Herman Melville- Complete Poems
Page 51
Unto the toiler; who returned:
“Cyril. ’Tis long since that he craved
Over against to dwell encaved.
In youth he was a soldier. Go.”
But Clarel might not end it so:
“I pray thee, friend, what grief or zeal
Could so unhinge him? that reveal.”
“Go—ask your world:” and grim toiled on,
Fitting his clamp as if alone,
Dismissing him austerely thus.
And Clarel, sooth, felt timorous.
Conscious of seeds within his frame
Transmitted from the early gone,
Scarce in his heart might he disclaim
That challenge from the shrouded one.
He walked in vision—saw in fright
Where through the limitless of night
The spirits innumerable lie,
Strewn like snared miners in vain flight
From the dull black-damp. Die—to die!
To be, then not to be! to end,
And yet time never, never suspend
His going.—This is cowardice
To brood on this!—Ah, Ruth, thine eyes
Abash these base mortalities!
But slid the change, anew it slid
As by the Dead Sea marge forbid:
The vision took another guise:
From ’neath the closing, lingering lid
Ruth’s glance of love is glazing met,
Reproaching him: Dost tarry, tarry yet?
25. DERWENT AND THE LESBIAN
If where, in blocks unbeautified,
But lath and plaster may divide
The cot of dole from bed of bride;
Here, then, a page’s slender shell
Is thick enough to set between
The graver moral, lighter mien—
The student and the cap-and-bell.
’Tis nature.
Pastime to achieve,
After he reverent did leave
The dozer in the gallery,
Derwent, good man of pleasantry,
He sauntered by the stables old,
And there the ass spied through a door,
Lodged in a darksome stall or hold,
The head communing with the floor.
Taking some barley, near at hand,
He entered, but was brought to stand,
Hearing a voice: “Don’t bother her;
She cares not, she, for provender;
Respect her nunnery, her cell:
She’s pondering, see, the asses’ hell.”
He turned; it was the Lesbian wag,
Who offered straight to be his guide
Even anywhere, be it vault or crag.
“Well, thanks; but first to feed your nun,
She fasts overmuch.—There, it is done.
Come show me, do, that famous tide
Evoked up from the waste, they tell,
The canonized abbot’s miracle,
St. Saba’s fount: where foams it, pray?”
“Near where the damned ones den.” “What say?”
“Down, plummets down. But come along;”
And leading, whiled the way with song:
“Saintly lily, credit me,
Sweet is the thigh of the honey-bee!
Ruddy ever and oleose,
Ho for the balm of the red, red rose!”
Stair after stair, and stair again,
And ladder after ladder free,
Lower and steeper, till the strain
Of cord irked Derwent: “Verily,
E’en as but now you lightly said,
’Tis to Avemus we are bending;
And how much further this descending?”
At last they dropped down on the bed
Of Kedron, sought a cavern dead
And there the fount.
“’Tis cool to sip,
I’m told; my cup, here ’tis; wilt dip?”
And proffered it: “With me, with me,
Alas, this natural dilution
Of water never did agree;
Mine is a touchy constitution;
’Tis a respectable fluid though.
Ah, you don’t care. Well, come out, do.
The thing to mark here’s not the well,
But Saba in her crescent swell,
Terrace on terrace piled. And see,
Up there by yon small balcony
Our famous palm stands sentinel.
Are you a good believer?” “Why?”
“Because that blessed tree (not I,
But all our monks avouch it so)
Was set a thousand years ago
By dibble in St. Saba’s hand.”
“Indeed? Heaven crown him for it. Palm!
Thou benediction in the land,
A new millennium may’st thou stand:
So fair, no fate would do thee harm.”
Much he admired the impressive view;
Then facing round and gazing up
Where soared the crags: “Yon grottoes few
Which make the most ambitious group
Of all the laura row on row,
Can one attain?” “Forward!” And so
Up by a cloven rift they plied—
Saffron and black—branded beside,
Like to some felon’s wall of cell
Smoked with his name. Up they impel
Till Derwent, overwearied, cried:
“Dear Virgil mine, you are so strong,
But I, thy Dante, am nigh dead.”
“Who daunts ye, friend? don’t catch the thread.”
“The ascending path was ever long.”
“Ah yes; well, cheer it with a song:
“My love but she has little feet
And slippers of the rose,
From under—Oh, the lavender sweet—
Just peeping out, demurely neat;
But she, she never knows—
No, no, she never knows!
“A dimpled hand is hers, and e’en
As dainty as her toes;
In mine confiding it she’ll lean
Till heaven knows what my tinglings mean;
But she, she never knows—
Oh no, she never knows!
“No, never!—Hist!”
“Nay, revelers, stay.
Lachryma Christi makes ye glad!
Where joys he now shall next go mad?
His snare the spider weaves in sun:
But ye, your lease has yet to run;
Go, go: from ye no countersign.”
Such incoherence! where lurks he,
The ghoul, the riddler? in what mine?
It came from an impending crag
Or cleft therein, or cavity.
The man of bins a bit did drag;
But quick to Derwent, “Never lag:
A crazy friar; but prithee, haste:
I know him,—Cyril; there, we’ve passed.”
“Well, that is queer—the queerest thing,”
Said Derwent, breathing nervously.
“He’s ever ready with his sting,
Though dozing in his grotto dull.”
“Demented—pity! let him be.”
“Ay, if he like that kind of hull,
Let the poor wasp den in the skull.”
“What’s that?” here Derwent; “that shrill cry?”
And glanced aloft; “for mercy, look!”
A great bird crossed high up in sky
Over the gulf; and, under him,
Its downward fli
ght a black thing took,
And, eddying by the path’s sheer rim,
Still spun below: “’Tis Mortmain’s cap,
The skull-cap!” “Skull is’t? say ye skull
From heaven flung into Kedron’s lap?
The gods were ever bountiful!
No—there: I see. Small as a wren—
That death’s head of all mortal men—
Look where he’s perched on topmost crag,
Bareheaded brooding. Oh, the hag,
That from the very brow could pluck
The cap of a philosopher
So near the sky, then, with a mock,
Disdain and drop it.” “Queer, ’tis queer
Indeed!” “One did the same to me,
Yes, much the same—pecked at my hat,
I mountain-riding, dozingly,
Upon a dromedary drear.
The devil’s in these eagles-gier.
She ones they are, be sure of that,
That be so saucy.—Ahoy there, thou!”
Shooting the voice in sudden freak
Athwart the chasm, where wended slow
The timoneer, that pilgrim Greek,
The graybeard in the mariner trim,
The same that told the story o’er
Of crazy compass and the Moor.
But he, indeed, not hearing him,
Pursued his way.
“That salted one,
That pickled old sea-Solomon,
Tempests have deafened him, I think.
He has a tale can make ye wink;
And pat it comes in too. But dwell!
Here, sit we down here while I tell.”
26. VINE AND THE PALM
Along those ledges, up and down—
Through terce, sext, nones, in ritual flight
To vespers and mild evening brown;
On errand best to angels known,
A shadow creepeth, brushed by light.
Behold it stealing now over one
Reclined aloof upon a stone
High up. ’Tis Vine.
And is it I
(He muses), I that leave the others,
Or do they leave me? One could sigh
For Achmed with his hundred brothers:
How share the gushing amity
With all? Divine philanthropy!
For my part, I but love the past—
The further back the better; yes,
In the past is the true blessedness;
The future’s ever overcast—
The present aye plebeian. So,
Mar Saba, thou fine long-ago
Lithographed here, thee do I love;
And yet to-morrow I’ll remove
With right good will; a fickle lover
Is only constant as a rover.
Here I lie, poor solitaire;
But see the brave one over there—
The Palm! Come now, to pass the time
I’ll try an invocation free—
Invoke it in a style sublime,
Yet sad as sad sincerity:—
“Witness to a watered land,
Voucher of a vernal year—
St. Saba’s Palm, why there dost stand?
Would’st thou win the desert here
To dreams of Eden? Thy device
Intimates a Paradise!
Nay, thy plume would give us proof
That thou thyself art prince thereof,
Fair lord of that domain.
“But, lonely dwelling in thy reign,
Kinship claimest with the tree
Worshipped on Delos in the sea—
Apollo’s Palm? It ended;
Nor dear divinities befriended.—
“Thou that pledgest heaven to me,
Stem of beauty, shaft of light,
Behold, thou hang’st suspended
Over Kedron and the night!
Shall come the fall? shall time disarm
The grace, the glory of the Palm?
“Tropic seraph! thou once gone,
Who then shall take thy office on—
Redeem the waste, and high appear,
Apostle of Talassa’s year
And climes where rivers of waters run?
“But braid thy tresses—yet thou’rt fair:
Every age for itself must care:
Braid thy green tresses; let the grim
Awaiter find thee never dim!
Serenely still thy glance be sent
Plumb down from horror’s battlement:
Though the deep Fates be concerting
A reversion, a subverting,
Still bear thee like the Seraphim.”
He loitered, lounging on the stair:
Howbeit, the sunlight still is fair.
Next meetly here behooves narrate
How fared they, seated left but late—
Viewless to Vine above their dell,
Viewless and quite inaudible:
Derwent, and his good gossip cosy,
The man of Lesbos, light and rosy,
His anecdote about to tell.
27. MAN AND BIRD
“Yes, pat it comes in here for me:
He says, that one fine day at sea—
’Twas when he younger was and spry—
Being at mast-head all alone,
While he his business there did ply,
Strapping a block where halyards run,
He felt a fanning overhead—
Looked up, and so into the eye
Of a big bird, red-billed and black
In plume. It startled him, he said,
It seemed a thing demoniac.
From poise, it went to wheeling round him;
Then, when in daze it well had bound him,
It pounced upon him with a buffet;
He, enraged, essayed to cuff it,
But only had one hand, the other
Still holding on the spar. And so,
While yet they shouted from below,
And yet the wings did whirr and smother,
The bird tore at his old wool cap,
And chanced upon the brain to tap.
Up went both hands; he lost his stay,
And down he fell—he, and the bird
Maintaining still the airy fray—
And, souse, plumped into sea; and heard,
While sinking there, the piercing gird
Of the grim fowl, that bore away
The prize at last.”
“And did he drown?”
“Why, there he goes!” and pointed him
Where still the mariner wended on:
“’Twas in smooth water; he could swim.
They luffed and flung the rope, and fired
The harpoon at the shark untired
Astern, and dragged him—not the shark,
But man—they dragged him ’board the barque;
And down he dropped there with a thump,
Being water-logged with spongy lump
Of quilted patches on the shirt
Of wool, and trowsers. All inert
He lay. He says, and true’s the word,
That bitterer than the brine he drank
Was that shrill gird the while he sank.”
“A curious story, who e’er heard
Of such a fray ’twixt man and bird!”
“Bird? but he deemed it was the devil,
And that he carried off his soul
In the old cap, nor was made whole
’Till som
e good vicar did unravel
The snarled illusion in the skein,
And he got back his soul again.”
“But lost his cap. A curious story—
A bit of Nature’s allegory.
And—well, what now? You seem perplexed.”
“And so I am.—Your friend there, see,
Up on yon peak, he puzzles me.
Wonder where I shall find him next?
Last time ’twas where the corn-cribs be—
Bone-cribs, I mean; in church, you know;
The blessed martyrs’ holy bones,
Hard by the porch as in you go—
Sabaïtes’ bones, the thousand ones
Of slaughtered monks—so faith avers.
Dumb, peering in there through the bars
He stood. Then, in the spiders’ room,
I saw him there, yes, quite at home
In long-abandoned library old,
Conning a venerable tome,
While dust of ages round him rolled;
Nor heeded he the big fly’s buzz,
But mid heaped parchment leaves that mold
Sat like the bankrupt man of Uz
Among the ashes, and read and read.
Much learning, has it made him mad?
Kedron well suits him, ’twould appear:
Why don’t he stay, yes, anchor here,
Turn anchorite?”
And do ye pun,
And he, he such an austere one?
(Thought Derwent then.) Well, run your rig—
Hard to be comic and revere;
And once ’twas tittered in mine ear
St. Paul himself was but a prig.
Who’s safe from the derision?—Here
Aloud: “Why, yes; our friend is queer,
And yet, as some esteem him, not
Without some wisdom to his lot.”
“Wisdom? our Cyril is deemed wise.
In the East here, one who’s lost his wits
For saint or sage they canonize:
That’s pretty good for perquisites.
I’ll tell you: Cyril (some do own)
Has gained such prescience as to man
(Through seldom seeing any one),
To him’s revealed the mortal span
Of any wight he peers upon.
And that’s his hobby—as we proved
But late.”
“Then not in vain we’ve roved,
Winning the oracle whose caprice
Avers we’ve yet to run our lease.”
“Length to that lease! But let’s return,
Give over climbing, and adjourn.”
“Just as you will.”