Complete Poetical Works of Robert Southey
Page 152
Well could Ladurlad now descry
The certain signs of victory.
19.
And now the Beast no more can keep
His painful watch; his eyes, oppressed,
Are fainting for their natural sleep;
His living flesh and blood must rest;
The Beast must sleep or die.
Then he, full faint and languidly,
Unwreathes his rings, and strives to fly;
And, still retreating, slowly trails
His stiff and heavy length of scales.
But that unweariable foe,
With will relentless, follows still;
No breathing-time, no pause of fight,
He gives, but presses on his flight:
Along the vaulted chambers, and the ascent
Up to the emerald-tinted light of day,
He harasses his way,
Till lifeless, underneath his grasp,
The huge Sea-Monster lay.
20.
“That obstinate work is done!” Ladurlad cried
“One labor yet remains!”
And thoughtfully he eyed
Ereenia’s ponderous chains;
And with faint effort, half despairing, tried
The rivets deep in-driven. Instinctively,
As if in search of aid, he looked around:
Oh, then how gladly, in the near alcove,
Fallen on the ground its lifeless Lord beside,
The crescent cimeter he spied,
Whose cloudy blade, with potent spells imbued,
Had lain so many an age unhurt in solitude!
21.
Joyfully springing there,
He seized the weapon, and with eager stroke
Hewed at the chain: the force was dealt in vain;
For not as if through yielding air
Passed the descending cimeter:
Its deadened way the heavy water broke;
Yet it bit deep. Again, with both his hands,
He wields the blade, and dealt a surer blow.
The baser metal yields
To that fine edge; and, lo! the Glendoveer
Elises, and snaps the half-severed links, and stands
Freed from his broken bands.
XVII. BALY.
1.
This is the appointed night,
The night of joy and consecrated mirth,
When from his judgment-seat in Padalon,
By Yamen’s throne,
Baly goes forth, that he may walk the Earth
Unseen, and hear his name
Still hymned and honored by the grateful voice
Of human-kind, and in his fame rejoice.
Therefore, from door to door, and street to street,
With willing feet,
Shaking their firebrands, the glad children run:
“Baly! great Baly!” they acclaim;
Where’er they run, they bear the mighty name;
Where’er they meet,
“Baly! great Baly!” still their choral tongues repeat.
Therefore at every door the votive flame
Through pendent lanterns sheds its painted light;
And rockets, hissing upward through the sky.
Fall like a shower of stars
From Heaven’s black canopy.
Therefore, on yonder mountain’s templed height,
The brazen caldron blazes through the night.
Huge as a Ship that travels the main sea
Is that capacious brass; its wick as tall
As is the mast of some great admiral.
Ten thousand votaries bring
Camphor and ghee to feed the sacred flame;
And while, through regions round, the nations see
Its fiery pillar curling high in heaven,
“Baly! great Baly!” they exclaim;
“For ever hallowed be his blessed name!
Honor and praise to him for evermore be given!”
2.
Why art not thou among the festive throng,
Baly, O righteous Judge! to hear thy fame?
Still, as of yore, with pageantry and song,
The glowing streets along,
They celebrate thy name;
“Baly! great Baly!” still
The grateful habitants of Earth acclaim;
“Baly! great Baly!” still
The ringing walls and echoing towers proclaim.
From yonder mountain the portentous flame
Still blazes to the nations as before;
All things appear to human eyes the same,
As perfect, as of yore;
To human eyes, — but how unlike to thine!
Thine, which were wont to see
The Company divine,
That with their presence came to honor thee!
For all the blessed ones of mortal birth
Who have been clothed with immortality,
From the eight corners of the Earth,
From the Seven Worlds assembling, all
Wont to attend thy solemn festival.
Then did thine eyes behold
The wide air peopled with that glorious train;
Now mayst thou seek the blessed ones in vain,
For Earth and Air are now beneath the Rajah’s reign.
3.
Therefore the righteous Judge hath walked the Earth
In sorrow and in solitude to-night.
The sound of human mirth
To him is no delight:
He turns away from that ungrateful sight,
Hallowed not now by visitants divine;
And there he bends his melancholy way,
Where, in yon full-orbed Moon’s refulgent light,
The Golden Towers of his old City shine
Above the silver sea. The ancient Chief
There bent his way in grief,
As if sad thoughts indulged would work their own relief.
4.
There he beholds, upon the sand,
A lovely Maiden in the moonlight stand.
The land-breeze lifts her locks of jet;
The waves around her polished ankles play;
Her bosom with the salt sea-spray is wet;
Her arms are crossed, unconsciously, to fold
That bosom from the cold;
While, statue-like, she seems her watch to keep,
Gazing intently on the restless deep.
5.
Seven miserable days had Kailyal there,
From earliest dawn till evening, watched the deep;
Six nights, within the Chamber of the Rock,
Had laid her down, and found in prayer
That comfort which she sought in vain from sleep.
But, when the seventh night came,
Never should she behold her father more,
The wretched Maiden said, in her despair;
Yet would not quit the shore,
Nor turn her eyes one moment from the sea:
Never before
Had Kailyal watched it so impatiently;
Never so eagerly had hoped before,
As now, when she believed, and said, all hope was o’er.
6.
Beholding her, how beautiful she stood,
In that wild solitude,
Baly from his invisibility
Had issued then, to know her cause of woe;
But that, in the air beside her, he espied
Two Powers of Evil for her hurt allied,
Foul Arvalan and dreadful Lorrinite.
Walking in darkness, him they could not see;
And, marking with what demon-like delight
They kept their innocent prey in sight,
He waits, expecting what the end may be.
7.
She starts; for, lo! where, floating many a rood,
A Monster, hugest of the Ocean brood,
Weltering and lifeless, drifts toward the shore.
Backward she starts
in fear before the flood;
And, when the waves retreat,
They leave their hideous burden at her feet.
8.
She ventures to approach with timid tread;
She starts, and half draws back in fear,
Then stops, and stretches out her head
To see if that huge Beast indeed be dead.
Now, growing bold, the Maid advances near,
Even to the margin of the ocean-flood.
Rightly she reads her Father’s victory,
And lifts her joyous hands exultingly
To Heaven, in gratitude;
Then spreading them toward the Sea,
While pious tears bedim her streaming eyes,
“Come! come! my Father, come to me!
Ereenia, come!” she cries:
Lo! from the opening deep they rise,
And to Ladurlad’s arms the happy Kailyal flies.
9.
She turned from him, to meet, with beating heart
The Glendoveer’s embrace.
“Now turn to me, for mine thou art!”
Foul Arvalan exclaimed: his loathsome face
Came forth, and from the air,
In fleshly form, he burst.
Always in horror and despair
Had Kailyal seen the form and face accurst;
But yet so sharp a pang had ne’er
Shot with a thrill like death through all her frame,
As now when on her hour of joy the Spectre came.
10.
Vain is resistance now:
The fiendish laugh of Lorrinite is heard;
And, at her dreadful word,
The Asuras once again appear,
And seize Ladurlad and the Glendoveer.
11.
“Hold your accursed hands!”
A voice exclaimed, whose dread commands
Were feared through all the vaults of Padalon;
And there among them, in the midnight air,
The presence of the mighty Baly shone.
He, making manifest his mightiness,
Put forth on every side an hundred arms,
And seized the Sorceress: maugre all her charms,
Her and her fiendish ministers he caught
With force as uncontrollable as fate;
And that unhappy Soul, to whom
The Almighty Rajah’s power availeth not
Living to avert, nor dead to mitigate,
His righteous doom.
12.
“Help, help, Kehama! Father, help!” he cried;
But Baly tarried not to abide
That mightier Power: with irresistible feet
He stamped and cleft the Earth; it opened wide.
And gave him way to his own Judgment-seat.
Down, like a plummet, to the World below
He sunk, and bore his prey
To punishment deserved, and endless woe.
XVIII. KEHAMA’S DESCENT.
1.
Tne Earth, by Baly’s feet divided,
Closed o’er his way as to the Judgment-seat
He plunged, and bore his prey.
Scarce had the shock subsided,
When, darting from the Swerga’s heavenly heights,
Kehama, like a thunder-bolt, alights.
In wrath he came: a bickering flame
Flashed from his eyes, which made the moonlight dim;
And passion forcing way from every limb,
Like furnace-smoke, with terrors wrapt him round.
Furious he smote the ground;
Earth trembled underneath the dreadful stroke,
Again in sunder riven;
He hurled in rage his whirling weapon down.
But, lo! the fiery sheckra to his feet
Returned, as if by equal force redriven;
And from the abyss the voice of Baly came:
“Not yet, O Rajah! hast thou won
The realms of Padalon!
Earth and the Swerga are thine own;
But, till Kehama shall subdue the throne
Of Hell, in torments Yamen holds his son.”
2.
“Fool that he is! — in torments let him lie!”
Kehama, wrathful at his son, replied.
“But what am I,
That thou shouldst brave me?” kindling in his
pride,
The dreadful Rajah cried.
“Ho! Yamen! hear me. God of Padalon!
Prepare thy throne,
And let the Amreeta cup
Be ready for my lips, when I anon
Triumphantly shall take my seat thereon,
And plant upon thy neck my royal feet.”
3.
In voice like thunder thus the Rajah cried,
Impending o’er the abyss, with menacing hand
Put forth, as in the action of command,
And eyes that darted their red anger down.
Then, drawing back, he let the earth subside.
And, as his wrath relaxed, surveyed,
Thoughtfully and silently, the mortal Maid.
Her eye the while was on the farthest sky,
Where up the ethereal height
Ereenia rose, and passed away from sight.
Never had she so joyfully
Beheld the coming of the Glendoveer,
Dear as he was and he deserved to be,
As now she saw him rise and disappear.
Come nOW what will,” within her heart said she;
“For thou art safe, and what have I to fear?”
4.
Meantime the Almighty Rajah, late
In power and majesty and wrath arrayed,
Had laid his terrors by,
And gazed upon the Maid.
Pride could not quit his eye,
Nor that remorseless nature from his front
Depart; yet whose had beheld him then
Had felt some admiration mixed with dread,
And might have said,
That sure he seemed to be the King of Men!
Less than the greatest that he could not be,
Who carried in his port such might and majesty.
5.
In fear no longer for the Glendoveer,
Now towards the Rajah Kailyal turned her eyes,
As if to ask what doom awaited her.
But then surprise,
Even as with fascination, held them there;
So strange a thing it seemed to see the change
Of purport in that all-commanding brow,
Which thoughtfully was bent upon her now.
Wondering she gazed, the while her Father’s eye
Was fixed upon Kehama haughtily:
It spake defiance to him, high disdain,
Stern patience unsubduable by pain,
And pride triumphant over agony.
6.
“Ladurlad,” said the Rajah, “thou and I
Alike have done the work of Destiny,
Unknowing each to what the impulse tended;
But now that over Earth and Heaven my reign
Is stablished, and the ways of Fate are plain
Before me, here our enmity is ended:
II — take away thy Curse.” As thus he said,
The fire which in Ladurlad’s heart and brain
Was burning, fled, and left him free from pain.
So rapidly his torments were departed,
That at the sudden ease he started
As with a shock; and to his head
His hands upfled,
As if he felt through every failing limb
The power and sense of life forsaking him-
7.
Then, turning to the Maid, the Rajah cried,
“O Virgin! above all of mortal birth
Favored alike in beauty and in worth,
And in the glories of thy destiny,
Now let thy happy heart exult with pride;
For Fate hath chosen thee
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br /> To be Kehama’s bride,
To be the Queen of Heaven and Earth,
And of whatever Worlds beside
Infinity may hide; for I can see
The writing which, at thy nativity,
All-knowing Nature wrought upon thy brain,
In branching veins, which to the gifted eye
Map out the mazes of futurity.
There is it written, Maid, that thou and I,
Alone of human-kind a deathless pair,
Are doomed to share
The Amreeta-drink divine
Of immortality. Come, Maiden mine!
High-fated One, ascend the subject sky,
And by Kehama’s side
Sit on the Swerga throne, his equal bride.”
8.
“Oh! never, never, Father!” Kailyal cried:
“It is not as he saith; it cannot be! —
I — ! — I his bride!
Nature is never false; he wrongeth her!
My heart belies such lines of destiny:
There is no other true interpreter!”
9.
At that reply, Kehama’s darkening brow
Bewrayed the anger which he yet suppressed:
“Counsel thy daughter! tell her thou art now
Free from thy Curse,” he said; “and bid her bow
In thankfulness to Fate’s benign behest
Bid her her stubborn will restrain,
For Destiny at last must be obeyed;
And tell her, while obedience is delayed,
Thy Curse will burn again.”
10.
“She needeth not my counsel,” he replied;
“And idly, Rajah, dost thou reason thus
Of Destiny! for though all other things
Were subject to the starry influencings,
And bowed submissive to thy tyranny,
The virtuous heart and resolute mind are free.
Thus in their wisdom did the Gods decree,
When they created man. Let come what will,
This is our rock of strength: in every ill,
Sorrow, oppression, pain, and agony,
The spirit of the good is unsubdued,
And, suffer as they may, they triumph still.”
11.