Herman Melville- Complete Poems
Page 70
Self pushing panoplied self through thick and thin.
Nor here maternal insight erred:
Forsworn, with heart that did not wince
At slaying men who kept their vows,
Her darling strides to power, and reigns—a Prince.
IV
Because of just heart and humane,
Profound the hate Timoleon knew
For crimes of pride and men-of-prey
And impious deeds that perjurous upstarts do;
And Corinth loved he, and in way
Old Scotia’s clansman loved his clan,
Devotion one with ties how dear,
And passion that late to make the rescue ran.
But crime and kin—the terrorised town,
The silent, acquiescent mother—
Revulsion racks the filial heart,
The loyal son, the patriot true, the brother.
In evil visions of the night
He sees the lictors of the gods,
Giant ministers of righteousness,
Their fasces threatened by the Furies’ rods.
But undeterred he wills to act,
Resolved thereon though Ate rise;
He heeds the voice whose mandate calls,
Or seems to call, peremptory from the skies.
V
Nor less but by approaches mild,
And trying each prudential art,
The just one first advances him
In parley with a flushed intemperate heart.
The brother first he seeks—alone,
And pleads; but is with laughter met;
Then comes he, in accord with two,
And these adjure the tyrant and beset;
Whose merriment gives place to rage:
“Go,” stamping, “what to me is Right?
I am the Wrong, and lo, I reign,
And testily intolerant too in might”;
And glooms on his mute brother pale,
Who goes aside; with muffled face
He sobs the predetermined word,
And Right in Corinth reassumes its place.
VI
But on his robe, ah, whose the blood?
And craven ones their eyes avert,
And heavy is a mother’s ban,
And dismal faces of the fools can hurt.
The whispering-gallery of the world,
Where each breathed slur runs wheeling wide,
Eddies a false perverted truth,
Inveterate turning still on fratricide.
The time was Plato’s. Wandering lights
Confirmed the atheist’s standing star;
As now, no sanction Virtue knew
For deeds that on prescriptive morals jar.
Reaction took misgiving’s tone,
Infecting conscience, till betrayed
To doubt the irrevocable doom
Herself had authorised when undismayed.
Within perturbed Timoleon here
Such deeps were bared as when the sea
Convulsed, vacates its shoreward bed,
And Nature’s last reserves show nakedly.
He falters. And from Hades’ glens
By night insidious tones implore—
Why suffer? hither come, and be
What Phocion is who feeleth man no more.
But, won from that, his mood elects
To live—to live in wilding place;
For years self-outcast, he but meets
In shades his playfellow’s reproachful face.
Estranged through one transcendent deed
From common membership in mart,
In severance he is like a head
Pale after battle trunkless found apart.
VII
But flood-tide comes though long the ebb,
Nor patience bides with passion long;
Like sightless orbs his thoughts are rolled
Arraigning heaven as compromised in wrong:
“To second causes why appeal?
Vain parleying here with fellow-clods.
To you, Arch Principals, I rear
My quarrel, for this quarrel is with gods.
“Shall just men long to quit your world?
It is aspersion of your reign;
Your marbles in the temple stand—
Yourselves as stony, and invoked in vain?”
Ah, bear with one quite overborne,
Olympians, if he chide ye now;
Magnanimous be even though he rail
And hard against ye set the bleaching brow.—
“If conscience doubt, she’ll next recant.
What basis then? O, tell at last,
Are earnest natures staggering here
But fatherless shadows from no substance cast?
“Yea, are ye, gods? Then ye, ’tis ye
Should show what touch of tie ye may,
Since ye too, if not wrung, are wronged
By grievous misconceptions of your sway.
“But deign, some little sign be given—
Low thunder in your tranquil skies;
Me reassure, nor let me be
Like a lone dog that for a master cries.”
VIII
Men’s moods, as frames, must yield to years,
And turns the world in fickle ways:
Corinth recalls Timoleon—ay,
And plumes him forth, but yet with schooling phrase.
On Sicily’s fields, through arduous wars,
A peace he won whose rainbow spanned
The isle redeemed; and he was hailed
Deliverer of that fair colonial land.
And Corinth clapt: Absolved, and more!
Justice in long arrears is thine:
Not slayer of thy brother, no,
But saviour of the state, Jove’s soldier, man divine.
Eager for thee thy City waits:
Return! with bays we dress your door.
But he, the Isle’s loved guest, reposed,
And never for Corinth left the adopted shore.
After the Pleasure Party
LINES TRACED
UNDER AN IMAGE OF
AMOR THREATENING
Fear me, virgin whosoever
Taking pride from love exempt,
Fear me, slighted. Never, never
Brave me, nor my fury tempt:
Downy wings, but wroth they beat
Tempest even in reason’s seat.
BEHIND the house the upland falls
With many an odorous tree—
White marbles gleaming through green halls—
Terrace by terrace, down and down,
And meets the star-lit Mediterranean Sea.
’Tis Paradise. In such an hour
Some pangs that rend might take release.
Nor less perturbed who keeps this bower
Of balm, nor finds balsamic peace?
From whom the passionate words in vent
After long revery’s discontent?
“Tired of the homeless deep,
Look how their flight yon hurrying billows urge
Hitherward but to reap
Passive repulse from the iron-bound verge!
Insensate, can they never know
’Tis mad to wreck the impulsion so?
“An art of memory is, they tell:
But to forget! forget the glade
Wherein Fate sprung Love’s ambuscade,
To flout pale years of cloistral life
And flush me in this sensuous strife.
’Tis Vesta struck with S
appho’s smart.
No fable her delirious leap:
With more of cause in desperate heart,
Myself could take it—but to sleep!
“Now first I feel, what all may ween,
That soon or late, if faded e’en,
One’s sex asserts itself. Desire,
The dear desire through love to sway,
Is like the Geysers that aspire—
Through cold obstruction win their fervid way.
But baffled here—to take disdain,
To feel rule’s instinct, yet not reign;
To dote; to come to this drear shame—
Hence the winged blaze that sweeps my soul
Like prairie-fires that spurn control,
Where withering weeds incense the flame.
“And kept I long heaven’s watch for this,
Contemning love, for this, even this?
O terrace chill in Northern air,
O reaching ranging tube I placed
Against yon skies, and fable chased
Till, fool, I hailed for sister there
Starred Cassiopea in Golden Chair.
In dream I throned me, nor I saw
In cell the idiot crowned with straw.
“And yet, ah yet, scarce ill I reigned,
Through self-illusion self-sustained,
When now—enlightened, undeceived—
What gain I, barrenly bereaved!
Than this can be yet lower decline—
Envy and spleen, can these be mine?
“The peasant-girl demure that trod
Beside our wheels that climbed the way,
And bore along a blossoming rod
That looked the sceptre of May-Day—
On her—to fire this petty hell,
His softened glance how moistly fell!
The cheat! on briers her buds were strung;
And wiles peeped forth from mien how meek.
The innocent bare-foot! young, so young!
To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.
To tell such beads! And more remain,
Sad rosary of belittling pain.
“When after lunch and sallies gay
Like the Decameron folk we lay
In sylvan groups; and I——let be!
O, dreams he, can he dream that one
Because not roseate feels no sun?
The plain lone bramble thrills with Spring
As much as vines that grapes shall bring.
“Me now fair studies charm no more.
Shall great thoughts writ, or high themes sung
Damask wan cheeks—unlock his arm
About some radiant ninny flung?
How glad, with all my starry lore,
I’d buy the veriest wanton’s rose
Would but my bee therein repose.
“Could I remake me! or set free
This sexless bound in sex, then plunge
Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge
Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery!
For, Nature, in no shallow surge
Against thee either sex may urge,
Why hast thou made us but in halves—
Co-relatives? This makes us slaves.
If these co-relatives never meet
Selfhood itself seems incomplete.
And such the dicing of blind fate
Few matching halves here meet and mate.
What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder
The human integral clove asunder
And shied the fractions through life’s gate?
“Ye stars that long your votary knew
Rapt in her vigil, see me here!
Whither is gone the spell ye threw
When rose before me Cassiopea?
Usurped on by love’s stronger reign—
But, lo, your very selves do wane:
Light breaks—truth breaks! Silvered no more,
But chilled by dawn that brings the gale
Shivers yon bramble above the vale,
And disillusion opens all the shore.”
One knows not if Urania yet
The pleasure-party may forget;
Or whether she lived down the strain
Of turbulent heart and rebel brain;
For Amor so resents a slight,
And hers had been such haught disdain,
He long may wreak his boyish spite,
And boy-like, little reck the pain.
One knows not, no. But late in Rome
(For queens discrowned a congruous home)
Entering Albani’s porch she stood
Fixed by an antique pagan stone
Colossal carved. No anchorite seer,
Not Thomas a’Kempis, monk austere,
Religious more are in their tone;
Yet far, how far from Christian heart
That form august of heathen Art.
Swayed by its influence, long she stood,
Till surged emotion seething down,
She rallied and this mood she won:
“Languid in frame for me,
To-day by Mary’s convent-shrine,
Touched by her picture’s moving plea
In that poor nerveless hour of mine,
I mused—A wanderer still must grieve.
Half I resolved to kneel and believe,
Believe and submit, the veil take on.
But thee, arm’d Virgin! less benign,
Thee now I invoke, thou mightier one.
Helmeted woman—if such term
Befit thee, far from strife
Of that which makes the sexual feud
And clogs the aspirant life—
O self-reliant, strong and free,
Thou in whom power and peace unite,
Transcender! raise me up to thee,
Raise me and arm me!”
Fond appeal.
For never passion peace shall bring,
Nor Art inanimate for long
Inspire. Nothing may help or heal
While Amor incensed remembers wrong.
Vindictive, not himself he’ll spare;
For scope to give his vengeance play
Himself he’ll blaspheme and betray.
Then for Urania, virgins everywhere,
O pray! Example take too, and have care.
The Night-March
WITH banners furled, and clarions mute,
An army passes in the night;
And beaming spears and helms salute
The dark with bright.
In silence deep the legions stream,
With open ranks, in order true;
Over boundless plains they stream and gleam—
No Chief in view!
Afar, in twinkling distance lost,
(So legends tell) he lonely wends
And back through all that shining host
His mandate sends.
The Ravaged Villa
IN shards the sylvan vases lie,
Their links of dance undone,
And brambles wither by thy brim,
Choked Fountain of the Sun!
The spider in the laurel spins,
The weed exiles the flower:
And, flung to kiln, Apollo’s bust
Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.
The Margrave’s Birth Night
UP from many a sheeted valley,
From white woods as well,
Down too from each fleecy upland
Jingles many a bell,
Hitched to runners old
Of the toil-worn peasants sledging
Under sheepskins in the cold,
Till from every quarter gathered
Meet they on one ledge,
There from hoods they brush the snow off
Lighting from each sledge
Full before the Margrave’s castle,
Summoned there to cheer
On his birth-night, in midwinter,
Kept year after year.
O the hall, and O the holly!
Tables line each wall;
Guests as holly-berries plenty,
But—no host withal!
May his people feast contented
While at head of board
Empty throne and vacant cover
Speak the absent lord?
Minstrels enter. And the stewards
Serve the guests; and when,
Passing there the vacant cover,
Functionally then
Old observance grave they offer;
But no Margrave fair,
In his living aspect gracious,
Sits responsive there;
No, and never guest once marvels,
None the good lord name,
Scarce they mark void throne and cover—
Dust upon the same.
Mindless as to what importeth
Absence such in hall;
Tacit as the plough-horse feeding
In the palfrey’s stall.
Ah, enough for toil and travail,
If but for a night
Into wine is turned the water,
Black bread into white.
Magian Wine
AMULETS gemmed, to Miriam dear,
Adown in liquid mirage gleam;
Solomon’s Syrian charms appear,
Opal and ring supreme.
The rays that light this Magian Wine
Thrill up from semblances divine.
And, seething through the rapturous wave,
What low Elysian anthems rise: