Herman Melville- Complete Poems
Page 71
Sybilline inklings blending rave,
Then lap the verge with sighs.
Delirious here the oracles swim
Ambiguous in the beading hymn.
The Garden of Metrodorus
THE Athenians mark the moss-grown gate
And hedge untrimmed that hides the haven green:
And who keeps here his quiet state?
And shares he sad or happy fate
Where never foot-path to the gate is seen?
Here none come forth, here none go in,
Here silence strange, and dumb seclusion dwell:
Content from loneness who may win?
And is this stillness peace or sin
Which noteless thus apart can keep its dell?
The New Zealot to the Sun
PERSIAN, you rise
Aflame from climes of sacrifice
Where adulators sue,
And prostrate man, with brow abased,
Adheres to rites whose tenor traced
All worship hitherto.
Arch type of sway,
Meetly your overruling ray
You fling from Asia’s plain,
Whence flashed the javelins abroad
Of many a wild incursive horde
Led by some shepherd Cain.
Mid terrors dinned
Gods too came conquerors from your Ind,
The brood of Brahma throve;
They came like to the scythèd car,
Westward they rolled their empire far,
Of night their purple wove.
Chymist, you breed
In orient climes each sorcerous weed
That energises dream—
Transmitted, spread in myths and creeds,
Houris and hells, delirious screeds—
And Calvin’s last extreme.
What though your light
In time’s first dawn compelled the flight
Of Chaos’ startled clan,
Shall never all your darted spears
Disperse worse Anarchs, frauds and fears,
Sprung from these weeds to man?
But Science yet
An effluence ampler shall beget,
And power beyond your play—
Shall quell the shades you fail to rout,
Yea, searching every secret out,
Elucidate your ray.
The Weaver
FOR years, within a mud-built room
For Arva’s shrine he weaves the Shawl,
Lone wight, and at a lonely loom,
His busy shadow on the wall.
The face is pinched, the form is bent,
No pastime knows he nor the wine,
Recluse he lives and abstinent
Who weaves for Arva’s shrine.
Lamia’s Song
DESCEND, descend!
Pleasant the downward way—
From your lonely Alp
With the wintry scalp
To our myrtles in valleys of May.
Wend, then, wend:
Mountaineer, descend!
And more than a wreath shall repay.
Come, ah, come!
With the cataracts come,
That hymn as they roam—
How pleasant the downward way!
In a Garret
GEMS and jewels let them heap—
Wax sumptuous as the Sophi:
For me, to grapple from Art’s deep
One dripping trophy!
Monody
TO have known him, to have loved him,
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal—
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape,
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-tree’s crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.
Lone Founts
THOUGH fast youth’s glorious fable flies,
View not the world with worldlings’ eyes;
Nor turn with weather of the time.
Foreclose the coming of surprise:
Stand where Posterity shall stand;
Stand where the Ancients stood before,
And, dipping in lone founts thy hand,
Drink of the never-varying lore:
Wise once, and wise thence evermore.
The Bench of Boors
IN bed I muse on Teniers’ boors,
Embrowned and beery losels all:
A wakeful brain
Elaborates pain:
Within low doors the slugs of boors
Laze and yawn, and doze again.
In dreams they doze, the drowsy boors,
Their hazy hovel warm and small:
Thought’s ampler bound
But chill is found:
Within low doors the basking boors
Snugly hug the ember-mound.
Sleepless, I see the slumberous boors
Their blurred eyes blink, their eyelids fall:
Thought’s eager sight
Aches—overbright!
Within low doors the boozy boors
Cat-naps take in pipe-bowl light.
The Enthusiast
“Though He slay me
yet will I trust in Him.”
SHALL hearts that beat no base retreat
In youth’s magnanimous years—
Ignoble hold it if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant, and trudge where worldlings go,
Conform, and own them right?
Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? the heart
Pine for the heartless ones enrolled
With palterers of the mart?
Shall Faith abjure her skies,
Or pale probation blench her down
To shrink from Truth so still, so lone
Mid loud gregarious lies?
Each burning boat in Cæsar’s rear
Flames—No return through me!
So put the torch to ties though dear,
If ties but tempters be.
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.
Art
IN placid hours well pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
Buddha
“For what is your life? It is
even a vapor that appeareth for a
little time and then vanisheth away.”
SWOONING swim to less and less,
Aspirant to nothingness!
Sobs of the worlds, and dole of kinds
That dumb endurers be—
Nirvana! absorb us in your skies,
Annul us into Thee.
C——’s Lament
HOW lovely was the light of heaven,
What angels leaned from out the sky
In years when youth was more than wine
And man and nature seemed divine
Ere yet I felt that youth must die.
Ere yet I felt that youth must die
How insubstantial looked the earth,
Aladdin-land! in each advance,
Or here or there, a new romance;
I never dreamed would come a dearth.
And nothing then but had its worth,
Even pain. Yes, pleasure still and pain
In quick reaction made of life
A lovers’ quarrel, happy strife
In youth that never comes again.
But will youth never come again?
Even to his grave-bed has he gone,
And left me lone, to wake by night
With heavy heart that erst was light?
O, lay it at his head—a stone!
Shelley’s Vision
WANDERING late by morning seas
When my heart with pain was low—
Hate the censor pelted me—
Deject I saw my shadow go.
In elf-caprice of bitter tone
I too would pelt the pelted one:
At my shadow I cast a stone.
When lo, upon that sun-lit ground
I saw the quivering phantom take
The likeness of Saint Stephen crowned:
Then did self-reverence awake.
Fragments of a Lost Gnostic
Poem of the 12th Century
* * * *
FOUND a family, build a state,
The pledged event is still the same:
Matter in end will never abate
His ancient brutal claim.
* * * *
Indolence is heaven’s ally here,
And energy the child of hell:
The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear
But brims the poisoned well.
The Marchioness of Brinvilliers
HE toned the sprightly beam of morning
With twilight meek of tender eve,
Brightness interfused with softness,
Light and shade did weave:
And gave to candor equal place
With mystery starred in open skies;
And, floating all in sweetness, made
Her fathomless mild eyes.
The Age of the Antonines
WHILE faith forecasts Millennial years
Spite Europe’s embattled lines,
Back to the Past one glance be cast—
The Age of the Antonines!
O summit of fate, O zenith of time
When a pagan gentleman reigned,
And the olive was nailed to the inn of the world
Nor the peace of the just was feigned.
A halcyon Age, afar it shines,
Solstice of Man and the Antonines.
Hymns to the nations’ friendly gods
Went up from the fellowly shrines,
No demagogue beat the pulpit-drum
In the Age of the Antonines!
The sting was not dreamed to be taken from death,
No Paradise pledged or sought,
But they reasoned of fate at the flowing feast
Nor stifled the fluent thought.
We sham, we shuffle while faith declines—
They were frank in the Age of the Antonines.
Orders and ranks they kept degree,
Few felt how the parvenu pines,
No lawmaker took the lawless one’s fee
In the Age of the Antonines!
Under law made will the world reposed
And the ruler’s right confessed,
For the heavens elected the Emperor then,
The foremost of men the best.
Ah, might we read in America’s signs
The Age restored of the Antonines.
Herba Santa
I
AFTER long wars when comes release
Not olive wands proclaiming peace
An import dearer share
Than stems of Herba Santa hazed
In autumn’s Indian air.
Of moods they breathe that care disarm,
They pledge us lenitive and calm.
II
Shall code or creed a lure afford
To win all selves to Love’s accord?
When Love ordained a supper divine
For the wide world of man,
What bickerings o’er his gracious wine!
Then strange new feuds began.
Effectual more, in lowlier way,
Pacific Herb, thy sensuous plea
The bristling clans of Adam sway
At least to fellowship in thee!
Before thine altar tribal flags are furled,
Fain wouldst thou make one hearthstone of the world.
III
To scythe, to sceptre, pen and hod—
Yea, sodden laborers dumb;
To brains overplied, to feet that plod,
In solace of the Truce of God
The Calumet has come!
IV
Ah for the world ere Raleigh’s find
Never that knew this suasive balm
That helps when Gilead’s fails to heal,
Helps by an interserted charm.
Insinuous, thou, that through the nerve
Windest the soul, and so canst win
Some from repinings, some from sin,
The Church’s aim thou dost subserve.
The ruffled fag foredone with care,
And brooding, Gold would ease this pain:
Him soothest thou, and smoothest down
Till some content return again.
Even ruffians feel thy influence breed
Saint Martin’s summer in the mind,
They feel this last evangel plead,
As did the first, apart from creed,
Be peaceful, man—be kind!
V
Rejected once on higher plain,
O Love supreme, to come again
Can this be thine?
Again to come, and win us too
In likeness of a weed
That as a god didst vainly woo,
As man more vainly bleed?
VI
Forbear, my soul! and in thine Eastern chamber
Rehearse the dream that brings the long release:
Through jasmine sweet and talismanic amber
Inhaling Herba Santa in the passive Pipe of Peace.
FRUIT OF TRAVEL LONG AGO
Venice
WITH Pantheist energy of will
The little craftsman of the Coral Sea
Strenuous in the blue abyss,
Up-builds his marvellous gallery
And long arcade,
Erections freaked with many a fringe
Of marble garlandry,
Evincing what a worm can do.
Laborious in a shallower
wave,
Advanced in kindred art,
A prouder agent proved Pan’s might
When Venice rose in reefs of palaces.
In a Bye-Canal
A SWOON of noon, a trance of tide,
The hushed siesta brooding wide
Like calms far off Peru;
No floating wayfarer in sight,
Dumb noon, and haunted like the night
When Jael the wiled one slew.
A languid impulse from the oar
Plied by my indolent gondolier
Tinkles against a palace hoar,
And, hark, response I hear!
A lattice clicks; and, lo, I see,
Between the slats, mute summoning me,
What loveliest eyes of scintillation,
What basilisk glance of conjuration!
Fronted I have, part taken the span
Of portents in nature and peril in man.
I have swum—I have been
’Twixt the whale’s black flukes and the white shark’s fin;
The enemy’s desert have wandered in,
And there have turned, have turned and scanned,
Following me how noiselessly,
Envy and Slander, lepers hand in hand.
All this. But at the latticed eye—
“Hey! Gondolier, you sleep, my man;