Vigil and vision :: :: University of Virginia Library

WHAT pip'st thou in the twilit thicket, Pan?
What dost thou here in this our day of June,
Thou that, long shut from sight of sun and moon,
Deforcing death's immitigable ban,
Revisitest the haunts and hours of man
And in our woodlands, where the ringdoves croon
Songs sad as life, re-trillst the olden tune
The blue bird fluted when the world began?
Back to thy grave, gray ghost, in Paxos Isle!
There, mid the moan of the Ionian main,
Under the sapphires of the Grecian sky,
All lapt and rounded with the warm sun's smile,
There dream thy dreams of sunny days gone by,
Far from our sad wan world of strife and pain.

LE CAPUCHON ROUGE.

(A PICTURE BY GREUZE).

WHEN all the world was young and fair,
When all earth's rills ran honey-dew
And all the firmament was blue,
In Eden we together were.
Two lovers on youth's golden stair,
Love's only sweets, indeed, we knew
And nothing of his bitter brew,
Nor ever heard the name of care.
Yet fair and young art thou to-day:
Upon me from the canvas there,
With thy red lips and artless air,
Thou look'st as if the world should ne'er
Grow old nor youth should pass away;
And I, alack! my head is gray.

MEDEA.

(A PICTURE BY F. SANDYS).

VENGEANCE, ye Gods! For I am wild with wrong.
Zeus, Heré, Ares, ye celestial mates,
And Phoebus, thou, that in the morning's gates
Thronest, invincible of shafts and song,
And Cypris, that, as thou art sweet, art strong,
And ye, ye grim inexorable Fates,
That over Gods and mortals hold your states,
Help me, that have endured too long, too long!
Me of mine enemies but justify,
That have no reverence for the most high Gods,
No thought of justice or the Furies' rods:
Then, ye Immortals, with your fiery cars,
Come, snatch your maiden back unto the stars,
To dwell with you forever in the sky!

BACCHANAL.

(A PICTURE BY ARNOLD BÖCKLIN).

WHO loveth girls and golden song,
Here let him come and have his will!
The sun above the heavenward hill
Yet hangs, and all the meads along,
The Winegod leads his winsome throng.
The merry month is with us still;
The world without a doubt of ill
Is glad or thought of Winter's wrong.
Alack! What hath our grayness here
With this glad Paynimrie to pass,
Our Winter with its golden year,
Who of Silenus but his ass,
Who know of Momus but his rod,
His tigers of the tipsy God?

DER TOD ALS FREUND.

(A PICTURE BY ALFRED RETHEL).

NEAR is the night of thy long day at hand.
Past is the Past, with all its joy and dole;
Life's mists are lifting from the appointed goal.
The sunset sleeps upon the slumbering land,
A mellow glory fall'n on sea and strand;
And with his hand of bone, Friend Death doth toll
The bell that parleys with the parting soul:
Almost the hour-glass empty is of sand.
Peace over all the landscape lies without
And peace within upon thy quiet end,
Life and its cares forgotten, hope and doubt,
Its storms all fallen stirless.—Heaven send
That, when my sands of life are running out,
Death by my side, as thine, may stand as friend!

GÖTTER IM WALDE.

(A PICTURE BY MORITZ SCHWIND).

I cannot heal me of the haunting care,
The backward yearning for a bygone day,
When things yet lived which live no longer may,
When the young world was, in a younger air,
On other wise than this our old world, fair.
Belike, 'tis idle; yet, in this our gray
Of modern lightlessness, mine eyes away
I cannot turn from the delights that were.
What boots the exile that 'twere wise to tell
Far from his fatherland content to dwell
Or him, that still in pine must live and die
In this our darkling dulness, he were well
Forget the Gods with whom, in dreams gone by,
He lived and loved beneath a brighter sky?

THE TWO POLES.

TWO poles of Art there be, the false, the true:
One negative, to whose plenipotence
Brute longing turns and sensual appetence
And humour shifting still from old to new:
The other, positive, the soul unto
Speaks and with Beauty sheer to heavens far hence
Above earth's mire uplifts the ennobled sense:
And all things gravitate between these two.
By this assay all spirits thou mayst test.
The high-tuned soul, in this our world of Will,
But Beauty follows, selfless and divine;
Whilst that to seek, which doth but interest
The Self, but stirs the ignoble sense, is still
The stamp and hall-mark of the Philistine.

INNOMINATA.

(A PICTURE BY MARIANO FORTUNY Y MADRAZO).

A face upfloating through a shimmering sea
Of dreams, resurgent whether from the Past
Of Time, meknoweth not, or if forecast
Upon the Present's glass, as yet to be,
From the dim dreamland of Futurity.
But this I know, of women, first and last,
This only she from the Eternal Vast
Of the World's Soul it is that speaks to me.
These are her lips, whom I have sought in vain
Through many a devious waste of nights and days;
These are her starry eyes, whose wax and wane
Still were my beacons in the dreamland's ways;
And never shall I take her by the hand,
Until Death bring me to the Unknown Land.

THE RAPE OF PSYCHE.

(A PICTURE BY PRUDHON).

WHAT is yon slumbering maiden, wonder-white,
That, like a gossamer, through heaven fares,
Upborne and wafted of the frolic airs?
Psyche it is they bring, in brief delight
To dwell with Eros in his land of light.
Alack, poor maid, how many weary stairs
Must thou o'erclimb of toils and doubts and cares,
Ere full thy sense shall steep in thy lord's sight!
Sweet soul of the world's joys and woes, the hand
Of vengeful heaven is heavy upon thee.
True, Love is strong; but Fate supreme command
Hath over him nor suffereth him free
His own, or e'er, in darkness and in cold,
The appointed tale of sufferance be told.

JESUS ON LAKE GENNESARET.

(A PICTURE BY EUGÈNE DELACROIX).

“MASTER, we perish!” was the cry. “Awake!”
And he, the mystic, heaven-deputed guest,
That slumbered, cradled on the billows' breast,
And dreamed, untroubled of the storm-tossed lake,
Amid the winds' wail and the wild wave-break,
Of realms of peace beyond the golden West,
“Where is your faith?” said and the word, from rest
Rising, that stilled the raging waters, spake.
Alack for unbelieving humankind!
How many a Hercules, without their care,
Hath wrought and perished, on the mountain side
How many a high Prometheus erst hath pined,
How many a Christ, exclaiming in despair,
“Where is your faith?” upon Life's cross hath died!

EDWARD BURNE JONES.

“NOUGHT is there better in this world than sleep,”
The Arabs say; “excepting death it be”.
Sweet sleep in death and happy dreams to thee,
Fair soul, that still on earth didst vigil keep,
Life all too short the lovely shapes to reap,
That through thy brain went trooping ceaselessly,
Pleading in colour and in form to be
Bodied and rescued from the dreamland's deep!
The lovesome memories of a brighter day
Thou limnedst, to thy pencil, as my pen,
Dear, when more colour was in life and men
Were simpler than beneath our skies of gray.
Friend, may we meet in some serener land,
Where our lost dreams shall take us by the hand!

VALEDICTORY.

(J. T. N., OB. AUG. 31, 1902).

YOUR name, set down among the names unknown
New-numbered of the innumerable rout,
Wherewith Death rounds our little lives about,
Falls on my heart, like the sepulchral stone.
You loved me not; nay, for your thought alone
You loved, your wayward thought, that would not out,
That mured you lifelong in a mist of doubt
And died with you, to blossom yet unblown.
Yet I, I loved you, as I loved my youth,
And with your death, though many a wave of days
And nights hath welled between our lives, since last
They met, yet somewhat of my Spring of sooth
And dream, methinks, into the darkling haze
Hath sunken of the insatiable Past.