-night
Of nature, and the summer this earth's day.
How should she pausing love the seasons' flight
Until the flower is pleasant in her way?

Lonely of man stood nature at her prime;
About her woods there was no human tone,
The melody of birds at morning time
Praising the gods alone.
Then on the bosom of the earth arose
Man, god's ploughman of the soil;
They gave him brain to understand his woes,
And made his palms strong for perpetual toil,
But taught him theirs were stronger than his own;
Tho' he lift hands and moan,
They were his lords; and lords must ever be
Almighty, tho' they needed his bent knee,
The incense of his wonder given in tears;
How should omnipotence or ageless years
Avail the mighty, with none weaker nigh
To feel amazement at their deity?
With only brother gods as strong and great
To watch and marvel none, how should a god create?
And yet these men they planted there to raise
Up to a cold perfection out of reach
The tribute hymn in season to their praise
With rich blood often of slain tender beast;
These men grew mutinous whom they would teach,
And questioned with themselves, “The great are least
And these our lords our henchmen; in that they
Rule not themselves, are frail in earthly way,
Hate to do justice, drowse at lustful feast;
Are these the rulers that we can obey?”
Then in a laughter turned themselves away,
And crowned their reason for a god and great,
Which all celestials chiefly loathe and hate.
Therefore mysterious omen, floating flame,
And nightly portent ringed with starry fire,
Dismayed the roaming, tribeless, kingless race,
Who builded god in thought to their desire.
Until the golden-locked one, Themis, came
And taught them ritual, justice, mercy, grace,
And many an old forgotten phrase
Of orphic hymn, age-altered yet the same;
And choral flutings and well-kneaded cakes
To Pan the bud-expander; who awakes
Nature, and is a god in nature's core
Seated, and one with nature evermore.
Pan is no cloudy ruler in dim haze,
No king of air-belts delicate afar,
But in the ripening slips and tangled ways
Of the blue cork-woods where the goat-herds are.
And we may find him by the bulrush pits,
Where the hot oxen chin-deep soaking lie;
Or in the mulberry orchard grass he sits
With milky kex and marrowy hemlocks nigh;
Where silken floating under-darnels tie
And mat the herbage of the summer-floor.
A god he is, this Pan, content to dwell
Among us, nor disdains the damp and hot wood-smell.
He is a god and more.

He loves the flaky boles of peeling pines
Brown as the sand; he loves the languid vines,
As the fruit darkens in their drooping leaves;
The crumpled poppies garnered among sheaves
Soften his eyes with colour as of dreams.
The first few crisping leaf-falls on his ear
Herald the wasting year.
He feels the ivies push their stem-feet up
Against the beech-bole all in seams between,
And broaden downwards many a rounded cup
In orbed tops of mealy buds white-green.
Pan too will watch in open glare unseen
The quiet locust seething in the blaze
Upon the vine-leaves of the quarry ways.

By broken margins seated of the main
The dog-troop's sour sharp yelping he will hear,
As they go flushing up gull, heron, crane,
And noisy at some stranded carcase tear.
Pan sees some maiden bloom with shining hair
Descending slowly from a temple porch,
Her sandals come in flashes like a torch,
Bound on some service to the image there;
Leaning she holds the myrtle bushes near,
And rinses from the lowest marble stair
Her sacrificial urn in currents clear.
Ay, and this Pan will watch the tillage yield,
The mastich coppice and the millet field.
The brown rough-bearded bondsman sits thereby
To hasten with long goad and urgent cry
The oxen treading barley round and round.
He scoops with eager finger for his meat
A pulpy-headed gourd, and to the ground
Tosses the rind, and watchful from his seat
Cries to his oxen lest they slacken pace.
These sights doth Pan consider, and all ways
Of human toil, all doings, all desire;
Whereby the new gods bend men to obey,
And give them hands of lead and brains of fire;
And crush them with the heel of iron sway,
And weaken them with labour, lest they rise,
In Titan fashion proud against the skies.