Herman Melville- Complete Poems
Page 86
“What avails it now that Solomon my father was wise? Rehoboam succeeds. Such oscillations are not of a day. Why strive? Rehoboam is my brother. When the oil of coronation was not yet dry upon him and repentant Jeroboam proffered his allegiance, only imploring that the king would not make his yoke grievous, and while the king had not yet determined the matter, I said to him, ‘It is not wisdom to repulse a penitent. Jeroboam is valorous, a mighty man. If you make him hopeless of lenity, he will stir up mischief, perchance a rebellion.’ When I said this much to the king my brother, without a word he turned on his heel. Then I foresaw what would come, and now I see it. But now as then he holds me for an imbecile. He surrounds himself with those whom he calls practical men. Why strive?” And he withdrew to his meditations and abstractions.
But an interruption not unwelcome occurred. Though as a people the Hebrews were not disposed to superfluous intercourse with the Gentile races, yet in one instance they would seem to have made an exception. The commercial alliance between Solomon and Hiram partook something of personal good feeling which radiating out, resulted in an international amity that for a period survived both monarchs.
And so it came to pass that Zardi, an improvisator of the coast, a versatile man, in repute for gifts other than the one popularly characterizing him, made a visit to the court in Jerusalem, a court still retaining something of the magnificence and luxury introduced by the Son of Jethro the shepherd. News of the Tyrian’s arrival reaches Rammon’s retreat. It interests him. With a view of eliciting something bearing on those questions that never cease agitating his heart, he effects a privy interview with the new-comer; thinking beforehand, “My countrymen are stay-at-homes; whatever is earnest in their thought is as contracted as their territory; but here comes an urbane stranger, travelled and intellectual,—Well,—we shall see!”
For Zardi, he was struck with the pure-minded ingenuousness of Rammon born to a station not favorable to candor. He was interested, perhaps entertained, by his youth and ardor entangled in problems which he for his own part had never seriously considered, holding them not more abstruse than profitless. But humoring a Prince so amiable, affably he lends himself to Rammon’s purpose. But it is not long before Rammon divines that Zardi, exempt from popular errors though he was, endowed with knowledge far beyond his own, ready and fluent, so bright too and prepossessing, was in essential character little more than a highly agreeable man-of-the-world, and, as such, unconsciously pledged to avert himself, in a light-hearted way, from entire segments of life and thought. A fair urn, beautifully sculptured, but opaque and clay. True, among other things he is a poet; a poet, if a sensuous relish for the harmonious as to numbers and the thoughts they embody and a magic facility in improvising that double harmony makes a poet then Zardi is such, and it is not necessary for a poet to be a seer. With a passionate exclamation he breaks off the conference, and for diversion from his disappointment solicits a trial of the accomplished stranger’s improvising gift.
Let us attend to the Prince and Zardi at that point in their interview when after some general discussion as to the strange doctrine troubling the former, he takes up the one mainly disturbing him, and makes a heart-felt appeal.
“Who, friend, that has lived, taking ampler view,
Reviewing life’s chances, would life renew?”
“Ay, Prince, but why fear? no visions dismay
When turning to enter death’s chamber of spell
One waves back to life a good-natured farewell,
‘Bye-bye, I must sleep.’ That’s our Tyrian way.”
“Nor hereabouts very new.
But, piercing our Sadducees’ comfortable word,
Buddha, benign yet terrible, is heard:
It is Buddha’s, I rue.—
From his Ever-and-a-Day, friend, ravish me away!
Fable me something that may solace or repay—
Something of your art.”
“Well,—for a theme?”
“A Phoenician are you. And your voyagers of Tyre
From Ophir’s far strand they return full of dream
That leaps to the heart of the nearby desire.
Fable me, then, those Enviable Isles
Whereof King Hiram’s tars used to tell;
How looms the dim shore when the land is ahead;
And what the strange charm the tarrier beguiles,
Time without end content there to dwell.
Ay, fable me, do, those enviable isles.”
The Enviable Isles
Through storms you reach them and from storms are free.
Afar descried, the foremost drear in hue,
But, nearer, green; and, on the marge, the sea
Makes thunder low and mist of rainbowed dew.
But, inland, where the sleep that folds the hills
A dreamier sleep, the trance of God, instills—
On uplands hazed, in wandering airs aswoon,
Slow-swaying palms salute love’s cypress tree
Adown in vale where pebbly runlets croon
A song to lull all sorrow and all glee.
Sweet-fern and moss in many a glade are here,
Where, strown in flocks, what cheek-flushed myriads lie
Dimpling in dream—unconscious slumberers mere,
While billows endless round the beaches die.
*A Reasonable Constitution
WHAT though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.
* Observable in Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” are: First, Its almost entire reasonableness. Second, Its almost entire impracticability. The remark applies more or less to the Utopia’s prototype “Plato’s Republic.”
The Rusty Man
(By a soured one)
IN La Mancha he mopeth
With beard thin and dusty;
He doteth and mopeth
In library fusty—
’Mong his old folios gropeth:
Cites obsolete saws
Of chivalry’s laws—
Be the wronged one’s knight:
Die, but do right.
So he rusts and musts,
While each grocer green,
Thriveth apace with the fulsome face
Of a fool serene.
A Spirit appeared to me
A SPIRIT appeared to me, and said
“Where now would you choose to dwell?
In the Paradise of the Fool,
Or in wise Solomon’s hell?”—
Never he asked me twice:
“Give me the fool’s Paradise.”
Suggested by the Ruins
Of a mountain-temple in Arcadia,
One built by the architect of the Parthenon
LIKE stranded ice when freshets die,
These shattered marbles tumbled lie:
They trouble me.
What solace?—Old in inexhaustion,
Interred alive from storms of fortune,
The quarries be!
Thy aim, thy aim?
THY aim, thy aim?
Mid the dust, dearth and din,
An exception wouldst win
By some deed shall ignite the acclaim?
Then beware, and prepare thee
Lest Envy ensnare thee,
And yearning be sequelled by shame.
But strive on, bravely on, yet on and yet on,
Let the goal be won;
Then if, living, you kindle a flame,
Your guerdon will be but a flower,
Only a flower,
The flower of repute,
A flower cut down in an hour.
But repute, if this be too tame,
And, dying, you truly ennoble a name—
Again but a flower!
Only a flower,
A funeral flower,
A blossom of Dis from Proserpine’s bower—
The belated funeral flower of fame.
Time’s Long Ago!
TIME’S Long Ago! Nor coral isles
In the blue South Sea more serene
When the lagoons unruffled show.
There, Fates and Furies change their mien.
Though strown with wreckage be the shore,
The halcyon haunts it; all is green
And wins the heart that hope can lure no more.
To —––—
AH, wherefore, lonely, to and fro
Flittest like the shades that go
Pale wandering by the weedy stream?
We, like they, are but a dream:
Then dreams, and less, our miseries be;
Yea, fear and sorrow, pain, despair
Are but phantoms. But what plea
Avails here? phantoms having power
To make the heart quake and the spirit cower.
To Daniel Shepherd
COME, Shepherd, come and visit me:
Come, we’ll make it Arcady;
Come, if but for charity.
Sure, with such a pastoral name,
Thee the city should not claim.
Come, then, Shepherd, come away,
Thy sheep in bordering pastures stray.
Come, Daniel, come and visit me:
I’m lost in many a quandary:
I’ve dreamed, like Bab’lon’s Majesty:
Prophet, come expound for me.
—I dreamed I saw a laurel grove,
Claimed for his by the bird of Jove,
Who, elate with such dominion,
Oft cuffed the boughs with haughty pinion.
Indignantly the trees complain,
Accusing his afflictive reign.
Their plaints the chivalry excite
Of chanticleers, a plucky host:
They battle with the bird of light.
Beaten, he wings his Northward flight,
No more his laurel realm to boast,
Where now, to crow, the cocks alight,
And—break down all the branches quite!
Such a weight of friendship pure
The grateful trees could not endure.
This dream, it still disturbeth me:
Seer, foreshows it Italy?
But other visions stir my head;
No poet-problems, fancy-fed—
Domestic prose of board and bed.
I marvel oft how guest unwined
Will to this farm-house be resigned.
Not a pint of ruby claret
Cooleth in our cellar-bin;
And, ripening in our sultry garret,
Otard glows no flask within.
[Claret and Otard here I name
Because each is your fav’rite flame:
Placed ’tween the two decanters, you,
Like Alexander, your dear charmers view,
And both so fair you find, you neither can eschew:—
—That’s what they call an Alexandrine;
Do’nt you think it very damn’d fine?]
—Brackets serve to fence this prattle,
Pound for episodic cattle.—
I said that me the Fates do cripple
In matter of a wholesome “tipple.”
Now, is it for oft cursing gold,
For lucre vile,
The Hags do thus from me withold
Sweet Bacchus’ smile?
Smile, that like other smiles as mellow,
Not often greets Truth’s simple fellow:—
For why? Not his the magic Dollar?
You should know, you Wall-Street scholar!
—Of Bourbon that is rather new
I brag a fat black bottle or two,—
Shepherd, is this such Mountain-Dew
As one might fitly offer you?
Yet if cold water will content ye
My word, of that ye shall have plenty.
Thanks to late floods, our spring, it brims,—
Will’t mind o’ermuch of goblet-rims?
—I’ve told some doubts that sadly pose me:
Come thou now, and straight resolve me.
Come, these matters sagely read,
Daniel, of the prophet breed.
Daniel Shepherd, come and rove—
Freely rove two faery dells;
The one the Housatonic clove,
And that where genial Friendship dwells.
To Tom
THOU that dost thy Christmas keep
Lonesome on the torrid deep,
But in thy Meteor proudly sweep
O’er the waves that vainly comb—
Of thee we think,
To thee we drink,
And drain the glass, my gallant Tom!
Thou that, duty-led, dost roam
Far from thy shepherd-brother’s home—
Shearer of the ocean-foam!
To whom one Christmas may not come,—
Of thee I think
Till on its brink
The glass shows tears, beloved Tom!
Under the Rose
(Being an extract from an old M.S. entitled Travels
in Persia by a servant to My Lord the Ambassador)
THESE roses of divers hues, red, yellow, pink and white, the black slave, a clean-limbed adolescent and comely for all his flat nose; he, before offering them to my lord to refresh him with their color and scent, did, at the Azem’s bidding drop into a delicate vase of amber; and so cunningly withall, that they fell as of themselves into the attitude of young damsels leaning over the balustrade of a dome and gazing downward; so that the vase itself was all but hidden from view, at least much of the upper part thereof, where I noted that certain releivos were, though, truly, I could get but a peep thereof at that time.
On the next day but one repairing to the same villa where the Azem made abode for that month, and there waiting to convey a reply to a missive from my lord; I saw by chance on a marble buffet the same vase then empty; and going up to it, curiously observed the releivoes before hidden by the flowers. They were of a mystical type, methought, something like certain pictures in the great Dutch Bible in a library at Oxon setting forth the enigmas of the Song of the Wise Man, to wit, King Solomon. I hardly knew what to make of them; and so would as liefe have seen the roses in their stead. Yet for the grace of it if not the import, whatever that might be, was I pleased with a round device of sculpture on one side, about the bigness of my lord’s seal to a parchment, showing the figure of an angel with a spade under arm like a gardener, and bearing roses in a pot; and a like angel-figure clad like a cellerer, and with a wine-jar on his shoulder; and these two angels side by side pacing toward a meagre wight very doleful and Job-like, squatted hard by a sepulchre, as meditating thereon; and all done very lively in small.
But the thing that meseems was most strange was the amber where this device and sundry other inventions were cut; for in parts it held marvellously congealed within its substance certain little relics of perished insects as of the members of flies in a frozen syrup or marmalade. Never had I seen the like thereof before; and my lord to whom that night I spake of it as he was
drinking his posset about the time of his retiring, he instructed me that that sort of amber was of the rarest and esteemed exceeding precious, and spake of a famous piece in the Great Duke’s museum at Florence; and much wished that the Azem had given him that vase in place of the jewelled scimeter you wot of. “And Geoffry” quoth my lord somewhat eagerly, “did’st thou note if the vessel was of one whole piece or in two parts, the bowl-part and the standard?” But verily I could not answer to purpose here, for I did in no wise handle the vase; and I doubt had the jealousy of the attendants permitted it; so that was there any junction of two or more parts, right deftly was the same hidden by the craft of the artificer.
It befell that at the next coming together of my lord and the Azem which was about that stale affair of the two factors at Aleppo; my lord after that business and when their black drink, coffee, had been offered us in little cups of filagree fine as my lady’s Flanders lace, and great jasmine-stem’d pipes two yards long, likewise, as is their cerimonious custom; my Lord, I say, holding the amber mouth-piece before him, shaped somewhat like a lemon and of a wondrous clear tint much the same, and of a diameter not behind, for among these people the higher the rank or the longer the purse, the greater the costly mouth-piece, the same being but gently pressed against the lips at the orifice of the inhaled vapor; my lord I say, holding this fair oval of clear amber before him, turned, through the interpreter, the discourse to considerations of the occult nature of that substance whereof it was fashioned; declaring, among other items, his incredulity touching the strange allegement that amber was sometimes found with bees glued up therein as in their own chrystalized honey, or, if not bees, then fleas and flies.